Going off on a tangent here. My question:
Would Freddie, Prinx Choyo, and other biologically female trans people, have been listened to, indulged and supported by the Establishment in any way like the way they have been if the trans rights movement had been led by them and them alone?
Just imagine for a moment if there were no biologically male trans people and this were an issue that only affected biologically female people.
Does anyone really think we’d be where we are now with “pregnant people” and “cervix havers” and “menstruators” etc? Would biologically female people alone, or even as the majority, ever have been taken seriously on this?
Would they have had the political clout, the social capital and the access to huge funding streams that the TRA movement has benefited from?
Do biologically female people have that kind of status in our society?
If we look at the enormous uphill, decades- or centuries-long struggles for biologically female people to achieve any kind of justice or equality on any issues that exclusively or predominantly effect women (AHFs), then the answer is pretty obvious.
Just yesterday there was a discussion about how women police officers still don’t have access to equipment (eg stab vests) designed for the female body, after 20 years of asking - leading to serious health issues for them due to wearing the ones designed for the male body. Leading in one case to the death of an officer - she had to remove her stab vest as it was physically impeding her from doing her job, in a dangerous situation. And she was duly stabbed and killed. And still the situation hasn’t been addressed.
It took decades of campaigning for rape within marriage to be recognised as a crime - and even though it is now (only since 1991 in England and Wales!), there are still many, many people today who believe in the concept of a man’s “conjugal rights”, that a woman permanently signs away her right to withhold consent when she gets married.
This is the reality of issues that only or predominantly affect biologically female people. Women’s health issues being ignored, domestic violence, horrendous rates of sexual violence and appallingly low conviction rates, men abandoning their children and squirrelling out of paying maintenance, leaving it all on the mother to provide - society manages to live with these and countless other injustices just fine.
It’s useful for TRAs to have some high profile biologically female trans people in the picture as it gives them legitimacy and diverts attention away from the fact it’s primarily a male rights movement. But I doubt very much that the average middle aged male late transitioner, for example, gives a shiny shit about a (biologically) female teenager who identifies as trans or NB.
We see in fact how the former demographic is very willing to encourage irreversible medical treatment in the latter demographic, no matter the eventual cost to the young person involved, in order to validate by association their own identity.
Once again - this can never be said too often - there is no symmetry between the sexes. Overall there is no parallel between the experiences and realities of male and female trans people.
There aren’t numerous middle aged, heterosexual women suddenly transitioning.
The exponential (4000% I think it is?) increase in teenagers declaring themselves trans has been concentrated among female teenagers, and has a completely different point of origin from that which initiates the process with those middle aged male people.
The world is still built around, by and for male people. We have not yet begun to attack the deep structural inequalities that exist between male and female people. All we have achieved so far is to scratch the surface of it all. And look at the backlash we’re receiving for the few gains we had made.
GeorgiaPass, no doubt you think you’re doing something seriously radical by identifying as NB. Challenging cis-heteropatriarchal norms or something. And tbh, when I was your age, I probably would have done the same. Like many women on here, I haven’t always been “gender conforming” at all. For years I went by a boy’s name and wore only “boys’” clothes, and would undoubtedly have identified as trans or NB if it had been a thing then.
Luckily for me though this was several decades ago so nobody encouraged me to make any permanent changes to my body; nobody was encouraging me to do any of it at all. And with time I worked out that it was all a trauma response - to the traumas I suffered as a girl on a personal level, and to the collective shared trauma of being female in an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal world.
I still hate the way women are second class citizens in the world we live in, possibly more so now than ever, but pretending I’m not a woman is not going to do anything to make that any better. It just reinforces the idea that other women deserve to be stereotyped, that women are stereotypes.
I hope you do stay on this board, Georgia. I think you have displayed an unusual graciousness in your acknowledgment both that you were inadvertently excluding the lesbian and bi women who are regulars on this board, and that your original tone was not the best way to start a dialogue.
I totally understand the fervour of youth, and idealism. The difference between older people and younger people is that we know what it’s like to be young, but you don’t yet know what it’s like to be older. You may be surprised to find that many/most of us still harbour our youthful idealism within us, but it is now informed by decades of life experience - often hard won and sometimes bitter experience - which gives us a level of insight we simply didn’t have when we were younger.
You may find that there are levels of connection you didn’t expect here at all. I hope so.