TW who supports the SC ruling - AMA

Thank you so much for this thread @VanishingVision

Many of us have been badly scarred by the TRAs who hounded us out of our workplaces, political parties, trade unions, etc because we voiced concerns over the erosion of women’s rights. It has been very healing to be reminded that there are decent TW out there who respect our rights and our spaces. I so wish we could hear more from people like you, rather than the aggressive TRAs who are the only trans voices we hear in the mainstream media.

Please do write to your MP to express your support for the SC ruling, and please encourage likeminded TW like yourself to do so too. Please also respond to the EHRC online consultation on the new guidance: your perspective as a TW who is happy to use male toilets will be an incredibly important contribution.

Major respect and thank you to you and the other TW who have contributed to this very thoughtful and useful discussion.

If 'care pathways' describes non-medicalised, non-surgical care, I.e. therapy with a therapist who is not forced or paid to push vulnerable children towards transitioning, then yes, we need those. That includes 'social transitioning', which is not a neutral act but which has been shown to effectively corral kids into medical and / or surgical harm virtually all the time.

Ach well

JKR can only state her opinion, and all you are doing is agreeing with her, not proving the majority are doing no harm.

I think the vast majority of trans people dont intend to threaten anyone. But intention isnt always the consequences of our actions.

There is a difference between not being a threat and being well meaning and not causing trouble for others.

But it depends on your perspective.

With regard to my earlier post about the majority of trans people being decent etc, just been listening to The Witch Trials and J K Rowling says ' I believe the majority of trans identified people pose zero threat to others' and goes on to say they are vulnerable to abuse and murder in the same way women are. So maybe I wasn't entirely wrong in my feeling.

I think saying ' my daughter who identifies as a man' is a really good way of putting it. If that should occur in the future you are acknowledging how she feels about herself without having to say things that you just cannot agree with.

@MumOfYoungTransAdult I dunno ' do you have evidence ' was my question too.
And to all, I haven't done a study no, therefore I accept that my opinion is wrong.

totally agree, that power we do have is our bodies and the potential to reproduce, breast feed, offer sex to men we like.

Women have power from various sources and in various ways - not least, legally. Women have human rights just as men do, and that is no small thing. In the past century we've gained the right to vote, and laws like the Sex Discrimination Act etc have given women power. That has been the main point of legislation like the Equality Act - an attempt to redress the balance so that women could aim for an equitable place in society.

It's startling how recently all this legal power is/was won, though. And if we consider current events in that context it can be seen as attempts to remove all of those legal powers that have protected and supported women.

(one could also argue we have other powers that are perhaps more subtle and complex than basic 'might', like social powers, intellectual powers, perceptive powers, etc. But that's probably another discussion.)

It sounds like you and your child have found a way to work through this together, which is fantastic.

He was using the men's before but can now see it's not ok.

This is interesting and shows the importance of different viewpoints coming together to figure this stuff out at a societal level. The law gives clarity on single-sex spaces which is a useful starting point. I do feel sympathy for transmen, given the "limbo" that some will feel in situations where they "pass" well enough that the law specifically allows for their exclusion from women's spaces too. Yes, they made their choice to look as much like a male as possible but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to live with the consequences of those choices. Obviously there are some transwomen who "pass" too. The third spaces discussion has been suppressed by TRAs but hopefully some of the more reasonable trans voices will start to break through, just as we're seeing on this thread.

I see it a bit like going through the five stages of grief, I've been through them all but have got to a reasonable acceptance, more for my own peace of mind than anything. I can't keep stressing about this forever.

Personally, I would not be able to use opposite-sex (or non-binary) pronouns for my daughter if she ever decided she wanted to transition as an adult.

When I started this my journey to understand gender identity and support my (then actively) gender-questioning daughter, I felt open to the idea that I may need to do so in the future. That I might need to reframe my thinking and accept "him" as my "son". At that time I was prepared to do this if it was the right thing for her and I focused my time on researching what the whole thing was all about - including here on MN.

I do still accept that as an adult she may transition - and yes, I would feel grief (hopefully through to acceptance) because of the significant health risks she would face if she took any medicalised steps. However, I am no longer prepared to alter my own reality if my daughter chooses a path which differs from it. She will always my daughter - in law, biology and objective fact - and I'm not going to say otherwise.

If I shared her belief that gender identity exists (I used to believe this) I would accommodate her belief by using the "correct" pronouns which relate to it - but I don't. However, I would like to hope that even in that scenario I would never have accommodated her expecting others to bend their own reality, either as an overt demand or through emotional blackmail. I'll never know either way because during my learning journey I realised I didn't believe we all have a gender identity. Even prior to this discovery about myself I would never have supported anyone enforcing their belief on someone else. There are many people who hold different beliefs who find a way to co-exist within society.

