Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[Rolfe]

And how do they know you're a transwoman?

 

[lionking]

..

 

[Rolfe]

If a bloke calling himself Mary-Anne ticks the "female" box, everyone who sees him will know he's a bloke, but I don't believe there's any compulsion on him to admit it.

 

[Matthew Best]

How can I elaborate on saying "At that point, the T was pretty much exclusively comprised of very, very, very homosexual males " it wasn't, that's it.

You could elaborate by providing the evidence you used to reach your conclusion. "It wasn't, and I can demonstrate this by.....[insert something here]".

 

[p0lka]

Emily’s Cat was questioning your assertion that “women” referred to gender and not sex at that time. Which is a different issue than whether gender and sex were considered different. In the vast majority of cases back then, “women” referred to sex, not gender. The only notable exceptions were some rather fringe academic feminists.

Why should the label die out? It’s not an insult. It’s a useful descriptor. Seems like taking offense to the term is an indication that you aren’t really ok with the behavior.

Nobody here disputes that.

I never mentioned 'woman' at all as far as I know, I was just pointing out that the idea of a role other than what your sex is, existed, when I was growing up.

 

[Pixel42]

I never mentioned 'woman' at all as far as I know, I was just pointing out that the idea of a role other than what your sex is, existed, when I was growing up.

Sex segregation wasn't instituted because of the traditional roles assigned to men and women but because of the actual, biological differences between males and females, virtually all of which place females at a significant disadvantage. It's great that such (mostly pretty arbitrary) gender roles have long been, and are still being, challenged, but they have no bearing on the issue of sex segregation.

 

[p0lka]

Thing is, gender isn't actually separate from sex.

Yeah I know, from the moment people are born they are moulded (by society/culture) to fit into gender roles that conform to their sex.

Gender refers to all of the non-physical aspects that are associated with sex. This includes presentation, functional roles, and behaviors. And all of those are associated with sex, they're predicated on sex. Part of the feminist emphasis on gender as opposed to sex was to point out that sex isn't prescriptive with regard to those gendered aspects.

Sex is being of the male reproductive category in humans. The gender role associated with males is being a provider and defender, a hunter, a soldier, a bread-winner, etc.

How very dare you to tell me how I should behave

The gender presentation associated with males is pants, flat-soled shoes, short hair, short fingernails, no make-up etc. The gender behavior associated with males is decisiveness, control, aggression, etc. All of these are correlated with sex - some of them are very likely evolved behavioral tendencies that increase the likelihood of a male being able to attract a mate and pass on their genes.

But they're not prescriptive.

Being male doesn't mean that you must be required to wear pants - there's nothing about pants that excludes female from being able to wear them. And there's nothing about skirts that means males are incapable of wearing them. Who wears what types of garment are largely social convention - they're ways to signal our sex. But there's also a fair bit about clothing that is a direct result of sex. Both males and females can wear pants - but they're cut and shaped differently, because our physical bodies are different. If a female wears male cut pants, they're likely to be too loose through the waist and too tight through the thighs. If a male wears female-cut pants, they're likely to find they haven't got much room for their testicles. Hair, on the other hand, is pretty much entirely social. Our hair doesn't grow differently, it's not like male hair follicles only grow a few inches then stop. Both sexes can grow their hair quite long, and in some cultures long hair on males has been the standard. Thus hair length is entirely a social convention. Make-up is also largely a social convention... but it's a convention that is more associated with reproduction than many people realize. Foundation smooths skin, and smooth skin is an indicator of estrogen; high estrogen during ovulation gives females smooth almost shiny facial skin - so it's an indicator of reproductive readiness. Lipstick and blush mimic the visual effect of dilated capillaries in the lips and cheeks that occurs during arousal, mimicking sexual receptiveness.

Being male doesn't mean that you are required to be the breadwinner. Even if there's a reasonable evolutionary explanation for the division of labor along the lines of sex, those roles - those functions - can generally be performed by either sex is the need arises. Female lions are typically the hunters; the male lion's role is to protect the pride (especially the kittens) from other predators. But male lions are perfectly capable of hunting, and young lions who haven't established a pride do it all the time. Similarly, female lions can absolutely wreck a trespassing young lion or an over-adventurous hyena if needed. The division of labor along the lines of sex is one of efficiency and balance, not one of necessity.

