NYTimes Op-Ed: Transgender vs. Cisgender view of "Woman" - grabbing popcorn

In My Humble Opinion
121

How is that different than the women who tell me I won’t fit in to their group because I never had children and therefore missed out on the shared experience of raising a tiny human being?

My childhood as a girl was different in many ways from the childhood of other girls - does that make either me or them less a woman?

Yes, there IS a difference in growing up a boy but do you honestly define yourself solely by what happened in childhood? There’s a difference between growing up black as opposed to white, does that mean we should have racially segregated book clubs, too?

There is a time and place to draw the distinction, there is a time and place not to. Yes, transwomen will always have a certain difference from ciswomen, no matter how early the transition occurs. Sometimes that will be a significant thing, sometimes I don’t think it really matters. Just as humans beings we have a lot in common, maybe we should concentrate more on that rather than dividing up into separate tribes and camps so often.

122

It isn’t, and that’s sort of the point. Women make friends with people with shared experiences. The more you have in common, the more likely you are to feel comfortable around others. Insisting that you MUST be accepted is not a way to make friends.

My bookclub is a women’s bookclub. All the women in it have known each other 30 years. It deals specifically with women’s issues - and the shared issues we have of being a certain type of woman of a certain age in a certain region of the country having grown up together. You wouldn’t be welcome in it either - you have the right parts, and we’d let you come, but within 30 minutes of the first meeting you’d realize that you don’t fit. We’d say you were welcome, but unless you are incredibly obtuse or stubborn, you won’t fit. Our bookclub is 20 years old, and we’ve introduced dozens of people to it over the years…the only people who have stuck are those who we’ve known since before we started bookclub. We’ve stopped inviting “new” people - we now just invite people who are only “new” to bookclub.

And yes, if an African American woman wants to start a bookclub to deal with the issues of being an African American woman, I shouldn’t barge in and demand to be included. That is her safe place, created to deal with that.

Institutions are different things, as are public accommodations, but my bookclub isn’t a public accommodation or an institution. I get a right of free association, and that includes whom I choose to invite to bookclub.

123

I wonder whether you’d apply the same standards to, say, a young woman who grew up in a culture where young women had vastly different experiences, say, a woman whose childhood involved moving from foster home to foster home and suffering serious abuse and poverty. While she’d still have a lot of the same experiences as the rest of you, there’s a pretty decent chance you’d have fewer experiences in common with her than you’d have with Jenner. And let’s take Jenner out of it, let’s make it a trans woman who was not in the public spotlight and who wasn’t especially frilly in her gender identity.

Edit: just saw your new post, and it answers the question: your group has a particularly narrow focus, it sounds like. Which is fine, but it doesn’t sound like it’s the trans part that’s really the limiting factor, nor does it sound like it’s an example of how trans women are fundamentally different from cis women, so much as it sounds like an explanation of what a homogeneous social group looks like.

124

So you never stereotype people based off how they are dressed? You are rare. I do, and you know what, I get to do that too. I get to judge if you have tats or don’t, if you dye your hair unnatural colors or if you wear a country club coif. If your purse is made of hemp or if its Coach. If you drive a pickup truck with a Confederate Flag bumper sticker.

You don’t need to conform to my beauty standards - good for you if you don’t. (And it isn’t beauty standards I’m talking about - it is in the case of some women, always being overdressed for the occasion - I’m also highly critical of people who underdress for an occasion - its a funeral, you don’t wear a tshirt) But I don’t have to want to associate with you if you can’t figure out what is appropriate. I’ll defend your right to wear too much makeup, loud jewelry and a short skirt to a baseball game - but I’m not going to think you have an ounce of sense or any idea of what you should wear to a baseball game - and my first impression of you is going to be “bimbo.” You are going to have to overcome that hurdle to become my friend.

That doesn’t mean I’ll treat you with anything other than civility. We just aren’t likely to hit it off and become buds.

125

Personal insults aren’t appropriate in this forum, and you are receiving a warning for the insults in your post. Please don’t do this again.

