What's the difference, exactly? I'll never know what it's like to be a cat anymore than I'd know how it is to be a man.
Well, how shall I put it… women and men are not different species. Though at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see TERFs claim that they are, and mean it in all seriousness.
A male can never know how it is being female, and vice versa.
Yeah, sure. Especially those who very much ‘pass’ as their gender (/s)
When trans women start getting belittled and harassed by men in the exact same way cis women are, they know. When they get sexually assaulted by a drunken asshole who thinks he has a right to her body, believe me, they know.
When trans people notice how everyone suddenly treats them a little differently (or not so little), they know.
Sure, they may not have gone through their gender’s childhood (though nowadays there’s an increasing number of transfolk who have even that aspect), but otherwise… they know. If society sees them as the gender they identify with, they know.
Like they'll say women can know what it's like by chopping of breasts and wearing a man's clothes, but the fact of the surgery alone is something men don't experience so.
Yeah, some details are different. But just because cis men or cis women don’t go through the same surgeries or have to take pills for their hormones (which some do!), doesn’t mean that they don’t have a whole lot of other things in common with transfolk of their gender.
It still doesn't make sense since gender and sex are different things. Animals don't have a society and the ability to impose stereotypes about behavior, appearance, or interests which is all gender is.
And here we have the founding fallacy and fatal error of the gender-critical movement: the complete, utter and persistent failure to differentiate between gender norms, gender identity and gender presentation. To them, it’s all gender norms / stereotypes; nothing else exists. And when TERFs hear us talk about ‘gender’, they think we mean the stereotypes, while typically, we don’t.
Granted, we all have some responsibility for that mess, because we tend to use the term ‘gender’ for all of these things, without explicitly specifying what exactly we mean by it, which can lead to confusion.
But anyway, for any GCs who might at some point read this: get it through your thick skulls that when I say “my gender is female” or “I’m a woman”, I don’t mean abiding by and reinforcing patriarchal gender norms or stereotypes. I simply mean the internal identity (you know, the one you think doesn’t exist), a sense of what bodily configuration is right for me, and perhaps some cultural expressions thereof (without ANY implied suggestions that “this is what a woman has to be” or that other women have to do the same).
Men are not required to be masculine nor women feminine […] Men can be "girly", and a woman can be a tomboy, but they will still be male and female.
I agree with that, fully. All trans and non-binary people I know agree with that, fully.
To say you know the experience of being female because you like stereotypically feminine shit is to say that is what it means to be a woman and therefore women who aren't feminine aren't women anymore.
…and you’re completely wrong, because that’s not what we claim at all. This is a straw argument; even for trans people who claim some aspect of their gendered behavior is part of their gender identity, it goes far deeper than just that. And the argument that “therefore women who aren't feminine aren't women anymore” is just complete bullshit that none of us claim (certainly no trans or enby person I have ever seen). It’s a straw construct built from the faulty understanding of us you have thanks to your fatally flawed and frankly incorrect gender-critical framework.
Even men who have hundreds of surgeries to appear female, already don't know the experience from the fact they needed those surgeries to begin with.
Right. And a cis woman who had an accident as a child which left her disfigured and in need of reconstructive surgery means that she doesn’t really know what it is to be female! Sorry, but by your own logic, that’s how it is.
Oh, I’m sure that the response here would be “Oh, but she was born female and raised as a girl, hence she’s female by definition”… which just goes to show that it’s not really about whether or not you had to have surgeries. That surgery bit is just one of the many moving goalposts that TERFs throw up in order to make the same basic claim they always do:
Men/males and women/females are fundamentally and irrevocably different. Men are dangerous predators by nature, always the oppressors; women are feeble victims by nature, always the oppressed. Which one you are is determined at time of conception and cannot be changed. There is no hope that things can be different; the only solution is for women to isolate themselves and self-segregate where they can; that is the only way they can maintain some safety.
