Continuation of Polypostwonder thread

[Imdunfer]

Follow on from this thread

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5532352-the-liminality-of-sex-perception-sex-based-spaces-and-bodily-autonomy?page=39

For argument sake, I understand Blaire White to be a woman. This is independent of the knowledge she chose to only undergo cosmetic facial surgeries and breast augmentation, while retaining everything else.
I think I remember reading that she politically aligns 'right' and is politically vocal about being a male, living as a trans woman. I'm not 100% sure, though. It's not a way that I could understand living, but it is financially lucrative in her case.

There is a person who declares themselves to be male.

That person chooses to live presenting as a female.

In spite of their self declaration as a male, complete with male genitals, you understand that they are a woman.

And you ascribe their understanding of themselves being male, at least partly, to financial motives.

This is either monumentally arrogant or monumentally stupid thinking, or possibly both. Or perhaps you just like playing with a largely female forum and seeing how many feathers you can ruffle.

One thing is for sure, and that is that I don't think anything you write on this subject from now on is going to be of any value to read.

I'll also add that as much as gender critical people hold as sacrosanct the biologically restrictive definitions of 'woman' and 'man,' many more people conceptually understand the words to be just as socially relevant as sexually.

I'd go as far as say I believe a larger percentage of the population (than gender critical-identified people) believe that the social definition of sex (maybe gender?) can be independent of the sex-based definition.

I very much doubt that. Evidence please.

I don't name 'woman' in the sense that you are suggesting, it is used upon me.

Assuming you are a reliable narrator this is, I am sorry to say, bullshit.

You call yourself a women and IIRC a "mother".

You walk into women's spaces.

You say yourself you fear how your social circle would react if you were to now tell them, after all these years allowing them to call you a woman, you were actually born male.

By these actions you demonstrate that you absolutely do knowingly choose to take and enjoy taking the word "woman" for yourself. You choose not to tell others who mistakenly believe you are a woman that they are wrong because it is your belief that you are a woman.

So please, don't insult me with pretending this just happened to you as if you do not have a voice to speak the truth.

You choose what to accept and what to not accept, and in doing so make yourself culpable for the sexism you choose to embrace.

If independent, why so crucial to se the same word? Why can you not simply allow that we do exist in ways you don't?

Adding one last response to @FlirtsWithRhinos

The implied suggestion that I adopt the identification of 'trans woman,' is unfair. 'Trans woman' has no cultural relevance to my life, other than to refer to a process I underwent that others undergo. It doesn't convey any cultural relevance. I'd go so far as to say no one understands 'trans woman' to even be a gender. Certainly not on FWR where 'man' is preferred and used liberally along with various motivations and characteristics that are assigned to trans people along the way.

I am in the world as a woman and mother (and daughter, and niece and aunt...). It is where I belong. It is where others know I belong. I accept my placement within women. It does feel comfortable to me and I even find it empowering sometimes.

That you believe I invite sexism is beyond. You have no idea.

I doubt my belief affects you personally or has an impact on the billions of other women in the world. I understand my belief is similar to that of other trans accepting women.

In that you are very very wrong.

Of course it affects the female half of humanity to change the definition of us from the simple reality of our sex to some sort of "social context" or exterior presentation.

It affects us firstly because it removes the recognition in language and law of what we are, and secondly because it turns us into something we are not.

Without the first we cannot share and cone to understand what is common in our experiences because of our sex and based on that understanding build the supports we need because of them.

As to the second, we've spent so much effort trying to get away from the idea that our bodies determine our minds or our worth, we are barely getting there even in supposedly progressive countries let alone what women have to deal with in Afghanistan or Brazil or Kenya, and here you are trying to push us right back into that box.

Dear God man, do you honestly not understand that?

Well, if you honestly did not know that before, you do now.

So if you dare to claim ever again that changing the name "women" to include men because of how they look, feel or their "social context" this post explaining it to you is here to link back to.

I do acknowledge the biological definition. The word has multiple definitions within multiple contexts and one of them is applicable to my life. If another word existed, I'd probably have been culturally placed by that word, but there wasn't and isn't at this time.

