Is Mumsnet shutting down GC views? FAO Justine Roberts

You might well avoid someone who sets up obvious cognitive dissonance in you, though......along the lines of them presenting in one way when the reality is clearly different. This mat not matter so much if you also did not feel that you had to monitor and suppress your own rsponses to the dissonance, or even to pretend that you hadn't noticed the mis-match - under pain of censure.

Why would you put yourself through that?

Sorry, you must have misread my post. I wasn't talking about employment law.

Yes, I agree. At least 40! Or preferably after a shit ton of therapy, as it used to be.

We’re talking about employment law, where the characteristic is ‘gender reassignment’.

It’s not an inborn thing.

Ha! Yes, I get sick of the sound of my own voice in explaining the background, too. I assume that most people know it already and the reasons for long explanations are over.

The truth is that one of the largest group of transitioners is now men who just a few years ago would have been classed as cross dressers; often older and married, and usually heterosexual. Men who have been cross dressing since childhood. Grayson Perry writes about this very well. It ceretainly has an erotic/sexual element as well as an emotional/psychological one.

A lot of such men have become emboldened in recent years to take their 'practice' full time - people like Eddie Izzard; Caitlyn Jenner and so on......

You only have to look at the what has become of the 'Beaumont Society' - set up in the 1960's for men who liked to cross dress, with a section for their wives to come along to weekend events and socialise with other wives. It is now a fully fledged 'trans' organisation.

I see quite a few men presenting as women around and about where I live - and most of them, I suspect, would fit into this category - and it is clear that for most that it has an erotic element to it, judging by presentation and sometimes behaviour.

I also suggest that new generation of younger men identifying as women fit this pattern too - and it is partly predicated on gaming culture/anime avatars/and that sort of thing.None of whom would fit the classic 'crippling dysphoria' diagnosis.

I think your characterisation of characteristic is too narrow.

Hi I am relatively new to MN. Where does one find these well established guidelines for discussion please?

‘Transition’ is a verb, it’s something the person has done.

No one is born with transition as a characteristic.

I disagree with that distinction too @Datun.

Firstly because women are not dickless men.

And secondly because the operations themselves are fraught with complications at best and and completely bloody bonkers at worse.

You cannot turn a penis into a vagina anymore than you can turn a lung into a liver.

And making genital operations the official dividing line between good trans and bad trans will contribute to the harms happening to dear, sweet, vulnerable, GNC, gay men with internalised homophobia like Shapeshifter and Ritchie.

And as a mother of a young adult son I worry just as much about these young men as I do about the adolescent girls and young women caught up in this self harming, body hating movement.

Maybe we should make 40 the minimum age for cosmetic genital amputation? 🙃

What you are missing in your comparison is that you might avoid those people on the basis of things that they have said or done, which are unappealing to you.

They key difference on that thread was the suggestion of avoiding someone on the basis of a characteristic they had. Not on anything they had said or done.

That sounds like phobia to a lot of people.

There are a lot of women who think the operation should make a difference. I'm not one of them, but I understand why they make that distinction. It demonstrates a level of commitment, and removes a body part that has historically been used as a weapon.

And, it would reduce the numbers by something like 95%.

So I do get it.

I disagree with it, though, because the definition of a woman is not a man who's had surgery.

And if more a practical objection is required, it's completely unworkable, and for many/most women, it makes zero difference.

Plus recently there have, imo, been a few bad actions/GC impersonators who say stuff like ‘I’m as GC as they come’ and then a few lines later use an obvious pejorative against trans people that has never been acceptable on mumsnet and is rarely heard anywhere at all these days (except as a humorous in-group self-reference).

A woman calling an obvious male a male is enough to make TRAs angry, so no genuine GC Mumsnetter needs to resort to crude insults to provoke a response.

In plain terms, there are no men who have changed sex and become women. No such people have ever existed; nor do any such people now exist.

I also find it disingenuous - and actually very reductive and offensive - when people make a distinction concerning those who have had cosmetic surgery to remove/add/amend the appearance of physical parts.

If an adult man chooses to have his genitals removed or an adult woman chooses to have her (healthy) breasts removed - in order to (as they see it) look less like the sex they are but are not happy being - then that's their decision (and I truly hope they don't later regret it); but a man without a penis is still a man, just as a woman without breasts, or who has undergone a hysterectomy, is still a woman.

