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What Does It Mean to Be a Woman?
This tweet came across my timeline this week, which at first made me laugh, and then gave me pause:
The idea that womanhood can be reduced to wearing dresses and nailpolish, and now, being moody once a month, has been one of the most troubling side-effects of the transgender movement. We are letting men with a mental illness (gender dysphoria) determine what it means to be a modern woman. Is it enough to feel like a woman? And does feeling like a woman just mean we’re cranky around our periods?
Spain’s beauty queen is a transgender activist with a message for the schoolchildren she visits: “There are women with a penis and men with a vagina, because the only key part of being a woman is to be and feel like a woman.” https://t.co/pxX9hwUv0E
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) July 13, 2018
I’ve always been a tomboy; it didn’t occur to me to try my wedding dress on until a week before my wedding; too late to make any alterations to what amounted to a potato sack. I wore red sneakers and forgot to get a manicure beforehand. Does that make Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner or Angela Ponce more womanly than me, because they like to wear pretty dresses and high heels? Dressing like a woman doesn’t make them more of a woman than me, someone actually born with female parts.
Transgender activists understand the shaky ground they’re on; it’s why they’ve begun inventing new ways in which they are women. It’s not enough for them to feel like a woman emotionally, now they feel like us physically. The Twitter thread below by Ultrans Instinct Bria was instructive about how little even those who pretend to be women actually understand the biology behind reproduction. Like most men, they believe that PMS is just about being moody; that being a woman is exemplified by being cranky women once a month.
Without a uterus, what muscle exactly is doing the cramping?
The “around the 10th of every month” line made me laugh. This is a common misconception from men about our cycles; they are called monthly, but they vary dramatically; very few women have a predictable period around the same date every month. Months have different lengths (February has 28; July 31); and our cycles don’t align with the calendar. The timing never falls neatly on one date every month.
In the process of emasculating themselves, transgender individuals with the biological parts of men who nevertheless identify as women, are through their activism stripping women of what it means to be female. There is no female version of “emasculation,” but that’s exactly what is happening here.
By accepting the transgender narrative, we are letting men define what it means to be a woman. We are letting them take our female athlete of the year awards, win our beauty contests, and best us at our sports matches. One would think feminists would be standing up for the definition of womanhood, but they’re too busy playing along with this delusion.
Published in Culture
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/06/17166/
The link above goes to an article written by a man who used to be trans gendered; he writes about people who have surgery to change their sex and then end up regretting it. Apparently, the LGBTwhatever community isn’t interested in hearing the views of those who go on to regret their surgery.
Schizophrenics have a suicide rate of 10-15%; 60% of male schizophrenics will attempt suicide at some point. Apparently, roughly 40% of trans people will attempt suicide, but a quick google search didn’t turn up any statistics on how often trans people actually commit suicide. According to the article linked to, researchers don’t really keep track of what happens to trans people after surgery (!) so no one knows how much of a “cure” it really is. And yet they keep pushing it as a solution. Unbelievable.
They are called TERFs and they are causing some Draammmaaa!
One thing I like about this cartoon is that it illustrates a reason why men might think being a woman is preferable. For all the talk about patriarchy and glass ceilings, the average woman gets a lot more respect and better treatment than the average man in our culture. Given that, it’s no more crazy for a man unhappy with his life to assume that he’d be better off as a woman than a mulatto deciding he’d be better off passing as white. Female privilege is a real thing, like it or not, and we’re not going to solve the problems of trans “women” without finding a way to address our culture that so prizes women over men.
Well, this doesn’t address at all why some women want to become men, but ok. How would you address our culture? What solutions do you propose?
Well, we can start by treating anti discrimination laws as applying to both sexes, e.g. a gym for men only would get sued out of existence, but you can find a Curves for Women anywhere. Paternal rights need to be enforced by the courts; “give the kids to the mother” should not be the default custody arrangement. Alimony should be limited to a spouse who can prove mistreatment and minimal in amount and duration, and asset splits should be far more equitable; no more “I got the Jeep and she got the palace.”
No more forcing men out of education and child care professions on the assumption that any man who wants to teach is a secret pedophile. Let’s not have every sitcom and commercial couple be a wise mom and man child dad.
Let’s pay attention to the massive school achievement gap in favor of girls, who routinely outperform boys in every subject except calculus. Let’s return to a cultural norm of a father married to a mother, instead of our current 40% out of wedlock birthrate, and push single mothers to recognize that it’s bad for their children to grow up without a father in the home.
I think the Men’s Rights people can go a little, or even a lot, overboard with their rhetoric, but they are not wrong in recognizing that most men are treated as second class and disposable citizens.
Lol. I barely know who Shania Twain is.
Well, there’s already a name for that one: couvade syndrome. Quoth Wikipedia:
The French really do think of everything!
Yeah, part of our resentment toward transwomen is probably envy.
@amyschley I agree that all of the things you list are problems which should be addressed. Whether our entire dysfunctional culture is responsible for a very tiny percentage of men who decide they would prefer to be women is another story, especially considering that some of those men who “transition” to being women then decide that they would like to go back to being men.
