Can you be a fully trans inclusive feminist?

[Imdunfer]

Inspired from another thread where it was out of place so I brought it here.

Someone seemed to claim that it was possible to be both be a feminist and to be trans inclusive, where by trans inclusive they mean males in women's spaces and shortlists (the attitude to sport wasn't stated).

I don't believe that you can truly be both, do you?

Make as many patronising and condescending posts as you like, with your clearly superior understanding.

I find it sad and depressing when women who identify as a "type" 🙄of feminist have no real understanding of women's history and the struggles our foremothers went through to get women where we are today.

It didn't involve acquiescing to the wants of a group of men.

It's like having a fancy dress party and insisting that those people really are Kings, Queens, Vampires and pirates.

Of course not. It might just be me as I'm not a feminist so I don't have any attachment to the term and who chooses to use it.

No you can’t be both, a feminist stands up for women’s rights and this doesn’t include men pretending to be women encroaching on every area of their life.

Well of course. If trans activists and fools who support them can change the meaning of words to nonsense meanings - woman, lesbian etc - then obviously they can claim the meaning of the word feminism has changed to a nonsensical meaning too. Doesn’t make it true.

If trans women were women they would automatically be included and none of you would have to keep banging on about a special branch of feminism and different definitions and 'seeing them as women'.

You dont even understand that your points make our argument for us.

Merci bien!

Exactly.

@Choppingwoodcarryingwater “Trans women aren't claiming to be natal females they are claiming to be sociological women.”

What is the difference between the two?

It's a complete nonsense concept. It's back to this 'let's determine sex by via something other than sex' argument.

Maybe I'm a sociological cat. Or a sociological Japanese person.

I'd love some thoughts on the equality training I did at work last year (an outside org, I'm not going to name).

They very much promoted the opinion they were a feminist organisation and at the same time included transwomen in their definition of women.

To their credit they listed all the protected characteristics correctly.

However when it came to intersectionality (really important in my opinion and in my workplace) they didn't include sex and gender reassignment separately, they just had "gender".

I thought this was really strange. I could see an argument for sometimes including transwomen and women in the same group (not saying I find that logical but I acknowledge that was their stance) but wouldn't true intersectionality need to acknowledge sex and gender reassignment separately?

A group of "women" under their definition will very much face different challenges based upon whether they are female or male (or even whether they have had gender reassignment surgery or not or whether they are perceived as trans or not). Just as the more commonly understood protected characteristics of race and disability would mean women's experiences differ.

It was such a glaring omission in an otherwise comprehensive training.

I came out of the training feeling as though the trainer had had to lie in order to maintain her truth, if that makes sense?

No. Because it comes down to whose rights would you fight for? Women’s to have single sex spaces or men’s to access them. Anyone saying there is no conflict is stupid.

So how are they women? What do adult human females and TIM have in common that make them both women?

I agree. Intersectionality was originally because black women were falling through the cracks in a specific organisation’s affirmative action programme- white women and black men were benefiting, but not black women. No true definition of intersectionality would fail to recognise biological sex as a key axis of oppression.

men hold more structural and societal power and that has led to ongoing oppression.

I find it interesting that you didn't identify the object of the oppression in that sentence. Who is it that is being oppressed?

Looking at it through a trad-left lens, I would add a 'some' at the beginning:
'Some men hold more structural and societal power...'
And they oppress everyone else - both male and female.

If your concern is mainly with who is doing the oppressing, and dismantling the tools and mechanisms they use to oppress others, it might be easy to lose sight of the importance of analysing who are the people being oppressed, and how and why is each group being oppressed.
I think some modern ways of thinking tend to do this, by lumping all oppressed people together, be it black, disabled, mentally ill, women, trans, gay, or whatever. From there it is just a small step to oppression being something you can identify into.

Traditional schools of feminism are concerned with exactly one class of people who are being oppressed: biological women.
Within this, there can be more or less concern with intersecting factors of oppression such as race and disability, but it is still about biological females.

I wonder one of the roots of the idea that 'feminism' can be about anyone who is being oppressed by structurally dominant males, is that we as a society have lost sight of the traditional leftist analysis of social class and the way power operates within capitalism.
If you are a man feeling oppressed and have no notion of trad-left analysis, you may latch on to 'feminism' as the thing that you use to fight male power.

A man who thinks that being a woman is simply about wearing dresses and lipstick and thinking ‘girly’ thoughts hasn’t got the first clue about how it really feels to be an actual biological woman.

They’ll never understand why bona fide feminists laugh hysterically at the absurdity of their claims that they really are women.

"I'm a feminist because I include Eddie Izzard (on fishnets/heels/lipstick days, but not others)".

Of course you can call yourself a feminist, but the rest of us are going to point and laugh.

