Q&A thread for New Posters

links to threads on intersex www.mumsnet.com/SearchArch?mustmatch=intersex&dontmatch=&nickname=&src_displ_option=s_t_d_t&fromDate=&toDate=&topicmode=chs&chosentops=5365

Addressing the claims you made about the only longitudinal study that looked into patterns of criminality in post-op transsexuals does not make this thread unwelcome to new people. I explained the study to new posters, gave its basic findings and linked to the already existing discussion on crime rates. That's wholly in keeping with both the aim and the spirit of this thread.

Fine. 4 crimes. Decades old data. No Matching. No information on whether the crimes were committed by trans men or trans women. Are you actually serious?

The reason a control group is used in longitudinal studies like this by the way is to measure social trends. A rise in crime rates or suicides could be down to social factors, such as a recession, so you need a control group to measure against. It doesn't need to be particularly well matched though. To carry out a study comparing criminality amongst different groups you would need very precise matching on a range of matters to meet even basic ethical standards. For all we know half the trans people in that study were sexworkers who were matched against middle class professionals. Without matching you cannot deduce anything which is why the author of that study has gone on record more than once to condemn those who misuse it to prove something it didn't find and wasn't looking for.

And I'm not really interested in discussing it further tbh.

@Helen8220

Have only just seen this thread and dont have time to read 10 pages.

But I understood your question to be about intersex.

There are people but one of the problems is that being intersex is a biological condition. There is little or no evidence that it has anything to do with being LGB or even gender non conforming.

And in fact there are some intersex groups who actively reject being colonised by Stonewall et al who use it to make their umbrella seem bigger that it really is.

So if you question was about people who are actually intersex, in your role it might be better to find out about existing inersex support groups and have this information available rather than presume some rainbow coalition is the most supportive place for them.

You could use the mumsnet search option to find earlier threads about this.

Well this q and a for newbies/ lurkers has gone a bit wrong!

Reading it though in conjunction with something Helen said on another thread made me realise something though.

Helen said that gender is about social norms for the sex. And that some people feel that the norms don't fit, and some of them will ID as trans.

Thing is that most feminists believe that enforced gender roles are shit. We generally want to let people break outside those often stifling norms.

Then I thought. When we have the same complaint, why such different ways to solve it?

And then I thought. Well it's mainly about something males want. And males are used to having things oriented towards them, in favour of them. Whether they realise it or not and yes even if are not very far up the hierarchicy in society.

I always wonder why with all the money and support and corporate funding and etc. There's not lobbying for trans specific stuff. Refuges, DV helplines. And yes changing and whatnot. All other groups who find the world is not built for them/ sympathetic to them etc lobby and fundraise and set up their own stuff.

There is massive political support for trans people. As a group I'm sure they could get a lot done. It would be something for stonewall to get their teeth into as well- real changes on the ground.

Anyway then I realised. It's mainly about males. Who are on the whole used to getting stuff they want. So when they want something, and it already exists, they say ok I want to get in on that. And the group it was created for say hold on a minute and they're shocked.

Take homosexuality.

Through my career the visibility of gay people, throughout orgs and increasingly in exec roles, has gradually increased. That's great. But it's men. Gay men. Out lesbians in my industry are, where are they? I've met one. The groups etc seem to be all gay men, and female allies. It's an interesting dynamic.

Anyway. That's what occurred to me earlier.

[quote jj1968]@CharlieParley

Perhaps start another thread if you want to discuss the Swedish study in more details rather than make this thread unwelcome for new people. I'm not really minded to join you because the latter cohort of the study only included four violent crimes I believe, and we don't know if they were committed by trans women or trans men, so I don't think we can really deduce anything from such a tiny sample and incomplete data.[/quote]
🤣🤣🤣

Tut. Charlie, away with ye and all those facts.

It's like saying wet water. It's a pointless term because water by definition is wet. Or saying 'I am a feminist who supports the rights of women and girls'.
Feminist is sufficient. I'm not inclined to add qualifiers to perfectly clear terms and watch those terms get diluted and appropriated. I won't do it with woman, I won't do it with female and I won't do it with feminist.

