TERF's - Feminists that don't think trans women are women

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At first I thought that was a joke...
This world seems like a terrifying place, sometimes

And transgender people in the West have pretended to be gay or lesbian have because that is more accepted in the West than being trans, that is why you get groups like the LGB alliance that have acted to close the door behind them for acceptance. A lot of experiences that I have read are along the lines of transgender people confused that they were gay or a lesbian, to say nothing about gay trans men or lesbian trans women that are going to have all the more criticism against them. Natalie Wynn was one such high profile person that did a video on the stigma she had to face of her own in following transitioning that she was not straight.

I in general think that the whole forced sex reassignment thing is awful. My state in Australia is actually one that forces it to be legally recognised, non-binary not recognised at all.

Yes, I agree we still have a long way to go to for recognition of non-binary gender identities.

What you are saying about trans folk having to identify as gay or lesbian struck a chord with me also, for personal reasons. When I was young, the whole idea of transgender was not even on my radar, I thought in binary terms male/female and gay/straight. As a solidly heterosexual person I would get frustrated by being constantly mistaken for a lesbian. It was only later in life that I came to the realisation that they were picking up from my dress and manner that I was queer - it just wasn't in a sexual way. (I'm AFAB androgynous, accepted pronouns she/her/he/his/mate ).

Like Rowling, I have personal baggage affecting my views. Because I too think I might have transitioned if there had been more awareness of transgender issues when I was young. But if I had, the world would be less two beautiful young people who I had the privilege to bring into the world, and whatever my failings in the areas of womanhood/motherhood, I can't regret that.

And I appreciate that you took the time to watch the video, it is not exactly a short one. In terms of a debater, she actually did a video on the fact that she was a competitive debater, and how she thinks that there are real flaws in using debates as a mediation for what is right, since debates measure who can speak better rather than what is actually correct. No one should just go off of who managed to use debate methods like appealing to emotion and such form an opinion on subjects.

Arguments of detransitioning are interesting and worth discussion, while also realizing that detransitioning is generally pretty tiny that the benefits to those who go through it do outweigh those that do not. Also that not all who detransition do it because they realize that they were the gender they were assigned, such as a YouTuber I have watched called Luxander. They detransitioned after realizing that they were not a man but non-binary, and have indeed received some harassment from the trans community (being a minority within a minority), but this does not mean they went back to being a girl and I think continued taking T at a lower levels. Apparently many that do detransition will at some point and to some level continue the process. To say nothing that many trans people find the harassment of transitioning not worth it for their mental health, so may pretend to be cis.

I am sorry if all of this is without statistics, as the Wikipedia article said, there is not a whole lot of actual research done so you end up with a lot of anecdotal stories, being rather complex and painting with broad brushes I think has been difficult. I do think that some trans activists need to cool it as to not be afraid that research into detransitioning like it will delegitimize transgender people, although it is not actually that hard to find conservative groups that try and used anecdotal experiences of people that detransitioned after not happy one way or another after transitioning.

The Wikipedia article also mentioned things like some problems with statistics before 2000 including gender non-conforming people into numbers, and I think that there is a problem in things being a bit too binary, where people are expected to be binary enough to get certain intervention or allowances. So you may have people forced into a system of meeting certain criteria so they could wear masculine or feminine clothes, so they could get top surgery, or have hormones levels that feel more genuine to them, but find that there is only so much of the process they think is genuine to them or how bad they want it, especially in regards to anti-trans stigma.

The most important thing is that I think people need to be allowed to explore who they want to be. Deciding when they are pre-puberty age is something that is going to be too tough for something like a binary male/female, which is why I think that it is looking like puberty blockers are important not as just a precursor to transition, but to give time for someone who might recognise something and have time to think about it. As far as I know there puberty blockers should not stop someone from being able to have kids if they later go through puberty.

The opinions of Rowling and yourself that you think that you might have considered transitioning if you were aware back then to transgender issues like today, I think is totally something valuable to discussion. Whether it is accurate or not to what medical doctors are currently requiring to recommend transitioning that would make someone sterile, it says something about these sorts of identity thing is not new. We need (or needed) either changes of what it means to be a woman so people don't hate the expectations, or recognition that there are people who have felt drawn to the androgynous and should be socially accepted. The cynical view is that people who just had a phase are now being pressured to transition, but I consider a more positive view that a lot of people could be repressed under layers of social culture while also being generally happy.

