Recommend me a book!

[RibenaBerry]

Right, reading these boards recently has given me a bit of a kick up the arse on my feminist principles. I've done a bit of 'light' reading in the area (think The Beauty Myth as a teenager) but think I need something a bit more serious without being so weighty I never pick it up. I'd rather have something published in, say, the last 15 years than any of the 'classics'.

Any ideas?

earwicga, i am confused

i asked you why germaine greers' view on trans gender women was dangerous.

you provided me with the definition of transgender phobia (thanks anyway for the clarification).

i still dont see how saying (and believing) that a man who cuts off his penis is not a woman. biologically or otherwise, is a dangerous view point.

in fact, isnt this whole thing just a 'poor men' argument in disguise.

poor men, they cant even be women when they want to be..........

You're welcome It's dangerous because it encourages and legitimises hatred/fear of trans women. It others them and makes them non-people. I don't understand the last two lines of your comment.

well, the 'poor men' argument is one we get alot of here on the feminist section.

and its a well known argument often employed when any discussion of feminism or frankly anything ot do with women specifically comes up.

and as i dont believe men that removing their penisis surgically are in fact women, your (vehemnt) stance of support sounds to me like a 'poor men' argument.

I would encourage you to do some reading on the matter frikonastick. Obviously the removal of a penis doesn't make a man a woman. There is a lot more to it. dittany and her ilk are threatened by trans feminism as it forces them to change and adapt their theories of gender.

thanks earwicga, but i think i will pass on that. not for any phobic reasons! just because i find my time taken up with stuff that pertains to women only. i know that sounds, well, maybe strange. its just that there seem to be plenty of groups out there to support men in whatever they want to so with their lives (or anatomy) and so i am going to stick with supporting women.

frikonastick - thanks for summing up how I feel!

I'm assuming I'm one of dittany's ilk? (emskaboo has moment as small bubble of pride fills her chest). I find your manner and tone disturbing. I know my opinion is challenging, but I'd hoped that I'd expressed clearly that my issue was with the patriarchal model and the reductive view of femininity were where my concern was focused, not on individual Transgendered people, who are victims of a system which views maleness and femaleness as encapsulating certain emotional characteristics.

I don't feel anything I said could be regarded as hate speech, but I do feel that saying a mutilated man is as good a representative of my gender as I am is a form of hate speech; and whatever you may say about a post op man not being a woman; 'Obviously the removal of a penis doesn't make a man a woman' that is not a statement held to be true by our legal system which allows male to female transgendered people to alter the sex on their birth certificates, perpetrating the myth that the removal of the penis does make a man a woman.

Sorry, please excuse my syntax, meant to press preview and pressed post.

Thanks dittany, that's exactly what I was trying to get across.

I agree with everyone who says that removing a man's penis and giving him hormone tablets doesn't make him a woman.

Imagine a white man who decided that actually, he is really a black man. He goes and has several Michael-Jackson-in-reverse operations to make his hair afro, his facial features a different shape, his skin darker, etc. and he then goes out into the world claiming he is a black man.

Would other black men be declared racist for not accepting that he is indeed a black man? I think not. Not only would he not be a black man in reality, he wouldn't psychologically be a black man, because he wouldn't have grown up with the experience of being defined as black in opposition to the norm of white in a racist society. Just as transexuals aren't psychologically women - they haven't grown up being limited and defined by their femaleness in a sexist society, which is why they are so damned arrogant about laying the law down to us that we have to accept them as women - if they really were women, they'd have been conditioned by sexism to be a hell of lot moer diffident, quite frankly and they wouldn't behave quite so much like ... er... well... men.

There are a tiny percentage of men who had their sex wrongly assigned at birth (usually hermaphrodite cases), but like others have said, the belief that a man is a woman, is generally a psychological problem, not a genuinely biological one.

HerBeatitude, I have two words for you: 'Black' and 'Albino'.

I'm not talking about albinos and well you know it.

" It others them and makes them non-people."

Actually, earwicga, it does this to women.
Trans-males and institutional patriarchy regard women as non-people, as did Freud, who believed that women were ultimately defined by their lack of penis.

Your view of women is very, very conservative. My view of women is revolutionary

If any man believes he's a woman, send him to Sakura's boot camp. To be initiated he must first have spent AT LEAST twenty years as a cleaner or on the check-out of a supermarket, on the minimum wage, with zero chance of promotion, which is the lot of many women.
Or, as Greer pointed out, he must spend a few years as a barren wife in India and see how well he's treated there. He'll be treated as scum, because that's how barren wives are treated in India.

This is the reality of being a woman, not how a person looks. I've been to Thailand and seen the ladyboys. They are more feminine than any woman will ever be. They are more feminine than my stocky old grandmother ever was, who bore seven children.
Does that mean they're more of a woman than she?

Prion, I take it you've never seen a black or Asian albino then? I have, and they most certainly do not look Caucasian.
Again, what a very narrow view of race and racism you must have if you think it all boils down to skin tone.

"dittany and her ilk are threatened by trans feminism as it forces them to change and adapt their theories of gender.""

Yes, gender is a social construct. It's a shame men are so threatened by these social constructs that they believe men who diverge from traditionally constructed masculinity must be women.
As I say, it's a very conservative, almost backward view of society. We need to move forward into the next millenium and accept people for who they are, however they are. Only a tiny minority of countries in the world have the means to operate on such individuals. Other men born elsewhere in the world have to choose a different, and more humane path, than chopping off their genitalia. Society must accept these feminine men for who they are, without forcing them to become parodies of "women" because the he-men won't stand for being chategorized in the same group as them.

It's terribly oppressive for men.

"dittany and her ilk are threatened by trans feminism as it forces them to change and adapt their theories of gender."

I mean, the breathtaking arrogance of that. Feminists must be forced to change and adapt everything we've ever thought and said about gender and feminism, ignoring the reality of the experiences of half of humanity, in order to accomodate a miniscule number of dysfunctional men.

Only someone with a male sense of entitlement could have the sheer chutzpah to believe that that's even a reasonable proposition.

Oh and good point about how reactionary it is to find that the answer to these individual men's unhappiness, is to change their bodies and appearance Sakura. Of course the answer is to change society, so that these men can be accepted for who and what they are. It suits capitalism to tell us that if we're unhappy, we can get happy by changing ourselves - have a boob job, lose weight, dye your hair, get a face lift, have trans-gender surgery - there's profit in all of those things and it doesn't upset any apple carts by looking at the societal roots of why people's unhappiness might express itself in dissatisfaction with their bodies.

Yes, and interesting that in all the 5 years I've posted on mumsnet this is the first time I've EVER been threatened by someone who wanted to have my post deleted.

From Greer:

"When he forces his way into the few private spaces women enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with threats..he does as the rapists have always done."