Thank You from a Trans Lurker

@Seethlaw
Late to your thread, but loving reading your perspective thank you.
Like any group of people made up of individuals my brain knows that not all trans people are the same. But sometimes with who screams the loudest it's hard to see that.
If anything my brain says trans people as a group should have a wider range of personalities within their group than almost any other grouping of people. Not everyone is the same. I know there are trans people who just want to live their lives respectfully and be equally respected back. It's so refreshing to hear you speak. By speaking calmly here you will achieve far more in terms of representing trans people and sharing mutual understanding than the people who come to scream and call us names.
I'm sort of sad that things have become so confrontational in general, but to me that just means the loudest have risen to the top. I don't think they are like, or represent the quieter people below.

Could I ask a question please? I don't have any experience of what it's like to be trans. Your calmness here, where others like to come to scream, makes me think you might be a calm person internally, possibly good at reasoning too. My question is this. Has being a calm person helped you navigate your journey with less difficulty than other trans people in your opinion?

@Seethlaw I hope your find what you are looking for in your journey, and while all journeys have ups and downs I hope your journey has far more ups than downs. We might seem like a scary bunch here, but we do really appreciate respect, good faith, and honesty. Thank you for coming to talk to us.

Yes, it's so weird how someone coming in and saying "I understand what a woman is, I'm not trying to redefine you for the purposes of myself or telling you you don't understand your own lives and experiences, I just want to tell you what it's like to be me" gets a better reception than someone coming in and saying "the thing is you are wrong not just about who I am but also who you are, your problem is that you don't understand your own experiences, I'm here to tell you why the things you think you need are wrong and anyway aren't as important as what I need, by the way science says sex is a spectrum and sex doesn't even exist anyway so it's not actually possible that you experience things that I don't".

It's a real headscratcher.

Missed the edit time on the last post, sorry - should say think that was less respectful and "pitying" and "patronising" because it was a view that didn't align with the "GC" one.
So it played to the "poor lost little girl" narrative.

Also the difference in replies to the "I'm a trans man AMA" thread the other day.
Lots of patronising all round, and "what does your mum think?" etc.
Definitely not calling a he.

Have to agree with @PhoebesPony where they say trans men getting an easier time of it on here and not outright hostility which it would be for trans women who comment/start threads but are respectful.
I mean, I've never seen the level of referring to as "he" to someone who is trans like in this post and others.
If it was a trans woman, it would be "he" all round , no way would they get "she" throughout.

What are their 10 commandments @Seethlaw?

I remember watching this interview with them on French TV and a male person called in. It was a remarkable segment.

https://x.com/Margueritestern/status/1781316307800965479

I see the rise of trans as being parallel to the rise of drag as a mainstrea artform and maybe dependent on the latter

Obviously not!

I know I wrote in haste but was describing the time line.

How what could have existed for years as an obscure corner of university courses, grew into a social influential concept.

If those indoctinated students hadn't moved into politics, the news media, the arts etc., most of the western world, let alone current 14 years olds would be bothering with thinking about having a trans identity.

And I thought it was clear that is what I was talking about as it was in response to where did this come from.

Maybe a current academic could do a study of why this particular at the time strand of elitist academic nonsense, that was really on no purpose other than to give Judith Butler a career, could find out why these willing acolytes were so willing to become true believers.

I suspect you will find it was (and still is) part of the male backlash against women's liberation.

Which at that time seemed to be well towards becoming an acceptable concept in society.

But the sex is the same as gender academic mythical studies were just a useful as making equality silly by publicising girl power as liberating, and 3rd wave feminism (probably through ageism as much as anything else) to endlessly and roundly denouce 70s feminist.

And the TRAs only have power because of the underlying culture of MRAs.

What better way to undermine the politics of Women's Liberation that was based on the reality that the male sex class discriminated against the female sex class.

If sex if not a real think then how can men be accused of sex discrimination, sex based violence, etc., etc..

Middle-aged men and 14 year old girls weren't finding trans through Michel Foucault and gender studies at universities, though.

It meant that those taught gender were more willing to accept trans ideology as more than internet spread subgroups or male fetishes.

As these 14 year old tumblr girls moved to universities their teenage identies were confirmed by universities obsession with queer theory.

