Why do you care so much about gender issues?

I have a young trans relative, they have a trans partner. They should have been healthy same sex attracted people. Instead both have increasingly poor health, one unable to work full time. It makes me furious that they were lied to by the NHS and their parents were lied to by the NHS. It also annoys me when relatives claim you must support family. I would not "support" children putting their hands in a fire, I wont support self harm.

Other annoyances like "no debate", the fake science, the treating women and girls as less important than males, the sporting nonsense influence me but it is the harm to young people that makes me most passionate.

😂
Much of TRA ideology is like a comedy sketch
(not the violent bits, obvs)

It was actually 'trans awareness' training at work that first triggered my doubts about transgender ideology. We were shown a video which explained that women have pink brains that make them like handbags and men have blue brains that make them like football.

Are you sure that wasn't a Harry Enfield sketch?

Why do some people mind about anything?
I wonder if there’s a difference between people who are more typical detail focussed or those who are more conceptual? I suspect that there will be people from both camps but who object to GI in different ways?

For me I relied on the BBC and Guardian so their mangling of language left me clueless. I think it’s the same for a lot of the general public who haven’t been put on “training” courses snd subjected to direct coercion and social contagion at work.

Resisting that sort of training and social pressure would be very tough - remember this has come from government and the civil service at the very top so is difficult for anyone to resist.

And it’s Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion in reverse. Firstly likeability - lose that and it’s difficult to get anything done at work. Second - and maybe most important - if you’ve made any public declaration of support for a cause then it’s almost impossible psychologically to row back on it. Which is why the email footers/pronouns and rainbow lanyards/stonewall rankings are so sinister. Anyone who’s done that will struggle to undo it even if not a true believer?

I was on a public forum page about 6 years ago where a trans sexual male speaking at a women’s event was being discussed. I realised it couldn’t be stopped so I thought a good compromise would be if he spoke about how he experienced misogyny as a trans sexual male. I would have found that interesting. I was still so naive lol. The barage of furious, unhinged responses put me straight into ‘systems thinking’ mode and I haven’t changed back since. The penny dropped that they actually wanted us to pretend that TWAW all the time. Not just TWAW when it doesn’t matter all that much to anyone., So many women still don’t realise this though, and the implications on a broad scale. Or they just don’t care.

@Theeyeballsinthesky That's a really helpful way of looking at it. I've never thought of people as being "system thinking" (me) and "how it affects me" thinking, and that actually makes sense of a few things! I remember once making a comment about the bad time Chinese women had (historically) when they moved into their parents' in law's house on marriage and were often treated very badly by their mother in law. The response was a quick put down about how I must have had a bad experience with a mother in law. Not at all, and I was nonplussed by the immediate assumption that this was about my personal prejudices based on personal experience, not my having read up on the history and, you know, actually thinking about other people and their lives and even caring about them. Everything is assumed to be personal.

Completely agree.

It is utterly wild. It's that feeling of 'surely not?' then an feeling of a punch to the gut when you realise where we actually are with this.

It scares the shit out of me.

Exactly. Both of these are real examples of the sort of thing I recieve in work emails regularly.

@Theeyeballsinthesky

In my experience, a lot of people aren't good at "system thinking" ie they can't do big picture thinking.

Indeed. I know that's one area where I'm particularly blind. I naturally focus on the individual, and I have to train myself to think on a global level.

So 'I've never met a TW/wouldn't mind them using women's loos/I've got bigger problems anyway" is as far as the thinking goes.

Also: "The TW I know wouldn't hurt a fly," ie. not necessarily focusing only on what directly concerns only oneself, but on what concerns the people around oneself.

There's also the slippery slope phenomenon. You start with something that seems harmless enough (eg. calling someone whatever pronoun they prefer), and you don't realise that the activists work from there to get you to accept bigger and bigger things, until you end up staring at a position that's obviously wrong to you, but you can't pinpoint where the limit should be drawn.

they don't see the problems that legally redefining women to mean "adult human female + some men with women feelings" means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women.

I'd been sporadically visiting MN for years before the SC judgement, but I could never stay around for long, and nothing ever stuck with me, because "I know I'm personally full of good will so I've got no reason to assume other trans people are not as well", and "I know TW who are nice and deserving of kindness", and "it can't be so bad", and "don't we all have to make some compromises for society to work properly", and and and.

By a complete coincidence, I happened to visit again on the day of the SC judgment. And the floor dropped from under my feet when I realised that its point had been to determine what a woman is. I may not think globally, but I do know the importance of properly defining things if you want to discuss them, so the fact that it had come to that, that the very legal definition of woman had been under attack, really shook me. I'd never realised that TRAs would go that far, that they would actually claim that TW are women. I had always assumed that we would all always work under the mutual understanding that, "We all know TW are men; we just squibble over which special authorisations to enter women's spaces they should receive." Once I realised that yes, TWALiterallyW was the logical endpoint of a trajectory that starts with eg. "calling a TW 'she' just to be nice to her", well, I had to revise my entire mental system, and it all fell apart.

And I think most TRAs and most passive onlookers work with the same kind of cobbled-together, internally incoherent mental system as I did. The proof is in the way they are unable to properly define the terms they use, even the most basic ones, such as "What is a woman?", "What does trans mean?" and so on. They mean well, and for them, that's more important than being logical or coherent.