The point of feminists discussing the social nature of gender roles and behaviors was never to demand that the two be treated as if they're entirely discrete and unrelated phenomena - the point was to emphasize that these are conventions that are not necessitated by sex. Males are just as capable of doing the dishes as are females. And there's no actual physical or biological reason that females cannot be CEOs of large companies. Conventions aren't rules.

Somewhere in the last couple of decades, activists got hold of this notion and distorted it so far out of whack that we now have people arguing that gender is completely separate from sex, with no relationship to it at all. They present it as if gender were arbitrary, as if at some point someone flipped a coin and said "heads, females wash the laundry, tails the males do it". And in the process of that errant (and foolish) idea, they've tried to appropriate all of the language that is associated with gender and pretend that those words have nothing at all to do with sex.

Including usurping the word that has literally meant "female human being".

Yes I agree with a lot of what you've said, but gender roles are still out there in peoples heads and exist unfortunately. All of us apes need to try and move on from our evolutionary tendencies and get with the modern world.

 

[Ziggurat]

I never mentioned 'woman' at all as far as I know

What the hell are you even talking about?

It has been your contention for a long time that the substitution of the label "female" for the label "women's" would help resolve the current conflict. The entire "tomboy" diversion came about as an offshoot of that, after you claimed that "women" was a gender label and not a sex label as far back as 1976. When your claim about "woman" was challenged, you tried to use the word "tomboy" as proof of how gender was being used instead of sex. It seems like you've lost track of the conversation, and no longer remember why we're even talking about what we're now talking about. But I remember. And it absolutely had everything to do with your claims about "woman".

 

[p0lka]

Nobody here disputes that.

Oh I definitely disagree, this thread is full of people that would dispute that.

Go check what was posted a couple of pages ago with the richie bow-grace person that rolfe posted.
It's all pervert check the harddrives etc etc etc etc so many posts.

 

[p0lka]

What the hell are you even talking about?

It has been your contention for a long time that the substitution of the label "female" for the label "women's" would help resolve the current conflict. The entire "tomboy" diversion came about as an offshoot of that, after you claimed that "women" was a gender label and not a sex label as far back as 1976. When your claim about "woman" was challenged, you tried to use the word "tomboy" as proof of how gender was being used instead of sex. It seems like you've lost track of the conversation, and no longer remember why we're even talking about what we're now talking about. But I remember. And it absolutely had everything to do with your claims about "woman".

I never mentioned 'woman' in the discussion with Emily's cat. Are you just trying to score points? grow up please.

 

[p0lka]

You are right in that my opinion is that woman and man are social gender roles and I would prefer people to not pay any attention to them though, and switching to male female would be clearer than man woman.

 

[Ziggurat]

I never mentioned 'woman' in the discussion with Emily's cat.

Trace the conversation back, and you will land on the post I linked. Why do you think we're talking about the word "tomboy" to begin with?

Are you just trying to score points? grow up please.

Last time you tried to pull this crap on me, you embarrassed yourself. Did you learn nothing?

No, I'm not just trying to score points, I'm trying to put this whole diversion in its proper context. Since you're still struggling with this, let me break it down for you, slightly abridged. Let's start with your claim about changing labels. This is not the first time you made the claim, but it's the one that precipitated the "tomboy" conversation:

I was saying that labeling sports and public spaces or anywhere else where sex is an issue as sex labels, ie male female, instead of gender labels, ie man woman would solve a lot of problems.

See that? That's you, talking about the word "woman". So the stage is set, you've made the claim that "woman" refers to gender and not sex. This is the topic, and everything that follows traces back to this claim. theprestige challenged this claim, saying

The labels were sex labels, up until trans rights activists convinced society to decouple gender from sex, and pretend that sex-segregated spaces were really gender-segregated.

You disagreed:

I was born in 1969 and growing up they were never sex labels to me and lots of other people, they were gender conformity labels which annoyed me. So i disagree as it seems gender roles have been decoupled from sex from at least 1976.

Now EC stepped in, saying:

I have doubts about your claim. I'm a mere five years younger than you... and at no point in my childhood did "boy" mean a child who wore trousers, liked toy cars and guns, and played cowboys & indians with the other kids at recess. If it had, I would have been consistently called a "boy" when I was a wee kid. But I wasn't, despite my penchant for math and science and climbing trees. Because the words "boy" and "girl" and "man" and "woman" have been consistently understood for both of our entire lives to refer to sex.

