I'm going to try to gather the energy to actually talk about the TERFs in the replies here rather than just yelling at them --

The thing is, TERF ideology makes the hypothetical in the OP logically impossible and meaningless

This is why TERFism is a form of "biopessimism" https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1384145600455737350

The TERF worldview is that the DEFINITION of a man is someone in the "sex class" that doesn't get pregnant and can't miscarry

The hypothetical is a contradiction in terms - like a Marxist saying "Well if capitalists had to work for a living then jobs wouldn't suck so much"

The TERF worldview is that everything about sexism and patriarchy is a logical consequence of "the facts of our biology"

The definition of being a man is not getting pregnant and exploiting the reproductive labor of people who can, which is the definition of being a woman

So therefore in this worldview if a cis man suddenly woke up one day with a uterus *that fact would make him a woman* and he would immediately be oppressed the way all women are

The hypothetical is a logically impossible fantasy, it just doesn't make sense, it's like asking "Wouldn't the world be a better place if landlords were the ones who paid rent to tenants?"

You could imagine punishing a specific landlord by taking his title to the building so you become the landlord and he becomes the tenant (just as 2nd-wave TERFs had plenty of "emasculation" revenge fantasies)

But switching all landlords with all tenants doesn't change anything

It's a pessimist worldview

The world the hypothetical imagines - "What if the 'sex class' that gave birth *were men* in the sense that they had all the privilege and respect and power men as a class have in our world?" is something TERFism outright dismisses as possible

I bring this up because honestly, despite all the time I spend arguing with TERFs, I feel like I get it - I am a pessimistic person and have a natural sympathy with pessimistic ideologies

I've gotten it since I was a fan of James Tiptree, or before

Actually before that even

It was a discussion I had with my mom when I was watching TV, specifically the first-season episode of Sliders "The Weaker Sex"

Note: I don't actually remember anything about this episode and I was like ten years old at the time so I didn't understand it accurately either

Looking at the summary now I'm pretty sure I misunderstood it (reproductive biology works the same in this world and the "gender flip" is more complicated than I perceived it as)

But I told her "This is a world where all the women are men and the men are women"

And she actually got mad

"This show is stupid, what does that even mean? How is that not just the same as our world? What's different about it?"

"Well the 'stronger sex' look like women in our world but they're stronger like men"

"But the reason men and women look different is that men are stronger! Men are stronger because they're physically bigger! Men being stronger is why they don't have to have long hair and makeup and women do!"

(My mom's not a radfem, she's a conservative Christian, but even so)

Anyway her surprisingly intense anger at a stupid science fiction TV show left me with a lot to think about

"If men could have babies, they would BE women, and they'd have all the stuff we think of that makes women women, like being smaller and having breasts" stuck in my head

I have to give credit to my mom in that from a very young age, probably unintentionally, she both raised my standards for science fiction "What if?" scenarios ("The question is what DOESN'T change if you flip X and Y") and got me thinking about feminism and gender

I mean, I think she's wrong in the end, and the TERFs are wrong, but this conflict reveals where we are as a culture right now - it's the conflict over attempting to imagine the unimaginable

Again, my mom's not a radfem, she's a conservative, but sometimes I think the difference between the two is how pissed off you feel on a given day

There's a straight line from "Of course women are the weaker sex due to the biology of childbearing" to "Of course women do all the childrearing because of breastfeeding and hormonal bonding in utero

Of course men are worse at those jobs, of course men work outside the home"

I would argue that as justifiably as trans people dunk on these insensitive cis-feminism bromides ("If MEN had periods the government would mail everyone free tampons", "If MEN got pregnant maternity leave would be in the constitution"), the fact that they exist is hopeful

The pop feminism mindset that creates these little slogans is opposed to TERFism

The people who write them don't have trans people in mind and are as likely to be transphobic as anyone else

But they chafe against the assumptions of cissexist society nonetheless

The hunger to imagine a world where things can be different, to imagine a definition of "men" that ISN'T "rooted in the facts of reproductive biology", to pull the oppressive structures of our world apart, ever so slowly, and rearrange them

Like, the way these conversations generally go nowadays is someone posts a meme like this, and then a trans man goes "Uhhh trans men DO menstruate and get pregnant" and then the TERFs pile on going "And it didn't change anything, did it? Which proves trans men aren't men!"

