How does that conflict with anything I said? My point is that our society treats women like garbage because of these systems and institutions built over generations to oppress women, not because women are smaller and have the babies.
What is it that you’re calling a false perception? That males can physically dominate and subjugate women, turning them into disenfranchised baby-making property? It is indisputable this happened, so to imply this is just an idea falsely held by men with delusions of grandeur is what I’m saying is wrong and offensive.
If you’re saying belief in female inferiority is a false perception, then okay. But it’s kind of a shallow statement. Antebellum whites believed black folks were inferior too, and yes this was false. The analysis can’t stop there, though. Belief in black inferiority served as a justification for black enslavement, which in turn further reinforced belief in black inferiority.
Women have been trapped in the same kind of positive feedback loop. It has nothing to do with “mythology”, and all to do with self-serving lies people tell themselves to make their actions seem fair and logical. Women are weaker. If a man wants to mentally justify why it’s right to physically dominate the woman he has been dominating, he can tell himself nature ordained it by making her weak. Women are biologically tied to offspring in a way that men are not. If a man wants to mentally justify why incubating babies is all she’s good for, he can tell himself nature ordained it by saddling her with this burden. And so and so forth. The package of self-serving lies that results is what we call misogyny, and this package looks remarkably similar from culture to culture precisely because the root cause is universal.
After reading your most recent posts, I’m starting to understand why we’re not seeing eye to eye on the question of what a woman is. It’s not a costume to me.
I disagree with your assertion that it’s basically chance that these systems were built to oppress women. Humans are just really good at oppressing other humans who are weaker in general. Even my TWO KIDS who are barbarians try to do it sometimes to each other (which obviously I stomp on because I want them to become civilized).
So: here is a class of human beings who in fact (a) are in general physically weaker and (b) have biological functions that make them incredibly easy to subjugate for many years of their adult life. Of course the systems are going to evolve to subjugate them!
Yes, exactly. It is so refreshing to read something that doesn’t make me feel like I’m in crazy town.
I’m definitely not saying this. Yes, obviously this happened.
What are we (feminists) trying to overturn, if not these mythologies and systems and institutions and “feedback loops”, all of which are part of and reinforced by culture? We’re not trying to change anything about biology (except giving women full control over their bodies and reproduction - which is very significant, but even that is done through the cultural tools of science and medicine), we’re trying to remake our culture and society.
I’m sorry if anything I said made you feel small or otherwise lesser. I certainly didn’t intend anything like that.
I may have offended people I admire, and if so I apologize. I’ll step out for the night. Best wishes and love to all.
And thank you for arguing your position so clearly. My own thoughts on the whole thing are still fluid, but I will say this: I will never hold it against a woman if her version of feminism is one that relates exclusively to female biology. Abortion rights, contraceptive access, female health care, factors relating to birth and the workplace–there is so much ground here, and so much history, that I cannot call someone wrong if they are not interested in collaborating with someone that does not share these factors.
That doesn’t mean that someone else is wrong to have a different perspective, or that either of them are wrong to have slightly different meanings for “woman”, but I’m not going to denigrate someone as a TERF just because they’d like to focus on some parts of society that continue to be incredibly problematic.
Birth control was hugely important to women’s liberation, so let’s not gloss over this with a parenthetical. By giving women the ability to plan when and with whom she became pregnant by, doors were suddenly opened. Sex became less risky so women didn’t have to get married just to enjoy sex. When you don’t have to single-mindedly pursue a husband or raise a bunch of kids that you don’t really want, you can do other things, like go to college, focus on your career, learn about the world, and become politically active.
Feminists have been trying counteract the barriers to female empowerment. These barriers include societal attitudes (like sexist stereotypes) as well the burdens posed by our reproductive biology. Birth control and abortion access are things feminists have fought for and continue to fight for, because so much of our disadvantage comes from unwanted pregnancies.
You didn’t make me feel small. I’m just surprised to see that your understanding of misogyny seems so superficial. It’s not just the result of a bunch of guys coming together to randomly conspire against people with tits and vaginas, and coincidentally, all following the same script of oppression.
That isn’t what was said at all. Not even close.
