Mermaids and the evolving understanding of gender identity.

For the record he is very happy in his body whilst enjoying all things sparkly.

“Evie” could be my son. I don’t get why any of those things are gender related

But then I don’t believe in gender stereotypes.

I read all of this and keep coming back to the question ‘who benefits from a whole swathe of children/young people being emotionally damaged and divorced from their physicality’ and there is no answer I can think of that is remotely positive.

I sincerely hope the NHS puts enough resources into good mental health services to try and offset the damage already done and try to mitigate how much more vulnerable to exploitation those affected will have been made.

nauticant your straightforward arithmetic may be missing something - the fact that there are two strands to dysphoria. It's not necessarily about wanting the body of the opposite sex; certainly the old transsexuals' accounts made it clear their issue was an inability to make peace with their maleness.

What's going on with the explosion of trans identities in girls and young women is their disconnection from their being female. The majority don't want male bodies per se, they want bodies that aren't female.

If it's characterised as "wanting the body of the opposite sex" you leave the door open to the less savoury motivations, while excluding all those women and girls developing dissociative disorders who nevertheless don't wish to be male.

If it's characterised as "not wanting the body of this sex" then we're able to analyse what's going on without the gender-euphorics clouding the issue. Because the gender-euphorics clearly do enjoy the body they have.

deepwatersolo I missed this report first time round and the content is familiar to anyone on here but it's interesting how close the 5 recommendations of 3 months ago (on p88) are to what the gov has announced. Maybe coming from a Think Tank rather than a women's group made it more palatable to some in power?
www.civitas.org.uk/press/transgender-ideology-leaving-a-corrosive-impact-on-society-new-book-finds-optimism-in-scrapping-of-gender-recognition-reforms/

Looks like the Guardian missed the memo (sorry if it's been posted already)

twitter.com/guardian/status/1309866584735875072

Little Girl Review-tender film about a girl born in a boy's body.

The straightforward arithmetic says that there are perhaps several thousand people with gender dysphoria, in a meaningful sense according to what it was supposed to mean, and several hundred thousand transgender people without it so I'd say the focus is very much on those who also simply identify as trans for whatever reason.

So we've gone from:

Gender dysphoria is a crippling MH condition; its sufferers are called "trans"

to

Trans people don't have a crippling MH condition; gender dysphoria is nothing to do with being "trans"

So wtf is "trans" if it's not a person being treated for that particular mental health condition?

Do the TRA actually give a single shiny shite about people with gender dysphoria? Or do they only care about the people with gender dysphoria who also identify as trans?

Another thing I have always thought about is that even if you are a woman with a mans brain or vice versa that doesn’t mean that you should have to change your sex or even that that is a good idea.

The neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen said that there is such a thing as male and female brains and that people with autism have an extreme male brain’. I personally think that is a pile of bollocks. Even if you were to prove to me that I do I fact have a male brain what would be the point of me having a sex change? Why can’t society just accept that someone can be female but have no interest in girly things?

I wonder if there is a word for the condition of 'feeling like being born in the wrong body.' Surely, that would be helpful for the discourse Mermaids is now engaging in

Well, I’d call it dysphoria. You know, like anorexia or bulimia - other bodily dysphorias.

Oh, but that would mean that transgender would be a mental health issue, and -as I’ve just heard Lisa Nandy say on Any Questions (iPlayer) to suggest that would be demeaning.

Because there’s nothing like a good bit of ableism thrown into this whole debate.

I wonder if there is a word for the condition of 'feeling like being born in the wrong body.' Surely, that would be helpful for the discourse Mermaids is now engaging in...

mobile.twitter.com/HJoyceGender/status/1309821243663753221

Tweet quotes Owen Jones:

"Some progressives are debating the legitimacy of trans identity. There is a sense that they are interlopers, infiltrators, sufferers of psychological conditions rather than people trapped in the wrong bodies"

From this

1). You are 'legitimate' not simply because you are human, but because you have a particular identity.
2). If you suffer from a psychological condition, you are not legitimate
3). Your legitimacy is drawn from the idea that people are born with a fixed gender identity that can accidentally be trapped in the wrong body.

Therefore if Mermaids starts to question the 'born in the wrong body' concept and agree that their purpose is to help people who simply feel like they were born in the wrong body, they are questioning everything that people like OJ believe about trans identity and trans rights.

I'd say they've repositioned themselves so there's now a larger gap between what they present externally and what they believe internally. It isn't clear that they're not going to get away with this.

My suspicion is that with beliefs that strong, even if you change whats on the website thats not going to change the views and attitudes on their forum and of the individuals involved and influencing others.

Therein lies a whole other can of worms that will need to be looked at.

Have they just changed what they say officially so they can still work with various agencies and have access to vulnerable children - and in practice still be pushing views incompatible with safeguarding.

I’m even more disgusted that Mermaids have capitulated so quickly. It means they didn’t have absolute conviction in their beliefs. To do what they’ve done and the life-changing actions they have advocated on a whim.

If they’d stood by their position and at least pretended they believed their own words it would have been one thing but the speed of the about turn and their inability or unwillingness to fight their corner suggests they knew it was made up nonsense.

Despicable and immoral.

It sounds as though they are having a bit of a crisis.

Literally 'Born in the wrong body' doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but if you water it down and just say that some people feel as though they were born in the wrong body, then you have to start addressing why they feel that way, and 'TWAW' starts to fall apart.

Ahh, having had a look I see that when they put up the amended version of the article they used a different URL. The original URL now doesn't go anywhere.

It's a coding glitch. You can see the article depending on the route by which you get onto the webpage.

It seems to relate to the fact that last night, when Alan Henness tweeted, they took the article down, amended it, and put up the new version

Oh ffs, autocorrect! First sentence was in fact saying "what's been done to vulnerable transsexuals" isn't a distraction. No idea how it mangled that!

I'm not convinced we should be characterising what's been done to homosexuals as a distraction here.

We look at the practices of other cultures and see them carving up their kids' genitals, we ask why the everliving fuck are women going along with this, and the answer we get from listening to them is "So the child will fit in with the culture, and not be ostracised, vilified, denied the chance to participate in their society."

This is what we have been doing to homosexuals. Here, in the UK, for decades.

Mermaids were able to take the line they did because the idea of using sharp implements to modify an adult homosexual's genitals, to allow them to better fit in and participate in our violently patriarchal culture, was considered a kind and reasonable accommodation by the general public.

Either mutilating genitals to fit in with sexist cultural norms is acceptable, or it is not. Yet we condemn it there while permitting as a kindness here.

Alan Henness is reporting that Mermaid's latest spiel about wrong bodies has been taken down. Another damascene conversion on the way?

twitter.com/zeno001/status/1309525078875439105

For me, the best of the tradition was trying to work out why the material reality (the structure) was still so oppressive despite liberation movements going back a 100 years. And some of that was that power played out through other forces in society - discourse, text, art and culture

@Gwynfluff - yes. Post-structuralism isn't the entire bogeyman in all of this. Watered down, third hand versions of it are. Post-structuralist approaches can actually help feminists to theorise why, as you say, there might be a semblance of equality (equal pay etc), but no real equality, and certainly enduringly oppressive structures.

Other theoretical models about how society, power & knowledge can also help - the cultural materialist approach derived from Marxism, for example.

But the real problem of post-structuralism (or cultural materialism, or Marxism or any ideological or theoretical position and/or analysis) is the people who spout a third-hand version, and hold it to be "truth" and see any disagreement with them, as a moral/ethical failing, rather than what it is - a disagreement.