And it’s even more heartbreaking when you see the transition and how performative it is.
I was a camp counselor at a science/nature camp when I was 16, for a bunch of 10 and 11 yr old girls. And one day while we were waiting around for the naturalist to come get us to go on the day’s hike, the boys cabin we were grouped with was exploring the area and overturned a log and found a salamander. One of the boys picked it up and they brought it over.
My girls all went “ewww, gross, keep it away!”
…right up until I said “whoa, cool, can I see it?”
This boy handed me the salamander and all of a sudden my girls were clustering around. They wanted to hold it. They were asking questions about it. They had stories of other times they’d seen a lizard or caught a frog or something. A couple of them went with some of the boys to look under another log and see if they could find another one.
All they had needed was permission to be curious, to show interest instead of disgust. And as soon as someone they were looking to for cues on “how to be a girl” showed interest, as soon as they didn’t feel like they had to perform socially-acceptable girliness and pretend to be grossed out in order to gain adult approval, all that natural curiosity and the fascination most kids have for the natural world just came bubbling right up.
“Women aren’t baby-making factories!”
Okay I hate to be ~that~ anatomy nerd, but if you think of the human body as a factory, the female body is literally a baby making factory! From the way our organs are set up, to our hormones, and even our external parts, our bodies are geared toward baby making.
So yes, women are baby making factories 😁
@theworld-onherhips did you flunk high school biology or what?
The female reproductive system is actually extremely hostile towards embryos
Our species have hemichorial placentas, designed to weed out all but the fittest embryos. We develop thick endometrial linings from a ridiculously young age in order to aggressively protect ourselves from what is essentially a ruthless parasite that is literally sucking our blood; every time we have a period our body is shedding blood and tissue so that it can efficiently eject embryos deemed unworthy, which is most of them
On top of that, there is only a 12 hour window each menstrual cycle during which we can conceive - over the course of a year, there is less than a week of time in which we are in danger of conceiving. Which is why it is perfectly normal for a healthy couple to go 12 months or more without getting pregnant.
The way our hormones are calibrated is to protect US, not the fetus. The wider pelvic girdle, extra fat, etc. is about minimizing the damage a fetus can do to the pregnant person
Also, I don’t know a lot about factories, but spending 9 months to make (typically) just one product and then not knowing when you can make another one sounds like a really poor business model.
Also what we consider carrying “to term” would kill pretty much any other creature on earth? Babies are not fully developed when they come out, they’re helpless to predators and can’t even stumble their way to a food source like most baby animals.
Scientists believe to “fully grow” a human, it would actually take 18-21 months, to equate the development of other primates’ babies.
The female body literally cannot carry a child to full development. It would kill us. We’re more like… game developers at Ubisoft— we kick the product out before it’s ready and hope we can work out the bugs to make them playable as they get older.
Reblogging for the Ubisoft comparison. I giggled the whole night after reading it, and even as I was laying in bed. It would just pop back to my mind and I’d get the giggles again.
Also I’d like to add that miscarriages are pretty common because pretty much anything wrong with the developing embryo or fetus can potentially cause damage to the person carrying it and the body will typically terminate itself and continue to do so until a defect is missed or the embryo/fetus develops successfully. Most of these self-terminations will typically happen in the earliest stages of pregnancy before or around the time you’re actually able to detect being pregnant and it’s a good thing too considering the psychological damage associated with the loss can be devastating. Being able to carry to term is way less common than people realize because of the taboo regarding talking about miscarriages so everyone assumes that you can get pregnant on the first try when usually you’ve had several undetected miscarriages already and may have several more that occur in later terms.
People make it out to be that pregnancy is beneficial to both parties but in reality it’s literally a fight for resources. The fetus wants the nutritious blood and will literally inflict damage onto the carrier if it’s not getting enough nutrition (which is why its important for pregnant people to get plenty of nutrients like calcium because the fetus will literally leech calcium from your bones and cause osteoporosis if its not provided with enough) and practically tries hoarding resources for development, while the carrier will try to distribute things evenly.
It’s basically the equivalent of having a camping partner that keeps hoarding and using up all the gear like matches, food, water, and they’re careless about stuff and might break a kerosene lamp or rip a hole in the tent, and they’re constantly making you carry most of their shit. You’re trying to make sure that both of you have enough stuff to make it through the winter so you have to be aggressive and hostile toward the person in ways that will limit how much they can keep taking from you, sometimes even ditching them shortly after you’ve started the trip because you know that spending the whole time is going to be extremely hard on you emotionally and physically.
…You can say woman. You can say female. You can say the mother. Why is this unnecessary neutral language used even in clinical, scientific, medical discussion about women’s anatomy and reproduction? There’s no debate or mystery about whose bodies are creating fetuses and carrying them. “People” don’t have babies - females do. Women do.
