Who do the transgender activists actually represent?

Let's think about what it was really like in the 80s and 90s. From someone who was there. Children were told to try not to be gay or lesbian. And now, they are being told that again. Otherwise, they're told they're being "transphobic"! Men told lesbians that they were lesbians trapped in men's bodies...

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When I came out at 14 in 1992, my father went to the doctor. Clearly, he didn’t want a gay son and the doctor thought that he could help. I received a book which suggested my sexual orientation was just a minor setback that could be rectified. It suggested that I simply had a neutral sexuality and that with effort, I could “redirect” this sexual energy to the “proper” sex — starting by fantasising about the more “masculine” women.

I genuinely tried this, for a week. Even at 14 I had a vivid imagination. I tried to imagine “masculine” women — short haired butch bikers, soldiers, anything that could still interest my sexuality, but as soon as the clothes came off and I was presented with a female form, my sexuality simply said no.

I realised then, even at 14, what “gender” was, even without consciously knowing it. I knownowthough, and I can explain it. “Gender” roles and stereotypes are imprinted on my sexuality as aproxyfor sex. I’m attracted to masculine things becausesocietyhas associated these as markers for male sex. This is how uniform, bear and leather kinks develop. All these “gender” things are signals to my sexuality that “this is a male”, simply because we no longer walk around naked.

Gender ideology is homophobic, and backwards

As Stonewall has now declared that gay men are attracted to malegender, they now have this backwards, and this is wholly homophobic. I am homosexual, exclusively attracted to the samesex. The gender roles and presentation are simply markers my sexuality uses. No wonder people are “disgusted” by gender non conformists, as their sexuality gets mixed signals and that cognitive dissonance can be felt. That is where bigotry and prejudice lie, failing to recognise it’s your sexuality having a meltdown because it’s not actually that clever, instead of recognising it and giving it a wry smile and a pat on the head.

Sexuality however is rooted in sex, specificallyphenotype. When all the gender presentation is stripped back and I see the naked form, my sexuality is interested in the sex characteristics of males, and this innate homosexuality is now under attack from trans rights activists.

Again and again I see sexuality reduced to a “genital preference”, with people saying that my insistence for male genitals is “exclusionary” to trans men, transphobic, and thus bigoted. Because they insist trans menaremen, if I don’t accept them as such and overcome my “genital preference”, I am bigoted and need to consider accepting men regardless of their appearance.

This is awfully and horrifically familiar. It is a new form of conversion therapy and while I have personally felt it (and then gone into full attack mode on twitter, which isn’t healthy), I can now see that lesbians are ground zero for this. Below are examples of the homophobic comments now made acceptable by this new ideology:

The Boxer Ceiling(warning, upsetting comments)
photos.google.com/share/AF1QipN6bUPUugEzmNmC-nZTunsVPUtgAuMANMmoVSD1j5gmROqY5E53VSCukHKc8zSRHA?key=bTMzMDNKeC1vbkFkRjlqTHJKM284RU1IQ3JkSlF3
Get The L out(UK)
www.gettheloutuk.com/

Continues:
uncommongroundmedia.com/how-i-became-a-trans-rights-activist-then-turned-gender-critical/

No one was allowed to mention gay relationships to kids in school. No one is stopping ANYONE talking about trans people to kids, there are packs and books galore; the hesitation is about the political trans lobbies trying to push that anyone suggesting watchful waiting or hesitating about rushing a kid towards life changing, untested medications and surgeries without questioning first things like this kid may be gay and struggling with it, this kid may have autism and be struggling with their identity, this kid may have emotional struggles that are contributing to their identity crisis is conversion therapy (another useful phrase borrowed from LGB people.)

No one is at risk of being sacked from their job if it's discovered that they are trans; there's legislation to protect as there is now for LGB people. But in the 80s that was a part of it: any teacher found to be gay could lose their job. No one trans is having to live a double secret life to keep their job; there's whole charities and well funded government groups ready to turn up and support them and employers earning badges and rainbows for learning how.

This is not in any way like section 28. It is crass in the extreme to appropriate and cartoonise the realities of what LGB people experienced at that time.

Siri, show me the world's best example of an echo chamber.

TRAs now seem to be all people who include themselves within LGBTQ. On social media today I saw Gencder Conservatives claiming that trans people were just pretending, sorry, trans women. Trans men don;t pretend evidently, they are just confused lesbians despite only 23% of them idenntifying as straight trans men.

