Wanting to discuss trans people with non gender critical folks

TPA constantly refers to 'safe spaces' in TPA's posts instead of the accurate 'single sex spaces'.

If the accurate 'single sex spaces' were used, TPA's arguments would not hold up.

"People are what they say they are" sounds good but doesn't stand up to the slightest examination.

It’s not something you can reason with.

The OP literally asked for points of reason that can be critically examined.

It is glaringly obvious that you are unable to bring any.

an entire generation seems to believe that memes on tiktok and insta are more reliable sources than textbooks and reports written by experts.

Alas not only the younger generation but all generations are susceptible to this belief. Exploited and weaponised by cynical men manipulating politics.

@AnonyMumAuDHD what you said is ready interesting and something I’ve not thought about but yes can absolutely see that thanks to the prolific and successful efforts by TRAs to muddy the waters that many people are uninformed or misinformed by the pseudo scientific claims. Such that they come to believe there is no middle ground when we both hold what we understand to be fact-based truths.

To be honest though I think this is the wrong place to ask for views from people who are not gender critical. FWR is where mainly gender critical women hang out.

I think it's a great place to have this conversation. I am 100% behind protecting women's rights, 100% behind JKR. But I don't want that vehement understanding of what we stand to lose to blind me to what other people's needs are that don't match my own. I would love to hear from trans or pro-trans people who are willing to discuss the importance of respecting each other's rights and not creating battlelines.

The aim of this thread is surely for people who believe in this 'scientific consensus' to explain why they believe it over the whole of the history of human evolution?

Maybe show the OP which 'scientific consensus' you are talking about? Unfortunately you cannot include anything from WPATH after they recently admitted in a USA court they were making it all up and it was just all their 'opinions'. So anything from a different source would be fab. Thanks in advance.

I'm half-way. I believe that for the most part transmen are transmen and transwomen are transwomen. I do not for one moment think this makes them exactly the same as bio men or women, but nor do I think it is as simplistic as saying they are necessarily mentally ill and confused. That used to be said of gay men and women. I don't know how another person's identity is formed and what feels right or wrong to them, so I don't have the right to dictate who they are. (Any more than they have the right to dictate how women respond to the erosion of our recently won and very fragile rights to safety and privacy.)

What I have noticed, and need to be honest about, is that while theoretically I am very heavily on the side of women's rights, in reality I know several transmen and one transwoman and I simply can't imagine most of them as their bio sex. Even though the transwoman is very masculine in many ways, in my mind they are 'she'. A friend's daughter transitioned and at the time I was very worried for her. But now, if I pass them in the street, I see her son, I think of him by his new name, he looks like a man. I do still have some concerns that there may be a change of heart at some point, or that the daily need for drugs will cause health issues down the line but I have insufficient understanding of what it is like to be in that person's skin to say unequivocally that not undergoing treatment would be a better life for him.

In the end, the only things I feel fiercely about are

• that self-ID should not be forced upon us when there are so many cases of men abusing transrights solely to gain access to vulnerable women;
• that teens are given proper support regarding body dysmorphia, suicidal ideation, autistic social anxiety etc and not funnelled into irreversible processes before they are mentally completely well and adult
• and that transwomen cannot compete in bio women's sports. Because they are not and never will be bio women
• people being bullied, harassed, losing their jobs, being sent hate mail and threats in the name of transrights. This level of state-condoned coercive behaviour skates too close to that of oppressive regimes.

Those things aside, honestly, I don't care if legitimate transwomen use the same public loo as me, and I am happy to respect what name and pronouns people go by, don't give a damn what clothes other people wear and think it is important to live and let live, which is a right that comes with the responsibility not to foster hatred or retaliation where none is needed.

The Hive mind speaketh. 😂

This is where your trans friend and I part company I'm afraid. Part of puberty for me was figuring out that I was developing as a woman physically and that I'd have to find a way to deal with the physical, social and psychological consequences of that change. Good and bad, convenient and inconvenient, conmfortable and uncomfortable, fitting my current internal sense or not. I knew what sex I was by looking in the mirror, and there were (and are) aspects of being female (social, physical and psychological) that I liked and aspects I didn't. The challenges of developing as a man would be different but not better. And claiming to be "a man in a woman's body" or "nonbinary" wasn't going to get me anywhere, at best it would replace one set of problems with a different set.