This is great information you’ve provided, so why are you couching it in such nonspecific and vague language?
all the debate in sports actually makes me hate my female body... i hate being female. “There’s literally thousands of high school boys that can dominate the best pro women athletes.” Men are always better so why even try? (I know it’s not true but these arguments really make me depressed)
The female body is not inferior, don't let a male model of society trick you into holding capacity for brute strength as the most defining trait of a person's value
Anon, we know that women are better at running supermarathons (vast distances), and at wild swimming/long distance swimming. Please consider - sports in which women regularly outperform men, or methods of judging those sports which result in women outperforming men, would not catch on in a patriarchal environment. There might be numerous ‘sports’ out there that women are better at than men, that we just haven’t discovered, because men aren’t good at them.
And the absurdity of valuing sports over, say, survivability? Which is real physical strength? Moving something heavy, or not fucking dying from cold or disease?
Women are less likely to inherit genetic illnesses (double X bby), can survive longer on significantly less due to fat stores and different types of muscles, and during times of widespread disease, women are more likely to overcome illnesses. When men get sick, they tend to get much sicker. Their biology isn’t geared toward survivability. Even testosterone, the beloved ~tough manly hormone~ decreases their lifespan.
Where men keep producing sperm, expending energy and resources, risking cell mutation.. Women’s bodies enter menopause. Monthly cycles which are very energy intensive stop so that women can live longer. The importance of this is described by “the grandmother theory”, aka, old ladies keep society running and continue to be very valuable even into old age.
Its unreasonable to expect to love your body easily in a society that tells women we are less than and dirty. Practicing body neutrality is a more prudent goal, you can read more about it here: https://www.healthline.com/health/body-neutrality#systemic-change
I was thinking about American Ninja Warrior the other day - and how most of the contestants are men and the women who do compete are at a disadvantage because a lot of the obstacles require upper body strength which is a lot easier for men to acquire, and reach which you have naturally if you’re tall.
But could you design an obstacle course where women would dominate? Obviously we’d still be talking about very fit and strong people. Could you design an obstacle that was easier for women? They do have some balance obstacles but the men still do them just fine. Often they “brute strength” them by just running across them really fast.
I’d love someone to do a study into this, and into sport in general, and come up with those sports that women are physically more suited for, other than the ones we do know already.
A sport designed for women to excel would probably look a lot like women's gymnastics. Upper body strength and pure power is necessary, but it also relies a lot on flexibility, balance, and "grace" - far more than men's gymnastics.
Actually, an even better example is rhythmic gymnastics. (It's a sport and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.) Men's RG exists, but it sucks. The sport requires extreme flexibility, extreme balance, extreme coordination. Rhythmic gymnasts are strong, but it's not a sport where raw power is particularly helpful, and size is actually a hindrance. Women doing rhythmic gymnastics are breathtaking. Men just look like they're doing a goofy lil dance.
So that's one example of a sport that plays to women's physical strengths.
Culture is not some untouchable law of the universe. Culture is a tool created and curated by people. No culture is sacred. No culture is static.
But, these are biological realities of animal life:
female, male
homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual
childhood, puberty, adolescence, adulthood
reproduction, family, death
Every human culture faces these realities, understands them, and then reframes them for the next generation.
When someone says “homosexuality doesn’t exist in my culture, that’s a foreign concept” they aren’t interested in a biology debate. They know that homosexuality is a reality of human life. They are simply letting you know they find it uncultured, base, and taboo.
When they say “homosexuality doesn’t exist here, inverts hold a spiritual ceremonial role” they aren’t elevating homosexuality. They’re marginalizing homosexuals to one sector of society. They find the idea of homosexuals pursuing regular life uncultured, base, and taboo. Any connection between “ceremonial inverts” and “foreign homosexuality” would be taken as a deeply spiritually insensitive comparison.
Framing homosexuality as a spiritual third gender or similarly narrow role is a cultural tool. It isolates a culture’s gay population from gays in other cultures. There are dozens of third gender examples. It’s interesting that cross-cultural gay solidarity was regarded as such a threat by so many different cultures.
No gay person should feel obligated to respect homophobic cultural ideas. No amount of cultural relativism or cultural sensitivity training will change my mind on that.
A movement has formed around the idea that one’s ability to build a family should not be determined by wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
“While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state. The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed ‘fertility equality.’
feminists opposed the bill; more on the bill overturning the surrogacy ban here
Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers LGBTs face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”
[...]
Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making. Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.
