M&S diversity officers give staff pronoun badges……. a step too far?

I have read back through VS. I think you simply have a problem when put on the spot with a question you don’t want to answer. When asked what you think about someone. When asked if something you have said is fact or your opinion. When asked why’I don’t need to understand’.

I accept trans people feel how they feel and there is a reason why they exist that will be found so logically that will be the foundation of all my answers

Do you think that dragons exist and that a reason why they exist will be found, too?

I'm struggling with the next bit about how that 'logically' equates to anything, though .

Rosie51 there are clear safeguarding guidelines that will not allow a grown adult to attend school as a pupil. I agree with those guidelines but as I said before, this person happens to be trans, they are not the only grown adult who wants to live as a child. This is not a trans issue. It's a human issue.

They can live as they wish as long as they are causing no harm to others (human or animal).

I've absolutely never said that trans people should be in women's safe spaces. It doesn't make any difference to whether they should be allowed to live their lives as the gender they feel though and I believe their plight to be genuine after spending time listening to them.

I accept that trans people do use those safe spaces and there is often no way to know. I also accept that they really don't always have a choice, like you and I, they need to pee and poo.

I also don't personally feel that communal spaces for women work for me or all women and would like more options.

I also don't feel that women should be up on any sort of pedestal. I don't automatically feel safe around women.

Are we caught up now on why I don't have all the answers, why I understand it's a difficult subject for others and why I realise I can't solve the issues by myself?

trisher

Rosie51 I could if I had the inclination or the time search the internet and find you photos of "real" women who have facial hair. I CBA.
Incidently it's gender not sex.

So now we have it. As many of us have been saying all along, gender and sex are not the same thing.

Gender roles are learnt and vary from society to society, and change over time. They are not innate things that people 'just know', or women would still be riding side-saddle and having attacks of the vapours. Sex, on the other hand, is not a role. It is a state of being.

So, people can act outside of their gender norms, but it is not possible to change sex. For this reason, many women are uncomfortable with male-bodied people who have made no attempt to dilute their maleness with female hormones being in their spaces when they feel vulnerable, or where they feel that they may be in physical danger.

When male-bodied people have been socialised in a male way, which they almost exclusively will have been by the time they start to 'identify as female', the gender roles that shaped their upbringing are likely to remain. This means that there are situations where stronger, testosterone-fuelled people who have been socialised to be dominant are able to say, in the name of equality and diversity, that they are the same as (generally) smaller, weaker people who have been socialised to 'be nice', to make allowances and to step aside to make room for others, and expect to have this believed 'just because'.

When (some of) those male-bodied people have a history of committing sexual abuse against women, it doesn't take a genius to work out why a lot of women will not want to be in close proximity to them in situations where they are vulnerable, surely?

I don't doubt that there will be photos of women with facial hair online - there's not a lot you can't find if you look hard enough - but I'm not sure what that proves. If she has female DNA she is a woman, regardless of hair. If someone has male DNA, is wearing a suit, has male-patterned baldness, a deep voice and an Adam's apple, but insists in the face of opposition that he is female and has a right to strip off next to naked women and girls, it's odds on he is displaying a disrespect for female boundaries, and that his motives for doing so are not innocent.

And Stefonknee does come under Stonewall's transgender umbrella.

VioletSky

Why do I have to answer questions don't know the answers too?

I'm not arrogant enough to try

VS you must have an opinion on my question whether or not you accept Stefonknee as a transgender 6 year old girl because they feel and say they are, and whether or not you think they should have access to places for children. I can understand if you are reluctant to answer these questions if your answers don't fully align with your view that transwomen are absolutely women because they feel and say they are. For what it's worth I don't accept Stefonknee for who they say they are, and I'd not allow them anywhere near my 6 year old if I had one.

You'd have to read back through. I've answered questions I've been asked, sometimes the answer was "I don't know".

I'm not sure what you mean by me not knowing why I say things.

I accept trans people feel how they feel and there is a reason why they exist that will be found so logically that will be the foundation of all my answers

VS I think you’ve been asked why you think/say something, is it your opinion or a fact? And I asked you upthread why you said I ‘didn’t need to understand’ something but answer was there none. Is this because you don’t know why you say things? What are these questions that you don’t know the answer to?

