According to Twitter poll, 7O% believe that a woman can have a penis.

sisterinsomnia · 2022-04-10T22:39:51+00:00

The activists took that poll over (astroturfing it). The results mean nothing, i.e., they can't be interpreted to mean that people in general now regard 'women' as a class consisting of a mix of penis women and vulva women.

sisterinsomnia · 2021-09-10T04:10:51+00:00

Love those gentle reminders! The statement is only true IF and ONLY IF 'woman' has nothing to do with belonging to the female sex. So someone, somewhere changed the definition without any democratic consultation. So all women out there who regard themselves as women BECAUSE their sex is female have now their identities invalidated in order to validate the identities of a tiny group of transgender individuals with female bodies.

sisterinsomnia · 2021-09-10T04:06:39+00:00

This is one of those odd things where someone accuses another person of what might apply to the accuser. AGP is a fetish and those transgender women who have it are fetishists. But they are probably among those accusing others of 'genital fetishism'.

sisterinsomnia · 2021-06-29T04:24:05+00:00

It is an erasure. Any woman whose gender identity is embodied, i.e., who is a woman because she lives with a female body has her gender identity erased (to use the trans-cult language). She can no longer be a woman on an embodied basis but is told that she possesses an abstract identity which just happens to coincide with the sex of her body, and that other people have the same body but do not identify as women so 'pregnant people' is required to replace 'pregnant women.' To be inclusive.

But that inclusiveness denies many, many women the basis on which they accept the label 'women.'

A corollary is that there is now no non-pejorative name for those who are of the female biological sex. Yet that is the very group which is suffering from sex-based forms of oppression.

Another way to think about this is to ask what would happen if, say, communists were called just 'people' because they clearly are people. Doing that erases the focus of what they identify with (in trans-cult language).

sisterinsomnia · 2021-02-03T07:13:50+00:00

I have been stunned by the sex differences in transgender leadership. TIMs end up as leaders in feminist places at much higher percentages than their actual numbers in the population would suggest while TIFs are quite rare in leadership roles. I can think of only one or two off the top of my head. But lots of feminist sites have many TIMs. So no wonder that Clymr would be hired to have opinions about something which will never happen to Clymr.

This is linked to the wider trend of erasing all words for biologically female people and replacing them with pejorative expressions such as vulva people while biologically male people are still called men. It has been shocking to watch because it casts light on the question how women got subjugated in the first place. Being inclusive and nice is just a polite way of describing doormattery.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-26T08:49:09+00:00

From the article it seems that Decaudin is campaigning to erase any reference to biological sex. He must be an MRA plant, because the group benefiting from that is men as all erasure of the biological sex that has so far taken place has affected only the female biological sex. There are no health articles about ejaculators, in the name of inclusiveness, but many about menstruators, for the same reason. So getting rid of biological sex means getting rid of women.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T05:28:41+00:00

Those who suggest that trans women often have a male concept of what an ideal woman might be could have predicted that they are going to compete in beauty pageants, dress seductively, mostly ignore real feminists concerns and so on. That's because the ideal woman of a teenage boy is pretty much a beauty queen.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T04:23:04+00:00

5) Is it okay to invalidate someone's gender identity? Wouldn't invalidating someone's gender identity be lgbtphobic? If no, can you explain why?

Please answer a question for me: Why is it possible for others to invalidate a deeply held inner feeling of one's true gender? I have never been able to understand this and it feels like a contradiction, but perhaps there is something more to this than I am aware of.

If someone misgenders me it doesn't bother me at all, so I find it difficult to fully understand why validation is of such central focus as it seems to be.

Having said that, I would personally not invalidate anyone's conceptions of themselves unless it was necessary for their health and safety (such as in some medical contexts where biological sex matters greatly), and I believe that this is true for most people. People are not going to want to cause discomfort to others.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T04:18:37+00:00

4) Can you explain why gender identity does not exist? Don't cisgender people identify as/feel like they are the sex they were assigned at birth? Don't other animals identify as their sex assigned at birth due to lack of cognitive ability to identify as anything but their own sex?

I don't think anyone has done research on the existence vs. non-existence of gender identity. All I can say is that I don't have an abstract gender identity and when I read about its presumed universal existence I have no idea what it means and why others find it such an important concept. People have personalities, true, and those show some pattern of being distributed differently by sex, but most everybody really is non-binary in the sense that most people are not walking two-dimensional Barbie or GI Joe stereotypes. Stuff that I see as part of someone's personality is assigned to that person's gender now. This is bad for feminism as it makes the gender boxes more rigid.

Because I don't believe that most people possess an abstract gender identity, I am very reluctant to assume that if only animals were able to think on a higher level they, too, would somehow be found to have such an abstract identity. In any case, studying something like 'gender identity' is impossible, because it is supposed to be an internal feeling and others cannot validate it by measurements etc.

I believe that the concept makes sense for transgender people, however.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T04:12:07+00:00

3) Why do you say people can't be born in the wrong body?

I personally think that this question is one about linguistics, but I have noticed that Mermaids (a trans organisation in the UK) now says that nobody is born in the wrong body. One can clearly have intense discomfort with the body one has, of course, but why that is the case is something for medical research.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T04:05:50+00:00

2) Why do you say sex is not assigned at birth? If sex is not assigned at birth then what is it?

