Continuation of Polypostwonder thread

You could say I have a healthy dose of scepticism, but he has literally lied! It's not just my perception of his words, he's completely backtracked and contradicted himself.

Add to that the heavy misrepresentation and the using words in ways contrary to normal usage in order to bolster his point.

I don't see how that adds up to truthful? But apparently you do, and don't want to discuss anything else I said in my post.

Like I said, that's your perogative.

"Female identified trans people" for TiMs🙄They're men!

Did you look at the TERF is a slur website btw? Still think "women are beoming as verbally aggressive" as TRAs?

So you basically believe everything this guy says aye? I mean, are you reading the same thread as everyone else? I guess that's your prerogative but I very much don't agree.

Did you read @Helleofabore's posts on testosterone differences in male and female children? Did you read the bit about male children having physical advantages before puberty? Even if he is short and slight, he still has physical advantages over women because he was born male.

Did you also miss the bit where he admitted that he actually did go through puberty? He's now saying he was given oestrogen "mid-way" through puberty. So he didn't have puberty blocked at all.

He's in his 40's and has been taking hormones since he was "mid-way" through puberty. That's not 40 years of hormones.

It doesn't matter anyway because...
No amount of years on hormones makes you female!
He's not female, he doesn't belong in female spaces.

When he started his hormones etc, yes I agree there wasn't the same social contagion side of things, however you go on to say
"It was not externally promoted and reinforced for him to behave as a woman"

You don't know that! He says his family was very supportive, but we don't know what his life was actually like, or what the family dynamic was, or anything else. What we do know is that he was a little boy who is gay during the 80's or 90's, so it's very likely that he had to deal with general homophobia, at least.

"I don't think he is anything much like the majority of the female identified trans people who we are battling to keep out of female spaces."

Trans identified males is the normal way of saying that. It's far less confusing and states clearly the actual sex of the person, which is very important at times, especially when women are trying to keep trans identified males from colonising everything set aside for female people.

The bottom line is that this guy is not a woman. He is male, not female. He does not belong in female spaces. He knows that, just as he knows he'd be breaking the law and causing problems for a lot of women.

He intends to do it anyway, and he doesn't give two shits how actual women feel about that, remember?

ah but poly is different you see because reasons.

I agree and, for me, it's why passing can never be a factor in whether a person can use female spaces. I mentioned in the last thread that I might not be able to tell if PPW was male, so it might not bother me if he used the same loo I did. It might not trigger my PTSD. (Things that I don't consciously realise can trigger my PTSD, so even if I didn't clock them consciously, it might still trigger it. That is another factor to consider.) But that doesn't mean other women or girls won't spot it. There's no way for anyone to know that.

PPW cannot possibly know if he passes with everyone he knows now and certainly can't know that he will pass with everyone in the future. No one can know that.

It's even sillier to think that it could be the basis for a legal or moral exception.

I think PPW is in a difficult spot, and I do feel for him. But that in no way justifies or excuses him using women's single sex spaces or services.

I remember we had another poster who told us they had that condition. And then he transitioned as a teenager after not having gone through male puberty.

He has become active as an activist and identified. He still can be correctly identified as a male person despite telling us he has never been questioned and had been fully accepted by everyone as female.

I am sure there are some female people who cannot correctly identify the sex category of a male person. However, I don’t believe that a female person will never correctly identify that male person’s sex category. I think it is highly doubtable that these male people ‘pass’ despite telling us confidently that they do.

I have seen too many claims where there has been slow puberty, complete puberty blocking and still that person is identifiable in unfiltered photos as being male. By all means, if you believe a male person’s claim that is your choice. But it would be a mistake to assume that they are not being correctly identified as male even with slow puberty, completely blocked puberty etc etc.

A long long time ago, hypo-gonadism and delayed puberty were mentioned by the person in question. For which the normal treatment in a male person (testicles, penis etc, no womb or ovaries) would presumably be exogenous male hormones if required.

Assuming this part is true, it has then been slyly conflated with taking female hormones as a medical necessity because of hypo-gonadiam, and magically becoming female as a result (and er hem, “going through female puberty” ha bloody ha).

