Trans sibling in law

[Primrose86]

DH's sibling has just come out as a man. She is 26 and autistic, lives at home with mum, spends life on the Internet, got kicked out of school at 16 etc etc She has plans to go overseas and transition in germany where apparently you can get surgeries on the public health system while living with her grandpa. Her mum is fully supportive of this.

How should I react to all this. Should I start referring to him as my brother in law? What usually happens after people come out. I assume they progress to hormones and surgery but honestly based on what I read, Germany is quite resistant to health tourists who never paid in even if they are citizens. Are people really happy identifying as another gender when they wouldn't look like the other gender?

No. You've misunderstood. Every Mumsnet thread is about putting other posters right. I'm talking about the posters on this thread who think it's OP's role to put her sibling in law right. It isn't. It's not her business.

Deciding that we can all pretend that biological differences between men and women don't exist/aren't important ...

Is EXACTLY the type of thing that could sounds good to relatively privileged women in a university setting, thinking about it theoretically.

But ia total disaster when applied to vulnerable women who live in the real world, dealing with its practicalities.

Ooh, there’s another “are you stupid, dear?”

I might start counting.

I think that referring to women as exclusively adult human females is constraining. But each to their own.

I’m female because I was born one, I’m a woman for a variety of other reasons - many of them external. I do “woman” in the way that I do it, based on the life I’ve had, and really resent being told I’m doing it “wrong” by those who’d have me in a group because of a set of chromosomes.

But you can't do woman wrong if you were born female. You are a woman just by existing. And I know any GC person who would tell you you are womaning wrong. TRAs OTOH like to tell people they are trans based on stereotypes.

What else do we ALL have in common then?
Including baby girls, butch truckers, fashion models, teenage girls who hate their breasts, and your Aunty Mabel who was in the Girl Guides in WW2 and ran messages for the ARP?
Or are you proposing a superior category of women who've thought deeply about their gender identity and the baby girl and your Aunty Mabel aren't female?

They’re not as important as our many other differences and experiences.

Having biology in common with an Afghan woman, for example, is nowhere near as important as our cultural differences.

Privilege has been mentioned a few times, and to be clear - far from it.

Quite true. The desire to believe that we, as humans, are more than organic flesh and bone is an entirely natural one: humans have been believing that since the year dot. This is the whole reason religion and ideological belief systems exist. As a species, we've also seen throughout history the degree to which we persecute others who don't happen to worship our particular 'gods'.

We want to feel that we have some form of 'soul'; some essence of humanity which makes us more than just animals. I've seen it argued somewhere that this is why there's a 'pornography' of death as well as sex: perhaps the essence of the obscene is that we are nothing but bodies. Yet our bodies are what we are: mammals, a dimorphic species, animals descended from apes: the theory of evolution being one the religious adherents were determined to deny despite evidence to the contrary. Compare today's GI arguing similarly unscientifically that men can be women and vice versa. The rest is metaphysics.

Humans are constrained, oppressed and in some ways enabled by the experience of living within our sexed bodies. Beyond that, narrow gender stereotyping and common (but unsubstantiated) assumptions about what it means to feel, look, dress and behave as a man or a woman, are adding far more constraints to the ones already imposed upon us by our sex.

For this reason I find any concept of 'gender identity' extremely narrow and reductive, and I reject this emphatically as an additional implement of my oppression. Being a woman means being born in a female body. This is the only relevant criterion.

Sorry what?

You don't think woman's safeguarding, safety, opportunities. dignity are important?

Thats what you're saying.

Because that's what you compromise when you decide the biological differences between men and women aren't important.

I'm honestly gobsmacked that women would actually admit that.

‘If society uses the biological fact of female to oppress women, through socially constructed gender stereotypes, it’s being classified by sex we should be rejecting, refuse to be limited because you happen to have certain chromosomes.’

Take away all the stereotypes, and oppression tomorrow, and women would still need different rights and could be oppressed on that basis.

