Trans sibling in law

I have a massive problem with the ghoulish 'allies' who berate family members.

They can fuck of to the far side of fuck and keep on fucking off.

They are using vulnerable people to demonstrate how woke and right on they are.

It's reprehensible.

I’m not really all that interested how men “identify”.

There’s a really clear difference between trans women, and biological women. Trans women haven’t generally been socialised as women.

That really obvious fact doesn’t change the way that someone identifies in their own skin, which we don’t live in.

This thread's a great demonstration of coercive control that underpins this whole ideology:
You will affirm, you will call this vulnerable young woman a man because I demand you do. If you don't you're a bad person, a transphobe, you'll be alienated from your family etc etc.

The positive thing is that people are now refusing to be bullied. Are insisting on speaking up and trying to protect the young and vulnerable who for too long were abandoned and left in the clutches of the trans extremists seeking to use them for their own purposes

And this needs to be said.

The behaviour of the OPs SIL is not good. The OP says that they behave in a way that's something that should be talked about more.

I always say it's fine for the do going interferers who know fuck all to tell you how you should behave if you have a family member do this. They know nothing.

It is like a grenade being thrown into a family.

We need to remember how many families have dysfunction relationships and wholly unacceptable behaviour.

I always say to don't respond to the identity. Be conscious of behaviour. That's what should guide you.

What you shouldn't do is tolerate behaviour you wouldnt tolerate from someone who isn't trans.

The OPs SIL is clearly deeply troubled. That doesn't mean she shouldnt be held to account for coercive behaviour. Nor should family members pander to unreasonable demands. Unreasonable demands remain unreasonable regardless of identity.

If we are talking about equality then this is really relevant. We actually treat people the same. And if someone acts like a dickhead, we respond to this accordingly. We don't just roll over and pander to it.

Whats agender then?

Nobody else has ever said that gender is a social construct, and that the way those constructs shape who you are is your gender identity?

It seems quite a lot of people accept the first part, but not the second.

Exactly. I’m really not sure why some people have trouble with understanding this.

You're using a different definition of gender identity to everyone I have ever spoken to about this.

The way you have been affected by the societal construct of gender, is your gender identity.

OK.

In which case, women don't share the same gender identity as trans women, do they?

Still condescending, got it.

I haven’t conflated anything that isn’t really clearly, already conflated. You can’t have lived a life under that social construct of gender and not been affected or shaped by that in anyway, nobody is immune to that.

The way you have been affected by the societal construct of gender, is your gender identity.

Not having a gender identity would imply that gender norms and expectations have had no impact on your life, your development, or your person. If that was the case, there’d be nothing to be critical of.

I’m not confused, I think you’re wrong.

And, we could perfectly well redefine “gender identity” as something more like “one’s subjective experience of being interpolated into socially-constructed gender roles”, and then it would mean something more aligned with gender in the first sense I described.

BUT (and it’s a big but), that isn’t how gender ideologues or gender activists currently use the term. Largely because then being transgender wouldn’t make any sense, as there wouldn’t be any mismatch between internal and external senses of sex/gender. It would simply be understood as a discomfort with society’s expectations of gendered norms, which is exactly the same thing feminists have always complained about. There wouldn’t be anything meaningful to transition from or to.

You are confused, because in your post right here you’ve conflated the two different meanings of gender that I outlined in my post.

The person below my previous post says they don’t have a gender identity. That is, they don’t believe in the idea of an innate, ineffable feeling of maleness or femaleness. That isn’t the same as not being affected by gender as a social construct.

To reiterate: if you believe gender is outside the person (as a social construct), you can perfectly well also think that you don’t have a gender identity (as in, an innate inside feeling of gender). These two things are not mutually incompatible.

There’s a difference between being oppressed by sexist stereotypes and expectations and having an internal sense of feeling like a woman.

That’s how I see gender (the social construct) and gender identity (a belief akin to a religious identity as far as I can make out)

I assume the person you are referring to as being "directly below" marshmallow is me.

I said I don't have a gender identity. Not that I'm not affected by gender expectations.

No, I know you don’t think that, and I don’t usually questions I can work the answer out to.

I’m not confused, and don’t condescend me please.

The person directly below you doesn’t have a gender identity. They have been unaffected by those social expectations, or constructs, and have somehow escaped the impact of them.

My point, which has just been proven, is that whilst I completely agree that you can acknowledge gender constructs whilst also criticising them, some seem to reject them altogether. Which to use your phrase, is codswallop. You cannot have lived a life completely free of gender based ideologies, or else there’d be nothing to criticise.

What’s your definition of transphobia?

I mean I think the whole gender thing is absurd and if it were my sister or my child I’d try and get them to understand that you can’t change gender. If it were my sister in law then whatever, I’d give no reaction because it wouldn’t really affect me.

Is this the lead up to where you say ‘I suppose you think trans people don’t exist either’? So predictable.

I think that ‘gender critical’ is now used broadly to include anyone who has concerns about the conflict between trans rights and women’s rights, so people who are gender conservative or just want the right to single sex spaces are erroneously included.

However, feminists recognise gender as a social construct that oppresses women.

When somebody says they don’t have a gender, they mean they don’t have a gender identity. Gender is externally imposed, regardless of any internal sense of identity.

As somebody born in the second half of the twentieth century, with grand parents born at the beginning, I would say that the story of that century was the story of women being released from gendered expectations, largely through gaining control over their fertility (a right that still can’t be taken for granted) and maternity rights (which still lead to discrimination).

Men have not moved nearly as far, but that is no reason for women to move backwards,

It’s not a neutral act to impose the idea of gender identities on others.

I don't believe in gender identity. I don't have an inner feeling of being a woman. I just am one. According to one of my friends this makes me agender or some form of non binary. According to some other friends it means I'm "cis" because I'm happy being referred to as a woman.

Gender stereotypes are bollocks and we should be fighting against them. Plus they vary depending on where and when you are. Eg pink used to be a masculine colour.

@SleeplessInWherever You seem very confused. There is a big difference between the long-established sociological concept of gender — socially produced stereotypes, sex roles and conventions, all external to the individual person — and the notion of “gender identity” as it’s been (very recently) invented by gender ideologues, which is an ineffable, inborn and unchanging, metaphysical or quasi-religious sense of whether one is “meant” to be male or female, and which is internal to the individual person.

One can perfectly well acknowledge that “gender” in the first sense exists (and is a way that women often find themselves oppressed or disadvantaged compared to men, and as such be “critical” of it); and also think that “gender identity” in the second sense is a made-up, unscientific load of codswallop.

No it's not. There's a difference between being Gender Critical and Transphobic. But screaming "Transphobia" seems to be the standard response to anyone questioning the TRAs hard line beliefs.

You can actually be supportive of how someone identifies, and still believe that it's impossible to change biological sex.

That. I'm GC. I work with a trans woman. I call her by her chosen name, and I now say 'her'without even thinking. She's lovely.

Do I think that she's a woman? No. But I see her as a person, and a particularly good and kind one. So I'm not going to agonise over the rights and wrongs of transitioning when I'm with her, and I don't believe that me referring to her as I do, is a lie. We just work together harmoniously and happily.

Well I don't.

I understand what gender stereotypes are and that people will align with / rebel against them to varying degrees.

But as to what then constitutes being transgender and how you change genders - I am no wiser than I was at the beginning.