A lot of obfuscation and sleight of hand and wide-eyed “I couldn’t help it, it all just happened to me, and I can’t help it if everyone thinks I’m female” etc.

edited to add: sorry slow typing hence cross posting

Thank you.

that may have been a consequence of an eating issue he has told us about.

It doesn’t mean he had NO testosterone production and usage as testosterone. And again, genetics does play a part in development as can be seen by the images of the male people in the media who had their puberties blocked and yet are still able to be correctly identified as being male sex.

Well, given that puberty blockers are now banned in the UK, these magical "passing" TIM will simply not exist anymore going forward a few years.
So sorry to use the verboten "exist" but in this case, it's actually true.

Any TIM currently under the age of 18 will not have access to puberty blockers (legally) and will therefore experience full male puberty and develop all of the physical characteristics of an adult man.

So there really won't be any more "no one can tell" or " society has assigned me as a woman" assertions.
Toddlers are able to distinguish between the sexes with remarkable accuracy. The rest of us, even more so.

So, the law is - no men in female spaces.
And it will be glaringly obvious who is a man and who is a woman, even with all the surgery and jiggery pokery in the world*
Because they will be fully developed MEN.

• We can already tell, but that's currently just a "belief." Obviously.

Certainly even if true, we are talking circumstances that apply to less than 1% of the less than 1% of people who identify as trans, yet the unique or very close unique circumstances of this nichest of the niche cases are being presented as having not just equal but more authority about what is relevant to being a "woman" than the circumstances shared by about 50% of humans.

This, for me. If there's any "dishonesty" that bothers me, it's a certain intellectual dishonesty. We can't know PPW's circumstances, but we do see their words, and these just don't hold up. There's intelligence, and emotional resilience, and such a gritty determination to engage as a minority voice, which I admire... but so much of that is being pressed into serving clever evasion of the issue at hand.

I know even this isn't quite that simple: the focus of PPW's posts is, of course, the exact issue at hand for them - this is hugely personal. And in a debate, you draw on the tools that best serve you. I think these serve them emotionally - a kind of drawing their own experiences in around them as a protective, unquestionable cloak. But the thing is, we have our own emotional worlds, too. Our relationships and suffering and trauma, that justify our arguments. Taztoy's so brave in sharing some of hers, and the list someone posted a few pages ago was devastatingly powerful and true. And yet we don't rely on these to the same degree - we acknowledge that this is a bigger issue than the self.

And given that, and also knowing there are other trans people who recognise the same (eg. that interview with Blair White someone posted recently - fascinating) - that there's this whole world outside PPW's posts that they won't really engage with, emotionally or intellectually - it becomes frustrating, and also, as I say a few posts ago, actually somewhat disturbing as the pages roll on.

It's what Helle says, about how theories can collapse when they rub up against real life. There's this kind of intransigent insularity that parallels the thinking of the ideology. I genuinely think that threads like this could help me to understand and empathise and reach out, and it feels ironic that they do, instead, almost invariably tend to leave me even more concerned: for the individual posting, for society, and for women*.

*by which I mean adult human females regardless of their respective self-identification - I mean, that anyone could suggest in earnest that it's acceptable for me to have to type all that in order simply to make my meaning clear in a debating a human rights issue will never cease to disturb me.

ETA If we take PPW's posts at face value, and I do try to - the whole board's built on the premise that people are posting as themselves - I do think their situation's really, really difficult, and I'd have taken the same perspective as many women still do on this only a short while ago. I honestly wish it hadn't come to this awful conflict, and there was scope for us to focus on the tiny minority of trans people in this position, who need society's care and attention - and who I can actually see as being deserving of the graceful concession of "woman" and "she" in quite a wide range of contexts. But this war wasn't of our making: in having conceded that much in the past, we now stand to lose everything, and PPW's emphatic denial of our very real and evidenced fear of this (even as their experiences are paramount in their own posts) really doesn't help to make the case that we can afford to renegotiate some kind of gentle compromise, even if some of us may, in some respects, actully want to.

I do think this is one of those "OK I happen to be lying, but [I believe] this scenario could happen somewhere, and therefore my lie is just as valid as the truth when it comes to the ethics and logistics of this."

