iron uterus

Yes to all of this, a hundred times over. To be a little blunt - when we state how the beliefs of gender identity and transgenderism are bullshit, and the fact that humans can't change sex; we're not ""denying your existence"" - that is quite immature and self-absorbed to say. We damn well know you're real. It's just that your existence is not tied to your trans identity!!

If you've tied your entire sense of self to your gender identity, then something is very wrong and that is your problem not ours.

On a much more personal note, now. What you call a "gender transition" is a choice and one you don't have to make - because gender dysphoria can and often has been successfully treated by getting some proper therapy for the root cause(es) of the dysphoria... which often consists of things like childhood trauma, experiencing homophobia and/or misogyny, having strict gender roles forced upon you as a kid; and more. It can be treated by healing that and by learning how to love and accept yourself just as you are. A vital part of which is accepting that you can be whatever and however you want to be without needing to be a different gender. This then makes a "transition" pointless...

And please believe me when I say that would feel a hundred times better, more whole, more freeing; than this long, involved, medically dependent road you've taken of pumping yourself full of synthetic opposite-sex hormones, undergoing significant and even extreme body modifications; and spending every day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed being dissociated from the reality of your physical body. Spending every day doing your best to create the illusion that you are the opposite sex; trying to do it well enough that other people perceive you as such.

However good you might think you feel doing that stuff, you only feel so because you've been led to believe that it is the only way you can be yourself. This is a lie. Everything you want to "transition" for, you can have and do without the transition. A woman can be and do anything, so can a man. And like I already explained, you'd have the beautiful and healing experience of loving your body and self as it is. As you are. Instead of walking the long tiring pointless road of trying to be something that you are not.

Radical Feminists:

Obviously it’s fine individually to like things for aesthetic appeal. Plenty of people like art for that reason. But when one class of people-women- is subject to social standards and expectations that another class-men- is not, it doesn’t matter particularly whether you enjoy participating in that system or not. You will be rewarded/punished accordingly. Women who say “i like makeup” either think they do because of the rewards that have created an unconscious association, or they’re lucky since they happen to like something that rewards them. Either way they still get rewarded for wearing makeup, whether they like it or not. It does not matter whether women like something, it matters that they and only they are forced to do something that is more work, time, and money they could spend on other things.

Your personal feelings are not relevant. Whether you’re happy to conform to the system, brainwashed into thinking you’re happy to conform to the system, just doing it because it makes your life easier, not doing it because you don’t like it and feeling the repercussions, or not doing it as a statement and feeling the repercussions, it is still unfair. Radfems are asking the first group to think of those in the other groups, the second group to try the opposite to examine whether they like it or not, and the third group to consider joining the last one.

Nevermind that we don't have magic to "change sex" and this is from a fictional children's book series.

2. This discussion isn't about if transwomen are trans or not. They are. That does not make them women.

3. Except the definition isn't particularly rigid, over 50% of the human race fits the criteria.

4. Except regardless of how we define "woman" males will recognize that they can impregnate, female can be impregnated etc. It is biological differences that are the root of the patriarchy, not giving names to these two categories of people. Not having a coherant definition of woman won't make misogynists confused and think they can forcibly impregnate a "person with a penis" nor that they cannot forcibly impregnate a "person with a vagina" who identifies as a man. Just because you took away the ability to coherently discuss the issue does not make the issue go away.

5. Using a biological definition of woman does not mean not recognizing women as real people with real lives. It in fact is helpful for that goal, since it places "woman" ad a category that says nothing more about a person than the biological category they inhabit, rather than about their personality or presentation. There are plenty of categories that people fit into on the basis of biology alone (like brunettes) and we would not argue that that's reducing them to anything.

do you genuinely think the terms "male" and "female" are natural to humans? people are on a bimodal distribution, yes, but there is no such thing as "two sexes", unless you're cherry-picking chromosomes, and ignoring xxy, xyy, and so many more. humans are more diverse than just "male" and "female".

by stating that any variation of xx and xy are somehow another sex, you are in fact taking away their classification as intersexual syndroms, denying them as medical diagnosis alongside the underlying conditions asociated to said variation, DENYING THEIR TREATMENT SINCE YOU CONSIDER IS NOT A MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS WHICH IS ABLEIST. Besides that, most (if not all) intersexual syndromes affect one sex SPECIFICALLY. For example XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) and XYY (Jakob syndrome) only affects MALES.

