How should we treat trans people?

but in truth I can only spot those who show obvious signs

Yes. Of being male or female. As the multitudes of sex recognition studies, including those that obscure "gender", show.

Give it up.

Dangerfloof
How can you know what you don't know?

I could say that I can always recognise a drug addict, but how can I be sure? I might recognise certain physical or behavioural signs that might well be obvious in some addicts but not every addict will exhibit these. There will be other functioning addicts who show no outward signs. I will have no idea who these people are and so my bias will be confirmed. I will be confident in my ability to accurately spit a drug addict but in truth I can only spot those who show obvious signs.

Cleverer people than me have spotted some parallels with the trans interpretation of queer theory and religion. Now I'm seeing more and more parallels.

Thanks for the link, wacademia - I'd be interested to explore this angle.

The patriarchal ideology has had many variants over the years. They're all much of a muchness, just told in different words.

Once you realise we're all indoctrinated into our local iteration of patriarchy, going back over the religious texts is quite illuminating. Even just reading the first couple of pages of the Bible with your DARVO goggles on.

The link address makes me think - "religious trauma" isn't just felt by people indoctrinated into a recognised organised religion. I bet I'll find my father's insistence on the supremacy of atheism reflected in there. He denies all gods while expecting to be treated as the supreme authority on what's true and what's inexplicable and what's irrelevant and what's wrong. Fucked me right up.

(Thankfully he also established Pratchett as a Wise Man, which means I can fully accept and believe it when MrsTerryPratchett tells me "holy hell, he's awful, run away!")

But you can only say that no one passes if you've seen a statistically large enough group and have correctly identified the TM and TW in a "blind" test.

Oh get a grip. There are endless studies on sex recognition, both including and excluding opposite "gender" hair styles and suchlike. Human beings recognise sex perfectly well. It's an evolved ability.

And guess what? Women are better at it than men. Could that possibly be because it's an evolved risk assessment tool because men pose risk to women in ways that women don't pose to men? Heaven forfend. Who coulda thunk it?

We're not in a fever dream. It's the real world. Where sex is real and everyone knows what it is.

Did I say no one? Not sure did but if I did then scratch that and add ‘very few’.

How can you possibly know this?

If you observe someone that you recognise as being trans well obviously, they don't pass. How do you know that countless other men and women that you see aren't actually TM or TW who do pass?
I dont know how we know. We simply do. Its millenia of instinct. Its survival, it's not a thing you can describe.
At times I have just known seconds before hand that something bad is going to happen to me. at times I have known by some sense that something bad is happening to someone else in the vicinity. When you walk in a room and can cut the air with a knife? You know something is wrong, but not what.
Its similar to knowing that a person is evil. Only had that a couple times and no idea if I was right, but I got out of the sodding way in case I was caught up in it.
I can look around a room and fairly easily tell you who is the rapist, who is the wife beater, who is the drug taker, who hates children, who dislikes animals, who is a control freak etc. Only need a few minutes. My life could depend on this information and certain types of people try to hide what they are, with varying success. But it's just a veneer, and men trying to do woman is just another veneer.
Aside from the fact they rarely have any idea about women so dont know how to do it.

But you can only say that no one passes if you've seen a statistically large enough group and have correctly identified the TM and TW in a "blind" test.

Otherwise all you can say is that you can identify those that you can identify.

Good question - but build, poise, voice, size of extremities, Adam’s apple... there are lots of cues. Cosmetic surgery? Well that helps I suppose... how many have medical intervention? I still say it would be difficult to pass without (cosmetic and body) surgery.

No, they don't
How can you possibly know this?

If you observe someone that you recognise as being trans well, obviously, they don't pass. How do you know that countless other men and women that you see aren't actually TM or TW who do pass?

Bloody hell: ‘There is just something about the way people walk, hold themselves, mannerisms - not the way the dress...’

I was recently in a city that is known for being ‘at the forefront’ of medical meddling. So yes there were more trans around than usual I suppose. And not the ‘I have a beard and I’m a woman’ types.

