On menstruation:
Yes, I am aware that not all women menstruate. But those women aren’t complaining about the use of the word ‘woman’ when referring to menstruation, and a hell of a lot of women who do menstruate (I’d imagine the vast majority but I don’t have numbers) object to being called menstruators.
So no, not all females menstruate. But only females menstruate. And it’s nowhere near as dehumanising as ‘menstruator’.
Since when did we assume all products were for all members of the targeted demographic? Not all men shave, but the ones who don’t probably don’t care about razors ‘for men’. There are plenty of products ‘for women’ that I have zero use for, and I’m not remotely upset about it. I don’t want kids, but I’m hardly crying out for ovulation kits to be marketed exclusively to ‘baby wanters’.
warumich wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 3:35 pm
Piggy wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 2:28 pm
Sex-segregated spaces are the big one, along with sports, awards, scholarships, etc. intended for females/women. They exist for women because we are historically and/or physically at a disadvantage and are frequently discriminated against. Opening them up to trans women, who are male by definition, defeats the entire point.
But this is where I feel I get confused. Trans* people also get routinely discriminated against, that's the whole reason they are so upset.
But maybe lets say that's not the case. Since women are being discriminated against, any person presenting themselves (convincingly) as female will face the same discrimination as any other woman. The only way in which I can make sense of an argument to exclude transwomen is if we assume that women are indeed inferior in some way to people assigned male at birth and therefore need the handicap, which goes against absolutely everything I believe, morally and empirically. But then what other advantages would a transwoman have that puts her at an unfair position with respect to other women, if nobody can tell she is a transwoman? Serious question, I may have overlooked something.
But stating "they're male by definition" is confusing your argument, because we haven't settled on a definition of male/female yet, hence the whole screaming match we're having. Whichever definition of male is right, mine, your's or someone else's, we can't use that as a justification for the arguments we are making as part of the whole enterprise of trying to sort out this definition. It's begging the question.
[Sports and other areas where physical advantage is at play I concede may be a separate issue, though as far as I know hormone treatments are quite effective at leveling things out]
If trans women don’t feel safe with men, they can campaign for a third space. It’s not on women to make room and give up their rights.
And in what world do we not have a definition for male and female? Those are the biological terms used in science to describe the different categories of sex across species. A trans woman is a male by definition because a trans woman is not female. Otherwise they wouldn’t be trans.
touchingcloth wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 3:58 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 3:43 pm
touchingcloth wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 3:33 pm
It was weird when Redmayne and Radcliffe came out publicly against her that they both chose the phrase “trans women are women”, because in the specific context of menstruation they’re not and Rowling had said nothing about trans men at that point. More than anything it feels like an opportunity for a half decent pun about how trans men menstruate was missed.
Yes, that was weird. So much of the debate is focused around trans women, and trans men sometimes get left out both by trans activists and by people who want to refer to everyone who menstruates as women.
It would be a lot easier if we had one set of words that was widely agreed to refer specifically to biological sex and another for gender identity, but I don't think we're there yet.
Aye, the two things get horribly conflated and I’m never sure if that’s because people don’t know the difference or just don’t care about it. I’ve come across people saying that gender is innate and rooted in biology at one end, and people saying that sex is a spectrum at the other.
It feels like better language might detoxify the debate, as it seems to me that most people could probably agree that some people need protections in law based on their genders, others need protections based on their sex, with all of those things sitting on a Venn diagram with some areas which overlap and others which do not. Do the general public care
nothing for set theory?
But we do have the language.
Male/female = sex
Man/woman/trans woman/ trans man/etc. = gender