In the past biological sex was sometimes assigned by physicians when an infant's genitals could not be readily identified as either male or female. This was done very very rarely, and most infants were classified as either male or female on the basis of observing their genitals.

Now many expecting parents know before the birth the sex of the fetus. If sex is assigned by anything, then it would be the moment of conception.

Sex is defined in humans the same way it is defined in other animals. It is not a spectrum in humans, though secondary sexual characteristics can be. You are female if you belong to the sex which typically produces ova and you are male if you belong to the sex which typically produces sperm.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-13T04:01:54+00:00

1) Can GC explain what is wrong with what I said above? Can you break what I said down and tell me what's wrong with what I said above and why you disagree with it.

These come down to gender identity. A cisgender man is someone who identifies as a man and was assigned male at birth. A cisgender woman is someone who identifies as a woman and was assigned female at birth.

Cisgender people are people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.

What if those who don't transition have no such abstract gender identity which just happens to match their biological sex? I am pretty sure that I do not, and my informal surveys suggest that many others don't, either.

I believe that for many people the way the feel about their gender is actually based on their biological sex. For instance, my gender is 'woman' because my body is female. There is a causal relationship which runs from the sex of my body to my gender. In a sense I believe that transgender people do not identify with their biological sex while what the gender identity school calls 'cisgender' people (it's not, really, the correct definition of what many feel) do identify with their biological sex. It affects our lives both directly and in how others relate to us. It is also the basis for sex-based discrimination, sexism, and so on.

In short, I think your definition is incorrect.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T23:38:12+00:00

Their website was hilarious the last time I looked at it which is about six months ago. They talk about vaginas (men are interested in vaginas because they are the tubes while female sexuality is actually about the vulvas so odd choice for the museum). They state that their important value is inclusiveness.

Enough said.

I can't get over the great eagerness so many younger feminists show for the destruction of feminism. I think that it is because they have not thought the consequences and that they are mostly too young to have experienced the kind of sexism which comes later in life. But maybe they just don't like feminism.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T23:35:13+00:00

This has probably to do with validation. Validation is a never-ending need.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T23:30:47+00:00

Men do womaning better

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T23:29:43+00:00

This is my new collection interest! I have: egg producers, uterus-havers, uterus-owners, folks with uteruses, vagina-owners, vulva-owners, individuals with a cervix, non-prostate-owners, birthing bodies

Which am I missing?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T05:48:28+00:00

I believe that it is an issue with the real fragility of the gender identity of some transgender people. When someone uses the wrong pronouns on them their world collapses. And yes, in all other contexts this would be viewed as a mental health disorder of some type and the responsibility for dealing with it would not be put on the shoulders of everyone else. This particular minority is treated differently, probably because most negative consequences are experienced by boring bog-standard women who are expected to be kind, without boundaries and so on.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-11-10T05:46:02+00:00

It also utterly invalidates my gender identity. I am a woman because I have a female body and because others treat me a certain way due to not having a male body. Yet suddenly my female body should be written about as if it was gender-neutral (people get pregnant now or bodies)! That leaves me without an identity and the other side tells me that this outcome is annihilating.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-25T23:22:04+00:00

This is the study which most clearly shows that the advantage male puberty gives is not removed or even much affected by hormone therapy. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31794605/

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-25T23:03:48+00:00

National Geography also just wrote about 'pregnant people.' It has been mainstreamed. So the two sexes now are a) men and b) everyone who wishes to be something else.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-10T20:07:35+00:00

The trans activists know that the pushback would come from men. That's why we don't read about 'ejaculators' or about 'prostate-havers'. The male biological sex is left alone. There are no groups calling themselves mxn, to be inclusive.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-10T20:06:11+00:00

One small aspect of this is that in the UK the debate began earlier because of the proposal to go for self-declaration of gender with zero safeguards around it. In the US everything has happened in the shadows. It took me some time to realise how much has been changed when nobody was watching.

I hope that the US can catch up on that needed open debate, but right now people are being pilloried for saying anything at all.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-10T20:02:24+00:00

The principle is to have your cake and to save it, too. I see this for nonbinary female-bodied people, too. Both groups want everything, i.e., to not be treated shittily like women are treated, but to still share in all the fruits from feminists work and, in fact, to be prioritised in that work so that we cannot say 'pregnant women' but must say 'pregnant people'. We must be inclusive and so destroy our ability to see the female biological sex as the reason for our oppression because it is now just something that applies to 'people' in general.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-09T16:42:12+00:00

The category 'women' is not allowed to have any boundaries. Or at least those boundaries are not allowed to be decided by women. The goal is to make the word meaningless. It almost is already.

When people talk about 'inclusiveness' this is what really is behind it.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-09T16:39:43+00:00

Women's sexuality is now defined by what porn creates and most porn is created to satisfy the masturbatory needs of heterosexual men. So there is not much asking women themselves what they might like in bed. The changes in this over time are pretty astonishing, actually.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-09T15:20:14+00:00

When you say 'pregnant people' you invalidate the gender identities of all women who identify as women because they have biologically female bodies, and you turn the female body into something gender-neutral. When the female body has been made gender-neutral it becomes impossible to talk about the female biological sex and then it becomes impossible to talk about the oppression women face which is based on sex.

