QT: Can men compete in women's sports if they meet all the same requirements of transwomen?

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-31T06:23:58+00:00

The way I read it, it's meant to reveal the silliness and unfairness of the testosterone rule. The sports organisations seemingly can't decide if their categories are about gender identities or bodies. They're letting in male people who identify as women, only if they meet some arbitrary rule that in no way accounts for the differences between male and female bodies. It should be clear that allowing males with feminine gender identities to compete with women is unfair because of the systematic average advantage of males (which is barely touched by testosterone rules), but a lot of people seem to suppress their knowledge of sex differences when prompted to focus on gender identity, so the question is meant to probe whether people really think that low testosterone equalises male advantage and makes it fair for males to compete alongside female athletes. It doesn't.

You don't need formal education in sports to get an inkling of the differences between male and female bodies. If you're interested in learning a tiny bit about female physiology I can recommend Stacy Simms' Ted talk "women are not small men" about women's training needs. Or you could read Caroline Criado-Perez's book Invisible Women--in particular the chapter on sports and medical research (or rather, the lack thereof) on women.

I mean, maybe, theoretically you could make some rules to totally negate the average advantage of males against females in sports. But then you have another problem. Even though women perform worse at, say, weightlifting than men (with some exceptions), we recognise excellence in women's weightlifting by comparing them to other women. Or take boxing. While the heavyweight champions may be the best, we still recognise excellence in the lightweight categories, too. But a man who competes at the same level as the top female athletes is not an excellent sportswoman, he's a less excellent sportsman. For example, women have on average 8 or 10 percent more bodyfat than men, and that holds for athletes as well as mere mortals. It's absolutely necessary from a health perspective, but an athletic disadvantage because it decreases the power to weight ratio, which is crucial for speed and power. Now imagine we make weight classes based on bodyfat percentage. If your average elite male sprinter has, say, 7% bodyfat and the average female elite sprinter has 14% (just guessing, doesn't matter exactly), what would you make of a male sprinter who has 14% bodyfat and competes with the women? Would he be an example of excellence in that category (let's call it the 14% category)? Or is he a non-elite sprinter? I'm going to say it's the latter. Same for all the other aspects of male advantage. If you found a shorter, weaker, fatter male athlete with lower upper body strength, thinner bones, more flexible ligaments etc... would you say 'here's an example of excellence amongst women-and-some-men!' ? Personally, I don't think so. You'd see at least some excellent women (by which I mean they're the top of that category) being displaced by non-excellent men.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-30T18:25:27+00:00

Assuming the current rules are fair is begging the question, because the question is whether the current rules are fair. The hypothetical given by the original poster is designed to reveal this.

I don't see how fair rules could be devised for mixed sex sports (at least those involving strength or speed), because men's advantages are multiple and relate to various body parts and systems: size, body fat percentage, joint thickness, q-angle, lean mass, metabolic ability to utilise glycogen vs fat, explosive power, tendon and ligament stiffness (important for transferring force), upper body strength, heart size, lung size, bone strength. And those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly others. We don't know all of them because we don't study women athletes adequately, and because there is always more complexity to uncover about the human body.

Trying to make rules so men can compete with women seems like a losing proposition to me, but I wouldn't be against trying it, as long as women's sports remain intact as well (that is, if women could decide to compete against other women or against small men with high body fat, thinner bones, etc.). What I am against is the elimination of the women-only categories with a very badly designed testosterone rule which makes zero sense either from a physical perspective or a gender identity perspective.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-30T07:04:12+00:00

Cheers!

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-29T12:45:38+00:00

Yes, it is strange. You know what I think? I think men invent femininity, their own picture of how women should be, and force it on women with violence, threats, humiliation, "medicine", grooming, economic coercion, advertising and so on. And they fall in love with their own invention of femininity, which is so much better than actual women, who, after all, have minds of their own and bodies that answer nature's purposes, not men's. And then they say femininity is the real thing and women don't exist (I've gotta credit de Beauvoir and Daly for these ideas).

I think trans and non trans men alike do this. I think if the trans movement were to succeed, it would fail. That is to say, if men could successfully strip femaleness from every social meaning associated with it (in short, from femininity), they would be able to enter the category at will but it would no longer be appealing to them. It gets its appeal from the sexual aspect which relies on female bodies. I don't think they'd want to wear makeup and women's clothing if these were no longer associated with women. So they actually need to weaken the definitional criteria of "women" to let a few people in, without changing the content much. They can do this because most of us haven't actually changed our understanding of what women are, we just added "trans women" as an addendum whose logical incoherence we paper over in our minds.

Anyway, that was a much longer aside than I intended. Long speech short sense: neurological sex is only useful to the movement because it conflates femaleness and femininity without destroying the category "woman" (since females are still presumed to be similar enough to each other to produce a standard to which trans women can be matched) while being unfalsifiable. The second it becomes practicably measurable it will be dropped.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-29T06:49:54+00:00

Brains are physical, I just don't think what we can currently measure about them should overrule the whole package of physical sex. I would also not use height, elbow thickness, or hair length to determine a person's sex, though I might expect these to differ by sex.

Oh, I do think men and women are psychologically different (though I don't know to what extent this is socialised vs innate, if such a distinction even makes sense), I just think behaviour is a much, much better and more useful measure than neurological scans. Some of the salient features of male behaviour are a greatly increased statistical tendency to sexual predation and physical and social aggression. That's why I like women only spaces. Neurology is not meaningful in this context because it has virtually no predictive or explanatory power with our present measurements, as far as I know.

Can you point me to where neurological sex has been reliably measured and described? I got the impression that the best we can do is say that men and women have a 'mosaic' of brain features that a programme can tell apart with low accuracy? I have also seen a study that shows at least some trans women have brains similar to women and gay men (in one small, specific and potentially unimportant way, kind of like elbows... the fact that gay men and women have similarities here should tell us that this is not a good or comprehensive measure of anything like neurological sex) but I have never seen anyone suggest either that they can reliably tell female from male brains, let alone that trans people's brains can be reliably classified as the sex they identify as without previous knowledge.

