Horrible transphobic piece in the Observer

Kim Fierce said:

http://www.everydayfamily.com/blog/pregnant-man-wants-fourth-child/

Here is another example of a transphobic piece claming to not be . . . it was posted in September but I just read it now. What do you think? The writer is claming Thomas Beattie is not really a man because a man would never voluntarily go through pregnancy and a C-section.

Click to expand...

Lili Elbe was one of the earliest recipients of gender reassignment surgery. That did include a uterus transplant but rejection of the organ caused her death. That was in 1931.

There are no doubt people more expert on the subject than me, but it doesn't sound unfeasible to me that a transwoman might want to become pregnant and bear a child, but medical science isn't currently up to it. And no doubt there are transwomen who wouldn't want to have children if they could. I don't think there are any automatics here, same as I would never suggest that a ciswoman would always want to become a mother. I know plenty of ciswomen who are childless by choice.

*clicks link, sees name Julie Burchill*

That troll is still around??

She's always been vile. I began avoiding anything she wrote fifteen years ago...

mirandashell said:

When you live here, you can just say 'Julie Burchill' and those are words enough.

Click to expand...

Britain's Ann Coulter for our American friends...

Kim Fierce said:

http://www.everydayfamily.com/blog/pregnant-man-wants-fourth-child/

Here is another example of a transphobic piece claming to not be . . . it was posted in September but I just read it now. What do you think? The writer is claming Thomas Beattie is not really a man because a man would never voluntarily go through pregnancy and a C-section.

Click to expand...

I happened to come across it. It wasn't as vile as the Burchill piece but it was still an ignorant piece of garbage with a liberal sprinkling of "I'm not racist transphobic, but..." stuff in it.

Anyway, there's some trans men who dislike him for that reason, but I think it's his right to have kids, and I also think "this is the one true way to transition" is a bad thinking habit in the trans community. A trans man who decides to get pregnant is no less a man than anyone else. And this ignorant bigoted woman doesn't know enough about the subject to have any right to spew her crap on it.

eyeblink said:

Lili Elbe was one of the earliest recipients of gender reassignment surgery. That did include a uterus transplant but rejection of the organ caused her death. That was in 1931.

There are no doubt people more expert on the subject than me, but it doesn't sound unfeasible to me that a transwoman might want to become pregnant and bear a child, but medical science isn't currently up to it. And no doubt there are transwomen who wouldn't want to have children if they could. I don't think there are any automatics here, same as I would never suggest that a ciswoman would always want to become a mother. I know plenty of ciswomen who are childless by choice.

Click to expand...

Totally. But Thomas Beattie is a transsexual man, which mean he can (and has) been pregnant.

Just as an aside, how is "cis" pronounced? In this context I've only seen the word in print, not spoken aloud.

If I remember my Latin from school I'd think "kiss" or "chis" but it could just as easily be "siss". Anyone know?

Mara said:

Anyway, there's some trans men who dislike him for that reason, but I think it's his right to have kids, and I also think "this is the one true way to transition" is a bad thinking habit in the trans community. A trans man who decides to get pregnant is no less a man than anyone else. And this ignorant bigoted woman doesn't know enough about the subject to have any right to spew her crap on it.

Click to expand...

I've gotten weird looks for saying this in RL, but I'm also of the opinion that a cis man who decides to get pregnant (should the tech present itself in the future) is also no less of a man. There's such an odd attitude towards what women should do to be women and vice-versa. I wish everyone would just live and let live unless it's life threatening.

Anyway, I've been following this thread for a while. Reminds of a book a friend of mine on GR nearly threw across the wall for going on about fake women vs real women... actually, I think it was by Julie Burchill, too.

A friend of mine has recently undergone the transition process and we had just got used to her being a her when her wife announced that she was pregnant... which sort of answered some of our not ever expressed questions about how far she had gone along that process to date... it also says something about how much we had accepted her as a woman that many of us were baffled about how she could make her pregnant having completely forgotten that she used to be a man.

I agree... the whole issue of a woman being someone who gives birth is really annoying to me too. My wife has never given birth and never intends to, does that mean she is not a woman?

Julie Burchill still up to her same old tricks, eh? I've been encountering her diatribes on and off for decades. First read her in NME a looong time ago, back when she was a very rare bird indeed - a working-class, female journo. I had high hopes for her. All hopes were dashed, even before she started to crawl up Thatcher's arse. What a disappointment she has turned out to be.

areteus said:

A friend of mine has recently undergone the transition process and we had just got used to her being a her when her wife announced that she was pregnant... which sort of answered some of our not ever expressed questions about how far she had gone along that process to date... it also says something about how much we had accepted her as a woman that many of us were baffled about how she could make her pregnant having completely forgotten that she used to be a man.

