The liminality of sex perception, sex-based spaces and bodily autonomy.

[polypostwonder]

This thread continues a discussion between BonfireLady (sorry, I wanted to tag you but the system says your username doesn't currently exist) and I on biological sex vs perceived/observed sex in https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5530455-us-to-open-worlds-first-childrens-detransition-clinic-texas-hospital-to-offer-free-services-reversing-the-effects-of-gender-affirming-treatments?page=10&reply=152406258

She has requested I answer the following two questions:

1. would you consider that a viable way forward is for you to self-exclude from women's spaces and instead either advocate for third spaces for anyone to use (e.g. unisex facilities in addition to single-sex) or (probably your least preferred) use the men's?
2. would you support a restriction on anyone under 18 (or 25?) making permanent changes to their body, to match it with their perception of their "gender"? Similar to other restrictions on permanent body changes.

I believe I have previously answered them both. My answers today are superficially the same, but I have better thought out my answers (maybe?). To do this though, I need to share some assumptions.

In the previous thread, I believe there was somewhat of an agreement on the following statements:

1. People can identify a man when dressed in clothes 'traditionally associated' with women. Clothes are superficial to sex.
2. People look at other people and perceive their sex. People are not identifying the gametes/sry/chromosomes/other unobservable immutable biologic factor inside another person.
3. Assumptions about sex are made based on a person’s sex characteristics amongst other observable cues.
4. Pretty much every person in the whole world "exists within the expectations of sex categories". Very rarely it's unclear.
5. If a person exists within the expectations of sex categories, then socially they are treated as that sex whether they wish to be or not.

Building on those statements and previous discussion, some additional thoughts:

1. ‘Biological sex’ is defined by a person’s gametes/chromosomes/sry/other unobservable immutable biologic factor. This cannot be changed.
2. ’Observable sex’ is based upon the perception of sex characteristics rather than known biological sex and influences the placement and treatment of people in social sex categories. Perception is not under control of the observed, nor is it a demand of others.
3. Observable sex can be heavily influenced by biological sex and sex-based function. But sex-based function is not a requirement for the perception of sex.
4. Women’s rights are a cultural accommodation to rebalance access to society and ensure health, fair treatment, safety and/or dignity. Not all women require or access every right, but these rights are a vital benefit to women as a class.
5. Users of a culturally defined space for members of one sex may feel comfort, privacy or protection through separation from non-users. But all users share an equal right to feel comfort, privacy or protection.
6. Misogyny is not biologically based. It is a prejudice directed at women’s observable sex. Sexism can be biologically directed, but it can also be directed at members of an observable sex.
7. Sex realists believe every person should live and be treated by society according to their biological sex, no exceptions.
8. Trans people have a wide range of beliefs and goals. They do not share a single motivation.
9. Better quality research should be done with trans people of all ages.

I think BonfireLady is correct in saying each of us sees the other's "belief" as non-sensical and our own as position as factual. I'm hoping we can discuss this from a somewhat sensical space.

@polypostwonder You are probably more externally similar to a woman than most trans-identified males, in that you appear to have had medical interventions before/during male puberty. However, testosterone worked on you in the womb and in the first few months of your life. You were socialised as a 'queer' boy during your early years.

The starting point for 'woman' is 'adult, human female', and it is not possible to change from male to female. You started off male, so you remain male and are therefore a 'man' or 'transwoman', if you prefer. The edge cases for me are people with Swyers or CAIS where there has been no development of testes or zero response to testosterone and the person has been socialised as a woman from birth. You are not an edge case for me. I would wish you a happy life but I think you should be honest with people about your history and not use spaces or take resources meant for women.

I think that it is just as unlikely that any male ‘passes’ after seeing all the male people crowing on line how Hunter Schafer / Ethel Caine / Kim Patras pass. And how Becky Pepper Jackson passes. Most of those, at least, had puberty blockers and still can be observed as being male.

