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BobbyBriggs
I don’t think you realise how fucking angry many female (afab) people are.
It’s less than 100 years since we got the vote. Within my adult lifetime it was still legal for a man to rape his wife. On average in the UK a female person is murdered every three days, almost always by a male and 50% of the time by a current or ex partner.
Yet we are being told that how society treats people with female bodies is irrelevant to feminism, and that our lived experience as female from birth has no more authority than a feeling in a male head.
And of course society can redefine womanhood as nothing to do with the female body if it wants to.
But our bodies still exist and the shit we deal with because of them still happens whatever we are (or are not) called, so IMO we have damn good reason to say we exist as a meaningful social and political group.
Yet we are being literally undefined, not for our own benefit but as the solution to a problem being experienced by males.
And this is progressive?
I think trans women and female people have a lot in common. We both suffer from gender stereotypes and toxic masculinity. We should be allies. We should join our voices. But we both also have challenges the other does not share. We are not interchangeable.
I want to talk about this. This is a massive thing that is being done to female people. Maybe it’s the right thing. I’d love to be persuaded that it is. I want the concerns I have to be dismissed not by just ignoring them or calling me a bigot but with convincing reasons why they are not the problem I think they are.
And I want there to be discussion about why, if sex and gender are different, we can’t support trans people by acknowledging both sex and gender instead of demanding the wholesale replacement of sex with gender.
But that’s not happening. The redefinition of women/undefinition of female is being imposed on us without any public debate because “it’s too toxic” to let the female people who have concerns, usually older women who’ve lived long enough to see that youthful ideals about equality don’t hold up against the established real world power structures, talk about it.
(In the interest of keeping the post succinct I’ll not touch on trans boys and men other than to say they also deal with the challenges of being female and the male/female power dynamic means they don’t impact male political power in the way trans women and girls impact female political power, so my concerns here are more about whether individuals are getting the right support than the overall social impact.)