Speaking generally now, the problems with this approach are:

1. Unless the person is real or honestly describing a real person they know, It's just a belief that this set of very unlikely circumstances could in reality ever all hit the same person.
2. Once lying is ethicalised as a valid approach, it's not just the lie that comes in at the start, it's that there's no reason not to fine tune the lie as it goes. The lie evolves and mutates in response to the opposing arguments. So even the position the liar came into the argument telling their lie to defend may not be the one they are arguing for by the end.

So going back to PPW, there probably is some truth here. It could even be mostly true. But the "well actually...." extra details that keep being mentioned for the first time just when they have the most effect on an opposing argument are too convenient for this to be 100% true.

Certainly even if true, we are talking circumstances that apply to less than 1% of the less than 1% of people who identify as trans, yet the unique or very close unique circumstances of this nichest of the niche cases are being presented as having not just equal but more authority about what is relevant to being a "woman" than the circumstances shared by about 50% of humans.

There's a lot of tossed salad and scrambled eggs thrown around to hide it, but once you see that is what's really being said you can't unsee it.

Once a person has not been truthful about something significant and something that is able to be judged as being materially untrue, why would anyone believe anything else that the person says that cannot be verified?

Where has he said he has a medical condition that prevented even his body producing normal male quantities of testosterone as a child?

What prevented him going through any stage (even tanner stage 2) of male development where male testosterone levels are different to female levels?

What prevented him from going through puberty? He also would have been producing male levels of testosterone throughout puberty. Even if some of that was not used in puberty, some of it would have been despite the assurances to the contrary. Because we also know from studies and papers that these hormones are not 100% effective in their roles in the body, meaning that even if estrogen was impacting testosterone, there is absolutely no guarantee that testosterone was prevented from making changes to the body with 100% results.

Also Even puberty blocked males that are appearing in media are able to be correctly identified as being in the male sex category even though many people believe that they are indistinguishable to female people.

I think that you are being extremely gullible to accept this self confessed liar's account of their life & circumstances. This is just a guy who indulges in a lot of wishful thinking. His story changes too. We don't hear about the alleged kids any more it's all just "Me, me, me...". I don't believe any of it other than the fact that he is a man.

This.

he lies. Objectively, he lies. So therefore I don’t believe him when he says he passes.

and, objectively, it doesn’t matter if he passes or not. The law doesn’t say “no men except those who think they pass”.

Why? Genuinely, what is it that you think is very unusual about him? I'm not trying to be an arse with the underlining FWIW, I'm just using your highlighting of the word.

What is it about him that you don't think is representative of other trans identified male TRAs?

Remembering that we only have his word that he passes and that everyone in his life actually believes he is a woman - and we also have seen that he's more than happy to outright lie about or misrepresent so many things.

I don't think he's at all unusual in TRA circles, or much different than the usual male TRA posters that we get here so frequently.

I think he's demonstrating a lot of TRA tactics, arguments, beliefs and perspective. Playing the usual word games, taking no responsibility or ownership of themselves or their actions and how that might effect others, general misogyny, disregard for reality, science, truth etc etc etc.

Edited to make it clear I was talking about gender ideology trans activists, not just trans identified men, because I know there are trans identified men who are completely lovely, reasonable people who don't gaslight women, acknowledge they can't change sex, don't appropriate our words, and aren't trying to demolish female rights either on purpose or as collateral damage to their own selfish desires.

I think that the posts show women how these subjective realities are built. How a portion of society has provide the structure for these realities to be given any semblance that some people then believe should be validated.

It is a great example of how philosophical theories work and just how much they lack integrity when they are evaluated against material reality.

I agree with everything you say, but to be fair to PPW I don't believe he is defining his womanhood solely as a feeling, but rather through his experiences.

I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt here. I do believe that, throughout his life since a teenager, other people have treated him as female; whether that's because he passes and they don't know, whether that's because they genuinely believe you can transition, whether that's because they're being kind, or whether that's because they just don't care or it's easier to put a feminine looking man in the "woman" box in their heads is another question.

At least, this is what I understand when he says "the world allocates woman to me" (paraphrasing).

I can sympathise and understand the difficulty with the opposite suddenly happening. As with all things, it's difficult when your lived experience suddenly changes overnight. I don't think he is coming at this from a malicious standpoint, and I find his posts interesting to read to get a perspective from the other side of the fence even if I totally disagree with them.