“We have this idea that infertility is about failing to become pregnant through intercourse, but this is a very hetero-centric viewpoint,” said Catherine Sakimura, the deputy director and family law director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We must shift our thinking so that the need for assisted reproductive technologies is not a condition, but simply a fact.”
infertility is described as a diminished or absent ability to conceive and bear offspring [x]. there’s nothing “hetero-centric” about this definition.
Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.
gay men choosing to use a surrogate has nothing to do with infertility or “specific life circumstances” and everything to do with the fact that males can’t create life. it’s incredibly dishonest to lump medical interventions that aid in reproduction with surrogacy as if they’re the same thing. the former only includes medical intervention; the latter includes a form of medical intervention and the use and commercialization of women’s bodies.
[...]
In 2018 Captain Aguilera, who is stationed at a Marine Corps base in Jacksonville, N.C., began thinking about fatherhood and taking advantage of his benefits. But “the V.A. told me they only offer these procedures to male soldiers who are married to women,” he said, referring to services like testing, hormone therapy and artificial insemination, and that surrogacy was not a covered benefit.
“But what about gay men?” Captain Aguilera said. “Why aren’t we on equal footing? The whole process made me feel like giving up my dream of becoming a parent.”
For those who can afford it, the six-figure cost to have children via surrogacy is a fair price to realize what once seemed impossible. “I am part of a whole generation of gay men who thought they would not have kids,” Andy Cohen, 52, the Bravo host and new father, said in a phone interview, acknowledging that he is “a privileged guy with access to the money and resources needed to do surrogacy.”
But some would-be gay male parents see this high price of parenthood as a penalty for not being straight. (Sperm donation and intrauterine insemination, commonly used by lesbian couples, are comparatively inexpensive procedures.)
gee, i wonder why artificial insemination is more inexpensive than paying a woman to undergo artificial insemination, carry a baby for 9 months and give birth... it must be a penalty for not being straight.
“Part of the reason I hesitated to come out was because I equated being gay with being unable to have a family,” said Mario Leigh, the 23-year-old founder of Affordable Families, a fertility-rights coalition in Connecticut. “Which is why I’m taking action preventively to ensure that this is not the case.”
A recent Marist College graduate who works at Raytheon Technologies, an aerospace defense company in Windsor, Conn., Mr. Leigh is waging a legislative battle to ensure his access to fertility.
Aided by Representative Liz Linehan, the chair of the Connecticut legislature’s Committee on Children, his organization is developing a bill that would lead the nation in inclusive language and insurance coverage. “We want to secure affordable coverage for anyone who desires a family,” Mr. Leigh said.
Mr. Leigh began envisioning his own fertility journey while watching reality television. “I saw ‘Million Dollar Listing New York’ star Fredrick Eklund and his husband welcome twin daughters via surrogate in 2017,” Mr. Leigh said. “Seeing Eklund become a father was incredibly enlightening and felt like the missing piece I needed to begin thinking about how I could also have children.”
Mr. Leigh was relieved to know that science was on his side. But he knew how easily he could be priced out of parenthood by the high cost of surrogacy, and that he couldn’t possibly be the only person facing those costs with fear.
“It’s a social justice issue, and young people are leading today’s social justice movements,” said Ms. Linehan of access to fertility care. “It’s also a fiscal issue, this is also about fiscal injustice. How will young LGBTs form families if they cannot afford it?”
[...]
“Opponents will say, ‘We’re not homophobic. We oppose discrimination in the workplace. You deserve the right to dignity,” Mr. Gevisser said. “But this openness stops at raising children.”
no. this openness doesn’t stop at raising children. this openness stops at you trying to commodify women’s bodies. lesbian women are female so they have the biological capability to have babies. gay men do not possess this capability but they can adopt one of the half a million children in foster care in the US and raise them if they so wish. feminists aren’t against homosexuals raising children, we’re against misogynists who want to exploit women’s reproductive capability under the guise of fighting homophobia.
[...]
In New York, a number of feminist activists do not share the belief that legalizing surrogacy increases gender equality. The most vocal opponents include Gloria Steinem and Deborah Glick, the first openly gay member of New York’s legislature, who view paid surrogacy as patriarchal, exploitative and even akin to slavery. Both women campaigned against legalizing surrogacy in New York State.
here’s an excerpt from Gloria Steinem’s statement on the issue: “The danger here is not the use of altruistic surrogacy to create a loving family, which is legal in New York now, but the state legalizing the commercial and profit-driven reproductive surrogacy industry. As has been seen here and in other countries, this harms and endangers women in the process, especially those who feel that they have few or no economic alternatives. Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others.”
Much as with transgender rights, some critics contend that the quest for fertility equality erases women and denies their essential biological role. And though many surrogate babies are born to straight couples, some opponents of surrogacy are uncomfortable with connecting the purchasing power of men — especially gay men — to the bodies of women.