So something which is supposed to be 'inclusive' is actually anything but inclusive, because it invalidates the gender 'identities' of the vast majority of women and because it tries to make feminists work in the future impossible. But then 'inclusivity' comes from queer theory and never was intended to be about fairness. It is intended to destabilise and destroy the concept 'woman,' and it is succeeding. Oddly enough, it is never aimed at destabilising the concept 'man.'

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-03T20:33:59+00:00

I appreciate what Linehan has done and how much it has cost him in lost employment and harassment.

If you have not already signed the support letter for JK Rowling, please do it! 17,000 names and still rising but more slowly. You can be anonymous, too.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/in-solidarity-with-jk-rowling

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-03T00:38:14+00:00

It is the handmaidens which truly upset me. I have a seat watching the reasons why women have not had rights all through the history though I still can't quite understand where the privileging of this TIM comes from. Is it just privileging male people? Is it virtue signalling and the successful trans campaign which argues that trans people are the most oppressed of all people ever, even if they are coddled rich white TIMs? Or a mixture of both? Or fear, based on the obvious fact that not going along with the adulation results in nasty shit being poured over one's head? Or something else entirely?

I would like to know.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-03T00:35:30+00:00

Autogynephilia can take several forms and one has to do with the biological functions of the female body which the autogynephile finds sexually arousing. There are some who have the fetish about menstruation, some who have it about being pregnant and about giving birth (but not about caring for the infant in general terms), some have it about lactating. I have even seen at least one person who constantly writes about a desire to undergo an abortion.

But such things cannot be talked about in any public forum. They do leak out in the writings of some trans women, such as that asshole who wrote Female and argues that being a woman is all about being degraded.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-02T05:33:53+00:00

Yup. Strangio is astonishingly misogynistic. I think Strangio chooses the side on the basis of most hurt to women. It is wrong that the mental problems of others are allowed to affect everyone in this manner.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-01T21:23:06+00:00

Yup. The current assignment of gender to colours is quite recent, from the early 20th century. That's why viewing it as biologically essentialist is so hilarious. There was even an evo psycho study arguing that women prefer pink as they were the ancient fruit gatherers (but ripe fruit is red, not pink) and that men prefer blue because of ?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-10-01T21:20:41+00:00

There was a study about how children gain colour preferences. The researchers asked very young children to pick balls with different colours. The three-year old group picked colours quite randomly, boys often picking pink and girls blue and so on. By age four or so this changed and the boys started avoiding pink and purple balls and the girls choosing them.

The explanation is that at a certain age kids want to know how their group (boys, girls) behaves, so they learn the cues for that from the world around them. But because they are still very concrete in their thinking, the meaning of things like colour preference becomes very policed. I knew a little boy who at age four or so firmly believed that when he put a necklace on he became a girl. The princess dress etc. may be something similar.

Once kids understand that their being boys and girls is stable and not depending on all that stuff the pink phase tends to be over for most girls. Of course now schools teach that being a boy or a girl might not be stable so perhaps in the future teens walk around in pink princess dresses?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-29T22:06:03+00:00

This is a part of the post-modernist idea that there is no objective reality so one's emotions and 'lived experiences' take precedence.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-29T22:04:17+00:00

My personal experience is that the pink princess dress stage is a phase and passes. Not all girls (or boys) have it at all, but those who do seem to have absorbed (kids are little sponges about how boys and girls are supposed to be, though the culture gives them the answers) the messages about princesses are just acting out the highest role girls are given in traditional fairy tale stories. Like boys playing at being astronauts etc.

So this doesn't really say much about the raising of the girl.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-29T22:01:39+00:00

Agreed on the importance of having more powerful people speaking out. The costs of doing so for many of us are truly high in potential job loss and nonstop harassment, but I already see a very slight change because JK Rowling spoke out. And Cleese supported her. Note, though, how Cleese doesn't get the death threats or the porn pictures. Misogyny really fuels much of the wokebeard social warriorism.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-28T22:53:04+00:00

That is weird, to close the comments only after six. Probably an attempt to control what is said. The Karen meme is a heaven-send for those who want to be misogynistic (and ageist) because it is easily generalised to any woman who is white and middle-aged even if she is not doing any of the things the meme Karen does. It suffices if she states something.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-28T22:08:45+00:00

You can go on the site and give them feedback. Just scroll down the page to find 'contact us,' then follow the instructions for feedback. Their language is 100% from the trans playbook so that 'woman' is just some weird essence inside someone's brain and inclusiveness means forcing everyone to see that way so that the female body becomes gender-neutral and the female sex is eradicated. Once the female sex cannot be named how are we to fight against sex-based oppression?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-28T22:04:39+00:00

Yup. He had a truly terrible childhood and it destroyed him. Still, what he is now is a real danger for all women and girls.

When they seemed to have to release him the newspapers wrote 'a warning' article about it but failed to mention that it is a transgender girl or woman that women should look out for. A few days later at least one newspaper did add the relevant information, and it is relevant, both because it increases the potential victims' chances of spotting the person and because transgender women/girls are a bigger threat than natal women/girls for reasons of average body strength and aggressiveness.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-27T18:35:10+00:00

I am so sorry. I can relate to some of your life experiences, though my views are of course just my views:

I would distance myself from them because all they do is hurt you and that is not how families are supposed to act. You are not the person on whose shoulders the whole family should stand and you are not responsible for maintaining contact with your family when they give you no support at all.