Also, the terms "male" and "female" are as natural to humans as being a "mammal". There are variations across all humans, that won't change the fact that we are mammals, primates, chordata, etc, etc. Male and female is a biological clasification present in every animal who reproduces sexually, such as humans and every other primates. To act like somehow we don't enter said classification is denying the basis of our biology as mammals.

Finally, transwomen are adult human males. Stating that somehow a woman is something else than an adult human female, you are in fact stating 3 things:

1) that being a woman is some abstraction/idea/stereotype/feeling, etc. All things that are subjective and impossible to determine which itself leaves real women unprotected in areas like law and medicine. This also implies that women with cerebral palsy, severe autism, or any kind of neurological condition that keeps them from expresing themselves or communicate their feelings to her peers are not women because they don't actually have an expression of womanhood, which means that they are left in the blank for legal and medical purposes.

When it comes to female / male / truly or ambiguous, the distribution is more like the two towers and a mosquito. This is regardless of if a person has a different gender expression, identifies as trans etc, just whether they are male or female. Intersex individuals (or people with disorders of sexual development) are still either male or female. Your body follows along a path to large gametes or small gametes, never both. There are only X or Y chrosomes, not Z, or W etc.

Humans are not hermaphrodites and there has been zero cases of a human who produces both sperm and ovum. It is also surmised that it is important for our genetic material to mix with another person's in order to procreate, which is why unlike some species, a person could never self-impregnate.

I'm sure it does hurt having someone tell you you're something you're not. When I was a kid my grandma told me dragons aren't real so I can't have one as a pet. Made me cry.

That doesn't make dragons real.

You can't be born in the wrong body, that mindset is born out of a the view that your body is just some vessel for your mind. You are the whole thing. Your body is you. I can understand you may have a condition(s) which make your life harder and I sympathize with that.

You say you were never supposed to be born into a female body; says who? Either you're looking to religion (which I don't ascribe to and can simply tell you I don't share your faith) or you're looking to biology, which has yet to show any actual physical condition which causes a person to be trans. At best you could say you were never supposed to feel you should have been male.

If this very specific circumstance doesn't apply to you, then you were not "assigned" a sex at birth, you are born or of that sex. gender is the expectations placed on you and the associations made with the sex you are born, but are not inherent to it. Sex is coded in your DNA and results in one reproductive system or the other.

Recognizing oneself as female regardless of any adherence to gender stereotypes is actually going against patriarchy. I don't have to be, look or act stereotypically feminine, but I am still female and I am still a woman.

Your individual circumstances don't actually contradict anything that I said.

Like yeah, there is obviously nuance, you're just bringing up some left field gotcha that was irrelevant to the original discussion.

Majority of people? People who don't have disorders of sexual development? Male or female. Not "AFAB" or "AMAB", which refers to individuals (such as yourself? I guess? Taking that at face value) that have a medical condition.

What exactly are you being excluded from, based on anything I said?

The fact that you have XX chromosomes and not XZ or XXU chromosomes still supports the SEX binary as a real and measureable phenomenon. Not gender. "Gender" is social rules and assumptions, not actually anything to do with being male or female.

If this very specific circumstance doesn't apply to you, then you were not "assigned" a sex at birth, you are born or of that sex. gender is the expectations placed on you and the associations made with the sex you are born, but are not inherent to it. Sex is coded in your DNA and results in one reproductive system or the other.

Recognizing oneself as female regardless of any adherence to gender stereotypes is actually going against patriarchy. I don't have to be, look or act stereotypically feminine, but I am still female and I am still a woman.

a christian asks me to pray with them. i do not. they call me a heretic. this means nothing to me and has zero social consequences.

a gendie asks me to call them xir. i do not. they call me a terf, and this can ostracize me from ~80% of my friends at best and lead me to losing my job at worst.

the difference is that (most (sane)) religious folk don't really expect me to believe what they do. there's no social foul in us walking parallel but distinctly different lives. whether or not i pray with them doesn't bear on their reality at all. we can even have sane and relatively pleasant cooler talks about our different walks of life! and because there is zero expectation, i may be more inclined to respectfully indulge them should it arise - i dated a christian once. i went to church with her every sunday, for example.

but if i do not they/them the they/them, i am suddenly crashing their world around them, have committed the Most Heinous of Sins, and every Queer (tm) person in a 15 mile radius must be alerted. i have Broken the Expectation, and in so doing have unleashed the unglorious wrath of the most privileged 22 year old with an amazon wishlist full of children's toys and lube whose biggest problem in life is policing thoughtcrimes 24/7. and because of all of that, i'm not really inclined to play along.

