One of the most long-running and boring fights on the Internet is over what feminism's about, you've seen it a thousand times.
This isn't about that - a more interesting and under-explored question is, who is feminism about?
I think there are 2 competing ideas now, one I'll call sex feminism, the other identity feminism.
The 2 feminisms
You might think "who is feminism about?" has a really obvious answer, so obvious it's not even worth asking - it's clearly about women, and men (and girls and boys too - I'm going to elide girls and boys into women and men most of the time here, it's wordy enough already).
But "women" and "men" aren't necessarily simple words with self-evident meanings that everyone agrees on, they're more like suitcase words, words with lots of meaning inside them. You can't just say "a women is someone who likes puppies", so feminism is about people who like puppies, and people who don't. That's absurd.
"Women" and "men" mean something specific. What do they mean? Why is it even important that they mean something?
Sex feminism
This is the more traditional view - a woman is a human female, and a man a human male - it's a pretty simple division, one I'd hope we all understand the implications of by now (I'll take it as given we both agree on what females and males are), there's nothing really confusing here, everything's as expected.
Female and male are the 2 sexes, so feminism is about the 2 sexes, it's sex feminism.
Under this definition of "women", "women" exactly means "female", so saying something is "for women" means it is "for females", they are equivalent: "women's toilets" means "females' toilets".
Identity feminism
This is the more recent view of what a woman is - a woman is "anyone who identifies as a woman" or "anyone with the gender identity of a woman" - this is generally called "self-ID" (it seems to be mainly concerned with women, men are not generally discussed).
In this view, a woman is a person with the gender identity of a woman, and so I'll call feminism under this view "identity feminism".
It might seem like a small change, nothing worth thinking about, but I'd argue that it's actually massive, and affects and implies many different things, far more than you would initially realise. I'm going to discuss some of those implications.
The short version is: under identity feminism, pretty much anything you would've previously thought is a feminist issue, isn't (because it isn't about women), and gay rights issues aren't actually gay rights issues either (because they're not about gay people). I'd say self-ID will destroy feminism and gay rights, if it continues.
Identity feminism seems useless, can't be used to advocate for anything, and is unconcerned with the issues raised by sex feminism.
There's a lot of disagreement about what exactly the "gender" in "gender identity" is - lots of different people have very different definitions, and a lot of the time it's very unhelpfully used as a polite synonym for "sex". Generally, every definition you see someone use will be different to every other definition (in Material Girls, Kathleen Stock describes 4 different definitions of the word). Because of the confusion and the ambiguities, I'm going to stick to saying "sex" as much as possible throughout, it's very well defined.
"gender" as a widespread concept didn't really exist before the 1970s, for what it's worth - it was first popularly introduced in 1955 - before then "gender" meant the grammatical class, like "la" and "le" in French.
The definition itself
The definition of "woman" as "a person who identifies as a woman" may seem clear, but there are problems with.
First, anywhere you see the word "woman", you can replace it with "a person who identifies as a woman". So, "women-only toilets" becomes "toilets only for people who identify as women". Simple enough.
We would like to replace "woman" with "a person who identifies as a woman", and we have "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", so that can become "a woman is a person who identifies as a [person who identifies as a woman]".
We can do this over and over again - "woman" ultimately doesn't mean some concrete thing, it just refers to itself forever.
The "gender identity" definition of "woman" is built on nothing, it has no foundations, it refers only to itself, and I don't think it means anything by itself - it relies on women already existing as a class or category for it to make sense: if women didn't already exist, saying "I identify as a woman" wouldn't mean anything.
What is this "woman" that people are identifying as? Unless there is a womanly essence that some possess, and some do not, it means nothing - the only thing a woman is is identifying as a woman.
And what does "identifying" as a woman mean?
Defining a woman as "a person who identifies as a woman" might tell you who a woman is, but it tells you nothing about what a woman is.
If you don't identify, philosophically
There's another thorny issue about identification, largely centered around gender-critical feminists - what if you don't identify as a woman not because you identify as a man, but because you disagree with the concept of "identifying as a woman" entirely?
Jane Clare Jones says:
I don't identify as a woman any more than I identify as having curly hair.
I AM FEMALE. I AM HUMAN. HUMAN FEMALES ARE CALLED WOMEN.
i.e. "I do not identify as a woman, I am a woman" (this is like me saying "I do not identify as a blond, I have blond hair"). Under "you are a woman if you identify as one", is Jones a woman? I don't know.
From someone else:
I wish people would understand that I don't have a gender; I have a sex. I am not agender, or any of that other stuff, because I don't subscribe to the belief system that makes agender possible. I am not cisgendered because I hate the gender that comes with being a woman, and I would never choose to identify with that. The use of cis just makes victim blaming easier. It suggests that women who don't transition choose the gender stereotypes that come with being of the female sex. My clothes and personality are not some big statement. They are just me existing as a women [sic] who likes certain things. I hate hyperindividualism.
An innate feeling
It's said that gender identity is an innate feeling inside your head, a feeling that everyone has:
Gender identity reflects a deeply felt and experienced sense of one’s own gender. Everyone has a gender identity, which is part of their overall identity
It's also said that you can't know what someone's gender identity is without asking them:
It is very important to know that you cannot visually tell someone’s gender. [..] In short, it is not possible to know [a person's gender] without asking
There 👏 is 👏 literally 👏 no 👏 way 👏 to 👏 know 👏 someone's 👏 gender 👏 unless 👏 they 👏 tell 👏 you.
These 2 points conflict with eachother, it's like saying "everyone has a favourite colour" at the same time as "there's no way of knowing someone's favourite colour without asking them" - how can you say everyone has a favourite colour as well as asserting that you have absolutely no information about their favourite colour? You're asserting something about every person's mental state, while also saying you can't know anything about that mental state, there's a contradiction.
The physical body
So, gender identity is innate, "one's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither", it has no material or physical effects on the world (as implied by the need to ask someone what their gender identity is, it is a feeling inside their head only):
Gender identity and gender expression are different
Gender identity is someone’s personal and intimate sense of their own gender. Gender expression is how they choose to reflect their gender identity in their physical appearance.
In this very NSFW image, you can see photos of a human female, and a human male. But, using "you cannot visually tell someone’s gender", we cannot say that the person on the left, the female, is a woman, or that the male on the right is a man - we do not know how each person identifies - a person's gender identity is entirely inside their head and has no physical effects by itself.
This is critical. It means that these bodies are not necessarily a woman's body and a man's body - they may be a woman's body and a man's body, but we can't make any claims either way, not without asking them. Woman, as a class, do not have a particular body - "only women have vaginas" is not right.
Similarly, we cannot say anything about women's bodies, or say anything at all that relates women to physical bodies, because what your body is, what your sex is, has nothing to do with your gender identity - your body is not what makes you a woman.
