Regarding these trans-denying arguments that Emma cites and I often hear:
Quote from: emma-f on December 24, 2018, 12:29:24 PM
1. One cannot be a woman unless one is born female. Being able to have a transplanted uterus will not affect that. the argument is that gender is immutable and therefore all manner of theoretical treatments would not affect that in their minds. Even if full chromosome change was possible it would not affect the argument as one would still be born male (I look at this solely from male to female in this case);
This argument of biological essentialism should disturb any feminist. It is just the flip side of the patriarchal argument that women are fundamentally so different from men that exclusion from traditional male occupations or roles is justified on a biological basis. That is, if biology can be used to mandate womyn-born-women affinities and roles, then it also validates men-born-men roles.
This is built on the argument that gender does not exist other than as a depoliticized substitute for the concept of sexism, which flies in the face of scientific research showing a neurological basis for gender identity within each individual. (See
Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of "Gender", 2013, published as an open letter; see also
Biological Origins of Gender Identity - A Survey, 2014)
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2. One cannot be a woman unless one has grown up and thus experienced socialisation as a female. There is some conflict here between second wave and fourth wave feminists in particular, but essentially most TERFs subscribe to a second wave feminism and consider that unless you have experiences all the issues and problems of growing up female (eg. unwanted male advances etc) you cannot truly understand what being a woman is all about.
This fails one the face of it. Does a woman raised in a wealthy Manhattan family with an education through postgraduate law school, for example, really have more socialization background in common with a girl raised in a rural village in Sierra Leone, without access to water, electricity, education and healthcare, than with a socially outcast person assigned male at birth but raised in a similar background to her own?
The experience of being raised female or male varies wildly across place, time, and family social position. The normative male experience may differ significantly from the normative female experience for a given place, time, and social position, certainly, but the individual experience may vary wildly.
There are, after all, males who have the experience of unwanted sexual advances, and even sexual assault. There are males who are socially outcast, and treated as 'other' by more stereotypical males. I would contend that there may be such significant overlap in social experience that some Assigned Male At Birth individuals may have had an overall socialization closer to the normative feminine experience than some Assigned Female At Birth individuals. That is, the experiences may look more like overlapping Gaussian curves than the two distinctive binary non overlapping experiences that gender critical feminism assumes.