To be baffled by and disappointed with the amount of transphobia on MN?

[ShutTheFuckUpBarbara]

I know I'll get flamed for voicing my opinion on this, but I don't care.

I just don't understand why there is so much hatred for trans people on here.

Yes, some trans activists are extremists and no I don't agree with them, but should all other trans people suffer because of them?

I get that there are issues that need to be addressed, as highlighted by recent items in the news and recent threads (which prison should trans people be sent to, can a MTW be a girl guide leader and various others). I don't have a solution for these, but I feel that as a society we should work together to make it work, rather than just spout hatred and insults.

It is especially disappointing as there are a lot of people in the trans community suffering mental health issues, often as the result of how they are being treated, and MN is usually a safe haven for people with MH issues.

I used to enjoy reading the Feminism chat (or most of it anyway), now almost every thread on there is transphobic

Most of us here are women, a lot of us are from ethnic minorities, or have a disability, a lot of us have been discriminated against, we know what it feels like so why do it to others??

Tumble

TRA's are the trans phobic ones. Not to mention homophobic and misogynist to boot.

Why is that? Do you have any ideas as to why people like you, Miranda and Helen feel as you do, and the transactivists who are campaigning so loudly don't?

Tumble, thank you for posting. I'm sorry you have faced so many difficulties.

The sad thing is is that right now we feel unable to actually campaign for our own safe spaces because we are scared of being labelled bigots, being accused of 'committing literal violence' against trans gendered people' (so committing violence against ourselves basically - htf does that even make sense!?) and being labelled trans phobic.

Ah - but they do not actually consider you to be one of the trans gendered people they allegedly wish to protect, do they?

Same as feminists are called "transmisogynists" for fighting for their own - women's - rights.

The TRAs pretend that there is no difference between transwomen and women, but they actually do see and make a difference.

Allegedly, transwomen are women, but they are always a bit more worthy and important than the lowly "ciswomen".

And I'd bet that the transwomen who are perfectly fine with their "female penises", rank higher in the invisible, inofficial hierarchy than those who are actually dysphoric.

Why is that? Do you have any ideas as to why people like you, Miranda and Helen feel as you do, and the transactivists who are campaigning so loudly don't?

True 'feminine' empathy ... ;)

Really sorry to hear of the shit you have experienced Tumble.

This is something that I don't really understand. If gender dysphoria has driven transgenderism, why have transactivists not been campaigning in a vast numbers to find out a cause and therefore a treatment?

Why do they vehemently disagree with doctors and shut down medical conferences?

Datun I'm sure I've said before on these threads that, in my opinion, the transactivists only want power. If they weren't getting somewhere with this they would go and join fathers for justice or some similar platform that gets them attention and notoriety.

Their only interests are getting recognition for themselves. They don't give a shit about anyone else. Least if all the people they claim they are campaigning for.

I've been off doing a bit of research. This is an old article but I think it succinctly summarises some arguments about 'intersex' as an biological issue.

Many intersex people have an “intersex identity” and their anatomy feels appropriate to them. I know of intersex persons who would gladly identify as “intersex” if the culture permitted. (Of course, intersex persons should be able to decide what surgery, if any, they require. Only they can know that - because only they can know their sexual identity, their unique sensibility which is something else again and is an issue some intersex people share with transsexual persons

drdrantz-sciencesexuality.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/intersex-people-disordered-or-different.html

There seems to be a body of scientific evidence suggesting the idea of two clear cut sexes is not that clear cut.

I know intersex is not trans. I am addressing the argument that relates to their being only men and women. I have more research to do. Don't all shout at once

Gender dysphoria is a very real and painful thing to have to live with. That's why I think the whole gender identity thing is a load of bollocks. There is a huge difference between someone who has gender dysphoria and someone who just fancies being the opposite gender just for the sake of it.

I totally agree with you.

Trans has allowed all this, by confusing the gullible, lazy and - though I dislike the term - virtue-signallers.

The Trans trend has enabled the previously (fairly) covert misogyny of the Left/liberals while also providing a rallying point for all the men who openly objected to women's rights in the first place.

YY.

Like a couple of earlier posters, I used to wonder why some of the posters I particularly respected, along with the redoubtable Germaine Greer, seemed to have a real down on transwomen. I used to work in a large, diversity-friendly organisation and met no fewer than three transwomen (that I know of) of the "traditional" type - people who wanted to live as a woman in a female body and took whatever steps were available to get as near to that result as possible. People like Tumble and the (now departed?) EgoSum. I can't imagine any of them being a threat to anyone and I really wouldn't have had an issue coming across any of them in the loos. For one thing if they did have anything I wouldn't have wanted to see, they wouldn't have wanted me to see it either! It would be unkind and unnecessary to remind such people that they were not "real" women; why would you do that, why would you even think it? I seem to remember putting that side of it in quite a heated argument on the FWR board one time.

Then, of course, the agenda ramped up and I began to see what the critics were talking about. I think my "peak trans" moment was reached with the aforementioned Danielle, bearded, balding, besuited, the works. Oh come on, I thought, he's not even pretending to try. And then that one whose name escapes me who became chair of an LGBT group and got real live LGBs banned from it. That one actually said they didn't even like women and didn't want female pronouns used for themself . Lastly, dear little Riley Wossname who several commentators have queued up to abuse (rightly IMO!)for claiming to be a lesbian and whining that women won't sleep with, er, her just because s/he's got one of those things that lesbians specifically do not want inside them. This is not transsexuality as carried out by people who want to change their sex. What they want is to change sex itself around them. It's kind of like travelling to New York by staying in the same place and expecting the world to turn under you, except for some weird reason it's working.