This means that identity feminism cannot deal with any issues relating to women's bodies, since we cannot say that women's bodies and men's bodies are different.
This should have been more obvious to me, since identity feminism is not about sex, only sex feminism is. Identity feminism divides people into groups by what they identify as, not by what their sex is, so it can't be concerned with differences that relate to or are caused by sex. Identity feminism, feminism under gender identity, does not care about sex discrimination.
When you talk about "women" in identity feminism, you cannot refer to biology, to bodies, or to anything physical at all.
Sex, and gender identity
The short version of the above point is, "sex and gender identity are not the same thing", which the HRC says:
One's gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.
So, your sex can be male, but you identify as a woman, so you're a woman - you're a male woman. Or vice versa, you can be a female man. People generally won't say this explicitly (the words "male" and "female" tend to be avoided completely), but it's implied by the quote above.
It is possible to go further here, and say that people who identify as women are female too, denying sex as a concept (Strangio is the ACLU's Deputy Director for Transgender Justice):
Girls who are trans are NOT:
-males
-“biological males”
-male-bodies
Just stop. A girl has a female body. A girl is biologically female
The US Department of Health and Human Services recently said:
The US Department of Health and Human Services publicly announced the nation's first openly transgender four-star officer across any of the eight uniformed services of the United States. [..] Admiral Levine now serves as the highest ranking official in the USPHS Commissioned Core and it's first ever female four-star admiral [emphasis mine].
The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and the White House have all done the same.
Jesse Singal has documented some more examples of this here.
You can explicitly say sex doesn't exist (more examples here):
This explicitly conflicts with the "sex as a biological variable" research policy, which
requires researchers to factor sex into the design, analysis, and reporting of vertebrate animal and human studies. The policy was implemented as it has become increasingly clear that male/female differences extend well beyond reproductive and hormonal issues. Implementation of the policy is also meant to address inattention to sex influences in biomedical research. Sex affects: cell physiology, metabolism, and many other biological functions; symptoms and manifestations of disease; and responses to treatment. For example, sex has profound influences in neuroscience, from circuitry to physiology to pain perception.
Periods, and women's health
Can women, as a class, have periods? If a woman is a person who identifies as a woman, then no. Only females can have periods, and males can identify as and be women, and they can't have periods, so not all women can have periods - also, some men are female for the same reason, and they_ menstruate. This means that periods aren't a women's health issue, and aren't a feminist one either.
This is why some have started saying "people who menstruate" or "menstruators".
Not all women menstruate, and not all people who menstruate are women.
Gender isn’t actually a determining factor on whether someone gets a period
[..] The only determining factor on whether someone gets a period? Having a uterus. And people who identify as male or non-binary can have uteruses! Because why? Let’s say it together: Gender and sex are different things.
This is why the Endometriosis Canada Network says women do not have endometriosis, only people with endometriosis do.
Some NHS patients have their sex marker in their GP registration changed to a gender identity marker, so that e.g. if they're a female who identifies as a man, it's "M" rather than "F". Since it's a sex marker, and only females have cervixes, only people with an "F" get automatically invited for cervical cancer screening, which means if you identify as a man and have your sex marker changed, you won't be invited for a cervical cancer screening despite being female.
You cannot treat a sex marker as a gender identity marker, they are not the same thing, but the NHS says:
a patient has a clear right to change their [..] gender marker on their records, on request
Despite that, the NHS has previously said:
The term "gender" is now considered too ambiguous to be desirable or safe because different locations and systems use it to mean different things. It is therefore desirable to use the two distinct terms "sex" and "current gender" [..]
Users may confuse the terms current gender and sex, or assume that they are synonymous. Therefore, it is essential that all NHS applications display and explain current gender and sex terminology and values in a clear and consistent manner
They also say labelling a field with just "gender" is ambiguous and incorrect, as it could be misinterpreted as a phenotypic sex status - patients can be given treatment for the wrong sex.
In practice, the NHS might record your "gender", but leave your sex blank, even if you've given birth twice.
Males that identify as women are invited for breast cancer screening, and females that identify as men are not invited for cervical cancer screening:
All individuals from 50 up to their 71st birthday who are registered as female with their GP are automatically invited to breast screening
Notice that it uses the words "registered as male/female", male/female being a person's sex, suggesting that you can change your sex on NHS records.
We can go further, and stop talking about "women's health" entirely.
And further:
In the examination room, Dr. Chong said, doctors and attendants should use gender-neutral terminology and avoid terms like “ovaries” and “uterus.” “You can just say reproductive organs,” she said.
(it is of course true even without self-ID, not all women can have periods, e.g. post-menopausal women, but this was never an issue before self-ID, it went without saying)
Pregnancy
Can women, as a class, get pregnant? Again, no, for exactly the same reason as periods above.
"Birthing people" is wrong, because it implies all women have given birth - obviously, many haven't yet (or never will). "people who can become pregnant" is also wrong, because you don't know if you can become pregnant until you are pregnant - you probably can't know whether it applies to you until then.
From an endocrinology lecture in a Californian medical school:
“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”
Pregnancy is not a women's issue, or a feminist issue - men can get pregnant.
Neither is anything to do with pregnancy, like abortion, maternity leave, childcare, or even the words mother and father - what is a mother, is she the parent that gave birth to a child? Not necessarily, you could be an adoptive mother. Is she the parent that's a woman? What if you don't identify as a woman?
Your periodic reminder that not all women need access to abortion care, and that some trans men and non-binary people do.
Saying “people who need abortion access” or “patients seeking care” or etc. is more accurate and inclusive.
Sex discrimination
Just generally, discrimination against women cannot be sex discrimination, because women are not a sex-based class (if it was sex discrimination, that would be like saying "women are discriminated against because they have brown eyes", except women don't all have brown eyes):
United Nations human rights monitors have strongly condemned the state of Texas for its new anti-abortion law, which they say violates international law by denying women control over their own bodies and endangering their lives.
Under self-ID, this is wrong - it denies females control over their own bodies, not women, so this is sex discrimination, not discrimination against women:
Gentle reminder: it’s not only women who need abortions. [..]
Women and girls are not the only people who get pregnant. That is a fact. So while you're on here complaining, there are trans and nb people who need abortions. [..]
Stop writing substack posts and articles that talk about Texas women being in trouble or Texs [sic] women's bodily autonomy being under siege. It's pregnant Texans. Pregnant people.
Again, we see the confusion between sex and gender:
In damning remarks to the Guardian, Melissa Upreti, the chair of the UN’s working group on discrimination against women and girls, slammed the new Texas law, SB 8, as “structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst”.
It cannot be both sex and gender discrimination at the same time, they're completely unrelated things (under self-ID).
