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The story I am writing at the moment has the main character wanting to be a woman, but not wanting any surgery (currently) . It has raised the question for me. What is is to be a women.
Is it the clothes you wear? The role you have in society? The way you act and interact? Your Chromosomes? Or the fact you possess a cervix.
The last one is something a Labour MP has said "only women have a cervix". So is she saying trans men aren't men or women born without a cerix or have had it removed aren't women?
The whole issue is very complex. It is perfectly possible we have all meat women who have male sexual organs under their clothing. They may have lived as a female all their lives. Are these people not women because of a few bits of flesh?
Perhaps this is why there is still a lot of misunderstanding of trans issues, Gender is not a straightforward subject.
Comments
Electroencephalography Test
If you look at YouTube, you may be able to find the EEG being done. The female brain is vastly different from that of a male. Blood chemistry is different. Pelvic structure is markedly different in a woman so she can birth a baby. SRS will not give a male Ovaries. It goes on and on. After having done SRS and lived as a woman for a long long time, I now know that I can only be a pretender.
The issue is…..
What each person is pretending to be. Many of us pretend to be something we are not.
I spent decades pretending to be a man - until I stopped.
You may feel that you made a mistake, but how you may feel about yourself has no bearing on the rest of us.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Hi Gwen, I know this is a
Hi Gwen, I know this is a personal question. Do most people you meet perceive you as a woman? I know this can cause problems or is it you still feel incomplete. I found this about brain structures changing with hormones.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrendo.2016.177
Surely if you are treated like a woman and seen as woman, generally you're a woman.
Leeanna
Not comfortable with "tests" for trans
I am pretty suspicious of all supposedly "objective" tests for whether someone is trans or not.
The problem is: what if the test says you aren't, but you feel you are? Trans is about your experience of yourself, not about EEGs or finger lengths or preferences for toys or the answers on some questionnaire.
And when you come down to it, why should there be gatekeeping? I remember that a decade or two ago, there was intense interest in "objective" tests for being gay/lesbian. Now nobody talks about it -- because gay and lesbian people are (mostly) seen as just another version of normal.
Assuming the American Taliban folks don't get control of things, I suspect at some point society won't feel threatened by trans people, either, so that what pronouns work for you, and what name you want, and how you dress and talk, and how you want your body to look will also be seen as just other ways of being normal. When that happens, all these "objective" tests will be relegated to party games, played for the humor of how wrong they can be.
That's even before you get into the unreliability of just about all research into such socially significant things as gender.
I agree, Used to be but you
I agree, Used to be but you're a man you must like women, lets give you electric shocks while we show you erotic pictures of men. Now it "Oh you're gay , ok , anyway..." No one really cares (mostly) But a trans lady uses a women's bathroom. Sorry done that one.
Leeanna
That Labor MP is wrong
she deliberately ignores TransMen who happen to have a cervix. She has been roundly denounced inside and outside her party. For someone supposedly (sic) on the left of politics, she seems remarkably in tune with the far right in the USA.
Sadly, there is a lot of discrimination in today's Labor Party. Anti-semitism is rife.
It is a long way from the party that my father joined before WW2 and even existed right up to when Blair/Brown took over. Their attempt to bring it more into the centre spawned a lot of hard-left factions that make those of the early 1970's look like childs games.
We in the UK need a strong and vibrant opposition who can offer real alternatives to the incumbents. The Labor party as it currently stands can't do that.
Just my worthless £0.02 worth on the subject.
back of to the real topic. IMHO, the majority of people find it hard to separate gender and sex. If you do that then you can have an adult level disussion on the subject.
Samantha
Hi Samantha , I have a hard
Hi Samantha , I have a hard left friend. I tell him the only way Labour will be elected is as soft tories. He said there is no point in that, it needs to be hard left. So therefore they will never be elected. Hard left is scary to too many people.
Leeanna
Gender
Is between your ears....sex is between your legs. Even that's not true for many born with a penis when they feel like a woman and present as a woman. That does not make them a pretender. Pretending is something you do when you do not believe in what you are doing. There is no pretence in being transgender. It is NOT a choice; it is something you are born into.