If anyone wishes to continue the breast-feeding discussion, please take it up in an appropriate thread and forum.

126

Then I guess I’m out of luck because other than one friend from my childhood I’ve left everyone else behind. I guess I get no more friends because I share so little life history with anyone else around me.

I mean, seriously? You don’t relish friendships with people who are different than you?

I make friends with people who don’t share my experiences… does that mean I’m not a woman?

I hope that’s not what you meant to say.

So it’s not a “woman’s club”, it’s a club of your childhood girlfriends - which is fine, so long as you’re not falsely advertising. To my ear “woman’s bookclub” means a bookclub for women… I don’t automatically assume it would mean “book club composed of women who have known each other for 30 years and shared their childhoods”.

So… is “womanhood” defined by checking off ALL the boxes on a list - pink frilly dresses, baby dolls, prom dresses, pregnancy and childbirth, grew up next door to you, etc. - or is it OK if you miss one or two on the list?

Is it an “African-American woman’s book club” or are only a subset of “African woman” allowed? Does it have to be African women from Georgia or who can trace their families back to slavery as opposed to being a woman actually from Africa who lives in America?

I’m having issues with what you say because you’re using language that sounds inclusive but you’re really excluding large swaths of the group that seems to be included.

Have you stopped to listen to what you just said? I’m not welcome in the woman’s book club even though I’m a woman and have “woman parts” because I wasn’t your buddy in childhood? You don’t see anything odd with that statement?

127

I do have friends outside of my bookclub - including a transman - who was not part of the bookclub circle when he was still presenting as female (not the same circle of friends). And I’m not making the rules up for anyone else’s African American bookclub - I’m unqualifed to do so. I just think you should be able to associate with whom you want.

And that is the point I’m trying to make. Being a woman is not enough to get you accepted into every group of women. I have a group of acquaintances (all women) who spend a lot of time on a boat during the Summer. I’ve never been invited along on the boat - although I know everyone that goes, talk to them at parties, hang with them in other venues. I’m just don’t make the cut for the boat circle. Transwomen shouldn’t take this as some personal slight. If you’ve been automatically accepted by every group of women you’ve met, and become an immediate member of their go to lunch or hang out group, you must be much more charismatic than I am.

128

If that is the point you’ve been trying to make, I’m afraid it hasn’t come across very clearly up until this point.

129

There is a difference between a small, private club and a public venue. None of us are talking about the half dozen school years friends you discuss books with, it’s the larger category called “women”.

A lot of what the OP/ED article boils down to is the notion that transwomen aren’t real women. OK, I get why that’s a debatable point to some people, but I’ve long looked at something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which supposedly supports and accepts all women, and question why they’ll accept a transman but not a transwoman to their group. Something which, by the way, I’ve disagreed with for 30 years. They say they value the experiences of all women, but they’re actions say "except transwomen".

If you want to differ about that, fine, a lot of this does come down to opinion. I lean towards “inclusive”. Some people lean towards “exclusive”. Something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, though, has grown too large to plead “private club” in my opinion. Are they welcoming to ALL women or not? If not, maybe they should change their name. Maybe “Michigan Music Festival for Women Assigned Female Gender at Birth”. Of course, that would still not explain why transmen - who are now allegedly enjoying male privileges and all that stuff - are permitted at a such a festival. A person who identifies as a man and lives as a man is welcome at the MWMF but a person identifying as a woman and living as a woman is not? WTF? Honestly, that was my first reaction and it’s been a constant for 30+ years. Maybe it should be “Michigan Musical Festival for People Assigned Female Gender at Birth”. If you don’t consider transwomen to be “real women” at least be honest about it and don’t rattle on about how you’re happy to stand in solidarity with your sisters… as long as those sisters stand over there and not too close to the speaker.

The problem, as I see it, is that there are some extreme variants of “feminist” who seem very keen to put up fences between themselves and other people, and a lot of it comes down to policing the way people think. They can be as oppressive as the people who have historically oppressed them.

