Gender swap situation

Everything you’ve posted here is part of the “cult” discourse @ruethewhirl

Example:
anyone who struggles with their gender identity

Imaging going back even just twenty years and saying that. It’s such a contemporary thing to say - the rhetoric of “struggle”, which then was reserved for physical illnesses like cancer - and the idea of “struggling with gender identity” at all. Gender was thought of as external social behaviour - so someone might “struggle” with gender roles, but not really with their own “identity”! And why struggle? Lots of people in the twentieth century weren’t keen on how gender roles were, or the fact of them at all, and they just wore their trousers or studied Engineering or played with Meccano and nobody thought they were “struggling”.

Plenty, in fact almost all, of the rather conventionally “feminine” women also didn’t much like the gender roles they were offered, and wanted jobs and equal pay and not to be sexually harassed, and they weren’t “struggling” with “gender identity” either: they were trying to overthrow sexism, which is what it was quaintly called at the time.

Finally, though, and you’ve rather hoist yourself on your own petard here: we all know that the whole point about “gender identity” in contemporary gender discourse is its relationship to sex. People who are trans are not “struggling with their gender identity”. They’re struggling with their sex - and precisely with their “gender identity” (so-called) not fitting their sex. Otherwise, why would they be struggling? If gender identity is an internal sense of “gender”, it can be whatever people want it to be. It’s the inconvenient sexed body aspect that is the struggle, as we’re constantly being told — the hurt feeling and dysphoria are all about not being the “right” sex/in the “right” body.

Just another example of the daft snits and snares gender ideology gets itself into. It’s all incoherent and inconsistent. Gender and sex are completely different except when they aren’t. Gender is socially constructed, oh no it’s not it’s an innate feeling, oh it’s not it’s a magical something else. People know instinctively who they are, and what gender they are, except they also don’t, and it’s a mental illness, except no it’s not, it’s gender dysphoria, which is a mental illness except it’s not a mental illness, no it’s just their body doesn’t match who they know they are, no it’s not it’s the gendered soul, and so on and so forth.

It’s exhausting. And philosophically and practically incoherent and logically contradictory. That’s why we say, as upthread here - that it’s just not true. And none of it can even all be true at the same time even if you’re sympathetic to the whole business. The genderist posters on this thread can’t even agree on what gender and sex are, or what is an “identity”.

it irks the crap out of me when people hijack the more troublesome aspects of the gender debate as an excuse to be intolerant about anyone who struggles with their gender identity on any level.

But there's no logic to responding in this way if you do struggle with personal identity. Why choose first to frame your identity within the boundaries of narrow stereotypes (often of your own making) and then get upset when you don't want to live within those rigid stereotypes - when nobody was ever forcing you to do so in the first place?

Suppose your name is Alex, but you look at the other people called Alex whom you know or recognise, but decide that you really don't identify or wish to live, dress, talk, look like or present in the same way as Alex Jones, Alex Scott, Alex Brooker, Alex Horne, your friend's mum Alex or your brother-in-law Alex.

Great news! Nobody is ever telling you that you must try to live as a carbon copy of any of them. They are them and you are you. You're Alex Robertson, an individual like nobody else (even other people who also happen to be called Alex Robertson). You only need to identify as you - and the vast majority of how you identify is very much determined by what you want you to be.

Oh my. 😂😂😂 Did you hurt yourself when you landed after that leap?

Show me where I said anything about the number of sexes or whether anyone can change sex. You won't be able to, because I have said precisely nothing about that.🙄And I am not trans myself, nor have I ever experienced gender dysphoria, I just happen to be capable of accepting that different people have different experiences. Glad we got that cleared up.

This thread started off as being about gender identity, not whether there are more than two sexes, and personally it irks the crap out of me when people hijack the more troublesome aspects of the gender debate as an excuse to be intolerant about anyone who struggles with their gender identity on any level. My posts were not attempts to get into the wider gender debate - there's a whole bloody forum on which to discuss that.