But you are quite happy to say that males who identify as women should be allowed into female prisons when there is no evidence that this particular group of males are less dangerous to women than any other males .

@CharlieParley

Perhaps start another thread if you want to discuss the Swedish study in more details rather than make this thread unwelcome for new people. I'm not really minded to join you because the latter cohort of the study only included four violent crimes I believe, and we don't know if they were committed by trans women or trans men, so I don't think we can really deduce anything from such a tiny sample and incomplete data.

Also, the term "radical feminist" seems to be used interchangeably with "gender critical feminist" but much of the feminist analysis I've seen that's labelled as "gender critical" from the UK seems based in Marxist, materialist or socialist feminism rather than radical feminism. Is there a difference between radical feminst versus Marxist feminist views on "gender" and the conflict of rights?

I'd be interested to hear the answer to this too. Are there many on here who consider themselves radical feminists, that is those who consider patriarchy responsible for women's oppression and as such seek to abolish patriarchal institutions such as the nuclear family, the church and capitalism, or those who consider themselves Marxist Feminists who seek to abolish private property? My impression is things are a bit more liberal/conservative in these corners but I'd be interested to hear otherwise.

No matter how sweet and nice and feminine-behaving individual men may be, some women have excellent reasons for not wanting to share intimate space with people who have or may have male genitals and a male outlook and a male rate of sexual offending. This means that people with male genitals or people who may have male genitals should continue to be excluded from spaces where women are vulnerable (prisons, hospital wards and particularly mental hospital wards, rape crisis centres, swimming and gym changing rooms, and yes, public lavatories), as they are at present in law, and the law should not be changed to make it impossible to exclude them from such spaces.

And how do we tell the difference between a transvestite and a transwoman, when Philip Bunce has won an award for women in business when all he does is go to work wearing a dress occasionally?

What you seem to be saying is that a man is a woman if he says he is, but if he commits a crime he isn't really a woman. So a transvestite is a transwoman until the point where he commits a crime, at which point he becomes an occasional crossdresser and not really trans.

As a very quick point most of the people on transcrime are what the site calls 'violent male transvestites' which seems to mean any man who was known to occassionally wear women's clothes. They are not trans women, they don't identify as trans women, they were not treated as trans women by the justice system and if imprisoned they went to male prisons.

Again with the " not real transwomen" . So what is a real transwomen and how do we distinguish them from all the " not real" ones?

Can you also explain how people can tell the difference between a “violent male transvestite” (as you quoted) and transwomen in female spaces?

And can you also explain how many of the cases listed on Trans Crime have been referred to as women in the press, and some have in fact been placed in women’s prisons, contrary to your claim?

Surely if they say they’re trans, they’re trans. You sound like you’re gatekeeping to me jj..

I think the problem is more that some groups are seeking to dismantle existing trans rights, which would leave trans people without any right to spaces to protect them from male violence and which they can use with dignity at all.

Not sure what 'groups' are being referred to here, nor which 'rights' specifically, but the problem here is clearly that it's male violence which needs to be tackled. Any suggestions for what we do about male violence? That might help us all, particularly women.

And the rights that exist are not socially enforced. Trans people should have the right to go to a toilet without worrying someone will either shout at them for being in the 'wrong' space or rape them.

Women should have the right to go to a toilet without worrying someone will rape them. The best way to do this is to keep such spaces penis free.

Trans people should have the right to walk down the street without facing violence and abuse.

Women should have the right to walk down the street without facing violence and abuse.

Trans people should have the right to define their gender and how they are legally viewed/treated without having to prove themselves to a government panel.

Why? How does this benefit society as a whole?

Trans people should have the right to trans specific healthcare without waiting lists which are up to 6 years in some parts of the UK.

People in the UK unfortunately often have to wait a long time for medical treatment for painful and debilitating conditions, sometimes several years. It's not only 'trans specific healthcare' which has long waiting lists. Perhaps you should be campaigning for better funding for the NHS.

Trans people should have the right to privacy and not be put in positions where they have to 'out' their trans status.

