Fugitivus Discussion Forum

I see you responded already, leaving this up as another viewpoint

You are treating womanhood as a club in which only certain people are allowed, by definition. Otherwise you wouldn't call them men who want to be women, but simply women. Frankly, seeing someone misgender someone else, no matter how much sexism they exhibit, feels like a punch in the gut.
Like Quixotess said, denying women with sexist views womanhood is holding them to a higher standard than cis women. Have you ever heard cis women make those kinds of comments and worse? I have, and yet no one ever questions their womanhood.

And the thing about the female experience, trans women are women. Rich women are women. Poor women are women. Women of color are women. White women are women. Women all around the world are women. Sexist women are women. Straight women are women. Queer women are women. Poly women are women. Monogamous women are women. I could go on forever basically with this list, and all their experiences are equally valid.. There are intersecting issues, and nonintersecting issues, and some women don't have to deal with some shit. and different women experience different privileges and different oppressions and different experiences with sexism.
To treat "female experience" as a sort of test to allow or deny trans woman into womanhood is absurd because female experiences are so varied already, and trans womens experiences count as female experiences too after all. Give me a *concrete testible definition* of female experience that doesn't use an appeal to being assigned woman at birth or something like that, and I'll give you a (cis!) woman who breaks it.

I appreciate the insight, Backpack. The main source of my confusion was, 'they are women, but they're acting like men', but I do indeed know cis women who act like men- they can be sexist, they can be emotionally flat, they can treat other women like pretty objects- and nobody questions that they're women. That's the thing I need to get in my head, like down in the deep layers of my brain.

Perhaps a mental block for you is thinking of sexism, emotional flatness, and objectification as male attributes, or things that men do. Certainly male privilege and harmful ideas of masculinity have a great deal to do with those things, but none of the things you listed are male behaviors. All of them can be enacted by women or any other gender.

That's... true.

That opens up a whole new level for me. If genitals don't define gender, and behaviors don't, then at the bottom line what does? Why call yourself 'man' or 'woman' at all?

Honestly, I don't know.

I think it's some interaction between a person's body (including their mind), their behavior and environment, and social construction. How those things interact may determine what gender they feel like (which is the same as what they are), but not in a predictable way.

Food for thought, then. Thank you for talking it out with me.

I know this is coming really late, but I just wanted to apologize.



I'm sorry you had to deal with that from me.



I'm also sorry for this. I just know that every group has its unique set of problems and that it's usually not wise to compare them, so I thought I should apologize for this as well.

Thank you,
It's the educate me 101 section, so I (tried not to) take anything here personally. I aso have a pretty tough skin (I'm the sort of person who reads transphobic comment threads on the internet to relieve stress sometimes <_<)
But it's nice when people learn stuff
If you (or anyone else) has any other questions about *whispers* trans stuff *gasp* then feel free to ask! Either here or in a PM (of course I don't represent all trans people, standard disclaimer!)! And I (or other awesome people!) may or may not answer <_<

I've wondered the same thing myself. I have a sort of discomfort with the notions of gender, masculinity and femininity, so why indeed‽ I ended up figuring one's identity needs no damn justification.

If any one challenges some one else' gender identification, I can argue that feeling such need to make that identification as to put oneself in the way of all the bigoted bullshit I see (and probably plenty I don't see) is more than most people have experienced. If I had to have some arbitrary standard of "authenticity," that would make a lot less nonsense to me than an externally provided default option based on sex. (even ignoring the fact that "sex" is not so clearly defined that none of us are ambiguous!) "A lot less nonsense" than the status quo now isn't saying much, though. I want to not dehumanise any one, so the only option that seems reasonable to me is to accept self-identification unconditionally and leave it at that.