Women's prisons and the Gender Recognition Act (2015)

I think if I were trans I'd find it really offensive to be called "a trans". Talk about dehumanising someone.

On the more general question, do you accept that intention counts? So that if there is a reason other than "to be mean" for specifying someone's birth sex, then it's not necessarily transphobic? For instance many non native English speakers don't grasp the new complicated language: you don't need a high level of English to know what a woman is, but many women from ethnic minorities don't know the word cervix, so may not know that "people with a cervix" means them. So using the word woman to include some biological males means that some women - especially the most vulnerable who don't speak much English - may miss out on essential health care.

This is also why, amusingly, one London borough, Newham, that was being held up by trans activists as particularly tolerant to trans people based on census results, turned out to have a large number of non English speakers who simply didn't understand the language used.

This risk was of course pointed out by all those nasty transphobes beforehand. That's what happens when activists insist that everyone must use their Humpty Dumpty language, where words mean what they want them to mean!

That's unclear. Possibly not at the moment, but we don't know for sure. What we do know is this (from Ireland's Gay News, so not transphobic, one assumes):

Under the Gender Recognition Act 2015, individuals in Ireland can self-identify their gender without medical or physical requirements. Currently, if a prisoner has legally changed their gender, they are placed in a facility corresponding to that gender.

It was actually @AKMC who specifically named lesbians. You said the above, which I assumed to be following on from the point about lesbians. No odds as it doesn't change my point: if you would not expect the IPS to decide on a case-by-case basis which biological females should be sent to a male prison because of their violent behaviour, as you mentioned above, yet you think it's appropriate for them to do so for transwomen prisoners, then you're effectlively saying that in your opinion, TW are not women.

That's a totally one-sided definition of transphobia which denies that there can ever be a conflict between women's rights and trans rights, and yet there are any number of instances where that is the case.

It even defines the recent Supreme Court judgment as transphobic. 🙄

a) Campaigning to remove rights from trans people.

In the UK, a number of groups which claim to “protect women’s rights” have campaigned to keep trans women out of women’s toilets, linking this campaign to discussions about the UK’s Gender Recognition Act and ignoring that the Equality Act (2010) protects trans people’s rights access to single sex spaces in line with their self-determined gender (find more info on the Equality Act). There is an allowance within the Equality Act to make exceptions to this, but any exclusion must be shown to be proportionate and justifiable and any exclusion must be made on a case by case basis. None of the national organisations interviewed as part of Stonewall’s Supporting trans women in domestic and sexual violence services reported having ever applied the exceptions in the Equality Act.

Campaigning against trans people’s human and civil rights constitutes transphobia.

b) Claiming there is a “conflict” between trans people’s human rights and those of any other group. 

This is a classic tactic of haters, fascists and others and has been used throughout history. Often the term “concerns” is a signifier for this. Just because you have “concerns” does not mean those “concerns” are valid. Indeed the fact that the term is being used regularly without evidence to support it suggests they are not. In the UK, people have said they are “concerned” that men might pretend to be trans women in order to gain access to women’s spaces. In the case of this example, campaigners claim that trans women ought to suffer because of the potential actions of cisgender men. There have been no documented cases of men pretending to be a trans woman to access women’s toilets for nefarious purposes.

IOW it's impossible to argue for biological women's rights without being deemed transphobic by that definition of the word.

Well I'm rejecting that entirely. We are allowed to argue for our rights. You are allowed to argue against them.

But it's not acceptable to try to silence us by claiming that we're committing a hate crime merely by asking for our rights. That's not how democracy works.

But nobody is denying you the right to use whatever language you want to talk about yourself. It's the attempt to force everyone else to use your language that's the issue. If I call someone a transidentifying male, that in no way forces you to do the same thing if you don't want to.

But in reality, women are the ones who are being denied the right to use whatever language we want to talk about ourselves: chest feeding instead of breast feeding, "birthing people" instead of mothers, "people with a cervix" or "menstruating people" instead of just WOMEN.

I'm not convinced that you have proved it, since you even got it wrong yourself originally, and the dictionary definition I gave didn't say that at all.

If I believed your claim (ie if you provided a reliable link, not just your personal opinion), I'd actually be perfectly happy to use the language in the government form that plodder posted up earlier, and say "people who identify as transgender", or "males/females who identify as transgender" when that's relevant, which it is not always - but is in this thread. It's excessively long but whatever. Copy and paste is good.

But the thing is, seeing as your definition of transphobia is that simply asking for women's rights is transphobic, then I can't see the point in making that effort, because even if I do type "men who identify as", you'll still find what I'm saying transphobic. And I'd much rather be called transphobic than give up on arguing for women's rights.

And do you agree that women are the correct people to define misogyny?