I agree... the whole issue of a woman being someone who gives birth is really annoying to me too. My wife has never given birth and never intends to, does that mean she is not a woman?

Click to expand...

I posted a comment talking about the straight man with a wife and kids who learned late in life that he had ovaries, as well as a straight woman I've heard of born without a uterus. (I never met the woman, but I work with someone who was a surrogate for her children.)

Gender is fluid, flexible, and the supposed gender roles are NOT set in stone OR nature. Male seahorses give birth, some animals can change their gender, lionesses bring home the bacon, and etc. etc. So many of us have been brainwashed about gender.

Yep, so very true... Even in terms of genetics there are more than the well known XX and XY combos (vague memory from an ancient genetics lecture, will have to look this up to confirm it...).

Socially and culturally there are so many different definitions and roles...

In a LRP game a friend of mine ran a few years back (Sci Fi, based loosely on Whedon's Firefly) they had a planet where the natives were assigned a gender based on the job they did rather than birth. So, someone doing something that was traditionally considered to be a 'male' role was expected to act like a man and vice versa. They did it to make a point about gender roles in society and also to confuse the players when a clearly female character put on blatantly exaggerated 'male characteristics'.

Apparently it was based on some concepts from Native American culture but exaggerated.

But yes, gender is fluid and the strict binary definitions are becoming more and more outdated.

eyeblink said:

Just as an aside, how is "cis" pronounced? In this context I've only seen the word in print, not spoken aloud.

If I remember my Latin from school I'd think "kiss" or "chis" but it could just as easily be "siss". Anyone know?

Click to expand...

I assumed it was like 'siss' but I could easily be wrong. The term makes me rather squeamish for some reason and I'm not sure why. Possibly memories of the fad of using 'het' as a swearword in some social circles I was acquainted with back in the 90s.
I have had a few friends over the years who were born one and became another but they avoided the politics and weren't academics so I don't even know anyone personally who even uses the term.

Gender is a funny thing though. My dad's read up a fair amount on the science behind it, especially with chromosomes and it's far more muddled than the majority of people realize. There's even a group of descendants of one person somewhere in South America or something who are all one gender until around the age of ten, when about half of them switch spontaneously.

The problem is that so many people have this fixed concept of what 'normal' is inside their heads, and then freak out whenever something is even a little outside of it. Which is generally why I consider them to be stupid.

areteus said:

Yep, so very true... Even in terms of genetics there are more than the well known XX and XY combos (vague memory from an ancient genetics lecture, will have to look this up to confirm it...).

Click to expand...

Here's one. There are some males out there with up to three 'x' chromosomes...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome

That's one of them...

Basically, being male is actually a genetic mutation (we are missing a whole arm of one of our chromosomes...)

eyeblink said:

Just as an aside, how is "cis" pronounced? In this context I've only seen the word in print, not spoken aloud.

If I remember my Latin from school I'd think "kiss" or "chis" but it could just as easily be "siss". Anyone know?

Click to expand...

I pronounce it as "siss", the way non-classics-scholars tend to pronounce the first syllable of "Cicero", and for about that reason. While it's not a hard and fast rule, English really, really likes a C followed by I or E to be that S sound, and it seems easiest to follow the most common phonics rules when dealing with relatively new terminology. (Mind, if everyone else pronounces it differently, I'd like to find out as soon as possible so that I can standardize to convention.)

I say "siss," but I've heard it's supposed to be pronounced, "siz."

I learned when I was pregnant that for the few few weeks in utero, the male and female embryos are identical . . the genitalia was described as "a bump and a slit" in what I read and then around 6 to 12 weeks (can't remember exactly) that is when the bodies diverge based on chromosomes.

It's 'siss', for those who were wondering.

Sonneillon said:

It's 'siss', for those who were wondering.

Click to expand...

Cognate with the cis- prefix as in Cisalpine, which means on the Roman/Italian side of the Alps, for instance. The cis- part is the Latin prefix cis- "on the near side of, on this side of," derived from the Latin preposition cis meaning "on this side of" (usually used in terms of place or time).

Cis- is the opposite of trans- in terms of the way the cis-prefix is used.

Whether the s of cis- is an s or a z is going to partly depend on the speaker.

How do you say Cisalpine? It's sometimes tricky to tell if its a true sibilant or a fricative.

Thanks everyone. I've never heard the word said aloud, so I was wondering. So "siss" it is.

Almost makes up for the vile original.

The saddest thing is that feminism is all about liberating people from rigid ideas about the immutability of gender, about not stopping people from being able to do things just because they are female. It certainly shouldn't be about telling people that they are not quite female enough to be awarded with a shining medal saying: "Oppressed".

Click to expand...

Exactly.