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Hey @Maj - thank you for the reply and you know I respect you too. I'm not going to get into a back and forth that neither of us want but I think you've misunderstood my points on -isms, on patriarchy and on intersectionality. I'm not trying to convince you of anything here - you also know your own mind :) just clarify where I think you misrepresented me.
I'm not saying trans and blackness are synonymous models of marginalised experience at all, I'm just saying the power dynamic between male and female is not in the direction of female to male, and therefore Veloccio's examples of female excluding male being like white excluding black, straight excluding gay etc are the wrong way round.
And I know Patriarchy is the structures society constructs to advantage men (sorry, can't agree it's just white men, plenty of non-white societies are patriarchal, some pretty fucking violently), but those structures are built out of both tangible institutions and the intangible individual actions people take every day, mostly unconsciously, that reinforce them. Patriarchy informs the individual actions between men and women (and men and men, and women and women) through which domestic and social power is enacted.
And I don't reject Intersectionality, not at all. Not do I think all intersections are fixed at birth. What I am calling out is an intersectional analysis that ignores physical sex, or assumes it can be subsumed into gender. Sex and gender intersect.
Ok, that's all I wanted to say. If I don't get banned I hope we will continue to have the odd cautious and polite interaction over the trenches - and maybe one day I'll even be able to get you that beer I owe you ;)
(And of course I don't forget that I'm a middle class white woman! I have a lot of privilege. But even women like me know what it's like to be spoken over by male people, to walk in a room, or sit in a park or get on a train even, and realise the women are just... not there, not myself raped thank god but yes pulled off my bike in the dark, not hit in anger but see the flash of rage for saying no or answering back, to try again and again to find the right words to say something reasonable without provoking anger and realise there can never be any right words for someone who doesn't want to hear...)
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When it comes to female-only spaces and language, the relevant comparator for other -isms isn't cis==white/hetro/abled/young, trans==black/gay/disabled/old, it's male==white/hetro/abled/young, female==black/gay/disabled/old.
Unlike Male people excluding female or White people excluding Black, Female people didn't need spaces / rights / opportunities reserved for female people to maintain power and entitlement, they needed, and still need, them as a refuge from Male power and entitlement.
That's the power dynamic that female-only spaces exist for.
And in case there's any doubt, I would 100% support (and indeed actively do support) Black people saying they need a space away from white, or opportunities created for Black people, to mitigate the challenges of being Black in a racist society. And the same for gay, disabled, trans and old people (and actually, young people), and any subsets in those groups or other groups that feel they need to define themselves separately to deal with the challenges they face by being not society's default human. Marginalised people have a moral right to physical and mental space away from the powers that marginalise them, and to be allowed to define themselves and speak of their own lives in their own voices.
Maybe you move in circles where this doesn't happen any more, but I promise you for me and many, probably most, other women, being female in this world is like carrying a weight around all day. Female-only spaces, places without males taking up our space, resources and attention, are the respite that allows us to heal and find ourselves.
But if we can't talk about the impact of sex in the context of gender (because notwithstanding that sex may be biologically complicated in the details, the physical and social consequences of sex for the roughly 50% of humans that do meet the criteria to be correctly recognised as female the day they are born are certainly fucking real) then this disappears from the picture. And that's just --- sexism on steroids.
You mentioned Intersectionality. You assumed I wouldn't know what it was. I was doing womens/gender studies back in the 90s. Yes I know about intersectionality. Back then it wasn't "who can pile the highest intersectional pile", it was about understanding that intersecting axis of oppression change the shape of oppression - that women experience different aspects of sexism based on factors like race, class and so on. Back then we saw gender as another axis of social control, cultural myths pretending to be "natural" (yep, pretty sure I even read some Judith Butler as well). We saw gender as a tool of the Patriarchy, something we needed to challenge and demolish in order to free both men and women from constraining stereotypes and myths. Our aim was to be without gender, just people with different bodies. If someone had told me then that 30 years later we'd be told that it's the gender, not the bodies, that is real, that people would start thinking they had to change their body to match their gender and that this would be called Progressive - well honestly I think I'd have blamed last night's acid.
So to talk about Intersectionality without including sex, the deepest, probably oldest, most universal axis of oppression, the one the runs like a faultline through our history and through all our social structures from our most private domestic lives to our heads of state, the one that we are unwittingly complicit in before we are even born because of what our gestation and care means for our female parent in a sexist society - to think you can reoplace that axis with gender identity and it doesn't even fucking matter - that's just a sick joke.
You talk about the real problem being the Patriarchy. I agree. You think saying a trans woman is male is transphobia. I disagree. I think society can neither challenge the Patriarchy NOR fully accept trans people UNTIL we can honestly talk about the significance of sex. Trans women ARE male. It's kind of the fundamental defining feature, otherwise they'd be cis women. Owning that is in itself is a huge fuck you to Patriarchy. Denying it is not only letting that big toxic lump patriarchy labelled "Maleness" to continue to exist unchallenged, it's actively perpetuating the Patriarchal power structure of male people believing they have the right to define, speak for and utilise female people.
As I said in my original post, yes, trans people exist, but Female people also exist (some of whom are also trans, of course).
We share many challenges. We could have a fantastic dialogue between trans people and female people about the way male-shaped culture shapes us and how to escape that and make it better for all of us. But we cannot do that when male people who believe they are the same as us appropriate our cultural and physical spaces, our political voice and even our own name, because you do not even allow us the words we need to describe what it is to be us and not you.
Because even if you don't believe our sex is innately significant, living as female in culture shaped by and for male people makes it significant, and we need the rights and language to talk about that.
