this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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For anyone who's curious about the actual messages, I think these are them:
I disagree with this, and I'd downvote it, but it sounds like they're just repeating what the supreme court said. I don't think it deserves a ban.
Completely defederating with us over this is insane
Well, they're right that it is pretty simple. Here's a fun experiment for anyone who thinks this isn't transphobic: try reading it again, but substitute black for trans. Totally reasonable they should have to use another bathroom, right?
That’s actually not nearly as extreme as I was expecting
It's worse imo, because it's the sneaky "reasonable" tactic that tries to pretend disconnection from its agenda. It's a filthy lying hat full of shit that doesn't even have the balls to present itself in truth.
And it works, because when people see straight through it and call it out for what it is, we end up with "concerned" and well meaning groups gathering themselves together discussing in depth whether or not it was reallly that bad and the overton window shifts further rightward.
Just because it's have a cordial tone, but it's pretty tranphobic all around the place. Master class on sealioning.
I mean the basic argument, that trans identifying peoples are in their own distinct categories outside of the typical gender binary, actually has some interesting meat to it.
Trans men and women do have different experiences from their cisgender counterparts, different medical needs, different journeys. None of which I am experienced enough in the subject to speak to.
Kinda loses me on their “I don’t use the word cis” part though
Op argument is that they are Real Women and then then Women Who Used To Have Penis, reducing the trans experience and identify to the sex they were born into. The part of not using the word cis is not even the worst, imo, like using the word "thing" to talk about people is pretty disgusting, or comparing "blonde women" with "trans women" like if gender identity was just a superficial aspect of a person instead of the fundamental one it is.
See, I just don’t think what you’ve deduced the argument to was what was actually said.
Think of it from a math perspective. The non-transphobic stance would be that woman is the superset which contains subsets of trans, cis, and others. The comment says they're two separate sets, woman and transwoman. This is why cis doesn't have to be used, because woman is sufficient to describe the set, because trans women aren't part of it.
This fucking website, "Let me just simplify that to the idea of math supersets for you"...and it works
That was very helpful way of reframing the discussion. Thank you.
Yeah honestly, I think saying trans women are not women, like that gatekeeping part is the main issue. You know, trans women aren't the same as cis women from like what they went through but they are still gatekeeping. Trans women are women. When you just say women without any further info people will derive that its referring to most probably cis women but this differentiation really does not matter. I think thats what the OP is arguing but who knows.
But personally it really depends on moderation style. I don't take huge offense to the feddit.uk mods not removing this. Its on the edge but if for example they don't have like gatekeeping rules about it then the other users should just downvote it. If it doesn't fall in lines with the rules then remove it but defederation of one comment is a lot if you ask me. But I get that they want to be a save space for LGBTQ+ people
Idk just saying that transwomen and cis women are different doesn't seem transphobic in and of itself, especially since the person seems to be saying that they should have the same rights now
Right, I agree, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying women and transwomen aren't the same.
As in, a rephrase of "transwomen aren't women".
Agreed - but the crucial point here is that the comment says that trans women are not women, which is a stance many would consider to be transphobia. I think the proper way to say it is that trans women and cis women are obviously not the same thing, but both are women.
This is the exact semantic they are talking about in the post. You just have different semantic parent objects. You want trans/cis with parent of woman, they used Transwoman/woman with parent as person. They are semantically equivalent.
They are not equivalent - one semantic assigns trans women under the category of women (not transphobic) while the other semantic assigns trans women as separate from the category of women (which many would say is transphobic).
Question ya wanna ask yourself is "WHY do they wanna differentiate between the two?"
What is the purpose of that distinction?
Is it medical care? 'Cos specific considerations are the only nice reason i can think of why you'd need to do that. Can think of a lot of nasty reasons why though.
The whole "I'm not saying 'cis'" is the biggest red flag. Typically in their mind it's because cis means "normal" instead of just being an adjective. It's like the people that say they have nothing against the gays (TM) but they don't like it shoved in their faces. Nothing against them but don't exist near me energy.
It's a very polite post on the surface, but do note that they refer to trans women as "it". I think they're being very polite because they know that saying "I think trans women are just deluded men and I don't want to respect those things" doesn't go as well.
They don't. Read the text carefully. The use of "it" doesn't seem to be in relation to trans women.
I agree it confusing, but the use of it seems to be more general. Note how the rest of the text doesn't use such a construction.
The UK is known for polite transphobia.
Blahaj admins trumping up something minor into a crisis so they can claim they're being discriminated against and enact a wild overreactive response?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. Well... not that shocked.
I mean in fairness, the original messages are a little bit ignorant yes. Mostly I was just trying to quote the accurate background material so people could see the primary source information.
Thank you for posting it. Good to know that Blahaj made the right choice for its users, which really wasn't obvious otherwise.