Why? How does this benefit society as a whole?

Trans people should have the right to be treated equally in work and housing and yet poverty, unemployment and homelessness remain disproportionately high amongst trans people.

Disproportionately compared to all other groups?

If these are the rights that trans people don't have, they seem to have as many rights as everyone else, but are demanding special privileges.

Thank you to jj for drawing attention to what a valuable resource Trans Crime UK is. For newcomers, this website collates data to counter the “this never happens” claims:

As a very quick point most of the people on transcrime are what the site calls 'violent male transvestites' which seems to mean any man who was known to occassionally wear women's clothes. They are not trans women, they don't identify as trans women, they were not treated as trans women by the justice system and if imprisoned they went to male prisons.

Yeah she was a wee girl of ten who just went to the ladies toilets where her dad waiting outside thought she would be safe

Jeez jj I never see you supporting women and girls. Sigh

No its not absolutely fucking fine. Just like its not when women sexually assault other women. But we don't make any other decisions in society based on just one incident, if we did we'd never release sex offenders from prison, let men work in schools, or women for that matter, or allow cars on the road.

see jj - we do exactly that. The DBS system of background checking (formerly the CRB) was brought in as a result of the horrendous murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells by Ian Huntley who should not have been allowed near a school due to his background.

The DBS system was subject to an attempt to undermine it recently by a transgender (male-born) judge who is advocating to make it easier to hide a name change to avoid 'outing' transgender people but will also make it harder to do name checking. Incidentally this judge, who benefitted from male socialisation and male career advantages for a large part of their life before transitioning and being included in the Times Top 100 Women which implied that the Time couldn't find 100 actual women to admire and find inspiring (they included two other non-female women - knocking 3 actual women out of the list).

One incident was one incident too many for the 10 year old victim of Katie Dolotowski who is a male born transgender convicted sex offender who was allowed by the social worker escorting Dolotowski on a visit to Morrison's to use the women's toilets while the little girl was in there. Dolotowski had a knife and sexually assaulted the little girl while her dad waited outside (because he was a normal human being and expected no males to be in the ladies toilets).

The Scottish government is currently bringing in a law to make this sort of attack easier (instead of being normal human beings and trying to prevent further attacks).

Trans ideology posits that Women are either Trans or Cis, and that these groups have something in common with each other but no other humans that makes them Women.

My understanding of myself as a woman is (a) female biology, and (b) the social implications of that biology. That's it.

Since a transwoman doesn't have (a) therefore doesn't have (b), whatever the "something" is that includes both Cis and Trans women, it's not part of my conception of myself as a woman and therefore under Trans ideology I am not a woman.

(It's important to point out here that while I think it's both comic and tragic that the people advocating for this new definition of Woman are also unable to define it, I don't need them to provide a definition to know that it excludes me, because if it includes male people it cannot include the only two things that on which my identity as a woman rests.)

So far, so academic.

But in the real world, while I don't really care whether I'm called a woman or not as long as there is a label for my sex class (I'm currently using AFAB as a label for describing female-born people which cannot be identified out of by transmen nor appropriated by transwomen), I very much care that the legal and social protections put in place to counteract the oppression of AFAB people were coded as "Women's", and therefore the redefinition of the word Woman has both opened them up to people with male privilege and closed them off from some of the females they were intended to protect.

So to describe me as cis is to impose upon me an ideological definition of Woman that does not in fact describe me in any way, is damaging to many AFAB people and excludes them from their legal rights.

transcrimeuk.com/

You can click year to year and read the cases that jj calls “only”. These are people who also want to access women’s and girls’ spaces but who no one, particularly not jj can explain how we can tell these people apart from the nice transwomen.

Unfortunately jj also thinks that it’s “only” just a few paedophilia cases to worry about in 2020, and we can just ignore all of the cases Trans Crime has documented going back to 2014. Because apparently it’s never quite enough cases (n+1) and they haven’t happened recently enough.

And if any newcomers are asking themselves is jj always this disingenuous, the answer is yes.

What do gender critical people want? Or if this varies which it probably does could you say what generally as a group gc people are looking for?