Do you feel that gender identity exists and is innate?

[FairHippopotama]

In progressive circles, there's the concept of 'gender identity' where everyone has a gender (not necessarily corresponding to their sex) that is unchangeable and inherent to them as a person. Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

why not discuss violent threats? Those are the threats trans allies make towards women who say men cannot be women. A male with a trans identity posted women saying no should be “raped with a splintery rolling pin”. Please explain how that is not misogynistic. If we can’t define woman, how do we know women are being murdered for being women?

No, it wasn’t coined to denote “non trans”. It’s an article of faith. There are not two sexes of women. So called “trans women” are just a type of man. If “cis” was a neutral term which just meant “non trans”, a “trans woman” would be a woman who identifies as a man, wouldn’t she? Not a man. But it’s not used for that by genderists, like you. So it’s rejected by most of us as a label.

None of us need men to dictate what is and isn’t worth focussing on for women.

I’ve got the impression from these posts that @onepostwonder is female.

Exactly. It’s absurd.

Thats not what that poster has given as a backstory.

Ok, I hadn’t checked back.

Onepost (if only) has posted fascinating thoughts about women’s rights across many threads.

Well Tarquin on his gap year, yah and onepostwonder (have I told you my teen transition story before?) have set me up for the day!

Fun times lol. I love when men come on to feminist boards to mansplain womanhood and how women are nasty meanies.

@FairHippopotama
Female' and 'woman' are sex and gender respectively, right?
Wrong.
I am a woman by dint of the biology laid down in my mother's womb.
I female for the same reason.
We have these specific words for the male and female of many kinds of animal - buck and doe, stag and hind, stallion and mare, boar and sow. None of them have 'gender'.

For centuries we've used 'man' for 'male human' and 'woman' for "female human'. It's only in the past decade or so that this has become controversial, under pressure from those who want to convince us that people can change sex.

Gender stereotypes are regressive and annoying anyway. They've bugged the hell out of me since I was about 4, and realised that I preferred toy cars to dolls.

ETA, also, I am a woman. A woman, not a cis woman. You don't get to redefine words and tell me what to call myself. Being a woman comes with a whole lot of baggage from growing up as female that is very different from the baggage of growing up male.

There's nothing internal that tells me I'm a man, and my personality (along with all human personalities) is too unique to be neatly characterised as masculine, but the very fact that I have no sense of self or inherent understanding of my own 'gender identity' makes me a (cisgender) man. Does that make sense?

At the risk of bringing in another contentious issue to illustrate the point:

A parallel would be calling someone with no belief in Allah a 'q*ffir'.

Some people would claim that the word is merely a descriptor for an unbeliever. Others feel that the word is a hostile term often used as an insult.

[I've tried to censor it to spare upset, but there's another 'q" word that's also considered offensive and sometimes used to apply to people, so I can't star it all out.]

@FairHippopotama
"'Female' and 'woman' are sex and gender respectively, right?"

Wrong. This is not a neutral or universal explanation but something you have knowingly or unknowingly taken from trans activism. Woman for centuries meant "adult female human" and still does to most people. Sure language can evolve & words can aquire new additional meanings, but what has happened with the word 'woman' is an Orwellian attempt to imply it always and only meant a gender role, and there never had been a word for an adult female human. Please don't join in with the gaslighting on this one.

Gender is simply a social construct based on sex. It’s not independent of sex.

Maintaining a level of respect for others' feelings sometimes comes above the truth.

Hard disagree.

In upholding a lie for one person you then expect everyone they ever meet in the future to suppress their feelings and their lived experiences.

That's a) not ok b) places your sister on a pedestal which can't be touch whilst simultaneously removed the ability of others to express themselves and their own potential issues with trauma.

Pronouns are not an act of neutrality. They massively impact on others by making it impossible for them to challenge where appropriate and to question where needed.

It means they become more at risk.

It's the school girl who is conditioned not to question a male who identifies as trans who acts in a voyeuristic way.

It's the lesbian who is told she can't challenge the male who insists he is female and is told that she's transphobic and not respectful if she doesn't consider him in her dating pool.

It's the rape victim forced to refer to her abuser as she allowing him to retain his power over her and further strip her of dignity.

And even on a level where we aren't talking about something criminal you have close family issue in fucked up power dynamics.

It's the Dad who is essentially emotionally abusive in insisting that he should now be called Mum and and transgression is a massive deal which isn't acceptable - when you have kids already struggling to process what's happening. It's the wife who is told she's now a lesbian - without her consent and she must fawn all over her husband and protect him. It's the siblings who walk on eggshells to avoid their brother going mental because they slipped up.

It's the siblings who struggle in social situations - even a polite question of 'do you have any brothers or sisters?' raises a minefield and potentially erases their lived experience which in turn makes it harder for them to create social bonds and their own sense of identity.