130

No, it hasn’t. I’ve been trying to make it from the beginning, but its gotten lost in hijacks on breastfeeding and in the SDMB way, people twisting my words to the extreme.

As I said to start with, we are a clickish, exclusionary gender. We are with ciswomen, transgendered women shouldn’t be surprised to discover that they aren’t universally welcomed into all groups of women because that isn’t the way it works for ANYONE.

131

WTF? You claim to speak for ALL women now? You do not speak for me. I don’t share your opinions on this matter.

Maybe the women you grew up with and associate with are “clickish, exclusionary” but not the women I hang with.

Neither are ciswomen automatically excluded from many groups of women.

Honestly, I am furious that you slather me with the same broad brush with which you slather yourself. I find your above statement to be offensive and insulting. We may share the same genital configuration but apparently little else.

132

Generally speaking, womyn’s festival isn’t likely to be welcoming to all women. Bring in your conservative Christian women and discover how “welcoming” they actually are.

Years ago, Minneapolis had a feminist bookstore - Amazon Feminist Bookstore (long before the ecommerce giant existed). I could go in there on a Saturday in jeans and a shirt that was a throwback to the seventies and feel very comfortable. The few times I stopped in while wearing a suit and heels from work, I was VERY uncomfortable, and was once asked to leave - my “kind” was not welcome (kind being women who wore suits, hose and heels to work for “the man.”) With a Women’s Studies minor in the era before the internet, I kept going - it was pretty much the only place to get certain material, but tried to go only when I wasn’t a figure of oppression likely to set of “triggers” and be perceived as committing “microagressions” by the staff and other patrons in the terminology of today.

Now, I don’t agree with that sort of nonsense either - but it is far from unique to the trans experience.

Transwomen face another hurdle in that they were biologically men - therefore their existence in a “safe space” for cis women can be perceived as “triggering.” I find it to be overly sensitive myself, but in a time and place where everyone seems to want to have the right to have their unique needs catered to, it isn’t surprising that those needs clash when it comes to this topic. For a woman whose been sexually assaulted and abused, is her need for her perceived emotional safety any less valid than for the transgendered woman? And yes, she is perfectly safe from the transgendered woman, this isn’t about reality, its about the illogical reality of emotional state.

133

I can understand that, completely. And if it were only that case is wouldn’t be an issue for anyone.

What we find in practice is that generally speaking transgender women are only rarely welcomed into female-only groups. It’s the exception that we’re welcomed. And often it’s couched with words such as “oh, um. you can’t join our wine and cheese club because sometimes we might possibly discuss intimate details about menarche, and, well, you know…”

Then again, it’s awkward when a cisgender woman insists on joining a transwomen’s group. Our tennis group has two cisgender women in it, and they both sometimes feel a little like second class citizens. Or when one gal is sobbing because she has no breasts after 5 years of hormones, and then one of the cisgender women says “oh, you’re better off without em. Mine were SO HUGE, I had to get breast reduction surgery” - and she wonders about the sudden looks of death aimed her direction.

So I get what you’re meaning to say, I think.

134

Know a significant difference? The conservative Christian woman would actually be allowed past the front gate. The transwomen don’t even get that far.

Do these abused, traumatized women somehow think transwomen don’t get raped, or that men don’t get raped?

Getting away from the music festival thing, and into the more hypothetical, if there was a “Rape Support Group” should they be allowed to exclude male victims of rape? If so, why?

The thing is, when you talk about the Amazon Feminist Bookstore and your chilly reception there at times, you can change your clothes. Changing your gender is another matter entirely.

I’m not talking about a small, private club or whether or not someone is appropriately dressed, I’m talking about discriminating based on physical features not easily changed or even impossible to change. There are some circumstances where that’s appropriate but very few. I’m saying that it happens sometimes (maybe even often) that transwomen are excluded NOT for those reasons but because they’re perceived as weird, icky, crazy, or something else unkind to speak to someone’s face.

