My son's girlfriend and pronouns

[BootMaker]

I have a wonderful son, and he has a wonderful girlfriend who calls herself 'him'.

We had what I thought was a great conversation about performative femininity and there are many ways to be a woman.

But I don't think we did.

🙄

Bloody obvious...she's a girl....

I’d like to know how old this girlfriend is. She could be anything from 11-12ish upwards and, at the younger end, may genuinely not have realised that it is fine for women to come in a whole range of shapes, forms, personalities and talents, none of which turn us into men.

No he does not!

No, I won't, I like to think I'm a reasonable person.

19, both!

I do think there is a conversation about what society expects from women and how one doesn't have to accept genderism

Agreed, however when hosting someone for a week it's very difficult to avoid pronoun usage completely.

Just play that one through...

Well I do feel a bit of a dick actually. I think I upset a confused young woman by being a little dogmatic.

So, I actually came out of the conversation with a little more understanding in the way that young people use gender as a descriptor than the way I went in.

I am not someone that won't listen, especially when it comes to women.

And I'm never afraid to admit that I didn't see someone else's view.

@BootMaker I have to say i really would not countenance such utter codswallop.

Most certainly in my own home i would not be observing other peoples beliefs, anymore than i would don a crucifix and say grace at the dinner table because a guest was a devout Christian.

And i would make it very clear to them.

Dogmatic?How? I don't understand the original ask.

I think, I actually upset a young woman who uses pronouns interchangeably because that's their wheelhouse.

There's a cognitive dissonance there because my feminism was forged in the fire of 60's and 70's feminism and being at Greenham Common with my mother. And my childhood next door neighbours were a lesbian couple of art restorers that my sister and I used to bother all the time and they'd invite us in for tea where we drank Earl Grey in the drawing room and then looked at their studio at all the marvellous things they were restoring and then I'd take them round to mine to show them the frogs in my pond.

And they were definitely a pair of women who loved and lived together (and still do nearly 50 years on).

And what annoys me greatly is that young women want to, or feel they are able to identify out of being female.

That shit runs deep.

One cannot identify in or out of womanhood, no matter how dirty, of messy, or difficult it is, we're in it.

So better so accept that and get on with being a woman rather than muck about with pronouns.

That's my point.

And sexism. Don't forget the sexism.

By having XX chromosomes, having a vagina isn’t enough. Men have surgery to have a vagina… they’re still men

They do not have a vagina that neither resembles or functions as a vagina.

It is an artificial hole that has to be dilated daily to stop it closing up, much like piercings.

Those men have a remodelled penis, not a vagina.

A surgical vagina is not a vagina. It's just a hole.

And a vagina isn't just a hole. It's an anatomical entity that is an intrinsic part of female anatomy, it's a birth canal that also connects the outside world to the uterus and ovaries. There's also the Pouch of Douglas. And not not just just whole hole but the labia (minora & majora) , the clitoris, the clitoral hood, the many parts that make up female genitalia.

The table displayed in this post, was created by an NHS surgeon and lays out the various stark differences between the surgical wound that some men who say they're women obtain and an actual female vagina:

https://genderblog.net/what-exactly-is-a-neo-vagina-then/

No shade, but what they try to achieve via extreme body modification, doesn't even come close to the highly complex, vascular, elastic and self cleaning organ that women naturally possess.

Exactly!

It's a wound basically, so the body constantly tries to heal it up. It has absolutely nothing to do with a vagina.

Difficult situation OP, personally I'd leave her to think about things now. Hopefully she will take your views on board.

Exactly my point. Maybe I should of put ‘vagina’

Somewhere, I wish I had saved it, is a wonderful comparison about the physical properties of a vagina, its self cleaning ability , its flexibility, ability for the skin to expand then return to its former size, the physical qualities of the skin apparently unlike any other body skin. The author, a doctor, then compares it to the sad surgical pouch that TIM call a vagina. It’s non self cleaning ability the way it clogs up with stinking gunk if it isn’t manually cleaned, its determination to close like a surgical wound, the inflexibility of the skin, the need to dilate, the actual quality of the skin used, sometimes penile, but if there isn’t enough then skin from.the colon is used. It made pretty grim reading.

Made me quite sorry for the sadly deluded men who think a surgical pouch ( without a cervix whatever IW says) is in any way comparable to the real thing.

just spotted that @solerolover has posted the comparison. Don’t read if you are squeamish!

I’m a female so I’m more than aware what a vagina is and isn’t. Maybe I should have wrote ‘vagina’ … because I know it’s not actually one when men claim to have one (which they don’t), which is why I pointed out the chromosomes

@viques I thought of the very same article and posted it just a few minutes ago!🙂

Thankyou. It should be compulsory reading for anyone contemplating it. It is horrific. Some of the comments raise interesting issues about why such drastic and unnecessary surgery isn’t viewed with the same disgust as FGM surgery which is rightly illegal in the UK and why this mutilation, with so many risks and poor outcomes, is allowed on the NHS or in private clinics.