Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

Sorry but you are holding forth how we are all wrong so I would like to know what basis there is for you to speak for people with transgender identities?

I'm here to discuss the substantive issues from a considered and informed perspective, because people purport to want to discuss them and ask questions. You can take that or leave it.

My arguments can be challenged on their merits.

I'm not here to justify myself personally to you or anyone else, nor am I going to do so.

Apologies if this has been said upthread (too much to read before work!) but I find it curious that this thread has appeared at exactly the time people are questioning the actions of MN in 'bumping' threads due to lack of traffic.

Sadly, in our current world, nothing is so likely to get engagement as a 'trans' thread, whichever side of the argument one sits. How convenient that this appears now.

This may, of course, get me banned, but it's so quiet around here these days I'm not sure that it would be much of a loss.....

Where does your expertise come from that you can speak for people with transgender identities?

You are here speaking on behalf of trans people.

You have claimed in a post to be willing to continue to effectively educate others on this topic.

Where does your expertise come from that you can speak for people with transgender identities?

Or mine about how to deal with the harm this child faces when everyone has to admit he’s not really a girl…..

Things that trans activists have been demanding requesting:

• redefinition of the meanings of woman and female
• redefinition of the standard use of pronouns
• removal of single sex spaces
• use of phrase 'assigned at birth'
• making other people lie in court (eg referring to an accused rapist as she)
• making medical posters unclear through not using terms such as girl / woman
• unfairness in sport, removing ability of women to have fair competition
• removal of right to be treated by someone of same sex (or at least to know when it's not happening) - See Dr Upton
• ...

Of course. This conversation isn't about me

. I think one thing these conversations have taught me is just how difficult some people find it to move beyond the assumption that recognising someone’s gender or trans experience amounts to telling a lie. And so much else follows from that.

But being trans isn’t a lie. Recognising someone’s experience doesn’t require denying biological reality, or pretending that their anatomy is something it isn’t.

The difficulty is that I don’t think any amount of explanation is going to resonate with someone who has already decided, as an absolute starting principle, that being trans is inherently dishonest.

if that’s the premise from which every argument begins, there’s very little room to consider whether the premise itself might be mistaken

@Lacksie Is there a reason why you ignored this question from @Helleofabore upthread? An answer would be appreciated. No need to go to town. Just a few sentences will do.

Where does your expertise come from that you can speak for people with transgender identities?

Where does your expertise come from that you can speak for people with transgender identities?

Prioritising self identity is also part of individualism. It is prioritising individualism above collectivism.

I totally recognise trans people and respect their right to call themselves what they wish, wear what they like and be free from discrimination and harassment. Someone who wants to present as the opposite sex is ok to do so, as long as they do not coerce, demand or bully others into agreeing they are in fact the opposite sex and should be treated as such.
if a man wants to dress in “female-coded” clothing abd call himself Janet, fine. He can do so whilst expanding the bandwidth of what it is to be a man, and using male spaces.

I think that some posters also use a different definition of coherent to everyone else.

But hey, it sounds good to confidently say something is coherent when it is the opposite. When someone uses their own definitions they can say things and mean it while everyone else is believing the person has said something entirely different.

You demand that I accept someone else’s interpretation of what pronouns mean, but do not accept my interpretation of what pronouns mean. You place a person’s self identity on the highest moral ground. Prioritising self identity over everything else is not moral: it is prioritising selfishness. It is, as a PP pointed out, nothing more than Be Kind. And it is not kind. Not to yourself, not to others, and not to the person who is being lied about and lied to.

When you demand that the world is run according to a belief system that allows no dissent and no alternative belief or practice, you end up with theocracy. Transgenderism is a deity-free theocracy.

You can recognise a person’s self identity without submitting to it.

We can recognise, respect and understand what being trans is, without " the whole world changing".

Society didn't collapse when we decided to accept some people are gay and accommodate that reality in our social institutions,

So it will be with recognising and accepting trans people, I assure you,

^For example, in the well-known rubber hand illusion, people can be induced to experience a rubber hand as belonging to their own body, despite knowing perfectly well that it isn’t. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92870^
Their conscious experience of bodily ownership differs from their knowledge of physical reality. Both exist simultaneously.
Of course this isn’t perfectly analogous to sex and gender, but the underlying principle translates. A person knowing they have a penis and yet experiencing themselves as female is no less possible or inherently more strange than someone knowing a hand is made of rubber and yet experiencing it as their very own limb.
The human brain is a remarkably diverse thing .

Though even if that were the case, none of that explains why the whole world has to change to support that person's illusion / experience.

Why can’t you see that? Norms, behaviours and social roles associated with sex are all examples of the recognition and meaning we give to sexual differences. That’s exactly what they are! One definition is providing examples of the very phenomenon I’m describing.

You say that recognising sex means understanding that people are male and female and that their bodies differ. That’s entirely correct. But that understanding is itself a cognitive representation of physical reality, produced through the brain and shaped by psychology, culture and society. It isn’t the physical fact itself, but our representation of that fact.

We inevitably perceive, categorise and interpret what we encounter. Sexual differences are real, but our recognition and understanding of them are cognitive processes. The meaning and interpretation we give to those differences — that is gender - which gives rise to the specific norms , stereotypes , social roles and behaviours associated with sex. We can change how we interpret and given meaning sex (eg challenge the idea that girls like pink), what we can't do is strip sex of all social meaning altogether (that is utopian).