So now I'm a TERF convert. Burn me.

I believe trans women need to fight for our own safe spaces and I will happily help with that however unfortunately thanks to some loud trans activists I am reluctant to even try because I fear being shouted down by them and labelled a trans phobe and a bigot which I have been labelled with before simply for disagreeing with some loud TRA's. Yes you did read that write; I am a trans woman and have been shot down and labelled a trans phobe just for speaking out against this madness.

I don't find this surprising at all.

Tumble, thank you for your honest and measured posts.

Sadly, reading what you're up against - from the self-appointed mouthpieces who claim to know better than you, and better than us, what being trans or being a woman is - in order to access the support you want, need and deserve to be able to live in peace with yourself just makes me even more certain that the whole world is going fucking mad.

There seems to be a body of scientific evidence suggesting the idea of two clear cut sexes is not that clear cut.

No there isn't. The only people who think this are (a) wishful thinkers who don't understand biology and (b) a handful of scientists/doctors who smell money to be made.

annie

Well exactly. Tumble may correct me here, but as far as I can see you have transwomen who are attracted to men and couldn't care less about women's spaces or appropriating the term woman. And you have transwomen who are attracted to women, often with an AGP fetish, Who are the ones demanding access to women's spaces and demanding that lesbians sleep with them.

I honestly don't know why autogynephilia isn't brought up more in the media. If it was general knowledge, like it is online, the argument would stop right there.

There seems to be a body of scientific evidence suggesting the idea of two clear cut sexes is not that clear cut.

You could make an argument that there are 100 or a million biological sexes and it would still just be a description of somebody's physical characteristics, not their identity. It still wouldn't be possible to change sex at will.

There seems to be a body of scientific evidence suggesting the idea of two clear cut sexes is not that clear cut.

Since I do not believe in gender as anything other than a stupid concept used to harm women, the fact that intersex individuals are okay with their body as is, and do not identify as female or male gendered, does not really suggest to me that the human species has more than two sexes.

An older relative of mine worked in the Samaritans for 20 years and she said not a week went by without getting a call from a secret cross-dresser. All straight, all married, very much a fetish. It's sad that they felt so lonely, ashamed and isolated (pre-internet and in a quite) as what they were doing was pretty harmless in itself. But we're now expected to believe that AGP isn't a huge motivator for so many TRAs who've piggy-backed onto the cause of genuinely gender dysphoric people who need support. It's so dishonest.

Just placemarking, welcome to mn tumble :)

There seems to be a body of scientific evidence suggesting the idea of two clear cut sexes is not that clear cut.

Maybe if you mean fungi.

Mammals do have two clear cut sexes. Males produce motile sex cells. Females produce larger sex cells and host the embryo.
It's not even the case that individuals can change sex, as is the case with some fish and some lizards.

This is something that I don't really understand. If gender dysphoria has driven transgenderism, why have transactivists not been campaigning in a vast numbers to find out a cause and therefore a treatment? This is something that I don't really understand. If gender dysphoria has driven transgenderism, why have transactivists not been campaigning in a vast numbers to find out a cause and therefore a treatment?

It really makes a lot more sense if we assume that this is all driven by MRAs... doesn't it?

As I see it, the MtT with actual dysphoria, the FtT and the young transitioners who are put on puberty blockers are all thrown under the bus to allow males, as a class, access to women's spaces, and enable them to erode all the anti-discimination laws that prevent them from discriminating against women.

The groups mentioned above are all used as poster children when it comes to campaigning, but it is not actually about them or their wellbeing.

Booboo you confuse sex and gender. They are not the same thing. You say: Traditionally gender was determined by the appearance of external sexual characteristics at birth...

No. The sex is observed at birth. This is not normally a medical process. The overwhelming majority of births happen without doctors present. Gender is a social construct.

Transgender isn't, as you seem to believe, a physical condition, nor is it a sexuality. Intersex is objective. Transgenderism is entirely subjective. There's no medical evidence that there's any such thing as an innate gender identity, nor is there evidence that people can be "born in the wrong body". There is no such thing as a sexed brain.

A PP has already addressed your comments on transing children, but not your claim that the very high suicide rate among transgender people is "partly due to the difficulty of accessing medical help to become who they feel they are."

This is also incorrect. It's a lack of therapy and care of co-existing MH conditions that appear to be the problem. A 30 year long-term follow up study of the trans population of Sweden found that: "Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group."

A report in The Guardian found that a "review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective."

And on June 2, 2016 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) denied national coverage for gender reassignment surgery after the agency conducted a year long review which determined that there is no medical evidence of a therapeutic outcome for patients who have undergone these procedures.

Tumble, not wishing to pry, but can you explain at all how your internal sense of gender identity works?

In common with half of those on MN threads, I don't appear to have one - just that permanent reminder from my body that it's female and thus does womanny stuff like being unimpressively titchy, menstruating (somewhat randomly) and tending to get pregnant.

intersex persons are natural variations (from the link)

Yes, all our phenotypes are natural variations, but it doesn't mean that some variations aren't a problem.
Intersex people cannot reproduce naturally. So, it's a biological issue, such as visual or auditory impairments are.
It's up to our society not to make it a social issue, though.

I would also like to know what 'femaleness' you identify with Tumble. We're back to that 'what is a woman' question.