Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

Cool, you sound awesome. Thank goodness for people like you. Second what pp said about being careful what you say as these threads get watched.

Sam Bagnall, Rachel Johnson and Sarah Baxter, who wrote the Sunday Times article, are all getting attacked on Twitter & deserve support.

I have always quite liked Rachel Johnson despite her connections

This is her (and fucking everyone's) story

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4121112/RACHEL-JOHNSON-told-class-call-Richard-Did-trans-kid.html

India Willoughby has been on full frontal attack on twitter. Paris Lees too Particulary on the producer of this show. No wonder few wil dare the onslaught

Sam Bagnall = I support you

Cool
Good luck with it all. There are very many intelligentr informed women on here as oyu know. I too have been lurking and reading for a long time.

Please don't reveal too much of your situation on MN, there are always fuckers that want to dox

" I think the idea of a fixed sexuality is a recent, western concept."
Indeed! Also the idea of what 'sexuality' or a sexual partner was for. So, doing 'your duty' to your country/city/state as a man by reproducing with 'suitable' women/wives was often seen as distinct from casual or recreational sexual activities. The ancient greeks seemed to have slotted men having sexual activity with other men into their social system, which AFAIK was based on age/status rather than sex.

BBC yes I meant NOT misgendering, thanks
I'm all for men wearing makeup and dresses and whatever else they would like. But no, I don't believe it makes them women. It did piss me off a bit that he was being congratulated for doing something (and not very well if I'm honest) that many women do every day without any fanfare. It's definitely a good way for men to get attention, if they so please.

CoolJazz, what type of service are you writing guidelines for? as it will make a lot of difference eg if you offer residential facilities, if you are medical etc
I don't envy you either but I think you are quite right to do all this reading and thinking first. I'd be prepared, I think, to have to argue the case with people who haven't done all this reading and thinking and are still of the 'let's be tolerant of this minority'- as I was myself a few years ago. Not that I want to oppress people, I just want to protect women and children. Wear what you like, I say.
Re the 'innateness'- I think the claim to innateness DOES echo the claim some homosexuals would make to innateness, maybe for the same reason (it's not our fault, we were born this way). This would also support the case for puberty blockers (except, as we have seen, most children accept their sex after puberty)But I don't see that it matters in the case of homosexuality. Sexual behaviour becomes relevant after puberty, so the sexual orientation of pre pubertal children is neither here nor there. As a PP mentioned there are men who have sex with men who don't identify as gay, and through history/across the world now we have societies which sanction same sex behaviour under some circumstances, which don't all involve a fixed identity. I think the idea of a fixed sexuality is a recent, western concept.

ageingrunner I read his guardian article and the comments underneath are unbelievable. All saying how wonderful he is for wearing blue eyeshadow. I'm misgendering btw, at the time of the article shon was a man.

Assume you mean not misgendering...
A man wearing makeup would be a positive thing IMO. I'd think it was wonderful - breaking down the idea of gender. We need more of this kind of thing. It's when that's taken to mean "Must be a woman inside" that it actually reinforces gender norms.

However I wouldn't automatically sort of worship and agree with the person on everything they say which does seem to be the case when someone with a public profile comes out as trans... although to be fair I have noticed this in general, where people who strongly agree on one thing automatically agree with the person on other things. But the trans thing seems to take this kind of cultish behaviour to a whole new level.

I don't know if it's any help to CoolJazz but this is interesting, re. affect of gender norms on unbringing and identity. (Afghan girls raised as boys.)

re. that Shania Twain song... Hrmphhh. I was 12 when that was released, and I loved it. It totally resonated. Now, that is alien to me. It's really hard to explain, but what I mean is I sort of "get" the idea of gender identity, but I think its a very immature thing. Because after that I went through being exasperated at boy's/men's immaturity and incompetence, plus joking I was "a gay man in a woman's body" (sorry!) because I kinda felt like that in certain ways (being practical, making double entrendre style jokes) before eventually observing and examining the social context, and reading stuff about this, which really resonated.

But now, if a see a MtT with (imo) nice style even if they don't pass, a tiny part of me is 12 again, in awe, going "Ooh, pretty". I guess because we're surrounded by messages that that is what to aspire to... I dunno, it makes it look fun. By I cannot be arsed to doll myself up everyday and loathe the masses of expectations and the rest of it that comes with that.

I'm sorry, I'm waffling, there was a point in there somewhere

Hmm, OK ,so I guess in order to give validity to the claim of innateness to 'feeling like a women' a person would need to define what that feeling is.