So yeah, I'm still concerned that you're preferring a virtually unmeasurable definition of woman/man (neurological sex) over a concrete, highly reliable measure (actual sex), and that the effect if not the purpose is simply to allow men access to everything formerly reserved for women, including the word itself.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-29T06:16:02+00:00

When you say neurological sex, are you saying you think there are distinctively sexed brains? I have a couple of questions, then.

Do you think these differences are significant enough to make them the more important classifying feature (in other words, is this more important than physical sex?)
Would you be willing to restrict legal sex change and access to women's spaces on the basis of neurological sex, assuming it could be measured?

Because honestly, I think a lot of trans women have bog standard male psychology. Behaviour is a much better measure of psychology than neurological features. And redefining women as an idea they have is a traditional male behaviour, a continuation of what men have been doing forever under patriarchy. And the more recent strains of activism I've seen online, involving bullying and sexual threats towards women, is so distinctively male in my opinion.

My worry is that you're trying to shift the meaning of 'woman' and 'man' from something concrete, meaningful, and highly significant to our lives (sex, including whatever sexed psychology exists) to something unmeasurable ('neurological sex') in order to blur the boundaries of 'man' and 'woman' so that men can have access to everything formerly reserved for women. That's the problem with an unmeasurable, unprovable, unfalsifiable definition.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-28T18:09:11+00:00

Women have multiple penises. The nose, for example, is a penis for breathing. We have ten hand penises for grasping, and as many foot penises for balancing.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-28T17:37:43+00:00

Right. I can say what I think trans is according to what trans people say, but the real question is whether any of it is meaningful. I just don't find gender identity a meaningful thing. I'm sure some people feel they have one, but I don't find it more important than, say, your star sign or whether you identify as belonging to a music subculture. Let alone more important than, or capable of replacing, sex.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-28T08:37:24+00:00

I didn't invent the word, so I can't really make up my own definition. Going with the definition that other people seem to use, it's something people say about themselves, but there may be wide variation in the actual content. It includes people who dress up as the other sex part time or always; people who medically alter their bodies to more resemble the opposite sex; people who identify as or believe they are the opposite sex (or both sexes or neither); people who know what sex they are but believe that "gender identity" is the more important classification and believe that they have some innate quality of mind appropriate to the opposite sex (or both sexes or neither sex). It's also anyone who says they're trans, even if I can't discern any difference from non trans people.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-25T17:01:08+00:00

It's not lame, the questions are designed to probe your ideas of fairness in sport, and of what defines men and women.

The reason to have men's and women's categories (when I say men and women, I mean adult male and female people) is that men have a large systematic average advantage in almost every sports category. If there were only an open category, men would win virtually everything, except maybe some ultra endurance events and a couple of other things where speed and strength aren't important. There are benefits to women when they can compete in sports: it boosts confidence; it is good for health; sporting excellence is an achievement in its own right; we are committed to enabling women to take part in the same aspects of public life that men enjoy; and some people make a career out of it. We should encourage girls and women in sports, and celebrate when they achieve excellence. However, excellence simply looks different for women because our bodies are a compromise between athletic performance and the ability to bear children (whether we choose to or not). A category just for women means that they can compete without the likelihood of being so dramatically outclassed by men that they are at risk of injury (in contact sports), or that they have no reasonable chance of winning anything. Splitting sports by sex doubles the number of people who can profitably compete, just as splitting boxing or weightlifting into weight classes increases the number of people who can sensibly compete in those sports. Unlike weight classes, however, women are also from a socially disadvantaged class, whom many people like myself desire to see especially encouraged in public life. Virtually all the people who benefit from sports being split into sex categories are women and girls, and virtually all the people who would suffer from sports being mixed sex are also women and girls. Why the flip would we want to take away those benefits from women and girls?

I'll answer the thought experiment for you, because you seem unwilling to commit to any principles or definitions: It's always unfair for men/males to compete in the women's category, regardless of their gender identity. Low testosterone rules are worse than useless, because they create the illusion of objectivity around the women's category while eroding its original, actually useful meaning.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-25T09:19:19+00:00

You say it's fair for a person to compete if they meet the requirements, but the question is: what should the requirements be? What categories are supposed to exist in sports, and why? It's not "lame" to pose hypothetical scenarios; it's a very useful way of figuring out what priorities someone places on different values, and for clarifying their positions when they seem ambiguous or inconsistent.

If sporting organisations wish to protect purely non physical identity categories, why do they have testosterone or other physical requirements? And why should we have separate sporting categories for personal identities at all?

These are questions worth asking because there are good reasons to have male and female sporting categories. Allowing males to compete in the women's category contradicts the purpose of the women's category, and adding a testosterone requirement is a useless papering over of this contradiction. There is no coherent principle or reasoning behind these rules, and the hypotheticals are designed to reveal this.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-23T05:29:36+00:00

"An experiment I usually try to ask women who think this way is whether or not they'd wear some of these overly sexualized outfits if they were alone on a remote island with monsters that they'd have to defend themselves from"

Hehe. The monsters is a nice detail because we do in fact internalise our society's requirements so thoroughly that they often feel as though they're coming from ourselves. De Beauvoir talks about this in The Second Sex in her chapters on girlhood and upbringing. Girls are taught to be self conscious of themselves as an object, and receive approval for looking good. We're aware of ourselves as selves, that is, conscious beings who are the centre of our own experiences, and at the same time we're expected to see ourselves as objects for the consumption of others. We reconcile these by internalising the social requirements, the male gaze, and pretending that it comes from our selves.

A more effective line of questioning might be to ask your female acquaintances if they are okay with little girls being absolutely surrounded by incredibly sexualised media, in which women show their worth by being fuckable. Even if they have reconciled these facts with their own "preferences", they may still have empathy for younger girls. As for the dude? Just tell him you don't like pornography in your games. You don't have a double standard because you're not asking for pornified men in your games.

