Sex/Gender Wars - What would be a win?

OP why post? None of what you've said is acceptable particularly contradicts what GC women want by and large. You seem to agree.

Have you posted on a TRA forum (on Reddit or Twitter) asking what they would regard as a win, what they would compromise on?

Other issue in eg USA is getting people onto lifetime medication and surgery is VERY VERY lucrative. Esp if you can start when they're children.

That single sex spaces remain so, see above, you use the toilets facilities that you were born.

Transmen who pass, and transwomen, to use the men's - in instances where toilets are shared spaces with cubicles.

Nondescriptname

A massive issue is that if you go on puberty blockers before puberty has got going. And then onto cross sex hormones.

You will not go though/ fully go through puberty.

This affects growth, brain development, emotional development and god knows what else.

To give a girl (female obv now need to specify...) puberty blockers at the start of puberty. Means very young. For my DDs, 8.5 years old.

1. That's just no way old enough to even start to understand what it means.

Regarding medical transition, as that was your original question, it isn’t a matter of winning or losing from my point of view as a woman who has no interest in transitioning. Winning and losing, if you can call it that, is really only important in terms of those directly affected. How it affects laws and rights is a separate issue.

So in those terms, a win would be if proper research was carried out which showed genuinely whether transitioning was beneficial or not, and, of course, open-minded research into whether it’s possible that a less medicalised, less invasive treatment might be found that works as well or better, should be ongoing.

My opinion (for what it’s worth) is that transitioning was introduced by a quack, was taken up by a reputable medical university (Johns Hopkins) found to be unsuccessful and dropped, but then took off anyway, despite there being very little evidence for its effectiveness. While all that is rather negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is never useful. There might be people it does help. The problem is that nobody actually knows.

I am, of course aware, that anecdotally there are some transitioners who feel it has made life better for them, but there’s an extent to which anecdote needs to be backed up by evidence and weighed against negative side-effects, both on the person (and, to an extent on wider society where it has an effect). Anecdotally, you could probably find a good number of alcoholics who would tell you drinking makes them happier. That doesn’t mean excessive drinking a lot is good for you, or for society in general. And I think the nature of transitioning, and the lazy assumption made by doctors, that it would be fine for their male patients to use women’s spaces mean that the effects on others are wider than with most other medical treatment pathways.

My suspicion is that there is such a scandal brewing over child transition that it might well spill over to the rest of the transition industry. It may be that transitioning does genuinely help a small number of patients, but because of the astonishingly poor way that trials have been carried out, and the absolute hysteria created when alternative, lower impact treatments are discussed as a possibility, it is almost impossible now for decent, untainted clinical trials to be carried out.

So I think in the end, there will be no winners. Rather there will be a big mess and probably a scandal on the scale of the lobotomy scandal, or perhaps even bigger. And that is not necessarily because transitioning is entirely negative, but because lobby groups have encouraged a willing medical establishment into performing a treatment that might be suitable for a minuscule number of people onto any number of people for whom it is wholly damaging.

Joolz last post of yours.

Women who are pushing back are thinking of all women and girls in the UK. And elsewhere in the world.

About women in mental health inpatient units.

About teen girls using communal changing.

About women and girls whose religion prevents certain mixed sex things. And those who feel unable to for many other reasons. Or who simply for obvious reasons- doing certain things in mixed sex facilities is just strongly socially and long term a no. And of course risk.

I mean so many women and girls. They all matter.

On here when people come to question put points etc it's invariably about them. Their situation as an individual.

It's always well I should be able to do this because X and I want to talk about why you don't want me doing that.

It's not about you! It's not personal. At all.

I'd like to see counselling help for people to accept being gender-non-conforming without denying their biological sex.

And children to get absolutely no crap about "wrong bodies" etc.

I dread to think what will happen to girls' and women's sports as there begin to be increasing numbers of young trans people who have not gone through their own-sex puberty.
The case will be made that these transgirls & transwomen should be in females' sports - and so should any other trans-identified males as it's only fair.

And my final point. Around children esp.

Speaking from my experience as someone born with a physical abnormality that had a moderate effect on my mobility. Was painful. Spent much of secondary school in and out of children's hosp having multiple surgeries that meant long recovery etc and then back again.

When you are a child who is different. Can't join in properly. Is in pain. No one else can really understand. Feeling like a bit of an onlooker outsider sometimes or a lot.

Then the attention and care and focus from docs etc feels really good. You are important in that time. You can talk about your issues and they listen. They want to help. It makes you feel, special?

I mean this is all from my POV and won't be everyone but I know it's common.

Surgery. You get away from school. You go somewhere different. You tell school etc you're going to hosp. You get sympathy, good lucks. Maybe a card signed by the class etc. That's also nice.

And in hosp you are looked after. You are important. People come and ask how you're getting on etc. In a children's hospital- as a teen and those years. You'd be on a children's ward. Mine it was other children in for unusual things and in for a while. It was sociable, fun (once well enough to get out of bed in my case wheelchair). They were all in the same boat. We had all sorts of fun. Even with the pain uncertainty etc.

I liked it. A lot.

For many children who are or feel like they don't fit. Those feelings should NOT be underestimated. I've not seen this flagged hardly at all. Most people haven't been there.