Why do I have to answer questions don't know the answers too?

I'm not arrogant enough to try

trisher

Rosie51 I could if I had the inclination or the time search the internet and find you photos of "real" women who have facial hair. I CBA.
Incidently it's gender not sex.

Incidently it's gender not sex. wish you'd tell that to the transpeople who insist they have changed sex, so are entitled to enter single sex spaces. So at last you agree if toilets, changing rooms etc are designated single sex then transwomen must accept that and go use the male provision or better still campaign for a third space for themselves. We are making progress.

This whole argument of you can only be trans if you keep quiet about it just shows how much further there is to go to acheive equality. That people can't appreciate that is mind blowing.
Can you only be feminist if you keep quiet about it? Or Buddhist? Or Tory? Or gay/straight/bi? Should people wear badges declaring their beliefs or orientations about these things too, in the name of equality, or is it only important that people declare the aspects of their lives that you find so obsessively fascinating?

Just admit it trisher you have no logical argument for singling out the word woman to not have a definition so you can't or rather won't answer the question. Anybody can see you bring in ridiculous situations to justify your ideology, but when asked for logical back up you deflect ignore or deny. If you cannot define something how can you know it's applicable? Why won't you define woman as adult human female even if it is allowed to be loosely used for those who do not qualify. We need to adhere to the definition in some situations, it does not negate needing the definition just because some situations really don't matter. And actually in everyday life I'd prefer my changing rooms and toilets to exclude the people in the images I shared earlier.

I agree its gender. Fortunately we dont segregate spaces by gender because it would be impossible to do that.

trisher

So how do I tell an adult human female in every day life Rosie51? Do I need to carry some sort of test with me and demand a blood sample before someone passes? It's no good defining words by just using another group of words if that definition isn't any use in real life.

So actually you are saying that LRW would in everyday life use the same indicators of what is a woman as most of us. In other words his scientific knowledge is of comparitively little use. The idea that he would have greater perceptions is debatable. I could argue that someone who has studied life drawing would be more observant and have as much anatomical knowledge. It's irrelevant anyway. You simply cannot tell. You might get 99% right but the 1% you got wrong might be the person you describe as an adult human female- that's a woman !

The point, as I can't believe you haven't grasped, is that it matters in law.

If anyone is a woman because they say they are, then sex-based laws along with a definition of who is allowed into sex-based spaces, are meaningless.

You persist in bringing discussions down to whether you/we/anyone would look under people's clothes, or carry out a blood test (which would, incidentally, give proof and shows that sex differences are real, and that there is such a thing as an adult human female), or other invasive and intrusive means of determining sex, which is clearly an attempt to suggest that sex or gender differences are meaningless, but which entirely misses the point.

The point is that it really doesn't matter to most people, unless or until a male-bodied person wants to impose himself onto or into female spaces or by not declaring his maleness remove a woman's right to give informed consent to intimate touching. It also matters when someone who has benefited from male socialisation and positive discrimination declares himself as female in sex-based sociological research programmes and skews the results against women.

Nobody expects you to police anything. That would be foolish, and would massively over-step the boundaries of citizens' responsibilities. The point, however, is that these things do need to be policed, and the erosion of the idea of what a woman actually is is blurring the boundaries of the law, to the detriment of adult human females.

Rosie51 I could if I had the inclination or the time search the internet and find you photos of "real" women who have facial hair. I CBA.
Incidently it's gender not sex.

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202111/medium-223523-danielle-muscato-danielle-muscato-24-apr-at-10-07am-if-you-53257914.png https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202111/medium-127910-slide-1.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202111/medium-527029-bunce1a.jpg

trisher would you look at these two people in the first two images and immediately think this is a woman? This is what we're being asked to accept, say you're a woman and hey presto you are one, no debate. And then there's Pip/Philip Bunce who's a man some of the time and a woman some of the time, apparently this sex switching is easy as pie.