“We’re talking about the eradication of womanhood as we know it,” said Phyllis Chesler, a feminist and professor, whose 1988 book, “Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M,” chronicled a high-profile surrogacy custody case. “Some people want to do away with reality, but biology is real, biology exists — and biology is what will get you pregnant.”
Michelle Pine, 39, a two-time surrogate in Klamath Falls, Oregon, said that “while there are certainly opportunities for exploitation, working with agencies or groups that offer some regulation help take away that piece.”
Many of the activists seeking fertility equality are not wealthy enough to cover the full cost of surrogacy. Captain Aguilera, who recently completed law school and will soon retire from the military, is considering a home-equity loan to cover future surrogacy costs and has applied for financial support from Men Having Babies.
He’s also caught the activist bug. “Now that I passed the bar, I want to use my law degree to help change these unfair policies,” he said.
As for Mr. Leigh, for the past year he has set aside 25 percent of each paycheck for a special surrogacy savings account. “So far I don’t even have enough for a single round of I.V.F.,” he said.
“I’m only 23, so I’m not worrying just yet,” he added. “But the clock is ticking. I want to be a father by the time I turn 30.”
Julie Bindel, a British feminist, has traveled around the world to research this issue. Here’s one of her articles on the topic.
You can read more on surrogacy here, here and here.
Ew this is so gross, literally a bunch of men stating they have the legal right to purchase a child as well as women’s reproductive labour under the guise of it being about gay rights. The women who would sign up for this will be, of course, poor women and, disproportionally, women of ethnic minorities. A rich woman doesn’t need the extra money but a poor woman might. This is exploitation, plain and simple. In some third world countries authorities have discovered so-called baby factories (in the most literal sense).
Nobody has the right to a biological child. If you can’t conceive naturally, you’re entitled to health care to aid pregnancy, but that’s about it. Nobody has the right to purchase a child via commodifying women’s ability to carry a child. What if the woman changes her mind and wants to keep the child herself? Where are her reproductive rights? What if she changes her mind and wants to get an abortion? In my country, biological mothers automatically are granted legal parenthood, and I think many other jurisdictions operate the same way. If the mother is required to give up this right, you’re essentially buying her rights... (considering many jurisdictions only allow up to 2 legal parents).
This isn’t about gay rights because heterosexual couples who aren’t able to conceive either would also not be entitled to a surrogate mother. If gay men want to become fathers, just adopt a child. This isn’t about money per se, because adoption is a lot cheaper than paid surrogacy. If you adopt a child, that child is legally yours, so the law recognises your legal rights as a parent. Same applies to heterosexual parents who are unable to conceive. Plenty of heterosexual people are infertile. It sucks, but those are the cards dealt by Mother Nature, and the law cannot change the laws of nature for you.
Women in the USA don’t even have paid maternity leave, yet these clowns think they should be able to commission a women for a child??? Imagine how messed up it must be to know that you, as a child, were paid for, and that your legal parents essentially bought you from your biological mother. Many adopted children struggle with not knowing their biological parents, but at least they know they weren’t put on the Earth as a product, a ‘’designer baby’’ if you will. An adopted child doesn’t have a better alternative than to be adopted, but a child conceived through surrogacy was conceived specifically in the context of an arrangement
Oh, and let me guess: if the child turns out to be severely disabled, the parents would feel cheated, huh? You paid all that money (or let tax payers do it for you), and you feel cheated, because the kid has Down Syndrom or autism. We know how this is going to go. Disabled children are less likely to be adopted, same goes for non-white children. These biases will, predictably, also apply to the surrogate industry
‘‘Fertility equality’‘ my ass. Both men and women are entitled to fertility treatments that aid conception, but that’s different from making a poor woman sign a contract that says she needs to give up her child that she carried for nine months, and also her legal right as a mother. It’s not equality if you treat women as baby factories :)))))
This is the Baby M case all over again, isn’t it? Except this time they’re trying to change the law
If you can't have children the natural way, adoption is the way to go. No one is special enough that they deserve a child with their genetics no matter what nature says. Adoption is more humane and more ethical.
Also that figure is way too low, modern population estimates might be as much as twice that. There were between 25 and 40 million in central Mexico alone, almost as many people in the North Amazon, almost as many in the Andes, and almost as many in the American South. All saw 80 to 99 percent population loss in the period of 2 to 3 generations.
The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.
Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.
Why are you all omitting the well known fact that it was not purposeful genocide but simply new microbes introduced that no one knew about at that time.
When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.
They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.
Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.
The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.
The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.
And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.
Colonizers are not innocent just cuz the germs did a lot of the work of the apocalypse.
You know what we need more of? Beginner’s classes for adults.