Because as angry as TERFs are about patriarchy their initial impulse is always to surrender to it

But leaving aside that out trans men are <1% of the population so asking "Why haven't you changed all of society yet?" is somewhat unfair trans men DO talk about how it IS different

This is out of my lane to directly talk about and in particular the question "do trans men experience misogyny?" is fraught

Trans men are, still, a very small minority in the total population, and one with a wide diversity of experiences, especially in terms of "passing"

But transition does fuck with how people perceive you and how they treat you - by nature, that's the whole point

And transphobia against trans men is not the same thing as misogyny - I would argue the intensity of it from cis women IDed as feminists demonstrates that

I think it IS possible to imagine a world where "the men get pregnant and still have male privilege", and the ferocity of people's attacks on transition are because they fear such a world and how it would destabilize their worldview

Just like, contra what my mom (and the writers of Sliders) thought, our world isn't the result of some inevitable evolutionary pathway where everything about "femininity" and "masculinity" ended up a specific way

You can look at other cultures all over the place where those Lego pieces arranged themselves differently, and doing so upsets people

(CS Lewis getting pissed off about papers on ancient Greek homosexuality and yelling "Don't tell me all the warriors in the Iliad were pansies")

It was perilous for me to start this thread without a conclusion in mind, as I typically do, but I feel weird leaving it without one, so --

I think TERFs should think about what they're defending when they defend stuff like the OP and how it cuts to the heart of their ideology

TERFs got very, very angry at Andrea Long Chu for, in her initimably trollish way, deliberately "destabilizing" the concept of the gender binary in a way calculated to hit their buttons

Saying that to be female is to submit to another's power, to be oppressed is to be female

I mean yeah sure taking that completely at face value it comes off as a gross sentiment

*But it's the exact same sentiment as all the stuff about "If men could get pregnant then bla bla bla"*

That's what that sentence means, when you get right down to it

The bougie cis feminist lady who wrote that sentence didn't have some nuanced, deeply spiritual concept of what "manhood" meant when she wrote it

And she'd probably agree it would be stupid to make it about "masculine stereotypes"

The statement "If the people who got pregnant were tall, muscular, bearded and wore suits and ties, then maternity leave would be in the Constitution" is a... silly fucking thing to say

Indeed, as TERFs like to crow, the experience of many trans men disproves it

Whoever was the first one to write one of these angry slogans about "If men could menstruate..." or "If men could breastfeed..." or "If men could give birth..." was wholesale ripping out the radfem definition of "sex classes" and replacing it *only* with power

The lady who wrote the OP directly agrees with Andrea Long Chu

She's saying "If the uterus-having gestating sex class *had power*, then they would no longer be women, they would be defined as men"

What's telling, to me, is that this is the logical consequence of TERF ideology and *they agree with it* to keep on sending memes like this but when confronted with it directly they find it very offensive, it cuts to the core emotionally

"Fuck you! This meme is just to express our frustrations! It's not supposed to *literally mean* that we want a world where men could get pregnant -- or that we want to be 'men who get pregnant' -- and it's disgusting to say that it does!"

Okay why though

Let's unpack that

It's tied deeply to the TERF obsession with what they call "passing women" -- the Sweet Polly Oliver/Mulan narrative, the woman who in all ways presents socially as a man and therefore accrues all of a man's power and privilege for herself

And when they grab a real historical figure to fill in for that narrative -- someone like Albert Cashier or James Barry -- and trans people say "Okay but a more accurate definition for such a person would be a 'trans man'" -- they become incensed

Assuming all the details historians have deduced about James Barry's life are accurate -- supposing his stretch marks in death really did mean he got pregnant and gave birth in secret -- isn't he exactly what the OP was fantasizing about?

A man -- a respected doctor and military officer, known to everyone as a man, with all the privileges thereof -- who got pregnant and gave birth?

And therefore, speculatively, pioneered the first surgical C-section -- as a man with a man's privilege who "knew how it felt"?

But that's the whole, like, seething writhing contradiction at the heart of TERFism

"Why can't men get pregnant? It'd be so much better if they could!" is this plaintive and fervent desire for the power and privilege accrued with manhood to be decoupled from reproductive biology

But the idea of this *actually happening* is a huge threat

A shock to the system, a cut to the core

Like they experience being directly told "Okay, if you want to you can be a man who gets pregnant, and we'll fight to make society respect that" as a horrifying violation

"I was a tomboy and I would've been transed as a child and that would've been the worst thing!" etc.

Like there's something precious and vital about the name "woman" belonging to you, even as those "What if MEN could..." questions reveal how much harm that label carries with it

Just saying

TERFs bang on about how circular and inchoate and ephemeral the definition of "gender identity" is

Fine, but they're apparently not free of it themselves