And the men with fetishes rode that wave.

Very late to catching up with this thread but would like to respond to a comment made about the growth of trans culture coming from America.

The growth came in both the US and UK because of the invasion of queer politics into universities. the obvious example was that even within a few years of them being established Women's Studies became Gender studies.

But one of the main (culprits) of the growth in queer politics was in fact French! Michel Foucaul. But was part of the concept of disrupting the norms. The most extreme of which is to challenge the reality of biology as being the same as how you identify.

And in terms of the US and UK it was the spread of this politics from universities into positions of influence in the media etc..

And it is only relatively recently to the influence in 1970/80 (?) universities that it seeped into popular culture. eg in the UK Stonewall ceasing to be about same sex attracted people and adopting the whole rainbow umbrella. (which may well just have been an opportunity to capitalise financially on the growth in the concept of trans - not gender dysphoria - in popular culture)

Sorry this is a very short and not very good lead up to the quesiton I want to ask of the contributors from France.

Is the academic culture in France more "conservative" in the sense that traditional subjects are taught, and there isn't the growth which the UK and US have of universities having ever more rarified subjects. (only found out the other day that a university in the UK has set up a museum of "Transology" which in other countries might have been seen as an art installation but here is a "serious" project of collecting and establishing history).

If French newpapers and tv are not full of queer educated young people earnestly telling their employers they aren't in touch with a new reality, which is what happened here, maybe that is one of the reasons there are not endless news item in terms of never ending articles about the oppression of trans people that happen in the UK and US.

And how many politicians in France are desperately standing on a soap box to vigorously virtue their support for trans people or even assert they are non binary or something.

Strange when in terms of cliches Anglo Saxons are seen as not very liberal and a bit inclined to conform, that both the US and UK have been so receptive to the concept of disrupting the norm. (Obviously both countries are multi racial but in terms of the power elite the heritiage is AS.)

NB in using the word trans I am referring to people who mainly seem to have adopted this identity as part of a cultural grouping, rather than someone who is gender dysphoric.

@Seethlaw

I wonder if you worry about the available spaces like unisex or gender neutral toilets in the UK, if you visit? my son is a trans man and I worry about the facilities available.

@murasaki
I find the use of She to describe cars and ships as really quite insulting.

This is something I found which may explain it. "Another tradition is to consider ships as female, referring to them as ‘she’. Although it may sound strange referring to an inanimate object as ‘she’, this tradition relates to the idea of a female figure such as a mother or goddess guiding and protecting a ship and crew. Another idea is that in many languages, objects are referred to using feminine or masculine nouns. This is less common in English which tends to use gender-neutral nouns, however referring to ships as ‘she’ may refer to far more ancient traditions."

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/why-do-ships-have-a-gender#:~:text=Although%20it%20may%20sound%20strange,using%20feminine%20or%20masculine%20nouns.

I also wonder if the use of 'she' is because men love boats and cars and so they kind of use she because they are an object of affection. But again, being an object of affection does sound insulting!

We still have some in English, oddly ships and cars are she. I have no idea why, other than that it was traditionally men who utilised them, which is an uncomfortable thought when you think about it like that.

I also think that fundamentally, when you come from a culture where every inanimate object has a gender which can't be changed, so you know that a table is feminine and can never be masculine, and a snail is masculine even if it is female, the idea that humans can change gender is never quite going to compute.

Re French grammar and gender! I would love to read an in-depth study of this. How language shapes our perception.

I still have no idea how French (or other languages) decided which things were masc/fem gender so it's not something i know much about.

correct. She last flounced after I pointed yet more research that disagreed with her position and she told us she was off to speak to the NZ Sports minister or some sports representative there IIRC. Which was super impressive, we told her so of course, and suggested some links to show them.

IIRC she was very unhappy that Harper’s review showed the same results as the Hilton Lundberg review.

Ah yes, the unmotored but wheeled transport user's mum.

I am not sure he even knew. But she was here.

Before I transitioned my mother was tempted to join to post GC stuff! 😆

No, I absolutely wouldn't expect you to stop any level of caution or suspicion.

Somebody's mother?? Honestly, I couldn't imagine asking my mother to join an online forum in defense of trans rights. That's actually so absurd that even happened.