Trans activism is a direct response to the first the christian right, and then their proxies attacking trans existing rights. First it was men will pretend to be trans then that veil fell away and all trans women were potential if not actual predators. And in the back ground the christian right opened their cheque books and sat back. Not once, not once, has a trans person asked to take a right of a cis woman in the UK ( anonymous twitter accounts with 20 followers ( why always 20) don;t count, lets be sensible at least). So show me a trans person that wants to give up their rights. Even Debbie H uses ladies loos

I think it's because lgbt are all treated the same by society. 40 years ago this exact same thing was going on, except it was gay people in the firing line. GC movement has succeeded where homophobes (whatever they called themselves at the time) failed. In 30 years time we will look back as we look back on the 80s now. While it felt right at the time, history won't see it from the same perspective.

People in the L, the G, and the B have never all been treated the same way! Look up the word "intersection" and consider how lesbians encounter homophobia and misogyny at the same time! So why you would claim the T is treated the same way, I don't know.

Did you know that transwomen in the UK got the legal right to marry a male partner before the LGB got the right to marry a same-sex partner?

The majority of people who think this is just like the 80s think that either because they were too young to be there, or because they did the grand sum of sweet Fanny Adams for gay rights.

How is it not the same? In the 80s they didn't want kids learning about gay people, in 2020 they don't want kids learning about trans people. It's the same censorship and suppression.

I think it's because lgbt are all treated the same by society. 40 years ago this exact same thing was going on, except it was gay people in the firing line. GC movement has succeeded where homophobes (whatever they called themselves at the time) failed. In 30 years time we will look back as we look back on the 80s now. While it felt right at the time, history won't see it from the same perspective.

Or alternatively, history will see the trend for handing out puberty blockers to children as a treatment for gender uncertainty the way today it sees the trend in the 1940s for using frontal lobotomies as a treatment for mental health problems.

Time will tell I suppose.

I want Mridhul Wadhwa to be very clear that the rape crisis service in Edinburgh not only is run by a male without a GRC, but also seeks to exclude anyone Mridhul considers 'bigoted' for not agreeing that Mridhul is now a woman.

In essence, a male person who has intentionally taken a powerful position in a women-only service and is now actively seeking to exclude and name call women from this service unless they conform to centering the needs of male people above their own. This includes women who cannot access mixed sex services due to protected characteristics.

Jean Hatchett has today been excluded from a meeting with this person for mentioning the Equality Act and the protected characteristic of sex. Current British law.

If someone can explain to me the ethics of this, I'd be grateful, because from where I'm standing, it looks very wrong to me.

In 30 years time we will look back as we look back on the 80s now. While it felt right at the time, history won't see it from the same perspective.

I personally think we'll be looking back in horror, a lot sooner than 30 years too.

That children, many simply gay, lesbian or autistic, were sterilised for liking the ''wrong'' toys, clothes, hobbies, hairstyles. That women were caged in prison with rapists, that women had their skulls cracked open and were strangled by males for ''sport'', that society victim blamed 9 year old girls who were exposed to by sexual predators. There's only so much harm that can be done before people are forced to open their fucking eyes.

🤷

Many of us here are LGB. Please don't appropriate and use our experiences to score your political points, unless you've got a reason to call homosexual people homophobes. Those of us who fought section 28 have no problem in sorting out that this is not the same at all and this political movement is in many ways highly questionably homophobic. If you're genuinely interested in gay rights, you might have more concern about what you are supporting and in the voices of gay people.

Why would 'identity' be added onto a movement that was all about acceptance of LGB sexualities? Is 'T' a sexuality? To do with sexuality? Nobody has ever answered this, as far as I'm aware
I think it's because lgbt are all treated the same by society. 40 years ago this exact same thing was going on, except it was gay people in the firing line. GC movement has succeeded where homophobes (whatever they called themselves at the time) failed. In 30 years time we will look back as we look back on the 80s now. While it felt right at the time, history won't see it from the same perspective.

Yes, adding 'transgender' to the LGB cause was a clever, if not really very logical move.

Why would 'identity' be added onto a movement that was all about acceptance of LGB sexualities? Is 'T' a sexuality? To do with sexuality? Nobody has ever answered this, as far as I'm aware.

I think one reason people support trans activism is that they read articles like this one by Owen Jones

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/03/anti-lgbtq-hate-crime-bigotry-britain

and they are misled into believing that the arguments people make against the radical trans agenda (ie the agenda that "a trans woman is a woman period") are the same outdated ones people used to make about gay activism, hence they are bigoted and unjust.

IMO, the activism and arguments are not equivalent. Saying "a trans woman is a woman period" and dropping the concept of biological sex in society (eg in the Census or in stats tracked by the Dept of Health) has a big impact on CIS-gendered women whereas saying something along the lines of "gay people should be able to live and love and marry without discrimination" does not redefine or affect straight people or straight lives or heterosexual marriage in the same way, IMO.