The women in the elder scrolls are varied: warriors, farmers, bandits, assassins, etc. They're not positive so much as just human, like the men. There are a couple of slightly sexier outfits (tavern serving maid has a low cut dress, for example) but mostly not, and nothing porny.

"would you say that when it comes to these sexualized designs, do you think that a character could be designed as sexy without looking like a total porn fantasy character?"

I'm not sure what you mean by sexy. If you mean overtly sexualised to cater to men's hard ons, then I'm not into it. Women characters should have cool, non-sexualised costumes, normal clothing based on them being people, not sex objects. Anyone who's attracted to women will still find them attractive, just as people who are attracted to men are still attracted to them even when they're fully dressed.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-22T17:35:37+00:00

"he (guy I was debating) was trying to explain why a lot of the female outfits from Mortal Kombat 9 can be seen as empowering, liberating, and practical"

I don't believe for a second that he believes this. He knows soft core porn when he sees it, and he likes it. It's not that he doesn't understand your arguments, it's that he likes the porny women's outfits and doesn't care if it affects women negatively. For an in depth critique of hyper sexualised femininity, I would recommend Sheila Jeffreys' book Beauty and Misogyny. Suffice it to say that I don't think 'empowering' is a very meaningful word in this context (exactly what kind of power are we talking about?), and I think women and girls choose sexiness because we're groomed into it and given few opportunities for achievement, respect, self respect or status that don't hinge on male sexual approval.

(I play games but mostly RPGs like the dragon age, fallout or elder scrolls series where the sex of my character doesn't affect the look very much. I wouldn't want to play a game where the women look like some pornsick male's jerkoff material)

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-20T05:25:46+00:00

Yes, when I say men I mean all and only male people. And yes, I think male people have been at the front of the movement to redefine womanhood to include themselves for decades, and that non female people have joined in, in smaller numbers at first and in greater numbers more recently. That isn't what I want to talk about, though.

The conversation I want to have is about you calling people whatever they want to be called, as you say you do, and whether that's respectful and harmless. I want you to address the charge of linguistic poaching that I made in the last two comments. I want to know if you can actually see the conflict and the harm in taking and redefining language other people use to define themselves.

Was it good, or harmless, for Mary Daly to redefine "lesbian" to mean "women-identified feminists" while downgrading actual lesbians to mere "gay women"? What if straight feminists took all those words (lesbian, gay, homosexual) to refer to themselves, too, and said the people previously known as lesbians were a mere subcategory of feminists, and as a result the people previously known as lesbians had to scrape for new terminology to organise events and spaces for themselves (which they would still need because their reality hadn't changed)? Or suppose I see a subculture that I like, but I'm not part of it. Would it be okay for me and a lot of others who feel the same way to redefine their language to include and refer to myself, even if that erodes the meanings of the language over time?

What I'm asking is do you understand the concept I'm trying to illustrate with linguistic poaching, and do you see how it could be harmful? Can you understand why I don't take it as a respectful gesture when you write that you'll call me "woman" if that's what I want, while at the same time you're engaged in the project of stripping the old meaning (female person) from the word "woman" and giving it a new meaning (person with a feminine gender identity) that does not apply to me and is of no use to me?

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-19T11:24:54+00:00

Yes, yes, you can misconstrue what I meant by using your redefinitions of my words. Very helpful.

We may be welcome to call ourselves "women" but you and others are working on changing the definition of woman. It's not about making certain sounds or syllables with our mouths, you know. It's about shared meaning, and you and others are attempting to take words that are already in use, and redefining them so they lose that original shared meaning and, if you are successful, have a new meaning, while the old meaning becomes more difficult to express. It reminds me of when Mary Daly said she defined lesbian as women-identified feminists, and the people previously known as lesbians were mere homosexual women. It's linguistic poaching. Besides, if "women" did mean people with a feminine gender identity, I would not count this term as applying to myself. So again, you cannot respect everyone by just calling them whatever they want. If you're part of the attempts to poach sex based language from women/female people, in order that men/male people can use said language as fuel for their personal identities, you are not respecting women/female people.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-18T17:54:42+00:00

You're framing it as calling people whatever they want to be called. But this entails a redefinition of 'woman' away from 'female person' to 'someone who wants to be called a woman'. The ability to name and define ourselves affects all women, so you can't please everyone by just using the words they prefer. It isn't respectful to go along with men's attempts to redefine womanhood as a personal identity and to poach woman centric language for themselves.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-08-09T18:17:21+00:00

Not sure what you mean by honest and true. Men are never women, regardless of how earnest they are. Men never belong in women's prisons, regardless of whether they chop bits off.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-30T08:08:08+00:00

Do you bring this level of radical scepticism to all categories, or just male and female? I propose to you that the world is a blob with patches of different properties, and that trying to distinguish, group and label different areas of the blob is always social construction. It's social construction to distinguish yourself from the surrounding environment (where does the air begin and end? Inside your lungs? Outside your mouth?). To distinguish air from water (what if the air is humid? What if the water has bubbles in?). To distinguish cake from bread (What is even banana bread??? Fruit bread? Fruit cake?). All human-invented categories that impose order on the single-item, the blob universe.

That said, certain categories have incredible explanatory and predictive power. For example, even though it's somewhat arbitrary where we place the boundary of "beach" and "ocean" the likelihood of being bitten by a shark is rather higher when the human is in one of these socially constructed spaces. Likewise the category MALE can predict with astonishing accuracy who is most likely to commit violent sexual crimes against other humans, for example.

It's funny how the kind of people who treat the categories of male and female with radical scepticism treat all other categories as common sense, and base their behaviour on them (which of course, is necessary for any sensible interactions with the world). It might be instructive for you to look at whose interests this highly specific deconstructionism serves.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-09T18:53:30+00:00

Could be, but what's stopping someone else from defining it differently?

Of course we can define things differently, but terms should be useful, in that they have power to explain and predict real phenomena. I'd be open to other definitions if they're useful and sensible.

