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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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General Trans Discussion Thread

337 replies

IBelieveTheEarthIsFlat · 22/10/2016 14:24

I seem to be hitting #PeakTrans on a daily basis now and thought it would be useful to have another general thread to discuss/post/share

If you haven't seen Magdalen Berns' recent blog post it's really worth a look

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canijustsaysomethingplease · 25/11/2016 19:01

Illegitimate, I am not lapping up any bullshit one way or the other. You think I am misinformed - would you link your authority/evidence/independent research?

Saying male and female brains are different is a world away from referring to any women's mind as a "ladybrain".

Datun · 25/11/2016 18:56

Where people are transitioning later on in life, having spent their entire previous life sucking it up, many will have children, who will be dealing with some very difficult possibly conflicted feelings, and I do worry about how they may feel reading some of the Spartacus comments.

Statistically, late transitioners, who have gone down the general male route of marrying and fathering children, are secret cross dressers who have AGP. They are not gender dysphoric, do you not want to have surgery, and remain attracted to women. I have no doubt that they find the Spartacus threads quite difficult.

illegitimateMortificadospawn · 25/11/2016 17:58

I am told that a study has shown that men's brains and women's brains are wired up differently, and that a study has shown that people who want to transgender have the brain of the sex they want to be.

You are misinformed. Time to start doing some independent research instead of uncritically lapping up the TRA bullshit about ladybrain.

canijustsaysomethingplease · 25/11/2016 17:48

CoteDAzur

You say I don't know what I am talking about... what I am talking about is someone who was a real life man who has a profession and a family who is transgendering because they have felt from a young age that they were born in the wrong body. They have had to go through intensive counselling. They are very clever and have informed themselves in relation to most issues. I take what they say at face value. I knew nothing about it at all until they told me.

They are not and are not intending to be porn stars... they have a partner, and work, and have a social life.

My understanding is that cross dressing is a sexual thing, a fetish, whereas transgendering is a psychological thing. The porn stars you have watched would be the sexual fetish thing, and I assume they aren't taking the hormones I mentioned. That is the difference.

I am told that a study has shown that men's brains and women's brains are wired up differently, and that a study has shown that people who want to transgender have the brain of the sex they want to be.

When people who want to transgender and take hormones they are assessed by doctors/psych people so if you want to know more about it I think it would be easy to find out. They don't just wander into a doctor and walk out with powerful hormones in the UK.

Prawnofthepatriarchy · 25/11/2016 17:43

Just this year there have been a load of rapes, murders and lower level sex crimes committed by transwomen - and those are just the ones I'm aware of, which is far from an exhaustive list. Women committing any sort of sex crime are very unusual, and crimes of violence are pretty rare. Men commit 98% of sex crime and 90% of violent crime.

I suspect it's the AGP group who are responsible for all these offences. Cross-dressing, I understand, is the most common fetish among sex offenders.

Of course, if or when violent male prisoners are allowed to transition things will get significantly worse. Testimony admitted by the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists to the Transgender Equality Inquiry in the UK Parliament last autumn sounded the alarm over what they warned is an “ever increasing tide” of transwoman criminal sex offenders.

From the report by British Association of Gender Identity Specialists: (it's a PDF)

"The criminal justice system merits quite a bit of thinking about."

"On the one hand, many of us can remember patients who were charged with crimes, convicted and who ended up on the sex offenders register when we thought that the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a trans person. A good example would be the transwoman charged with sexual assault after some brief fellatio with two males who were two and three years younger than her own age at the time (she was eighteen). They were visitors to the area and boasted to their cousin of their recent sexual encounter. The cousin, enlightening them as to the nature of the person they had had a sexual encounter with, caused them to feel embarrassed. One thing led to another and the patient was charged with sexual assault. Given that she was in a kneeling position at the time and that it would have been perfectly possible for either one of the males concerned to run away this seemed a bit implausible. In the end, she was convicted of being reckless as regard to age. This does place her on the sex offenders register, though. One suspects that she would never have been charged at all if she had been a born female."

