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.

@HousePlantEmergency I'm so sorry you went through that and that they didn't take your pain seriously. 💐

@murasaki Absolutely. Black women face medical biases from being women and from being black. Here's just one example:

In the UK, Black women are five times more likely to die from complications in pregnancy and during childbirth than white women. In the US, Black women have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality of any country in the industrialized world. And many of the pregnancy and birth complications killing Black women are preventable. Preeclampsia, a hypertensive condition that can occur suddenly during pregnancy, strikes Black women at 50 percent higher rates than white women in the UK and 60 percent higher than white woman in the US. The risk of developing the condition escalates in women with other chronic diseases, including lupus, diabetes, and kidney disease, which Black women in the UK and US experience at significantly higher rates.

Literary Hub » Healthcare Has a Race—and Gender—Problem

Can we not turn this into a race discussion? The childbirth stats are very heavily influenced by poverty. Let's stick with women, shall we, that's enough of a battle against the trans activists.

Of we're talking about healthcare and being listened to, which we were at this point in the thread, I think it's valid.

Let's not police the discussion where it's not needed.

We were talking about women.

Difference in listening rates between black and white women is important but of no relevance to the trans discussion and if people pick up on it it will derail the discussion we were all engaged in.

The linked article deals with how women are mistreated by the healthcare system. I quoted the bit about black women because it was relevant to the post I quoted. I think it's important that we include groups like Black women, older women, pregnant women, girls, etc. when we talk about how women's concerns are dismissed by medical practitioners and researchers. We're not a monolith.

But the article also describes how the healthcare system routinely fails women. E.g.

Health-care providers and the health-care system are failing women in their responses to and treatment of women’s pain, especially chronic pain. Biased gender expectations directly affect how real, serious, and deserving of treatment women’s pain is perceived to be. Women are more likely to be offered minor tranquilizers and antidepressants than analgesic pain medication. Women are less likely to be referred for further diagnostic investigations than men are. And women’s pain is much more likely to be seen as having an emotional or psychological cause, rather than a bodily or biological one. Women are the predominant sufferers of chronic diseases that begin with pain. But before our pain is taken seriously as a symptom of a possible disease, it first has to be validated—and believed—by a medical professional. And this pervasive aura of distrust around women’s accounts of their pain has been enfolded into medical attitudes over centuries. The historical— and hysterical— idea that women’s excessive emotions have profound influences on their bodies, and vice versa, is impressed like a photographic negative beneath today’s image of the attention-seeking, hypochondriac female patient. Prevailing social stereotypes about the way women experience, express, and tolerate pain are not modern phenomena—they have been ingrained across medicine’s history. Our contemporary biomedical knowledge is stained with the residue of old stories, fallacies, assumptions, and myths.

Following on from Catiette's excellent post, I just wanted to add a thought I had after having read it:

(full disclaimer: This may very well have been said already, but I gave up on the thread some time back, because I can't handle the word salad arguments for why we must believe that men can become women, and I would have completely lost my temper, and that wouldn't do anyone any good at all)

As a woman who has studied history, it suddenly occurred to me that women never had a gender (separate from our sex) because we never needed one. I'm generalizing here, because there always have been women who have pushed back against the restrictions of patriarchy, but, within the history of written record and therefore historical evidence, they are very few and far between.

Whether for good or bad (and I would argue for bad), women didn't need "gender" because we had no rights at all. Everything we were, wore, ate, created, and everyone we birthed, belonged to men. Even free women, even wealthy women, owned nothing that wasn't ultimately controlled by men.

We were a sex. We were the weaker, degenerate, malleable, useable, birthing sex. There was really nothing men needed from us except our wombs. Most men, including in the Church, through medieval times and beyond, believed that all babies grew from a seed that the man provided; a womb was just a vessel in which that child would grow.

Sex is all we were. We didn't need a gender to be able to prove that we had thoughts, ideas, intelligence, cunning, potential, or any kind of a future that didn't include servicing men in the continuation of the human species, because we never had, and we were never going to have, any existence outside the control of men.

It wasn't until we started pushing back against the constraints of the patriarchy (secular and religious) that we needed a word to define this new state of being, separate from what men defined us as.

I would argue that it started with tiny steps during the Enlightenment (only for women of independent means or male relatives who "indulged" them), continued during the early Industrial period, expanded rapidly during the mid-nineteenth century, closed down somewhat between 1890 and 1914, then exploded after the First World War. And we were still called "the female sex."

Most of us are aware of the rest of the story, through the Second World War, the Fifties, and the beginnings of Feminism, and, finally the term "gender." But I think the seeds of the idea for gender, as separate from sex, came about only when women began taking things to ourselves, and some very brave women, especially in the nineteenth century, had to risk everything in order to change the rules and laws so that we could keep what we had taken as ours. This is when we started to realize that although sex could never be changed, or used to improve our situation, gender could become something we could use to define the impositions and restrictions placed upon our sex.

And so it remains today, with sex immutable, but "gender constructs" which can be used, chopped and changed however society wants to. Or not used. But this has been what activists have been trying to claim, and take from us, because they can't take our sex.

This is all very Western history of course, and maybe it's all been said before, but that was what I thought after having read Catiette's post, and having been on the Sunderland Minster thread.

Does any of this make sense?

Well, OP wanted to discuss bodily autonomy.