It’s supposed to be really, really good for you to keep learning new things as you age. It helps stave off strokes and dementia and Alzheimer’s and improves memory. And hey, learning stuff is fun.
But I really don’t want to be infantilized when I try to learn something. And I definitely don’t learn the way a child does. And honestly, what adult wants to be in the same class as children? Very few.
This occurred to me recently because I’d like to learn how to actually ice skate properly. My parents never signed me up for classes, because it wasn’t a thing they ever cared about or thought about. Now I’m in my twenties and want to learn, and also don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of eight-year-olds who probably honestly skate better than I do. Because that’s embarrassing, and embarrassment is not how you learn.
Would it be good to lose the social stigma of being worse at something than a child? Yes. Hell yes. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and like I said: adults don’t really learn the way kids do, and a lot of people use these kinds of activities to make friends, and I don’t want to make friends with an eight-year-old, either.
So.
Beginner’s classes for adults. Let adults suck at stuff and learn how to get better and learn new things and broaden their horizons, while still being treated as adults. Classes for writing, for pottery, for chess, for art, for instruments, for singing, for sports, for chemistry. For everything, dammit.
Hey, y'all in the notes: she wasn't asking you to call her beautiful or say she's adorable or "uwu she's so sweet i would die for her". She's asking you to interact with physically different creators regardless of if you think they're beautiful or not. Beauty standards are a farce and we need to stop implying that beautiful is the most important thing someone can be. Every person who says "oh she's so sweet I would die for her" or "anyone who calls her ugly is getting their kneecaps caved in": this is for you. You are being madly infantalising. It's like when you say to a fat person "oh you're not fat, you're cuddly" like, shut up! I thought we were past this by now. She is a PERSON and you are all scrambling to say just how beautiful you think she is, without even thinking about the message she is trying to send.
This isn't me saying she's ugly or whatever the fuck. I don't believe in ugly. This is me telling you all to stop being so fucking surface level with your beauty 'activism'. She knows what she looks like and she probably doesn't need hundreds of people infantalising her because they need to performatively show off how good they are and how much they don't care about traditional beauty standards. Grow up and interact with her like she's a person, not a fuckin three-legged puppy.
You're not smarter than decades of neuroscience. It likely is the case that trans people have an issue with bodily mapping, but they don't have any regions of the brain missing in those areas like people with Bodily identity integrity disorder do. What they do have, however, is brain regions similar to the opposite sex. Everyone looks out into the world, sees men and women, and then looks at themselves. When trans people look inwards, their neurology tells them what they are, and that's identity
Holy strawman! Honey if i thought I was smarter than decades of neuroscience then why would I bother to read the studies and spend my time learning about the topic?
Brain (link) Sex (link) Doesn’t (link) Exist (link). There is no such thing as a male or a female brain. You’re not smarter than neuroscience either 😉
Apart from one (which we will get round to in a minute), every single study that found brain differences in transgender subjects has a fatal design flaw: they recruited trans women attracted to men and trans men attracted to women. In other words, these transgender subjects, in relation to their biological sex, are homosexual. Brain differences in homosexuals are already well documented, and could obscure any additional brain differences that relate to being transgender. This is what’s known as a confounding variable and it renders every single one of those studies, to put it technically, completely and utterly fucking useless lol.
Only one study I found actually separated subjects who referred to themselves as trans lesbians (who would be straight in relation to their biological sex)- most of this study operates under the assumption that brain sex is real and should therefore be viewed with skepticism, however the transbian subjects displayed some interesting brain differences which were completely unrelated to the now-debunked concept of brain sex:
As you said, the brain region associated with body integrity dysphoria has been identified - in the right parietal lobe, which you can probably guess is a mere fraction of an inch away from the right parieto-temporal junction. This evidence indicates huge similarities between the two types of dysphoria - but while there have been documented cases of people developing body integrity dysphoria after a head injury, there are no known cases of head injury transing somebody’s gender. Luckily, the study goes on to explain why that might be:
(Note: Untreated here just means they haven’t started HRT yet, which again would be a confounding variable). The putamen and thalamus, where transbians also display differences, are much closer to the brain stem than the parietal lobe. Any head injury that deep would kill you. Interestingly, the putamen and thalamus are also involved in sensory input and body mapping, among other things.
Finally I’d like to drop the bomb that identity is a much, much broader concept than what your neurology tells you you are - you’re thinking of self image. Self image is admittedly a small part of identity, but the disconnect transgender people experience is an even smaller part of that:
The entire trans experience lies in mainly 1 but possibly 2 aspects of self image - and while this is almost certainly just a coincidence, these also happen to be the same aspects of self image that people with eating disorders have issues with. As a result, it’s fair to say that being trans is no more an “identity” than anorexia is. If you think gender identity is a valid identity according to the widely accepted definition of self image, you are employing logic which should mean you also think anorexic people are fat simply because they see themselves as such.