"Emma from the Manchester office said they were in support of the proposal"

-> Reads to me as The Manchester Office as a group is in support. If it was just Emma it should say 'she'

"The service user and their partner are separating. They intend to remain in the marital home"

-> The use of 'they' in this context is downright confusing. Does it mean the user and partner are separating but both intend to stay, or the service user is staying alone, or that the partner is planning to stay there alone.

"Emma from the Manchester office said they were in support of the proposal"
"The service user and their partner are separating. They intend to remain in the marital home"

"John Smith from the IT team said they will be prioritising this next week"

I would understand that as 'Somebody will do it when they get round to it. We don't know who'.

Those of us who have worked in areas where safeguarding law has to be applied 100% of the time, where compliance with legal and financial regulations is compulsory 100% of the time, understand ‘exceptions’ really cannot be made because we are forced by employers or professional bodies to be aware of the bigger picture.

Against that, as proposed by the judge in the Sandie Peggie case, is the idea that every time a trans person enters a new setting there should be an assessment of whether they pass/are sufficiently committed, so they can know which facility to use. If a judge can honestly not see why this is a bad idea for everyone, having apparently thought about a case for months, perhaps it's not surprising that other people are rather muddled.

In truth, the only time I've heard they for a known person was in the context of a contrived/performative compliance with the idea that we 'can't assume someone's pronouns'.
I've mainly come across it in the writing of my younger colleagues, who persist in emailing things like "John Smith from the IT team said they will be prioritising this next week" requiring me to check whether the whole IT team will be prioritising it, so it should be fixed in a day; or Just John, so it will take at least a week.

means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women.

and renders such planning offensive and taboo.

@CautiousLurker2 I very honestly didn't mean either to derail or to be pedantic and I was (still am) sincere in thanking you. I believe language is extremely important when talking about sex and gender and that's why I often muse about the differences in my two languages and how it can be a factor in how GI is more successful in English-speaking countries. But I'll stop.

as @Theeyeballsinthesky comments, I think it is simply that people in general really do not think about the wider implications. They will hold the belief that ‘exceptions to the rule’ are benign - it’s only one person, one time, etc - when the legal ramifications mean that once you have allowed the precedent, you open the floodgates. Once you allow that exception, the social contract has been broken and people are required to constantly justify and explain the logic, when in the moment of that exception being made, there wasn’t any. Someone simply thought they were being kind, or were put on the spot and acquiesced because it made fewer waves.

Those of us who have worked in areas where safeguarding law has to be applied 100% of the time, where compliance with legal and financial regulations is compulsory 100% of the time, understand ‘exceptions’ really cannot be made because we are forced by employers or professional bodies to be aware of the bigger picture.

For me, this is why I am flabbergasted at the way companies and institutions have allowed themselves to believe the blatantly obvious misrepresentation of any law where sex is pivotal to its understanding. In Banking you don’t get to redefine what a financial term is because your clients demands it.

I think 'they' is commonly used to refer to something indefinite, so when it is used to refer to a known person it has a distancing effect.

Its always been grammatically correct to use 'they' singular in English when the sex of the person was unknown. When the sex was known, the appropriate sex pronoun was used instead. For obvious reason, as it leaves no doubt that the reference is to one person rather than two or more, and why would we seek to deliberately introduce ambiguity?
The use of they singular as a default has gained popularity purely to service GI. The fact that grammar allows for it, is neither here nor there, as the rule of grammar merely provides an option for a specific circumstance (sex unknown) rather than being an alternative that offers equal clarity.
The push for acceptance that it's embedded in the English language as an equally valid, widely used alternative to the singular comes from the same place as 'there have always been trans people'. It's purpose is to frame any objections to GI and its trappings as a new thing born out of a sudden spite against trans people, and disguise the fact that we are being required to change our behaviour and language to accommodate the ideology.

In my experience, a lot of people aren't good at "system thinking" ie they can't do big picture thinking. They approach issues from the perspective of whether it will directly affect them at a personal every day level rather than whether it affects people across eg a sex, a race, an age. So 'I've never met a TW/wouldn't mind them using women's loos/I've got bigger problems anyway" is as far as the thinking goes.

they don't see the problems that legally redefining women to mean "adult human female + some men with women feelings" means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women. Public services for example use census data to plan for eg how much maternity provision an area is likely to need based on the number of women of child bearing age live there. If we don't know how many actual women there then we can't work that out and allocate resources. We can't provide single sex anything if the definition of women is "adult human female and some men"

it'd just impossible to work like that and that's before we get into the impact on women who eg have experienced sexual violence or for cultural reasons can't be on their own with men

most people's thinking starts and ends with their own direct experience

Sorry - I think you’re being pedantic and trying to derail this thread. Being very proficient in the English language myself (completing a PhD in English just now, bur also have.s BA and MA in it, and also lecture/tutor undergrad English and creative writing) I have encountered it many times in my personal and professional life - it really doesn’t matter whether in your individual experience you can’t recall anyone using ‘they’ or not. It simply means that you probably didn’t notice at the time - no-one runs a continual audit of every spoken English encounter.

Perhaps you could return to the topic of the actual thread, as started by @GCScot, or start your own thread on the vagaries of the English language?