some parallels

[Manfreglory]

I've been teasing out this idea, that transphobia and xenophobia have much in common.

• both rest on 'you're not from here; your culture is different; you can't know what it is to have grown up 'over here'/had period pains/gone through labour.

• both reject difference or change in favour of sameness or stasis. 'You look and talk and think differently/you underwent a journey to get here/I can't fully relate to you'.

• both rest not just on culture but on biology: 'Your genes are different than mine/your genotype for phenotype A, B or C aren't identical to mine'.

• both are territorial: 'i sweated blood as a member of this sex/to make it in this society - who are you to come here and demand a seat at the table'?

• both are suspicious of the reasons for transformation. 'You just want the perks of being female; you just want to look up our skirts in the toilet; you just migrated here from Guatemala for financial stability.'

• both demonize, aggressively overstating the chance that the person has or will commit a crime. (Migrants: no need to give examples, just read the news. Trans people: 'you just want access to 'our spaces'' (i.e. the spaces where women/cis women enjoy their privacy from all men, cis or trans) so you can assault us'.

• both minimize or even deny, the need for the transition: 'No child is born trans/those parents were homophobic as the kid was just gay/trans women are men with their dicks lopped off/people should stay in their home country and migration is too dangerous'.

• both hysterically fear that the trans person/migrant will corrupt innocents: 'they will indoctrinate children in school/they will spread religious fundamentalism'.

Gender critical women: ask yourself if you've been radicalized into the new right.

Okay @Manfreglory thanks for the prompt reply I'm asking because the majority of TRA posters here argue for self ID policies. Not any sort of gatekeeping.

So when you starting talking about a transman who appeared male that seemed a jump to an extreme case, if that makes sense.

Don't be daft.

How does believing someone is a woman (because they are female) equate to believing they don't exist?

You still don't see the issue with what you have said, do you?

Read only the part that I enlarged. Do you understand that logic that you are trying to use in the post is indeed homophobic?

Please stop trying to deflect and address your own homophobic post.

I don't think anyone on this thread is suggesting they be negated out of existence. You can no more negate a trans person out of existence if you don't believe in gender identity than you can negate a religious person out of existence if you don't believe in god.

I am slightly uncertain about your position, given that a trans man treated as a man by a doctor might be 'negated out of existence'.

Are you also keen not to "negate" millions of women globally "out of existence"? Like the women of Afghanistan? Because if using a word to describe someone with which they personally would disagree "negates them out of existence", then that's the very effect that your redefinition of woman to an internal state as opposed to an objective reality is having on all those women who don't share your belief in gender identity or are not even aware of the concept.

Again, as with my post above on single sex spaces above, do you see that we can't have it both ways? Someone, somewhere, loses out.

So, again, as with my post on single sex spaces above, this leads me to consider other factors in drawing my conclusions about the word "woman" (or "lesbian", for that matter): namely, where the greater need lies.

In utilitarian, numerical terms, that's easy, obviously. But the other factor I consider is that transwomen already have a descriptor to distinguish themselves legally, polically and socially - "transwoman". Whereas, if they take the noun "woman", too, women have nothing to distinguish themselves. Indeed, to take your emotive phrase above, many millions are "negated out of existence".

So, once more, as with my post on single sex spaces above, this leads me to the clear conclusion that adult human females globally have the right - an urgent need - to a distinct signifier: "woman".

@Manfreglory

A woman who claims to be a man is nevertheless a woman, because she cannot change her sex by wishing or wanting. If she is exclusively sexually attracted to other women, then she is a lesbian. Because that is what the word means.

So much harm has been done to young women and girls by gender identity ideology which tells them that their homosexuality is unacceptable and they must mutilate themselves at worst or lie to themselves at best in order for their entirely natural sexual orientation to become acceptable.

Some women fancy other women and only other women. They have no choice in the matter and it's abusive to demand payment of a trans tax of full surgery before they are "allowed" to feel that way - removing their breasts and uteruses, disfiguring an arm or a leg and taking toxic doses of testosterone. To insist that they have to do all that to be accepted as something they will never be is so utterly cruel, I cannot fathom how you would think that is how society should proceed.

Ditto for gay men and boys, of course, but lesbians are despised by GII even more than gay men.

Oh for fucks sake. You do know that if I point at a transman and say "You are female" they don't disappear in a puff of smoke don't you.

They'll continue to exist, they just won't be male.

you negate that they are allowed to exist as trans. that's how. when they wouldn't want
to, cannot, exist any other way. essentially it's you telling them where they can go and what they can do, based not on their identity but on their chromosomes. that's how. pretty basic.

maybe you do go around pointing at people, telling them what they are and aren't. how's that going for you? making friends?

