big argument with old friend

You are completely wrong about that althemiddle.

All that’s required to be trans is to say you’re trans. No surgery required.

If by “being fully trans” you mean someone who’s been issued with a Gender Recognition Certificate declaring their sex to be that of the other gender, then that doesn’t require surgery either. It just requires some paperwork, £5 payment, and sign off by a gender recognition panel.

'sWhy I use it.

How do we tell? We can't. That's the problem, in a nutshell.

I've had 'the discussion' with a couple of old female friends on separate occasions. Fortunately, although we disagree, they know me a major leftie, so being gender critical comes as a surprise and they have been open to discuss and then move on with normal friendship. My male gay friends are pretty sensible and agree it's all eyerolling material. The thing I always bring up in the discussion is - how do we tell genuinely, in distress people with dysmorphia from those seeking to force a fetish into women's spaces?

I did try to educate him a bit with some of the reasons women feel unsafe about sharing facilities and sport, and misogyny in general

As a fully grown man who has probably felt unsafe in certain situations due to his sexuality, you really shouldn't have to educate him on this.

And what the fuck does he think a same-sex marriage is?!

Sadly your old friend is a raging misogynist who doesn’t give a shit about women. Purely centring male rights unapologetically.

Don't give any more time to him and please don’t feel sentimental regret because he’s such an old connection. He’s got toxic, women-loathing views ingrained through him. He’s not worth it.

This morning I watched the recent Neil DeGrasse Tyson interview with Bill Maher and was cringing at the fact that Tyson refuses to accept that there are differences between men and women, particularly in sport. He refused to say that the line taken by Scientific American on this subject (i.e. women are held back from equalling male sporting levels because of societal issues) and Tyson also tried to argue that there might be proof that women exceed male performance in long distance swimming so there’s no reason women and men can’t have equal performance levels in sport.

To quote Maher “It’s nuts!”

To be honest, Tyson was quite aggressive on almost everything Maher mentioned, as soon as Maher mentioned the upcoming January planetary alignment Tyson went off on a tirade about people thinking the universe cared about them and was giving them signs. Maher was just mentioning the fact as an astronomically interesting occurrence, he’s not a spiritual thinker. To me, it seemed as Tyson was doing a lot of mind reading and projecting when being interviewed, and he didn’t seem keen on letting Maher finish a sentence without interruption.

The representative from the Democratic Party who was on the show later was also behaving in a similar way when being asked about why the Dems lost the election - defensive, dismissive, condescending and wouldn’t admit that people had had enough of ID politics.

I encounter aggressive and condescending behaviour like Tyson’s quite often in a certain type of person who claims to be a free thinker but really gets their ideas wholesale from their tribe, and it sounds like the behaviour of OP’s friend when they were having their discussion too. It’s frustrating when someone like this refuses to even listen to something they don’t agree with - I don’t have the urge to stick my fingers in my ears to block myself from hearing people saying things I disagree with and I don’t know why this has become so prevalent an attitude in society of late.

The whole bloody thing is just so emperors new clothes and in 100 years they might look back on this period in history with the same level of WTF as we do on the Salem Witch Trials.
The vitriol that JKR has received of late is just insane.

I love that Sense and Sensibility quote.

Kelly Willis also said the same thing pretty much in a lyric.

"What in the world is all this talking for?
Nobody's ever changed nobody's mind
About what's right,
In front of them."`

Save your energy for arguing with people who make laws and policies.

The Gareth Roberts book is excellent, and also very funny.

One of the things I've found about arguing with gender ideologues (apart from the fact that it is an entirely futile activity) is that their arguments are generally emotional rather than based on reason, eg you're a bad person if you don't believe this, trans kids are killing themselves because they can't get puberty blockers etc etc

I remember once having an argument online with someone who reacted to my saying that men couldn't become women by saying that some men really wanted to be women and put in loads of effort into it, and how dare I say they weren't real women? But how can you reason with someone whose entire argument is irrational? Really wanting to be a woman doesn't make you a woman, any more than really wishing you were 25 again makes you 25.

If you have to argue with these people, I'd just keep repeating that humans can't change sex and that men can't be women. Though best not to argue at all because they're idiots.

