Can transsexuals truly be allies to women?

The GC position is broadly speaking, all choices around personal appearance, hobbies, possessions, names, colours, all the rest of it, is fully available to men or women.

Sex is something you're born with, it cannot change, but each sex has a very wide range of people with a very wide range of choices over appearance and preferences. None of which are an indicator of their sex.

Adults are free to make any surgical interventions to their body to any extent and to any appearance that they like and if this helps their MH that's great. However a body, no matter how surgically altered to look like another sex, does not change sex.

The debate is where and at what point someone of one sex should be counted as now of the opposite sex - when they take on a full or a partial outward appearance via hormones or surgery? when they embrace particular appearances and choices? when they simply state their preference of which sex they wish to be counted as regardless of fact? The hard fact is that they cannot change sex, and to count someone of the male sex as being legally or in any other way a woman is in itself harmful to biological women in many ways.

The legal fiction of being a woman being created and this crossing of the line made possible was what started this mess.

Is it realistic though to expect a cure for GD? Therapy must be of some use, and possibly psychiatric medicine, but the fact that someone has decided that surgical intervention can be done so therefore should be, is, from an ethical pov at least, debatable. I mean surely the fact that one can resemble the opposite sex as far as possible doesn’t actually cure the desire toactually be the opposite sex? For other psychiatric conditions, Bipolar for eg, there’s nothing that can be changed about the body that can be altered in order to resemble a person who doesn’t have Bipolar, so we have to focus our efforts on staying well in other ways, so what is different about GD? Also I know that one method of treatment can work quite well for a long time, but then for seemingly no reason it can stop working. Is this the same for SRS? Can it be great for a few years, but then symptoms reappear and cause problems again? I can come off one med if this happens, and go on another, or none at all, but surgical adjustments can’t be undone, and can that be a source of distress in itself, causing other symptoms to be exacerbated?

Also, and you can probably answer this Hamster is there ongoing MH support for people who have had SRS? The way it works for me is that I will be under the care of the MH team, where hopefully I can get the right help to become stable after an episode, then when I’ve been stable a while I’ll be discharged. If I subsequently become unwell again I can either go to my GP, who will refer me back, or if it’s within a year of my last discharge from MH, I can go straight back to them. Do the same sorts of procedures apply for GD or do you just get the op, get support for a bit after that, then just get left to get on with it as if you’re cured?

I’m just wondering, because I don’t know, so forgive my ignorance that’s why I’m asking, Is it that SRS is seen as a final cure for GD, or is it part of a life long treatment framework?

Sorry for the mahusive derail. It’s probably for a new thread but it kind of came up here. Do feel free to ignore.

Oh and please forgive spelling. I’m crap at spelling for reasons, which I shan’t go into.

As to terminology. I think there's a point here about "identifying" - the ever-present beast of the early twenty-first century.

Men can hold feminist beliefs. Of course they can. The issues come when they want to take on an identity related to those beliefs - ally, feminist, whatever.

If we all stopped identifying or trying to identify, and just had opinions and beliefs, that would be better!

Me neither, Lang. Unfortunately many societies seem to be heading at full speed in the opposite direction.

(Though the Anglosphere and the Spanish diaspora countries are heading there fastest, and it might be interesting to figure out why.)

Fundamentally, the very notion of 'trans', whether transsexual or transgender, is antithetical to feminism, and therefore harmful to women and girls

Agree if we're talking the current definition of "trans".

But is there a world in which "trans" comes to mean "unusual member of one's birth sex"? And anti-discrimination measures are centred around that?

Because I wouldn't mind that world at all.

I'm not discouraging you from putting it here if you want, though PMs are fine (or would be if I ever checked them). I'm just sort of having a "community disruptors are why we can't have nice things like a nuanced conversation" moment.

James Caspian, 'Note of Caution: A Gender Therapist Asks Questions'

concludes:
"I went into therapeutic work in order to help alleviate suffering. Clinicians, psychotherapists, doctors all work to alleviate suffering. When I first became a psychotherapist, there were a tiny number of people who had suffered so much and had struggled so long with how they felt about having to live out their gender, that they really felt the need to transition, physically, to the opposite one. But that’s a very extreme solution. The psychological motivations and emotional reasons for people going to gender clinics are hugely varied and complex. For instance, research shows that there is a very high ratio of people on the autistic spectrum presenting with gender problems. Autistic people, of course, have problems with the issue of “role”.