"The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences. It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this."

Worrying stuff. The report was discussed at the time on the blog GenderTrender.

Datun · 25/11/2016 14:05

Prawn

Are they turning up for the crime of voyeurism? If many transwomen have AGP and just legitimately walk into a ladies and do except secretly get aroused by being there no 'crime' is committed. Up to and unless they start recording.

Prawnofthepatriarchy · 25/11/2016 13:33

I'd be really interested to know. DNA is, according to the FBI site, male or female. So if a transwoman was registered as female then detectives seeking a man due to DNA evidence might be bamboozled. However I suspect that the police will keep their own records, registering offenders by sex, maybe as well as gender presentation. They'd be mad not to. The powers that be have already pointed out the high rate of violent prisoners applying to transition.

On the topic of crime, I am beginning to wonder whether transwomen commit even higher rates of certain crimes than other men. It's not all, just a certain type of transwoman, the highly sexually motivated ones. Because we're told that trans people are a tiny fraction of the population, 0.3% isn't it? And yet they are turning up in court at a worrying rate.

illegitimateMortificadospawn · 25/11/2016 09:11

Excellent question, lightup.

lightupowl · 25/11/2016 08:50

I am fairly new to the feminism boards so apologise if this is OT, has already been covered or is a stupid question.

What happens when male/female DNA is recovered from a crime scene but the criminal now officially belongs to the opposite sex? If a criminal's records have been 'corrected' and sealed, might this cause the police to look for, say, a male person when the criminal is now officially female? Or are there procedures to get around this?

Prawnofthepatriarchy · 24/11/2016 11:16

Twogoats, I don't post on the Guardian site any more for precisely that reason. It's shit to see the way they've thrown women under the bus.

Twogoats · 24/11/2016 11:06

Owen jones has an article in the human today saying that racism in the LGBT community needs to be tackled. I commented that misogyny also needs to be tackled, especially by the trans community, and got deleted for breaking community guidelines... Sigh!

IAmAmy · 23/11/2016 21:45

Thelilywhite it is difficult! It's reassuring to see these threads too and find others who think the same.

Datun · 23/11/2016 21:44

Thelilywhite

I know how that feels. It's very isolating. Give it time. People are reaching peak trans on a daily basis.

Thelilywhite · 23/11/2016 21:40

Iamamy Like you, I appreciate these threads. I cant discuss at work and the last supposed radfem friend I spoke to said she didnt understand and she didnt feel threatened at all. She is the cleverest woman I know.Hmm

IAmAmy · 23/11/2016 21:26

Prawn I definitely agree, it's become a very important issue given the impact it could potentially have on women's spaces, services, also the idea that there are such things as a "girl's mind" and "boy's mind" is incredibly regressive. Things already seem to be going that way (the Green Party and the "non-men" term being a recent example I can think of).

Datun I think that's true, it seems like it's (not sure if this is the right word but...) "fashionable" for feminists of my age to be overly concerned with being "pro-trans". I struggle to phrase that right as I wouldn't want to seem like I think "anti-trans" is a good thing, more the obsession with being "trans-inclusive feminists". I find so much of it worrying not least the erasure of women, women's issues and what that could lead to.

It's great for me to be able to discuss it and much more here!

Datun · 23/11/2016 21:20

Amy

I don't want to encourage you to visit anything dark, but there is a very definite underbelly to why some people transition. It sounds like your friends are still at the, let's call it the happy clappy stage. Where everything is about inclusivity and live and let live. And of course, there are many trans people for whom this is an appropriate response. Unfortunately, it is now including people with a far darker motive. Hence the polarising of opinion. It kind of depends on which transpersonal you spoke to or read about last.

You are probably right to not engage. And I'm glad you're finding refuge here.

CoteDAzur · 23/11/2016 20:57

"the penis gets very, very small"

I'm saying this in the nicest way possible, but I don't think you actually know what you are talking about here.

Go on a porn site and watch just a few seconds of transwomen in action, and do please report back on how "very very small" you find those penises.