So can you explain why “gender” which you are now saying is an internal sense of self, should trump sex when it comes to accessing single sex spaces, or why it should be considered if any importance at all apart from to an individual? Why should someone’s “feelings” of what sex they are be considered of more importance than their actual physical sex?

if everyone affirms this child as a girl, won’t it cause him serious psychological harm in a couple of years when he has to be told he must change with the boys and play on boys teams? Won’t he lost all trust in the adults who have lied to him? How do,you think that should be handled?

sex- based stereotypes - girls like pretty dresses, boys are naughty (these are things my young girls have been known to pipe up with 😩) - are one manifestation of gender. But gender isn't reducible to any particular set of ideas or stereotypes. Gender is the social/ psychological meaning that is produced when we recognise / perceive/ identify sexual differences . It can take any number of forms - and does so variably across cultures - what you can't do is eliminate any meaning (gender) altogether.

Being gender incongruent has nothing to do with embracing or rejecting any given set of social conventions- or stereotypes associated with sex. A trans woman may have very typically masculine interests - it doesn't stop her from perceiving herself to be female.

At an individual , psychological, level, gender incongruence occurs when a person's own recognition/ awareness of self contradicts what would be typical for their sexed/
Reproductive anatomy.
That doesn't mean that they are deluded about their anatomy- they know what body parts they have- only despite those parts they persistently and consistently recognise self as being the other sex.

People insist that this is impossible, or that it must be ideologically driven , a "belief system" they have adopted, a projection of sexist stereotypes , or a form of "delusion", but those assumptions express a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain / basic cognition works. It's entirely possible because perception/ recognition is an active process generated in the brain- it's not something that is passively determined by a person's body.

Our experience and recognition of ourselves are generated through neural processes in the brain. The brain actively constructs and maintains internal representations of our bodies and "self"; it doesn’t simply register our physical anatomy and produce an inevitable, corresponding psychological experience.

We know from cognitive neuroscience that a person’s subjective experience of their body can differ from its actual physical characteristics, even when they understand those characteristics perfectly well.

For example, in the well-known rubber hand illusion, people can be induced to experience a rubber hand as belonging to their own body, despite knowing perfectly well that it isn’t. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92870
Their conscious experience of bodily ownership differs from their knowledge of physical reality. Both exist simultaneously.

Of course this isn’t perfectly analogous to sex and gender, but the underlying principle translates. A person knowing they have a penis and yet experiencing themselves as female is no less possible or inherently more strange than someone knowing a hand is made of rubber and yet experiencing it as their very own limb.

The human brain is a remarkably diverse thing .

It is the trans community who are claiming someone’s “gender identity”is the most important characteristic in a person, and must be respected to the detriment of all else. Maybe have a word with them.

Meanwhile we try to continue our relationship with our child, and we discover that he is on a very well-trodden path, with poorly thought through arguments, many of which read like scripts, and that there are undoubtedly people who are trying to separate him from his family (in our case, I could name one person, and there are probably others in real life, and many voices online whispering that we don't love him and that disagreement is hatred. And he gradually starts to make demands, and if you don't accede, or he perceives that you are not enthusiastic enough, he starts to distance himself.

This seems very similar to someone who has joined a cult.

Maybe your son isn't so good at articulating his feelings and experience, but there is a huge amount of perfectly coherent and detailed info out there .

There really isn't. I have yet to see a coherent and rational explanation of what "being trans" actually is.

for what it's worth (im sure very little) I would be happy to keep talking through the substantive issues with you - what it is to be trans, what is gender, etc. As a non gender critical, but informed voice.

OK then. What is it to "be trans"? Perhaps you can be the first to explain what it actually is. I hope you can do better than your "explanations" on this thread of what you think gender is.

But when someone takes the time to explain it carefully and coherently, the response is simply, “That’s just your own made-up definition”, or “No, it isn’t.”

Is the single sentence "Gender is the knowledge, recognition and meaning that we give to sexual differences" a "careful and coherent explanation" in your mind?

You said earlier that you believe this is "expressing the same idea" as the WHO definition: "Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy".

I can't see how gender being the socially constructed behaviours and roles of different categories of people as a group can be the same as the "knowledge, recognition and meaning that we give to sexual differences". These are two different things.

The knowledge and recognition that we give to sexual differences would be the understanding that humans are either male or female and the bodies of males are different in a fundamental way from those of females.

Your "explanation" of how this is the same as the WHO definition appeared to consist of saying "I say they're the same therefore they are". This isn't an explanation in the normal meaning of the word, but as I've already observed, you seem to be using words in a non-standard way, with meanings that are not the usual meanings of those words.

rapid your posts are very well expressed. You haven’t sympathy. I agree with you. There are a v small minority of people IMHO who do feel this way and we should support them but there are dark forces trying to move confused autistic children this way too, for reasons I suspect aren’t good.

We are in Scotland and the teaching around this stuff is wild. However trying to do don’t the system is impossible. Most of the teachers hate it too but have no choice

I have said to my kids - I paraphrase. that some people want to change their gender and we should be really kind and just let them go along with it. We know they can’t change it but it’s easier to let them think it for now.

all v unhealthy but one of my kids had similar and the messaging was very strange around it all