There are those who want to prove that gender is entirely neuro-biological, that gender identity resides completely in the brain, from birth. For instance, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in the UK seeks to prove that this is the case. Therefore, there’s nothing you can do about it: you can’t be “cured” of it, it’s part of you, a natural difference in someone’s brain. You can’t change the composition of the brain: so, in order to help a person with that kind of neuro-biological make-up, you change their body to match the brain. They are seeking to prove that gender identity is not a choice. I think that it’s possible that neuro-biology plays a part for some of the patients I was seeing. But no one has proved this definitively, and in addition, there is clearly a large social and cultural element in what constitutes gender

"These days, I have de-transitioning people contacting me on regular basis. I don’t believe that one is “transphobic” for listening to them and giving them a voice. There is nothing to fear from talking to those who regret transitioning or are critical of it. We need to know the truth, and once we hear from a spectrum of people it’s going to be a complex picture. The method I was going to use for my research is called phenomenological analysis. It means letting people speak for themselves. The researcher must stay out of the way. I simply wanted to give people a platform to be heard.

From a Jungian perspective, I think we need to understand how the collective unconscious comes into this. We need to get at the deep reasons why this political bandwagon has gathered so much momentum. We need to understand this “shadow” phenomenon where people who question are vilified and silenced, and people are afraid to say what they think. It comes up time and time again throughout human history. Why has gender now become such a political flash point? It has become impossible to have a critical discussion about it. Critical thinking is being confused with criticism, and criticism is being confused with attacking people. Maybe the “shadow” of liberalism is repression: we are not allowed to think, let alone speak, critically. Jung would say that some things come out of the collective unconscious, manifest, then subside again. In the meantime, we need to be circumspect with how we allow these manifestations to affect vulnerable individuals, and we need to allow people to talk, and to question."
humanumreview.com/articles/a-gender-therapist-asks-questions

see recent update to his appeal against research being blocked:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3500436-James-Caspian-oral-hearing-granted

Fundamentally, the very notion of 'trans', whether transsexual or transgender, is antithetical to feminism, and therefore harmful to women and girls. It must create a fuckload of cognitive dissonance to be a so-called gender critical transsexual.

Yes to this.

Some men hate women.
If you don't hate women, then we're groovy! :)

It's difficult because the medical profession has so many strands to it, big pharma opportunists, surgeons who find a profitable niche/enjoy boundary pushing challenges, psychiatric medicine with all it's patriarchal underpinnings. All that is before you get to the earnest do gooders and non profits with their own agendas to push.

It seems nigh on impossible for any individual with gender dysphoria to navigate a pathway through that will truly serve their best interests and no one else's.

It does seem to be a case of making your choice from a selection of bad options. I guess my take is that having "lie to yourself forever" be one of the options is a bad idea, and is never going to end well, and that seems to be supported by the clear lack of being at peace with themselves demonstrated by people who chose that option.

I feel like this would be a really interesting conversation to have but am a bit reluctant to get into it here due to the inevitability of malicious people who take joy in disrupting and upsetting others jumping in.

So yeah it is a headfuck....

"Which then leads to "is the medical profession culpable?", which in turn runs parallel with, "what help is there for the sufferer of GD when psychiatric intervention fails?"

The role of the medical profession is very relevent.
Understanding the sexism, male pattern behaviours there which have shaped both interventions and the way that dysphoria is understood is relevent.

I think the fact that you realise that these are the issues GC women are worried about says a lot about you as a person Hamster

I don’t have any clarity hamster.
Just know that I like what I read off wha5 you post

No help 🤦‍♀️

I'm not sure what you do with that realisation if you've already had genital surgery and so on.

Fundamentally, the very notion of 'trans', whether transsexual or transgender, is antithetical to feminism, and therefore harmful to women and girls

This is the case and coming to that realisation as a transsexual has got to be a gigantic headfuck.

I think a way forward is to look at the language being used and change it to an honest vocabulary, for example:

there is no such entity as a "transsexual" there are only surgically altered people [because no human can ever change sex];

there is no such entity as a "transwoman" there are only men or males, [who cross dress or are transvestites];

men are adult human males [this is a fact];

etc

There were some significant threads last year which identified the impossibility of separating transsexuals from transgenderism.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3463920-Lets-go-back-to-2007

AngryAttackKittens wrote:
"I'm going to point every "but the nice, harmless old school transsexuals whose movement has been unfairly appropriated by the nasty transgender people" person to this thread from now on.

All the same elements we're seeing now were there in that old BBC roundtable from the 70s with the 4 transwomen, the politician, and the doctor. None of this is new.

see also demonstration of issues raised by OP in thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3445694-Letter-in-the-Times-Plea-To-The-Trans-Lobby-from-group-of-transsexuals