You have your own family now and your in-laws and they deserve more of your energy and affection because they also return it.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-27T18:28:14+00:00

Forced teaming. I find it incredibly sad to see how many women are taken in by this, probably because they have so internalized the idea that trans women are the most oppressed people in the world, even if they are Jennifer Pritsker. But it also makes me very angry because directing all one's compassion in that direction ends up truly hurting vulnerable women whose rights are trampled over.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-26T18:00:36+00:00

I began studying this whole thing because of the quarantine and then spent quite a bit of time on various trans support sites. And I spotted the same thing! Anime, in particular, is much, much more common on those sites, a large number of posters have an anime pic of a toddler-looking girl's face attached to their handle and many of the memes use anime cartoons.

I have seen no studies of this, and it could of course be the case that these interests have something to do with generational cohorts and not with being drawn towards trans. But just from my experience it seems as if anime is playing some kind of a role here. Also, I have been told, certain types of porn where women are degraded.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-26T17:56:24+00:00

Doing the dishes, laundry, vacuuming, caring for infants and toddlers. Those are things assigned to women and girls in most cultures, though of course feminists have for long fought to make them jobs for everyone who lives in the same family (the same with male-assigned tasks).

I don't think TIMs think of being a woman in those terms, however, which is odd because if you really feel female inside from early childhood you would notice the chores that women do and would start doing them, too.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-24T20:36:04+00:00

Yeah, the alphabet soup is fun. I am pretty sure I could find a letter to fit me and I am as vanilla as they come.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-24T20:34:58+00:00

So telling the truth is hate. Where have I read about that before? 1875? 1734? 1984?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-24T20:33:48+00:00

Applause! Thank you for all the gc women in the UK who have worked so very hard and been attacked even harder for the work they have done. You got this done.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-14T22:57:51+00:00

Anyone on Twitter should contribute some sane comments to the hashtag

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-13T18:12:43+00:00

The person could no longer win in the male categories because of age so moved to the female category. I think narcissism must be quite common among some of these individuals. Most ordinary people would refrain from doing something like this, knowing full well that they have a physical advantage caused by sex difference, and seeing how embarrassing it is to then pretend-win in the new category.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-13T18:09:58+00:00

So silly. Sex is assigned when the egg and sperm meet, and most expecting parents know it before the baby is born. TRAs stole the term from the time when intersex babies sometimes had a sex assigned to them. It's appropriation from a marginalized group.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-13T02:37:59+00:00

The few conversations I have had about this suggests that the women who are into this truly and really believe two things:

Women's rights have been fully achieved already, and
trans people are so marginalized, oppressed and tortured that we must be kind to them, and we must include them always and everywhere even when that means centering them.

I think 1. applies to young women who don't have children yet and who might not be in the work force yet. 2. applies to older women, too, especially the ones who know someone who is trans, such as a family member.

I also suspect that one reason is the nonstop bombardment from the TRAs who keep complaining if the word 'woman' is used anywhere at all. The other side doesn't complain (I have started...)

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-11T16:25:18+00:00

Yeah..
I have been told that this is the reason why we are not allowed to have a term which means biologically female. So we are then called vulva-owners or menstruators when such a term is needed.

A very tiny number of transgender women appear to be deciding on mainstream words and their meaning, at least in the Wokestan writings.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-09T16:25:27+00:00

I was an ally in terms of including the kind of trans women I thought all were at the time (after surgery etc., with strong gender dysphoria).

I had no idea that being inclusive means handing over my own definition of my womanhood, erasing the female body and turning the class of all biological women, oppressed on the basis of sex, into a sub-category of the gender identity class 'women', where they are now viewed as the privileged part of that class while male-bodied women are the truly oppressed ones.

And I had no idea that noticing those things in my second paragraph would be interpreted as transphobia.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-09T15:31:27+00:00

Hear, hear. I sometimes wish I wouldn't care, because my life would be happier that way.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-07T14:40:32+00:00

One part of that disconnection is the tremendous problems liberal Western feminists have in deciding how to relate to issues such as female infanticide in other cultures, because they don't want to come across as Western white colonialists who are critiquing a culture the West once colonized and so on. So very few even dare to write anything on those topics.

That's what happened after the Cologne mass sexual harassment case: a lot of mealy-mouthed thoughts trying to be feminist without appearing racist or Islamophobic.

It's a real hornet's nest, to discuss those issues, and you start seeing the creation of the oppression hierarchies real fast. Women are not at the top on those hierarchies, and that is among liberal feminists.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-07T14:35:52+00:00

I agree. Most of the eager supporters just tick all the boxes on the woke form. If you are against racism and sexism then you must be for trans rights or you lose your woke credit or must even think (gasp!) and figure out what you are going to do about women's rights clashing with trans demands.