There is just something about the way people nice, hold themselves, mannerisms - but the way the dress or have their hair (in a lot of cases there was an attempt to ‘blend in’). There is just something - even if you aren’t directly looking at a person, they just catch your eye. It’s hard to put your finger on it.

I think many do pass a lot of the time. That’s fine we can disagree, I’m not obsessed

No, they don't. Just because most people are too polite to point or stare does not mean that the 'oddness' or downright bleedin' obvious has not been registered and recognised.

And what about the fact that dysphoria is no longer required for transitioning?

In fact, TW now speak much less of dysphoria than they do of EUPHORIA.

The euphoria they feel when doing themselves up as women.

It’s such a turn-on!

Witness the Telegraph columnist so EUPHORIC over what he calls his second puberty and his budding teenage tits — which he just loves to make bounce by running up the stairs.

Why the fuck are we elevating sexual excitement to a civil right?

Especially a sexual excitement that is premised on penetrating women’s boundaries?

Witness the TW filming himself masturbating in a cubicle in the women’s toilets.

Genderism, uncoupled as it is now from the psychological distress of dysphoria, is rape culture writ large, with TM (who transition for very different reasons than do TW) and children used as human shields to deflect understanding of that — meaning identity confusion is intentionally, iatrogenically, being induced (and we know from the 1980s-1990’s faddish escalation in Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnoses how easily identity confusion can be induced) in children to cloak the sexual purposes of men.

The pounding on the windows in Brighton was metaphor in action.

There is no Golden Mean of reasonable accommodation to be found here unless and until genderism is divorced from the notion of “identity,” recoupled to the psychological condition of dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia — conditions previously acknowledged as exceedingly rare — and then, like every other psychiatric illness, studied, evaluated, and treated using properly controlled study design and evidence-based protocols. Which, by the way have to include the new modalities of therapy that have come into practice since the days when talk therapy, ie psychoanalysis Freud-style, was found to be ineffective and discarded in favor of medical and surgical alteration. Evidence-based therapy protocols have come a VERY long way since then.

But without severe medical intervention that's not realistic for me.

And probably not even then. You'd live in fear of being outed.

I feel that the trans community is giving me a choice of medical mutilisation or acceptance of rape and other discrimination.

This insinuation that oppression can be identified into and out of is the most offensive and infuriating aspect of the trans ideology. It blames every woman on earth for every incident of violence, rape, murder, harassment, discrimination, underpayment, you name it, that has been visited on us because of our sex. And it's bullshit. No one ever asked the German women and girls raped by the men of the Red Army at the end of WW2, or the women and girls raped by men in the Congo, or in South Sudan, or girls whose own mothers conspire to iron their breasts or mutilate their vulvas, what their gender identity was before choosing to hurt them. No one asked the millions of girl foeti aborted for being girls in India what their gender identity was.

Go on, twitterati, screencap this post. I dare you.

I'll even cut my tits off if it helps.

There is a very long history of female self-mutilation to avoid rape. The Catholic church has at least one saint who is in part glorified for just this. I see parallels with the glorification of female saints who self-mutilated or fought back and were murdered by their rapists, preferring death over violation, and the "brave and special" narrative surrounding transitioning youth, most of whom are female. Many female Catholic saints were persecuted because they refused to marry and in doing so were "womanning wrong".

• Female Catholic, "does womanning wrong" by refusing to be sexually available to men, takes death or mutilation over submission, is canonised as a martyr and glorified.
• Young lesbian, "does womanning wrong" by refusing to be sexually available to men, takes death via suicide or mutilation via mastectomy over submission, is pronounced brave and special.

Cleverer people than me have spotted some parallels with the trans interpretation of queer theory and religion. Now I'm seeing more and more parallels.

However councilling to change thinking could cure them as stopping the therapy if successful would mean they no longer thought that they were the opposite sex

Agreed.

