Trying to understand everyday views on sex and gender discussions

Trans people aren't saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex rather expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females.

1. A significant proportion are "saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex" - including some of the most prominent and influential.

Loads of posters here can evidence this on request.

2. In any case, is "expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females" so straightforwardly problem-free as you (appear to) imply above?

Andrea Long Chu's describes being female as: “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”* This is in a work called Females.

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer Prize.

Females was shortlisted for a well-recognised transgender writing award.

*This is the less distressing (by a long way) of the two (in my experience) most commonly cited definitions of femaleness by Chu. Google the other. I won't type it here.

I’m trying to think more critically and actually work out what my own opinions are.

I would suggest firstly thinking about your perception of what gender means to you & how you see your own gender in order to flesh out your beliefs.

Gender refers to the spectrum of behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females that are mostly categorised as 'man' 'woman' & 'non binary'. Trans people are simply expressing a commonality with one of those categories. This is a personally subjective intuition based on value belief systems that only an individual can make.

It's important to note the difference between sex & gender. Trans people aren't saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex rather expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females.

I think transactivism unfortunately has an incredibly destructive side, where breaking up young people from their parents is an actual aim

A knowledgable poster has often pointed out that this is one of the main methods for control used by cults, and this is a cult.

I was born in the 70s to a feminist mother. I was taught that gender was an abhorrent social construct and encouraged to just be myself. I have done my best to teach my daughter the same.

I don’t care how people style themselves. I want to live in a world where people don’t look twice at someone who is gender non-conforming.

I do believe that the best way to protect marginalized populations, including trans identifying people, is accurate data collection. That means not obfuscating sex just because someone doesn’t like the reality of their birth.

Has OP not been back? Bit rude.

It will be weaponised against parents too.

This. It is all about power.

Yes. And that statement is a clear and obvious oxymoron.

Forcing people to chant an obvious untruth is making them perform an absurdity.

Its a power game.

I was recently in a small venue with a similar loo setup. I was faced with the decision about whether to follow two drunken men (men, not trans identifying men) into the toilet that I knew to have 3 cubicles, so being alone in a closed room with two drunk men vs taking my chances in the toilet with the urinals plus cubicles.......

It's a bit of a digression but demonstrates another difficulty that lack of consideration for safeguarding causes.

@PriOn1
I am so sorry. This is terrifying.

My own experience is that I realised a long time that the problems imposed by self-ID are so huge that it should never be allowed to be legally enforced. As soon as a man can legally switch to “female” you may as well open the doors of any female space where women are undressed to any male predator. They are finding this out in various countries where self-ID is already in place.

More recently, I’ve also come to see that most of the prominent men campaigning for so-called “trans rights” which generally includes self-ID are almost certainly not those previously known as transsexuals. They are those previously called transvestites, known for wearing women’s clothes, and more, for sexual kicks. The two groups, once separate, have been merged under the shortened “trans”.

I also came to believe that women and girls transitioning were likely caught up in something like a fad. Historically, that group didn’t really exist at all, outside of very rarely women who pretended to be men in order to access careers women were not allowed to do.

Gradually I also concluded that transitioning children is a terrifying experiment, where nobody has bothered to follow up the patients to properly check whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I suspect, in the vast majority of cases (perhaps all) they don’t.

As far as discussing this goes, I used to discuss it only with family. Unfortunately this backfired when my daughter got heavily involved in LGBTQ+ groups, who told her I was unspeakable and eventually convinced her she had to cut me out of her life because I was so awful.

Following that, I started talking to a lot more people, including work colleagues, as I wanted to know how many people agreed with her. So far, everyone I have talked to agrees with me on most of the above.

I think transactivism unfortunately has an incredibly destructive side, where breaking up young people from their parents is an actual aim. My daughter is not better off without me in her life. I have loved her unreservedly from birth. I certainly would not hurt any of her friends.

I hope the situation will eventually be resolved. We cannot move to a middle ground. We had it before, when transsexuals were often accepted as kind of honorary women. Everyone knew they were not women, but it was understood they had a medical condition that meant they needed acceptance. Now we are being pushed for unreasonable policies, such as legal self-ID and the ban on conversion therapy, which will be weaponised against therapists who believe it’s essential to question why their patients feel they are the wrong sex.

I hope my daughter comes back to me. Transactivism has caused an agonizing and unnecessary rift in my family. I see it as wholly destructive in its present form.

Well trans women aren't women. By definition. I don't think many people genuinely believe they are if they really think about it, regardless of what they may say.

Yep.

@Schallern I would like to know what this means to you?

I’ve been taught that anything less than fully accepting trans people as the gender they want to present as is transphobic.

I had a trans woman aquantance and maybe this is just a small thing but when this person's birthday came around I bought makeup and I felt very pleased that I'd bought a gift that showed how accepting I was. I knew this person would be pleased with the effort too and the meaning it had.

