Jesus christ that thread:
What bugs me - for personal reasons - is: what about people who have had hysterectomies/ovariectomy and/or mastectomy? Do they cease to be woman? Or people who are intersexed? Or the myriad other things that can make "gender" hard to determine from their biology? And at the end of all that being trans is just another aspect of it all.
When you start policing the terms to tightly all that shit falls apart. Just let people fucking live their lives as they like.
Note: I can't watch the vid right now in work.
For, like,
ever women who don't menstruate for whatever reason have tolerated 'women' being used to refer to people who menstruate because they understood it was a generic catch-all term that wasn't meant to catch every single edge case or be an ironclad rule. Outside of a clinical setting, people accept that sometimes terms will be used to refer to groups they belong to in ways that don't necessarily directly include them because casual conversation is often kind of loose.
Post-menopausal women have, historically, not lost their shit every time they see a tampon commercial referring to the product as something for women because they get the broader context.
So the above post is weird, because this whole subject is because a specific subset of women want to police usage of the word to make sure it
always includes them. At which point I'm not clear on when the catch-all term women would
ever be appropriate--if we're discarding the biological because sex and gender are different, are we going to hard enforce gender stereotypes? Because otherwise, seriously, which situation would you ever be referring to all women that wouldn't either include people who don't feel the situation applies to them or exclude people who feel it does, but identify as men?
I also don't understand how trans women receiving fully successful and function uterus (and I guess ovary?) implants would be a gotcha in this case--then the trans women would menstruate and just be included in the 'woman' umbrella anyway. The objection isn't people not wanting to be lumped in with trans women, it's basically just menstruation isn't fun to think about
or to say so maybe don't insist on using it as a descriptor.
Edit: This is not going to end well for this poster:
Honestly? I understand where she's coming from. Transgender people don't need to be centered in every single conversation. For example, if we're talking about abortion, it's okay -- and, I'd argue, the right thing to do -- to say "women" and "women's rights." And "women need access to abortion." And then, when appropriate or called for, expand that conversation to include trans men and non-binary people. Because it's ten-year-old girls that are being raped in this country and being forced to give birth. Ten-year-old girls.
And don't think I haven't noticed that, when it comes to "inclusive" language like this, it's only women who are having their place in their conversation subsumed by other people.