135

I can’t think of any good reason to exclude transwomen from a women’s group unless that group is focused on health issues that are exclusive to ciswomen. Like menstrual/pregnancy/menopause stuff. And even in that case, saying “no used-to-be-boys are allowed!” would be wrong.

However, I do think there is a difference between being accepting and welcoming and being accepting and tolerating. If a group is centered around a narrow set of experiences, I think it is okay for that group to tell newcomers, “Hey, ya’ll can be one of us. But just remember this group is focused on X, not Y. If you want to talk about Y, you should probably go to another group.”

But such a group probably shouldn’t advertise themselves with a big umbrella term. It wouldn’t be a women’s group so much as a Women with Narrow Experience group.

The closest analogy that I can think of: natural black hair care forums. There are a lot sprinkled over the internet. Black chicks wanting to trade hair care tips while dealing with psychological hair baggage. Sometimes you’ll see white chicks participating in the discussions, and their posts are generally tolerated. But if the forum is for folks with kinky hair and the conversations are focused on how to deal with societal stigmitization of kinky hair, then it becomes an annoying sidetrack to have to politely listen to someone who meets the conventional standard of beauty crying about how hard it is to tame their soft, loose Andie MacDowell-esque curls. Sometimes you want to have that “safe place” to talk about tough issues without having to listen to advice from someone who is inexperienced in those tough issues. You can go to a general forum to listen to that kind of cluelessness.

But I’m straining to think how this would apply to the transwomen-ciswomen dynamic.

136

On another message board I’m a moderator for a private sub-group open to women on that board.

When one of the regular posters came out as transsexual there was a brief discussion and she was welcomed into the women’s forum. As has every other transwoman since. (We wound up getting a disproportionate number because we acquired a reputation for enforcing respectful treatment, and for respecting that they are women by allowing them into the women-only forum. As an example.)

Yes, sometimes we discuss menstruation/menopause/other biological female related topics. The transwomen do occasionally ask questions but largely just watch those threads.

On the flip side, the transwomen have had discussions about their transitions and physical issues related to that. The ciswomen do occasionally ask questions, but largely just watch those threads.

Honestly, I think both sides have benefited considerably from these discussions.

You don’t need to have identical experiences with someone to empathize with that person. You don’t need to have identical experiences with someone to offer her support. Ciswomen may not experience SRS but many of us have had surgery and can commiserate with that, and offer advice on how to take care of yourself while recovering. All of us have experience with fluctuating hormones, even if it’s for different reasons. One of the things I learned is that transwomen do have issues with, shall we say, vaginal discharges post SRS and we had a interesting discussion on how ciswomen deal with those and the pros and cons of various methods. Very enlightening on both sides. Talking about safe spaces, where else are transwomen going to feel safe enough to ask ciswomen for such advice?

Please don’t get the idea that the majority of the forum is about such things - it’s mostly mundane relationship issues, dealing with contradictory societal expectations for women, dissing sexist pigs, and the like. Wow, it turns out that transwomen have a lot in common with ciswomen when it comes to dealing with the crap society dishes out to people living as women.

Yes, both sorts of women need their safe spaces for their particular sub-group, but sometimes you find ciswomen who want “protection” from being “invaded”. It reminds me of arguments over toilet access (except transwomen in women’s toilets seems to squick out the men more than women, we even had a thread about that some time back. The poll results were 92% of women (I excluded the male responders) said they didn’t mind sharing a public toilet facility with transwomen, and that included pre-op transwomen). After a couple minutes it becomes clear the root of the objection has more to do with who is defined as a woman than the actual mechanics involved.

Again, I’m not talking about you and a half dozen buddies forming a very narrow interest private group. I’m talking about groups that hold themselves out as welcoming to all women who then kick transwomen to the curb, use of public facilities, and the like.

137

Overall your posts make a lot of sense to me as a distant but sympathetic observer of the whole shebang. As do the other folks, even though you’re not all 100% on the same page here.