I myself wonder if under the right pressure I might have considered the transitioning. Only been a while that I recognised how I had been repressed. have no idea how I could be different if my long nails were not called out as wrong because only girls have long nails, or the times I was called out as gay because something about them must have seemed feminine. How I might be if given a different context why a fear I had was accidentally walking into the wrong restroom like a subconscious part of me was worried about I might forget which one I was supposed to go into. Could I have been convinced to give up my manhood?

But, even if I don't think I would have liked that eventuality, I do wish that I did not feel as repressed as I do now, like not beat myself that one time because I found a boy cute because I was pretty sure that I was not gay (a common insult used in my childhood against me), so I could better recognise now if I find a boy cute. I think that panic results I had for a long time from gay people came from fear of my own feelings, that it did not make sense because I liked girls more. But I am pretty sure that there is a good explanation from earlier this year why my heart would beat faster when a certain guy came into the office I was working at. Still don't know why with a friend I had from Highschool and scouts, why I spent a lot of time around him and when in group setting I make a joke and always look for his reaction, him eventually coming out as gay. My point is that we should be allowed to work things out when younger, with allowances of not being binary, to not struggle and figure ourselves out later.

Yes, and I understand that just because I consider myself androgynous does not mean I have any right to pretend to understand the experiences of trans people. My intent was only to explain certain of my own experiences which have affected my views.

My frustration is with absolutist views that one has to be either a man or a woman and that recognises nothing in between - I think we have that in common, anyway. Please forgive me this, but I find some trans activists seem to have very absolutist views. I mean, it's understandable that when one has gone to extreme lengths to be able to pass as the gender in which they identify, that they will be very vocal in pulling down anyone who seems to be preventing their acceptance. Any hint that their gender identity is not recognised is incredibly emotive and words like Rowling's can be triggering, I do get that.

But at the same time, I think it should be recognised that this dogmatic, absolutist stance is dangerous in that it disallows open discussion of issues. If all it takes to be labelled a transphobe and "disgusting TERF" is recognition that there are biological differences between men and women, I think there is a problem.

As I said, I can't pretend to understand what trans people have gone through and the barriers they continue to face on a daily basis, but I do have sympathy and I don't want to make things more difficult for them. I just think that if we are to achieve true acceptance, people need to be able to voice their opinions in safety, as long as they are not causing harm.

I don't agree with allowing anti-trans hate speech. But Rowling seems to have good intentions here. It might not be very palatable to trans activists, but if someone has some concerns about the way we as a society reconcile gender identities and biological sex, that is (or should be) a valid issue for discussion.

I mean, I could be wrong and Rowling is a true transphobe and using the biological differences between men and women to deny trans people their hard-won gender identity. Certainly I think she has misconceptions over the experience of gender dysphoria and the genuine relief that transition can bring to many. But I believe she is trying to start a discussion that will actually prove to be important in securing public acceptance of non-binary gender identities in the long run.

Always preferred Terry Pratchett.

I hate it when "celebs" get political and say whatever trending! That's why i don't admire any of them! they're only where they are because of what they've done or whom they know, then what they know! JK Rowling will say anything, for more publicity, just like the rest of them

I have a genuine question and I would blike to state first that I'm neither inentionally transphobic nor intentionally racist. If you think I am, let me know how.

Here's my question: do you guys think Rachel Dolazal is black?

She identified as black, race is a social construct and as a biological category, it never made sense. There is no distinct gene the presence of which makes a person one race, the absence another, and on top of that, most people don't knoe thrir genes. There are minor differences in health issues associated with the social category of race, but these are only statistical averages. There's no such thing as a black brain. ... And yet, personally I'm struggling with accepting that it's not just her claiming to be black, but that she *is* black.

Somehow, I have less of a problem with thinking of transwomen as women, but I can't really argue why. Maybe it's just because I've watched contrapoints videos and feel more familiar with the concept, but all her arguments can be transposed onto race and transracialism, and suddenly it all falls apart for me.
Any thoughts?

That sounds complicated, specifically as you said that there is not something like a black gene, that race generally works out as a social construct as so far that we generally base it on how we feel about how people look, which may or may not be reflective of things like a commonality of similar genes. That generally historically there has been the likes of discrimination purely based on how someone looks on the outside, like the son of a white woman and black man will still be referred to as black if they still look sufficiently black, being the first black president instead of biracial.

I think that the important thing with regards to race is along the lines of how they may be treated based on their appearance, but we also quite often also imply that they faced similar discrimination through their youth in reaching who they are as an adult, which becomes a bit lopsided if someone changed their appearance to another race when they became an adult. And a history of people changing their appeared race has elements of people seeming to turn their back on their brothers and sisters by trying to look like another to avoid the bias of that race, or clumsy acts to mimic another race because you don't believe an actual black person could play the part or even mock them.