What irks me about this thread is, yes, the absolutely breathtaking blind arrogance, by which I meant nothing relating to sexes, spaces, safeguarding, or any of that. Those are separate, wider debates imo, which also need to be had. 'Blind arrogance' was specifically a reference to pps baying that there's no such thing as deadnaming, no such thing as gender dysphoria, no such thing as living as a member of the opposite sex, 'correcting' pps' wording, the placing of quote marks around terms that are in the actual dictionary ffs, the overall trend on this thread to state opinions as hard facts, and of course let's not forget the the oh-so-edgy 'hides head in hands' emoji repeatedly being used to invalidate opposing perspectives (which imo says something completely different about that particular poster than they presumably think it does, but let's not get sidetracked here.)

What I am saying is that some people on this thread seem pathologically incapable of grasping that they cannot simply browbeat others into agreeing with them. And that merely because they believe specific things around gender (as opposed to sex), it doesn't make them right. And that, nothing more, is what I meant by blind arrogance. HTH.

Cult think. That's given me my best laugh of the day so far. 😂

Aw, c’mon, is that all you got?

I know many friends, family and colleagues dealing with incredibly difficult traumas and sad situations — bereavement, terminal or serious illness, child loss, awful personal circumstances, addiction, suicide, rape, assault — some really awful stuff. I have huge empathy for them. Many women here will have experienced the same themselves or in supporting others. People all around us are often left to ‘get on with it’ and deal with things that are unimaginably difficult and sad, with little or no support. So, unfortunately, forgive me for finding the self-indulgences of “identity” issues rather less weighty than the really awful things that can happen to a person. Many of these are things that people live with life-long as pain or trauma that never really goes away.

So I have some empathy for young people who are sucked in to silly fads and discourses online; but what makes you think that “identity”, especially gender identity, is actually deserving in reality of all of this rhetoric about “empathy” and “vulnerability” and “my lived experience”, and “no-one else can understand me!” and so on?

Wanting to be something you aren’t is an everyday fact of life for most people. Most people also have a lot worse to deal with in life than that. Not only for the actual young people, but also for the (largely) middle aged men who come out as trans, all of this has the quality of teenagery self-absorption, of believing that your self and your appearance and how people see you is everything and the centre of all the world (and much of “trans” discourse is very very shallow, all about clothes and makeup and appearance and me-me-me, and a fair amount of whining about how mean mummy is for not going along with it all).

So forgive us if we reserve more of our “empathy” for people who have much worse problems in life than “identity” ones, whether as actual teenagers; or as older middle-aged men. In the grand scheme of things, really, quite a lot of it is self-delusion and dwelling too much on the self overall. And the most “empathetic” thing to do with that is really to say come on, let’s get things in perspective, get off your online “communities”; and think about reality a bit more, and things that aren’t just about what you want to be real, but how you accommodate yourself to how your life actually is, and all the things you can do with it and for other people, not just yourself.

Bullshit. But you know this.

Well you clearly have zero understanding or empathy.

I think if you spent some more time getting to know an actual trans person (I don’t mean kids experimenting with identities) and listening with curiosity and without judgement, you very well might acquire more of both those things . maybe you just don’t have that capacity 🤷🏼‍♀️ (but most people do).

But as usual @Tandora, you’re suggesting that we simply don’t know or haven’t talked to any trans people — but in actual fact, rather a lot of what makes many of us conclude this is all pretendy fantasies, is actually having done so, and heard all the pretendy fantasies first hand!

I have. I work with a lot of young people who identify as various kinds of gender labels, from trans to nonbinary to genderfluid etc. And the answers one gets are not very self-reflective - they contain a large amount of wilful self-delusion, and a lot of uncritically recycled ideas garnered from online “communities”. What I definitely don’t hear is anything “new”.