Years later I actually did the thought experiment of "what if I woke up in a man's body tomorrow" myself. I reckon my first thought would not be "oh no, I am in the wrong body, how do I get back to a woman's body?" It would be "ooh weird, so how do I live with this body and operate in this world as a man? What are the good bits and the bad bits? How can I adjust?" I adapted to being a woman over time and I'm pretty sure I could do the same if I woke up as a man.

And most of us have other fish to fry than obsessing about what gender we aren't. It's a bit like when Dr Who rematerialised as a woman she didn't waste time worrying about what sex she was she just got on with saving the universe same as always in her new body.

And what about the realities? Did your trans friend specify whether I would only change sex or whether I would grow a few inches when I transformed to male? I am a rather short woman, would my imaginary male body be the same height and I'd have to live as a very undersized man or would it give me a few inches so I'd just be a slightly shorter-than-average man? Those are two very different life propositions. Men who transition all keep their height and many of their other physical advantages; they can pick and choose among other phsyical characteristics. They might keep their deep voice like RMW.

To be honest though I think this is the wrong place to ask for views from people who are not gender critical. FWR is where mainly gender critical women hang out.

What do you think the 'scientific consensus on gender identity' says?
How many gender identities are there?
The same number as there are humans? Because if it's to do with how an individual feels and wishes to be perceived, that is presumably individualised.
Or are there two? Because a trans identified male would say that they.have a female gender, and vice versa for transmen. So they are transitioning from the gender they believe is culturally linked to their sex, to the 'other' one of the two.
Or are there three genders? Male and female for trans people who wish to trans from their sex-related gender to the cultural gender of the opposite sex. And a third, non-binary (ie neither female or male) gender for non-binary people.
Or are there no 'genders' because gender is a cultural phenomenon which changes over time and geography (unlike sex), and is therefore better termed 'personality'?
Or are there whatever number of genders are currently in vogue, eg taking a few of Transparently's words, cis, pan, trans; maybe add to that 'non-binary'; then I think we'd have to have 'agender' for people who don't think they have one at all. So,say, 5 genders?
What is the current consensus?

You are correct in thinking we won't change our minds. But will you allow that, in a secular pluralist society, we should be entitled to continue to practise our protected beliefs without being punished, attacked, or silenced? Such practice includes:

Expression of the beliefs and arguing for them.

Lobbying for access to information about birth sex (but only to the extent practically required).

Setting up single-sex services, associations etc (note that this does not in principle preclude so-called trans-inclusive equivalents for those that believe in transgenderism).

Lobbying against irreversible medical treatments of people too young to understand the consequences.

Or do you think the above activities should all be banned?

@Mouldemortthe phrase 'i must not tell lies' springs to mind for some reason.

I mean, this is copied homework, word for word.

But ok, yep, the basic fact of two groups with wholly incompatible beliefs where compromise or reconcilliation or changing those beliefs is impossible, is probably about right.

So the answer is obviously: parallel facilities so that each group can have their own needs and access met without interfering with the other one. Yep? Right. That's the law.

Let women have single sex spaces and resources, let gay people have single sex resources and spaces, add gender neutral ones for people with gender identities and everyone can leave everyone else alone and crack on in peace. We got there in the end.

Yay for the SCJ eh?

😂

Oh goody

" why of all the bits of a person it is 'gender identity' that gets the privilege of being occasionally present in the 'wrong body', and then the body needs fixing and the disconnect needs affirming rather than looking at why they feel that way."

Please provide evidence for the 'scientific consensus'

You’ve come to the wrong place. Being gender critical is a protected belief which means it’s not dependent on evidence. Gender critical people have a pseudo-religious opposition to the scientific consensus on gender identity. It’s not something you can reason with.

WTF?!?!

if i woke up tomorrow and had a male body I sure as hell would not be putting on a bra, because i wear a bra for functional, not fetish reasons. I wear clothes that suit my body shape, not because they suit my brain, not because they are feminine or masculine.