Work, and pay
According to a report in the Guardian in 2014,
A third of managers would rather employ a man in his 20s or 30s over a woman of the same age for fear of maternity leave, according to a new study. A survey of 500 managers by law firm Slater & Gordon showed that more than 40% admitted they are generally wary of hiring a woman of childbearing age, while a similar number would be wary of hiring a woman who has already had a child or hiring a mother for a senior role.
A quarter said they would rather hire a man to get around issues of maternity leave and child care when a woman does return to work, with 44% saying the financial costs to their business because of maternity leave are a significant concern.
As this is caused by the possibility of becoming pregnant, and pregnancy isn't a feminist issue, this isn't a feminist issue either - women not being hired because they are women isn't a feminist issue. Indeed, here the reason women aren't being hired isn't because they're women at all, it's because they're female.
If you think the gender pay gap is largely because of motherhood, it's actually a motherhood pay gap, and therefore a sex pay gap, not a gender pay gap, and not a feminist issue.
Kleven finds a sharp decline in women’s earnings after the birth of their first child — with no comparable salary drop for men. The cumulative effect is huge: Women end up earning 20 percent less than their male counterparts over the course of their career.
Childless women have earnings that are quite similar to men’s salaries, while mothers experience a significant wage gap.
Believing in self-ID & that it is a "gender pay gap" specifically suggests that a female would immediately start being paid the same as a male once she told her boss she identified as a man, even if nothing else changes - it is women who are paid less, and so if the female is a man, she would not be paid less.
More generally, identity feminism can only be concerned about discrimination that only happens when you identify as a woman, because you identify as a woman, and the discrimination would immediately stop when you identify as a man. I don't think anything meets that criteria.
Identity feminism seems useless, and won't care about anything.
Worse, since you can't know someone's gender identity unless you ask them what it is, you can't discriminate against them because of their gender identity until you ask them what it is - identity feminism only cares about discrimination that occurs as a result of an innate feeling that you must ask someone about, you cannot be discriminated against because of your gender identity while walking down the street, since no one will know what your gender identity is.
Sex can be perceived (extremely accurately, women appear to be better at perceiving the sex of a male than of a female), gender identity cannot.
Toilets, prisons, shelters, sports, etc
Above, I said
Under [the "sex"] definition of "women", "women" exactly means "female", so saying something is "for women" means it is "for females", they are equivalent: "women's toilets" means "females' toilets"
and so, in the past, saying "these toilets are only for women" meant "these toilets are only for females" - you could call them "females toilets" and indeed many still do - how many toilets in a restaurant do you see with an "M" or "F" on them? Here, toilets are segregated by sex.
But if "women" now means "anyone who identifies as a woman", then "womens toilets" now are "toilets for anyone who identifies as a woman" - by changing the definition of a word, you've changed who is allowed to access a facility. Toilets are now segregated by gender identity.
Why would you segregate toilets by gender identity? It is sex, not gender identity, that influences sexual offences, and toilets are segregated by sex to reduce the risk of males committing sexual offences (and because of womens' fear of sexual offences) - nearly 90% of reported changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism or harassment reported at leisure centres and public swimming pools are committed in unisex changing rooms (unisex changing rooms make up less than half of changing rooms).
If you are a male that identifies as a woman, and believe that a woman is anyone who identifies as one, and you go to a restaurant with women's toilets, and the restaurant takes "women" to mean "females", there will be a conflict of definitions, and probably a conflict in reality.
The exact same applies to women's prisons, and women's domestic abuse shelters (you will be able to imagine other examples) - though the latter can and does avoid it, by being specifically female shelters - the Equality Act 2010 allows single sex-exceptions:
Application of this exception must be objectively justified as a means of achieving a legitimate aim. An example given in the explanatory notes to the Act is that of a group counselling service for female victims of sexual assault where the organisers could exclude a woman with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if they judge that clients would be unlikely to attend the session if she was there.
Schedule 23, paragraph 3 of the Equality Act 2010 also allows a service provider to exclude a person from dormitories or other shared sleeping accommodation, and to refuse services connected to providing this accommodation on grounds of sex or gender reassignment. As with paragraph 28 and other exceptions under the Equality Act, such exclusion must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
Sports, too - are they segregated by sex, or gender identity? The occasionally vast differences in strength between males and females (here, hand-grip strength) would suggest sex:
90% of females produced less force than 95% of males [..]
The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men
Graphs of similar data can be seen here and here.
Generally, male performance in sport is 10 to 50% higher than female performance - for example, the fastest recorded male tennis serve is 157mph, and the fastest female is 131mph, a difference of 20%.
The fastest 15 year old boys are largely faster than all women, except in marathons, where the women's record is still faster than the 18-year old boys record. (generally, the longer an event becomes, the more competitive women are; see Sarah Thomas, the only person to have swum the English Channel 4 times in a row (swimming for 54 hours straight! Can you imagine!?), and the holder of the longest, second longest, and third longest current-neutral swims; Chloe McCardel holds the fourth longest. (though after I researched this, I found out that this might only be an artifact of long-distance events being unpopular - supposedly, only really really good people compete in unpopular events, and so as ultra-long events are less popular among women than men, the average woman is better than the average man. I'm not sure about this either way. Thomas' records still stand, regardless.))
I might be reading too much into it, but I think this is why you sometimes see actresses listing their pronouns, but not sportswomen - self-ID conflicts with and can undermine sex-segregation in sport.
The attempt to get "people that identity as women" into women's sport does not use arguments, it's just semantic wordgames: taking a word that previously meant "female", redefining it to mean something entirely different, and then pretending your new definition has always been what the word meant, allowing males into women's sport.
Gendering by stereotypes
How do you know if someone else is a man or a woman? You must find out their gender identity - you could ask every single person you meet, but that takes a lot of effort. It's a lot easier to assume, to use stereotypes, like "does the person have long hair", or "do they like running around and making noise, or prefer being quiet" - you can see this in this video, where a girl says she likes "boy activities", and is told that means she is a boy.
Helen Webberley, a GP currently suspended from practising medicine for running an unregistered online healthcare clinic that prescribed puberty blockers to children, said she asked patients how their "gender developed" - did they always play with boys, want to play with "boys toys", or wear "boys clothes"?
You can be more direct, and think doing "masculine things" like playing sport makes you a man (a man is someone who does masculine things, like playing sports), or that liking to cook makes you a woman. "No no, he welds, he must be a man, woman don't weld".
That sounds quite regressive, doesn't it?
Self-ID works against the achievements of feminism in the 20th century.
Here are some people, particularly children and teenagers, with this kind of thinking (from an article written by Jesse Singal):
Claire believes that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender roles that she had internalized. “I think I really had it set in stone what a guy was supposed to be like and what a girl was supposed to be like. I thought that if you didn’t follow the stereotypes of a girl, you were a guy, and if you didn’t follow the stereotypes of a guy, you were a girl.” She hadn’t seen herself in the other girls in her middle-school class, who were breaking into cliques and growing more gossipy. As she got a bit older, she found girls who shared her interests, and started to feel at home in her body.