Having cosmetic surgery on sex-based areas of the body, or taking opposite-sex hormones, is a personal preference, but in no way represents an official 'compromise' which somehow opens the door for you to access facilities that are still restricted to the opposite sex; in the same way that you in no way lose your existing access to facilities that are restricted to your own sex.

*My impression in the last couple of weeks has been that there are fewer old hands who have all the info at their fingertips and an increase in people who haven't got much depth of understanding. *

Yes, that might be true. The tide has turned, and explanations for newbies may be taking second place to either a more active role for a lot of women, or just an assumption that it will sort itself out, now the tanker has been turned around.

My impression in the last couple of weeks has been that there are fewer old hands who have all the info at their fingertips and an increase in people who haven't got much depth of understanding.

Interesting - I'm not a regular poster on these boards but do read them frequently and I've started to have this impression.

a young generation of women have bee brought up with all of the gains made by previous generations and many have yet to fully realise that sexed differences are real and consequential.

I don't think that new though - I was teen/young adult in 90s and came out of education with impression I'd face few issues being female even in a male dominated environment - it was a huge shock when I found myself paid less, given fewer opportunities and had training withheld because I was female.

I job hunted - as did DH female college denied a promotion for a job she was essentially doing because she didn't have enough experience only to watch a man with no needed experience be given the job. In both cases other women also saw the situation and left - and despite us and men like DH and other male colleges stating the problem the workplaces still had no idea what the issues were meaning all women left and frequently decide it must be women as a group who were the problem.

The Op was uncomfortable and unhappy with her work situation didn't feel able to raise it at work logical thing to do is job hunt out the entire situation.

Constant lumping of post-op trans people into the same bracket as fetishists is unhelpful and unkind.

Do you really think it was feminists who decided that cross dressers are actually transsexuals?!!

Because it wasn't.

There are way more cross dressers than there are transsexuals. It certainly wasn't women who decided they are actually women and should have access to women's spaces.

You're directing your ire at the wrong people.

Take it up with Stonewall.

GoFasterKnickers:
"Whether people like it or not, trans people exist and have a right to exist."

Indeed. But we should distinguish. This can be (and is) read different ways.

If 'trans people exist' is taken to mean 'there are some men who claim to be/would like to have been women and some women who claim to be/would like to have been men', then, fine. Of course such people exist.

But that's not what some trans ideologues mean when they say 'trans people exist. If 'trans people exist' is taken to mean 'there are some men who have changed sex and become women and some women who have changed sex and become men', then no, no such people exist.

(Of course there are also legal fictions: some men may have the juridical status of a woman in the same way Tesco has the juridical status of a person. Fine. Such legal fictions have always been around.)

In plain terms, there are no men who have changed sex and become women. No such people have ever existed; nor do any such people now exist.

Is it allowed to say this on MN? It is the plain truth.

It depends on the moderator on shift!

I had a post deleted that was a very long one, almost an essay. Had a chat with the mod via email and the bit that got it deleted seemed to me to be the least congee bit and certainly not something that contradicted employment law (it was a observation re: nonbinary being a recent addition to the public discourse, in a humorous tone).

Perhaps MNHQ would consider being more explicit about why posts are deleted, rather than the catch-all ‘breaks talk guidelines’ (which are quite nebulous, as some words are ok in some contexts) or the difficult to parse ‘not in the spirit’ (which is next-to-useless phrasing for many neurodiverse posters!)?

That is because this sub board was set aside specifically for discussions around sex and gender. People who don't like the topic could always stay away from it. There is a 'general feminism cha't for those that prefer.

Could not agree more. I was about to post on that thread, and it had gone. I completely accept that if someone hotfoots it here and says 'What do you think about this, my neighbour Joe Bloggs, who lives at 12 Anywhere Crescent, Anytown, AN1 1AN, is now Josephine Bloggs ...' that's an invasion of privacy and should be deleted. But in the case of a couple who voluntarily gave an interview to the BBC on a controversial subject how can anybody say we can't discuss their views?

But I do have a big issue about being compelled to go along with a lie. Perhaps you don't suffer from the cognitive dissonance many of us do when required to pretend in public that we are not seeing what we are seeing and that all our senses are telling us is wrong?

For some neurodivergent people it can be really quite hard to have to essentially play-act in the workplace and not "say what you see". This doesn't mean trans people should not be employed, just that employers need to recognise and acknowledge that there are potential conflicts and that it would be sensible to try and resolve them fairly, rather than telling people to shut up and Be Kind.