The trouble is generally that it's very very hard for men to accept the need to dig through their past to see what's influenced the emergence of their sexed/sexual identity.

And even if they do, there's still the underlying problem of needing some form of coping mechanism to mitigate feeling impotent in other areas of life.

If it's no longer classed as a disorder then there's no reason for anyone to analyse why they feel the way they do, and so the basic human need to feel in control of our environment gets funnelled into the typical vocal/violent demands for validation as soon as the person feels they're powerless.

And there's never any reason to work out what the underlying control issues are all about.

So, no impetus to find alternative, healthier means of feeling in control of one's life.

. Like any medical condition you get the treatment and hopefully move forward, you don’t keep identifying as that condition

Wait, I thought being trans was no longer a disorder. If it is not a disorder why does someone qualify for elective surgery and hormones on the NHS to treat it.

Some people want (need) to be perceived as the opposite physical
sex to which they were born

Ok well here I have a conundrum. And it's real.
I have an abiding need to be perceived in real life and in law as old enough to draw my pension.
I have got to somehow give up work, its killing me. I am beyond tired, I cry at the thought of getting up on a morning, I really struggle to do my part time job. If I could just retire this would all go away.
Sadly I am 20+years away from real retirement. But if I could just get a new birth certificate that said I was born 20 years before I actually was, and people when they looked at me saw a little old lady. Then all my current problems would disappear. I could happily claim my state pension and live a life sans working.

Of course it's just the menopause, it will pass, I will one day feel better. But just for right now, I wanna be a pensioner.

Sorry Tyro didn't explain myself well. Physical treatment eg hormones, cosmetic surgery etc will not cure the person as the cessation or reversal of this would cause the issues to worsen. However councilling to change thinking could cure them as stopping the therapy if successful would mean they no longer thought that they were the opposite sex.

So by treating him as a woman, we're actually treating him as a man, because if he was actually a woman we wouldn't be scared of him.

What we end up with is men who say they are women being pandered to and 'treated as women' out of fear, and women who say they are men having their wish to be treated as men ignored because they're not scary.

So we still end up treating men as men and women as women.

Exactly. Transwomen are treated to, and are benefitting from, male privilege everywhere.

But then they would still have the condition, just like a diabetic for example who is treated with meds/diet but still has the condition.

No.

Gendered dysphoria can be cured.

A prerequisite is the patient and the therapist believing it's curable.

And then you just have to smash the hell out of all the conditioning and work out where it came from, so you can establish new coping mechanisms for social reality.

Could it be that we're scared of what the male might do if his psychological needs are not pandered to?

Maybe sometimes, yes.

So by treating him as a woman, we're actually treating him as a man, because if he was actually a woman we wouldn't be scared of him.

What we end up with is men who say they are women being pandered to and 'treated as women' out of fear, and women who say they are men having their wish to be treated as men ignored because they're not scary.

So we still end up treating men as men and women as women.

It’s a theory. I didn’t not know what the mental health care profession community would make of it or whether it could be used as a basis for new successful treatments but yes it’s a reasonable sounding hypothesis.

In case you missed it, Field - I've experienced severe gendered dysphoria since very early childhood. I'm speaking from personal experience that checks out with every trans or AGP person I've ever known.

It only sounds like bollocks if you think a gender identity is a fixed thing that is inherent in the developing blastocyte.

Only difference with me and them is, no one told me I was behaving like a boy and that this was wrong. But they did tell me I was fat and that this was wrong. So my bodily dysmorphia revolves around my perception of fatness rather than my genitals.

Gendered trauma's at the root of it. All of it. Gendered trauma and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

But then they would still have the condition, just like a diabetic for example who is treated with meds/diet but still has the condition. If you stopped or reversed the treatment they received and they are suffering again they are not cured and never have been. Therefore the condition is part of their identity.

No I don’t think think that.

What do you think then? Because, quite frankly, you seem to think that male wants trump female needs.

I don't. And I don't give a flying fuck what the males think about that.