Some time after that I can remember hearing the phrase 'Trans women are women' for the first time. This was the point I started to think more carefully as I realised that if I really had believed trans women were women I'd have just bought that person booze or chocolates, like I do all my female friends. I realised I'd been fawning because I didn't believe this person was a woman. Furthermore I hadn't known until this point, hearing on the radio while sat at the lights in my car that we were supposed to view trans woman as actual women rather than just making a polite pretence.
So I had to confront that I wasn't the amazing accepting person that I thought I was, which was a bit of a bummer at first but I'm happy now to be considered 'Transphobic' if I literally can not convince myself to disbelieve the evidence of my senses.

i seem to work on a tit for tat basis

I will use a preferred pronoun ( provided I don’t get myself too confused ) in the first instance

if the person behaves respectfully- so a man using the gents or a gender neutral loo - that would be fine. If they behaved disrespectful then they would become a he

having spent many years being missexed due to working via email with colleagues round the world i think generic “they them” or “he him” pronouns work in women’s favour so I can’t get bothered

but can understand that others find that disrespectful in itself. To me that seems a little strange - hanging onto a mechanism that is used to help practise sexism . Because if they don’t realise you are female you get listened to much more respectfully and making work progress is easier. Sad but true

Regarding language, when did it become acceptable for another person to demand compliance through language to their subjective beliefs about themselves that do not have a base in material reality? When did 'kindness' become single directional and used as a tool to try to coerce compliance in acting as if an individual believes in another person's subjective reality that is not also based in material reality?

As with many of these entreaties that treating a male person as if they were female, the pleas for 'kindness and respect' only go one direction and that is centring a male person over the needs of female people.

It is not a neutral act to use a person's demanded pronouns when those pronouns do not reflect the material reality of that person's sex category. Whether that is a seemingly passive demand where a male person is accepting female language while also then accessing female single sex provisions or a coercive demand (including stopping communication).

Think of it like any other belief system.

Do you oppress your Christian or Muslim or atheist friends and colleagues? Presumably not.

Does that mean that you accept their metaphysical beliefs about themselves and the world? Also not. Everything is fine.

If a new colleague or a friend demanded that you profess adherence to their beliefs, on pain of ostracism or punishment (or if your employer suddenly expected you to), that would be unreasonable or even cultish behaviour. That’s what the trans orthodoxy we had in the last 10 years has pushed for, pretty successfully sadly.

Normal age old human behaviour. Enforcing profession of faith, shunning, fads. We recognise it for the silliness it is in history. We should be a bit braver to politely decline to be part of it in the present.

Far out! So many typos! Sorry.

My opinion as a disabled person is that I don’t want any non disabled people using the disabled toilet.

and I once went to a very woke theatre that had labelled the loos “urinals and cubicles” and “cubicles” and had had to station a member of staff outside them to answer the inevitable questions.

i did actually wonder if it would reduce the queues in the ladies (it didn’t)

when I was ten my local football club did a term of sports with us and the girls weren’t allowed to do football we had to do netball.

so given half a chance I’d have identified as a boy then and how much more pressure is there today? It’s actually worse now than when I grew up.

so I understand why people do it, but it’s a cop out.

They want to reduce the discussion to ‘toilets’ because some people can make the. moralistic judgements because they personally ‘don’t care’ and some people can being the discussion back to something they can label as ‘obsessive’ and either directly accuse or imply that some women are obsessed with ‘genitals’ or ‘checking for genitals’.

It generally shows the person who makes those accusations to have very weak arguments that are based solely on emotional reasoning and cannot even be defended logically.

It is also rather important to remind posters that just because you consent to a male person using a designated female single sex provision doesn’t mean your consent in anyway overrides other’s lack of consent. And consent is one of the important bases to consider for strong safeguarding.

Even if a provision is one that is publically accessed, in principle consent is important.

@LtRipley I was just going to say that - who mentioned the toilets ? Ah distraction

sterilisation of children , giving them treatment that means they spend every spare moment in the gym trying to avoid osteoporosis , it’s bloody terrifying and all they go on about is which loo can they use

I am with other posters in picking up the dissonance in people who declare they don’t care about whether they are sharing female single sex provisions etc with male people yet tack on value judgements such as ‘be kind’ when other people do and have valid reasons for it. It very much does also come across as ‘I’m alright Jack!’.

Just because you think what you are doing is ‘kind’ doesn’t mean that it actually is ‘kind’ in reality when viewed holistically.

It's almost as if other people want to talk about toilets all the time to deflect from the other important things (and public toilets ARE important because we are all forced to use them and there have NEVeR been enough toilets for women) that are harder to trivialise. Like mental health wards, same sex personal care, boxing, domestic violence shelters, prisons, changing rooms for NHS staff etc

an alarming preoccupation with public toilets

That is a trope.