So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

Both the quizzes linked to have said I am a man. Should I be worried? That how old are you thing said I was a man too (even though I had long hair at the time).

It just shows how rubbish all this gender crap is really. I am a woman, mother to two children, breast and vagina too. I'm just more stereotypically masculine than feminine and reject gender stereotypes. I am still comfortable to be referred to as 'she' although I'm not massively annoyed if someone accidentally calls me 'he'. She is the usual pronoun for a woman and I am a woman.

Oh and I wasn't a pregnant individual when I was pregnant, I was a women. In fact it was one of the times when I really really identified with other women as it's such a strong and unique to females shared experience. The idea of denying that seems just bizarre to me.

I don't really understand why a movement that affects such a small number of people is so dominant at the moment in what seems to be a very destructive way. Women have so many other things to fight without having to fight to be recognised as women still.

Thanks italian no time to read that - I need sleep.

The threads moved on a bit from does gender identity exist? To how should transexual people act? How should society respond to them?

Whole different topic but very interesting.

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid don't want to pick on you and off to bed now anyway (sleep tight) but have you read 1984?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

There is a real danger to not calling an object or person or animal the thing which it is.

If we categorised all cats together and just called them cats, because I really cannot think of any way of totally defining a lion I mean some have got manes, some may not, some are yellow but some are white etc etc)

www.kpbs.org/photos/galleries/nature-white-lions/

some are quite tame really, not so ferocious etc etc.

Then we could end up with the lion population dying out, because every time we counted cats we came up with millions of millions of them, except they all looked like this instead of this.

Now that is a flippant example but we need to be able to say what things are. Double speak means we cannot say what things really are. I think the reason we are getting ourselves into this emperor's new clothes scenario is because trans people want to be taken seriously, and not discriminated against and want to feel valued etc etc, and I want all that for trans people too. But I don;t want words used for female or males or our bodies to be disrupted to the extent that we cannot speak about anything in a meaningful way.

And I firmly believe that for the sanity and protection of trans people (such as counting the murder of trans women, especially trans women of colour) it is vital that we are honest about who people are.

This news story makes me so sad, but if we could not identify this woman as a trans woman, than we would not have the full story and I suspect that the hiding of information could go both ways in terms of being unhelpful to women born women and unhelpful to trans women.

www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/07/31/florida-man-charged-murder-transgender-woman-india-clarkes-death

Anyway, night all.

Ah, I see Dementor I hadn't thought of that. I suppose then we would have to target all preventative care to everyone , although that could be done relatively cheaply , at least in imparting information, by online means

I don't think anyone has suggested no one records someone's sex on medical records.

And I've never said there was no such thing as biological sex. This is a thread discussing transgender not the 98-99% of people who it is easy to define the sex of.
I said I can't think of a definition of biological female that would work for 100% of women.

You asked for examples of language change having an impact on women's issues.

If you are expecting me to agree with every crazy thing a trans activist puts on social media you are barking up the wrong tree.

It's a bit like selecting the most bonkers rad fem blog you can find and assuming all feminists must agree with it.

If people are brought up to think they are what they identify as, and their actual bio sex isnt recorded, then they may not realise that they can be affected by certain disorders.

I got a letter through inviting me to a smear test when I was 25. I presume that wouldn't happen in a future where bio sex is considered meaningless.

Oh yes, the olden days when people who wanted to have relationships with someone of the same biological sex were seen as delusional and bad.

As opposed to now, when people who want to have relationships with someone of the same biological sex are seen as delusional (there's no such thing as bio sex remember!) and bad (You are a transphobe if you won't have sex with a lesbian with a penis):

therealpornwikileaks.com/lily-cade-gender-warfare-sexual-entitlement/

You don't get it, do you? The point was that not every social change stands the test of time

Not every change does last. I was simply pointing out a massive social shift that has happened pretty recently.

Now I would say there is a lot of attention on trans / gender issues at the moment.
No I don't know if it will stick, or how much it will change society but neither do you.

As in, when a baby is born, how do you identify whether it belongs to the group more at risk of prostate cancer or the group that may need smear tests?

Or , more importantly as it can happen unexpectedly at a very young age, the group who has blood dripping out of whatever the acceptable name for a vagina is.

The issues you mention only apply to adults who, whatever you call them, are likely, at least in the western world, to have access to reliable information about these issues before they have to deal with them.

italian don't interpret my "I wouldn't be surprised" to mean I'm 100% on board with this, it is inevitable and for the best.