This is the crux of it really. If you define being a woman by gender stereotyping, any gender stereotype that you could name, I can show you a woman who doesn't have it. But they are still a woman.

There simply is no answer other than a biological one. Which is why, when you ask a trans-woman what it is that she is feeling that makes her a woman, it comes out as an essence of some description -indefinable and subjective. Likewise if you ask what are the similarities between you and me (a woman) which make us the same. There aren't any which don't resort to gender stereotypes (see above).

It's also worth noting that many transwomen, particularly the activists, display male socialisation, to such an extent that they come across as hyper male. But continue to say they have empathy with and an affinity for women, because they are one. It's an extraordinary disconnect.

With regards to the LGBT community in general - I am not in that community, but I should imagine they have the same attitude as women in general. A desire to be inclusive and fight for a minority who is suffering, until the disconnect hits them in real life. (Like monkey's friend above).

Also, of course there are many transwomen who don't make demands, who do just want to get on with life peacefully. They tend to know they are men, are often attracted to other men and have zero desire to appropriate womanhood at the expense of women.

As A guy called Helen (a transwomem) says to transactivists at large, if you don't want women to think you are entitled abusive men, stop acting like it.

Frankly, if transactivists hadn't insisted on us agreeing that they are actually women, none of this would have happened. All the gender nonconforming trans-people would just get on with their lives like they have for years.

And I find it all a little immaterial anyway. Unless you have been socialised as female since birth, you haven't lived as a woman and all that entails. Not to mention the fact that you will never experience womanhood from the point of biology. And it's glaringly obvious when you speak to trans-women.

It's a mindfuck and I don't envy you your task.

"How is one accepted as innate identity and not the other?"
As regards homosexuality, we have the interesting case that I remember from the 80s-90s where the safer sex campaigners realised that there were men out there who had sex with other men, BUT who didn't 'identify' as gay (whatever that meant, but I think more in terms of the whole social scene and 'acting' like a particular type of gay man.). Hence a separation of the objective 'who you seek to have sex with' bit, and then the 'who do you feel like inside' identity stuff. It wasn't really an issue, just that groups realised they had to be careful about their wording in material, else the men who had sex with other men but didn't identify as gay would think it wasn't aimed at them..............

As regards 'innate' and homosexuality, first I think the 'I was born this way, I can't help it scenario', was a tremendous cop-out, even if it did enable gay marriage and decriminalisation. I would have preferred, ......innate, a choice, who cares! What is it to you even if I did chose this? In fact, if I mythically had a choice, I would still chose being a lesbian!.............
Indeed, why most people are heterosexual, and exactly how they all get trained into being that way, and the social construction of sexuality, are interesting areas of study. There is no straightforward 'gay gene', even though it seems to be impossible (as well as distinctly unethical) to try and change someones sexual orientation.

I guess for me the whole difference is that 'sexual orientation' is, kind if by definition, focused outwards onto other people. It's not a case of 'I feel like a lesbian' inside, but I either fancy other women (as opposed to men), or I don't. Many women anyway have found that their sexuality is more fluid, with many women being married etc for many years before falling in love with a woman. You can feel like all the other women around you, you might not identify as anything 'different', but fancy women as opposed to men.

It's objective, rather than the magic, purely subjective 'I feel like a woman in my head' of supposed gender identity. Some women do, some women don't, and seems some males do as well. Only becomes a problem if you insist that women are supposed to 'feel like women' in the head, and that that means something significant (or means something signifcant if they don't!).

Oh, WankingMonkey, that's just awful to happen to your friend. And the idea now that a lesbian can be assaulted for saying no to sex, and that our own community will think that's just fine and dandy, is the cherry on top of the horror-cake. At least in the 80s when you got bashed you got sympathy from your fellow benders.

Finally saw the documentary and was very impressed - not just at the stuff I personally agreed with, but at the way it brought many viewpoints into it.

I was particularly struck by the 17 year old who has now transitioned, and who talked a lot about never fitting in as a child amongst boys. There was then a long session of her applying makeup, and I thought if you had been around in London about 1970-1981 during the New Romantic thing, you'd have been fine, as some of the boys I knew wore more makeup than the girls, and while it was def playing with gender presentation, there was no implication that a boy with shimmery eyeshadow on was not a boy. She perhaps would have fitted in just fine, have found her in-group, without having to feel she wasn't a boy at all.

