"Trans women ARE biological women"

[TangenitalContrivance]

I see this argument and comment more and more the last few weeks and hugely over the last 3 days.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1k1tliv/trans_women_are_biological_women/

This statement, and the comments underneath it absolutely baffle me.

The approach, one that I am sure will only work with a minority of the people who said TWAW, is to undermine the definition of words, yet again, and deliberately cloud the water when it comes to speaking clearly and using terms that everyone agrees with

I have seen it said in more places than Reddit however, and by respected people

Oh my, this is hilarious!
“You probably haven’t “

Of course we bloody have, do you think everyone here hasn’t spent years immersed in all these discussions?

The fa’fafine do not regard themselves as actually women. The name means “in the manner of a woman”. It is a way of accommodating male homosexuality in a society with strictly gendered roles for each sex.

I do know transpeople well. I have listened to them and read books they recommended. I like those transpeople, but it's very difficult to respect their worldviews to the extent that they are based on pseudoscience, such as "sex is a spectrum". [How can one measure the position within this spectrum? What is the dimension (e.g frequency/wavelength on an electromagnetic spectrum) - some measure of maleness to femaleness?]

When someone points me to a coherent philosophy of transgenderism, I may be able to change my worldview. Until such time, my current understanding of sex (binary, immutable) and gender (a largely unhelpful social construct based on stereotypes) is the best model I have come across, and one that doesn't lead to damaging and unethical medical and surgical treatments. It also has the huge advantage of not trampling all over women.

You're welcome.

You know what actually is a spectrum? The spectrum. And yet bizarrely we manage to differentiate between different colours to the degree that traffic lights, for example, can be a thing*. Yet somehow the people who think sex is a spectrum are unable to differentiate between any of the points along it at all. It is very odd.

-* Sorry colour-blind people. But you know what I mean.

I'm not a vet but I know what a dog is......

That’s interesting thank you 😀

No you don't, it's complicated. Dogs are a social construct and exist on a spectrum with cats.

JK Growl-ing doesn't believe this, because she's a bigot.

I love the weird pretzel logic here.

A transwoman is not a man though

If a transwoman was a woman he would just be a woman, the fact that a transwoman needs to call themselves a transwoman is because he isn’t a woman, he started life as a boy, and grew into a man.

The transwomen I know have zero interest in seeing naked women …because they are straight ….and only like men

So they are men who like other men. You mean gay men.

and the concept of male and female is reductive

Systematics is reductive it's the entire point of it. The definition of mammals for example allows you to sort tigers, naked molerats and sunbears into the class Mammalia but you wouldn't be able to picture any of them based on the definition of mammals alone. So for sex we reduce the definition to the most basic characteristic every man or every women shares with every other man or every other woman, the size of the gametes their bodies will make during the fertile period of their lives. Nothing else matters, not their hairstyle, not their clothes, not their brains, not their feelings. If you make small gametes you can wear whatever you want, wear make up or not, have long or short hair, play rugby or not, like a pint or not, you are male. I don't care if this is reductive, you can not have useful systematic categories otherwise.

Ah... viques.... you are far too logical..

I do enjoy the posts telling women here that biology is more complicated than they think etc.
What with our backgrounds in medicine, genetics, biology etc.
Especially to @Igneococcus . How many degrees/postdocs do you have again? 😂

I know! I did laugh when I saw that iggy was involved.

I actually hate the messy/complicated argument @Faffertea yes, developmental pathways are complicated (but we do understand them quite well at this point, it's 2025) and things can and do go wrong but the basic principle of binary sex and its role and importance within evolution is really quite simple.
Right dp (BSc, MSc, PhD, one postdoc) and I (MSc, PhD, two postdocs) are off to the allotment, there's asparagus and rhubarb to be harvested.

I must admit I do find the embryological development difficult to keep in my head. But then it doesn’t really come up in my everyday clinical practice.
Knowing when I need to consider an ectopic pregnancy or prostate cancer in my differential diagnosis does though. Funny that. I wonder how I know?

So how are you going to determine someones sex in going to the toilet exactly? Based on how they look?

You seem to be suggesting that some people are selfish, dishonest and like transgressing social boundaries for their own gratification.

The point is it's not just about toilets, it's changing rooms, hospital wards, prisons, security searches.

So you are saying trans people will break the law anyway?

Personally, I have given up on toilets. They are pretty much a lost cause as far as single sex integrity goes, for the simple reason that they are not policed.

Where is matters most is those situations where male "women" have been exposing themselves in female changing rooms, been on wards next to incapacitated women, strip-searching women, or present in rape crisis centres. And now something can be done about that at last.

I agree the big guns you mention are the first and most important ones.

But I'm not giving up on toilets, to roll over on this and say in effect 'boys will be boys' is to accept that there's a significant proportion of women who will have lost public access to facilities because men's bad behaviour worked so well for them and it was too much trouble to stand up for women. If you want to see actual oppression and marginalisation and minorities going unseen and without a voice, it would be those women.

It’s deliberately trying to cloud the narrative. Saying that these men are biological women and always were and merely assigned male at birth, is ridiculous obfuscation.

The so called experts who claim this, are so captured and In so deep with this harmful and corrupt ideology that they have to claim these bizarre lies otherwise the whole argument and rhetoric collapses, and they can’t be seen to have supported a lie.

Well no because I don’t believe in binary male and female anyway. My point actually is how much this plays into the patriarchy. You dont look like a woman - so you shouldnt be in here. We are socially conditioned as women to look and act a certain way - not butch, but petite and small.

Specifically mentioned in the judgment which looks at this and still concludes that the only way for the act to be coherent and usable and to protect all rights is to go on the principle of binary sex.

One wonders how much of reality you do actually “believe in”.

The surpreme court is wrong - laws dont make morality. How many laws throughout history have we looked back and thought what they hell were they thinking.