Why do you care so much about gender issues?

Thank you very much, it does answer my question. English is my second language, but I am very proficient (putting false modesty aside, most people including native English speakers readily believe I was raised in a bilingual household). I don't think I have ever come across someone who has replied "yes, they are" rather than "yes, she is" in the particular example that you give, but it's most interesting to know it could happen bona fide.
This being said, I still can't get used to the English way of referring to a baby as "it", maybe it's the same underlying semantic construct.

I still think it's very bizarre when referring to one's own husband, and over a whole paragraph where said husband is topic number one and the pronoun is used half a dozen times at least.

@JanesLittleGirl thank you also for your reply, although your situation is different. I would use the English "they" in your example as well because I don't identify the figure on the beach.

On my most forgiving days I can convince myself it’s just a delusional falsehood. But mostly I see it as the abuse of vulnerable children and young people on a massive scale.

I find it so maddening that so many brilliant and intelligent women are just pandering to these men.

For most of the reasons already stated but also because it’s a deceit that I refuse to enter into and what infuriates me is that every last person knows it’s a deceit and yet so many go along with it.

The Free Speech Union support people who have been cancelled for having gender critical views (ie for continuing to believe in reality). But they rely on crowdfunding for individual cases.

In the United States, most of the pushback has come from Christian charities, who apparently have a much better grip on scientific reality than the institutions of government and education.

Sorry that last para should have read: Not sure if that answers your question, but I would - and do - use ‘they’ when I know the sex of the person I refer to, but sometimes it’s not the focus of the sentence I am responding to, or the subject of the question, so unless I reframe the question asked above: Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I might instead reply ‘Oh, my daughter? Yes, she is,’ because I’ve now clarified the ‘who’ - or the subject - of the conversation.

It’s a bit late and my cutting/pasting and editing abilities failed me 🤦🏽‍♀️

You are trying to find a difference that doesn't exist. Three of my grandparents didn't have English as a first language. While I would say "I saw a figure walking along the beach and they stopped by the fairground", they would all say "I saw a figure walking along the beach and it stopped by the fairground". It is a use of English thing.

I think it’s because language doesn’t exist in a vacuum, especially when it’s spoken and part of a conversation.

So, for example if someone said to me: ‘Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I’d likely reply ‘yes they are’. I know she is female, but the person I am answering doesn’t, and the sex of my child wasn’t foregrounded in the question. If they’d asked ‘did you say your daughter is at university’ I’d have replied ‘yes she is’.

Not sure if that answers your question, but I would - and do - use ‘they’ when I know the sex of the person I refer to, but sometimes it’s not the focus of the sentence I am responding to, or the subject of the question, so unless I reframe the question asked above: Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I’d likely reply ‘yes they are’. ‘Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I might reply ‘Oh, my daughter? Yes, she is,’ because I’ve now clarified the ‘who’ - or the subject - of the conversation.

My TL:DR A small number of very sick puppies prodded and probed around our boundaries until they found a way in through our children. It will take a long time to repair the damage that they have done but, however long it takes, these people will spend one hundred times as long in their own special hell. Yes, I really hate what they have done to far too many children.

Wouldn’t have thought much about it years ago when there was the odd MtF in the town who dressed like ‘normal’ women. Then came the onslaught MtF AGPs wondering around in rubber mini dresses and stripper heels, being made to use a unisex loo at a wedding finding myself confronted with drunk men coming out of cubicles still doing up their trousers, young teenage girls with obvious autistic tendencies on testosterone and the degradation of women’s sex based rights

*only good things

You're being confusing. You accept that singular they is a common construct, so why are you arguing that it makes the person it's used for sound like they (!) have multiple personalities? It doesn't. Just because it's used for a non-binary person, or in any other circumstance where the speaker doesn't wish to indicate the person's sex for whatever reason ("My friend called, they need my help!") doesn't magically strip it of its singular quality.

Mainly because of the dishonesty. Non gender critical people know that people of the male sex can’t be women. It’s an indisputable fact. So to watch them blatantly lie online and make supposedly scientific arguments about spectrums and seahorses and pretend they see no difference at all between a transwoman and their own mother makes me lose ever more respect for them.

Transgender people deserve to live their lives free of discrimination and I wish them all nog good things. But they aren’t women. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. So why can’t you say it.