There was a survey done by a trans charity some years ago about the wives of transitioners. This survey (long since forgotten and buried) showed that psychological breakdowns in this group were through the roof. I forget the percentage (this is all source and posted in the depths of MN if you can search and find it - I've tried before but can't find it) It was shocking and raises some highly taboo questions which deserve significant attention about the impact on the immediate families. And whilst you might be utterly fine with it, it highlighted that there's clearly an issue and not one that I believe has gone away with the passage of time and changing attitudes if the posts of the many members of families on MN are anything to go by.

It's selfishness of the highest order to expect everyone else to put the demands of an individual over their own wellbeing and to suspend reality.

What you do for one person you must do for others because the problem is when and where is it legitimate to ignore 'being respectful'.

A man insisting he is female is NOT respectful to women
A woman insisting she is a gay man is NOT respectful to gay men.

Why don't they count? This isn't equality.

And yes the truth always matters. It is the very foundation upon which liberal democracy and equality is founded. Justice isn't possible when you start making arbitrary exceptions which can't be supported by blanket legal definitions or disrupt the workings of existing legal protections on the basis of sex. Gender isn't sex. This matters.

You may not have grasped the significance and importance of this. It doesn't stop it being the stone cold truth.

We can't be nice and be fair at the same time. Justice and democratic process which protect all always must come first.

You can't hide from yourself either. All these attempts to force others to deny reality and help keep you in a state of denial aren't about politeness. They are about avoidant type behaviour. Unaddressed avoidant type behaviour has toxic consequences for the individual demanding it - psychologically it sets you up for huge crashes and an inability to cope with certain situations. So your efforts to be respectful merely set up people for a fall in the long run. This isn't being kind. Especially when we talk about children and the psychological damage to children wanting to use wrong sex pronouns.

It's really not ok. None of it is.

If pronouns were neutral then this conversation would be different. They are not so this matters.

Hugely.

Superb post @RedToothBrush

Also as a follow on to that.

Why can't your sister just get that fucking therapy instead of insisting that we all have to accomodation her lack of mental health care and failure to address her needs?

And why must we continue to allow this to happen to subsequent little girls?

There is a problem here in that if we say that your sister is legitimate, we legitimise the failure to treat the next wave of kids.

Children are constantly use to validate adults. This isn't ok either.

This is the heart of what we are not supposed to talk about, recognise and see.

Trans advocacy is fundamentally anti equality, anti liberal and anti democratic process.

Thank you, Red.

Control of language, silencing of dissent, and labelling/othering of those who do not submit has been and.still is key to genderism.

Gender identity exists, for some people, but not for others. It is not the case that everyone has one and it is not inate. It is most equivalent to the "sense of the presence of God" that some religious people experience. For people who do not have that sense, it is meaningless. While it is reasonable to legislate for boundaries that allow people to feel it and express it and not be shamed or discriminated against for living by something that feels true for them, the people who don't share that mindset have every right not not be shamed or discriminated against for failing to live by a mindset they do not share.

Gender is an emergent phenomenon that forms from the dichotomy of living in a patriarchy that defines culturally acceptable boundaries for what is reasonable for a woman and what is reasonable for a man which comes up against an individual's sense of self, detecting the boundaries between ones own personality (or someone else's) and how far that falls within or outside the sphere of what is acceptable for your (or that other person's) sex. When that boundary is detected then there are two possibilities - either the person must belong in a different gender category or the limits and boundaries prescribed by our culture are wrong. It does seem odd to me that the public discourse goes more for option (a) than option (b)

No, onepost is a man who says he's a woman, because surgery and hormones etc. They say that they have changed sex.

I dont have a "gender identity" so clearly the answer is no.

I don't think you understood the first part. It wasn't meant that literally, but thanks for the lecture.

Please, at least don't lie. You are not sorry that you used the word cis gender. If you were sorry, you wouldn't continue doing it.

It's pretty common, that male people don't understand how women (like real women) see womanhood - as something heavily intertwined with being female. It seems that many male people don't have a comparable experience.

And trans identified females aren't a point against this - trans identified females mostly show us, how bad are the norms and expectation the world still puts on women.

When that boundary is detected then there are two possibilities - either the person must belong in a different gender category or the limits and boundaries prescribed by our culture are wrong. It does seem odd to me that the public discourse goes more for option (a) than option (b)

It's not that odd when you consider the origins of the trans movement.

The archives of Press for Change, who were at the forefront of the campaign for the GRA back in the 90s, show how this was what they were really campaigning for. It was nothing to do with eliminating stereotypes, it was all about men being accepted as a type of woman, even if all they did was put on a frock and a wig occasionally.

Going back further still, in the 70s when James Morris became Jan, he didn't want to do away with stereotypes, he wanted to 'be' a woman, but of course not the sort of woman who did the traditional "women's work" in the house - he conveniently had a wife to deal with that.

The trans movement has always been about stereotypes - not about doing away with them, but about insisting that the stereotypes are what makes someone a man or a woman. It's profoundly anti-feminist and anti-women.