Working with teens, I'm struggling with the pronoun issue in the office.

@Notamum12345577 women are not responsible for protecting men and women's spaces are not there as a refuge for men.

If men are attacking transwomen ie a man dressing up as a woman then the men need to be educated to understand that people can dress as they please. Men need to sort this out for themselves.

But there have been more cases of trans women being attacked by men in men only spaces.

Evidence? Which country? Also, it's not just about safety. No males belong in female spaces. It's a violation of the privacy and dignity of women and girls.

I am a great believer in single sex spaces. I am not trans affirming, but I do find it difficult both ways/opinions. In this country, there have been very very few cases of trans women (used to be men) attacking women in women’s only spaces. But there have been more cases of trans women being attacked by men in men only spaces. So tbh I struggle which way to lean in my opinion. 🤷

What ever your personal opinions, you respect their choices and refer to them as they request. No skin off your nose, them wanting to be called ‘She’ when it is obvious they were born ‘He’ doesn’t harm anyone. You can think in your head that it is weird, but why not just respect their choice as far as the ‘He’ or ‘She’ bit? Basically is what I do, whatever my personal opinions.

The reason I think this is wrong, is because I don't believe this is about about respecting someone's choices, because their choices have a direct influence on your choices. Why is there no reciprocal argument to say "Why not just respect the choice of someone to refer to you in a way they perceive you, not the way you want them to pretend to perceive you?"

You have a choice to pretend to believe in someone else's worldview and religion and perception of themselves, or to be true to your own worldview and beliefs and perception of others, to trust your own perceptions instead of deferring to someone else's.

You are under no obligation to say "peace be upon him" every time the prophet Mohammed is mentioned, however passionately someone believes you ought to. You are under no obligation to call a priest "Father" when he is not your father and you don't believe in his religion.

This is no different. This is someone demanding that you pretend you believe something you don't believe. This is not just skin off your nose, it's your whole bloody nose. And your eyes, mouth and the rest of your face too quite frankly.

I use the name or 'they' even if preferred chuffing pronoun is 'she'. 'They' is a respectful compromise that basically says the sex and gender of the person we are discussing is not the sum total of who they are.
I don't mind 'they'. We used to use it in the early days of feminism to prevent unconscious bias against women when applying for funding etc.

I think @Quz is fairly new to these boards and I hope they stay around, because I think they have more in common than not in common with GC feminists, they just haven't been around the discussion here enough to understand the terms and the stakes involved. I think if they went to see the break it down for me thread, they'd agree with more of it than they disagreed with.

A few years ago, sex and gender were words that could be used interchangeably with no real problems. Since the advert and growth of gender studies and the exponential rise of young people believing that they are trans and being told that it's no big deal if they want to identify other than their bio sex, things are significantly different.

Commonly agreed definitions on mumsnet:

Sex - biological, binary. Sometimes a disorder of normal binary sex development happens and sex is harder to identify, though this is rare and even more vanishingly rare that a person with a DSD cent be identified as either male or female sex after some investigation. There is no third sex, and sex isn't a spectrum.

Gender = gender identity. A social construct or an identity one adopts. Most GC feminists aren't fans of the concept of gender identity for multiple reasons, the main ones of which are: 1) it's part to play in the erosion of female sex spaces and rights, and 2) it's reliance on regressive stereotypes about sex. Women have long hair and wear make-up, men wear suits and like fast cars, and so on. We are critical of the concept that an innate gender identity exists and that it is has taken precedence over sex in society in recent years. Whereas previously women could tell a man entering their changing room or toilets to leave, in modern times that man can claim to identify as a woman, abuse the actual woman in the room and get her chucked out, fired and blacklisted, because his feelings of gender identity apparently trump her sex-based rights.

The problems with gender identity and preferred pronouns taking precedence over sex fact and sex based pronouns are widespread. If the term woman as a sex descriptor is eroded in widespread society into a meaning more akin to gender identity, it becomes accessible to anybody who wants it, and the consequences disadvantage biological women.

A world in which a biological male can be a woman and go by female pronouns, is a world in which biological women's rights are surrendered. Biological men enter and win in women's categories of sports, male rapists get housed in women's prisons, and awards and grants intended for women go to men.

Meanwhile teens are sold "change your gender identity!" as a harmless solution to normal teen awkeardness and discomfort. This has led to experimental pharmacology on teens (puberty blockers), cross-sex hormones with very little acknowledgement that a previously healthy sexed body may not cope very well with that, and irreversible surgery on sex organs because sex and gender identity is still very much conflated. Meanwhile the kids end up no happier, but with a bunch of additional problems.

Ah ok, yes I misunderstood. I read it as she worked with teens as a few of her colleagues were teenagers 😁

@Notamum12345577 I think you're possibly misunderstanding the issue. The OP works with children/teens (in a school or as a social worker or something) and some of them identity as transgender.

The issue is that her adult colleagues then refer to them in office discussions with other professionals (when the teens are not there) by their preferred non sex-based pronouns. While that can be just a polite gesture, it can create confusion:

• if you haven't met the young person in question yet
• if there are safeguarding concerns or other reasons where biological sex is relevant
• if you think the gender identity is a way of expressing other underlying distress

I found @Quz explanation helpful in how they understood Gender Critical as took it to mean a feminist who is "critical of" the existence of gender dysphoria. Maybe you mean a feminist that is critical of the conflation of sex and gender? I would think that would be every feminist?

It made me understand how ‘gender critical’ is a confusing term. Those post exchanges also demonstrate just how confusing it is in how people use (and mis/understand) sex and gender. I’d prefer if the term gender critical was dropped in favour of ‘women’s rights advocate’ but that might lead back to an unhelpful circular argument about the meaning of the word ‘woman’.

