Please help me untangle why gender is such an issue

Ugh, using valid above in a colloquial sense - should have chosen a better term.

Look, it's not complicated. You have a sex, you will experience some sex-linked behaviours and tendencies, mostly around reproduction, and then you have a personality which forms around a temperament.

Depending on your sex, you will be shaped by one or other of a set of sex-stereotypes, to a greater or lesser effect.

It's all either body or society, unless you believe in non-material essences that exist outside of the body aka religion.

Yes, that's where this very thin ideology falls down.

Have whatever gender identify beliefs you want about yourself, change them at will, twice a day if you like.

But those beliefs exist in addition and are separate to the biological truth of male and female sexes and the legal protections afforded women on the basis of sex.

They do not replace, alter, nudge, weaken or in any other way compromise those facts.

but I see trans woman as female, so that's not a problem for me

Seeing trans women as female is often a problem or even an impossible ask for other people though, and surely their feelings matter too.

You are radically overstating the evidence for a cross-sex identity being 'a durable biological element', especially given that the brain is plastic, and responds/changes to social and other external input.

Its irresponsible to over claim like this. Unless you misread and overstate available evidence, there is no way to confidently assert causation.

It's a valid hypothesis, that dysphoria emerging in early childhood and persisting through puberty and into adulthood, has a neurological basis, but studies looking at the brains of post transition adult individuals and finding some similarities with the brains of same-sex oriented adults, is far from a strong indication of causation.

midge I do find it telling on these threads, the lack of acknowledgment that we're being shoved out of the woman club, from the people doing the shoving. Perhaps this thread will be different?

This is such an important point.

As soon as you include any male person - no matter how he identifies, no matter how "sincere" he may be - in the female group you will be excluding some of those females.

Excluding females from their own group so that males can not only be included in that group, but required to be centred within it.

No. That's unacceptable.

I'll consider the analogy as worthwhile the day we have documented evidence of an individual waking up in a different body.

Until then I will file this all under the term 'belief' and 'ideology' and not give it more consideration as something I should be giving anymore serious thought and consideration to.

Every human comes out of a woman who was born a woman whether they identify now a fucking octosexual unicorn or not.

No man ever has to worry about the impact of pregnancy or childbirth on their body even if they now identify as a woman.

Saying that sex is not binary is interphobic and this has been stated repeatedly by people who are intersex that saying this is hurting their interests and they are actively being used in a way they dislike to uphold an ideology which again hurts their interests.

We are what we are physically. Who we decide to be is something else entirely and is about personality not reinventing our sex or what sex is.

I don’t want to contribute to a pile on, positrans, you’re engaging respectfully and intelligently which I appreciate, and which is quite rare in these parts from those with your point of view.

But this set of beliefs has to be treated as a topic akin to religion in a secular society. You can believe what you want, but you can’t compel others to those beliefs. I’m a gender apostate if you like, and I am going to resist your attempts to frame my life with your worldview by claiming I dont have a gender identity because “agender”. I don’t have one because I don’t believe in them, no more than I believe in souls.

There’s plenty of science seeking to demonstrate the sections of the brain that correlate with religiosity and religious experience, but proving they exist doesn’t make God factual. Same with gender identity. (Also keen to see those links)

Why does the required respect for someone’s identity not stretch to me and women like me?

I think my gender was something I was born with, and that is normally aligned to sex

The word you are looking for is personality.

Not a wider load of sexist bollocks in which we must perform certain behaviour or tasks.

Brain transplants isn't quite the right analogy. Consciousness transplants is closer. Particularly given the context is all about the dualism and the dissociation.

If I woke up in a man's body tomorrow, I would feel like me in a man's body. As opposed to today, when I feel like me in a woman's body. The hormonal weirdness would probably unsettle me somewhat as I'm used to naturally cycling female hormones, but I would still feel like me. Because I have dissociation issues, and me is the inside not the outside.

midge I do find it telling on these threads, the lack of acknowledgment that we're being shoved out of the woman club, from the people doing the shoving. Perhaps this thread will be different?

Positrans:

I don't mind splitting by sex in some cases at the moment, but I see trans woman as female, so that's not a problem for me.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying there are no differences between male-bodied and female-bodied people if they both identify as women? How does that work?

'Hard numbers are uncertain in this area but the estimate is that about 0.01% of the population of the UK have gender dysphoria. If 0.3% of the population is trans, this means that about one in 30 trans people have gender dysphoria. In that case, who are the other 29 people?'