As has been mentioned before, some people’s concept of passing is that the male people have acquired developed breasts and a cavity inserted into their groin and that is all. Or that people who are not really looking or feel the need to closely observe don’t register the sex correctly of a person they have seen.

Thanks @HenriettaSwanLeavitt.

"In English, we have 'woman' for social sex/gender and 'female' for sex/physical. The separation grew looser and remained okay for women as long as it served women. No one was confused when someone said 'woman' or 'man' or 'male' or 'female.' Feminism was instrumental in building distinctions and between the two to identify structural imbalances and power dynamics as applied to gender/sex.

Gender critical people have been recombining the two, to the point of manufacturing this crisis. It's found some legal legs, because of some well-connected gender critical people, financed by American culture war organisations and cemented by socially conservative judges. (yes, admittedly somewhat of a conspiracy theory)."

No. I'm sorry but that is simply not true.

"Woman" in English was never a word for gender separate to sex until very recently, and this change, which is absolutely not reflected in most people's day-to-day use of the word, only arose relatively recently.

What actually happened, which I can bear witness to as this is my lived history and I saw it play out, is this.

Dictionaries before about 2000 simply defined Woman as an adult human female. That was the only meaning in common use.

20th century "Gender Critical" Feminism, at the time of course simply Feminism, did have the insight that society's expectations of a person because of their sex were separate to sex, but they didn't use the terminology "woman" and "female" to differentiate them. The terminology was "sex", "female", "woman" for sex, and "gender" and "feminine" for the social constructs around the female sex.

Crucially, and contrary to your assumption that "woman" and "female" were equivalent other than one was gender-based and one was sex-based, in Feminist discourse at the time that the split between Gender and Sex was being explored , there was no noun equivalent to "woman" (a person of the female sex who therefore experiences the social expectations assigned to that sex) that meant a person of either sex who embodies the social expectations assigned to the female sex because we did not see these gendered expectations as innate or desirable, we saw them as an artificial outcome of sexism that hurt and constrained both sexes but especially marginalised, limited and disempowered women. The idea that someone could "be" a gender rather than simply perform it was simply not how we thought about gender.

It was only later, as Gender Absolutist people (trans and allies) became successful in promoting the idea that "man" and "woman" should be considered aspects of the personality, that some individual women suggested Woman-the-gender and Female-the-sex as a compromise to be kind (amd make mo mistake, it is one hell of a generous offer to give up our entire history and social and cultural presence under our original name and ask in return only to preserve the ongoing space to continue to be recognised by our sex instead of an imposed social gender). But ultimately this was already unworkable, as Trans identifying men were already laying claim to the adjective "female", and even claiming that their hormone and physical interventions make them actually "biologically female".

I mean, just think about it. Think about what you know and it already doesn't line up to your claim.

If "woman" had always meant both sexes and it was just those pesky Gender Critical Feminists who spoiled it, why would there ever be a GRA and equivalents in other countries at all? These laws do, after all, predate and indeed are broadly the cause of current Gender Critical challenges to Gender Absolutism.

And if "woman" had always been unproblematically understood as a mixed sex gender role and "female" as physical sex, why would Gender Absolutists use the phrase "assigned male (or female) at birth" rather than assigned Man (or Woman)?

So I'm sorry, but no.

Woman has always meant us, adult human females.

It meant us when the women were the people who could not inherit if there was a male heir. It meant us when our husbands had the legal right to rape us. It meant us when we were not allowed to vote. It meant us when people said our natural place was the domestic sphere of children and homemaking not the public sphere of money, power and lawmaking. It meant us when Feminists began to unpick our sex from the constraints of gender.

And there is still no moral justification to take our name, and with it our history, our rights, our discourse, our privacy and our legal, political and social existence to label your personality.

You are who you are and that is ok, but find your own name because you have neither moral right nor logical basis to claim ours.

