How was your gender transition?

When asked to select gender on a form I select other and type
Gender is a social construct to which I do not prescribe. If by gender you actually mean sex then I am an adult human female (woman)

And if it is my GP when I am ordering my HRT I add. Why is 'gender' relevant to my medical treatment but biological sex is not?

Who on earth has written all of that? Gender critical beliefs are valid but must never be spoken aloud!!! Non-binary health care - what is that?! Should everyone be offered a smear test regardless of anatomy?! And in what way are trans people and non-binary people being excluded from normal services? Are their bins not being collected?

I definitely would refuse to define myself in any gender related way - until they can write a description of what any gender actually is which makes the slightest bit of sense.

And then to top it off. Anyone who states this fact are transphobic.

@MilesOfCarpetTiles

I feel these debates end up going around in circles. There are spaces that are needed to reflect sex-based differences. By extension these spaces should be differentiated and clearly labelled for tg function they serve. Toilet facilities, female changing rooms, shelters, female specific medical clinics should have nothing to do with someones identity but the purpose they serve - menstruation, needing to sit down/crouch, often having kids to take care of for female looks, female shelters owing to the raw statistics that show women are more often the victims of male perpwtrated violence, medical clinics because women have breasts, uteruses, services, vulvars etc and therefore require specialist medical input.

Gender identity andidelovy has completely bulldozed these spaces all in the name of their own needs without any respect for why these female only spaces exist in the first place.

But it's not even that, a lot of the time. The world in many cases see,s way more accepting of variation than what these ideas propose. I mean, no one bats an eye at women who wear pants or no make-up, no one cares about men who cook, lots of boys play with dolls sometimes, lots of girls play sports.

The vast majority of people don't consider these things especially gendered.

I’m not agender. That’s a category in a belief system that I don’t believe in. I would just say that I don’t believe in gender identity. Toilets should be organised by sex not gender identity, zodiac signs, personality, etc etc.

Indeed, it really doesn't work or make sense to make spaces and legislate on what amounts to personality traits.

So if you are agender, and you want single sex facilities, they you have as much right to demand that these facilities are single sex. As much right, according to Bristol Council, as a Transwoman who is demanding they be mixed sex (although I am not sure Transwoman will ever accept you having the same level of rights as them).

So if Bristol Council ignore your demands, they are discriminating against you on the basis of your gender and that is transphobia?

Apologies if this has been covered, not read the full thread.

Thank god / goddess / gxd, I was thinking exactly the same thing.

NO ONE CARES WHAT MYSTERIOUS GENDER SPECTRUM YOU THINK YOU'RE ON

I don't really think the idea they are suggesting of gender as a personal identity is particularly coherent.

It makes me think of a young non-binary person I worked with for a while. Clearly female, but short hair, very uni-sex clothing, tended to like a lot of anime etc. On the other hand obviously a female body.

But even in terms of gender, very clearly not a "manly" person in terms of personality, In a lot of ways, less so than I am. And in fact didn't even particularly seem to like men as friends and such.

Trying to parse this idea of gender just tends to show how silly a concept it is if you divorce it from sex. Which suggests that legislation that includes it will not work out all that well.

Yes it is a really fudged policy.

I get where you are coming from OP.

It's kind of taking Bristol CC's own words at face value and following to their logical conclusion.

(Obviously the people who wedged the trans policy in will be expecting the majority of people over 30 to identify as "cis". They won't have a concept of what the feminist position on gender is.)

Playing along, the first thing that strikes me, as a similarly agender person, is that why are non male /female identities discriminated against with no facilities of their own? It almost makes me feel as if transwomen and transmen are cis trans, because everything is shaped to fit around them. Why are the non binaries, agenders and others so marginalised?

Is anyone else in the same boat? Do you feel comfortable as agender, even though that may be incorrectly presumed to mean you don't believe you have a sex? Do I need to tell my employer or anyone else?

No because I don't believe in any of it. The myriad genders are just a way to label personality in a fashionable way and gender has forever been a cage which traps men and women in society into pre-assigned roles and behaviours, so none of it is for me. I find the whole ideology suspect and entirely too restrictive. The fact it is being applied to legislation and spaces such as prisons, sports and changing rooms when these should be separated by sex (why was it that we did that in the first place?) is outrageous and patently demonstrates complete disdain for the safety of women and children. And that is before I get going on the muddying of language and definitions. Don't get me started ...

