juliet

More just that there has been a lot of it, this week.

If you asked me to guess, I'd say that you don't feel any resonance with modern stereotypes of womanhood (and possibly motherhood), so you've made the logical choice to disassociate yourself from them. I do get the logic, but I think a better choice (especially, given your position of relative privilege) would have been to stand up to those stereotypes and be a good counterexample.

I've called myself a woman for most of my life and been perfectly happy to ignore and/or 'stand up to' stereotypes as required throughout. I don't feel it's a particularly good fit as a label; my primary feelings about gender are that I'd rather not, thanks. So I don't, any more. Other people with similar feelings may make different decisions, which is their choice, just as mine is my own. I don't think that gender identity is something one *owes* to anyone else.

Stereotypes of gender do of course exist and get pushed on people (children especially, as has been extra clear to me since L was born, but adults too) all the time, which is infuriating rubbish which limits people of all genders. I'm not going to stop pushing back on that because I don't use one of the main two gender-labels any more. And it's not like I have suddenly thereby become personally immune to the effects of those stereotypes, because I am still put into the 'woman' box by the vast majority of the people I interact with. But even if that weren't the case it's still a pretty important part of my feminism that gender stereotypes are toxic bullshit.

School changing rooms are shitty environments for all children -- the absence of any trans kids in my class at school most certainly didn't keep me safe. Trans kids are much (much) more likely to be at risk in school than they are to pose any kind of threat to cis kids. As is pretty clear from listening to the kids I support through Mermaids and the experiences of the trans kids I know personally. And the tenor of the current debate in the UK puts those kids even more at risk, which is properly scary.

Believe me, I really do know where people are coming from on this. I've been engaged with this stuff for actually decades plural by now. If I haven't read that particular article before I've read others like it. I've spent a lot of time discussing it and thinking things through. I know where people are coming from; I disagree.

I'd rather not take this discussion further on here (it's been a bit of a week tbh); would be happy to talk about it in person though (assuming cons etc do ever return in The Future Times).