I genuinely don’t understand why that isn’t obvious. That is why we have the concept of ‘indirect discrimination’.

I mean, why can't Afghani women just 'identify' as men to escape their position, do you think?

You are very lucky @SleeplessInWherever if you have never been discriminated against because you are female but in fact I'll warrant you have but you can't bear to think about it.
If for example you were ever given baby dolls and told "you'll be a lovely mother" then that's just the start.

However, I'm not asking "is culture important". I'm asking "what is a woman?" You don't think you have much in common. What DO you have in common with all other females that makes you all women?

I'll wait.

I’ve answered, very clearly; what makes us all female.

This Aunty Mabel I apparently have doesn’t have a shared experience of womanhood with me, does she, because we have very different lives and experiences.

@SleeplessInWherever

" I also feel the same way about “adult human” anything, yes - it removes any complexity of who we actually are."

Men - the adult humans males - really don't care one bit about complexity, or indeed about "who we actually are", when seeking to remove rights from women and girls. All they care about is that women and girls are "human females". It literally doesn't go any further than that. That's the definition of women and girls for them, and that's why it's the definition we too must use to fight for our rights. Otherwise, we'll just be talking at cross-purposes.

Again, genuinely don’t understand this.

How do you think Afghan men are controlling Afghan women? Do you think they are just naturally placid for cultural reasons?

Well done! Women aren't all the same.
We are all female.
If you don't think women are all female you're going to need a different definition.

We have one that works very nicely thanks.

Well, yes you do. You have the shared experience of being female.

What shared experience do we all have with trans women?

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186338-d1627791-r942938675-Lyric_Hammersmith_Theatre-London_England.html

Regardless of feelings about mixed sex toilets, is it not obvious that urinals, while arguably gender neutral, are not sex neutral?

But apparently we can solve this problem if we just don’t refer to sex?

I don’t think Aunty Mabel can use a urinal either.

Well considering you're selecting carefully which posts you reply to for any you can pull this performative stuff with, why not? Count away and have fun.

I can change my hair, my nails, my clothes, my walk, my hobbies, my colour preferences, my choice to nurture or not, I can make my mouth say anything at all, and I can have extensive plastic surgery and take a lot of drugs, but what I cannot change or escape is being inside a biologically female body. I'm reminded, again, horribly, of the incident of the poor woman with a trans identity sobbing to her taxi driver rapist 'I'm a man'. It made no odds. She was existing within biology that men feel entitlement to use.

Waffling interminably about angels dancing on the head of a pin in the way that I can do in a very privileged life in a very privileged country will make no material difference to that of any kind. And the key reasons women have for doing it is so that they can feel lovely about and reap the binary sexist rewards of giving the rights and bodies of other women to men.

So the argument is that female biology as a grouping should be disregarded because there is "no shared experience of womanhood" , but that "identifying as a woman" is a valid category which groups women ( the ones who don't identify as not-women) with men who identify as women?
But if even the females in that grouping have nothing in common beyond their biology, what on earth do they have in common with the males in the group and what do those males have in common with each other?

And just imagine the degree of privilege you would need to have to not even consider what this would mean for womem prisoners or rape victims, etc, etc, etc

There are far too many responses to reply to them all individually. What a frankly boring day that would shape up to be. They’re all along a similar theme anyway, so answering one does seem to answer quite a few.

I am not reaping sexist rewards, or giving anyone to anyone, thank you.

I don’t expect you to answer every post, but I remain baffled by your inability to acknowledge the impact of sex.

A trans man in America, me in the U.K., a woman in Afghanistan - we are all, for instance dependent on sex specific medical care. We can’t do that by force of will - it’s something that needs to be enabled by society.

I would recommend watching an episode of Call the Midwife - it’s very good on the structural, medical and legal changes that have impacted women’s lives over the last 60-70 years.

My opinion on the quality of Gender Studies degrees is not improving at all with this thread.

Indeed it's a walking advert for making all reputable universities drop the subject.

Yes, how terribly boring it is to actually be able to back up one’s views.