You were right

harvey

Where does it say that? I thought bair meant Jenners children

bair WHAT group of 9-11 year olds have been used to validate Bruce Jenners female identity by showing them pictures of him posing I underwear with his balls and penis tucked between his legs??

If I hadn't had my 'peak trans moment' before I'd be having it now.

It's Daily Mail so I screen-shotted the headlines.

Man dresses as a woman - Heart-warming responses from children.
Woman dresses in the style of 'younger women' - She's gone too far.

Oh and I also don't like idea of gender and reject the concept of having a 'female' brain - doesn't seem much of a step if that idea takes hold that there will be lots of things I shouldn't bother my pretty little brain with and oh look! we're suddenly back decades....

Queen - if someone's had a namechange, is it good form to "out them" on a thread? I didn't know it was the same poster (indeed don't know if it's the same poster, you could be mis-remembering the name for all I know).

Harvey - your peak trans moment post for me exactly sums up why I also feel that the whole situation has become completely mad. I regard myself as a pretty liberal person and have no issue with men wanting to wear frocks and do their nails but object strongly to this overiding way more important issues relevant to millions of women. I'm also not a cis woman, I'm a woman. Having read the thread about 'what does it feel like to be a woman' it seems obvious that the vast majority of women who responded didn't have a feeling of gender but of biological fact whereas the trans women were very keen to claim that they knew what being a woman felt like. Maybe society needs categories of woman, man, transwoman and transman? And whilst I sympathise with transgender people we need to sort these issues out as I don't want to be forced to share changing rooms etc. with any man who decides to self identify as a woman.

sorry kick not kiss

kiss not much at all in life is separated by gender, many things are divided by sex; because there are biological facts and practicalities which make that sensible and useful

Trans activists and changes in LAW are having things seperated according to gender. And there is no useful basis for that at all. No practicalities are facts that make that logical in any way

Mide - as I said, I haven't looked into that much, so my ideas are rambling and unscientific. but it just seems to me that many things in life are separated by gender (and I have taught in 7 schools in 2 countries, and only come across sports that are split into male or female, often with them being labelled 'basketball' and 'girls' basketball', as if women are somehow the other kind of sport, not the real one), and there are other ways of deciding how to categorize.

e.g. about a baby, we ask if they are m/f as pretty much the FIRST most important thing. Most parents to newborns probably focus more on how much sleep they get each night as the most important aspect of parenting.

It is a slightly tangential to the main point of this thread, but as a theory, it is interesting to think how the whole transgender issues would be affected if we had a society that focussed less (or even not at all) on the male/female divide. Would it perhaps leave many people feeling less conflicted about their identity if being 'not really one particular sex, I just feel like me'?

Didn't you start a thread just the other day saying that you weren't going to be posting on trans threads anymore Ego?

Kickass- I'm probably missing the point here but a lot of sport isn't separated by sex IMO. Maybe I should say only top level sport is separated by sex, which is where the differences in things like body composition will become more clear.

Taking marathon running as an example, yes the world class athletes are separated but that's prob 1% of the total field in say the London marathon. Everyone else runs together although I don't know if when you finish you get ranked by sex.

The difference in body composition from a man to a woman at say 200Ibs could be very noticeable. A man at 200Ibs and at 10% body fat is going to be a lot stronger and faster than a woman at 200Ibs and 20% body fat.

i would like to tell you about my peak-trans moment.

It was when I learnt that trans-activists had lobbied and had RadFem2012 cancelled. At the time I didnt even really know what Radical Feminists meant. On the agenda for that meeting was FGM.

FGM is an issue which is very close to my heart. My SiLs, MiL, some of my neices and a number of my friends have been cut

And here we have a bunch of men who electively mutilate their genitals (under anaesthetic of course) closing down a forum where FGM was to be discussed; women would have been sharing their experiences. And if these men could not be invited, they would rather the discussion didnt happen at all.