[..]
For younger children, gender identity is an even trickier concept [than for adolescents]. In one experiment, for example, many 3-to-5-year-olds thought that if a boy put on a dress, he became a girl. Gender clinicians sometimes encounter young children who believe they are, or want to be, another gender because of their dress or play preferences—I like rough-and-tumble play, so I must be a boy—but who don’t meet the criteria for gender dysphoria.
being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic. you go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualised when like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade yugioh cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it. and then you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you and wishing you could be a boy or be completely genderless again and it takes you Many years to come to terms with yourself Or you simply try to Lean In to everything and do makeup tutprials on YouTube and claim it's for fun. like how can this be treated as normal
[Sex reassignment surgery] and it's irreversibility just hits way too hard. It all hits too hard, honestly.
Prior to developing dysphoria I liked my body, I had no issue with my breasts, I had neither good nor bad thoughts about the other areas. I was 13.
Then I met a boy. Nothing actually violent happened, and it's not like it was sex. But something did happen, on multiple occasions, it makes me feel sick. I felt like I couldn't say no, I didn't want to lose my friend. I had ASD and severe anxiety, I didn't have anyone else.
I very quickly hated myself. Body parts suddenly meant something I didn't like. I thought I was disgusting, fat, womanly. I couldn't see there was nothing wrong with me.
Then, I don't know how I came across it, I must have looked up breast removal. I came across trans videos.
What can I say? They were tomboys, I was a tomboy. They hated their bodies, I hated mine. They wished to be male, did I? I asked myself. Yes. I wanted to be a boy. I always hated being a girl, I told myself, cherry picking my own memories and failing to recognise the recent cause for my self hatred. My hate for being female, and being me, only got worse when I came out. Stopped school, stopped leaving the house, stopped washing, felt worse (oh, I wonder why?). Went to GIDS to start my fantastical medical journey of becoming "the real me". Now I'm here.
Post testosterone, post top surgery, post hysterectomy, post sex reassignment surgery. Feeling like I'm cool about it for a while before it gets too heavy again and hits. I'll never grow into the woman I could have been. I'll never not be reliant on hrt. I'll never have the intimate relationships and connections other women get to have. It's gone. That's it. And this fucks with me a lot. I feel like I am stupid for it being important to me, like I'm not supposed to want it or that it's no big deal because "there's other ways" but I am still upset and I wish I could just cry it out but it won't leave, not fully. I wish I could have loved my body, instead I tossed it.
It sucks how it happened, it sucks so much knowing now that it was all down to those incidents. And transition was all essentially down to how I felt then.
I might have been 16 for T, 18 for top surgery, and ages 19-20 for SRS. But ultimately the decision of transition was made at 14, when I was affirmed [without] other options offered. And let me tell you, a depressed dysphoric teenager doesn't fucking know what she wants and she can't ever comprehend how much in life transition effects. I mean, they asked me if ever wanted children. I didn't know! I was 14 and hated my genitals, how are you asking me that expecting a final, for-life answer?
And I can't do anything about any of this.
There's a comfort in that, if I wanna try being optimistic. I don't have to worry about what I can't change.
But that doesn't fix the hurt I feel from the loss of those experiences, the loss of my body's capability to keep me healthy, the loss I feel socially.
I feel like SRS severed my connection to who I am, was. Now I'm stuck in a role some sad girl at 14 chose.
In October 2012, Carey Callahan began a course of bimonthly intramuscular testosterone injections. After years of harassment and discomfort in her female body, she had made the decision to transition to being male. In the short term, she was happy. But she soon discovered that life as a transgender man was not what she had expected. Her discomfort persisted, as did the harassment.
I was sexually abused as a child and started dressing like a boy so everyone around started to convince me that I was a boy because I dressed as a boy, I knew I was a girl but I started to thinking maybe, I am a boy everyone is saying I am. I started going to therapy once I left school and started to heal, I started loving dresses but still don't wear heals or make up, I know i am a woman but I was scared to show my body incase a man took advantage of it.
So yes, it can be a trauma thing.
If this happened to me in this day and age my parents and doctors probably would of convinced me to transition, I would have never healed.
being a girl and hitting puberty is like having raw meat hung off of your chest sometimes
I was told "you're not like other girls" so many times that the phrase became my gender identity
The prime example of this sort of thinking is this tweet, which currently has 192 thousand likes:
I don’t really understand how people who were young in the 80s act so confused about different gender identities and expressions when the celebrities of their time looked like this
linking to photos of Grace Jones, Prince and 2 other people who I think are Boy George and Annie Lennox.
This woman is effectively saying "these men did not behave or express themselves in completely stereotypically masculine ways, so they are not men" and "these women did not behave or express themselves in completely stereotypically feminine ways, so they are not women" - instead of saying "it's fine for men to be feminine and women to be masculine", she thinks "a feminine man is not a man, and a masculine woman is not a woman".
What's one of the most male-typical behaviours? Being attracted to females.
What's one of the most female-typical behaviours? Being attracted to males.
(this a now a fairly common point, which you can see discussed by the BBC 2 years ago here from 9m55s)
From Singal's article above:
Today, Max identifies as a woman. She believes that she misinterpreted her sexual orientation, as well as the effects of the misogyny and trauma she had experienced as a young person, as being about gender identity.
From Sonia's Appleby's employment tribunal case (which she won) against the NHS child gender identity clinic where she was in charge of safeguarding:
some staff [at the clinic] have raised concerns the service, which has now a referral rate of nearly 2000 referrals annually is bound to be seeing some children, who falsely presenting [sic] as being transgender as a less oppressive option than acknowledging they are gay. There is apparently no acceptable mechanism for discussing these phenomena within the team
A report from a doctor and governor at the same clinic said:
“It says some children “take up a trans identity as a solution” to “multiple problems such as historic child abuse in the family, bereavement . . . homophobia and a very significant incidence of autism spectrum disorder” [..]
The true histories of “highly disturbed or complex” child patients were not properly explored by Gids clinicians struggling with “huge and unmanageable caseloads” [..]
they say that some parents appear to prefer that the child was transgender and straight rather than gay – pushing them towards transition.” [..]
“There have been many times when the push to transition has come from families who are uncomfortable with the sexual orientation of their child……some parents express real relief at their child is not gay or lesbian, suggesting being trans is a better outcome for their child”.
One clinician:
"Maybe we are medicating gay children, kids with autism and maybe medicating traumatised children. And if we are, we are doing bad things to these vulnerable kids.”
More:
So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”.
“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” he told The Times.
“Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.”
Another female clinician said: “We heard a lot of homophobia which we felt nobody was challenging. A lot of the girls would come in and say, ‘I’m not a lesbian. I fell in love with my best girl friend but then I went online and realised I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy. Phew.’”