I will not be labelled agender. That assumes I believe in gender identity ideology, which I don't. Any questions should be phrased like religion: what is your religion (none, Christian.....). So what is your gender identity: none, trans etc.

I am going to do the consultation later so thanks for the ideas here. I definitely don't want single sex facilities to be turned into gendered facilities. This may be Bristol but if they publish their report then other cities and counties may use it as a template. So it does affect us all.

They seem to have got a bit confused about the difference between gender and sex and the reasons we have single sex facilities in the first place.

They say:

"People often use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably when talking about a person being male or female, or masculine or feminine. However, ‘sex’ is recorded at birth and refers to a person’s biological status as either male or female, based on their physical attributes and external anatomy.

‘Gender’ refers to the characteristics typically associated with being feminine or masculine that are constructed by society. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy etc. as well as relationships with each other. Ways of understanding gender vary from society to society and can change over time. Gender identity is our own internal and individual sense of self as being feminine, masculine, a mixture of these, or rejecting current gender norms entirely."

So they are quite clear that gender and sex are different. They acknowledge that sex is about the physical body and gender is about feelings.

So this bit doesn't make sense at all:

"Bristol City Council will support trans service users and citizens, including non-binary, gender fluid, or agender people, to use the facilities (such as toilets, changing and washing facilities) that best fit their gender identity."

Someone needs to explain to them that the single sex facilities are for people who share a sex, not a gender identity. They are respectively for male people with any gender identity (or none) and female people with any gender identity (or none). What is the purpose of single gendered facilities based on people's feelings about their gender, when the people using them can have either male or female bodies? How is this different from just making everything mixed sex?

Have they explained why they think people who share a gender identity but not a sex should share facilities which are segregated on the basis of sex?

How do they intend to label these 'gendered' facilities? They can't use the normal terms women/men, ladies/gents, or the person wearing a skirt/trousers, because these have always been used to designate sex and it will be confusing to nearly everyone.

Is it even legal under the Equality Act to have single gendered facilities? There is a single sex exemption, but no single gender exception, so surely they have to be either single sex or mixed sex (any gender).

There is no such thing as gender identity in the sense of something universal in humans which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex. Knowing this does not make me agender.

I have, or am, a particular sex; I do not have, nor am I, a particular gender if 'gender' is not synonymous with 'sex' but is taken to mean something connected with gender identity in the above sense.

In fact, no-one has a particular gender in that sense, since there is no such thing as gender identity in that sense.

I know some people think otherwise. We need to learn to live with this disagreement, just as we have with disagreement about whether or not there are such things as immortal souls, paranormal auras, guardian angels and the like. But, no, I am not agender or cisgender, any more than my aura is green, my soul free from sin or my guardian angel hard to please.

In the sense intended, I have no aura, soul, angel ... or gender. There is no such thing.

MilesOfCarpetTiles
I 'care about it' precisely because when gender replaces sex in law and policy it has real-life consequences. They'd love you to think it's all a semantic irrelevance. If it was a random blog saying 'Hey! If you answer all 'C' in our quiz, congrats you are agender!' I would ignore it. But it's a City Council.

Good point. You are clearly passionate about this - it possible to find and post a link to where we or Mumsetters from Bristol can complain about this to Bristol City Council, maybe with a call to action in the title in a new thread? It took me a while to get through your OP and even longer to realise we are on the same page, and you could create more impact by driving direct action than encouraging conversation here, interesting though it is.

Actually, the thought of having someone spit in my ear grosses me out more than the thought of the knife, just.....ick.

I had a visceral reaction to this in that it is such insane level of naval-gazing that I can't believe people waste their time thinking about it and I can't believe that anyone expects anyone else to care about about it.

Then I thought that since I do reject gender 'identification' in so far as believing I am a woman, on a biological basis, with female and masculine traits (I call this my personality), then that would make me 'agender', according to Bristol City Council.

However just because Bristol City Council gives this 'agender' definition, this doesn't make this definition true. Why are you taking it at face value?

I am a woman, I do reject gender identity based on outdated stereotypes, and I am not agender!

I think if someone held a knife to my throat and said I had to pick a gender (assuming knifetothroatgender wasn't an option), I'd probably pick agender.

Don't give the London School of Economics gender studies students ideas.

thecritic.co.uk/watch-me-take-a-knife-to-your-throat/