FGM is NEVER going to affect MTT people, yet they insist that the language is changed to FAABGM or LGM, so they don't feel excluded

Other issues that affect the women in my family/wider community; child marriage, lack of access to any healthcare, lack of access to education, ALOT of death in labour. These issues are common to millions of women around the world. I relate my families experiences, to try to humanise the issues. Alot of people tend to minimise these problems as being 'distant' and 'irrelevant'

These issues kill women. And MTT people whine on about being excluded and try to change language so that it is impossible to mobilise action to help actual women. They are excluded. These issues will never affect MTT people. And changing language and forcing their way into conversations and spaces is not going to improve the trans peoples lives in any way at all. so until they can show a little compassion, they will get no more from me, im afraid

Longlist I can't speak for anyone else but I don't like being called cis because I believe it to assume that I have a certain gender identity and that it aligns with my physical/genetic gender. Transpeople often describe being trans as having a different innate gender to the one they were assigned at birth.

For me, I present physically/biologically as female and have experienced certain conditions because of the way society treats people who present as I do in certain ways.

I don't have a concept of innate gender identity or a male or female brain. There may be differences in the brains of men and women but so far the science is not strong enough to support this. The differences found are small and not necessarily particularly important. Also, brain differences can be because of repeated behaviour. Such as black cab drivers have enlarged areas of the brain that deal with directions. People with these brains don't become cab drivers. Cab drivers exercise that part of the brain and increase its power.

I don't see myself as feeling like a woman and having a body that matches this. I imagine that there could be a man with a very similar inner life to me, and that our differences would be our physical experiences and the way we have lived through societal expectations.

When people talk about cis privilege it's often to say that a cis person has the advantage of their gender identity being aligned with their physical body. I don't have a gender identity so I can't associate myself with this. I can understand why a trans person may want to use the term, and if you believe that you have an inner gender identity that aligns with your physical body then I would say feel free to call yourself cis, but I don't have that concept and I don't recognise it so I don't want to be labeled as such.

I hope that makes sense - and sorry it was so long!

My motivations for wanting gender neutrality, or perhaps less insistence on gender, aren't to accommodate trans gender people, but to make it easier for people to be seen as equal individuals, not labelled as male and female in almost every thing that they do. There's no reason why mixed bathrooms couldn't have sanitary facilities, condom machines, baby changing etc.

Sport is harder, as there are differences, but categories, based more on some kind of trial rather than purely sex, could open opportunities for women to be seen as equals. There are many sports with A and B teams, and most marathons have time trials applied to runners for their starting positions, so why not extend that, so that (like many public marathons) there is ONE race, open to all, but with like abilities competing together? Again, my reasons for thinking about this are more about wanting less division between the various sexes/genders, but it also applies to many situations that trans people find themselves in. (Which Olympic team can they compete in, which bathroom can they use etc)

It just seems that so often people confuse equal and same, when really different and equal is the truth, but I would like to see ALL differences being accepted as equals, rather than insisting on the somewhat false oppositional binary that is often presented.

And I reject cis. My gender doesn't match my sex. I have no gender

I am a woman, due to my biology and experiences because of my biology. No prefix required. Or welcome

Kissangel, there's a grain of truth in what you say about sporting performance, mixed in with a lot that is simply biologically wrong. It is true that women as a whole are culturally conditioned, at least in our society, not to take part in sport, and not to take part in activities that might lead to them developing muscles (I've coached women's sports teams where some of the women have fretted that if they do weight training, they'll develop "ugly" muscles). So most women could be stronger than they actually are. But that doesn't mean they'd be able to compete with men on an equal basis.

When I was at my strongest, back at about the age of 30 when I rowed a great deal, I could do about 5 pull ups relatively easily. That puts me way ahead of most women - most of the women I know couldn't do one. And that difference is entirely due to training, not to innate ability. But at the same time (and I've played a lot of mixed sports in my time) most men of normal BMI, even complete couch potatoes who've never been near a gym in their lives, could do several pull ups without training. That's just the effects of testosterone for you.

So I'm all in favour of trying to get women to think about being physically stronger (it's good for you, builds bone density, improves health, and gives you access to sports you might find fun). And (quite a hobby horse of mine) for most sex differences there are two overlapping distributions of abilities for the sexes, not two distinct spikes separated by a huge chasm (in statistician speak, the D value between the two distributions is small). But it's a denial of basic biology to think that the difference in physical performance, either at the average level or at the extremes - the Paula Radcliffe level - can be erased.