[..] "Some people were transitioning their gender to match their sexuality"
[..] Several clinicians suspected that some of the “transgender” adolescents were reacting to homophobia at home.
“For some families, it was easier to say, this is a medical problem, ‘here’s my child, please fix them!’ than dealing with a young, gay kid,” the third female clinician said. At the service’s “family days”, a parent was allegedly heard saying that they did not want their child to have gay friends because they “didn’t want them mixed up in that hedonistic lifestyle”. “It is converting people into heterosexuals,” one of the clinicians said. “We had so many families who would talk about not wanting their daughters to be lesbian.” Young people “repeatedly” confided their own “disgust” that they may be gay, according to the clinician.
Katie Herzog, a lesbian (also see this reporting):
Gay people tend to be more sex-nonconforming than straight people:
Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests [..]
Prehomosexual children were judged more gender nonconforming, on average, than preheterosexual children, and this pattern obtained for both men and women. This difference emerged early, carried into adulthood, and was consistent with self-report. In addition, targets who were more gender nonconforming tended to recall more childhood rejection.
Self-ascribed masculinity-femininity and gender-related interests showed the largest heterosexual-homosexual differences [..] The gender inversion hypothesis-that gay men's traits tend to be somewhat feminized and that lesbians' traits tend to be somewhat masculinized-received considerable support.
Note the over-representation of lesbians in soccer - 2 Swiss players dating eachother is said by their coach to be "not unusual" ("nicht aussergewöhnlich").
Mermaids, a charity that now describes themselves as "[helping] gender-diverse kids, young people and their families since 1995", said this in the early 2000s:
Gender Identity Disorders in infancy, childhood and adolescence are complex and have varied causes: in the majority of cases the eventual outcome will be homosexuality or bisexuality, but often there will be a heterosexual outcome as some gender issues can be caused by a bereavement, a dysfunctional family life, or (rarely) by abuse. Only a small proportion of cases will result in a transsexual outcome. Whatever the cause, a child with a gender identity problem is very often deeply unhappy
Kimberly Shappley, in Texas, is another good example:
As early as 18 months old, Kimberly Shappley's son started showing signs he identified as female. Now, the Christian mom shares how she learned to embrace Kai's transition — for her child's happiness and safety.
Shappley has said (7m30s):
"I remember even thinking, before Kai was 3, that this kid might be gay, and I thought that that could not happen, and that would not happen. We started praying for our family, prayers turned into Googling "conversion therapy", how can we implement these techniques at home to make Kai not be like this? Putting her in time-out for acting like a girl, putting her in time-out for stealing girl toys, spanking her"
“No matter how much punishment this kid got, you couldn’t beat it out of her,” Kimberly said. “You couldn’t pray it out, I couldn’t cast it out.”
If a boy's parents beat him for being gay, but they will accept a straight daughter, why would the boy not say he was a girl?
At its most extreme, in Iran:
Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery - and to avoid it many flee the country.
Girls and boys
It is very important to know that you cannot visually tell someone’s gender [..] it is not possible to know [a person's gender] without asking
We can apply this to fetuses, and to babies - we can't know the gender identity of a fetus or of a baby, since they can't tell us (assuming they even have one; a source below asserts that nobody has one at birth). This means that we cannot say whether a fetus or baby is a boy or a girl, not until they are old enough to tell us what they identify as:
"When our child Zoomer was born in 2016, my partner and I decided to raise them without assigning a gender."
"We didn’t disclose their reproductive anatomy to people who didn’t need to know and we used they/them pronouns until Zoomer could tell us what pronouns fit best."
Mount Sinai Hospital's Adolescent Health Centre:
People do not know their gender at birth (They don’t even know what gender is!), so they cannot be “born a man” or “born a woman.” [..]there’s just no way to tell what gender a baby will identify as later in life.
The teacher then told the class that “girls are not real, and boys are not real”
This is why a guide given to journalists in the Olympics this year said to avoid the term "born male/female", as "[no] one is born with a gender identity".
The same guide also said "[gender] identity is a fixed, innate trait that cannot be changed", even though this contradicts nobody having a gender identity at birth - that's what "innate" means.
It is impossible to talk about boys and girls being treated differently if they don't exist, not until they are old enough to tell us what their gender identifies are.
Past people
I've discussed people in the future that don't exist yet (hypothetical future fetuses), but what about people in the past that don't exist anymore? How do we know if they were women, if they identified as women?
It is very important to know that you cannot visually tell someone’s gender [..] it is not possible to know [a person's gender] without asking
We can only call someone a woman if we ask them whether they identify as one - this is impossible for dead people, especially those who lived before self-ID became a prominent concept. What do we do then?
Was Elizabeth I a woman? I don't know how she identified, did she ever say "I am a woman"?
Without such evidence, we can't say she was a woman (or compare how she was treated as a queen to kings that came before and after her, since we don't whether she was a queen, a king, or something else entirely).
If you find a female skeleton from 1000 years ago, was that person a woman? You must resort to stereotyping, in the absence of written evidence otherwise.
National Geographic, reporting on finding the skeleton of a female hunter:
Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex [..]. In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.
Identity feminism cannot be concerned with women in the past, because we can't know who was a woman and who wasn't.
Sexual offences
I apologise for bringing this up, but it must be said.
I, a male, will not start being sexually harassed in public if I start internally identifying as a woman. It just won't happen, there is no way that sexual harassment is influenced by a person's gender identity. Some males are sexually harassed, yes, but the majority of sexual harassment, assault, and rape is against females (almost definitely because the offences are far more often committed by males, and males are far more likely to be attracted to females than to males). As such, sexual offences are, if not determined by, at least influenced by, sex, not gender identity, and will be a feminist issue under sex feminism.
But, if you believe in self-ID, sexual offences are not a feminist issue, since they are influenced by sex, not gender identity - the majority of sexual offences are committed by one sex against another sex, not by people with one gender identity against another gender identity.
The ever-present issue remains - how can you claim one gender identity commits most sexual offences, if you don't ask the gender identity of every perpetrator? (this also applies to victims, how can you claim one gender identity is the victim of most sexual offences, if you don't ask every victim their gender identity?)
Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures for England and Wales show that 94 per cent of convicted murderers and 97 per cent of individuals prosecuted for sexual offences other than rape are male. [..]
About children:
Under self-ID, this is not correct unless the survey also asked the children what their gender identities were.
In UK law (the Sexual Offences Act 2003, section 1), rape is defined like
(1) A person (A) commits an offence if—
(a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis,
(b) B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
and so is literally determined by the sex of the perpetrator, not the gender identity - females cannot be rapists in the UK (except if they're convicted under joint enterprise).