And most people know nothing about this new world where we are vulva-owners so that 'trans women are women' can be literally true (which requires the decoupling of biological sex from gender altogether). They believe that transwomen are all post-surgery, very very few and very very oppressed, and ask what the harm might be in just being kind.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-07T14:28:18+00:00

This is not quite on the topic, but for other reasons I was trying to learn about OnlyFans and came across one woke piece which worried about those content creators (naked pic makers) who were not white or who were LBGTetc. But not one word about women vs. men in that context, because we are erasing biological sex as one of the axes of oppression. Indeed, several of the articles I read chose to discuss a man who created naked pic content for the site, even though I am willing to bet all my money on the vast majority of the content creators being biological women.

So there is something going on in the air which attempts to erase our ability to even see sexism.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-07T14:23:20+00:00

This is the inaudible women problem. I have experienced it in meetings where my comment is met with silence and then some minutes later a male colleague makes the same comment and it is eagerly debated. I have had female friends experiencing exactly the same thing. And I have experienced it when trying to explain to a contractor what I want to have done to the gutters (he ignored me and I had to get a male neighbor to come and repeat what I said to get the right work done).

There was a study on this, many decades ago, where several meetings (maybe faculty meetings?) where recorded and then the various exchanges were analyzed. Women's comments tended to be ignored by both men and women.

So this is not new stuff and it is very real.

Not sure how to combat it though I do recall reading a few suggestions. You can join the conversation and say "given how Joe added to my initial suggestion, blah blah" but that might backfire, depending on how sexist others are. Or you can talk to a few people before meetings to create a group which agrees to discuss the proposals of each other and so give them more of an airing.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-05T18:50:59+00:00

It's hilarious. This is such a good summary of the irrational era we live in (Trump is just one sign of it). Or magical thinking or whatever you wish to call it. Facts they are irrelevant or fake, emotions define truth.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-05T13:10:25+00:00

That's the problem in a nutshell: The exclusion of women was, and is, the exclusion of female-bodied people. It had nothing to do with gender identities.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-05T13:08:49+00:00

I find the whole idea of discussing ways to be a woman inane to begin with. I am one and that is the end of the story. Whatever way I 'do' womanhood is correct because of that body I have. And the same applies to all other women. The gender woo just tries to turn sexist stereotypes into something desirable, in my opinion.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-05T12:42:01+00:00

Agreed. And earlier she wrote some very anti-feminist pieces, so she is not an ally in all respects.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-09-05T12:40:47+00:00

Sort of unrelated, but vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world! It is subtle in flavor and not at all boring if you get the real thing.

My point is, of course, that what is called vanilla sex may be the impression of people who have been dulled by exposure to porn etc to such an extent that they don't get what is going on and view it as bland.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-28T02:05:55+00:00

Agreed on all grounds. Besides, in practice it is hard to separate the various reasons for greater trans suicide or suicide attempts, homelessness and mental and bodily harm. They may not be caused only by how others treat them but also by feelings of dysphoria and related issues.

In any case, those who commit the violent acts, harassment etc. against transgender people are mostly not women.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-27T09:57:21+00:00

Perhaps not a contradiction in itself, but I'm not sure how a feminist woman defines her own gender as 'woman' in those cases where she adamantly supports the idea that it's people who get pregnant and menstruate and so on.

Once your gender (woman) has nothing to do with your biological sex (female), which must be the case in the above example, how is that gender defined? You are a woman, because you like pink and sparkles? Makeup and high-heeled shoes? Feel feminine and submissive and passive? Or what?

The contradiction here is that once you relinquish the connection between biological sex and the gender 'woman' then the bottom of much of feminist activism falls away. That's because the oppression women experience is sex-based, not gender-based, on the whole.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-27T09:49:45+00:00

This might be a more distant connection to the same thing, but worth thinking about:

The female body is in the process of being completely erased (we are vulva-owners or cervix-havers or uterus-carriers instead) by being made gender-neutral (pregnant people, menstruators), while the male body stands as it always has, with no attempt to increase inclusive language in health screening messages on, say, prostate cancer (all ejaculators, time to check your prostates).

I think this difference is driven by a kind of misogyny, the hatred of the female body, which might be shared by trans women, trans men and those nonbinary people who have that body. Nobody in those groups wants the female-bodied people to have a name, even though absence of a name for that group makes fighting sexism extremely tough.

And yes, I think the trans women are dominating much of the activism. Natal women are expected to be inclusive and kind and that plays into the very sex-patterned developments, too.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-21T23:04:08+00:00

My own theory about some of this (in addition to the need to be kind and inclusive) is that the successes of the second wave of feminism make sexism and misogyny less obvious to young women who are in college, say, because colleges were fixed in the 70s and 80s. There is sexual violence and online sexism but not yet any gendered division of labor at home or labor market discrimination or differential work load when it comes to children and sick relatives and so on, and the lack of women higher up in the hierarchies is not visible at that age point. So many young women think the problems have been sorted and that now the problem is to incorporate trans women.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-20T04:56:15+00:00

So wonderful! The first good thing I have raid today and it is very very late.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-20T04:49:46+00:00

What is weird about the choking shit is that when I first heard about this niche form of sexuality it was only in the context of men who had died trying to use self-strangulation to enhance their orgasms. Now suddenly it is vanilla sex, desired by a large chunk of all young women? If that is not social contagion I don't know what it is. But it's also dangerous to take something which was niche for very good reasons (it is dangerous) and to advertise it as something every teenage girl might like to try with a boyfriend who knows nothing about anatomy.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-20T04:41:56+00:00