EC introduced "boy" to the conversation, but note, she's still explicitly tying it back to "woman". It's not a separate topic, it's the SAME topic. She is STILL talking about your claim that "woman" refers to sex and not gender. Her point is that "boy", "girl", "man", "woman" were ALL sex terms and not gender terms. You then responded:

Did you ever get called a tomboy?

This sparked a whole discussion about the meaning of tomboy, which we need not rehash here. You introduced "tomboy" in this post, but seem to have forgotten either that you were the one to introduce it, or why you did so. You were trying to prove that these terms were gendered, as a way to support your claim that "woman" has long been gendered, which in turn is part of your attempt to argue that switching to sex terms instead of gender terms would solve things. I need not touch upon why you are wrong here, having already done so at length. For this post, all I'm doing is demonstrating how we got to this point in the conversation, since you clearly don't remember. And how we got to this point, again, is your claim that substituting the label "female" for "women" would somehow fix things.

You may not remember, but Pepperidge Farms remembers.

 

[Ziggurat]

Oh I definitely disagree, this thread is full of people that would dispute that.

Go check what was posted a couple of pages ago with the richie bow-grace person that rolfe posted.
It's all pervert check the harddrives etc etc etc etc so many posts.

The problem with richie is not that he dresses like a female. The problem with richie is that he sexualizes dressing like a female child. And yeah, there's something deeply disturbing about that. If you can't recognize that, or why it's disturbing, I don't know what to tell you.

 

[smartcooky]

A demonstration of how ridiculous things are getting in attempts to get round the law...

Trans suspects can ask for female and male officers to search differe…

archived 25 Jun 2025 21:06:59 UTC

archive.is

This is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to end-run around April's Supreme Court ruling... getting a male to search the areas around the dangly bits, and a female to search around the bumps.

 

[smartcooky]

The BBC are still doing it....

Zara Jade jailed after stabbing and tying up victim in Halifax

Zara Jade, from Halifax, attacked her victim and then made demands for money, a court hears.

www.bbc.com

....using "she/her" in reference to obvious biological males. For the removal of doubt THIS is the person they are talking about

The perpetrator is a biological male (a so too, apparently was the victim)

Zara Jade, 54, attacked her victim at a Halifax flat last year and left her tied up while she​

went to an ATM. ​

Jade admitted offences of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm, robbery, fraud and false imprisonment at Bradford Crown Court.​

She was jailed for nine years with an extended licence period of three years.​

The injuries inflicted were described as "superficial" by prosecutor Lydia Pearce, who said Jade then took cash from the victim and also demanded ​

her PIN number.​

Jade used tights to tie her victim into a electrically-powered chair, set in the recline position.​

Helen Joyce, spokesperson for Sex Matters, correctly described this as "journalism rolling over without a single attempt to stand up to its core values"

 

[Agatha]

54? He's had a hard paper round.

 

[Ziggurat]

54? He's had a hard paper round.

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

 

[Orphia Nay]

And how do they know you're a transwoman?

If a bloke calling himself Mary-Anne ticks the "female" box, everyone who sees him will know he's a bloke, but I don't believe there's any compulsion on him to admit it.

parkrun is run by participants who volunteer. It's down to the Run Director on the day, or the Results Processor to enter the "assisted" details or not. Like lionking said, it's just a fun run or walk.

 

[Rolfe]

parkrun is run by participants who volunteer. It's down to the Run Director on the day, or the Results Processor to enter the "assisted" details or not. Like lionking said, it's just a fun run or walk.

You can't have it both ways. It's either just a fun event, or it's something where times and rankings matter. If you're going to time the participants and collect, collate and publish the data, then clearly times and rankings matter to some people. It's thoroughly unfair to maintain a "female" category in which males are permitted to participate willy-nilly. It's obviously upsetting a lot of female participants to have their performances bumped down the rankings by males who have entered themselves as female, and to see people they know are male awarded the accolade of "fastest female".

ETA: look what I just saw.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1941420457510793503

 

[Matthew Best]

The perpetrator is a biological male (a
so too, apparently was the victim)

That means this will soon be cited as an example of the violence against transgender people that JK Rowling has caused.