No man will ever experience female puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and menopause. No man will ever know what it is to be a woman and what we deal with in our lifetime.

You missed a bit in your final sentence.

Gender being a socially constructed set of roles, behaviours, expressions, and norms that a society associates with being a boy, man, girl, or woman which, collectively, deny women and girls from reaching their full social, economic and political potential .

The fact that you think trans women aren't women speaks of your branch of feminism.

I think this is a key sentence. It highlights the mistaken belief that
I [and many others, often loosely known as GC feminists or even TERFS]
'think trans women aren't women'
because of our branch of feminism.

No, we 'think trans women aren't women'
because that's demonstrably true, not because of our branch of feminism, but because of science.

I may wish fervently that scientific and social reality wasn't as it is, but I wouldn't be daft enough to base a whole ideology on a denial of scientific fact, i.e. that human sex is binary and immutable.

Who gets to decide that being a feminist means transwomen are allowed in segregated spaces? I am a feminist and I support the inclusion of transwomen - where appropriate.

We would help ourselves so much by labelling things properly. That's the problem with language. Labelling vagina-only spaces as "women" has led to unreasonable and ridiculous conclusions when it comes to trans inclusion.

Anything purely identity-related can include transwomen. Because anything truly identity-related doesn't matter at all. "Women vs men" on a quiz, for example. Who cares if a transwoman is included? She is more than welcome.

People with penises (and extra strength) in a space with no supervision or cameras - of course transwomen cannot be there because that has nothing to do with identity and never bloody did!!!! Use language properly ffs!!! Stop calling those spaces "women" and you fix all your problems.

We're separating penises and vaginas. We're protecting from violence and rape. Not separating "people who like makeup and wearing heels from people who don't". FFS!!!!

Get the labels right and this shit disappears instantly.

Also: this is fuelled by insidious forces trying to justify installing surveillance everywhere. I have already seen cameras in women's vagina-only bathrooms and open bathrooms visible to the rest of the bar, precisely because we're allowing men penises in vagina-only spaces but we know that we cannot have penises in vagina-only spaces!!!!! Obviously!! Omg sick of even hearing about this.

And an absurd situation arises because transwomen are at equal risk of violence / rape if actual men are allowed in these vagina-only spaces. So who benefits?? The insidious forces trying to justify surveillance in every corner of the country.

Anyone reasonably thought to possibly have a penis needs to be questioned / stopped and if they insist, then staff either need to escort them inside the bathroom or ask them to use the disabled toilet. Business owner choice on which. And say no to surveillance in private spaces: both penis and vagina-only private spaces. Thanks.

Oh and if you have a penis and insist on using vagina-only spaces: please sit down to urinate. Thank you.

Quite!

“Women” isn’t an identity. It’s the English word used to describe adult female humans.

You want another word to describe people who feel like women - or whatever you need for these weird women vs men quizzes.

'Liberal feminists' believe that measures designed to promote safety and fairness for women (as well as modesty, and association rights, for both sexes) are infantilising towards women, who are, to quote my annoying trans friend, 'better than that'. That is why they think that prostitution, porn, and surrogacy are issues of female autonomy, and shrug off the bad outcomes, yet are righteously indignant about the Garrick Club.

I think this stems from a form of magical thinking which stops them realising that the persistent and ubiquitous oppression of women is rooted entirely in the fact that, at population level, men are bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive, and more antisocial, than women, and are capable of raping and impregnating them. This enables them to overlook the male sex of transwomen in favour of an approach based on treating their self-perception as purely a matter of personal autonomy.

This would be disastrous for women's rights if 50% of the population were trans. But, as trans people are rare, the liberal feminists are perhaps in the same situation as a vegan who very occasionally eats roast lamb, or a lovely bit of gorgonzola: he's not a vegan, but he is causing a lot less animal suffering and environmental damage than your average omnivore.

We're often accused of obsessing over trans issues. But this is just about the only place it can be discussed, and it is fascinating, philosophically, legally, and practically.

It doesn't follow that it's the biggest or only problem facing women, so liberal feminists may not be completely useless.

Or include Kellie Maloney, but didn’t include 2005 Frank Maloney when he tried to strangle his then wife.

To flight for a cause, we have to be able to define it.

Womens lib, means setting women free from the constraints assumed because they are female. Its being aware of how men and woman are treated differently for no reason other than their sex, and how that been used to benefit men and disadvantaged women. For example, women are assumed to be carers, even for random men.

There may be fights to be had around gender, but we have to be able to define it, and it cannot be instead of 'womens lib' because sex discrimination still exists.

And this is what is wrong about changing feminism from womens lib, to gender. It ignores sex, and assumes that women should stop working towards womens lib and focus on gender. Basically be the carers of trans identifying men, put our issues to one side for the benefit of these men.

Gender used instead of sex in feminism is anti feminism.