What a bozo.

I don't know that your friend is a misogynist, but he sounds like he is not super bright. WHich is actually ok, but it means people are easily led in a lot of cases.

There have been a lot of people really misled by bogus science on this - because it was presented by real authorities or people who should have known better - look at the recent controversy at Scientific American, or Neil DeGrasse-Tyson. Or the fact that it has been accepted by the medical system.

For people who tend to accept authority they just believe that what they are told by these people is right. And frankly, the left has invested a lot in recent years in discrediting people who question authority - look what happened on the left with COVID. People who questioned are presented as anti-science right wing nutters.

In the UK this is now much less the case, but some people are really in a bubble even so, maybe especially a certain kind of lefty gay man.

I wouldn't assume your friend wouldn't sleep with a trans man btw, people are often not quite as consistent on this as you might think, some gay men do date trans men.

Solidarity @ramenmonster and yes some gay men are deeply misogynistic. It's easy to see who he identifies with

lots of scientists and doctors would disagree that there is a biological difference between men and women

Is he a complete idiot?

‘Doctors’ of what? There’s a big difference between a Medical Doctor and a PHD ( in Gender Studies or Queer Biology) .

Excepting the profiteers of course.

I'm sorry that your friend holds these shocking views! I mean, is he not very bright? He doesn't even concede on the biology front?

Amongst my friends my strongest GC allies are all gay - male and female. They are, to a man and woman, tearing their hair out at the grouping together of LGB with TQ+. My oldest friend is a gay man and he has been absolutely scathing of Stonewall and their antics. But, most sadly, he was kicked out of a cycling group for gay men that he founded in his area of London because of his GC feelings and opinions.

There's an excellent book written by a gay man, called 'Gay Shame' ( it's also available to listen to on Spotify), which tackles this:

Only a few years ago, it seemed that the fight for gay rights was won in the UK: legal equality was achieved, prejudice rapidly dying out. Mission accomplished, right?
Wrong, argues Gareth Roberts. Homophobia is making a major comeback under the guise of the ideology of ‘gender identity’. The enforcers of this new creed insist that attraction to people of the same sex is ‘hateful’. They argue that effeminate men and butch women can’t just be gay, but must ‘really’ be trans. Worse, this ideology has colonised the gay rights movement, capturing institutions like Stonewall and the gay press completely. Anyone who disagrees risks professional suicide.
So what happened to the funny, grown-up culture, truth-telling and knowing irony of many gay men? How and why was the older gay rights activism, which gifted such progress to homosexual people, hijacked?
In this passionate, witty polemic, Gareth Roberts answers these questions and argues that we need a new gay liberation movement.

www.amazon.co.uk/Gay-Shame-Gender-Ideology-Homophobia/dp/1800752830

Worth a read/listen? Maybe buy it for your friend as a Christmas present?

Many people in the trans community would read that claim as being very transphobic.

You're clearly letting your bigoted views that only one type of person can potentially carry a child colour your judgement! Not very inclusive cake. Educate yourself from these unnamed "many doctors".

Adding that it’s clear how the arrogant doctors and crazy academics have misled so many people into thinking somehow there’s such a thing as a third sex or how sex is a spectrum.

The saying that 'A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.' Is very apt under the circumstances.

@ramenmonster please bear in mind that trans whatever are not truly physically trans until all the bits and bobs have been taken away so a fully transman would be unable to carry a baby with no uterus/

Really interesting article. Thanks for posting. The 'spotlight' idea makes sense to me.

Women are being colonised, he may not care, but your friend does not perhaps realise his rights are being decimated too? A whole generation of young gay kids being told they are "born wrong" and need to be experimented on. The definition of gay has been changed!
Perhaps he'd listen to Dennis Kavenagh, Barry Wall, the EDI Jester on YouTube, Clive Simpson's Two Poofs & A Podcast on Substack? I'm sure there are plenty more gay men standing up against this.

You're right. I need to do better™️.

He doesn't need to identify as a woman. There is no difference between a man and a woman, he says. Therefore anyone is equally likely to be able to carry a child, whether they are male, female, man or woman.