Do you not see the rather significant differences between these options "They should be bona fide trans which to my mind does mean they'd generally have taken hormones or had surgery or be dressed accordingly or done combo of these."

So you fully believe that a male person needs to go through a brutal surgical process that you have decided is the standard to prove to you that they are transgender ? And you believe you are supporting people with transgender identities?

And what the fuck has 'dressing' got to do with it? It is up there as an equal priority.

Afghanistan now??

They exist as someone who believes they are or would like to be the opposite sex. That continues unless they change their minds.

So what about the "trans people" who have supposedly "always existed"? They were not recognised as the opposite sex, so they didn't in fact exist, right?

yes - to my mind. not to yours, since you believe only in sex.

Most gender critical believe somewhat by definition that noone can change sex. Views on gender and practicalities differ.

R.e. bona fide trans - I would repeat your question about how would this be applied in real life?

Would you continue to allow "Rose" into the changing room in the Darlington Nurses case?

https://sex-matters.org/case-briefings/bethany-hutchison-and-others-v-county-durham-and-darlington-nhs-trust/

Single sex provisions are just that, single sex provisions.

They were never intended to be 'single gender'. One person of the opposite sex enters into that space or provision, it no longer is a single sex provision. There is no way to compromise or philosophise out of this reality.

As has been mentioned before and by Naomi Cunningham, if you purchase a nut free meal and it arrives with traces of nuts or just one nut, it is no longer a nut free meal at all.

The logic simply cannot be bent to support one male person accessing a female single sex provision .

TL;DR BlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlahBlah…and so men can be women.”

That’s all any of this ever boils down to.

No, no. You are the one claiming that not accepting that a person has changed sex negates them out of existence. So in your terms, how can there have been any trans people in previous centuries since they were not recognised as having changed sex?

Afghanistan just has a more extreme version of the rules that existed in most societies before women had a framework of rights and services that enable them to participate in society on equal terms with men.

Single sex spaces are just part of that. We also rely on the ability to control our fertility (including rape laws) and specific health care and a legal system that protects our rights.

Afghanistan shows how easily rights can be taken away.

America is another example.

Do you think anyone asks women in Afghanistan whether they would like to identify as a man and go to university?

Do you think a girl raped by a family member in Oklahoma can identify out of her need for an abortion?

it's not an extreme case at all. i'm
sure many trans people do little to externally transmit their gender identity but i dare say most do. so my example isn't extreme. neither you or i have any idea how many trans people we see in a given day because so many "pass".

No, no they really don't.

I don't "just believe in sex", I know that gender is a very real force - a very damaging force, a consistently negative force, but a very real thing. There would be no point to being gender critical if we didn't believe in its reality, like not believing in fairies but fighting to abolish elves anyway. There have been a lot of political arguments which in a desperate attempt to serve everyone end up serving no-one, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Trans activism, in its perversion of the feminist concept of gender, is the only movement I can think of that keeps the bathwater but throws out the baby.

R.e. do trans people exist? Yes there are people who experience gender dysphoria and try to live and present as the opposite sex, although until recently that's been very rare.

But this feeling does not determine anything ontologically - i.e. that someone's born in the wrong body or we all have a gender identity that overrides sex. Sex matters.

It is analogous to someone claiming God is real because they have experienced God.

But this is all a tad metaphysical for Monday morning...

People can identify as being transgender. It is a philosophical belief because there are no biological or neurological markers that have been isolated as being indicative of being transgender.

The issue is that you are arguing that a group of people with a philosophical belief about their identity, that does not reflect material reality, should be treated by society as if that belief is based on material reality. You are arguing that one group's identity takes priority over the sex based needs of female people.

What other group in society has their belief, one based in philosophical theory and belief but not based in material reality, gets to have its demands prioritised in this way? ie. prioritised over the sex based needs of female people.

You are relying on purely emotional reasoning at this point. You have no evidence to support your arguments which seem to be based on your own prejudices about female people, those that have been shown to be misogynistic and homophobic.

Yes - no hormones, no surgery, no concept of being trans.

What happened? Were they not trans? Did they not exist?

Telling people where they can go and what they can do based on material facts of their existence, rather than self-declared identity, is very common.

For example, if a man identifies as a six-year-old boy, should he be allowed to attend primary school as a pupil? I expect you would say no, even though you're advocating the opposite when it comes to places restricted by one's sex.