Birth wars: the politics of childbirth

Originally published by Glosswitch at the New Statesman

To be of woman born is a universal experience, yet women themselves remain a diffuse, fractured group. “What is a woman, anyway?” is still considered a deep, meaningful question to ask. The polite answer is, of course, “whatever anyone wants it to be”. More than that would close off the vessel, seal the hole, glue back together the broken shell. There’s a sense in which women are simply not meant to be whole. We need to be in pieces so that men can survive intact.

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Why I Won’t Accept The Politics Of Gender Identity

Originally published by The Morning Star

THE concept of gender identity is being enshrined into law in several countries now, giving new legal protections to transgender people on the basis of their identities.

In the United States, the Obama administration recently signed a declaration that all public schools in the country must recognise the gender identity of their students.

Canada has recently announced new legal protections for transgender people. In Britain, there is interest growing in allowing people to legally define their own gender.

As a person on the political left and as a member of the LGBT community, I am expected to applaud these changes to legislation, but instead I am critical.

This is because the concept of gender identity is poorly defined, and the politics of transgenderism is harmful to women and girls and rooted in individualism rather than collective action.

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I fought for civil rights. It is offensive to compare it with the transgender fight.

Originally published at The Charlotte Observer

Let us be clear: HB2 cannot be compared to the injustice of Jim Crow. In fact, it is insulting to liken African Americans’ continuing struggle for equality in America to the liberals’ attempt to alter society’s accepted norms.

Recently, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch compared HB2 to Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws were put into place to keep an entire race positioned as second-class citizens. HB2 simply says that men and women should use the restroom of their biological sex in government buildings and schools. This comparison is highly offensive and utterly disrespectful to those families and individuals who have shed blood and lost lives to advance the cause of civil rights. I take this as a personal slap in the face because I was an active participant in the civil rights movement.

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My Canuck Sisters, Say Goodbye

Originally posted at Mancheeze

Internal experiences and sensations are not material realities and cannot be legislated. Gender resides in your psychology. It’s interesting they use the term ‘sense.’ We can’t legislate senses because they are highly inaccurate. Also if ‘there are a variety’ of individual experiences of gender, which ones matter?

Moving onto ‘Gender expression’ we see the words ‘behaviour’ and ‘appearance.’ A person’s behaviour and appearance aren’t connected to a person’s sex.  Sex is independent of gender. You cannot change your clothes in order to change your sex. You are born a sex that is clearly defined and immutable.

Gender is independent of sex. Gender is an invented concept of patriarchy. It’s a hierarchy with ‘femininity’ at the bottom and ‘masculinity’ on top. Gender behaviours and appearances are learned, and it means they can be unlearned. A female infant is not born with a predilection to play with dolls or wear pink. She is taught that this is her ROLE. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but this is mainly for people who don’t understand the differences.

Feminism rejects gender because it teaches females behaviours and attitudes that are detrimental to our freedoms as human beings.

Transactivists are enforcing gender stereotypes ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity.’ They’re saying if a boy plays with dolls, flicks his long hair, and claims he’s a girl, he really is a girl.

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A Bathroom of One’s Own?

Originally published at The New York Times

Relatively few Americans considered bathroom access a civil rights issue until last week. They deserve to hear the arguments pro and con before making up their own minds. Much remains to be said and learned about the issue; truncating this conversation just as it is beginning is wrong (and arguably violates the Administrative Procedure Act).

Here are just a few questions that people might have asked before making up their minds. How uncomfortable are people with the prospect of those with different anatomies sharing their bathrooms? Is this discomfort likely to grow or decline? Since gender identity cannot be confirmed before entering bathrooms, how great is the risk of voyeurism or other abuses? How costly will it be to provide gender-neutral bathrooms, and how would people of all genders feel about such alternatives? Will market pressures such as the boycotts against North Carolina’s bathroom regulation produce a better mix of solutions than the government’s one size fits all?

And how many transgender people actually experience indignity when using traditional bathrooms, and what is the nature of this indignity? Discomfort about using a urinal when men at nearby urinals think one is a woman? Annoyance at having to wait for a stall to conceal one’s anatomy?