I hope you found these studies and definitions educational and that you’re open minded enough to have flexible views in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. I’d love that for you. Peace✌️
This is a story about a gender non-conforming girl being told over and over she can’t do what she wants because she’s a girl and instead of realizing how sexist and regressive that is they just keep pushing it from both sides. The idea that gender non-conforming girls are really boys is sexist horseshit.
It’s saying “girls can’t be X” just like women and girls have been told throughout history. Now they say that if we want to be gender non-conforming we have to hate who we are, female, and try to be something we never will be, male.
You know how irritating it is to be told that existing how I naturally am is an imitation of men? As if I glued my body hair on and didn’t just grow it due to being an adult, as if I didn’t take makeup off but put something on to make my natural face look the way it does, as if doing anything outside of femininity was proof that I hate being a woman instead of an act of self love.
You know how terrifying it is to know there are people who would have seen me as a child and told me my problem was I needed surgery and hormones? You know how horrific it is that not liking pink and princesses as a child is enough to cause you a lifetime of medical experimentation because people can’t accept unfeminine girls and women?
To me this might as well be the modern form of hospitalizing and medicating “unruly” women and girls. You can be gender non-conforming, but it comes at a price. You can be yourself, but only if you pretend you’re someone else.
I was trans and thank goodness I woke up to see it for what it is, a crock of sexist misogynistic regressive bullshit trying to pass itself off as progressive.
I am a gender non-conforming adult human female and I love myself. What gender non-conforming children and adults need is self love and acceptance, not to be pathologized.
The turning point in the story was jack saying “I am a boy”. It wasn’t about the fact that he doesn’t like dresses or wants to be a superhero. His parents never said “hmm, this child doesn’t like ‘girly’ things. I diagnose you with transgender”. It wasn’t the parents’ choice. It was jack’s.
I will agree that the story gives a somewhat stereotypical image of gender, and that gender identity and being trans are about a lot more than your opinion on dresses. But it’s a book for kids, meaning that, by nature, it is very simplistic and is not intended to be the end of a child’s learning experience (ie, there are a lot of children’s books about counting and simple math, and those are understood to not give a whole picture of mathematics, but instead to begin to develop a child’s understanding of numbers and maths). The book was designed to introduce children to the idea of being transgender, and open them up to a more in-depth understanding as they grow.
The book says, quite plainly, that if a girl rejects femininity then it is a sign that she’s not really a girl. There’s nothing to defend here. And the fact that it is a book destined to children, as you rightly point out, is even more alarming. Because I guarantee you that if I had ever come accross this trash book as a child, I would have thought something was wrong with me and assumed I wasn’t a girl but a boy and needed to change who I was.
“I will agree that the story gives a somewhat stereotypical image of gender”
somewhat ? somewhat ?
Girls are blond and have long hair. They wear pink clothes in a pink room with a pink cake. They like ribbons, tutus, ballet, dresses, sparkles, unicorns and fairies.
Boys have short brown hair. They wear blue.They wear suits and ties. They like action games about exploring and being super heroes.
That’s somewhat stereotypical to you ? What more do you need ?
And if you agree that a book promotes sexit gender stereotypes then it’s not a good book for children, period.
“The book was designed to introduce children to the idea of being transgender”
I did not “figure out” my “gender and gender expression”.
Gender is just another word for sex stereotypes, “Jack”’s story illustrates that clearly enough, and sex stereotypes are the cornerstone of sexism and patriarchy.
I didn’t have to figure them out, they were taught to me and placed on me from the day I was born. Gender is being told your sex has to follow these rules our culture made for you, you fit in these roles, you do these things.
Gender is not my personality, it is not my fashion sense, it is not my likes and dislikes, it is not my sex. I may be gender non-conforming because of those things, but none of them are “gender” and there is no “my gender” because gender is done to me, not something I have or own.
“Trans people exist.” I am well aware or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I think what you mean is “people who can be (or think like or feel like) the opposite sex”. That is what I find offensive as it is built upon the foundation of sex stereotypes and therefor is sexist and further enshrines patriarchy. That is why trans activists and feminists are at an impasse. I can’t fight my oppression with someone who’s actively enforcing it.
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“Jack” is a literal child (presumably a five year old). Children don’t understand biological sex, at that age it’s unlikely it’s been explained to them, but they are very familiar with sex stereotypes because they are surrounded by them.
To “Jack” the difference between boys and girls is the difference between liking pink, dresses, fairies, and ribbons and liking blue, ties, adventurers, and super heros. Of course a child that wants to be more like their role model of the opposite sex or who enjoys things that they’re told are for or liked by the opposite sex is going to think “I am the opposite sex” because them that’s what separates the sexes.