If this hypothetical situation becomes reality in the future, my concession would be that I'd a) refer to her as "my child" or "my daughter who identifies as a man", without judgement or affirmation b) stop using pronouns to describe her altogether - no she, they or he. I'd go through the mental gymnastics of complete pronoun removal when describing her (I appreciate this isn't easy - as per Rapid's comments - and I may find I can't do it because my brain gets muddled) c) I would accept other people using my child's preferred pronouns if that's what they wanted to do.

If those accommodations weren't good enough - there's a poster on page 6/7 of this thread saying that the only way to be a good parent is to actively use preferred pronouns - I'd reluctantly find a way to grieve and accept my child's decision to pull away from me. Right now though, I'm fighting as hard as I can to avoid such a scenario because the idea of it breaks my heart and keeps me awake at night. But what I won't do is bend my reality just to avoid it.

We all have different lines on this as parents and children. No one family's way is better or worse than another's if they can maintain a way to communicate with each other when there are differences of opinion on an (adult) child's transition.

@ArabellaScott totally agree, that power we do have is our bodies and the potential to reproduce, breast feed, offer sex to men we like.

The reasons that TIMS want to invade our spaces is including the ridiculous notion of breast feeding support) is motivated by a need to steal what little power we have.

And males as part of the ruling class (not individual men) don’t have a problem with it because they do not care or do not recognise this.

And as for the handmaidens, they think sucking up to these men is a way of gaining some power.

Thank you for articulating that Arabella. It is very important to keep remembering this.

Power is at the root of all of it, and the whole subject needs to be seen through the lens of power dynamics.

The key factor that matters, for everyone, is that males have, overall, more power than women.

That covers historical power, cultural power, physical power, economic power. (Exceptions and anomalies, such as individual women who are very rich, or have political power, or men who are very powerless, do not disprove the overall picture of male/female power dynamics, which holds true worldwide and has done for century upon century. Only women have ever had the reproductive burden, which is part of what makes the threat of rape so potentially utterly life altering. Only women are affected by menstruation, pregnancy, birth, menopause, all of which are life-changing and life-affecting processes, including the potential of them. A woman is affected by the potential of pregnancy, menstruation, etc, even if she is not currently in that state.)

Within the category of male, there are males with less power than other males.

Women, as a category, still have less power than males, no matter where a male sits on the hierarchy of male power.

Some males feel marginalised because they have less power than other males. They may see 'becoming female' as a way to escape the power hierarchy/ranking among males, or they consider that if they have less power than other males they must ipso facto be female.

Some males find the power disparity is all mixed up with their sexuality. So 'debasing' themselves by acting 'as a woman' turns them on. This is where we see the grotesque parodies. 'Submission' is an exaggeration and thus subversion of the power dynamic.

Some females rail against their vulnerabilities and see 'becoming male' as a way to gain power and escape that vulnerability.

All the pleas to be kind to trans people are subtly suggesting that people who identify as trans are by nature less powerful than people who are not. In some ways this is true, as there has historically been prejudice and discrimination against people who are non-conforming. In other ways, not.

It doesn't mean that an adult male who feels victimised in some internal power struggle about his 'masculinity' being threatened is less powerful than a woman. It doesn't mean that Imane Khelif punching women in the face is fair. Or that Kate Dolatowski, undeniably marginalised and vulnerable, should be in a women's jail. Or that Eddie Izzard, who yes, has been the subject of ridicule for his clothing choices, is entitled to use women's toilets.

(I apologise for all the quote marks - often words are being used to mean something that is not quite as advertised, so I feel they need to be held in quotes. I would have done the same for 'kind' and other words but it gets a bit much.)

Anyway. I don't think any consideration of the subject can have any merit unless it includes examining the power dynamics at play, which are always built on the male/female hierarchy. It's inescapable.

The thing about gender ideology is that it doesnt have one fixed reason to justify why TWAW/TWAM and the non binary stuff.

A very small group would say that sex change is possible, as in someone has actually changed sex and sex means what we all say it does. The majority would say that sex as we know it doesnt exist, or is irrelevant or changing a single sex characteristic is enough.

All of it wants to alter perceptions of sex. Its not about gender non conformity, its just using the word gender instead of sex.

There will be allies and young people who dont see this. They are seeing it as a modernised gender non conformity with changing pronouns and medication.

These groups don't deny sex exists, but are still actively stopping women highlighting the safeguarding issues and attacks on women's rights.

I wonder about making a blanket statement about the majority of people with transgender identities being well meaning towards others. Can it be said that any person who expects (not just would like or appreciate but expects) anyone else to act as if their belief is material reality, including language changes, is well meaning with no intention of making life difficult for others? At home, at work, anywhere?

How many families have we seen mentioned, either by a family member or by someone observing, where family members are cut off if they don’t use the right pronouns? It would be great to know that the majority don’t have these expectations, but I am not sure I believe such a claim made currently. It would be an interesting study.

I suspect that there are lot of enforcers who are not transgender, but who enforce language and belief from what I have seen on MN. I wonder how much that group of people confuse the perception overall.