This is for me a really big issue with the children going for assistance around gender.

Oh I missed the original post main question. Know it's been ditched.

I have zero issues with adults having cosmetic surgery. It's up to them in the end. On the NHS it's very hard to get cosmetic surgery. Even sometimes to try and return something to how it was before illness/ treatment etc. If the NHS consultants etc take the view that something is a clinician need over whatever thresholds in place to protect resources etc. And that cosmetic surgery is seen as essential for the patient with whatever level of confidence they use that it will be successful and will result in a very significant improvement for the patients long term health and wellbeing. That's up to the NHS. Otherwise, and for most, cosmetic procedures that feel anything from wanted to essentially needed by the person and do not meet NHS thresholds can be and are done privately.

My other views-

Puberty blockers are very strong drugs and there is definitely not agreement they are harmless and irreversible. Puberty is a time of massive change. Across the board. Psychologically, physically, emotionally. Changes in the brain and whole endocrine system etc.

They can be used for precocious puberty but it's recognised that they can cause any number of issues.

Much much more research is needed to ascertain the full picture of these drugs if they are to be given to children with no medical (physical) indication. At the moment one side days. Safe fine. No debate. Other side. Studies indicating issues, concerns about prescribing with inadequate assessment. Tavistock were not following up properly which is shocking.

It seems to me obvious. I mean surely it is obvious. That puberty is a very complicated process that affects our whole bodies and our brains. As with other things to do with brain etc it's not fully understood, not everything. To halt this fundamental part of human development is just really incredibly extreme. It doesn't need studies to know that. Stating it's safe and fine when that is very very far from known is taking risks with children. Many can't understand that approach at all.

The way double mastectomy is being normalised as no big deal for girls and young women. In ?USA some at 14 I think? 14yo are no way mature enough to decide that. That's just a fact. Removing healthy body parts to meet an aesthetic.

Has the popularly and normalisation of breast enhancements led to a similar view of bread removal? And WHY for non binary girls and women is no breasts the thing? Why is the default to aim for no breasts IE male? That's telling in so many ways.

Thanks for replying with your thoughts On first glance you seem to be pretty well aligned with the GC women of MN - so am not sure why you thought you wouldn't be.

I suspect you're a million miles away from what TRAs want though.

Come on OP - 40 odd replies of mostly informative suggestions.

Play fair and give us your suggestions. What are your wins?

Equality Act guidance changed to state that where single-sex provisions have been in place, organisations can only opt-out of applying the sex-based exceptions after showing that they have consulted with all groups of women who would be most effected by such a change, by putting arrangements in place that ensure that all women can continue to equitably and easily access the single-sex provision elsewhere that the service is proposing to remove, a detailed and thorough Equality Impact Assessment that considers the impact of turning a single-sex provision into a mixed-sex one.

The Equality Act amended to make sex-based exceptions opt-out rather than opt-in for a limited number of provisions (such as prisons, hospital wards, women's dorms, sports, programmes, course, scholarships, awards created to address sex-based inequalities etc). So that these provisions are single-sex by default while others can be single-sex by choice.

I’d like tolerance of GC views. Frankly, I do not need everyone to agree with me. If other people feel they have a gender identity and that is important to them, then I don’t feel the need to challenge them and prove they are wrong. I’d like the same courtesy extended to me and my views.

The current insanity whereby anyone who doesn’t believe a trans woman is literally a woman in the same way as any other is painted as a reprehensible bigot and the associated culture of shaming and intimidation is terrifying to me. It’s also unlike anything I’ve known in my life. I cannot think of another issue where I would be afraid to say what I think, but I certainly do not raise this topic.

It would be interesting to see these questions asked of the wealthy powerful organisations and individuals currently removing child safeguarding and women's rights. Stonewall, GIRES, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, Press for Change and countless other powerful people embedded in government and positions of influence. You know, the ones with all the influence who have got us to this awful position. What's their end game? What do they want to happen?

As a transwoman joolz, what would you consider to be a win?

Oh and the main thing I meant to ask you OP.

What is your answer to the question in your OP? Fairs fair.

It's not sex gender wars.

It's vagina people trying to fight against the very recent and extraordinary removal of anything single sex, a limited number of things in place for very good reason.

The removal of any any all language that meant until very recently the half the female people on the planet.

The denial that sex has any real relevance but to a limited amount of things related to our reproductive system.

The positioning of the 3 billion or do bodies with vaginas on the planet as privileged.

And of course. The way we are increasingly referred to by our cunts.

It's not a war. We are fighting back to protect the fundamentals of bodies with vaginas everywhere. Girls women elderly women.

And we are losing.

No more space without males.
No more universally understood words to refer to us all, all the females in the human race as one group.
That leaves us utterly fucked.

That aside plenty of posters have given you what I would regard as quite sensible answers. What do you think of them?

Let's try this OP, you answer a question:

how would you like the following to be segregated, if at all

• secondary school toilets and changing rooms
• prisons
• sport
• hospital wards

??

twitter.com/lilylilymaynard/status/1446451061493993491?s=21

I could live with recognition and acceptance of 5 genders, protection of single sex spaces and healthy open discussion on issues including risks and benefits, without pile-ons and death threats (so that would probably mean dismantling certain online platforms).