Sorry for that word dump. I'm having a hard time processing my own thoughts about this but didn't want to keep putting off responding.

Nothing to apologise for, I've seen longer sentences :D

A boy who was treated as a girl from an early age and medically altered early on would indeed be a very unusual case, and we might have social reasons to treat them as though they were a woman. But I think the reason that we treat naturally developed features and acquired features differently is that we know perfectly well that nature creates an entire, incredibly complex being when it creates an animal. Our physiological differences from men are profound, ranging from the life alteringly significant ability to conceive, gestate and deliver babies, to the dozens of miniscule differences in a wide range of things like immune function, metabolism, susceptibility to disease, joint laxity etc etc. And not just our physical features but our motivations, desires, and thoughts are shaped by the kind of animals we are, and by our evolutionarily determined reproductive roles and strategies. Nature creates a masterpiece of detail every time it creates an animal, and it's the history of our evolution and development that give us our essential nature. We sometimes pretend this isn't so--we pretend that we are intellectual beings of our own invention, but that just isn't true. Anyway, adding prosthetic breasts is, in my opinion, more analogous to putting on a headband with cat ears than it is to growing breasts in puberty. It's a flesh costume, one that doesn't change the type of animal underneath. In fact it merely reflects the type underneath, since being a trans woman with a desire to mimic femaleness is necessarily an exclusively male experience.

Also sorry if that was messy or incoherent. Very tired :)

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-05T04:35:49+00:00

I'm not sure that's what we need, to be honest. To take the friend I was talking about, I think what she needs is intellectual honesty and to stop treating women's interests as unimportant. I don't think the breakdown in communication was due to sensitivity, impatience or mistakes, I think it was due to her being emotionally and intellectually manipulative in order to rationalise her worldview and behaviour and make it appear less like what it is: prioritising her personal identity, and her affiliation with other transfeminist philosophers and activists, over women's collective interests and safety. She rejected the idea of third spaces, by the way, which made me think it's not really about safety for her. I think when faced with someone like that, patience is beside the point and women need to advocate for their interests more directly, with e.g. policymakers.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-04T16:03:07+00:00

GC claims "woman" does have necessary and sufficient conditions

Do they? I think different GCs probably hold different positions. See, for example, Kathleen Stock, who supports a 'cluster concept' in which no one feature is necessary (not my view). Even if GCs held that gametes and only gametes that determine sex, that would be a viable position, though they'd have to bite the bullet as regards some counterintuitive boundary cases. That's certainly one way of solving this minor problem, and is by no means the most implausible solution.

Is this different from the trans-affirming position, which says the same about trans women? At the bare minimum, you could make the same argument for trans women who typically pass.

I think it’s different. I meant that when there’s a disagreement between chromosomes and phenotype, I would find phenotype more socially important and would thus treat it as the overruling feature for the purpose of categorising ambiguous cases. It’s socially important because the CAIS person will be treated as female from birth, and will thus have female socialisation. They’ll presumably have a similar risk profile to women when it comes to committing/being the victim of violence. And their political interests would largely align with those of women, I would guess. And I would say privacy considerations would favour them changing alongside other people with an externally feminine phenotype rather than other people with SRY genes.

As for trans women, I don’t think they have female phenotypes, not even if they pass. I would say, as a tentative definition, that a phenotype is an evolved body type that develops according to an organism’s internal logic. Seeking a medically created female body as an adult has a very different social significance to being born and growing up female. Firstly, trans women will be socialised male. I have no reason to think they are less likely than other males to display the behaviours of aggression, sexual predation and social domination, though I’m open to new evidence if it exists. Secondly, seeking to medically imitate a female body is not the same as being female, and doesn’t create the same political interests. For example, some men want a feminised body for sexual reasons, because they eroticise feminine subordination, or have a paraphilia, for example. Women, meanwhile, have an interest in escaping relentless sexualisation and eroticisation by men, especially where that sexualisation is tied to harmful sexist stereotypes. So even if I thought that medicine could create a female phenotype (I don’t), I would propose that there are socially relevant differences between a born phenotype and an acquired one, especially where the motivation to acquire the female phenotype may in fact be motivated by distinctively male psychology/behaviour.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-04T08:14:32+00:00

Firstly, even if some difficult-to-categorise cases exist, that doesn't mean the concepts of male and female are bad. They're still very useful and map onto reality exceedingly well. Better than many of our concepts. I don't see anyone deconstructing the concepts of bread and cake as vigorously, for example. No one is panicking about the cut offs between related species, or about how we distinguish and name colours. It is impossible to come up with perfect necessary and sufficient conditions for almost all of our important concepts. If you don't believe me go read up on the philosophical debate on the definition of knowledge, or the sorites paradox. This is a feature of how human thought interacts with the world, and it is absolutely not unique to the categories of sex, which are actually firmer and more reliable than many other categories.

Secondly, I think our understanding of sex has to take into account the fact that sex has an evolutionary history in the species, and a developmental history in the individual. Usually we take one of two evolved developmental pathways to end up at a clear type. But sometimes the mechanisms that drive us along these developmental paths conflict or don't succeed due to genetic variation, environmental influences, etc.