FGC
Female genital cutting is a crime in the UK, punishable with up to 14 years in prison. This is clearly a sex-determined issue, not gender identity-determined, so under identity feminism, female genital cutting is not a feminist issue, as woman as a class can not be subjected to it, only females can.
Male genital cutting, by contrast, is not a crime.
Sex-selective abortions
An estimated 4.7 million fewer girls are expected to be born globally in the next ten years because of sex-selective practices [i.e. abortions] in countries with a cultural preference for male offspring
Female fetuses are being aborted because of their sex, not their gender identity - we know it's not possible to know a fetus' gender identity, so we can't say whether they're girls or boys.
So, millions of fetuses being aborted because of their sex is not a feminist issue, under self-ID.
All of these "is not a feminist issue" suggest that self-ID is generally unconcerned with 20th-century feminism.
Identifying, and pretending to identify
Identifying as a woman has no outward physical effects on the world, the only way to know if someone is a woman is if they tell you that they identify as one.
A person identifying as a woman manifests in the world as them saying "I identify as a woman".
A person that doesn't identify as a woman, but lies and pretends they do, manifests in the world as them saying "I identify as a woman".
Say someone identifies as a woman, and tells you so - you now think they're a woman.
Say someone doesn't identify as a woman, but tells you they do anyway - you now think they're a woman, but they aren't actually one.
The 2 situations will look exactly the same on the outside, only the "true feelings" inside the persons head will be different.
It is impossible to distinguish someone who identifies as a woman from someone who is pretending to identify as one, i.e. you cannot tell a woman apart from a man pretending to be one.
A male exposing himself in a women's changing room can be assumed to be exposing himself, but does that still hold if the male identifies as a woman? Does indecent exposure being illegal depend on a feeling inside the perpetrator's head?
“Merager [a sex offender, convicted of indecent exposure in 2002 and 2003, and charged with 6 further counts of indecent exposure from 2018] claims to identify as female so he can access women’s locker rooms and showers [and has been arrested for indecently exposure in a women's spa this year]” reads an internal flyer by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that was sent to law enforcement departments in southern California in late 2018
Sexual orientation
When watching soaps, you won't generally find just 1 gay character, they tend to come in at least pairs, for an obvious reason - there's little point in having only 1 gay character, they need to be attracted to another gay character, what would be the point otherwise? It doesn't really make sense to think about someone's sexual orientation if they're the only person in the world, it only matters when there are others.
Describing a person's sexual orientation is describing a relationship they have to other people, sexuality is about other people - a person's sexuality is not some innate quality that has no effects on the outside world and can exist without it, it requires other people to make sense.
This is why self-ID affects sexual orientation - it changes other people.
The UN page I linked to above describes sexual orientation like this:
Sexual orientation refers to a person’s physical, romantic and/or emotional attraction towards other people. Everyone has a sexual orientation, which is part of their identity. Gay men and lesbians are attracted to individuals of the same sex as themselves. Heterosexual people are attracted to individuals of a different sex from themselves. Bisexual (sometimes shortened to “bi”) people may be attracted to individuals of the same or different sex. Sexual orientation is not related to gender identity and sex characteristics.
In short, a gay person is attracted only to people of the same sex, a straight person only to the opposite sex, and bisexuals to both.
You probably believe that gay women are only attracted to women.
We can attempt to combine these 2 points with "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman":
- gay people are only attracted to someone of the same sex
- so gay females are only attracted to females
- gay women are only attracted to women
- so gay women are only attracted to [people who identify as women]
The more generic version of 4 is "a gay person is only attracted to people with the same gender identity as them", it has nothing to do with sex.
So now we have both "gay females are only attracted to females" and "gay women are only attracted to people who identify as women".
Imagine we have 2 people, both female, Alice and Sam. Alice identifies as a woman, and is gay. Sam identifies as a man, and therefore is a man. Under 2, Alice may be attracted to Sam, since Sam is a female. Under 4, Alice cannot be attracted to Sam, since Sam is a man.
So, there is a conflict between "being gay means you attracted to people of the same sex", and "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman" - you can't hold both definitions in your mind at the same time.
You can't both think being gay is about same-sex attraction, and also that a gay woman is attracted to people that identify as women. This is obvious in hindsight, as (from above) "sex and gender identity are not the same thing". Gay can't mean both same-sex attraction, and same-gender-identity attraction, you must choose one.
Unfortunately the only source for this is the Daily Mail, but you can see where this thinking leads:
Jo Baiao, who has won British and German championships and is the dance partner of former Strictly star Kristina Rihanoff, has said that the ballroom industry now prefers to use the term ‘equality dance couples’, ‘gender-free dancers’ or in some cases ‘mixed dance couples’.
He wrote to the BBC: ‘Strictly is late to the party. “Same Sex” couples who are now known by EQUALITY dance couples have been on screens before. Get it right!’
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday last night he added, ‘We no longer use the term “same-sex couples” in our community.
'I am sure Strictly are aware of this.
'And if they aren’t then the choreographers certainly will be.
‘This is because if you do not identify yourself as male or female, if you are non-binary or trans, you don’t want to be put into the “same-sex” category.
The BBC's current style guide says
Homosexual means people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender
This is incoherent.
Section 12 of the Equality Act 2010 is far better:
Sexual orientation means a person's sexual orientation towards—
(a) persons of the same sex,
(b) persons of the opposite sex, or
(c) persons of either sex.
This forced redefinition of homosexuality has been called "semantic homosexuality" by Cathemerality - you're gay not because of the sex you're attracted to, but because you're redefined a word, which changes your sexual orientation.
Again imagine Alice and Sam. This time, both identify as women, are gay, and are attracted to eachother. No problems here.
Now imagine that later on, Sam begins to identify as a man, and that both of them are still attracted to eachother. So Alice is still attracted to Sam, a man, and that means that Alice, since she is a woman attracted to a man, is no longer gay, and must be bisexual. Also, Sam is still only attracted to women, but is now a man, and is therefore straight.
As an example of this process, in the 3rd season of Netflix's Sex Education, a female character supposedly tells her boyfriend that they'll be in a "queer" relationship, because she doesn't identify as a woman.
Alice's sexuality changed as a result of an innate feeling in Sam's head - gender identity means a person's sexuality can be changed depending on feelings inside other people's heads, what your sexuality is depends on other people's innate feelings.
Does this mean that you can't know whether you're attracted to someone before you ask them what their gender identity is? If you're attracted to people because of their sex, regardless of their gender identity, does that make everyone bisexual (e.g. for females that are only attracted to females, some of the people they are attracted to will identify as men, so they are females attracted to both males and females, i.e. bisexual)?
You can probably see why the terms "girldick" and "boypussy" exist now, and why there are constant fights over who gay people should be attracted to - imagine you're a lesbian, and a male that identifies as a woman says you should be attracted to them, since you're gay, and gay women are attracted to women, what do you do then?
