the meaning of "woman"

I find that one of the issues around transgenderism is a complete lack of understanding of what it means to be a biological female.

When I hear transgender women speak about their womaness it is always in the most stereotypical terms - the very terms women in the 70s fought to get away from. It’s always “I liked pretty clothes, I liked dolls, I liked makeup etc. that’s how I knew I was really a woman". These have nothing to do with being a woman.

Being a woman is from the minute you were born being told that you were a little bit less than men, it is being told ‘no' more often than ‘yes', it is knowing that your voice will be overpowered if men are around, it is learning very quickly to ‘be good’, it is having the trauma of periods or having the trauma of not having periods, it is trauma of giving birth or the trauma of not giving birth.

When I have been in spaces where transgender women have entered they don’t behave as women, they behave as men, they feel they are owed space, they assert their rights, they don't nurture others as women do, they don't leave space for others as women do.

When my gentle son was three years old he announced he was a girl and his name was Mandy. He refused to answer to his real name and would only wear frilly nighties. This continued for a good two to three years. My ex-husband took him off to a counsellor who blamed me for being a feminist. I didn’t fight my son's demand to be a girl but neither did I reinforce it. I might have gently reminded him he was a boy but he could be a boy who wore nighties if he wanted. My son gradually grew out of wanting to be Mandy but it worries me what would have happened to him had he been born three years ago rather than forty years ago. His experimenting as a three-year-old would today be ingrained in him, he would be labelled transgender and I would be powerless under new laws to question his demands in any way even though he was only three.

As someone who grew up in the seventies and eighties I know only too well what the women before me fought for. I was regularly patted on the bum at work by male colleagues, called ducky or similar, I was paid 1/3 less than males for exactly the same role, I wasn’t promoted because I’d soon leave to have babies anyway. I was expected to leave work and never return if I became pregnant. Men I dated expected sex in return for dinner. I was taught to play dumb so that I didn’t bruise men’s delicate egos.

I support transgender people as transgender people but that is something different from being a woman. It seems to me that those who identify as transgender women are getting their egos bruised and are responding to this in just the same way men before them responded to feminists in the seventies who were labelled as 'men-haters', 'hags who couldn’t get a bloke', or 'ugly bitches'.

Now women are 'TERFs' - it's still name-calling, it’s still silencing the voices of women.

I don't see any of these transgender women showing any respect towards the gender they want to become.

#australia #language #concepts #meaningofwomen #beingawoman

theatre bathrooms

I went to the theatre in Perth with my husband in 2018 (just before I peak-transed). I needed the toilet after the show finished (lots of women did) and when I entered I saw (and heard) a man dressed in women’s clothes standing in the queue in front of me waiting to use one of the cubicles. He was talking to another woman. He was about 6ft 4”, obviously a man and was trying his best to speak and gesture “like a woman”. The rest of us stood quietly and watched. He was very loud. I didn’t think anything of it. I was still in the “be nice” and “they’re not doing any harm” frame of mind. Except (and I didn’t think anything of it at the time) his presence made some women walk straight back out of the women’s toilet as soon as they saw there was a man in the bathroom. They were forced to leave because his presence made them uncomfortable. Then I heard him joking with the woman he was with; “Do you need a tamp?” and he pointed at the tampon dispensing machine. She just laughed. She didn’t answer him. She just laughed it off. But I DID think something of that. I remember feeling uncomfortable and that it was a strange thing to ask a woman. I’ve never asked a friend that, and I’ve never been asked that in the women’s toilets when we’ve been on a girls night out together. You just wouldn’t ask a woman that out of the blue and completely off topic! It was bizarre.

I told my husband about him when we got outside and what he’d said about the tampon machine. He said “Yeah, it’s a sexual thing.” And we got into a bit of a row over it because I tried to argue that it’s not sexual, it’s gender dysphoria and all that. My husband just kept rolling his eyes at me in exasperation. I couldn’t imagine why a “trans woman” would get off on women’s periods and tampons etc. They believe they are a woman, so why would they get off on tampons and period blood? My husband’s words; “If you can think of it, there’s a man out there who will sexualise it and wank over it”.

#australia #theatre #tampons #sexualfetishes

campus bathrooms

I was in my penultimate year of a law and arts degrees many years ago when Wollongong University Arts faculty building changed their bathrooms (at least on the level my class was on) to gender neutral to be more inclusive. I felt beyond extremely uncomfortable using the toilets, especially during 'time of the month' knowing that biological males were there too - regardless of how they identify. I felt degraded and disrespected and, most importantly, very unsafe. I only ever used them once. My daughter will never be allowed in a public bathroom alone. Her safety, and all girls safety, takes priority over a grown man's feelings that evidence he is in an unstable and vulnerable mental state.

#australia #universitycampus #genderneutralbathrooms #bathrooms #toilets #menstruation