As PP said, our way, keeping Man and Woman to mean what they always did and finding new names for the newly recognised human facet of Gender Identy, allows for both of us to be a accepted and respected in the way we understand ourselves. Yours is the one that demands the unexisting of the other.

'Woman' just differentiates species.

A female can be any species.

The vast majority of people would just look blank if you asked them about their 'social gender' now, never mind 100 years ago.

TIM=Trans Identifying Man
TMI = Too Much Information

or is it just me?🤔

You don't really address the issue, and where you try to, you seem to be recreating history itself (as well as women) in your own image: the history of the word "woman", its intersection with "gender", women's history and feminist thought.

Historically, and across many cultures there's an understanding that 'sex and gender' (in the interest of saving words, I don't like it either but it's early and I have to get out of here...) were related (closely in most people) but different contexts.

Absolutely. This is what women have resisted for hundreds of years, a resistance that was eventually made explicit in the language of feminist analysis. Read on...

In English, we have 'woman' for social sex/gender and 'female' for sex/physical.

Wrong!

Female is an adjective, applicable to all female animals and plants. Used as a noun, it 1) doesn't discriminate between different organisms, and 2) can feel somewhat inappropriate and degrading because of these wider associations (cf. our shared understanding that referring to "Blacks" and "Gays" can be problematic). I've experienced the use of female in a misogynistic way myself: in anger, a man once wrote, "kill the female" at me.

As such, thankfully, we have - or used to have - a distinct noun for human females, reflecting their worth as a group. Equivalent descriptors which, curiously enough, aren't currently being challenged and appropriated include "cow" for female cows, "bitch" for female dogs and "vixen" for female foxes (lucky cows, hens and vixens, eh, enjoying their own words?)

However, you may notice that each of those three examples above has certain negative connotations. This is because of the way in which gender - society's conception of human females - creates artificial, strong, and often highly problematic, associations with words denoting female beings. We see it even in "Stupid woman!", which, depressingly, slips off the tongue far more easily - naturally - than "stupid man". Note that "naturally".

In such a context, it becomes difficult to distinguish between "woman" as adult human female and "woman" as socially and culturally constructed being. This much I acknowledge. But I see this not as a fundamental, inescapable truth, but as ongoing evidence of millennia of males seeking to control women by defining what they are, what they must do, what they can't do; decoupling them from the infinite potential of the wonderful blank slate that's "woman-as-female-half-of-humanity", and binding them instead to "woman-as-what-I-say-she-is". As such, embrace and exploit this oppressive history ("woman's always been culturally constructed") to compound women's lack of recognition in an new, 21st-century twist on the same feels ironic - and exquisitely cruel.

Unsurprisingly, then, women have spent centuries seeking to untether "their" word - "woman", an adult human female, sex-based but filled with infinite potential - from these reductive "gendered" associations. The feminist movement, and feminist theory, gave them the language necessary to advance this age-old project, separating "sex" and "gender".

The exact history of the word "gender" is complex - someone else may be able to go into more depth. It's relationship with sex is also complex - we still don't know which, and to what extent gendered expectations and behaviours do actually have some biological foundation of imperative.

The separation grew looser and remained okay for women as long as it served women. No one was confused when someone said 'woman' or 'man' or 'male' or 'female.'

I honestly don't know what you mean by this. You seem to be saying that, over some undefined time period, "woman" progressively became separated from "female", and women condoned this on the basis that this was useful to them? (Which time? How was it useful?) But you also say that there was total clarity (the surprisingly confident "no one" became "confused"?) Further information and clarification needed. All I can think is that you're referring to the relatively recent (miniscule-ly, in historical and geographical terms) appropriation of the word "woman", for the first time, to include a minority of males?

Feminism was instrumental in building distinctions and between the two to identify structural imbalances and power dynamics as applied to gender/sex.

