The implication that women can get pregnant but that men cannot is deeply harmful and transphobic. Please reconsider your assertion.
I don't mind if you live your life and get your needs met, but I quite resent the way cishet women are getting crapped all over in the process. So, no, I will not reconsider my assertion. To the best of my knowledge, it is completely 100% accurate for biological sex. I see no reason why it should be denied to serve the political agenda of a small subset of people when denying it actively harms people like me when people like me are a much larger percentage of the population.
“trans-erasing” would be more strictly accurate of the statement (“transphobic” is often used for all anti-trans discrimination, but it's not really a great generic term.)
OTOH, your stated rationale: fear of trans people and the beliefs you associate with them, is precisely transphobic.
> I find the position of a lot of trans people to be deeply harmful to the rights of cishet women.
And that may or may not be a valid opinion, but that's irrelevant to the fact that claiming that only women can get pregnant is false.
> To the best of my knowledge, it is completely 100% accurate for biological sex.
Biological sex is multidimensional; the usual way legal gender is initially ascribed is based on presentation of external genitalia at birth, which while it is a biological sex trait and has a correlation with other biological sex traits, is not necessarily aligned with what, if any, functional reproductive capacity exists.
The idea that “biological sex” is a unidimensional binary trait is a common but erroneous idea.
When trans people can figure out how to speak to their issues without silencing cishet women trying to speak to their own, I will be happy to ally with them. But my experience so far has been that my interactions with people who identify as trans or nonbinary have been completely poisonous.
I am fine with supporting their desire to live as they choose. But I am really fed up with their agenda actively harming me and other cishet women. Trans individuals get vastly more friendly, sympathetic support on HN than cishet women do. The idea that I have some obligation to invest more of my time and energy in benefitting them when they have done nothing but actively harm me is deeply offensive to me.
How specifically? What specific issues faced by cishet women are erased by recognizing that becoming pregnant is not uniquely associated with women (cishet or otherwise)?
The issues of trans people are different than those of cishet individuals. But trans people act like saying that is somehow othering of them -- unless they are saying it to further their political agenda. There is zero reason anyone should feel compelled to come in here and piss on me for trying to make the point that I believe sexism will also persist. That it is not fundamentally different from racism in that regard.
Male to female transexuals face different problems from cishet women. They seem to have a much easier time fitting in on HN than I have had. And as best I can tell it is in part because powerful men can help a transexual and in the process signal that they aren't up to funny business, that it isn't rooted in sexual desire. But an awful lot of powerful men will do not a damn thing for me and I am quite confident that part if the reason is because they fear potential scandal. They fear people will talk because I am a woman.
I was quite open on HN about being homeless and having a genetic disorder. No one here feels compelled to do shit all for me to help me resolve my issues. My sob story has completely failed to cause people to take seriously my request for help to figure out how to make money online.
I in no way believe your question to be sincere interest in my problems as a cishet woman. Every interaction I have ever had with you suggests to me it is merely a politically correct means to be completely dismissive and contemptuous. So I am going to leave a couple of links here and then, most likely, not engage further. Because the situation here where there is only one woman on the leaderboard of HN and she can get no real support of a sort that will help resolve her financial problems and everyone is completely comfortable with literally watching her starve while standing idly by and then I have to put up with crap like this on top of it -- there just is no polite, politically correct means to reply to that. It is galling and I can't believe people subject me to this and then act like I am somehow the one in the wrong.
http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-art-of-nonch...
http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/11/genevieve-traylo...
So consider me completely and totally unimpressed with your posturing. You could have kicked a smidgeon of support my way a long time ago instead of being one of the people here actively making my participation on HN more challenging and unwelcoming. Your consistent choice to be a thorn in my side makes your good guy act ring hollow to my ears.
I've spoken to you exactly as I would to someone who I knew personally and greatly respected.
> You routinely talk to me like I am an idiot.
Well, routinely might be overstating the case given our limited interaction, but its true that I treat you exactly like everyone else on HN (except the people I don't respond to at all), which means that I would treat an idiot the same way.
> The issues of trans people are different than those of cishet individuals.