Looking at pictures of Rachel, it does not look like she is trying to make fun of black people, she would be leaving behind white privilege, but you could also argue that she would have already benefited from it to reach her current position in life, but also in doing this she probably has opened herself up to harassment. I think that a lot of this is similar to how trans people are, that they are not making fun of a gender, they are leaving benefits behind of that gender despite benefitting from them to a point, but also opening themselves up to a lot of harassment. Differences may come about from movements in separating out gender from sex, from the need of a woman to be able to give birth, while race also has a lot of implications of heritage, that we places importance of the culture of one's heritage and expectations on how that might have impacted someone's upbringing.

And along those lines we get into discussions of things like cultural appropriation, which is a bit of a loaded subject, but I think is a bit overused in that people take too hard of a stance against merely adopting elements of another culture. I think that if it is done with an effort to be respectful and not selfishly act like you such a great person for merely liking an element of another culture, you should be fine. My favourite example of this sort of thing was how I heard a story of a young Caucasian girl wanting to have a Japanese tea ceremony as a party, which caused a lot of uproar from people saying that she was appropriating another culture, but from what I heard she actually did respectfully and as correctly as she could.
https://ifunny.co/picture/japanese-tea-party-throw-a-fun-japanese-tea-party-for-Xpwq0BCA4

Feminists have it all wrong about trans people, especially transwomen. They also don't understand why transmen identify as male.

I don't identify as a feminist but I admit, I don't really understand it, too. Is it about the society more ready to accept someone switching their gender than to accept a masculine woman or a feminine man?

Unless she's adopted, apparently her "biological parents" say she's got no black in her.If she identities as black, well up to her. Whom i'm i or the rest of the world, these days to argue with peoples views over logic and facts.

Personally, I think that there is a thinner line between gender than compared to race.

As babies there is little physical difference between a clothed baby that is a boy in comparison to a girl. Before puberty, the differences are predominately cultural. The sex of a baby is determined in a split second. It doesn’t take much for a different possibility to occur.

Our understanding of sex and gender has changed over the years. It’d certainly be rather simple if everyone neatly fit into categories. However, you have outliers and experiences that don’t quite fit into the cultural average. Scientists still argue over the various differences between the brains of men and women.

I tend to avoid women’s magazines and their websites. Usually their content just hasn’t appealed, and I dislike how rigid the gender roles displayed in them tend to be. I can’t relate to struggling to understand men (my personal view is that everyone's confusing except cats and computers ). One time I remember stumbling upon one of these websites and finding a quiz. I could tell from the website that their target demographic was straight women (I am a lesbian) so I felt a bit out of place. The quiz drew me in with a rather clickbaity nature, it challenged me “we bet you can’t guess what men on average find attractive in women”, so I thought “alright, let me have a go then”. I just chose what I found attractive and it turned out to average out with a survey that a group of men had answered.

Then the quiz complimented me with a comment along the lines of “you really seem to understand men! We bet you have a lot of male friends or a couple of brothers. However, if you really want to test your knowledge- try our do you know how to speak to men? Quiz”. I didn’t bother taking that.

However, I suppose that’s an interesting point. Being attracted to women is oftentimes an inherently masculine trait. Most people are cisgender and straight. When you break down attraction, men and women are attracted to one another because of a desire to reproduce to maintain the continuation of the species. I recognise that as someone that was assigned female at birth, it doesn’t make much logical sense for me to be attracted to other women. Afterall, I can’t reproduce with one. There are numerous theories out there about why homosexuality and bisexuality keeps cropping up in nature.

Despite this masculine aspect, I still very much identify with being female and a woman. I have wondered about my gender identity before, but if I were to identify otherwise it wouldn’t feel accurate for me. Being gay can be odd, since I still go through menstruation as my body prepares for pregnancy, yet I lack an interest in men.

I never went through a boys are icky phase and I never fully understood why most of the girls around me did. Nor did I quite understand why it was looked down upon to play with the boys in the same way I did with the girls, but I would choose to only play with the girls since the adults almost always made it weird if I played with a boy. Plus, the other girls would threaten that we couldn’t be friends if I associated with boys so I often didn’t. I was aware that when we got older we’d probably develop feelings for boys but that didn’t disgust me. When I used to think about it, I would think “I mean, it doesn’t seem quite right - I can’t quite imagine being interested in that yet- but I’m sure I’ll feel differently when I’m older. Seems pointless to hold the boys are icky approach if we’re going to grow up and change our minds anyway” then I grew up to only be interested in women so the joke is on me I guess.