Agree to an extent. The verb "building" is problematic, though, suggesting something constructed by feminists. Rather, feminist theory created a name for what already existed, to enable a more explicit and structured resistance to the previous unthinking melding of sex and gender used to justify women's oppression, disenfranchisement, enslavement sand abuse. Child-bearing (females) = nurturing (women are unsuited to the workplace); physically weaker (females) = mentally weaker (women are undeserving of a political voice). In decoupling these, they sought to liberate women from these artificially-imposed chains of gendered standards, while also enabling serious study of these, including their origins and impact.

Gender critical people have been recombining the two, to the point of manufacturing this crisis.

I don't understand this. Explanation needed.

It's found some legal legs, because of some well-connected gender critical people, financed by American culture war organisations and cemented by socially conservative judges. (yes, admittedly somewhat of a conspiracy theory).

I'm not deigning to respond in any detail to this tiring trope, except to say that it often feels dangerously close to the good ol' physically weaker (females) = mentally weaker (women) in its implicit suggestion that foolish gender critical women are unknowingly swayed by complex forces we wot not of.

What follows returns to you and your experiences, and you and your assumptions about what "most women" think. It doesn't address the question of our historical oppression, and the need for a word for human females to name this; our ongoing global oppress, and our right right to a word for human females to challenge this; our personal experience, and the very evident of many women now for a word to describe how we conceive of ourselves; the practical implications (my discussion about the Taliban; research into female bodies - there was one on concussion - being corrupted by the inclusion of trans "women"; the very clear practical consequences you claim to understand of sports, prisons etc....

No one is forcing you to be friends with trans people.

Honestly, I do find this a very weird way to end, which I think, in its sheer irrelevance, further exposes your difficulty separating the personal and the political. This has nothing to do with my relationship with trans people. I know and like a number. It's about women's rights.

You know? That group who recently won the vote? What do we call them now? Are you honestly saying we should refer to them as "adult human female", so the kids being taught that women = gender identity are clear on this important issue (unlike the ones with whom I discussed the Taliban)? Should we qualify the history books accordingly, lest they assume women self-identified into their own disenfranchisement? It's really not outside the realms of possibility, if the word is normalised to include males' gendered self-perception. And that scares the life out of me.

I present a solution that gives everyone a word.

I remain unclear what your equivalent is. It seems to be favouring your "side" on the basis of an unevidenced assumption about what "women" think. Which, to me, is solving this problem (adult human females' autonomous existence being dismissed) with... the exact same problem (adult human females' autonomous existence being dismissed!)

I hate the "erasure" trope, but I can't think of a more absolute example than a historically oppressed group - women - being told they're no longer entitled to a descriptor of their own, on the basis that this descriptor has been so corrupted to excuse their oppression that its meaning can be denied and reframed.

The word "women" really was never ours in that sense, was it. Adam's rib > male gaze > trans ideology. We only ever were what men told us we were.

The fight continues.

NB. I typed that before reading any other responses. Maybe that's a good thing - we think independently! - or maybe not (if I've just repeated arguments expressed far more concisely by others earlier today!) Returning to the source to catch up and see now...

By the way, I should add how much your thoughtful engagement is appreciated, PPW. It is making me think, not just about how to refute your arguments, but also about your position. I appreciate how distressing and challenging the current debate must be for you. I've always had a great deal of sympathy for the group which used to be known as transexuals - and concern, to be honest, at what I see as the damage being done to them directly as a result of the overreach of the current ideology. The world isn't yet set up for people like yourself, it's true, and this is a huge issue. It's the current solution to this that I take issue with, as the world's also still not set up for women! And boy has it cost us blood, sweat and tears to get even to where we have. Even now, I'm sat typing at a male-default table, a little too high, my arms aching more than those of the average male would. We need a word to advocate for women, even as you advocate for your own needs and words. Decouple the two to lessen this unpleasant conflict of rights, and many women here would be advocating for your needs right with you.