If I understand it right, people with CAIS have the mechanisms that usually sends people down the male pathway (SRY gene, male hormones), but that developmental pathway fails due to insesnsitivity to the hormones, and a female developmental pathway partly succeeds (the development of an externally female phenotype) but not fully (no ovaries). So there are good reasons why they could be categorised either way. Personally, I would say that for the female external phenotype is most socially relevant, and therefore people with CAIS should be treated as female and women for most purposes, except in medical situations where their genetic maleness could be relevant. But yeah, as long as we categorise people by sex, then for fuzzy cases, where people don't fall automatically into one or other category, we have to decide which features are most important and assign them a categorisation on that basis. This isn't a major problem, in my view.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-02T07:00:44+00:00

I don't like being blunt or hurtful, and tried to discuss things nicely with people at first. The problem, as I see it, is that we define as 'rude' and 'offensive' everything we don't want to hear. And we don't want to hear women telling the truth or defending their interests. Reading a little bit of feminist history has made me realise that women at the cutting edge of promoting women's liberation have frequently been very unpopular. That's not to say there aren't people who are unnecessarily nasty, as well. But when you're talking to people who have redefined clarity and truth as hate speech, you're never going to meet their standards for politeness. I had this problem when discussing the issues with a QT friend. I tried to hedge my bets and use language she would understand and accept, that wouldn't hurt her feelings, but she used the ambiguity in my choice of words to deliberately and repeatedly miss the point and answer straw men. Yet had I used the plain language necessary to prevent these misunderstandings and make a compelling argument she would have been devastated and thought me a villain.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-06-01T05:25:34+00:00

Agreed. The really effective tactics are 1. telling everyone that their critics are right wing bigots, thus isolating us and our ideas from our likeliest allies. 2. associating their movement with gay rights by analogy so that progressives will accept it without looking more closely 3. redefining language and demonstrating so much outrage when people disagree or use different language that many well intentioned people hesitate to say anything at all.

Logically the twaw position is incredibly weak, though, because at the core is equivocation between two terms: 1. woman (female person) and 2. woman (personal identification as a female person despite lacking the key qualification).

Spikygrasspod · 2021-05-31T12:06:42+00:00

There's a tiny bit of fuzziness at the boundaries of many of our concepts, but that doesn't endanger the categories themselves. The real question is why you have decided to take this radically sceptical, deconstructive approach to sex and not to other concepts. It's a little uncertain where the sea turns into the sand but do you try to walk on waves, or sail in the desert? There could be some argument about when raw becomes cooked becomes burnt but do you eat cinders or raw meat? No, you don't, because there's an important practical difference and the exact boundaries don't matter most of the time. And anyway, sex is not a spectrum like thin to fat or small to big. There are two big, very different categories into which almost everyone falls, and a tiny number of hard-to-categorise cases.

Oh, and I can't believe I have to say this, but humans are not bananas. Humans are not merely a set of genes. They're an evolved kind. They're born from other humans. In other words, there's a process and a history involved, not just a list of properties.

Spikygrasspod · 2021-05-30T08:01:20+00:00

That doesn't work because words also have historical associations, not just current meanings. The redefinition of woman from 'female person' to 'feminine person' allows people to equivocate between both meanings. For example, athletes like Veronic Ivy/Rachel McKinnon say they deserve to play in women's sports (sports for female people) because they are women (feminine people). Even if we agreed to your redefinition, there'd be significant confusion due to all the remaining associations. And if we ever did manage to shift all the associations, then presumably 'male woman' would no longer satisfy male people who wish to be treated as women, precisely because 'woman' would have lost its association with female people.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-11-28T20:37:18+00:00

I don't know where it originates, but I don't think it's a medical claim so much as a an "ameliorative definition": a redefinition for political purposes. I don't know if these philosophers created the ideas or just reflect ideas that have emerged through activism, but you can see some turning points perhaps in two philosophical papers. In Sally Haslangers "Gender and Race" -- in which she argues that 'women' should be redefined in terms of social subordination based on perceived femaleness rather than on femaleness itself. Her idea is that this will help the word 'woman' do the work of picking out those individuals who are the concern of feminism. The second paper is Katharine Jenkins's "Amelioration and Inclusion" in which she argues woman should actually be defined as a gender identity so that no one is categorised as man or woman against their preference, and so that we can centre trans women in feminist spaces.

More recently I feel a lot of the discourse has evolved online, so it may be difficult to pin down the origins of different ideas. But you should also look at the advocacy work of Stonewall and Mermaids, for example, since they receive money to train people on trans issues.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-30T15:01:17+00:00

Yep. My non-binary friend recently posted a list of all the ways we're allowed to talk about her. Not just pronouns, but also honorifics, nicknames, terms of endearment, descriptions, everything. There was a common theme: anything but female/feminine.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-29T16:03:03+00:00

It's hard to predict. I've seen a lot of stories on the internet that give me a prima facie reason to suspect the number may be increasing rapidly, but it would be good to have studies to prove one way or another.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-29T12:14:38+00:00

Does anyone want to discuss? I've heard the argument from TRAs that trans people are so few in number, and have been using the facilities they pass in within incident for decades, that we shouldn't even be arguing about this. Does this paper show that it's not a big deal, at least in bathrooms, and that there might be other things more worth focusing on? Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-21T13:37:04+00:00

No and no.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-21T12:07:34+00:00

A world without gender roles. That's the dream!

I guess there would still be sex differences, though, so people could still develop self-directed paraphilias around e.g. menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation. It would be much harder to justify why other people should play along, though, if there were no gender roles.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-21T11:58:30+00:00

That is certainly what radical feminists like Raymond have been suggesting since 1979, yes. Others, such as Stock, think that expectations and norms will always accumulate around men and women, and the most we can hope for is to make gender norms vastly more flexible and less harmful.

If someone is distressed by harmful, rigid gender roles, then we should expect a more feminist society to involve fewer instances of gender dysphoria. And if we got rid of the harmful Othering of women, transition might be less appealing to certain men with AGP. But if someone is attracted by the gender role of the opposite sex, regardless of the actual content of those norms, then transgender would presumably persist as long as differentiation between men and women does.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-21T11:46:42+00:00

Is this what's meant by a 'mosaic'?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-21T05:51:21+00:00

I think most transgender people do have sex role distress rather than body dysmorphia; or sometimes body dysmorphia arises as a complication of sex role distress or autogynephilia. The scandal is that doctors are trying to align young people's bodies with their distress, rather than trying to treat the distress and allow people to accept their bodies.