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Social work professor speaks out on behalf of her FtM autistic daughter

Originally posted at 4th Wave Now

My daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, as am I, is now 19 years old. She had felt (and told others) that she was a lesbian most of her life. When she was 16, she began watching a TV show called “Degrassi,” which featured an FtoM character. After a few weeks, she announced that she was not actually a butch lesbian, as she had previously said, but was in fact trans. She started attending a local PFLAG meeting, where she met many trans people, including a number of FtoM trans teenagers who were raving about a certain “gender therapist.” Although the APA recommends a minimum of one year of “gender counseling” before surgery, this gender therapist (whom I consented to, before really understanding what I was doing) gave my daughter the go-ahead to have a bilateral mastectomy after only two sessions. This gender specialist never reviewed any of the Special Ed records or spoke to my daughter’s previous therapist, who had known her for a decade. And, crucially, she never asked my daughter, “Might you be a lesbian?”

The gender therapist (whom I believe has an unholy financial alliance with the surgeon) gave my daughter (then 18 and one day) the go-ahead for the $30,000 surgery (covered for all university employees and their families where I work). My daughter is now on testosterone (which she clearly is unable to evaluate the risks and consequences of).

To give you some sense of my daughter’s level of understanding of what it means to transition, she told me recently that she believes that the testosterone “will grow her a penis.”

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Your meme is stupid, and it makes you look stupid.

Originally posted at Secretly Radical

OF COURSE NOT ALL TRANSWOMEN ARE CRIMINALS. Some of the best male people I know are transwomen.

HOWEVER.

1) ALL TRANSWOMEN ARE MALE;

2) MALES AS A CLASS ARE A DANGER TO WOMEN AND CHILDREN;

3) THE LABEL “TRANSGENDER” REQUIRES NO MEANINGFUL TRANSITION;

4) TRANSITION DOES NOT RENDER A MALE PERSON HARMLESS.

THE ISSUE IS NOT TRANS PEOPLE USING PUBLIC RESTROOMS.

THE ISSUE IS MALE PEOPLE USING FEMALE RESTROOMS.

If males are not dangerous, why do we have sex-segregated bathrooms in the first place? And what the Hell do you think actual transwomen are afraid of in the men’s room? Evil urinals? No, it’s males. If their fears are valid, why piss on the fears of female people??

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Did my views on trans women change?

Originally posted at The Idge of Reason

Appropriating the language of feminism for misogyny is a problem. That is not about denying trans women anything. Trans women need the discussion of structural inequality that they face part of. Feminism is not about controlling the worlds women so they have to concentrate on managing your identity instead of the lives they face because of structural inequality imposed on them for being women. Women did not choose the things attributed to our gender, even if you value them. They are not an innate part of womanhood. If your identity is so fragile you need women to manage it for you, that is about you, not them. There is no female brain that meant women wanted to be subservient for years. There is the responsibilities that still fall disproportionately to women, there is economic inequality rooted in this, there is the reason feminism existed in the first place. Which has not gone away.

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G.S.A. now means Genders & Sexualities Alliance

Originally posted at Purple Sage

Gay-straight alliances were originally created to support gay and lesbian students, but young people don’t want to identify as gay or lesbian anymore, even if they are actually homosexual. These designations are old-fashioned now, and much too “binary.” The cool thing to have now is not a sexual orientation, but a gender. In fact, sexual orientation is bigoted; anyone who has a sexual orientation is exclusionary and therefore oppressing people (especially if they are female and their orientation excludes males).

The goal of a gender and sexualities alliance is not to support gay and lesbian students, it’s to desegregate school washrooms and promote the idea that there are infinite numbers of genders that people may choose from, and that bodies need to be medically altered to reflect people’s “gender.” This does not help gays and lesbians at all, and in some cases it harms us. It reinforces sex stereotypes by claiming that anyone who is masculine is male, therefore lesbian women are encouraged to identify as male and change their bodies so that they appear male, instead of identifying as lesbian women. In addition, gender theory does not allow for lesbians to exclude males from their dating pool as long as those males “identify” as women, which is abuse toward women who are exclusively lesbian.

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Bathroom Laws: putting women and girls at risk

Originally posted on YouTube by Mancheeze