As an example, even parents who joined the protest about the Supreme Court judgement seemed confused as to what that day in London was for. It seemed like some just turned up in general support without understanding what they were supporting.

Yet some of those parents also decided that we on MN should be warned to be careful describing the protest as not peaceful based on the group who were the major focus, those who called for harm to women and grafittied statues.

@BlueJeansAndMoonbeams I dunno, "do you have evidence?" was my question too.

I'm quite old and in the old days there were "transvestites" and "transsexuals". There were far more transvestites than transsexuals, including a lot of heterosexual transvestites who were often fetishists.

Now that they're all called "trans" there are still several different kinds, and there are probably still roughly the same numbers of different kinds including large numbers of those heterosexual transvestites and fetishists. I used to have some TV and TS friends (all male). I didn't really know their familes. Reading the transwidows threads here made me re-evaulate what I thought about those TV and TS friends, including the transsexuals who I suppose would be as close to "true trans" as exist. I kind of wished I hadn't read the transwidows threads but as they say, once you see it you can't un-see it.

As for my own DC, well, my DC doesn't mean any harm to anyone either. That doesn't make it acceptable or safe for anyone including my DC if my DC is in women's spaces. I'm glad the SC has clarified this but given how negatively the judgment has been framed in the press and by activists who claim to support trans rights, I don't suppose that my DC is grateful. But as far as I can make out employers and service providers are required to provide suffficent unisex provision as well as separate men's and women's, and that seems like the best possible outcome.

TWAW/TWAM may not represent all "trans people" but I am not convinced that this is just a "vocal minority". You don't even have to believe TWAW to suppose that men (transwomen, nice harmless vulnerable transsexuals) should still be allowed to use women's facilities. It seems to me like a pretty substantial proportion of "trans people" and their supporters.

@RapidOnsetGenderCritic it's unfortunate that the vocal minority have pushed the TWAW and The TMAM so hard as I'm sure not all trans people actually believe they have changed sex. I know my child doesn't and there have been several trans people on here who don't believe that. My child is using female facilities , he's been questioned a few times due to being bearded etc but accepts it as necessary and not a big deal. He was using the men's before but can now see it's not ok.
I see it a bit like going through the five stages of grief, I've been through them all but have got to a reasonable acceptance, more for my own peace of mind than anything. I can't keep stressing about this forever.

I am not in your situation it must be awful. I cannot be sure of this but i think i would be just saying no.

I can't do it. The cognitive dissonance is too much for me, and I am not prepared to lie because someone else tells me I have to. I have tried to avoid using pronouns at all, but I get tied up in knots trying it reword it all and end up incoherent. I also have problems with the societal consequences of all the pretence that people have changed sex and can therefore enter spaces that are for the sex they claim to be.

Thanks for your follow up post @JamieCannister

Of course some could be. Some men deliberately dress as grotesque parodies of women as part of their sissification fetish. They'll openly admit to it. I can find some illustrative quotes if need be.

It'd be daft to pretend AGP males don't exist on a thread about trans identifying males.

It doesnt mean all trans identifying males, but it's imperative women are allowed to talk about this. Without being chastised for being 'rude' or 'aggressive'.

God here we go “you are being offensive” “attacking me” “aggressive”

bla bla bla

i love MN because i can read and disagree and be disagreed with, that to me is democratic debate.

On the subject of TW going about their lives not bothering anybody. Well if they are not how would we know.

All we know is WHO IS BOTHERSOME.

I have never shared this but here is my personal experience of TIM.

Lesbian only day down the then LGB cafe, with my mate who had just come out male in there claiming to be a long term woman, caused a big fat fuss circa 1994

TIM wanting to come to a women only hostel i worked at called themselves pre operative female. 6ft 2 clearly male in a dress circa 1995

Sought legal advice was referred to a TIM lawyer who turned out was only interested in my legal case because it was against my women’s only employer.

My issue was nothing to do with trans rights.

The local LGBTQ were represented on a sexual violence forums constant attempts to divert from women’s issues, despite the bloody data in front of their faces.

Two young TIMS in TK max following me around, despite no provocation from me, aping women. I wrote a poem on bluestocking pub about it.

Current customer who describes himself as TV, doesn’t understand about sex segregation (explained it to him)

Never met a TIM who was not in women’s faces one way or another.

The only thing that I can see could be considered impolite or offensive is in this bit "do their best to avoid presenting in public as a grotesque and (IMHO) offensive parody of the opposite sex".

I apologize for the implication that trans people are a "grotesque parody". Whilst I am absolutely certain some could be fairly described as such it was completely wrong of me to make such a sweeping statement.

@JamieCannister is free to state their opinions. I am equally free to find them aggressive and unpleasant and not want to engage with them. I'm not going to respond any further to this.

@ArabellaScott I am GC, but IMO, it’s offensive- and a pp asked, so I replied.

This has been a polite and honest thread for the most part. I would prefer it wasn’t spoiled.

I have made my point - YMMV - so I shan’t respond on this again,