When I tried to understand why the TRAs are demolishing the female biological sex while leaving the male biological sex alone I realized not only how sexist the whole movement is but also how misogynistic many trans men and nonbinary vulva people seem to be. They don't want to have anything to do with that dratted female body so they want to erase it. Trans women also want to erase the female body, so the only group which might not be interested in that project could be nonbinary penis people. In other words, most of the TRA movement is fueled by some type of misogyny, imo.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-20T04:39:02+00:00

I watched Miller and Yearwood run in those races. A friend who coaches running pointed out that the winning TIM had zero technique, was flailing their arms all over and so on, while the girls the TIM beat had good technique. In other words, the victory was due to the male physique and the differences that happen around puberty. If you join a bicycle race with a motor bike you will do quite well even if your steering is poor, in other words.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-11T05:07:11+00:00

I finally read the thing carefully. It is an embarrassing piece, stitched together with a giant needle and wonky stitches. Solnit makes so many elementary mistakes, states her personal beliefs as statistical facts and so on.

She confuses biological sex with gender

She makes a complete mess of her attempt to explain what might be sex or might be gender but isn't either because she carefully avoided looking for it . She tells us that detransitioning is very rare when nobody can actually say anything about that now, given that transitioning rates skyrocketed in the last ten years among teens, especially girls, and that most who decide to detransition don't go back to the place where they transitioned.

And she also tells us that it's nobody else's business to inquire about very young transitioners because their families know what is best for them.

I want to weep. I liked her mansplaining story, but this is really both so extremely biased but more insultingly showing no thinking and no effort.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-10T16:38:00+00:00

She can write that trans women pose no threat for so-called cis (sic) women because she clearly hasn't done any research on it. Her forte is the optimistic and breezy style and instant intuitive observations. It's not the kind of jaw-breakingly boring work that one must do to understand that 'cis' does NOT mean just a woman who is not trans, but a woman who has a special woman essence in her mind which just happens to match her body. So all 'cis' women are expected to be completely happy to see the female body turned gender-neutral because their identity is that essence in their heads, nothing more.

She clearly has not thought through what will happen when we have no acceptable way of talking about female people. Because if we can't name the people who are of female sex, then we can't define the targets of sexism etc.

But yes, she certainly has not even Googled the topic of incidents in toilets/bathrooms. I have quite a few in my files.

I think she bases her arguments on some very nice trans folks she has known in her life and not on what today's trans activists are demanding. But what matters for women's rights is the latter, sadly, and not the fact that many trans people are good people.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-09T23:03:16+00:00

How does one complain?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-09T23:03:03+00:00

It is part of the erasure of the female body. Now that body is gender-neutral, so there can't be any such thing as sex-based oppression because there is no female biological sex.

And of course everyone who menstruates belongs to the sex which produces large gametes, though it is possible to belong to that sex and not to menstruate, too. Besides menstruation stops for everyone at some point.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-09T22:52:58+00:00

Very good. I had a story about an invading force entering the Country of Women. The invaders called themselves refugees and were successful in making the original residents see them as such. But while real refugees would just silently try to learn about the country and get their lives at least a little bit fixed, the colonizers begin by demanding that all the basic laws of the country be changed and that what history can be talked about must be policed.

The old rule about citizenship was that the basic rule was to be born into the country. Not so, after the colonizers have said their bit. Now the basic rule is what the colonizers satisfy but perhaps nobody else among the existing inhabitants. When some of them complain, the colonizers tell them that they obviously identify as men and should leave the Women's Country for those who do identify as women (which means loving pink, sparkles, sleepovers, makeup, erotic clothing and girly talk).

The policing of history means that old role models in the history books of the Women's Country are now assigned to various trans groups, because they didn't act in properly feminine ways. And neither can the old cultural issues be now discussed, such as the female body, as the colonizers don't have those.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-06T00:11:14+00:00

That's really good. I had anorexia, too, so I get what you are saying (and hope you are doing well now).

What helped me to recover (yes, ultimately completely) was exactly what you talk about, though it happened almost by a fluke. I ended up having to do something quite hard and unrelated to being female-bodied, and I ultimately excelled in it. Because it was hard, my thoughts had to be on it and after a while my brain circuits were rebuilt? Or eating a healthy diet (provided by others for a year) together with different thought patterns did that? Not sure.

That's why I think that the online sites pushing people into focusing on their gender identities all the time are extremely harmful. Just as harmful as the pro-ana sites.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-04T07:22:22+00:00

It is not possible to predict what the right side of history will be. All we can do is to try to be as honest, clear and compassionate (in the Buddhist sense) in our thinking as possible and to keep testing our basic values.

There are cases where the rights or desires of different people stand in clear conflict, and the way forward in such cases is to openly discuss this conflict and to try to find solutions to it. The right way forward is not to try to stifle all debate or to just ignore the rights /desires of one side. Similar cases come when religious rights clash with, say, women's rights.

