The dreaded issue arose with my son…

What was said that we shouldn't confuse and mislead children when talking about the concept of gender identity.

So you taught your child that if they were unhappy with sexed aspects of their body (eg growing breasts at puberty) they could choose to become the opposite sex?

Surely you realise that children can believe something they are told is factual even when it’s obvious to all adults around them that it’s made up guff (Santa, tooth fairy, the ice cream van plays a tune when the ice cream is all sold out etc).

Genital operations performed on transgender people are crude and brutal, often resulting in incontinence,
& anorgasmia (and always resulting in infertility).
People who transition have difficult lives because they are fighting against material reality itself, so no matter how kind the public are, they will almost inevitably come to to the point where they realise how futile all their personal pain and suffering was.

Corinna Cohn, who had genital surgery at 19 and is now mid-late 40s has said that gender transition was like setting off from a riverbank in a boat without anyone warning teenage Cohn that reaching the opposite bank would be impossible, and now Cohn is trapped in that metaphorical boat for the rest of Cohn’s life.

Why would you want to encourage this outcome in a generation of young people?
What do you get out of it? You are convincing yourself that you are kind and righteous and we are awful transphobes, when what we actually want is for vulnerable teens to make it to old age with their bodies healthy and whole and for them to be able to
wear whatever they want and have same sex partnerships without shame, if that’s their sexual orientation.

Dr Az Hakeem ran a support group for post op transsexuals and he’s said that the people who were least likely to feel unsatisfied with their transition where the ones with the highest number of autistic traits because they didn’t notice all the subtle social interactions of those around them, that the black and white thinking of ‘wearing a blouse, so I can’t possibly be mistaken for a bloke!’ protected them from regret.

I dunno about you, but I think doctors sterilising autistic people on the basis that they aren’t socially aware enough to later regret it is a bit of a problem and has the whiff of eugenics about it.

You are suggesting that if two men want to hold hands in Britain, as they do in the Middle East, then they might feel the need to transition to do so? Seriously?

Yes, gendered expectations and roles exist - but nobody , in our culture, anyway -is forced to conform to them.

Same sex attrraction is no longer illegal. Gay people can get married. Boys can have long hair, girls can have short hair. That is what children see when they look around. But suggesting that a boy is really a girl becaude he likes dressing up and plays with the girls at playgroup is seriously regressive.

How is any of that relevant to male people using women's toilets or children wanting puberty blockers?

MargotBamborough · Today 11:28

Justtochat · Today 11:26

No-one is suggesting it’s good to encourage a child to think they should change their gender.
Nobody should be encouraging children to think about gender full stop, unless they can actually explain what gender is and why anyone should care.

I have met/known several trans people. Every single one of them was very obviously their natal sex, no matter what clothes they were wearing or hairstyles they had.

People actually 'passing' as the opposite sex is vanishingly rare.

Can you quote directly where people have said this? Because I think you've misunderstood what they were saying. This is the Sex and Gender board. We discuss gender all the time, that's what this board is for.

Because someone said you shouldn't mention gender at all and others have said gender can't be discussed without reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

That's a bit of a circular argument though, you notice the transpeople who are noticeable but not the ones who aren't. How would you know?

What about people who naturally look masculine or feminine despite that not being their sex? Would you suspect them of being trans?

most of us can visually tell the difference between a trans-woman and a woman

Or on the radio. The truth is that there are multiple cues to someone's sex, often very difficult to disguise.

This is the Feminism: Sex and Gender board. Of course we understand about gender stereotyping.

What has this got to do with children being taught that they can change sex?

You think living as the opposite sex is all about stereotypes. Can you understand why feminists would think this is regressive?

Oh. So you cannot give a clear explanation so you are leaving?

Hilariously you have continued to show that you seem to hold some prejudice about this through the use of 'echo chamber' and declaring there is a 'transphobic undercurrant'! What a hypocrite.

It seems that you exist in an echo chamber where you believe in unsubstantiated mantras such as 'live as a man' while not being able to define just that. Yet breezily tell parents how easy it is to inform their children.

Has it sunk in that you cannot explain "live as a man" without resorting to supporting someone's belief in themselves that defies material reality? That if you are asked to explain the difference to a child who will use that information as a base to make their future decisions, you cannot. Yet, you claim to not support gender stereotypes???

Has the dissonance sunk in yet?

Or have you simply resorted to telling anyone who questions you that they are giving off 'transphobic undercurrents' to make yourself feel better?

Because having been through this with my own child where five out of their friends (there was 7 in the group) all declared trans identities within 6 months of each other, I can fucking assure you that you really need to have some pretty clear definitions to give when you are asked questions in conversations such as the OP has had.

Calling it transphobic to expect to be able to substantiate your answer with non-circular logic or falsehoods is not going to cut it I am afraid. It will simply mean your child has little to base their knowledge on. And at the end of the day, that is on you as a parent.

And unquestioning support of allowing changes to policy in safeguarding to be made based on prioritising 'gender' and not 'sex' when sex does indeed matter, then leaves children open to harm.

I think this is for @Justtochat

But that is hugely concerning

I have dc and yes I’d want safeguarding against that

Oh, is that you away? Cheerie-bye, then.

I was going to ask:

'If people cannot accept the difference between gender/sex as literally defined'

'literally defined' - by whom, and where? The Scottish government says there is no difference between the two terms.