Of the snippet I quote, how much do you / the rest of us think this is really the same phenomenon as the new hyper-pious religious convert or the far left/right political convert? Or the virulently anti-smoking ex-smoker? Or the exercise evangelist ex-fatso? Or the over-the-top ex-drinker or ex-damn-near-anythinger?

ISTM that something pretty big had to be going on in any transwoman’s head to motivate him to become him/her and go on to become her. So on average many (most?) of them are gonna overshoot the middle-of-the-road ciswoman position before they finally settle down into the groove they eventually discover for themselves.

IOW & IMO cut the newbies some slack; they’ll (mostly) learn to fit in better as they get more practice at belonging.

138

I am, too, but maybe my group of friends is different that Dangerosa’s. Yes, we do sometimes have “girl’s nights”, but I can remember maybe 3 times in the last 10 years that something has come up (menstruation, say) that a transwoman wouldn’t have any input on. We usually bitch about who we’re dating at the time, exs, bills, jobs, etc. Subjects that anyone can chime in on. And when the married (I’m divorced) ladies or mothers (I do not have children) need to talk about something that I have no personal experience with, I listen and offer an opinion if asked because I don’t have to share their exact experiences to be involved in the conversation. I can’t imagine telling a transwoman that she can’t hang with us because she doesn’t have the same genitals as we do, by that logic I wouldn’t have any male friends, either.

139

I guess I can see how it could be awkward to always have someone in your midst who can’t participate in the conversation except as a listener. I know that I don’t like always being the listener. So if I were one of the “talkers”, I might feel worried that we were somehow excluding the person who is always a listener. I might bend over backwards coming up with general discussion topics that I don’t care that much about, but that allow the listener to partipate. Which wouldn’t be as fun as talking about what I and the other “talkers” want to talk about. So in that way, I guess I can see how diversity may not always be conducive for fun.

But if a listener has a problem with always being the listener, it’s their job to steer the conversation to something they can talk about and that the others can relate to. You can’t get butthurt about being excluded if you don’t ever try to command attention.

I can’t see myself enjoying a woman’s social group. Not because I don’t like being around individual women (I do), but because I don’t think I’d have much to talk about in a group structured around womanhood. And I think I probably would make the other women feel uncomfortable because I wouldn’t have much to say, which would beg the question of why I was even there.

140

On the flip side, over the past 20 years I’ve had people ask me from time to time why I never joined a rather well-known organization of female pilots. Well… two reasons.

First, as part of our marriage vows my husband and I promised not to join a group where the other was not welcome. This has to do with his past experiences as someone disabled facing discrimination, but we did promise each other. As it is an organization of women pilots, and he’s male, that was a bit of an issue. As it turned out, he said he’d be OK with making an exception in that particular case and if he really wanted to he could join the men’s auxillary or commiserate with the other husbands, who apparently use the meeting times as an excuse for a boy’s night out. Which I was OK with.

Once that was out of the way, though, and I attended a few meetings, I realized that, other than similar genitals, I had very, very little in common with these other women. Even if we were all pilots. There was a heavy emphasis on conventional general aviation, of “moving up”, getting more ratings, flying more complex aircraft, encouraging women to go into as a profession… and meanwhile I was flying minimal aircraft out of grass fields or flying antiques in areas with little to no radio or radar coverage.

I decided that a similarity of genitalia was not sufficient reason for me to join the organization. I felt I fit in much better with the guys in the ulralight and homebuilding and experimental associations than with the girl’s club. I have nothing against the organization, but I just didn’t fit in despite how much I seemed a natural for membership.

Of course, I fully acknowledge that it was a lot of the pioneers who were members that made modern aviation as equitable as it currently is, where a women usually gets respectful treatment and can hang out with the guys who are greasy to the elbows or “bush flying”. It’s just that women no longer have to be members to be women aviators. (Alright, it was never a formal requirement, but I don’t want to bog down with that tangent.)