The problem comes when adults don’t take the time to explain to their child that they can like or do or wear whatever they like, but that doesn’t make them the opposite sex. People can’t change biological sex, but that’s okay because it’s just a part of your body and doesn’t change who you are as a person. You can be a girl and love baseball or be a boy and play with dolls, you can be yourself.
The moment an adult says “yes, actually you are the opposite sex” is the moment they reaffirm sex stereotypes. They’re saying “yes, the difference between boys and girls really is just who likes blue and who likes pink.“ They’re saying “something is wrong with you because you’re a girl who doesn’t like girl things.”
Not to mention that a child doesn’t understand that they can’t change sex, like I said, most of them don’t even know what sex is. They think it is just as simple as a haircut, a change of clothes, a new name, and different toys. Adults should know better. They know that they’re setting their child up for a life of self loathing because “they were born wrong”/”their body is wrong”/”they were born in the wrong body”. They know medical transition is setting their child up for a lifetime of dangerous under-researched medical intervention just to attempt to appear like the opposite sex.
Why? Why put a child through that? Why not just love them for who they are? The only reasons I can come up with are parents who are afraid their child will be homosexual or bisexual, parents who are so sexist they can’t fathom someone being gender non-conforming, or parents who are using their child as a pawn in their own politics.
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Yeah, I don’t doubt this book is meant to target children, it is a children’s book after all. It does exactly what I said it does, it tells children “do you not like the things other boys/girls like? You’re the opposite sex.” It enshrines sexist stereotypes, sets kids up for failure (since humans can’t change sex), and does it all under the guise of “being yourself”.
Apparently “being yourself” means a lifetime of trying to change yourself into someone you never can be, but what do I know, I’ve just lived through it.
Everything Jackie in this book does is such a common girlhood experience. All of it was just a completely normal kid behaviour. I've also said in my childhood that I was a boy. I also was a dinosaur, a doctor, a cat, a horse and a lot of other things. When I was little, I would play with other girls and boys and we would switch pretending being moms and dads, so everyone would get to be in every role. I've hated my body as I grew older, because the restrictions of girlhood become tighter and crueler the older you get. I've wanted to be seen as person, but I've only been seen as girl.
When I became teenager, even though there wasn't any transgender regressivism shown down everyone's throats, I still thought about sex reassignment surgery, cause I hated bras, hated shaving, hated long hair, hated constantly being told that everything I liked wasn't for me, because I'm a girl. And boys of my age were completely free from all those restrictions.
When society constantly puts you down for the crime of being female and wanting to be a person, the hatred for womanhood is a logical conclusion.
I'm at precipice of 30 and only now I've finally grown into my body. And giant step in that road was widespreading of gender nonconforming women. So I could finally see, that nothing ever was wrong with me, I was just a normal girl, that grew up into a normal woman.
And transgender movement is once again robbing girls of the chance to just grow up and be seen as people. And that's horrifying.
Whenever I see people afraid of crossing the 25 year mark in their lives I want to tell them to cancel their subscription to societal expectations and start befriending actual old(er) people. Then you’ll realize how fortunate you are to be growing w time, how much life is surrounding you, waiting for you to do whatever you want w it
I still can’t get rid of feeling that I “wasted” my life. I still feel bad every time my birthday comes. On the other hand though, I learned several things...
- We stop developing at the age of 25, meaning it’s the actual time we reach full adulthood. Shouldn’t this be time when our life actually starts and not ends?
- Apparently, “young adult” is someone who is approximately from 20 to 40, depending on definition, middle age is defined either roughly 40-60 or, according to some psychologists, closer to 45-65. And it’s not counting older adults that come after that, who still exist and live their lives. Why the fuck do I feel old then? Who taught us that species that can live up to hundred years expire after turning 25? My grandma and her mother started to feel like their lives are fading away only when they crossed 75 years old mark. That’s 50 years more than number I have in my brain ingrained that is my “expiration date”. My great grandma died one month before turning 100, by the way, and out of these extra 15 years she lived after reaching threshold, only 3 were actually bad. She was climbing fences with me when she was 80.
- Adulthood™ is a scam. It just is. I heard a theory that we’re all “25″ after we reach this point because brain stop developing and the theory explored that it’s the reason why elderly are so grumpy, their mind is stuck in their youth, but body starts falling apart. Literally everyone I know who is in their 30s, 40s and 50s is the same dork as they were in 20s. When I talk to my grandma, at some point it feels like I’m talking to a teenager/young person from another time and not “an old woman”, whatever that might mean. And that is solely because she doesn’t keep with new things, being an introvert, my older friends who actually do keep with progress and innovations can easily “pass” as 20-somethings, especially online if you can’t see their face. All these restrictions, all this “age appropriate behavior”, weird ass misconceptions about boring adult life and even more boring elderly years is a scam and constructed conformity that benefits nobody. Adult life isn’t boring. By the way, contrary to popular belief, adults learn much better than children during their developing years, so don’t restrict yourselves when it comes to hobbies or education.