Something which many women - and significantly more black women- seem to have precious little of in the hands of the NHS.

Anyway, the thread had moved on a little bit.
I don't think there's any need to disapprove of posters talking around a subject.

And the fact that this poster is probably middle aged, middle class and white makes it further pertinent.
I'm sure his demographic have got better listening rates, than those of black women.
I think they get listened to a tiny bit more.

Edited to add - I'm sure he'll come on and insist he was raised by wolves in a dungeon... but his entitlement comes from somewhere. It's astonishing.

@FlirtsWithRhinos and @Catiette, can I just say thanks for all your input on this and other threads. I know very little about feminist theory and have barely engaged with the seminal texts and writers. I find most social theory to be a difficult read. It's not that the concepts are too hard, there is just something about the style of writing that I can't engage with. I can understand and enjoy hard science literature, yet I still haven't finished Material Girls after many months of trying. The only reason I have found myself on a 'feminist' forum is because of gender ideology; I would never have chosen to visit otherwise. I find your explanations and thoughts on feminism very accessible and educational.

Speaking of a male person’s insistence that he ‘passes’, if that male person has declared that he is female, why would anyone trust a self reported belief that he passes?

@polypostwonder

A question has just occurred to me. Have any women who lost out to you on women only short lists/ awards been aware of your male genetics?

If they were, how do you think they might feel about that?

I remember the OP mentioning not being a male because he had not ‘penetrated’ anyone. This was posted on a thread in February.

”I have never sexually understood myself to be man or male. I would have a hard time trying to believe any of my partners have either.

I've never penetrated anyone, nor did I ever had the urge to do it. Your genuinely held beliefs don't rewrite or recontextualise my sexual experience, nor the experience of my partners.”

Of course, we have known for a very long time that some male people do believe female people are just fuckholes. You only have to see some of the quotes from male people with transgender identities to know this doesn’t change with transition.

Alessandra Asteriti picked this up as well as being implicit in some of the court decisions.

"Mr Goodwin had also raised a claim with regards to Article 12, the right to marry. The Court finds a breach in this case as well. They are content to consider that, if a man undergoes surgery, he becomes a woman. Where the sexes are conceptualised as the one who penetrates and the one who is penetrated. This is not said explicitely but significantly, the section opens with the statement, by Mr Goodwin that he ‘enjoyed a full physical relationship with a man’. This is enough for the Court. Mr Goodwin feels like a woman, and he is penetrated like a woman. Ergo, he can marry a man. Marriage reduced to traditional sex positions. The rest is just flourish."

https://alessandraasteriti.substack.com/p/a-genealogy-of-gender-identity-gender-842

I think that it is important to remember the inherent misogyny that is foundational to any male person who declares they are a female person.

I remember the OP mentioning not being a male because he had not ‘penetrated’ anyone. This was posted on a thread in February.

I remember that because I was so gobsmacked by what a male point of view it was. I don't think I can think of anything more male.

I've never heard any woman think of shagging in that way or view male vs female that way. It was even more shocking that OP seemed completely clueless about how male centric this view was.

Women are fuckholes and if you're a fuckhole you're a woman. Almost like Andrea Chu's “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”.

For me because of my abuse, it ties in with BDSM and women being bottoms/slaves/sex toys. It's such a regressive, male way of looking at women and sex.

It' was also weird because men can be the ones being penetrated - e.g., gay sex or pegging - and women can penetrate. It was inaccurate, misogynistic, and showed OP's true colours.

I remember the OP mentioning not being a male because he had not ‘penetrated’ anyone.

If that's correct and if I'd known it, it would have changed my posts on this thread.

@polypostwonder is this true, and if so do you have any explanation of such a remark? I'm hoping it was satirical or has somehow been taken out of context.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5492207-whats-the-deal-guys?page=5&reply=150597923

Woman means fuckhole then.

ffs

So, completely taken out of context, then. The comment was made in response to another poster saying

"As for your version of what your sexuality is defies any logic. You and your husband are both men. Presumably engaging in sexual activities that only two men can engage with."

It was a perfectly reasonably response.

What Arabella said.

I don’t consider it was taken out of context when you consider the wider context. I think that it highlights exactly what Alessandra pointed out.

Some male people use the concept of being penetrated as one of the aspects of being described as a ‘woman’.

The very fact that the OP even mentioned it in the wider discussion is pertinent.

I think it was telling, but perhaps in a different way. To me, it suggests that onepostwonder sees himself as a woman (partly) because he's not 'a proper man' because men penetrate.

But virgin men are men, not just potential men. So not penetrating doesn't particularly assist in his wish to be a woman. Similarly, women are not 'people who don't ejaculate'. It's very reductive to frame womanhood or manhood as a matter of sexual experience. That's not to say that sexual experiences are not sometimes profound, and may feel defining. This is partly why abusive sexual activity is so disturbing.

It was simply a response to someone saying "presumably you fuck your husband up the arse as most pairings of two males do".

The very fact that the OP even mentioned it in the wider discussion is pertinent.

He mentioned it because he was asked!

But you’ve taken the question asked clear out of context here in your reply?

He did. Some people would have responded differently. It still says something about how he sees 'man' and 'woman', and by extension probably illuminates his self-perception.

No I haven't. I have quoted the question he was asked that made him make that response about penetration.

did the person actually say to him “presumably you fuck your husband up the arse?” Because that isn’t what it says in the quote you gave