I suspect the other 29 are made up of a combination of:

• People who are intersex
• People who are made to believe they must be the opposite gender because they don't fit into society's stereotypes (particularly regarding who they are attracted to)
• People (overwhelmingly men) who are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as the opposite gender
• People who reject society's gender stereotypes and therefore attempt to identify out of them (and may identify as non binary)

There are probably a few other scenarios that I can't currently think of. One difficulty, which I'm sure most on this thread recognise, is lumping all of those people in together as T, believing they are all the opposite gender and that they should therefore be treated at all times as the opposite sex. It is simply nonsensical.

I genuinely feel for anyone who is unhappy in their body for any reason and of course believe they should get support to find happiness. I am not at all convinced that the current ideology is the right way to ensure that happens.

positrans
I am in my fifties and have never met a single person with a “gender identity “ aside from a trans identifying person.
Not one of the women I know or have known has this mysterious inner identifying-with-womanhood feeling. They just are women, of all personalities and interests.
This “Agender” thing is nonsense. It is rather like non-binary, in that everyone is non binary , so it is a meaningless term . i am not agender, I am female. I like some traditionally feminine things, and some traditionally masculine things, and a lot of other things, just like everyone else.

You think that you are the way you are because of something fundamentally female in you, yet you don't know for certain, there is nothing beyond sex that you have in common with every other woman. and the evidence of other people says that this is not a universal feeling or belief.

However to support transideology you have to have that belief.

I’m concerned all this talk over gender is just reinforcing potentially damaging social stereotypes of what it means to appear male or female.

Got it in one.

Society doesn't give much status to effeminate men and butch women, particularly lesbians serve no purpose to men. Unless they act as incubators.

The brain triggers the release of the hormones from the sex organs in the sexed body.

I said brain in the context of your talking about transplanting your brain into a male body.

If you are simply female you are free to be a 'feminine' female or a 'masculine' female without any pressure to change your body to match a stereotype. If you say feminine males are actually females and masculine females are actually males you're forcing everyone to conform to stereotype.

That thought experiment would instead have to be that at birth if your brain were swapped into the body of another baby of the opposite sex, would you grow up feeling yourself to be in the wrong body. It's not an idea that goes anywhere.

The majority of “male” and “female” hormones are produced by the sex organs, not the brain.

Elsiebear90 the idea of transplanting your brain into a man's body is beyond science fiction. Male and female hormones are released by the brain, which control how bodies develop and exist.

Every cell in your body has XX chromosomes.

Your memory has all the memories you have of being female in a female body.

*could have

Yes, but femininity is usually linked to being female, obviously some women are very stereotypically masculine (going against societal pressures) and aren’t trans, but I don’t think me being a feminine female is a coincidence or social conditioning etc and that if I was raised to behave like a stereotypical man I would do that happily and have stereotypically male interests. I think my personality is linked to me being female, rather than a result of being socially conditioned and that I couldn’t have been raised to be different and behave more “manly”.

I don’t agree that men and women are exactly the same except in body. I remember reading about a study where they tried to raise a a boy with a damaged penis as a girl and (didn’t tell him he was a boy) because they believed gender was a social construct rather than innate. The boy exhibited stereotypically masculine behaviours and interests, became suicidal and after finding out he was actually a boy changed his name and decided to live as a man. Obviously that was just one case, and it’s not really ethical to experiment like this on a large scale.

If you're interested in the David Reimer (Joan/John) story, I'd recommend reading about what went on. It was far more than someone raised as a girl having their "true" "gender identity" come out. It was many years of abuse by an insane doctor with parental unwitting collusion:

www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joan

"He would show us pictures of kids, boys and girls, with no clothes on," Kevin says. John recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse: "He'd say to us, 'I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.' "

But alone with the children, he could be irritable or worse. Especially when they defied him. The children were particularly resistant to Money's request that they remove their clothes and inspect each other's genitals.

But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities, which they were instructed to perform sometimes in front of Dr. Money, sometimes with as many as five or six of his colleagues in attendance. But to resist Money's requests was to provoke his ire. "I remember getting yelled at by Money because I was defiant," John says. "He told me to take my clothes off, and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, 'Now!' Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking." In a separate conversation with me, Kevin recalls that same incident. " 'Take your clothes off - now!' " Kevin shouts.

Tragically, this is part of David Reimer's emerging gender identity:

But it made a difference to her peers. That fall, Joan had transferred to a technical high school, where she enrolled in an appliance-repair course. There she was quickly dubbed Cave-woman and Sasquatch and was openly told, "You're a boy." But it was her inclination to urinate in the male posture that caused the greatest friction between her and her schoolmates. The girls barred her from using their bathroom. She tried sneaking into the boys' room but was kicked out and threatened with a knifing if she returned. With nowhere else to go, Joan was reduced to urinating in a back alley. By December, she simply refused to go to school.

I think my gender was something I was born with, and that is normally aligned to sex

So what is it? How do you define female?