Thursday 23 August 2018

What makes a woman anyway?

An article I want to keep a link to: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html


Very brief summary

Different brains in men and women are because they have been shaped by a different experiences.

Many people who call themselves progressive ...— are buying into the idea that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us: the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries.

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women shouldn’t get to define women - that’s something men have been doing for far too long,and it needs to stop. .... Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists.
....

The “I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by some trans people .... is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.