So so sorry to read this. Wishing her and you everything strength and hope that she comes through safely somehow. The fact that she's already on cross sex hormones and planning mastectomy must be so hard to bear. Just wanted to send a hug

To be clear, I'm not envisioning someone with internalised homophobia who on some level doesn't want to be gay, more an intersection of naivety and theoretical thinking that might lead someone to conclude their same sex attraction was the straight attraction of a trans person

"I can see the process being "I like women. men are meant to like women, there fore there is something wrong with a woman liking women".

I do wonder whether some of this is "I want the people I fancy to look at me like they look at the opposite sex".

Because they are young and maybe autistic, the reality that there are more straight people than gay people, and that everyones first crushes are unrequited hasn't registered yet. And they haven't experienced the difference between the monochrome inner drama of unrequited love and the body slam fireworks of mutual attraction that once they feel it will make people who might fancy them more attractive than people who won't.

So for now all they know is that they fancy the same sex but all the people they fancy are straight. And surely if they were gay, the people they fancy would be gay, right? So I can see how a young maybe autistic person growing up with the idea of trans identity might think maybe that means they are actually straight too, the opposite sex and straight, just in the wrong body.

Yes, I've read Shakespeare (Marlowe, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, you name them) as well as Agatha Christie, thank you. And I would be quite interested if you could find me a centuries old literary reference where "they + plural" is used when referring to a person who is well identified.

@Donury236your experience is not unique, unfortunately. See the trans widows threads.

This would annoy me so much, I guess at least your DH doesn’t think he is an actual woman. Men can wear maid outfits if they want, I would prefer it if they could go out in whatever clothes, and not worry about having people think they ARE women. Passing is such a red herring. Gender diversity acceptance should be more normal, not conforming to narrow dress rules.

Honestly, if you put this post in relationships, I think you’d get some more specific responses, your DH sounds really annoying, I guess he has many redeeming qualities and you think about these issues more then most people.

Unlike our very modern "iel", the English singular "they" is centuries-old 😉

100%, genuinely honest question: how can you use "they" In the plural for someone you know? Isn't it a bit like saying that person has schizophrenia or a multiple personality disorder? Don't you hear how absurd that sounds?
At least in French we have the made-up pronoun iel for "non-binary". It's singular.

One thing that the stream of Employment Tribunals are demonstrating is how deeply anti social / anti work ethic so many transactivists are.
Upton with his sinister making notes about Sandie Peggie when she stepped outside the changing room when he was in there. Followed by the vast amount of NHS staff time and ££ being spent on resolving his personal demand to change with unconsenting women.
The psychologist Haech Lockwoood who sued and lost against her NHS trust employer over repeated "deadnaming and misgendering" because she self identified as non binary and having read the judgment, evidently harassed her colleagues into complying with her preferred language.

That's just 2 recent examples. Almost every court case showcases anti social and bullying behaviour by transactivists. Behaviour that undermines a cohesive efficient workplace built on constructive working relationships.

Bring your whole self to work does nothing for the emotionally incontinent transactivists who need to start prioritising workplace needs, not personal wishes.

Thanks for this post @GCScot. I don't have anything to add to PPs about 'why', - we all know - but it's good to know that I'm not alone in caring as much as I do.

But it's all quite recent, for me.

I'm GenX and I'm a latecomer to Mumsnet. I remember I started to get incensed with the case of the male murderer called Scarlet Blake who was reported in the BBC news as a 'woman'. (He killed a cat and a man, and the cat got my attention). I was annoyed enough to complain to the BBC that Blake wasn't a woman blah blah and then of course got the bollocks brush off.

Then I started lurking here and learnt a whole lot more. I'm amazed that not ALL women are up in arms about it.

But I also know that for years I was oblivious, while women were already fighting this.

At least the majority of public opinion has turned and is now supporting the rational view that transvestite men shouldn't be competing in women's sport. People find it difficult to defend that, no matter how 'kind' they'd like to be.

I agree that transphobia has been pitched as the next exciting prejudice after homophobia. And so unthinkers think it's equivalent, and jump on the virtue-signal bandwagon, without any thought to the consequences for women's rights.

I would love to 'recruit' more to the cause but I think it has to happen naturally with the beat beat beat of the employment tribunal cases. I have a feminist friend who still doesn't understand the actual nastiness of these men.

100%.

I think that these is a massive irony that even the hard left, people who call themselves "literal communists", love certain aspects of capitalism and don;t think of communism as taking away any of the good bits of capitalism.

On the other hand the richest free market business owners are the most entitled so and sos when it comes to moaning about failing public services, and rely much more on the state than ordinary people (and ordinary person relies on the state to educate his or her kids, rich business owners rely on it to educate thousand of it's future employees)