However, I know I’ve mostly been talking about gender expression rather than gender identity. The two can indeed be rather separate concepts but can tie into each other. As for race, I cannot fathom how someone could realistically identify as black if they were white, or Asian without any Asian ancestry. With sex, if things went differently in the womb a person could’ve easily been the opposite sex. Everyone has nipples and hormones can make a significant difference. I can understand gender dysphoria, something that has been studied extensively and transgender people do seem to think more along the lines of the gender they identify as. Yet, can you ever truly think like a certain race? How would that work? What would even cause that and what would it actually mean? It doesn’t make sense to me and I don’t see a basis for it.

Personally, I see it exactly the opposite way:
Race is a concept that things like one's skin color, eye shape or hair facture determine one's position in the society.
Gender is a concept that one's sexual organs determine their position in the society.

Both are largely unjustified but one's sexual organs at least do determine one's possible roles in reproduction.
Race is completely a cultural construct, IMO absolutely unnecessary and largely toxic in modern world.

There’s a difference between gender and race because humans have an innate gender identity, but not an innate racial identity.

If a person appears to belong to a race then they will often be treated as if they do, regardless of their ancestry. Look at, for example, Peter Davison, who is treated as white even though his parents were black. Regine Chassagne is another example. Rachel Dolezal was treated as if she was black even though her parents were white, so there’s a serious extent to which she was genuinely black.

We also see this with, for example, North Africans. In the US, legally speaking North Africans are white, but socially speaking I think few people would identify them as white and some self-identify as black. Or Italians - they initially weren’t perceived as white in the US. Or the Kardashians, who are Armenian - they seem to be treated as white when someone wants to criticise them for being insensitive, and non-white if someone says something racially tinged about them, or if they behave in a way that isn’t acceptable to posh white people. In the U.K. we don’t recognise Hispanic/Latino as separate from white.

Gender is both similar, in that people will treat you according to how they perceive you, and different, in that we recognise that for some people their gender may not align with the one they are routinely perceived as being.

To continue with the sincere questions that don't mean harm (but if they do, tell me how, so I can reconsider):

What's an innate gender identity?
It's not biological, or we could (theoretically) test for it. That's basically the "female brain/male brain" concept.
But the medical argument is highly controversial anyway, because it means some dictor gets to decide who's genuine and who isn't.

It's not a social construct, otherwise it wouldn't be innate.

Identity (without gender) seems to be a complex mix of feedback loops between a brain and its environment. - yet, we don't have a discussion about whether I need to "accept" anyone's self-identification as valid, as there are identity thieves and con artists and simply crazy people. But furthermore, one's experience of one's own identity changes. Sometimes drastically due to trauma, sometimes intentionally through therapy, etc.
These things run against the notion of 'innate', and, worse, could lead to the idea of conversion therapy.

That leaves us with gender performance theory- i.e. gender as habitual performance.
Which is comparable to race. - which functions with the Kardashian example. They are "assigned" a race according to which of their actions is being evaluated/or whichever way is opportune to the critic. But that's only possible because they are visually ambiguous.
It wouldn't work if they were blonde and Scandinavian looking.
But performance theory is incompatible with innate identity

I tangentially feel a connection to several of ContraPoint's videos where she looks at a whole lot of different sides of gender, how it is performed, and why we do it: Autogynephilia, The Aesthetic (I think), Pronouns, Beauty, "Transtrenders", and I think Opulence. I think that in some way or another they went some way into explain how Natalie, an AMAB (assigned male at birth) person might identify female and present as such.

A whole lot of things from gender being a construct created socially, to it as a performance, and what someone gets out of that. And I think it is while a lot of people are comfortable with how all those things line up with how their body is, some people see a mismatch with how the majority are within themselves. A lot of people I think live in a place of kind of privilege where they say that they are what they are that this is just what being a man or woman is and that is just what everyone with that type of body experiences. They might even see traits as simply a biological element or a social one that just don't do if it makes you uncomfortable, but the fact that lots of people actually do experience a mismatch should show that it is more than people being confused.

I think that as humans we are primed ready to be able to identify people as male and female, and there are just people who realize that they don't fit the one their genitals say, are both or are neither. Some people think that it is an influence of hormones that form the brain during pregnancy, and could be very complex and difficult to recognise on a physiological level, but I am aware that are evidence that it is more than simply someone out of the blue choosing to be seen as weird. The only real way I think that you can recognise the experiences of others outside of your own that may identify differently is to ask them why they might identify differently, rather than rely on just people who are afraid of those people.