I think the term transgender was popularised in the 90s by crossdresser Virginia Prince, in order to avoid the terms transvestite and transsexual, which had a certain stigma due to the fact that people understood them as sexual conditions of men. This according to Sheila Jeffreys, anyway.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-18T06:04:22+00:00

He's fixed on the label terf in an us vs them/paladins vs nazis fantasy. Maybe just send him terf stuff but don't say it's terf, just say it's feminist stuff and ask what he thinks.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-05T16:15:54+00:00

Or their ability to define womanhood?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-05T16:14:11+00:00

Nothing wrong with just liking sex and not needing to make it into an elaborate, artificial performance with hierarchical role play that reproduces your internalised misogyny. Kink isn't spicy. It's an artificial flavour enhancer for people who burnt out their taste receptors with porn.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-09-05T16:08:14+00:00

I thought it was a delicious orchid.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T17:36:44+00:00

Results: GC feminists are suspicious as fuck, and rightly so.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T16:28:31+00:00

Thanks for checking it out.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T16:14:18+00:00

It might be simpler and quicker to say 'no' more often.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T16:13:34+00:00

We all (even dogs, apparently) are laser sharp at detecting men and women, except youngsters who have lost this ability due to exposure to postmodern deconstruction.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T16:09:35+00:00

You can if you want. I'm suspicious, given the ubiquity of appallingly misleading strawmen of GC feminism, that you intend to pathologise feminists without understanding their views.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T15:43:12+00:00

It's a political movement, not a psychological trait. Why would you need to study it?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-31T15:19:31+00:00

Yes. At any moment in which you are not conceiving, gestating, delivering or lactacting, you are sexless. Sexism and misogyny will not apply to you. Your risk of domestic and sexual violence at the hands of men will be lowered to the average. Also, men will not talk over you. /s

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-30T19:59:40+00:00

It's a success because it reduces demand. Reducing demand matters, because most of the women and girls who are 'supplied' are coerced in one way or another--financially, emotionally, physically. They are taken from the most vulnerable, poor populations. The stories they tell are horrific. It is, in general, an industry of abuse, even if there are some exceptions.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-23T03:19:56+00:00

It's definitely easier to say WTF to men in women's sports if you've ever tested your one-rep-max in the bench press.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-20T15:54:16+00:00

Where does the 'industrial' come in? Do we have factories? Do the factories produce facticities?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-19T15:19:18+00:00

Yeah, the only women worthy of being adventurers are very slim. The 'character' options for sturdy or plump women are not very many.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-19T15:16:22+00:00

He can make changes--like voter suppression and stocking the high court with judges--that will last longer than four years, though.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-19T04:17:22+00:00

I hate Biden, too. But the republicans are working hard to sabotage climate action and to keep big money in politics. I'm not American, but I'd really love it if you all would vote Trump out then argue this with Non-Trump when he's in office.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-19T03:22:52+00:00

I'm sorry you're struggling. Of course you can do whatever you need to in order to feel better. But are you placing too much meaning on your breasts and what it will be like to get rid of them? Maybe start with taking the focus off the question 'am i lesbian or trans'. The answer to the question doesn't need to be found right now; the answer will still be there to be found later. It's not urgent.

Instead, it might be worth doing some digging. What do you like about the idea of going to the beach topless? What would you feel? How would people react? What would it mean for you? For me I hated my hips. I felt they meant domesticity and childbearing, and I wanted to be an adventurer instead.

Do you do any sports or activities where the focus is on what your body DOES rather than what it looks like or symbolises or how it makes you feel? I ask because taking up strength sports actually significantly relieved my body dysmorphia, and other women have said so too (usually in relation to weight, but this is not unconnected to our sex and gender)

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T14:38:50+00:00

Really???? But whyyyy? Why so much love and compassion for rapists? Gah, don't answer that, I think I already know.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T04:40:57+00:00

If you're non judgmental you can't judge me for being judgemental. Come on. If you're going to do moral relativism do it all the way. Don't kink-shame my moral absolutism /s

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T04:26:35+00:00

Erm. 6.8% of tens of thousands is quite a lot of people. Help me math here. Is it, like 680s of people?

And why the fuck is a twice-convicted rapist not locked up permanently? Can we please just free all the non-violent people who are in for stupid marijuana and traffic charges and throw the rapists in a deep well?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T04:19:11+00:00

"This is our formal notice to vacate: The meaning of WOMAN is taken. Its definition is and will only ever be adult human female. A GIRL is an infant to adolescent female. Males are men and boys. All those occupying these spaces under false pretense, please promptly vacate the premises."

I love it. <3

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T04:13:14+00:00

It's not your fault that a shit person deliberately trampled your boundaries and didn't give a fuck what you wanted or what was best for you.

It's normal to not be psychologically prepared to object or fight back, because we don't expect people to shit all over our boundaries. We can't imagine doing that to other people, so we don't expect them to do it to us. And it's normal to try to 'normalise' the relationship by pretending things are okay before you've had a chance to process.

None of this is your fault. It is all his fault. It doesn't matter what it felt like or what you said; he kicked over your spoken boundaries and did what he wanted because he doesn't give a fuck about you. Fucking boundary trampling men do it on purpose, it's not a mistake for them, it's deliberate. It absolutely didn't happen because you weren't clear enough. Because you know what men do if they're not rapist fucks and they're not sure if you want anal sex? They ask you. They make sure. But violators creep around and figure out what they can get away with.

I'm so sorry you went through this. You will be okay despite the hurt.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-15T03:20:08+00:00

When someone puts their fingers, or something that they're holding in their hands, inside you, their entire body isn't usually pressed against yours, their hips aren't on yours, their legs aren't between yours, their face might not be breathing on your face, they don't ejaculate bodily fluids into you, and you can't get pregnant and you're probably not going to get an STD. Trauma can have lots of non-physical components like emotional betrayal etc. And only the individual can say how they feel about it. But for me, I don't feel that it's the same.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-14T19:53:12+00:00

You're welcome. Wikipedia has a page on teleology if you're interested. Obviously not everyone views the world in that way.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-14T16:00:38+00:00

I guess it's a philosophical question; Is a cat a collection of those features our human concepts and language can identify and describe? Or is it an organic whole with an intrinsic telos--a purpose or function determined by nature, not humans--that our concepts merely attempt to imperfectly describe by noting its features?

