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??

Shutthefuckupbarbara it is important to distinguish the criticism of the transactivist ideology and the people that are trans. By people that are trans I mean adults who have chosen that path after consideration as an adult person and after experiencing an adult life. Unfortunately, these ideology has jumped to get adepts from kids and specially LGB teens that are pushed to become trans rather than lesbians. There is a lot to discuss about how this ideology is impacting families and women's lives. It is not just a matter of toilets, a couple of trans who took their lives recently were in a men's prison for murder and identified as women once there, one of them after committing further murder while in prison. Saying that you are a woman in your imagination, should not be enough to be considered one under the law. And that is all it will take if they pass the current 'gender identity' bill. Identities are not fixed, people change and it is fine if they change into appearing as the opposite sex, but this should not diminish the rights of that sex. This gender identity ideology is getting into law. There is a petition to stop it.

www.citizengo.org/en-gb/pc/41304-say-not-dangerous-gender-identity-bill?m=5&tcid=33078820

See also www.transgendertrend.com/gender-identity-rights-of-the-child/

To be clear. The number of sexes seems irrelevant to the trans debate.
The point is can you change sex. The answer, at the moment, is no.

As I have said several times, the intersex community want to stay away from the debate and who can blame them. So why bring the number of sexes into the debate when the real issue is changing sex?

Sorry, just came back to apologise for my insensitivity to Tumble, and had to raise an eyebrow at the idea of Nature being 'a well respected, if populist, scientific publication.'

I shall now add populist to my list of 'words that clearly mean something else today'. Nature is bloody heavyweight stuff.

I find it wanting and modern science seems to have moved on.

Modern science has not discovered the existence of multiple sexes. That would imply that there are multiple ways for mammals to reproduce, and there aren't.

It's certainly true that scientific advances mean that more people are being identified with conditions that could be included under the intersex umbrella, but that isn't the same as having more than one sex, and there is no standard definition of 'intersex'.

More importantly, nobody has found a link between being transgender and being intersex. However, life would be easier for everyone if people weren't so obsessed with gender. (That's gender in the social, cultural sense, not gender in the 'don't want to pin it down, lets muddy the waters and confuse it with sex' sense.)

It's something that is a fairly big deal at the moment -

My view - there are men, women and trans.

The trans should have rights but no more so than women or men.

And maybe they need there own spaces but not shoehorning themselves into where they 'don't fit'.

Somebody asked me earlier what exactly is it about being female that I identify with and feel like I should be (not that exact wording but that was the gist of it) and tbh I'm not even entirely sure myself.

This is not an easy thing to explain but it's not so much that I identify with certain feminine traits, I've just always known and instinctively felt that there is something wrong with me and that I'm not really "me" if that makes any sense. When I look in the mirror I know it's me staring back at me but it doesn't feel like me. I see a body and I see movements being mirrored but in my head I'm supposed to look like someone else, sound like someone else...I feel detached from myself and from that person staring back at me.

I feel like I'm not "me" inside my head. I feel like my body is wrong; that it is not supposed to look the way it does and I'm meant to have a different body. I have tried to fix this various times; I've starved myself, I've overexercised, taken steroids, taken drugs all to try and fix my body and make me like it; make the "me" in my mind match the "me" that my body is. None of these things worked and I just ended up hating myself even more.

When I was 16 I had a breakdown and ended up being sectioned after a suicide attempt. I was convinced that I was a girl and no amount of people telling me I wasn't could sway me. I was completely delusional tbh. Anyway I was treated and I accepted that I wasn't a girl; I only wanted to be one.

The scary thing is is that if I was a 16 year old now then I wouldn't have been treated for my delusions; they would have been pandered to and I would have began the transitioning process to become a girl. Looking back now, that's not what I wanted. I'm glad that my delusions were accepted for what they were and treated accordingly.

So why bring the number of sexes into the debate when the real issue is changing sex?

I think it was you who started arguing over the number of sexes. I'm not really sure why.

Thanks Tumble. It's really helpful to have you post here. It's obviously a difficult thing to understand if you've never had these feelings.

"Ok shiny here's a couple more links for you.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18962445 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17765230"

Explain to me what you think these studies demonstrated (or claimed to demonstrate, Boo.

Do you think OP will want to know that Tumble doesn't think we're a bunch of transphobic bigots? Fish doesn't think so either... Perhaps OP needs to reconsider.

This thread is nearly full now. Perhaps you could start a new thread Tumble? I have enjoyed reading your posts and perhaps some of the trans activists and people on here who scream "transphobic!" at us could learn a thing or two from you.

Probably not Prawn. Like I've already said; every time Fish arrives to talk about her trans gendered child or a trans gendered person themselves arrive to tell us their experience of the damage TRA's are causing and that they don't think we're transphobic bigots, all the people shouting "transphobia!" all go quiet until the next thread on the subject.

Tumble

Can I just add that I wholeheartedly disagree with transing children? Pumping children full of drugs when we don't know what the long term efects of those drugs are is completely barbaric. How can anybody honestly think it's a good idea? It's just madness!

"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"

Trans-rights always involve taking something away from women: our safe spaces, our ability to name our oppression, our right to be seen as people beyond a basket of traditional stereotypes.

Tumble, as you're still here and seemingly unoffended (hope that's true) by being quizzed: have you any idea whether there is any autism in your family?

The reason I ask is that there's a lot of it in ours, and a feeling of being permanently the 'wrong fit' for the world and for your own body does seem to go with it. Anecdotally, transgender feelings seem to be somewhat more common in those with ASD (and there's some actual evidence that ASD is very much more common than average in teenagers who define themselves as transgender).

No autism in my family AFAIK.

Campaigning for more unisex toilets would be a good start imo.

I'm just baffled there's 1000 posts on a thread about this subject. Bizarre as never noticed any transgendered-bashing on MN. I do suspect however that some people go looking for offence here (as everywhere).

YANBU

This will be coming to a close soon so in the meantime this is for you Tumble