Men and women are physically different. That is just true, and it’s not MRA nonsense to say that. Women are not MORALLY inferior to men; they are not of less inherent value. But they have been treated that way for all of history, in essentially all cultures, because they cannot identify their way out of physical reality.
The people chosen to be the victims of the systems and institutions you talk about were not chosen at random. They were chosen because of the physical reality that they’re women. That can never, ever be identified out of. Gender ideology will never change the reality of sex. That’'s why this falls disproportionately on the heads of women.
The idea that we must accept woman-identified males into the club even when they make no alterations to their body or mien is one of the harder ideas for me to swallow. I have a hard time not thinking bad thoughts about a guy-looking person who wants all the precariously perched benefits of womanhood without suffering any of the biological or social realities of womanhood. At least female-presenting transwoman deal with the social realities. They will know how it feels to be treated like a piece of meat whether they want it or not. But a male wearing a Venus symbol t-shirt? No. I am sufficiently woke to call them by their preferred pronouns, but I don’t think I’ll ever think of this person as a sister. Lived experiences matter a great deal to me. You won’t be able to convince me you’ve lived a life of a woman if you’ve spent your whole life experiencing the world as a male who is treated like a man.
I’m coming back to this because it’s not about rights, it’s about feelings. No one has a right to shower or change in front of other people (and let’s be real, in jail showering alone is a privilege). Maybe you don’t understand other people’s feelings that showering with someone who still has the equipment of the opposite sex is a violation of their privacy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t respect those feelings. You probably don’t really understand how misgendering feels bad either, but you clearly take it seriously and don’t say those feelings are unimportant.
And in this case, it’s definitely not relevant what ‘cis gender feminists’ aka liberal feminists say. They aren’t in that situation where they have so little control over their lives, and female prisoners are much more likely to have suffered child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and all kinds of abuse than average, and are some of the most marginalised people in society. No one is asking their opinion of these changes before pushing them through, and I think that’s unfair.
But who is asking you to that? That’s what bugs me about all of this. No one has ever said that any trans person has the same lived experience as their cisgendered counterpart. They obviously haven’t. The whole concept of a trans person is that they experienced being consistently assigned the wrong gender, something most cisgendered women have not.
The issue is when, because of those different experiences, the cisgender group–the majority, the ones is power in this situation–decide to exclude the trans people, the minority.
Since being trans does not (1) make you in any way inferior or (2) something the trans person chooses, that makes that action by the majority a form of bigotry. And thus that action is wrong.
That’s the end of the moral argument. It doesn’t matter after that point whatever logic is used to justify the bigotry. It doesn’t matter if you’re afraid that a trans woman is really a man trying to infiltrate your women-only political movement and sabotage you, any more than it does if you are afraid the trans woman is a man trying to perv on your kids in the bathroom. It’s still bigotry–discrimination due solely to them being trans. And thus, it is categorically, fundamentally, and utterly wrong. If not, then the whole concept of bigotry fails.
I fully accept that you don’t see a trans woman who appears to you like a man as being “one of your sisters” because they lack certain shared experiences. But, then, what about a cisgender woman who happens to have lived a charmed life, who, through other forms of privilege, never actually had to experience the discrimination you describes? Would you also see her as “not a woman”? What about a black person who grew up in a black country and never experienced racism. Are they not black?
Sure, shared lived experiences of discrimination are important. But they aren’t the definition of gender. If they were, then the concept of trans people can’t exist. There can be no “assigned the wrong gender” if gender is just defined by whether you’ve been discriminated for being that gender.
That male-presenting trans woman? If she’s not an asshole, she’d be the first to admit she doesn’t have your lived experiences. But I cannot see why that justifies thinking of her as male in your head.
What can it possibly accomplish to think “he” and say “she” other than the practically inevitable slip up where you misgender them?
Do note, BTW, that this has nothing to do with Rowling, who has outed herself as a full-on transphobe, exactly as people had assumed. She walked like a duck and talked like a duck. I actually had come in here to see if any of that had informed the discussion.
Even I have to admit that, while I find monstro’s argument fundamentally flawed at a conceptual level, the actual result is unlikely to hurt many people. The trans woman who presents entirely as male is extremely rare, and she is at least willing to pay lip service to them.