Reading through this incredibly interesting thread reinforces just how harmful and damaging the gender ideology has been. For (mostly) everyone.

Certainly for women trying to hold to sex segregated spaces, for young confused children, teens, adults trying to figure out their identity in a world where everyone is telling them ‘be this’, for the troubled and damaged young trying to escape trauma and believing transitioning is going to magically resolve that trauma, especially and increasingly for lesbians, gay and bisexual (young) people who are now collateral damage and subject to horrific homophobia triggered by a backlash against the trans agenda with objection of entry of males into women’s sports, prisons, short lists spiralling into culture wars and even damaging in how laudable progressive aims are now subjugated, lost, and replaced by the trans agenda.

I’ll try again 🤣. I meant therefore adults

Sorry to be an arse, but It's Selective mute, not elective.
Huge difference in meaning. Elective = making a choice; Selective =of the type that only happens sometimes. Selective mutism means mutism that only happens sometimes. No implication of choice intended. The name changed 30 years ago.

They are working in an office. So while teens, they are most likely 18 plus, therefor children.

These are children. Do you respect their choices when they want to eat chocolate for breakfast and crisps for lunch? When they want to watch tiktok instead of doing maths?
Social transition is a medical intervention. Reading this thread makes me certain that, in the office, it's vital to check for each kid, who authorised this and when was it last reviewed.
The trans kids are mostly the most vulnerable - variously deeply autistic, elective mute, self-harming, severe social anxiety, neglected, traumatised. Some have very good reasons to want to walk away from their childhood name. Each one is an individual.
Since they are so troubled, the pronouns are usually they least of my worries when working directly with them. But using sex-based pronouns to be clear who is which sex does relate to the services we provide.

So many of us here have recounted our own childhood yearning to be a boy. I wept inconsolably on the eve of my 10th birthday because double figures meant my body would change, I dreaded growing breasts and vowed I would “cut them off” when they dared to grow. I called myself “Jim” and my best friend Amanda was “Bill” and we rode around topless on our bikes because that’s what all the boys did.

No-one called us Jim or Bill or indulged us, and at puberty I LOVED my new breasts, small and perky, I’d whip up my shirt whenever I was in a locked bathroom to admire them in the mirror. Puberty is the cure for the vast majority of kids with gender dysphoria, and GIDS and Mermaids were preventing that with their unevidenced drive to transition children with multiple other mental health/social problems.

It really is a scandal.

No skin off your nose

Well that in depth analysis really convinced me.

What ever your personal opinions, you respect their choices and refer to them as they request. No skin off your nose, them wanting to be called ‘She’ when it is obvious they were born ‘He’ doesn’t harm anyone. You can think in your head that it is weird, but why not just respect their choice as far as the ‘He’ or ‘She’ bit? Basically is what I do, whatever my personal opinions. Also, if you don’t and call them by the wrong gender (in their eyes) you could find yourself on the end of a disciplinary. It is different if they are aggressively pushing opinions onto you, but if they aren’t …..

Gender and sex are being conflated by activists and it’s trickling down into their extensive sphere of influence (see, for example, the police sergeant who initially dealt with the latest ‘punch terfs in the face’ speech making a point of referring to the male thug as “the female”). They have moved from ‘woman’ meaning anybody who says they’re a woman, via ‘woman = adult human female’ being hate speech, to ‘identifying as female’. Any and all language that references biological reality is designated hate speech (including ‘biological reality’ and ‘biological male’), even the suggestion that males are stronger than females (which they obviously are) is a “hateful narrative”.

The aim of all these linguistic redefinitions is to silence women who want to voice concerns about the bigger, stronger, more predatory sex class identifying into their safe spaces. These are not marginal views, they are espoused by a very powerful lobby that has massive reach into organisations across the western world. Many men across the board have embraced the opportunity to stick one to the ‘feminazis’ and make women feel insecure about their boundaries. And yes, some women (perhaps acculturated to accommodating men's wishes) give blanket consent on behalf of all women.

Criticism of gender and gender ideology, and not wanting males in female safe spaces, stats, services and sports, in no way implies “being critical of anyone being trans” - this is an obvious straw person (actually, straw man may actually be more accurate!) again designed to shame and silence women. Males who identify as trans can ‘be who they feel like they are’ to their heart’s content - the criticism is of those who demand access to things segregated specifically for reasons rooted in biological sex. Many of those demands are expressed with stereotypically male aggression, and women - not the men who physically attack trans people - are the chosen target. The terfisaslur.com site is just the tip of an iceberg of misogyny (we now have male MPs, police officers and senior executives freely using this slur). Are you conflating criticism of such activists with criticism of trans people per se??

And yes: gender critical people believe that there are two sexes, male and female.

There are in innumerable number of gender expressions (personalities).

Whatever one's gender expression, one is and remains the sex observed at birth. "Doing manly things" or "wearing manly clothes" doesn't make you a man; having a penis and XY (or XYY or XXY etc, essentially, having a y chromosome) does.

Similarly, "being girly" isn't what makes a person a woman. If you have a penis, wearing a skirt and growing your hair long doesn't magically make you a woman (ask any Scot). Having XX (or X or XXX etc) chromosomes does.

Very occasionally a person like Caster Semenya is born with genitals that appear female but they are genetically male. This is very rare, nobody's fault.

It has nothing to do with the young teen females who don't have an intersex condition but who believe that if they don't like makeup or heels or chatting about who you fancy, but prefer maths and tech, then they must be "not a girl" as that is what girls are. So they must be a boy. This is a logic error. Unfortunately the logic error has huge consequences, or it wouldn't much matter.