People won't generally argue this officially in newspapers or magazines, they tend to argue on social networks, but there is a lot of controversy - here's some in a Reddit image gallery. I don't think I'm weakmanning here, these are fairly common opinions in certain circles:
Lesbians are lesbians, even the ones attracted to men
so many lesbians literally are men
[It's a myth that] lesbian sex can't get you pregnant, based on the assumption that both women are cisgender
Nobody wants to be called transphobic, a vagina fetishist or a terf. These screenshots show hundreds of lesbians described with those words and worse, told to open their minds to sleeping with someone with male genitalia or to try ‘change their preferences’! Lesbian sexual orientation is treated as problematic and even harmful, which stigmatises lesbians. There is an incentive to try change sexual orientation so you no longer face this kind of harassment or anti-lesbian stigma.
Some examples:
"Lesbian = female homosexual" is not hate speech!
Yes it is! Bigot! Your narrow mindedness belongs in the trash, just next to white privilege, misogynists, nazis, religious fundamentalists... etc.. shame on you
"I'm attracted to women, but not those women with penises" please, do us all a favour, and stop ventilating
you have no right to refuse to date someone who belongs to the gender(s) you are attracted to solely [because] of what's in their pants. this sort of exclusion is transphobic and invalidates our gender identities
including trans people in your sexuality is not a preference, it's a duty.
Some of these males feel like they are entitled to sex with females, that females can't exclude them because of their sex, and wish that females that refuse to have sex with them died, or attempt to shame and coerce them into dropping their boundaries by calling them bigoted genital fetishists.
A lesbian writes:
I have a really hard time with my sexuality right now and I don't see any solution to the problem. I have a very strong genital preference for vaginas and my gf has a penis. [..] Orgasms and sexual pleasure is non existent in my life. Is genital preference "conversion therapy" a thing that works? Because I really really need it and my current situation gives me so much anxiety. I just want my gf to be happy and she reaally doesn't deserve to be with such a sexually broken person as me :(
"I felt very bad for hating every moment, because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that"
"I was told that homosexuality doesn't exist and I owed it to my trans sisters to unlearn my 'genital confusion' so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me"
"I knew I wasn't attracted to them but internalised the idea that it was because of my 'transmisogyny' and that if I dated them for long enough I could start to be attracted to them. It was DIY conversion therapy," she wrote.
[to a lesbian] have you considered going to therapy for getting over your aversion to dick?
[lesbians] just keep making the same transmisogynistic jokes over and over again, "oh I don't like dick" that's not because you're a lesbian, it's because you're transphobic. Women have penises
"Gay rights" does not exist
There are even more implications about homosexuality (and heterosexuality) generally.
Take Alice and Sam yet again, both are female, and Alice is a woman. Say Sam walks past Alice on the street, and Alice is attracted to Sam. Is Alice gay?
If you believe a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, this question can only be answered with "I don't know", because we do not know Sam's gender identity unless we ask Sam. You cannot know what your sexuality is unless you know the gender identity of every single person you are attracted to.
Remember,
It is very important to know that you cannot visually tell someone’s gender [..] it is not possible to know [a person's gender] without asking
Similarly, say two males are caught in a bathroom having sex, pre-1967 in England and Wales or pre-2003 in parts of America, and are arrested. Is this a gay rights issue?
Again, this depends on their gender identities, so the only answer we can give is "I don't know" - their arrest has nothing to do with their sex, being gay relates only to their gender identities.
We can take a look at the English law at the time, the Sexual Offences Act 1956, section 13:
It is an offence for a man to commit an act of gross indecency with another man
Under "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", whether the 2 males have committed a crime here depends on an innate feeling inside their heads - the 2 males may or may not identify as women, so this law wouldn't apply to them.
I would argue that self-ID destroys the concept of sexual orientation, and removes any utility it could have. Pretty much anything you would've previously thought is a gay rights issue, isn't.
What use is gay rights, if it does not care about people getting arrested (and in many countries, killed), for homosexual acts?
The same process can be applied to everything concerning homosexuality - I'll give a few more concrete examples.
Stonewall and compulsory bisexuality
Nancy Kelley, the CEO of Stonewall, said this in a response to an article about lesbians being pressured or coerced into having sex with males, titled 'We're being pressured into sex by some trans women':
if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it's worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.
We know that prejudice is still common in the LGBT+ community, and it's important that we can talk about that openly and honestly.
She is equating lesbians not being attracted to males with racism, saying that it is prejudiced for lesbians not to be attracted to males, and that they should consider how "societal prejudices" have made them not attracted to males.
I would argue that this is attempted conversion therapy (if lesbians just examine their thoughts and feelings deeply enough, they will find that their lack of attraction to males is just prejudice, and that their true sexual orientation in the absence of societal prejudice includes males too; lesbians' refusal to (i.e. not consenting to) have sex with males is not legitimate, they cannot find males unattractive or refuse to have sex with them because of their sex), and homophobic (lesbians, and gay people generally, must change who they are attracted to, they are not allowed to only be attracted to their own sex).
Stonewall believes that if lesbians aren't attracted to males, they are bigoted, akin to "sexual racists" - it's not acceptable for females to be only attracted to females, they must also be attracted to males - bisexuality is compulsory.
Of course, the same applies to straight women, and to men, but curiously lesbians bear the brunt of this argument.
This tension between same-sex attraction and same-gender attraction is a straightfoward implication of the previously mentioned BBC style guide, which said "Homosexual means people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender", but the article does not mention the conflict.
Planned Parenthood Toronto ran a workshop called "Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women" which had participants "work together to identify barriers [to lesbians refusing to have sex with you, hence "cotton [underwear] ceiling], strategize ways to overcome them, and build community" - getting participants to learn how to "overcome" women's refusal to have sex with you. The person that ran this workshop later began working for Stonewall.
Page has discussed this in email exchange here, where, in response to "lesbians are sexually attracted to females. This does not include trans women [sic] with penises", Page said "Trans women's [sic] bodies are female bodies, whether or not we have penises":
The cotton ceiling is a theory proposed ... to explain the experiences queer trans women have with simultaneous social inclusion and sexual exclusion within the broader queer women's communities. Basically, it means that cis queer women will be friends with us and talk day and night about trans rights and ending transmisogyny, but will still not consider us viable sexual partners [my emphasis].
The term cotton ceiling is a reference to the "glass ceiling" that second wave feminist identified in the workforce, wherein women could only advance so high in the workforce but could not break through into positions of power and authority. The cotton represents underwear, signifying sex.
Lesbians "will still not consider us viable sexual partners".
"The cotton represents underwear, signifying sex."
"identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them"
"Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers"
Same-sex marriage
So, believing a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman means your sexuality is not your own, it depends on others' innate feelings.
A gay person is then a person that is only attracted to people with the same gender identity as them, and gay rights are about people being attracted to people with the same gender identity as them.