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I will watch these but they are long so I likely won't respond today. I approach this with genuine hope it won't be just the same old cherry picked quotes out of context and distorted strawmen misrepresentations I've seen so many times before - ever the optimist me.
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Ok, I hear you.
I have been an active member for years and met many of its people in real life (including you).
I don't get involved in flame wars and I treat everyone with respect even when I disagree with them. For my part I will continue to participate in the forum as I always have.
I do not believe I am transphobic but I do believe female people need the right to a political and social existence separate from male at times regardless of how they identity.
If you chose to ban me for that it would be a shame but your house, your rules.
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I suspect the issues don't come up, not because of any failure for privilege to be granted, but because residual privilege is a kind of thing and there is none, no privilege for a trans man, worst of all worlds in a way.
That's pretty much what I'm saying. Female people don't have male social power and privilege, and they don't gain it by transitioning.
And I'm sorry for your friend and hope he has his quiet life. From what I read, that type of pre-transition story is sadly not uncommon for trans men.
(Are you saying your trans men friends excluded due to high testosterone from male sports as well?)
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Amd whether I post again or not, I won't be hiding this thread. Because despite the assumptions and prejudices thrown at me, and apparently unlike those who threw them, I do seek out other views. I'm not comfortable in an echo chamber. I read articles and commentary by trans people and by self-assigned allies. I read a lot of sources (yes even the daily mail, but very very rarely, certain less often than I read trans writers).
And if there's one good thing that could come from this frothing, I hope the next time someone sees a woman being denounced as a Nazi sympathiser or a right wing bigot or a hate filled transphobe, instead of thinking "god aren't some people awful, I can't believe we have such hate in this day and age, thank god good people are there to push back" they pause to think "I wonder what she actually said?"
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The reason trans men are not talked about as much (or rather, not talked about in the same way, because there are certainly questions being raised as to why the distribution of young people identifying as trans is skewed so highly towards trans men) is indeed a consequence of society’s deep rooted misogyny, but it's nothing to do with "hatred of trans women" - a projection I utterly reject - and the only "Moral Panic" I see on this thread is the cynical portrayal of women as bigots, transphobes and right wing stooges just for talking about the consequences for them of redefining womenhood from a type of body to a type of mind.
It's simply because male and female bodies are not physically equal and society’s deep rooted misogyny means female and male people are still not socially equal, and therefore the inclusion of male people in the definition of "womanhood" has more significant consequences for female people than the inclusion of female people in manhood.
Of course very few people consciously decide to prioritise / enable male people over female, it just kind of happens because it's what feels "normal". Female people are structurally and culturally disadvantaged, partially from the realities of our bodies but mainly from the way society reacts to them and encodes power in male norms. In other words, the challenges female people face because they are female are implicit.
To counter that, we have explicit mitigations - spaces, opportunities and rights - that are defined as women-only (back when Women meant Female).
It's unavoidable this (implicit on one side, explicit on the other) should be the case because the only way to counter unconscious bias is to consciously chose to override it.
But exactly because these mitigations are defined explicitly by an act of will rather than encoded in unconscious social norms like our challenges, they are also vulnerable to being changed simply by an act of will. Hence they can be taken from us and made mixed sex simply by saying "we will include some men in this because Reasons", or even, as we have seen, by redefining the word Woman and thereby opening up all single-sex mitigations while avoiding having to give any Reasons at all.
So that's how it goes for Women.
But for Male people it's exactly the opposite. Very few male privileges or powers are written down anywhere, but they still accrue to male people through the structural and cultural biases that favour them. Male privileges and powers are implicit, ingrained so deeply into normal that many people deny it even exists.
And when it is recognised, the appropriate response is not to say "let's open up male privilege to a small number of female people who identify as men", it's "let's stop privileging male people over female".
So no one is saying to men "you have to include trans men in male privilege now" because there just are not that many things that are explicitly Men-only they could be excluded from in the first place.
Keeping a little on topic, male sports would be an example where it is explicitly men-only, but it's also an example where male physical strength makes an actual difference and trans men, even if included, are unlikely to upset male chances of winning. (And of course, many - most? - trans sportsmen choose to complete in women's sports anyway).
Hence, male people's sporting, social and legal existence is not threatened by trans men in the same way that female people's is by trans women. And that's why there's more questions being asked about exactly why trans women should be treated as interchangeable with female people simply because of an inner feeling they have, and whether it's right and fair that female people should carry the social cost for meeting this need of males.
It's not a conspiracy, it's not hatred, it's simply a reflection of the existing power dynamic between the sexes into which society is trying to fit trans identities.
One interesting aside here is that some of the few occasions where a male privilege is explicitly defined have also been kept explicitly male-only. Hereditary peerages, for example, have an explicit exemption in the GRA to ensure a male heir doesn't lose his right to inherit if he transitions to a woman, nor an elder sister gain it if she transitions to a man. I believe the Masons and other men-only clubs are also happy to keep male members after transition. And I think it's the American rowing association that recognises trans women as women for women-only races, but not for mixed team races where the women's spots have to be taken by female people to avoid one team having an unfair advantage. Heads men win, tails women lose.
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I literally am a female person. And no, I'm not "a bizarre and sad ...swivel eyed bigot walking hand in hand with the far right" - you are so laughably wrong here all I can do is pity you and your narrow narrow wordview and your lack of understanding.
But men like you are nothing new. There's always someone ready to justify ignoring women (OG)'s voices, ready to tell us why our own understanding of our own lives is just all darn wrong.
And I'm out. Enjoy arguing with the shadows of your own mind.
A friend was just diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer at 54. He has been told men with simiar cancers to his typically live 4 to 7 years from diagnosis. The treatments he needs to achieve those 4 to 7 years are pretty awful.