Rosie51

^So how do I tell an adult human female in every day life Rosie51^ For lots of everyday life it really doesn't matter if somebody of the male sex wants to present as a stereotypical woman. If you're sitting next to me on the train I really don't care. However if I'm in hospital, a prison, naked in a communal shower I damn well want you to be the biological definition. And if I should have the horror of being raped I do not want to have to use female pronouns for a man because he needs validating as something he's not. Transwomen are transwomen. If they were women to start with they wouldn't need to trans.
I'm still waiting so I'll ask the question again. Is it only the definition of the word woman that causes this confusion for you or are there other words? Are you able to define female. child, dog, tree?

So you are agreeing that there is no need for a definition of woman in everyday life. That in fact you do as I do and rely on how someone presents. So why are you constantly demanding definition?
Now I am expected to define other word for you. Really?

Chewbacca

*In other words his scientific* knowledge is of comparitively little use

Poor Robert Winston. All those years of research, teaching and helping people have babies when they wouldn't otherwise have been able to. And it's all been of little use because a granny in a chat room said so. The medico scientific world will be gutted.

LRW is entirely secure, and deserves all the praise and accolades he receives for his scientific work. However I think even he would agree that there is nothing scientific about identifying people in everyday life. In fact to equate his scientific statement with judgements we make on appearances is truly undervaluing and denigrating his scientific achievements. Only someone who is absolutely uncertain about their own perceptions would try to undermine a statement by using such an analogy.

So how do I tell an adult human female in every day life Rosie51 For lots of everyday life it really doesn't matter if somebody of the male sex wants to present as a stereotypical woman. If you're sitting next to me on the train I really don't care. However if I'm in hospital, a prison, naked in a communal shower I damn well want you to be the biological definition. And if I should have the horror of being raped I do not want to have to use female pronouns for a man because he needs validating as something he's not. Transwomen are transwomen. If they were women to start with they wouldn't need to trans.
I'm still waiting so I'll ask the question again. Is it only the definition of the word woman that causes this confusion for you or are there other words? Are you able to define female. child, dog, tree?

On here you are an unknown quantity. How do you know you’re a woman?

In other words his scientific knowledge is of comparitively little use

Poor Robert Winston. All those years of research, teaching and helping people have babies when they wouldn't otherwise have been able to. And it's all been of little use because a granny in a chat room said so. The medico scientific world will be gutted.

So how do I tell an adult human female in every day life Rosie51? Do I need to carry some sort of test with me and demand a blood sample before someone passes? It's no good defining words by just using another group of words if that definition isn't any use in real life.

So actually you are saying that LRW would in everyday life use the same indicators of what is a woman as most of us. In other words his scientific knowledge is of comparitively little use. The idea that he would have greater perceptions is debatable. I could argue that someone who has studied life drawing would be more observant and have as much anatomical knowledge. It's irrelevant anyway. You simply cannot tell. You might get 99% right but the 1% you got wrong might be the person you describe as an adult human female- that's a woman !

trisher

Rosie51 if I stood 50 people who looked like women in front of Lord Robert Winston and asked him to identify those who were "real" women do you imagine he would be any better at itthan you or I? If not why is his scientific opinion meant to influence my everyday life? It might apply in laboratories but we don't live in laboratories.

I'm still waiting for my tick list on how to identify a woman and what happens to the ones who don't pass.

I think most of us would get it right most of the time. I'd imagine Lord Robert Winston would probably do even better as he'd be very attuned to skeletal differences, walking gait etc but the point is that he confirms there are only two immutable sexes. Why do you have such difficulty in accepting that scientific fact? I have my definition of woman, it's adult human female. I'm waiting to find out if you have confusion over the definition of other words or is it just woman? Can you define female for example, or child, or dog?

VioletSky your post @ 11.20 ended with don't you think? You asked for my opinion and I gave it as no. Because my given opinion didn't chime with yours, you've stated yes it does. Is that your opinion or is it a verifiable fact? If it's just your opinion, I'll discard it. If it's a fact, you'll need to provide evidence to support your statement.

I didn't call you arrogant I asked a question. Do you really think you know more that Lord Robert Winston who has stated absolutely clearly that there are two sexes and only two sexes and that you cannot change from one to the other?