There’s a lot of deliberate self-deception going on in the whole thing - from the unwillingness to hear anything negative about medical aspects of transition (“those old people had bad experiences but that won’t happen to me”); to fending off reality with online talking-points that are disconnected from the real world (“trans people are everywhere constantly peeing next to you in bathrooms and you just don’t notice them” — no, in real life they are extremely visible and are “clocked” by everyone, and people, especially women, are generally just politely not showing this or attempting not to engage). As I said, lots of pretendy fantasy, the kind which seems plausible on Tumblr or Discord, but not so much out in the real world.

I’ve never yet heard any trans person actually explain their experience without resorting to the usual cliches about liking stereotypically “feminine” things and “being born in the wrong body” and so on. And pretty much every single young trans person I know is also autistic/on the spectrum/has ADHD (if male), and/or has other forms of chronic physical or mental illness (if female). Which makes me suspect that lots of the “gender” discourse gets co-opted into other mental health issues and becomes part of someone’s “identity” that way; the discourse is also full of Americanisms (as above with “bathrooms”) that are clearly gleaned online but sound jarringly odd in a British context (trans teenagers are always very exercised about “bathroom surveillance”, and how this is all linked to threats to abortion rights, which is simply not applicable in the U.K.).

As we keep pointing out @Tandora it doesn't matter how many conversations we have with transpeople - we are not going to find they have changed sex.

Most people are are happy to be supportive of how people dress or express themselves. But they aren't going to pretend that men can become women or vice versa.

Obviously.
because it’s not in the least bit rude to ask people to address you with your chosen name.
It is meanwhile rude to refuse to address people by the name they have requested you use.

And why is engaging in a complicated pretendy fantasy which involves becoming a medical patient with complex needs and negotiating difficult social relationships and legal structures which keep constantly reminding you that it all is really only a pretendy fantasy, any better for “the person” than just accepting that you’re not a woman?

Why don’t you ask this of a trans person in the real work. , with genuine curiosity ., and listen, really listen to their response. You might want to phrase the question in a less presumptuous and judgy way of course- but ask the question all the same. Listen to the answer. Hear what they have to say. You might learn something new.

It’s not just that though. OP said that she is demanding that not only must her new name be used but her friends must also change the way they speak and use wrong sex pronouns to refer to her in direct conversation with her. And then being nasty when she doesn’t want to do that.

I don’t think we should condone bullying and coercion in children.

Are you suggesting that asserting that there are only two sexes and no one can change between the two is ‘blind arrogance’??

You appear to be deep in cult think.

Same back atcha

😂

🎶🎶Let it go, let it go, Turn away and slam the door🎶🎶

good grief. and what if Mr Smith wants to be called Mrs Smith and all the children know he is a man and that it is against their own beliefs to indulge his nonsense?

I'm not getting what you're getting from those words.

What ideology do you think I'm obsessed with?

She said she wants to do this as it's all making her uncomfortable but they are all in the same friend group and it's not a big school so she doesn't have much of a choice. The OPs own words.

I'm not the one obsessed with an ideology.

Seriously! If her friend means that much to her your daughter would make the effort to use the pronouns sally wants! It’s not affecting your daughter and it’s likely to be hurting her friends feelings

I don't think the OP has suggested anything to lead you to this conclusion.

You seem extremely invested in this child staying in a friendship that is causing her problems. Why would that be?

Of course she can. Definitely. And if there were other options, that would 100% be my take on it. But as the OP has said, it's a small school. She'll likely end up without a friendship group.

The request was to lie.

See where the power dynamics in this relationship lie. It's somehow considered rude not to call Sally, Ron, but not considered rude to demand Jess calls Sally, Ron.

It's not much of a friendship if you go nuts because you cally Sally, Sally instead of Ron!

Good manners don't mean going along with everything someone says just because it would make them happy, though. A name, fine. Pronouns, no. It's not good manners to try and force your opinions on others either.