CoolJazz this is a brilliant website to help organise one's thoughts on transgenderism.

thenewbacklash.blogspot.fr/2015/03/thank-you-for-visiting-my-blog.html?m=1

CoolJazz
I only ever seem to de-lurk to recommend the work of Dr Rebecca Reilly-Cooper who is very clear and easy to understand on sex and gender.
sexandgenderintro.com/

I have no connections to the LGB community, but from an outsider's point of view, T seems to have been accepted as part of them. Are the concerns about T on LGB community very visible, and been given a high profile, within that community- or is it still a marginal voice and most LGB have not yet woken up to the implications of T?

Most of my friends are gay or lesbian so I hang out a lot in 'gay bars' and such and the general tone seems to be gay men don't care much as they aren't affected at all. And lesbians seem to really dislike being associated with transgender...because (and I am not saying this is true of all..but in my group it seems pretty common) they are pressured into accepting males as partners. One woman I know was actually assaulted. You can imagine the story really. Chatted up, took this woman home..discovered a surprise penis. Said no. Transphobia!!!! And whacked across the face. I didn't know about any of this until months after it happened as I used to blindly accept the transwomen are women rhetoric and never thought any deeper into it. It was MN that opened my eyes to this all and because of this I had conversations about it with friends and discovered that she had gone through this. She also too a lot of shit afterwards from various people who had been told by the transwoman how transphobic she was and how she was interested until she saw the penis and she is focused on genitals...yadayadayada. Basically, lesbians are no longer allowed to exist. As sex doesn't matter apparently. Gay men can't exist by the same token, but they don't know this as transmen do not do shit like that.

Went off on a tangent a little there, apologies. But yeah, tone in my group is gay men don't particularly care. Lesbians do care very much but are ignored.

The main part of 'trans' is apparently this feeling that one has of being a woman/man. However, I do not have this, nor does anyone I have asked about this. People simply feel like themselves. They ARE male or female, but have no internal feelings of being male or female, if that makes sense. You also cannot ever know what it feels like to be something you are not and never have been. So...even from the very start the argument falls down. I have spoken to some transgender people on reddit about this and the conclusion was that I, and others I know must be 'a-gender' or 'gender queer' as we do not have this internal sense of being a woman rather than knowledge that we are women. I would be really interested to hear if anyone on here has this womanhood essence that is claimed...as otherwise, everyone is actually trans? Which is a bit ridiculous.

Cool. An article that really helped me sort out my head on the gender issue is this

aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

Its fairly long, but brilliant at tying up all of the knots.

I have absolutely no idea why homosexuality is always brought up in relation to transgender as they are not alike at all apart from the fact that people may experience discrimination due to being either/both of them. That is where the similarities end and infact, much of the trans ideology is deeply homophobic in itself...mainly the push for transing of children, who if left alone are extremely likely to just become gay 'cis' adults. Trans must be distanced from LGB. Especially for the sake of lesbians who are being thrown under the bus in all of this and battered from all angles.

I suppose, sexuality is verifiable and knowable. A person can easily know which sex they are attracted to, by the verifiable experience of being sexually attracted to them. Of course, it's not verifiable to anyone other than the individual, but it's still objectively verifiable. If we could invent a machine that could read sexual attraction in brains we could run it and verify which sex attracts a person.
Being a woman when you're a male person isn't a verifiable feeling. It's a person claiming to feel something of which they can have no knowledge. Sexual attraction is pretty much universal, being a woman isn't. Males can't experience being a woman because the condition of being a woman excludes males.
It's difficult to explain - but I bet someone with a better understanding of scientific and philosophical concepts could put it better than I did.

I don't think there is much science that supports differences in male and female brains. As a spectrum, there are very few at either end and most people are in the middle.

The innate difference between men and women, apart from biological sex is understood to be down to hormones, I believe.

Transwomen, say, claiming innate femaleness, but then needing to replace their male hormones with female hormones shows up the contradiction.

And as gender stereotypical roles have changed across time and place, it's difficult to argue that they are innate. Even down to many people thinking the colour pink is feminine when it was largely regarded as a masculine colour, 200 odd years ago.

Wanting to perform the roles of the opposite gender is entirely different, and a lot more understandable. If people feel constrained by their gender role, it's entirely plausible to want to peform it differently. The problem is with the stereotype. Reinforcing gender stereotypes is damaging, and is the very thing that makes people want to change from one to the other - by making one set the provenance of women and one the provenance of men.