I met a transwoman wanking in the ladies' toilet when I was aged seventeen. Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Personality and self expression have always existed, and teenage rebellion too - now it is being re-framed as 'gender' as part of a larger post modernistic theory that is known as 'Queer Theory'. This arose in the late 1980 and 1990's.

Yes, gender roles vary across time, society and culture - but that doesn't mean that one has to conform to gender roles - certainly not in our society. We now live at a time of maximum personal expression; there are few hard rules for how males and females are expected to behave.

Sex remains, though, and has effect and consequence. This effects, consequences and implications are especially important for women and girls ( females).

If you teach your child people stay the same sex throughout life then Uncle Julian becomes Auntie Julia, what are you going to say? That's wrong and a lie and don't talk to that person?

'People can't change sex, but they can have their bodies surgically changed to look like the opposite sex.' (This is more or less what my mother said to me when I read about Jan Morris's so-called 'sex change' when I was a child.)

It would be a lie to say that they can change sex. I think it would be wrong to lie to a child in this way. What do you think? Do you think that whether or not people can change sex is just an opinion and all opinions are equally valid?

We understand what you mean by sex and gender - but most here have an issue with the whole concept, and with its implications - let alone " accept it".

Here is a direct result of forcing through the replacement of single sex toilets with 'gender neutral' toilets.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11873283/Traumatised-13-year-old-girl-attacked-boy-gender-neutral-school-toilet.html

I suggest you look up Loudon County in the USA but be aware it discusses a child being raped by a transitioned teen male in the gender neutral school toilets.

Other safeguarding issues arise with school trips away. Where parents of males who have transitioned, or even female children, insist that that child is accommodated with their 'gender' not their sex.

Plus there is the sport issue. And not just changing rooms where male people under 'gender' segregation are welcomed, by those not actually having to share the space, into the female communal changing room.

And there is a safety issue too

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12204921/High-school-volleyball-players-speaks-transgender-athlete-issue.html#:~:text=A%20transgender%20rival%20from%20Highlands,I%20am%20still%20recovering%20from.

I am happy to get you studies that show from 6 years old that male children are stronger and faster on average than their female peers. There are now three across school children studies from three different countries that all conclude the same.

Nicely conceding there

If you cannot back up your posts with definitions and reason bow out

You may be interested to read this - written by an 'old school' transsexual:

"The term transsexual was defined as a medical one and was what appeared in all my early medical files when I was sent from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital and into psychiatric units.

By the time I got to the point of surgery - always the end of the process and after several years of other therapy first back then - something had shifted. As you were asked to sign a waiver before they consented to do the surgery that you understood that it was not changing sex but reassigning gender.

I was told by the psychiatrist about to pass me onto the surgeon that this was a legal requirement because the law would not recognise any change of sex and he was sure never would as he had just gone to court to give evidence to help annul a transsexual's marriage to a man as illegal on those grounds.

So gender was introduced into the nomenclature not for any reason other than to give a separation from sex.

This is probably why transsexuals have always been realistic about this concept of changing sex. We had to get that before we passed that point. If we didn't then you were not taken further.

I would guess based on how many people today seem not to get this biological reality within the transgender community that it is not part of the treatment path nowadays.

After I was signed off by Charring Cross in the early 80s (they only did two or three years follow up after my final surgery) I was basically left alone and never really asked about the subject again, even by GPs, though, of course, I told them all every time I moved to a new area. I did not even see my notes until 2004 when my GP wanted to check them with me during the application for a GRC and I discovered that they wrongly claimed I had had breast enhancement. I had been offered it on the NHS in 1980 but had turned it down.

All the records still used the term transsexual. I never even heard the term transgender until all the stories started appearing on Digital Spy where I had posted regularly on media matters and the subject had suddenly become something everyone was talking about. But calling it transgender.

That's when I first started searching the net to find out what was going on, joined the only non fanatical forum I could find (Angels) and started catching up on what had been going on over the past decades whilst I was getting on with living.

Whenever I used the word transsexual I was reminded not to, just as I was told to use terms like Cis and Terf. I looked into what these meant as I had no idea and quickly decided they were needless or provocative so I was not going to follow that pattern. But transgender or trans for short seemed a harmless enough word and I thought, as transsexual emphasised the misconception of 'sex change' perhaps it was a sensible modification.

The reclamation independently seeming to happen now appears to be happening partly out of distancing to some degree, but also I think because it emphasises that in our case - whilst the biological reality is understood - it always was about changing as far as possible the sex characteristics of the body. And not about expressing a girly gender identity, or indeed any kind of lifestyle preference or interest in clothes or hobbies.

For some gender expression very much seems to be what it is about. I think for transsexuals it is about the body. Probably why there is very little interest in physical transition by those transgender and it is really more about expressing personality in a way they find more comfortable.

So without presuming different causes or origins as we are still guessing on those with any of us - I think there are two very different focal points of what we seem to be doing about it.

Reclaiming transsexual just seems to have occurred to a few people at the same time as a way to point that out"

Gender has always existed and has always been played with and always been interesting and always will be.

Eg in the Middle East, many men wear perfume and hold hands with their male friends in the street. These things are seen as entirely compatible with being manly, in the UK they would be seen as non-conforming with a male gender identity. Nothing to do with biology.

In many cultures historically, women were the ones to wash and prepare bodies for burial and this was seen as being a female-gendered task. Again, nothing to do with biology. In more recent history undertaking was gendered as a male profession and female undertakers are non-stereotypical.

You might as well tell children not to look at the world around them as not to notice gender roles, it's just part of culture.