Sex and gender are not interchangeable words. It is not possible to have a coherent discussion about this, if people use them interchangeably

Facitities such as changing rooms and toilets have always been segregated based on sex. This makes sense eg, provision of sanitary bins, urinals, avoidance of rape etc

You cannot segregate based on gender. Gender is an internal 'feeling' of being feminine or masculine. Some people have this and some people don't. And for some people it changes periodically

What people want to do to accommodate trans people, is to stop segregating based on sex and start segregating based on gender performance. This makes no sense whatsoever.

I am a women. I have no gender and reject gender. I don't wear frocks or makeup. I have short hair and I am an engineer. But I do need to have sanitary disposal units. And I would like to avoid being raped again

Also if you expand the meaning of the word woman to include those that feel like women, can you not see it renders the word meaningless. You cant be something, when its definition is to feel like that something

I think that if we could somehow create a gender neutral (but not gender blind) society, then many of the issues around trans-gender would just evaporate. The same would apply to race (or age or any other powerarchy in society).

Of course, just how we would achieve that is a mystery, but discussions such as this, and even media pieces which can cause more problems than solutions, do help to make people engage with the issues.

One example: bathrooms/toilets. Why not have large, shared toilet spaces (along with baby change facilities, mirrors etc) with smaller sections on each side for single sex? that would allow people who wish to be gender neutral to do so (or just to minimize the queues for women's toilets because places don't put in enough), but offers privacy for any women or men who may want it.

There are ways to change how a society thinks and operates, and starting with some of the external, physical elements of society (e.g. toilets), can influence, and be influenced by, the society living there.

Another example: sport. Why not have categories based on size/weight etc. So, instead of men's rugby and women's rugby, you have the under 200 lbs and over 200 lbs teams. We already divide sport by age as well as sex, why not change the categories to size & age? I haven't read enough to know how true it is, but the book The Frailty Myth talks about how girls can be just as strong and fast as boys, and even beyond puberty there are examples of women who can challenge men at speed, endurance and strength. Given that even before the age of 5, girls are taught to be 'lesser' in sport, then would their bodies develop more equally if they had the same opportunities at physical prowess? Or could there be a way to categorize by muscle/bone density? After all, boxing is done on weight, so it's not s ridiculous idea. Interestingly, when Paula Radcliffe almost equalled the men's time for a marathon, she was disqualified for using male pace setters (just like the men do). Apparently women can only using female pace setters, or they're not playing fair. We know that women out perform men at longer distances, yet those races aren't seen at the Olympics, or other big sporting events. So, if sport were more gender neutral, then it wouldn't matter whether a person identified as male or female, or had certain genital features, as the competition would not be about men competing against men etc.

It is making the assumption that other people in general have an internal gender identity, that you can make that assumption about them, and then classify them based on an attribute you assume they have that stems from your own belief system.

It's also not anyone else's business what someone else's internal gender identity is.

Off on a tangent, but what is the issue with the word cisgender?

From the above:

'Had she really understood the history of black women in America, Dolezal would have recognized that she is perpetuating a fetish for black women’s bodies that devalues actual black women while celebrating our parts when attached to the right (white) form. But she was not alone in this act of playing black and benefiting from it. Since black womanhood is apparently all in the look, our society would rather have white, former Disney pop stars twerk, talentless celebrities with enlarged backsides and their equally talentless siblings with swollen lips than celebrate the black woman’s form with the person who carries it. Black women learn that we are not desirable, that we are invisible, and yet we are imitated by the world’s Dolezals and in our popular culture. Little black girls like me could never have passed for white – and would’ve been ridiculed if we tried – but anyone with the right accessories can now seemingly claim to be black women when it suits them.

Spokane was, for once, perhaps just ahead of the curve: we might be moments away from declaring that simply wearing Black Woman is enough to be a black woman ... or even preferable to it.'

A good response to the Dolezal situation, about black girlhood:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/became-a-black-woman-spokane-rachel-dolezal-black-girl