I have no idea how the future will look, but I am completely certain that we are right now seeing social contagion and something similar to those historical events where one cause or issue suddenly swamped everything else for a certain length of time and then petered off. Because of the Internet this particular contagion is much more widespread and because of the profit incentives in it for the medical industry it may take longer for it to fade to some much lower level.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-04T04:59:47+00:00

Thinking, thinking... No, can't think of any reason why it is always women who get the truly violent and brutal and sexist attacks.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-04T00:34:49+00:00

I haven't found a general explanation that wouldn't put everyone else into the binary categories. That assumes that those binary people are content with extremely retrogressive gender roles. This is insulting, especially as many if not most people are gender nonbinary in terms of hobbies, interests, personality types and so on but if they don't get the label they are not allowed to be seen as such.

But yes, there are some nonbinary people who seem to use that identity to protect themselves after traumatic experiences and also as a stepping-stone in the stream they are crossing to either transition or detransition. Like a temporary identity but it may become permanent, too.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T23:43:22+00:00

This isn't true. There was quite a large study that looked at the life outcomes for sons by the same mother that were of different races.

The kind of racism you are about is not what I was referring to, but the cumulative impact of past racism over larger geographic and demographic areas. Redlining, discrimination in mortgage lending, deeds which excluded black families from buying houses in white areas (which would not have been redlined etc.) and so on in the past affected the amount of wealth that black families could create and ultimately pas on to their children. These were either openly race-based rules or rules which in practice affected blacks and whites differently.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T12:36:18+00:00

When I first saw that picture about a year ago I thought it looked exactly like a happy doggie. You know, begging for a meatball, sitting there excited.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T12:35:11+00:00

I think I may have the same theory...

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T11:59:50+00:00

I know. But they are getting their asses/arses handed to them on Twitter, at least.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T07:12:11+00:00

Navratilova is a much respected athlete and Lesbian herself.

I don't understand why this is an issue the TRAs wish to push so hard.

Seeing a transgender woman win all parts of women's weight-lifting, say, even after having already retired from the men's event due to age casts the situation in a light which is not exactly favorable for the TRAs. Most people oppose the inclusion of trans athletes in women's elite sports for fairly obvious reasons, so pushing this issue is not going to work to their advantage of just wanting to have a marginalized and oppressed group be included.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T07:01:19+00:00

This is the new religion. Sing it, sister. Or sibling or whatever. Sigh.

How did we get to this from second wave feminism? When did we think that it would be a great idea to take the class 'women' and turn them into a sub-category of the new gender identity -based category 'women'? And how did it happen that the old class 'women' is now the privileged class and that the other class of 'women' is the less privileged one when it consists of people who enjoyed male privilege until transitioning?

In any case, to be 'cis' requires that one identifies with some abstract female essence in the head or even the soul, then looks into one's pants and notices, happy, that what is there matches this abstract female essence. Most people define their gender on the basis of their biological sex, not apart from it.

And when that is the case, well, then we are adding up apples and oranges when we use 'inclusiveness' as the justification to write 'pregnant people.' Because every time one nonbinary female-bodied person is included and validated, a bus-load of ordinary women are excluded and invalidated.

I hate that whole trans-built edifice, as if one's gender is some weird shitty religion, as if what personality someone has determines which box to tick on forms. And once you go that way you can't define what the group oppressed on the basis of sex even is. "Woman" has become an individual choice, and all the structural reasons why women have been oppressed are disappeared.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T06:00:53+00:00

The word 'transphobic' has lost all meaning, like a nice glass of wine which has been poured into the Pacific Ocean. What would you call a real transphobic act now? The kind which involves loathing and hatred?

Millions of people seem to be reality-phobic. A child's biological sex is almost always known even before birth these days and certainly after birth. To pretend that it is Schrodinger's sex, to be revealed only after parents have asked the child at some ripe old age, say three, is pure idiocy if for no other reason than because it will never ever work unless the child, indeed is kept in a box like that imaginary Schrodinger's cat was. Other adults and other children will inform the child.

The project of erasing biological sex from human vocabularies is more useless than almost anything I can think of. It will never come to pass. But it's not impossible that the concept of women as adult female human beings will be erased on the political left. I think of today's anti-feminist situation as a pincer move: Both the far right and the far left are enforcing retrogressive sex roles on us.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-03T05:47:28+00:00

That is an important point about the impact of class (and class and race are linked). Most real changes in inequality require real money to be spent (making auditions blind is an example from the few cases where change is not costly).

For some reason much of the woke world pays not attention to that, being too busy language-changing and then enforcing the new language they created. No structural analysis, but a belief that each individual must be altered and then change will happen. It will not. The cultural revolution of China didn't work in the long run, either.

In fact, today's liberal feminism has no structural analysis, either. That may be why it doesn't even try to define the concept 'woman' or exclude anything or anyone from it.

There are many studies which show that poverty and crime are correlated for all racial and ethnic groups. Racism also contributes to black poverty which would be lower without it, but poverty everywhere tends to breed more crime, for fairly obvious reasons (urgent economic needs which cannot be met, high levels of general stress because being poor is exhausting etc.)

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T23:01:09+00:00

So sorry for the pain you are experiencing. I am fairly sure that had I possessed a switch-sex button at puberty I would have done that, and not because of my sex as much but really because how my sex is treated by the rest of the society. What helped me was to read a lot of feminist classics (Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer etc etc). I didn't have to agree with everything they said but they gave me wider frameworks to understand the issue.