A man-made cat is not the same as a nature-made cat. The very fact of its being constructed gives it a different history and meaning to a cat that simply... is. That's my philosophical position, and I don't usually press it on other people.

If we really did have the technology to make males nearly identical to females... they would have the same features, but different histories and meanings. What would that mean for how we treat them? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Could we medically excise men's statistically higher tendency to rape and murder other humans? I might consider dropping my nature philosophy and joining the tech revolution in that case.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-14T03:00:47+00:00

Ehhh. I think female and male are types created by nature, not just collections of features. A female is a creature whose body is organised around the reproductive role of conception, gestation, delivery. You might as well ask whether we can surgically construct a cat if we get all the cat features right.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-01T15:42:46+00:00

It feels really lonely when everyone else is doing something that seems really obviously wrong. Right? Twice as lonely when they say you're the wrong one :(

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-01T03:00:46+00:00

I'm so sorry about your friend. She could have asked you more about your views before leaving. She could have disagreed with you without ghosting you. Things are fucked. I had a terven disagreement with someone recently. Why do I feel so anxious and angry? I don't usually feel this awful when I disagree with people about things. Maybe it's because I feel like everyone is poised to reject me and paint me as the villain.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-30T03:04:03+00:00

Yay! It looks so shiny and new I'm afraid to post.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T15:16:49+00:00

Abolish prostitution, get reproductive rights into the law, get better healthcare & social security for everyone but especially mothers, get women into politics, make it 'mainstream' to always include women in every kind of research & policy making and always look at specific effects on poor women, non-white women, elderly women, mothers & carers etc., start undoing the policies that reduce social mobility, rewrite the whole damned legal system to address rape and domestic violence adequately. Make more cultural spaces just for women. I dunno. Just throwing some ideas.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T15:04:26+00:00

That medium article complains that Criado Perez mentions police uniforms being dangerous because they don't fit well over large breasts, and that this is exclusionary and transphobic. I am not a police woman, and even if I were, I don't have a large bust. I have invented a new term, small-bust-exclusionary-researcher-feminist, and I now intend to slander Criado Perez for her exclusionary work. SBERF! Also, NPERF! (Non-policewoman-exlusionary-researcher-feminist). Criado Perez needs to think specifically about me before she researches anything. /s

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T14:58:37+00:00

I wonder if trans women have 'feminine' patterns of work and transport. Do they do the majority of care work in their families? Either way, I didn't throw the book out the window when it looked at issues that I personally don't face but other women do.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T14:52:13+00:00

Feminists are always accused of shaming individuals when they attempt critiques of culture. Critique the expectation to wear high heels to work? You're shaming women who wear and like heels. Critique religious doctrine? You're shaming the adherents. Critique violent media? You're shaming those who enjoy it. If your moral framework is individualistic and focused on personal freedom, then critiquing society is unimportant and respecting everyone's conception of the good life is paramount.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T14:47:55+00:00

So, I actually read this. It sounds like some racist white scientists said that white people were more differentiated in their secondary sex characteristics, which they were so desperate to prove that they measured people's arses. So when the article is talking about 'biological sex' they're not even talking about reproductive roles & organs, they're talking about body shape. No wonder they're confused.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-29T03:06:44+00:00

Like feminism. Might want to know what it's for before we completely retool it using gender identity.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T15:33:52+00:00

That's an incredible indictment of Butler. Well worth the read.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T04:57:11+00:00

Yep, it always helps to look at the reasons why women might need something separate. Sometimes it's about bodies, sometimes it's about socialisation, sometimes it's about class. Sometimes it's about all of those together. When transgendered males say they need or deserve access to women's spaces, because they're "women", they're using a new definition of "womanhood" that is totally incapable of justifying those spaces in the first place. They hope you won't notice the mix up, though.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T04:53:19+00:00

I've seen that. It's so friggin gross. Where does identifying with a barbie come from, I wonder? Can't be society. Must be the soul.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T04:34:32+00:00

It's one of the main groups that pushes the transing of kids. They present themselves as a charity that helps trans kids and their families.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T02:12:54+00:00

Maybe it feels like a betrayal because her internalised misogyny is now externalised--it's spilling out onto us, too. She feels like throwing up when she's correctly identified as female? Why? Because it's so disgusting to have a female body that you need to retch? I sympathise, to an extent. I also struggle with internalised misogyny. Those values were imprinted on me at a subconscious level, so I can't get rid of them. But I sure as fuck am not going to hurt other women by explicitly endorsing those values.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T00:59:33+00:00

I like how they frame it as a ban of people competing in the category 'consistent with their gender identity' rather than 'inconsistent with their sex'.

There are no 'gender identity' categories in sports. Otherwise they'd need to check the gender identities of everyone competing. And I guess we GC types wouldn't be allowed to compete at all, since many of us deny having gender identities at all.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-28T00:37:30+00:00

I was reading the comments and I thought I'd read Mermaids' open letter to JK, since they're presenting themselves as friendly and civil opponents. They cited a study that purportedly showed that trans women are no more of a threat to women than are other women. But when I read the study, it said MTF transsexuals maintained male levels of criminality. Mermaids seems to have taken the statement that MTFs were not more dangerous than control of the same natal sex to mean they're not more dangerous than anyone. Which is false. Male violence disappeared again.

They also said that there are accounts of trans people being totally fertile, but they link to a study about males, plus one story of trans female who gave birth. But she started taking T at 25, well after puberty would have helped her eggs to mature. Mermaids is deliberately conflating adults going on hormones with children missing out on puberty. Where's the study on what happens if you don't have a natural puberty at all, Mermaids? Not that one study could tell us enough about such incredible interference with nature.