But, yes, leftists have taken over the court system, with disastrous results.
I don’t think it’s envy.
I think we are angry at their presumption.
You might be jealous. I am not.
I am not angry with them at all; they are mentally ill, far more than I ever was, or am, and I am a diagnosed schizophrenic. Lucky for me, wanting to have parts of my body amputated was never part of any of my delusions; I feel very badly for those who aren’t so lucky, and am not angry with them at all. I am very angry with the psychologists and doctors who exploit this mental illness for their own selfish political purposes.
If we wouldn’t get angry with someone who is hearing voices or who thinks space aliens are controlling the airwaves, then why would we get angry with a man who wants to be a woman?
I’d call it hysterical symptoms but that would only encourage them.
“The American Psychiatric Association permits a diagnosis of gender dysphoria if the criteria in the DSM-5 are met. The DSM-5 moved this diagnosis out of the sexual disorders category and into a category of its own.”
Gender dysphoria was magically de-disordered in 2013.
[Edit: changed date from eight-hundred ninety-five years in the future to five years in the past to more accurately reflect the flow of time experienced by base-line humans.]
Sure, but now that he’s a man again, he’s probably wrong.
Men really don’t know what it is like to be a woman (and vice versa). This is readily apparent in the ghastly and cringe-inducing behavior of the more extreme drag queens and flame-tastic gays.
Which they are free to pursue in this most free of all countries; lame impressions and weak cosplay are practically guaranteed by our Constitution.
Uncle Miltie used to dress up like a woman for laughs, but laughing is now prohibited.
Perhaps we should bring it back.
U go GF
Thank you for the rebuke, JAC.
I consider the fact that trans “women” return to being men proof that biology can overcome our pervasive cultural messages that women are superior.
But let me offer one more observation about how women are privileged over men: we’ve had two discussions on transgender issues this week, both of them coming down to “how dare men think they can be women.” Nobody gets offended at trans “men” going into the men’s bathroom, or competing in men’s sports, or having masectomies, and I think it’s primarily because we’re more offended at privileged class impersonation than privileged class slumming.
When you say “play together”, you mean sports, right?
And I was being silly!
My favorite scene from the movie . . .
100% in my experience.
I think that reflects a privilege that women have, but I don’t think the privilege makes men second-class overall. Women do have a privilege of being the overall less-muscular, impregnable sex with more orifices which might be violated. This is a privilege partly based in nature: we are the overall less-muscular, impregnable sex with more orifices which might be violated, and as a result, polite society has sheltered us in a way it hasn’t sheltered men.
Yes, there is much in the modern world that’s unfair to men, but being more outraged at penises entering private vagina space than vice-versa has a basis in nature. Honestly, I do find the outrage over this way overblown: when the radfem-tradcon alliance keeps on hinting, none too subtly, that I should now make a habit of fearing for my safety in restrooms and locker-rooms, my main takeaway is that they’re engaged in cheap emotional manipulation to make their point. They’re scaremongering, even if it’s scaremongering that does reflect a natural difference between men and women.
I also find the “OMG, a man in the women’s restroom!” hysteria tiresome. 1) I am never inappropriately dressed outside the stall. 2) Being tall and … sturdily built and having a case of resting [unhappy woman] face, I’ve never had a man try to mess with me. 3) If a man is planning on violating a woman, the bathroom door and the social opprobrium of violating a woman’s space isn’t going to stop him anyway.
I am sorry, @cm, wasn’t trying to rebuke you. I am maybe a bit sensitive about these things, because I have kind of been there? The incredibly tiny number of men who want to become women have no power on their own: all of their power comes from the medical professionals who are exploiting gender dysphoria for their political agenda.
Trying to have a rational debate with a man who thinks he is a woman will be about as successful as trying to convince someone who thinks that he is George Washington that he isn’t: the medical professionals are the people we should be challenging here.
Not much new under the sun there, either.
That’s from Samuel Hahnemann’s Organon of Medicine, published nearly 200 years ago. His advice on the care of the dangerously insane was far ahead of its time as well.
I believe the TERFs big beef is that transwomen are demanding that lesbians have sex with them and their penises, while not wanting to have sex with a man is kind of the whole point of being a lesbian. So being a lesbian now is transphobia.
“You should have sex with me for social-justice reasons,” is not the turn-on some people think it is.
Because the people who hear voices and think aliens are controlling the airwaves didn’t try to do things like legislate bathrooms and try to get the military to fund their delusions.
Right, but trans people would have no power whatsoever if they didn’t have the support of the medical community; anyone who is seriously detached from reality can wreak great havoc if they are taken seriously. There is a reason why “trans gendered” people are taken seriously and other varieties of insanity are not: the “trans community” suits the political purposes of some people.
When it gets to the point where someone seriously wants to amputate part of their bodies, it’s fair to give that person a pass for being insane; the doctors and the psychologists who agree to the procedure should not get a pass.
Quite right. You normally don’t get angry with the delusional until they start demanding that you share their delusions.