A good feminist therapist might be able to help you feel better too, if that is something realistic in your circumstances (location, finances etc.). I wish you peace and joy in the future.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T22:50:16+00:00

It is a good piece. The far left is increasingly authoritarian and inflexible. The horseshoe theory of politics really does apply to that part (though not to everything in politics) in that the far right and the far left are both more likely to have authoritarian group-think centered and also in the very black-and-white thinking where introducing nuances is seen as 'problematic.'

He writes about the demands to stop blind auditioning because it has not produced enough orchestra members belonging to racial and ethnic minorities. That it has increased the share of women in orchestras quite dramatically should matter to progressives, because returning to auditions where the player can be observed will bring back sexism. So how are those clashing interests going to be negotiated?

I guess they won't be negotiated at all...

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T20:56:26+00:00

I am not a cis woman. That is a made up term, states that the person is comfortable with their 'assigned gender' from birth, and, more crucially, states that this person has some weird woman essence in her head which just nicely happens to correlate with their female body, but the body itself is not at all the basis of how she defines her gender.

That is why we get cervix-havers and the rest of the shit: By ruling that nobody identifies with their bodies in determining their social gender. But I do, and I believe that most women and men do. Those gender definitions are invalidated and ridiculed when wokerati use ovary-havers and the other shit.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T20:52:47+00:00

TRAs are the ones who have the powers of naming. They rule the language, and the new words they have created are both lies (afab is not an actual process) and made so that it is impossible to talk about the group 'female people.' The group which faces sex-based oppression.

So afab would be the closest to that. But nobody is 'assigned' a sex at birth. This was done in the past for some intersex babies. Today most people know the sex of the child they are going to have before it is born. Sex is observed, not assigned.

And it is a term for sex we need, not something fuzzy such as 'gender assigned at birth'. I guess one might argue that visitors who bring pink balloons to celebrate the birth of a girl are starting the process of assigning her the female gender stereotypes and so on. But that is not helpful, and in any case a very tiny minority should not be allowed to demand total power over language as part of trans rights.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T20:45:36+00:00

Considering that it is written by a self-acclaimed expert on sex, the absence of the clitoris should have made the editors immediately reject the piece.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T20:44:35+00:00

This is one of the things which gave me another mini-peak. That the clitoris is erased altogether in the picture is deeply symbolic of the erasure of the biological woman in everything.

And yes, this is a real article, and yes, it is aimed at teens.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T06:31:11+00:00

Oddly enough, my online reading suggests that many AGPs are very right-wing. You are correct in that the vocal activists and the movement itself is far left. Imagine far left strongly advocating retrogressive gender roles because they are good for trans people...

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T06:28:08+00:00

Hear, hear. I have a folder full of other examples of the differences between word use in health articles aimed at men vs. women. I have never seen 'ejaculators' used anywhere, and prostate-havers was used only in Teen Vogue's famous anal sex article (which tries to make nonprostate-havers accept anal sex) where the pictures of the pelvic area of non-prostate-havers had erased the clitoris!

That article is a metaphor for the whole trans movement. And shows what it thinks of us non-prostate havers.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T06:23:12+00:00

The authoritarianism in the way sexual orientation has simply been turned into gender expression orientation is very shocking from lefties. Lesbians are told that it is transphobic to 'have genital preferences' and that at least they should try once. Not that different from what hetero men used to do to Lesbians in the past, and almost like forced conversion therapy.

When did feminism lose its thread this badly? I wrote "feminism,' because I have heard these arguments from feminists. We now have feminists essentially trying to pimp other women so that TIFs and TIMs can be made happier. That's the reason for those extremely convoluted attempts to explain away sexual orientation as somehow having nothing to do with the sex of the bodies. It doesn't work, of course. One part of the theory contradicts other parts of the theory and the whole thing is an illogical mess. But we should be nice, so they keep trying until suddenly the group they try to cajole into sexual activity is the one that has always been cajoled into sexual activity.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T05:19:33+00:00

Our words have been stolen and the thief now screams at us that we are the thieves because it is really their word. This might be the definition of gas lighting.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T05:17:38+00:00

Hilarious, especially because I read a couple of trans women say that they don't want anything to do with womxn because they belong in women.

And once again a man (there is no pressure to have mxn) preaching about this. Are they so fuckin blind and deaf and arrogant that they can't see one sex being left alone while the other sex is being torn apart? Or is that the goal?

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T01:04:51+00:00

What is the power structure like at Reddit? Has it been captured by trans activists the way it looks now?

I guess what I am trying to understand why one particular and fairly small group wields such out-of-all-proportions power there. The whole place is a giant porn site with other things tagged to it so I get why it would not love feminists much, but the vicious hatred doesn't smell quite the same as from MRAs. It looks like it was TRAs who decided on the banned list.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T01:00:22+00:00

Forgot to add that the reason why looking at all the existing studies is not terribly informative when the total number of studies is so small and most quite old.

sisterinsomnia · 2020-08-02T00:59:30+00:00

I saw this discussed on the detrans subreddit several times. The honeymoon effect seems to be common, a bit like that initial uplift from going on a new antidepressant or something where the reason for feeling better is actually hope that improvements will soon begin. If they don't, despair can set in.

sisterinsomnia