Great post 👏👏👏

You seem to be saying that, over some undefined time period, "woman" progressively became separated from "female"

Even now, the law is clear that when a peerage can only pass down the male line, it definitely means the male line.

No passing it on to a daughter, however manly she may be.

As someone (like millions of other women worldwide) who has experienced numerous female specific medical conditions and experiences, I just find this continual insistence that TW are women so unbelievably insensitive.

*Distress at getting your first period
*Distress at not getting your first period
*Worry about why your period hasn't arrived
*Contraceptives that fuck your body up and turn you into a person you don't recognise
*Pregnancy
*Miscarriage
*Gestational diabetes
*Pre eclampsia
*Child birth
*Injuries sustained during childbirth
*Post child birth complications (which I will live with for the rest of my life)
*Breast feeding
*Mastitis
*Regular smear tests
*Mammograms
*Menopause
*Internal scans
*PCOS
*Endometriosis

I could go on.
All of these are often invasive, painful and distressing experiences.

Not to mention the fact that women make up 75% of auto immune disease cases worldwide.

These are just the medical ramifications of being born female. That's before we even get into the cess pit of what it means socially to be a woman.

So, my guess would be, if 'transition' would somehow magically encompass all of the above, and it was possible to become an actual woman quite a few TW would probably not be so keen.

The fucking audacity of it all just blows my mind.

<Coughs> *hysteroscopy.

When TRA say that we all know women=gender and female =sex, I question what else they are reconstruction in their mind.

I've never heard of a women been referred to as a man in all seriousness because she is doing or wearing something gender non conforming.

The women=gender, female=sex is used by those who want to argue for trans rights, but dont want to debate the idea of sex change or who want to include men with no surgery/hormones. The 'socially a women' idea is only said in relation to men who want to be women.

What I want to know is how one performs “woman gender”. @polypostwonder how can one know one is actually a woman? Is there a list of thinks you need to do? Do we need a spreadsheet?

No one has ever explained what living as a woman is. And they never will.

Bar the facile hair, clothes, make up bollocks that we all know to be irrelevant.

It's wearing a v-neck love, keep up.

Dammit!! I’m not a woman then. I have no v necks!

<checks t shirt >

Ooh, I'm doing it right today!

Great list.

I'll add having our pain dismissed as being psychological. I'm permanently disabled because doctors dismissed my spinal cord tumour as being all in my head. (I'd tell them "of course, pain is all in my head because I wouldn't feel it if I didn't have a brain.") I've also seen this with friends and my DD.

I'm sorry to hear that.

And an even bigger issue for black women, and even money can't buy you a listening ear, as Serena Williams found.

Amd how long it took to even acknowledge that the mesh issue was real.

Is my spinny skirt redundant now?

Similar thing happened to me.

I had a pelvic floor repair surgery following a brutal delivery. (Which included having my peroneal nerve severed from being left in stirrups for so long and resulted in foot drop. With a new born)

I woke up in so much pain I thought I was dying. I screamed like an animal on my hands and knees for hours and hours and was told I was being dramatic. Never known pain like it. Child birth didn't come close.

After several hours they had evidently had enough of my screams and 'relented' and took me down to have a CT scan.
On the way down through the corridors, they stopped my trolley for a moment and I remember thinking "If I smash my head against the pipes on the walls, the pain will end"

After I had the scan, consultant came to see me and said "I'm sorry, it appears we have put a stitch through your ureter. We're going to have to take you for emergency surgery to remove it"

So for hours and hours I had urine backing up into my kidneys with nowhere to go. The pain was like nothing I have ever felt.

So then I had surgery to remove it, and a stent put in my ureter to keep it open. This stayed for 6 weeks and caused me terrible pain.

Then another surgery after the 6 weeks to have it removed.

THIS, and countless other experiences are what it means to be a WOMAN.
You know, continuing the human race and all that jazz.

But I'm sure having your dick chopped off and some tits bolted on makes us the same.

You know you are a woman if not having a period tells you something important about your health.