The thread is about whether all trans people agree with gender ideology and TRA beliefs, Catherina; but congrats on the thread derail…

Is the distinction between 'transwomen just trying to get on with their lives' and 'transactivists' as clear cut as we sometimes believe?

To the extent that AGP is driving either of those groups, which may not be a large extent of course, I don't think the distinction exists. My guess would be that older AGP TW were always pushing it as far as they could get away with, they just didn't have the social leeway to make that kind of unreasonable demands that modern TRAs do. A very strong "need" to trespass on women's boundaries, whatever those boundaries happen to be, seems to intrinsic to the fetish.

And of course older TW didn't have the internet echo chamber telling them that every escalation and imposition onto women is completely reasonable and justified. So they would have had some connection to social feedback that stopped them going too far. But ultimately all the insanity that's happening now has been driven by the political machinations and funding from the older generation.

Are we asking that from trans people now? Be trans quietly? Not so "in your face"?

No. I want Fallon Fox to be very, very clear that Fallon was born male, before signing up to fight a woman and breaking her skull.

I want Mridhul Wadhwa to be very clear that the rape crisis service in Edinburgh not only is run by a male without a GRC, but also seeks to exclude anyone Mridhul considers 'bigoted' for not agreeing that Mridhul is now a woman.

I want Eddie Izzard to do whatever Eddie pleases, be in 'boy mode' or 'girl mode' as Eddie sees fit, but not to do any of it in women's single sex spaces.

But that was specifically in a country and situation where the law didn’t apply.

But nice to see that you are so readily pulling the "did not happen" card here on something that has been lived reality of lesbian/gay/divorced etc employees at her work.

When I worked for the church - of the 3 of us in the Office, 3 of us had gay siblings (1 married and two with a long term partner). When one of the 2 announced their impending marriage, the vicar offered to come along and do a blessing (this was before you could get ‘properly’ married in the church).

The most homophobic nonsense my sister has had recently (pre lockdown obv) was from a bunch of cackling idiot straight women in a flipping lesbian bar... yeah, hissing ‘lezza’ at a passing lesbian (she hadn’t event clocked them as she was going to the loo) in a lesbian bar is so ‘be kiiiiiind’...

Thanks Mn for removing my name change fail! (Used a different name to ask a sensitive question about my DD and school, and my app keeps defaulting to it annnoyingly)

My post was just to say that yes, CatherinaJTV could well be in the US - but my example of my colleague was specifically from the U.K.. (Also, in the U.K. trans people have been protected from employment discrimination longer than gay people, under the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999.)

The Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 were secondary legislation in the United Kingdom, which prohibited employers unreasonably discriminating against employees on grounds of sexual orientation, perceived sexual orientation, religion or belief and age.
These Regulations have now been superseded by the Equality Act 2010.

This was a year before the legalisation of same sex civil partnerships in 2004. So any same sex partnership or marriage has always had legal protection from employment discrimination.

Maybe they are in America? Which most of the world isn’t. Not so’s you’d know sometimes. Different laws, different history, different culture...

That reminds me of the "don't ask, don't tell" policies in many institutions. If my lesbian sister in law had married her partner, she would have lost her job. So she could be lesbian, just not be "showy" or "official" about it.

When and where was this? I’ve been a lesbian woman in the workplace in the 90s and 2000s, and never been openly discriminated against - in fact my partner, and the female and male partners of other gay colleagues, were regularly invited to work events. I’m pretty sure I could have brought a discrimination case for being fired for being lesbian even well before the EQA2010, so are you talking about a time well before this? Except civil partnerships only came in in 2004, and same sex marriage in 2014 (after the EQA2010), so I strongly suspect you are talking a bit of creative nonsense here.

@CatherinaJTV you’re completely missing my point. My point was (in relation to the thread topic), that my colleague was someone who transitioned well before all the current TRA gender ideology side of it came into being. She transitioned when there was a very different idea of the “transsexual” to the current “trans umbrella”. (I’m presuming that you know the current gender ideology simply did not exist in the 1980s?)

Some of the ideas in the current ideology I cannot imagine that she genuinely believes, as they are in direct contrast to her work; but she seems still okay to go along with the current movement, perhaps not quite appreciating what it involves (she’d now be in her seventies so I imagine she doesn’t delve much into youth social media).

She can’t lose her job though can she - that’s illegal.

I want people at work to be professional, dress and act professionally, I don’t want to discuss their sex lives or medical issues - just get on with the job. Follow the law and don’t play games and make demands that no one else could possibly away with.

I don’t really care to know about their personal lives (unless relevant). And I don’t want it to be all ‘being your whole self to work’ (the NSPCC showed where that could lead).

I am a foul mouthed sweary git, but in the office I am all sweetness and light, super friendly and super helpful. Because it’s my job to get along with the other teams and advise them.