Same-sex marriage, since it is about sex, relates to females marrying females, and males marrying males, not women marrying women, or men marrying men. For something to be a gay rights issue, it must involved people being attracted to people with the same gender identity as them, i.e women and women, or men and men, and same-sex marriage does not meet this criteria. Essentially, same-sex marriage and gay marriage aren't the same thing, and only gay marriage is a gay right issue.
So, same-sex marriage is not a gay rights issue, though I've not yet seen someone argue this.
Gay men donating blood
What would previously have been described as men who have sex with men donating blood is also affected. In the past in the UK, a male that had sex with another male would've been banned from donating blood for life - when males have anal sex with other males, there is a significantly higher risk of getting blood-borne infections, like HIV.
Notice, "males", not "men". If a woman is anyone who identifies a woman, then a male having sex with a male may be having sex with a woman, so this is straight sex (not gay), and it is a straight man and straight woman who are prevented from donating blood. Similarly, two females having sex may both be men (so, gay sex), and would not be prevented from donating blood. Men who have sex with men are still allowed to donate blood.
In that link, you can see the confusion I mentioned earlier between sex and gender:
Anyone who has had anal sex with a new partner or multiple partners in the last three months, regardless of their gender or their partner’s gender, must wait 3 months before donating.
Yesterday it was reported:
Two questionnaires administered by Public Health England previously sought to determine how patterns of STDs differ between men and women and between heterosexual and homosexual groups. But following consultation with transgender groups, respondents are no longer asked about the sex they were born but instead whether they ‘identify’ as male or female.
Pronoun disclosure and TWAW
If "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" implies lots of things, does anything imply that you believe "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman"?
If you are a woman, and you think that it's impossible for someone to tell if you identify as a woman unless you tell them, it'd be nice to have a handy way to tell everyone that you identify as a woman. In English, women are referred to in the 3rd person with "she" and "her", so you could tell people to refer to you with "she" and "her". As such, when people announce their pronouns as "she/her", "he/him" etc, they are telling you they believe in self-ID. If you did not believe in self-ID, there would be no need to do this - a woman is a female, and you can extremely reliably tell a person's sex, but you can't tell what their gender identity is.
Again, "in English, woman are referred to in the 3rd person with "she" and "her"" is very different from "in English, females are referred to in the 3rd person with "she" and "her"".
And if an organisation asks or requires you to announce your pronouns (as the Scottish Government is reportedly about to), they are asking or requiring you to adopt a political belief, a belief in self-ID, that a woman is not a female, but a person that identifies as a woman.
Another sign is the commonly repeated phrase "trans women are women" (with obvious replacements for men, girls, etc) - it means "trans [people who identify as women] are [people who identify as women]", i.e. "[males who used to identify as men but now identify as women] are [people who identify as women]", a more obvious statement of belief in self-ID - a person is a woman if they identify as one, regardless of what their sex is.
This is why the ACLU says "trans girls are girls".
General language
Unlike "pregnant people", there are some things that you can't pretend don't exist because you've changed the definition of a word, like the sex difference in heart attacks - men and women can have different symptoms, it is specifically males and females that are different here, not those of us with a uterus and those without:
As with men, women’s most common heart attack symptom is chest pain or discomfort. But women are somewhat more likely than men to experience some of the other common symptoms, particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting and back or jaw pain
It is important to note that men and women are equally likely to experience chest pain, or pain in their left arm
Chest pain was the most common symptom for both men and women, with 93 per cent of both sexes reporting this symptom. A similar percentage of men and women reported pain that radiated to their left arm (48 percent of men and 49 per cent of women).
More women had pain that radiated to their jaw or back and women were also more likely to experience nausea in addition to chest pain (33 per cent vs 19 per cent).
Less typical symptoms, such as epigastric pain (heartburn), back pain, or pain that was burning, stabbing or similar to that of indigestion, were more common in men than women (41 per cent in men vs 23 per cent in women).
The same applies to drug development and testing - many drugs have different effects on males and on females, and must be tested on both (because of this, it's recognised that you can't just test a drug on one sex, hence the "sex as a biological variable" research policy). For example, Covid-19 vaccines are ~7x more likely to cause heart inflammation in boys than girls:
Data from the US, where millions of young teenagers have been vaccinated, suggests there are 60 cases of the heart condition for every million second doses given to 12 to 17-year-old boys (compared to eight in one million girls).
Notice that it says "boys" and "girls" - you must be able to says "boys" and "girls" here to talk about this properly. Not using the words can be dangerous, it leaves you unable to talk about the unequal effects of drugs.
It is of course possible to cede the word "women" to people (and organisations, and governments) who believe in self-ID, and then you must either come up with a new word that means the same thing (though that adds extra complexity to everyday language, for little benefit), or retreat to "female". The latter might be what ends up happening, though in current usage, describing women as "females" comes across as a bit creepy, or like you're David Attenborough watching some orangutans in the Borneo rainforest, and even "female" is being appropriated now.
Sex feminism can be preserved if you just say specifically that "feminism is about females, not women", but I doubt that will happen either.
In 1993, the now dead American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said
The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. ... When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.
The zenith of the language-rewriting process occurred last week, when the ACLU, unhappy with her recognition of women and of reality, rewrote the quote to say
The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person]'s life, to [their] well-being and dignity. ... When government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.
Today, from the Lancet:
Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.
4 days ago, also from the Lancet:
About 10 million men are currently living with a diagnosis of prostate cancer—making it a major health issue.
Mount Sinai Hospital's Adolescent Health Centre:
When we talk about birth control, gynecological care, and (sometimes) sex, we often avoid using the terms “girl,” “woman,” “boy,” or “man.” This is because we’re usually giving medical advice that relates to people not based on their gender identity, but based on their physiological characteristics [..]
Because many people are transgender, non-binary, or another gender, there are plenty of men with vaginas, women with penises, and people who don’t identify with being either a man or a woman
The erasure of women continues.
Ginsburg also said
One thing that conspicuously distinguishes women from men is that only women become pregnant. And if you subject a woman to disadvantageous treatment on the basis of her pregnant status [..] you would be denying her equal treatment under the law
There is a general point to be made here about language - some now pronounce that you should say "pregnant people", "front hole owners", "people with a vulva", "menstruators", etc.
You may notice that these terms all share something in common - they all refer to one class of people, to women, to females - if you stop using the same word to refer to them all together, you lose the ability to discuss them together as part of a larger topic (females), and the connections between them; political activism around females and their specific issues (previously called feminism) can only exist if you recognise that pregnancy, menstruation, sexual assault, etc, aren't independent, they all affect the same group of people, and that group is given a name:
When you get the cervix-havers and menstruators and non-prostate owners and front-hole owners all together there is at least one English term that applies perfectly efficiently to them and only to them. That word is ‘female’.
