"A woman who is trans"

I think after the collapse of the gender ideology, stonewalls next grift will be to make flat earthers a protected minority. I mean, if they can try to convince people people can change sex and that gender should trump sex anyway , why not try to convince people the earth is flat. Both beliefs are the same level of batshittery.

And following from that, if gender identity is a philosophical belief about oneself, and no one has to act as if that belief is materially real, isn’t it already protected under the current legislation? Why does a special characteristic need to be in place?

If you want to have an identity that you are just another version of being male but have a whole other set of language around your identity that is not female language (ie invent new terms without reference to any other group as was done when male people took female language) and you don’t believe you are female when you are not, why does this require a specific protected characteristic ? No other philosophical belief has a specific one.

Then there has to be a discussion about enforcing people to treat your philosophical belief as if it is materially real. I agree anyone should be free to believe they are whatever they want.

What I don’t agree with is any enforcement that someone has to treat that belief as being materially real.

There are people out there who have had body modifications to suit their identity as a vampire. No one in society should be forced to act as if that makes them vampires.

So again, I ask, why should gender identity be given such special treatment by society?

Believe what you want to believe, but if there is no material reality foundational to that belief and it is just your identity, why should it have special categorisation under the equality act?

And again, why does that need a special category of protection ? The procedures are not treating a medical condition. They are elective body modifications to suit a belief that is not based on material reality?

If any person wishes to make extreme body modifications, are they already not protected? Why does there need to be a special category? The special category was introduced at a time when it was needed for marriage. It is not needed now for that purpose and seems to instead have created an expectation of special entitlements that no other group of people have because it is not protecting an equitable outcome or providing equitable opportunity. It has been used to create additional privileges not available to any one else..

If it was simply about protecting freedom to make extreme body modifications, doesn’t everyone have that freedom in the UK? Or do you expect the public to fund those, meaning an additional set of privileges ? And if you expect the public to fund those through the NHS, why?

What other philosophical belief gets that privilege, why should gender identity get that privilege?

I guess there’s two parts to this. Discomfort can come from the body and how you’re perceived. This will be hard but try to imagine you grew up feeling that there was a mistake and you should’ve been born male. You grow up noticing the difference in how boys and girls are treated and talked about differently. Every time someone calls use she you feel discomfort because there is a disconnect between how you felt you should’ve been born. I will admit gender stereotypes play a part, but it’s not all there is to this.

Oh I 100% agree with you on non-binary identities. Especially as it concerns gender. No person is 100% masculine or feminine. The whole thing is ridiculous!

Also, I’d just like to say that I really appreciate how you’ve interacted with me

When it comes to matters of presenting rather than outright identifying, I think the gender critical position is quite close to the trans position. Man wants dress and makeup and long hair? Go for it and stereotypes be blowed! After all, women have been wearing "men's clothes" for decades now.

Though I think many have reservations about feminine presentations that verge on parody or pornography. That just feels like taking the piss, especially if the man doing it claims to actually be a woman.

If its just a case of changing a patients body to how they want it to look, why identify as the opposite sex and involve anyone else?

If a man thinks he would be happier with breasts, why not just do it, and not expect to be a accommodated anywhere other than male spaces? Why name and pronoun changes?

Its not just a case of 'presenting' as the opposite sex, its wanting everyone else to see and accept them as the opposite sex.

Honestly, I think non binary is either totally meaningless or it applies to absolutely everybody 😂

But I would genuinely love to see this genderist social movement refocus from transitioning to the opposite sex to finding new ways to identify outside sex
That might mean de-emphasising sex, or maybe following other societies in having gender subdivisions that recognise socially meaningful differences within the sex binary rather than pretending it can be crossed.

Because ultimately, changing sex is not possible, and pretending it is by pretending the very real gaps don't matter (or worse, forcing others to say the gaps don't matter when they know they do) is only going to lead to continuing anger, hurt and tension. But creating something new to express this thing that is not sex, that is wide open territory.

This is a really interesting discussion. I have definitely noticed this misconceptions about the GC position in online trans spaces. I’d probably be a lot happier if I could believe you’re all genocidal meanies.

Transitioning a child is never okay. I finally came out to my parents at 15 and was referred to a GIC, but I decided not to see them at the time because I didn’t feel like I had enough life experience to make that choice. It was only in my early 20s that I felt I had confident in my decision.

Even claiming to be 'not men' rather than women would never work because of safeguarding.

We cannot have safeguarding while some men are hiding their sex.

In my case I acknowledge I haven’t changed sex, but I feel more comfortable presenting and having attributes on the other sex. Most would disagree but medically transitioning is a core requirement to be transsexual. It’s not just about clothes. It’s about the sexed body not developing in the way the mind expects.

All of this.

I think if men who identify out of being men had not claimed to be actually women, but had identified into a category of their own with its own name and a campaign for its own spaces, there would have been a lot less pushback.