They say they see no evidence of young women transitioning to escape misogyny, but have they looked for evidence? Anyone who suggests it might be a possibility is shouted down as a transphobe! I haven't seen any study that even attempts to measure internalised misogyny in trans youth, and on the other hand I have seen several anecdotal accounts saying that this is exactly what made people want to transition. If Mermaids cared about children they would be as keen on further research as we are.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T15:37:43+00:00

And gender change as an escape valve for individuals so we don't have to look at power structures and systematic violence and disadvantage.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T02:38:13+00:00

Well, I'm actually happy to leave 'choke on dick' comments to the lovely trans rights activists. It seems to be a core part of their gender performance, and I wouldn't want to appropriate that.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T02:23:41+00:00

Oh shit, I'm low masculine and very low feminine. I'm nothingggg I'm some sort of neutral human.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T02:05:59+00:00

Ugh. Placing personal identity over structural analyses of injustice isn't radical. Somebody needs to confiscate that word from them and ask them to sit in the corner and think about what they're doing.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:33:12+00:00

Determined female at conception sounds like a useful term, but could we shorten it a bit? I think we could take out three quarters of the words and have it mean the same thing :P

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:32:17+00:00

I was wrongfully mis-assigned the wrong height at puberty.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:31:20+00:00

It's super scary when they're stealing the very language and concepts we need in order to talk about the theft.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:30:38+00:00

Right? They just want to make natal sex seem arbitrary, like a mistake, so that their chosen sex has more weight.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:29:36+00:00

Wowwwww that's a really loose, inaccurate and terrifying definition of privilege that I think translates roughly as 'I want what you have, it's not fair, this is your fault'

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:26:19+00:00

Mmm, but if there's something like CAIS, where the body develops under the influence of female hormones, that person will look female, and possibly have female genitalia, so it might be practical and humane to assign them the legal sex of female. In a world where we treat people as male or female, parents have to make the best decision about how to raise their child, what to tell people, etc. I think that's what assigned means here.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:19:35+00:00

Wouldn't that make, like, all feminists trans men? Shit, we could start a movement.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:18:04+00:00

I read that the damage from strangulation can be invisible, internal, and not necessarily noticeable straight away but possibly days later. There is no safe way to assault your partner.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:16:10+00:00

Well I think you're right. Wait, there's a radical left? Where can I find them?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:14:00+00:00

You could always identify as a trans women.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:11:57+00:00

I completely agree. Their moral analyses of prostitution are completely individualistic and focused on 'free choice'--they're blind to power, to systematic oppression, they refuse to analyse structures, and they prioritise negative freedom (not being prevented from doing what they want) over every other value. They welcome market values into every arena of life, including the female body. Because they're relatively privileged, they don't perceive being 'positioned' themselves by societal structures, so they have little interest in how those structures constrain others even more cruelly. They have utterly betrayed and abandoned other women and children. I am so angry at them.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T01:03:39+00:00

Wow. That second video was illuminating. Indiya trots out the usual fuckery whereby women's words (about male violence) are harmful and likely to cause violence. Yuck.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T00:36:05+00:00

Ermmmm. But we're not defining men women by secondary sex characteristics such as facial shape and body hair. Our idea of womanhood is based on reproductive sex. Which, incidentally, you can't change with facial feminisation surgery or electrolysis beard removal. Not that anyone would try to 'achieve' 'womanhood' by doing that :)

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-27T00:25:12+00:00

I feel like they're always trying to make it a crime when we talk about their bad behaviour. What can we do except keep talking?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-26T15:53:33+00:00

I mean, incels seem to be angry because women say 'no' to them. They suffer from the incredible disappointment of expecting high status and loads of sex with beautiful subservient women, and from the gap between this expectation and reality. The problem is their entitlement*. Likewise, a lot of AGPs make themselves happy by indulging in appropriating women's identity and invading their spaces. They're happy because their expectation that they're entitled to us is being facilitated by a society that supports TRA over women's rights.

*Also, it's worth thinking about who encourages this entitlement. Michael Kimmel, the theorist on men and masculinity, suggests that many white men feel real grief over the loss of social mobility and dignity that they were promised in an American that is increasingly unequal and that denies dignity to many working class people. He suggests that right wing commentators are working hard to manipulate those 'valid' negative feelings into anger at women and immigrants so that men won't look at who's really to blame for their economic problems. This wouldn't explain the entitlement that rich men feel, though. I guess there are multiple causes.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-26T15:46:33+00:00

Hmm, but some people like Blanchard think AGPs might be as many as two-thirds to three-quarters of trans identified males. If they're a majority, and they're driving the modern TRA movement (which I think they are) it doesn't make sense to me to call them 'not real' to distinguish them from 'real' HSTS.

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-26T05:41:24+00:00

Yep, 'passing' and 'conforming' are gender performances, not gender identity (sorry! there are about five definitions of "gender"). Gender identity is innate, so they say. In ordinary TRA speak, gender identity is an innate 'sense'. Though 'sense' here obscures whether this mental state is more like a physical sensation, a belief, or a wish. In more rarified academic discussions, gender identity is sometimes defined in terms of 'norm relevancy'. In plain English, it means people perceive gender norms appropriate to the opposite sex as actually applying to them. So a male has a deep feeling that norms of femininity somehow apply to him, regardless of whether or not he conforms with them. Just like women know that norms of femininity apply to them, even if they resist. This might be the intellectual basis of claims that trans women don't experience male socialisation because they interpret it as not applying to them. 'Norm relevancy' is what Jenkins goes for in "Amelioration and Inclusion". It's ultimately incoherent. If you're interested, Bogardus responds with a pretty comprehensive take-down in "some internal problems with revisionary gender concepts".

Spikygrasspod · 2020-07-26T04:52:46+00:00

You are most welcome :)

I'm sorry, the attacks on your faith must feel exhausting and threatening. Happily, most of the threads here are not about religion so you should be able to engage as much or as little as you like on that issue, and still have plenty of space to talk about LGB and other aspects of trans rights activism.

Yeah, it has also been an immense relief to me to find this space after years of alternately wondering what was wrong with the highly individualistic mainstream feminism I was being offered and what was wrong with me.

Spikygrasspod