The refusal of TERFs to recognise this is just prejudice.
The Truth
Joannebarbarella wrote an indisputable reality. Pretty simple when all the psychiatric double speak, all the politics, all the medical analysis is removed. The conflict only arises when what is between the ears and what is between the legs doesn't match up. If one is a female it doesn't make her any less because there isn't a vagina between her legs. The same applies to a male if he is lacking a water weasel.
If they are female they can deny it and hide it. Join the Marines and make a man out of that woman. Not all do but many joined the services to prove they were man not a girl. No matter how hard they try, the mind never receives the reset because it's not a software problem but hard wired in. It's the basic operating system. When science, medical, politics, and the persons themselves understand, lives and the whole world will be a better place in at least that respect.
Thank you Joanne
Hugs leeanna19
Barb
Life is a gift, don't waste it.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radic...
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Thanks you both Jo and Barb ,
Thanks you both Jo and Barb , BTW , water weasel LOL
If something clucks like a chicken, looks like a chicken, to me it's a chicken I don't want to check under the feathers for extra bits.
Leeanna
It's rather sad
that people are still asking this question and now it seems I may not be able to play physical contact sports against cervix owners. That I have lived and worked as female longer than those often doing the shouting doesn't seem to enter the equation. I'm afraid the truth of the matter, is that until people are more sympathetic to those who are different, and I include all minority groups here, we are always going to be outsiders even though a lot of the time they aren't aware on encountering us. Still, the way the greedy are destroying the planet, it may not matter for much longer and we shall pass the way of the dinosaurs - see there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Angharad
It depends
That's because real people are complex -- biologically, socially, mentally ... The usual idea of "woman" includes a whole bunch of characteristics which aren't necessarily related and which in general aren't binary. So most of the people that are generally regarded as "women" will have some of the characteristics, not have others, and yet others will be ambiguous. In real life, people mostly pretend the inconsistencies aren't there. (And when they can't, the usual response is to make the inconsistency -- or the person -- disappear: using surgery, marginalization, prison, or murder.)
So the question "what is a woman?" is a political one. It's really about which people you want to allow to be considered "women" and which you want to exclude. From what I can see, the people who make a big deal about it start out with an idea of which people they want to admit to womanhood and which they want to exclude (and maybe who they'd like to get rid of), and they monkey with the definitions to get the results they want.
However, putting philosophy aside, there's a practical issue. We live in a society that doesn't have room for anyone who doesn't appear to fit neatly into one of the two gender categories. So if you don't want a lot of hassle, you pick a gender and try to present in a way that most people will gender as that gender. For practical purposes, you are a woman if most people looking at you will think "woman." If that's what you want, you might or might not need various surgeries. You may not even need to hide all evidence that you didn't start out that way, if you live in a place where people are willing to take you as you present (like where I live.)
she's a rancid little bigot
who openly wants to strip us of the rights we currently have and have for literally decades, and who's recent "newsworthiness" comes from publicly endorsing a convicted terrorist and would be school shooter (and in being able to, is breaking the terms of his parole)
That comment in particular (last year) was her endorsement of Phonehacker getting all bent out of shape by a medical article simply acknowledging that trans men and non-binary and intersex people *also* have cervicies, not just cis women
since then she has shown naked hostility towards trans people being allowed to exist in society and has actively abused staffers who stood up to her on it till they quit and then doxed one of them for complaining about her behaviour
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quite frankly cisciety's obsession with our genitals is fucking disgusting, and pegging our "legitimacy" to "the surgery" is some eugenics bullshit
as far as I'm concerned ;"i am a woman" and "i have a cock" are entirely unrelated traits about me, and it is only a society that wants us powerless to exploit us that puts any connection between them
things only seem "complex" because of people with admited genocidal intent deliberately creating confusion to make our lives harder
I never knew that about her.
I never knew that about her. I doubt if Labour will do anything about her. They took ages to act on the anti-semitism. It is an amazing truth when you say cisciety's obsession with our genitals is fucking disgusting. It's not as if anyone goes around showing them, or indeed their cervix.
Leeanna