And what there was wouldn't have come from gender critical women who are presently having to defend their own identity and their own spaces from appropriation and stereotyping.

The remaining objectors would have been the ones gender critical women are often (and often wilfully) confused with, who think men should be manly and women womanly; who are in fact not gender "critical" at all.

The only exception to this scenario would be if there had still been a push to transition children and young people; I think a lot of women of all political persuasions would still have opposed that.

What is gender recognition if the recipient understands that they haven't changed sex?

What is gender? What exactly is being recognised and protected?

If a patient is distressed with their sex, but understands that the solutions dont change their sex, what exactly does the treatment do? Because it hasnt change their sex, the thing that they are distressed about.

Its nothing to do with sex, is it?

Gender Dysphoria or Gender Incongruence is a self diagnosis condition, with self determined solutions. So a man feels better wearing fishnets thats the solution, isnt it? Or if he wants to have lots and lots of surgery, thats the solution for him.

But either way, thats what he wanted to do. The diagnosis legitimises the outcome he has always wanted.

The idea of protection and recognition of being different from our birth sex but not the opposite sex is very interesting, but I’m wondering if you’ve just re-invented non-binary 🤣 I know some would just say I’m a man, but that isn’t a term I can relate to. Unless you’ve experienced not feeling your birth sex that probably won’t make sense

I know it’s (mostly) not personal and I do respect where you are coming from even if I don’t like what I’m discovering about myself

Edit: posted without quoting

What do you think is the solution to gender dysphoria? I transitioned because I had gender dysphoria and was miserable for many years. I reached a point where I felt like it was either transition or be unhappy for the rest of my life. I’m happy and thriving in a way I never could before, so it was the solution for my medical problem.

1. Not if it implies some expectation to treat people of reassigned gender as the opposite sex, because this unreasonably reifies into law all sorts of unevidenced assumptions about how (so called) cis people experience their sex and that of other people that are at best reductive of the range of experiences within that sex and at worst directly damaging to the people of that sex. However, if the protection is simply to treat that person as an equal human being of their own sex regardless of how they like to present or what modifications they may have made, or even to recognise them as a equal human being of a new variation of humanity that is socially at least accepted as separated from their birth sex while being no more like the opposite sex than a person of their birth sex is, then absolutely.
2. As above. Recognition of being meaningfully different to your birth sex, sure. Recognition of being meaningful more like the opposite sex, absolutely not.
3. By correct (biological) sex terms and pronouns, by gender neutral terms or by a new terminology and neo pronouns, whichever makes most sense to you.

Do you see? The issue is not so much that you do not want to be a man, it's that in claiming to be a woman and expecting this to be accepted as a truth you are imposing a reductive idea of womanhood onto the people who actually are women, bastardising the language we need to describe our own experiences and organise for our own needs, and disconnecting us from our social and cultural past that we need to make sense of our place today.

I know you feel terribly got at, but really it is not about you and being horrid to you, it is about us and the fact that regardless of how you feel about yourself, we exist in a different way to you and there are many meaningful facets to our lives that simply do not factor in yours, and it's not ok to simply ignore all those differences because they are inconvenient for your own needs.

💯

Well said.

I’m going to assume your answer is no to whether gender reassignment should be a protected characteristic.

The characteristic was designed to protect transsexuals that plan and do physically transition in some way. There is a physical reality to it so it is a protected belief because it covers the process and not just the idea of it.

I do wonder what the rate of AGP is amongst transexuals and transvestites. I know there is no reliable data on that issue. I have read quite a bit about this issue. but i suspect it is quite high. Just based on the sexually provocative behaviour at pride for starters.

aside from asserting women's rights, what needs to be put back in the box is all the public displays of sexual behaviour that belongs in the private domain, and the crossing of boundaries with regards to child sex education, which has wandered in to a very dark place.

Totally agree.

What protections do you think anyone’s philosophical belief should have that they don’t already have I the UK?

What recognition exactly do you think your philosophical belief should have ?

If you are referring to yourself as anything that doesn’t reflect your material reality, why should society support your description? Ie. if you include any reference to female people in your description of yourself when you are not female, why do you believe society should accept that?

If you and others like you create a term that references you as being male and in no way references you are being female, great! Go for it.

However, female language is for female people.

There was a discussion on reddit regarding sexed brains and whether it would change anything if they found out they didnt have a female brain after all. The answer was no, they would still transition.

Another where they discussed other solutions, again, the answer was no they still would transition.

Transition isnt a solution to a medical problem, its something they want to do, and they found a diagnosis to legitimise it.

You know what I would like to know?

If this all encompassing hatred of yourself as a man leads you to spend money on surgeries, take hormones forever, with all the attendant medical risks, upset women, over and over, and encounter awful harassment, why the fuck do you never see transwomen setting up loud and public campaigns to find a cure??