Gender swap situation

You are not horrible people. DD may lose her friendship with Sally , but she might not.

DD had a friend like this. She declared herself a man and called herself Bob. She liked other girls who were pretending to be men. Her parents and DD and myself still called her Susan.

Susan then declared she was called Dave, then Harry, then Pete.. you get the idea. We continued to call her Susan.

By the time she left school, she was identifying as Susan and as pansexual.

Susan and DD are still best friends.

It's actually very sad. Throwing around insults on a thread where parents are discussing (most very sensitively) how to navigate a teenage trend that's being enforced by compulsion and accusations of bigotry.
We really are letting children down by insisting that they must ignore reality. Sally / Ron is no doubt vulnerable and confused (given everything the Cass Report revealed about the make up of children caught up in this). So it's really important that parents are allowed to discuss the implications without the seething fury of transactivists condemning everything except capitulation.

It really matters that parents speak freely about this if we're to support our children as they navigate all this.

If my friend wants me to say that Jesus is the son of God or wants me to say grace before we have dinner together and I decline to do that, would it make me a shitty friend?

Sorry, what do you mean by different? Or opinion? Have you changed the meaning of those words too? I can’t reply until you define every word you use.

What offends you so much about me having a different opinion? I know you want to change my mind but that’s not going to happen, just as I know you won’t change your opinion.

Why? I haven’t abandoned words having meaning, so my words can be clearly understood. Yours, on the other hand can’t. In fact, for all I know you’ve just sent me a short shopping list. Was that milk you wanted?

Like I said, @ninjahamster is just posting meaningless gibberish.

Ditto!

And by correct you probably mean incorrect, ie the preferred pronouns.

OK - I’ll just take all your posts to be meaningless gibberish then.

Same here.

Do you think female children should be forced to share changing facilities with male children who use female pronouns?

Do you think that's fair on female children?

Do you think it would be fair on male children to call them she then tell them that sex matters when it comes to single sex spaces and female boundaries?

O. M. G. You have just misspelt Sally's name.

That is literally genocide! 😂

And that’s your choice. Mine would be to use their preferred pronouns.

don't be daft. Of course we don't all have to think the same. But if we are going to communicate we have to have a basic understanding of what words mean.

We all use the word green to describe the colour of a tree's leaves. If you started calling them blue, and insisting the rest of us did just because that's what you want, you would find yourself being laughed at, ridiculed, and probably eventually lose a lot of friends.

If someone in my social circle came out as trans, i would do my best to remember their new name and use it, because i am not a complete twat. But i will never use wrong-sex pronouns, so at "worst" i would continue to use pronouns that fit to their natal sex. But at best, which i would try to do, because i am not a complete twat, i would use they. But if i "slipped up" on the name, in their presence or not, i'd just say "oh yeah, sorry [name] and carry on. I would not apologise for using "they" though. They can accept that or not, and cool the friendship or not, but nobody is compelling my speech like that.

So Ron is looking for validating performance from your daughter, and your daughter is treating her friend exactly the same as she always has, and Ron is getting shirty.

No, you’re not horrible. Just untrained. I assume your daughter will be summoned shortly for a struggle session where she’ll be made to chant “Sally is dead. Long live Ron” until she weeps with joy and gender enlightenment.

Meanwhile, Ron has magically transformed. Ovaries still intact, uterus present and accounted for, every cell still XX, but now cloaked in the sacred power of a haircut, a hoodie, and a name borrowed from a Hogwarts character. The pronouns have shifted, so reality must obey. Biology is passé. Memory is subversive. A vocabulary slip: reclassified as an act of violence.

Your daughter isn’t cruel. She’s a 14-year-old trying to make sense of a lifelong friend who’s rewritten the rules mid-game and now expects everyone else to clap on cue. She may need space because this whole performance is exhausting. Ron is making your daughter walk on eggshells, punishing her for remembering reality, and expecting her to perform belief on demand. That’s not friendship.

I would talk to dd discretely help her realise what an utter drama sponge Sally/Ron is and help her realise that the dignified response is to not feed the drama. Just tell her to politely apologise and teach her to grey wall any emotional response. Maybe encourage her to stick with friends who aren't so self-indulgent and controlling. Chances are Sally/Ron's behaviour is only going to get worse.

I would tell my child to treat Ron as a nickname and use it. I would try my best with the pronouns but people will slip up at times.

Ah well we disagree. The world would be boring if we all thought the same!

But it's the old 'a marathon begins with the first step' principle.

If you know that an ideology can be far-reaching and dangerous, why would you want to express agreement with, or condoning of it? Even something as apparently minor as using non-biologically-based pronouns will not be viewed as a kind indulgence on your part, but rather as your approval of the whole ideology.

"But you were happy to acknowledge that Ron is a boy before; what changed? When did you suddenly become a bigot?"

If you believe that full-on addiction to heroin is a very bad thing indeed (which I hope you do), would you think you were 'being kind' by not stopping somebody who "only want to try a tiny little bit"? You aren't being kind by guiding somebody right to the very edge of a sheer cliff, just as long as you don't actually push them off.

For the words we use to communicate with others to be understood, rather than just being incomprehensible garbage, they need clear definitions. The word “she” is the third person pronoun used for female people, just as girl and woman are also words used for female people. As we all know, humans can’t change sex. Born female? Die female.

Humpty Dumpty - that shows how infantile this all is. A small child being told it’s bedtime - “no, it’s not bedtime, Mummy! Bedtime doesn’t mean that, it means playtime! You’re silly!” Plus footstamp and general tantrum.

No different to someone insisting we all abandon the clear definition of a word we all know, and use something else because it suits that person - and then throw a tantrum when others don’t.

DH's 15 year old niece is now his 'nephew' and has changed their name to one that isn't even a recognised human name which makes things even more tricky (it's actually kind of embarrassing calling them by this name). We are all expected to go with it and we do try but it's hard going and we slip up all the time.

I understand that it's a difficult time for our 'nephew' but they can't see how difficult it is for some of the older family members. They go into a complete strop if my in-laws mistakenly call them by their birth name.

@JohnnyLuLus

I’ve got to say many colleagues still ‘slip up’ and call me by my maiden name 2 decades after I married. It’s hard to shift and even harder the older you get. Tbf, I answer to my name, my maiden name, last year’s teacher and, occasionally Mum in the classroom!

3 years ago, I got my first Gran…