I like a lot of these reflections. But just want to add one thing: Your brain may be “done” developing in neurobiological terms at 25 *on average* ... but YOU are not done developing. Your experiences add up. Wisdom is a real thing that is built over time.
I am 24 myself and can only imagine who I will be once I am over 60 like one of my neighbors. She may not have ever traveled out of this country but she has been so many places in life. Situations I mean. And it really does show. She always pauses to think before answering on anything. She has equanimity in the face of shit I have no idea how to face.
Also not every old person is grumpy lol. Though I guess you may mean everyone hates facing chronic pain and illness, which is what advanced old age becomes. And yeah that is true. Your insight on how we can remember the elderly can be still just as vital and human in their consciousness as the young are is really important.
I'm turning 29 in a few days and I'm so goddam thankful that I found feminism when I did and that I got to see posts like this before 25, because this expiration date at 25 is such an absolute bullsh*t.
First half of my twenties absolutely sucked. I've only finally hit upturn a couple years back and now a year shy of 30 I feel like I'm finally living. This year may have been hard, but it was also a year that I've got to travel all on my own for the first time. I've finally gained some agency over my own life. I've started picking up new skills, rediscovered the joy of learning.
I don't care about our misogynistic pedophilic society anymore, that demands women to be forever young, imitating teenagers. I want to live, to grow old and become a crazy old hag, that had a life full of experiences and capable of facing any calamity without batting an eye.
.... Anyways, I will always be skeptical of radical feminists who choose to date/marry men. However, in my opinion, as long as they understand the true nature of men and admit that they're coping just to be happy with the men in their lives, whatever. I get it. I still love my dad despite the numerous things I've found out about him but thats a post for another time. And I still have romantic longings for men because I too am straight, so I get that aspect as well.
But as someone who was previously indoctrinated into conservatism and eventually altright nazi spaces from a young age, I have seen firsthand the shit men say and do when women aren't listening. You might say that those were a few bad men, but they weren't. They weren't. Men can be good but in the context of women and sex they can't be. They will still always hold onto their baseline misogyny, and they will always battle and struggle against it, and some of you can deal w that, but I can't deal with that shit anymore. I don't wanna make this a mile long textpost but this is the gist of it: date and fuck whoever you want. But don't deny the basic reality of men ladies. You're smarter than that.
I miss those days too. Nowadays asexuality is considered a sexual orientation. Not surprising, since people also managed to equate atheism and religion. I quess the only thing left to wait for is people adding "bald" to hair colours...
A billboard on my high street bears a public health message. “Black man over 45? You have an increased risk of prostate cancer. Early diagnosis can make a difference. Speak to your GP.” It ends with a Prostate Cancer UK logo and “Men, we are with you.”
I hope it prompted many men in my diverse borough to take a lifesaving test. When male biology is a medical issue the message is clear and direct. No one suggests this poster should address “people with prostates” so that trans men (ie natal females without prostates) won’t feel excluded. Or say “Men, trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth, we are with you.”
In tweets which have resulted in vile misogynist abuse, JK Rowling objected to the term “people who menstruate” replacing women and girls. “If sex isn’t real,” she wrote, “the lived reality of women globally is erased.”
The first six paragraphs of NHS guidance on prostate screening uses “men/man” nine times; the first nine paragraphs on cervical screening uses “women” once with a caveat about trans men. Health campaigns address “menstruators” or “people with cervixes” even when lack of clarity might undermine the message, especially for women with poor English.
Worst of all, campaigners against female genital mutilation, many of them survivors themselves, are told FGM is a “transphobic” term, because the clitoris (which is sliced off in this vile crime) is not the only female sex organ.
If you believe that “trans women are women” not just as a social/legal category (as I do) but are biologically female (as gender ideologues do) the penis is “female” too. Women must avoid words describing our bodies and reproductive capacity, even where they’re vital to define and combat abuse.
In a long, eloquent essay, JK Rowling has now laid out why she has taken a stance which has caused particular outrage in the nuance-free US. “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it,” she writes. Millions of women, who stay silent for fear of abuse such as Rowling endured, will be grateful.
I’d like those who denounce her, including graceless Daniel Radcliffe who owes everything to her genius, to answer one question. Why is “woman” a forbidden word, but “man” is not?