Why don't you put effort into agitating for that then, instead of all this effort into trying to persuade the world that "woman" means more than it meaningfully can?

I very much have personal experience with 'woman' as it applies to more than half of the population. Not one person, government or organisation has ever needed to know what my chromosomes are, my internal organs look like, what gametes my body was organised to support, or the status of any SRY genes.

I live under the same language, law and cultural beliefs. I am not above it, nor do I control it.

Everything I do on FWR is very male. It's the deal.

There is another word though, transwoman, which Poly seems to reject. Bit transphobic, that.

Because I'm not.

That's because you are literally male.

As has been explained. Thank you.

Actually no, I'm not suggesting you call yourself "trans woman" at all.

I think that's actually the worst of both worlds.

It is still linking whatever it is you feel to the existence of female people which is the fundamental problem for women, and it's also reducing you by making you into a not-quite-something (a not-quite "woman") instead of recognising you and others like you as a fully realised something else.

So what I'm actually suggesting is that trans people invent a whole new terminology for Gender that allows the people we currently think of as trans women to be fully realised and recognised in their own right as separate from and nothing to do with being female. (And similarly for trans men, and enbies, and any other identies that arise of course, because unlike sex this new expression of humanity diversity can be as fluid and expansive as Genderists want to make it).

And it doesn't have to be limited to trans people either, because once it's nothing to do with sex, it's just another thing some people will have in common. So the women who today feel you do have something in common with them can still find that commonality under a new name, while still being women as well under the old.

It's expansive instead of regressive. It goes from being a zero sum game to win/win.

Lying by omission is still lying.

You pretend you had womanhood thrust upon you because everyone assumes you are female, but that isn't true is it?

By your own telling, you transitioned as a child/teen.

So before the "everyone thinks I'm a wonan", there was a decision to transition because of how you felt inside.

That is the genesis here. You are in your mind a "woman" not because of how people treat you but because of your own beliefs about how female people feel.

Some TRA posters with their purposely outrageous word games and claims remind me of Colin the emotional vampire.

I'd like to add more, but even if I try and generalise about the motivations of any male who would come to FWR to gaslight the (mostly) females here in this way, I think the post would end up deleted. I'm not even sure this one will be left to stand, but it kind of sums it up for me.

As you have always known, because it is just part of who you are.

You are very welcome, not that you were ever actually confused about your sex.

You know you are, and always will be, male.

Do you believe you should be recognised legally and socially as a woman?

If society and the law said "no, we won't do that, women are simply adult human females and that does not include male people no matter how medically altered they may be or how they may present socially", would you accept that?

I know we've just gone many messages about social 'gendery' stuff, but woman isn't solely about gender for me though, which seems to get lost. Personally, my initial motivation was embodiment away from physically growing into adulthood as a man. I had issues there. But yay me for avoiding that whole shit show.

About the quest for utopia, gender isn't an identity. It's a system that was created by and enforced culturally. You're asking me, along with fewer than 1% of the population, who marginally maybe have something maybe in common with one another, to invent a replacement for one of the most entrenched tools of social control? I'm all for doing away with gender. The various factions I've witnessed within trans space would never work toward anything in partnership.

I've worked towards making gender more irrelevant. I'm continuing to focus on this.

You're asking me, along with fewer than 1% of the population, who marginally maybe have something maybe in common with one another, to invent a replacement for one of the most entrenched tools of social control?

Yes.

Better that than entrench it further as you do today.

Better that than have fewer than 1% of the population expect that society rewrite the self knowledge of 50% because they can't face the sex they actually are.

But also no.

No I don't expect less than 1% of the population to do that alone.

I don't think you realise how much support you would have. All the GC voices that currently speak against you would stand with you for a start, because having gender entirely outside sex is where we also want to be.

So instead of trans people having to fight on two fronts, the traditionalists who believe gender has to be tied to sex and the GC feminists who don't want have gender linked to sex at all, you'd have just one front and more allies at your side.

I wish you would understand - we don't want you not to have the space to be you, we just want you to stop creating that space by squashing us.