I would not be entering female spaces because i know that it’s distressing for females to have males in places where they are vulnerable and undressing.

🤣 I know right 🤣. I don't know whether to be massively offended or just laugh at the unfeasible misogyny! To be fair, I have sometimes wondered over the course of my high-powered ('male'?!) career where I've always been the main breadwinner, whether I would like to spend more time on make-up and nails and stuff. But maybe the fact that I don't means that I'm really a bloke?!

If anyone non gender critical does rock up again, I'd like to know why of all the bits of a person it is 'gender identity' that gets the privilege of being occasionally present in the 'wrong body', and then the body needs fixing and the disconnect needs affirming rather than looking at why they feel that way.

There are many ways that people, particularly when they are younger feel a disconnect between who they appear to be to others and who they feel themselves to be. Not just thinking they're Napoleon. It's not unheard of, for example, for people to be absolutely convinced that they do not belong in their family. That despite what the biology tells them, they are not actually related to the people around them. We generally look at why that is, rather than helping them search for their 'real family'.

A PP described it as someone really really wanting to be the opposite sex, and trying to do something about it. (They alter themselves and they try to alter society to redefine the sex binary.)

Something must cause this desire in the first place, so I do believe it's a genuine psychological phenomenon: we don't have to probe any further to decide how to respond to it.

In addition, some non-trans people have adopted the belief that everyone has a gender identity which is indicative of their true sex: if it is incongruent with their birth sex, they should be treated legally and socially as if they are of the opposite sex to their birth sex.

Taken together, this forms a more-or-less coherent (but unfalsifiable) metaphysical belief which is shared by maybe 20% of British people. It differs from other such beliefs in requiring both believers and non-believers to act as if current local physical reality is other than it really is.

This is onerous for non-believers, for all the reasons set out elsewhere on this board.

More importantly, it's a human rights breach for believers to force non-believers to practise their belief.

(Examples include: punishment for expressing non-belief, refusing to allow birth sex to be recorded or acknowledged even when it's a practical necessity, forcing women to vie with men and make themselves vulnerable to them, etc.)

We cannot hope to persuade believers that their beliefs are wrong, nor should we force them to live as if they were. But they should extend the same courtesy to us.

In short, it is not disrespectful to tell trans people that we do not share their belief system, and don't wish to practise it.

Every transwoman is as genuine as the next.

I think one reason people may think trans women belong in female single sex spaces is that trans women also face risk of harm by other men. The problem is men, and that certain groups of people need protection from men. That includes women (who need single sex spaces) and trans women (men who need third spaces separate from women and other men).

So in that regard, trans women and women have something in common.

But I don't think you can ever square the circle and somehow genuinely believe that, just by saying so, you are magically the other sex. And the very fact that a trans woman would try to insert himself into a single sex female space is ample proof that they don't really understand what being a woman is.

I have more of a moustache and beard situation going on than my TW pals! 😂

Lol your experience is similar to mine . I mainly knock around in jeans, usually the ones I wore yesterday unless they are dirty, plus fresh undies and first top/sweater that comes to hand. Undies are all the same, matching for ease, in neutral beige or white. No thought required. I wash/shower if there is time, do teeth and rush downstairs to let the dogs pee and feed them. Until recently I might have knocked on kids doors to wake them.

beyond that my morning coffee and meds regime is all i care about.i might pop some spf foundation and mascara on if popping out but most days dont bother. I don't even dry or style my hair - it’s long and curly and best left to its own devices. It’s very usual to end up with readybrek, pasta sauce or mud on my clothes. I am too busy to care or to change until bedtime unless I have to go out.

But I am still a woman. A mother. I don’t wander the universe ‘feeling’ like a woman - unless knackered and stressed after decades of caring for AuDHD DC, carrying the mental and physical load for running their lives and our home counts? The stuff that means that even if I wanted to piss about putting together feminine outfits and revelling in makeup or mastering the dyson hair-wrap I was bought a couple of years ago, I really don’t have the time or energy. But I never see that included in a TW’s definition of their sense of being a woman. Funny that.