The issued of trans people are different than those of cis people, sure, and, for intersectional reasons, those of transhet people are different than those of cishet people; “different” as in overlapping rather than disjoint, but, sure, that’s not a point in dispute anywhere. (Well, except among people who deny that trans people actually exist, rather than being playacting cis people, which is actually a distressingly common viewpoint.)
> But trans people act like saying that is somehow othering of them
I've never seen an example of that, though I'm sure it's happened sometime, somewhere.
I've seen people pointing on that certain issues are not unique to, say, cishet women, such as pregnancy, which can affect people who are neither cis nor het nor women.
> There is zero reason anyone should feel compelled to come in here and piss on me for trying to make the point that I believe sexism will also persist.
I saw people disagreeing with some of the supporting points, but I didn't see anyone doing anything that can fairly, even metaphorically, be described as pissing on you. (Also, your argument seemed more normative: that sexism “needs” to persist than descriptive, e.g., that sexism will persist. While I don't see any reaction extreme enough to match your description, normative arguments often are more emotionally charged than descriptive ones.)
> Male to female transexuals face different problems from cishet women. They seem to have a much easier time fitting in on HN than I have had.
The first statement is clearly true, the second less so, but even if both are, I'd be hesitant to assume that they are linked.
The issues facing any given cishet woman may not be the issues facing cishet women generally.
> And as best I can tell it is in part because powerful men can help a transexual and in the process signal that they aren't up to funny business, that it isn't rooted in sexual desire.
I don't think that that is at all any more the case with cishet powerful men helping a transwoman compared to a ciswoman. (I suspect that it's difficult in either case, and the extreme and notorious fetishization of transwomen may make it even harder in that case.)
> But an awful lot of powerful men will do not a damn thing for me and I am quite confident that part if the reason is because they fear potential scandal.
Regardless of the relation, or not, to problems people with other traits face, that's quite possibly true and quite sad if it is true. I'm not really familiar enough with your own circumstances, but it's certainly a common issue in our society, as is such support only being offered with the kind of strings that, well, are the reason the fear of scandal exists. This is certainly a problem that women in general face (cis or trans, though perhaps in slightly different ways.)
> I was quite open on HN about being homeless and having a genetic disorder. No one here feels compelled to do shit all for me to help me resolve my issues.
AFAICT, gender, orientation, etc., aside, HN isn't really the kind of community where people generally participate to provide that kind of support. I'm not saying it never happens, just that it's not central to the nature of the community such that it not happening is a noteworthy event that needs a special explanation.
> My sob story has completely failed to cause people to take seriously my request for help to figure out how to make money online.
If I had insight to offer on that point I would.
> I in no way believe your question to be sincere interest in my problems as a cishet woman.
It's a sincere interest in understanding what the argument is that you were making about erasure of the problems of cishet women. But you are entitled to disbelieve that, and to not respond to it: that avoids any opportunity for productive discussion, but if you don't believe that's possible because of your preconceived notions about me, nothing I actually say is going to make any difference.
But it's going to be hard to have any discussion if every discussion is secretly about the preexisting grudges you have against the HN community and individual members and not about whatever the discussion appears to be on its face.
> Your consistent choice to be a thorn in my side makes your good guy act ring hollow to my ears.
I have neither made such a choice nor tried to put on a good guy act, but to the extent that my posts have made you feel unwelcome, to the extent I have been a thorn in your side during the troubles you have experienced, I regret that.
You voice regret while doing nothing different.
Please stop bothering me. I consider it to be actively malicious behavior at this point. If you genuinely regret it, than at least leave me alone henceforth as the least worst thing you can personally do for me.
While you've been quite vocal about your emotional reactions—which I do regret—you've been far less clear about the concrete actions to which tiu had those reactions, which makes it very difficult to assess whether I ought to do anything differently and, if so, what (the same is true of your criticism of the HN community more generally; you clearly feel you've gotten inadequate support and others have gotten better treatment, but it's not at all clear what you expected HN members to do for you and how others have been better treated.
> Please stop bothering me. I consider it to be actively malicious behavior at this point.
It's a public forum, and you don't get to exclude people from responding to you because of your interpretations of their motivations.
I'm certainly willing to consider criticism of things you think I've done wrong, but merely responding to your public posts, as such, is not something I’m going to avoid.
If you choose to see that as “actively malicious”, well, it may not be reasonable, but there’s really nothing I can do about that, is there?