If I say I don't believe in God at work, no one will bat an eye.

I read an account today of an autistic female person who claimed that they were 'not socialized as female' because of their gender non-conformity and autism. This confused me until I realized that what they mean is that they did not experience a mainstream socialization. They received punishment other people did not and they did not receive any of the 'perks' of being a girl. They decided that this means they did not receive 'female socialization' but some other special socialization for 'freaks'.

Undoubtedly, being treated like a freak is traumatizing. The gender policing that gender non conforming people, male and female, go through, is traumatizing. It is alienating.

Nevertheless, socialization is not something you choose, it is something other people do to you to get you to learn your 'place' in the gender hierarchy. This is why a girl who shows interest in feminine things is not punished for it, but a boy who shows interest in feminine things is harshly punished. On the flipside, a girl who shows interest in masculine things may be mocked and excluded for it. A boy who does the same thing is praised.

'Male socialization' doesn't mean "everyone loves me and believes in me because I'm male." Because gender is about power, 'male socialization' is about educating and indoctrinating boys to denigrate girls, women, and anything associated with them so they can take their place in the masculine hierarchy. Policing boys who break that code is absolutely part of male socialization.

'Female socialization' doesn't mean "people are nice to me because I'm a girl and I'm nice to people because I'm a girl." Because gender is about power, 'female socialization' is about educating and indoctrinating girls to prepare them for subordinate roles to men. Policing girls who refuse subordination is absolutely part of female socialization.

see. okay. this is true about chairs. and while i personally think “adult human female, female meaning of the sex which produces ova” is a very clear and comprehensive definition, not everyone agrees. and, for the sake of argument, that’s fine! but that’s not how the law works. lawmaking bodies agonize over the precise definitions of terms to ensure that the law does what they’re hoping it will do, and is not easily misused. that’s their job.

in ireland, the bread that fast food restaurants use is legally considered cake because of the sugar content. cake is regulated differently than bread. do you and i need to argue the finer points of cake and bread? how sweet do you think something has to be so we can consider it cake? does it matter? not really. but it does when you’re trying to tax staple foods and non-staple foods differently.

there have been multiple court cases in the US determining if a taco is a sandwich (as of May 2024, it is, as per the superior court of indiana, fun fact). is a taco a sandwich? i don’t know! i don’t really think so. if someone said “hey i made sandwiches” and gave me a taco, i’d be confused. and anyway, does it matter? not really. but it does when i’m trying to determine if a taco restaurant can open in a space that won’t allow sandwich shops.

is a barbershop different than a hair salon? i think so. i go to a hair salon, my brother goes to a barbershop, if we switched our appointments we’d both be unhappy. it matters for the sake of communication, but is it a super important distinction? not really. but what if i signed a non-compete agreement with the barbershop i work at that said i wouldn’t work at any nearby barbershop for six months after terminating my contract? can i work at a hair salon? now it matters.

if i needed fifty chairs for an event, and the company i contracted with sent fifty horses, or fifty tables, they could argue “but it’s something with four legs that a person can sit on!” and they’d be correct. but i would know i’d been given something different than what i asked for, and i would expect the chair supplier to know that, too. so if i want to demand a refund/return/exchange on the basis that i’ve received the wrong product, do i have a claim?

so, okay, you feel we can’t define the term “woman” perfectly. or maybe we can define it, as in we know what we’re trying to talk about, but we don’t have a good term for it. wouldn’t be the first time it happened! but if we are creating a legal category, it does in fact need to have parameters. meaningful parameters.

if i want to give some speeches promoting radical gender acceptance, i could probably get away with never outright defining the word woman. but what if i want men who kill women to have their crimes classified as hate crimes? i need to have a meaningfully defined category of what a woman is and what makes one different from a man. mexico requires that congressional candidates be split 50-50 between men and women to enforce gender parity. “woman” has to be a meaningfully defined category, or else … well, you’ll end up with the same problem they keep having to deal with.

My French is pretty rusty but I spent three days with family two summers ago and came back with an accent. Immersion is the best way!