Treating people differently does not mean treating them as inferior. It irks me that gender ideologists conflate these two things. When we exclude men from women’s sports, is that treating men as inferior to women? No of course not, that is ridiculous. It’s us acknowledging that biological differences exist between the sex classes that makes competing them against each other unfair.
There are men that have significant commonalities with women. So I guess that means we have to make everything mix-sexed, right?
The existence of a few rare cases of close similarity doesn’t negate the existence of many that hugely differ. Again, gender ideology is rife with these kind of appeals, and they are unconvincing to people who can spot fallacies.
Because we are subconsciously programmed to recognize sex. Telling women to ignore the part of our brains that clearly sees a male person standing in front of us while we’re naked, is like telling a gazelle not to run when they see a lion. Try to shame and condemn the gazelle for being prejudiced all you want, but the gazelle is the one that will pay the price if it drops it’s guard and ends up attacked.
It is extremely disappointing to see so many men show such a profound disregard for women’s feelings. I feel like any day, my conservative in-laws are going to ask me why so many Dems believe males have an inalienable right to undress around naked women and girls—even as women and girls are increasingly coming to speak out against this. And I will not know what to do except shrug. “Because they are women on the inside!” doesn’t convince me and it damn well sure will not convince them.
Nonsense. Being a man doesn’t make you inferior, and you didn’t choose it, but that doesn’t make me a bigot to exclude you from the group of women.
What women have in common as a group is our shared biology and our lived experience as women and girls. That’s it. There’s no ‘female soul’ or other mystic doodads. It’s not bigotry to exclude someone from a group who has none of the attributes that define that group.
No, you’re just obscuring the rights issue. Of course the right isn’t to change in front of people. The right being question is the right of trans people to identify as who they actually are, and not have the state systematically trying to erase their existence.
The issue is that, as prisons currently operate, the feelings of those who feel unsafe because of people having different genitals fly in the face of those rights. At the very least, you could argue that those who were victims of sexual violence would be similarly harmed seeing genitals as trans people are from being misgendered. Problem is, prisons are shitholes that don’t care about that. The whole point of prison is to remove rights.
But, while restricting some rights, like freedom of movement, make sense, many just seem to be inhumanity for its own sake. It’s not like doing so has helped. We have one of the largest prison complexes in the world–we’re not solving the underlying problem.
Like it or not, trans rights are human rights, because trans people are human. The only debate possible requires ignoring the defintion of bigotry I explained upthread.
No, you can’t exclude me, since I am not female. I exclude myself.
I get tired of this. What is the purpose? You ignore most of my post, and go out of your way to interpret something in the dumbest possible way? You’re not going to convince anyone, any more than ywttf did when she interpreted iiandyiiii as saying the exact opposite of what he said.
If you really think you can beat my arguments, engage with them in full, without attempts to circumvent them in a way you know I didn’t mean.
Of course, the actual reality is that you can’t, because you know that the reason why misogyny is bigotry is the same sort of argument.
The right for a person to self-identify is a 1st amendment issue. If you choose to come out as a trans woman tomorrow, the government is not allowed to persecute you for this action.
Your mistake is in assuming your self-declared identity now means everyone else on the planet must treat you a certain way. Just because you announce that you are a transwoman doesn’t mean people are now obligated to see you as female and ignore what your body is. Your self-identification doesn’t entitle you to undress with women and girls, and you are not denied any rights by requiring you to use men’s facilities. It’s simply holding you to the same standard other members of your sex class are held to.
Women’s feelings are not being ingores. TERF feelings are being ignored. What you are saying is the equivalent of when the KKK claims that white people don’t matter. No, not all white people are racist. And not all women are transphobes.
Most feminists are not TERFs. It is possible to care about women’s rights and feelings and not say that trans women are actually men. We can just acknowledge that they are women with a different life experience than your own.
You’re not the victim here. As far as posters and the SDMB goes (and not the wider world), the victim are the over a dozen trans people who left the board because this hatred for them would not be stopped.
When Biden loses in November, please remember you said this to me.