CoteDAzur · 23/11/2016 20:49

"cross dressers, which is completely different from transgendering. "

Considering that no surgery or even hormones are necessary these days for someone to call themselves transgender, what exactly is the difference?

Is it that the latter actually think they are women whereas the former know they are men?

canijustsaysomethingplease · 23/11/2016 20:30

Someone in my family is currently trans-gendering male to female, and we have talked quite a bit about the issues.

In relation to removal of the penis, the reason why so few have had the operation is because it is:

  • very expensive, to most prohibitively expensive; and
  • very risky.

Once a man starts to take the female hormones, they grow breasts, bodily hair reduces, the body shape changes and the penis gets very, very small. I personally would worry about someone at that point using a male toilet.

A part of the vulnerability may be the hormones - I suffer slightly just before my period, and was slightly off kilter when pregnant - the hormones taken when transitioning have a similar affect, I believe, except stronger, and all the time.

Many trans people are extremely, extremely critical of any abusive trans activists.

To the best of my knowledge, the men who are referred to in the video are cross dressers, which is completely different from transgendering.

Where people are transitioning later on in life, having spent their entire previous life sucking it up, many will have children, who will be dealing with some very difficult possibly conflicted feelings, and I do worry about how they may feel reading some of the Spartacus comments.

ChocChocPorridge · 23/11/2016 20:23

I know that this offends some people, but I think that having kids really brings home to you how dangerous being a woman is. How impacted by pregnancy and children your life is. Obviously, I'd imagined it, I thought I had a pretty good grip, I've been a woman a while, I was suitably worried about it happening when it shouldn't etc. Yet still, there were times when I realised I really wasn't prepared for whatever (the first was being unable to leave the house when I had the first time of a newborn sleeping long enough for me to gather my thoughts, and think that a wander down to the corner shop would be nice, but DP was at work, and I couldn't without mucking about with and waking up a baby)

I think that men are so sheltered from this aspect of womanhood in general. Not only have they never worried about getting pregnant, they've never carried a child inside them with all those health concerns and pressures, and, more often than not, they take a second chair when it comes to looking after the baby once it arrives. I think that's why they, and then transwomen don't realise how core biology is to women, because it really is a secondary thing, they're all about fire and forget because they can be.

Their lives won't change as they get their first periods, carry a child, and then go through menopause. Things just get more/less sensitive, slower to work, but largely stay the same.

Mrsglitterpants · 23/11/2016 19:58

Glad you enjoyed the article.

Macmillan Cancer Support have launched a new campaign aimed at women about examining your 'ladyparts' to try to detect female cancers earlier. As soon as I saw it I KNEW trans folk would make it all about them. And lo and behold, on the Macmillan FB page the SECOND comment is from a transmen saying men have wombs too and do not consider them lady parts.

Why do they have to make EVERYTHING - cancer, FGM, abortion, menstruation, ALL ABOUT THEM?

I am SICK of it.

Prawnofthepatriarchy · 23/11/2016 19:00

You're so right about it wasting time, Amy. There are so many important topics feminism addresses that aren't getting the attention they warrant. However I feel that this issue, however small a percentage of the population it may represent, is by far the most important for feminists today.

The erasure of women's issues, our sports, our spaces will result in an inability to campaign on any topic if the word "woman" becomes meaningless. If transmen are men, the word "men" also becomes meaningless too. We end up with a situation in which gender is 72 icecream flavours while sex doesn't exist among human beings.
.
Eventually the world will register that words for "adult with female reproductive system" and "adult with male reproductive system" are needed, and we'll have to scratch our heads as to what those words might be. Sad

Seachangeshell · 23/11/2016 18:40

And another thank you from me. Brilliant article

IAmAmy · 23/11/2016 18:30

Prawn it is, I'm lucky that a couple of my best friends do agree though! It's frustrating on the whole as to me it's diverting feminism and stopping us from talking about vital issues, setting us back in many ways. Your son sounds great! Becoming quite interested is how it starts Grin

grumpyfeminist · 23/11/2016 17:53

Another thank you for that link MrsGlitterpants