I don't know if this is a good thing / bad thing. Step too far etc. I honestly don't know, the only thing I'm sure of is that there will be big changes and I could imagine this happening.

To me it does seem a bit odd to delete pregnant women.
But for all I know one day I'll be chatting to my grandkids about how "in my day there were no pregnant individuals just pregnant women"

You are right the futures not written yet, who knows how it will turn out.

"Like I said things change quickly."

You don't get it, do you? The point was that not every social change stands the test of time.

You know how we are told that misgendering is so hurtful, than transwomen want to curl up and die when someone calls them "he" because their dysphoria just kills them? Well, I would like to understand how come Travis went through pregnancy with swelling belly and all that without going ka-boom. Where was that unbearable gender dysphoria then?

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid - I don't understand what you want to happen in the future? What do you think is the best way to proceed? As in, when a baby is born, how do you identify whether it belongs to the group more at risk of prostate cancer or the group that may need smear tests?

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid you are talking as if it is to be assumed we will be written out of our own story! I bloody hope not. I hope things are changing for the better. I hope that increased maternity leave and redundancy packages are for the benefit of individuals.

Because a small number of biological females who identify as trans men can and do get pregnant, doesn't mean we need to stop talking about pregnant women. There is only so far we need to fall down this rabbit hole before some sensible person in authority, (I don't care if they are male or female, trans or not) will say, ah no, the emperor has no clothes on!

In this story Trevor is a trans man who has had a baby, who obviously has the necessary female anatomy to do so. I have no problems with Trevor doing whatever Trevor wants with Trevor's body. I am not sure how I would feel about Trevor being my La leche League breast feeding counsellor, but since I am 50 now my breast feeding days are well behind me. I think the key thing for me is that Trevor probably needed some specialist help and as a member of a very small group of people who are in that boat Trevor probably needed that specialist help to identity as a member of the group. So we do need to identify who is whom and what is what in these medical situations. I think it is just being honest about what is real. And the idea that males, biological males, can get pregnant is just confusing, unhelpful and untrue, referring to pregnant women is not confusing, because we are talking about biology, not some kind of identity we may have for ourselves.

rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/07/trans-father-rejected-as-leader-breastfeeding-support-and-advocacy-group/

It isn't very long ago that it was progressive to believe that women had penis envy and little boys had Oedipal complexes. Now that isn't seems as progressive. It is seen as ridiculous. Not every new cultural idea stands the test of time

And even more recently homosexual acts were illegal. Like I said things change quickly.

It isn't very long ago that it was progressive to believe that women had penis envy and little boys had Oedipal complexes.

Now that isn't seems as progressive. It is seen as ridiculous. Not every new cultural idea stands the test of time.

Regarding people calling pregnant women, pregnant individuals - I'll hold my hand up and admit I was talking from a Western perspective not every country in the world (my bad).

But I genuinely would not be surprised, I'll be almost 70 then. Now admittedly my nan is a bit older than that but so many things that we take for granted sound alien to her.

Just things like how much mat leave you can take and redundancy packages, employers duty of care. She looks at me like I'm crackers.

I'm a big embarrassed to say the language she uses is not remotely polically correct. And she can't see why she should change,

The world changes fast and thirty years is a pretty long time.

dementedDementor twitter has a lot to answer for, it's given a voice to a lot of people who maybe should not have one!! It's easy to say offensive and damaging things anonymously and it's easy for things to be assumed, like we should take any of this crap seriously! At the moment the traffic is going in one way, if Twitter has been invented a few decades before it would probably have been used to out gay people or damage trans people. I wish there was more of a moral responsibility to things to speak kindly, wisely and in a measured way. Social media is like a sledge hammer to crack a nut! (not a tweeter fan!)

Agender is total bullshit.

I think many agender people would not consider themselves trans because they have grown up in families where nobody expected them to have a gender identity, so they have never transitioned from anything in the first place.

Other agender women feel they have transitioned and are trans.

The taking issue with vagina cupcakes is downright stupid.

If somehow trans activists are stopping sanitary protection being sent to girls who need it - or preventing sanitary protection being discussed as an issue then that is really damaging.

I'm sure some of the things trans activists do / or try to do are damaging.

I've seen a bit of the vagina cupcake shitstorm on twitter. It's fucking nuts.