I'm so annoyed by these pseudointellectuals who can't seem to grasp the relatively simple difference between "sex" and "gender".
I don't understand what this has to do with the difference between sex and gender. Is "woman" a sex or a gender?
'Female' is a sex, while 'woman' is a gender.
Sex refers to biological characteristics like chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy. That's why we say things like 'female dog' or 'male cat'—we're talking about biological sex, not identity.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social and cultural construct—it includes roles, behaviors, and identities that society associates with being a 'woman' or a 'man.' That's why it makes sense to say 'a woman wears makeup' or 'a man wears a suit,' but not 'a male wears makeup.' Saying 'a male wears makeup' sounds off because makeup is associated with gender expression, not biological sex.
The wikipedia article is a jumbled mess then.
That seems to be an incorrect definition. Shouldn't it be "A woman is a human identifying as female"?
It can vary on the context, but "female" and "male" are "supposed" to refer to biological sex alone.
That's why it can be offensive when men talk about women as "females", and why it also would sound slightly silly to talk about — for instance — women penguins. "Female penguins" sounds much more correct, doesn't it?
Women penguins only sounds weird because that's not the normal word for it. They're girl penguins or lady penguins. "Woman" feels too formal and human.
And why isn't "women birds" the normal word for it? And do you think scientific studies call them girls or ladies?
Nah.
You can, but it works because it's essentially joke-y, because clearly female penguins aren't women, but female.
Kinda like referring to a granny as "young lady/miss", even though everyone knows they're not.
Scientific studies also use male and female in reference to human subjects' gender identities. Woman and female are both incredibly old terms which have been used interchangeably as there was no widespread concept of gender identity in the English-speaking world until recently. We had to invent the term "gender identity" to separate gender from sex because they'd previously been used to refer to the same thing.
You seem to be saying that a trans man is female because he was assigned the female sex at birth. Have I understood that correctly?
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction
https://www.etymonline.com/
Small sample of studies using male/female to refer to gender:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6748626/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10685922/
Well, sort of. I know sex isn't as black-and-white as people make it out to be, but since we're already having troubles explaining gender being a spectrum, I'd thought I'd leave out the more nuanced bits in favour of succinctness.
I mean yeah, the word gender, meaning "male or female sex" is from as early as 15th century, but only came to be the more common word for "sex" as "sex" started getting erotic connotations.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
Edit whops I posted before finishing writing just a moment
As I was saying language nor gender identities are never as black and white as we'd like them to be. So yeah, you are right in that in different contexts, scientific studies like you say, may as well use female and male to refer to subjects. As in male for trasnmen and female for transwomen. As it should. If they're not like studying uteruses, I don't see why them being trans would matter.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men.
So the problem is the word "female", not the word "woman", am I understand this correctly? If I am, then what should the correct sentence/statement be? "A woman is an adult ..."
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely confused because I thought XX -> female, XY -> male, but there are a bunch of combinations that present themselves / have a male or female phenotype. Is woman supposed to be the gender and female the sex?
Yes.
But like I've said, the issue is that most people don't know their difference between "gender" and "sex". Hell, my native language doesn't even have two distinct words, which is a huge negative when trying to educate them on the subject.
And because they don't understand the difference, they sometimes, or all the time, think "woman" refers to the biological sex, and thus they insist "men can't become women", because biologically you don't change from male to female, and that is true. But your gender does change from masculine to feminine, so it is not wrong to say that men can become women.
It's honestly just a lack understanding. And that lack of understanding stems from fear of seeming stupid, so they fear talking about it and interacting with the subject. Which is why it's called transphobia, despite those people not necessarily being directly afraid of trans people.
Languages, or gender identities, are never quite as straight forward as we'd like them to be.
"Biological sex" refers to many different traits, some of them changeable, some of them not. It would not be inaccurate to refer to medical transition as changing one's biological sex
Okay, that is true enough, biologically you do change, but not genetically, or gonadly, at least not yet. Who knows what the future brings?
I'm just trying to "use their language" to get the ideas through, not trying to differentiate between trans and cis. In fact that's sort of been my point that there's usually just no need to.
I’ve never heard of a gender/sex distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘female’, what are you basing this on? By whom is this distinction ‘supposed’ (as you put it) to be a thing?
I doubt the general public would agree, anyway. In the Cambridge Dictionary, I find ‘female’ defined as ‘belonging or relating to women or girls’
You may of course argue your definition of ‘female’ should be the correct one, but it’s not the common one at the moment. I would think it’d be strange, though, if you couldn’t refer to a trans woman as ‘female’, which your distinction seems to imply.
The general public are a subjective take, and also, dumb as fuck.
Yeah, sex is related to gender, but it's not the same thing.
If its your colloquial necessity to objectify women, then I don't know, be equal and objectify the trans girls as well.
But if you don't, then it's gonna be preferable to address them as "women", not "females".