Non Binary / Gender Neutral

[MissBax]

Okay so I know this may spark some serious debate. I just want to say that I really don't want to offend ANYONE, however AIBU to say that the whole non Binary trend (for want of a better word) is getting abit out of hand??
If someone was born a man and chooses to transition to a woman or vice versa I understand that, but to say you don't identify as having a gender... I just don't understand it?! I am female but have never been girly - I didn't have dolls, I despise pink, and I always played football with the guys, climbed trees and was very sporty. But I'm still a girl. I know boys who didn't necessarily like "boyish" things but they're still boys. Any girl or boy can like anything they like.
Now we have "non binary" people who SAY they don't identify as one gender or the other, yet some of them are born female, wear make up and dresses. So following typically "girly" or "feminine" characteristics. Or those who have a sex change and THEN say they're non binary?! So then why have the sex change?!
AIBU to think this is just another way to ruffle people's feathers and possibly attention seeking?
(I wait in anticipation for being called ignorant and a biggot etc...)

Molly, I don't think they are attention seeking.

From what I've heard it's just a bunch of awkward British teenagers who don't feel able to ask, and a teen who happens to have an androgynous in appearance and has a unisex name like Charlie (but not actually Charlie, obviously).

None of them are thinking of it as a trans issue, just as a social awkwardness issue.

I guess we are reaching a place where we can never be sure of someone's sex, though a guy with a penis would be male born (presume transmen are easy to spot, unless it was a man who had a neo vagina who went back to being a man) - all the different permutations are just too confusing.

I've had a another light bulb moment on this thread.

Gender equality as a goal (instead of the goals of feminism, historically) really means equalising out of existence, through words alone, anything that disproportionately affects women, doesn't it? So nothing needs to be done, a breezy dismissal is enough.

Mostly it is obvious what sex an adult is, but it can be more difficult with young adults, as the boys haven't developed their adult bone structure.

Yes, Shiny.

Also means you could develop feelings, be attracted to someone without knowing their sex or what genitals/ breasts etc they have which ties into some trans claims that you are attracted to the person - so sex, genitals etc shouldn't matter.

It's a Brave New World out there. Our kids might go down this route - who knows.

I imagine many people become attracted to people whose appearance they are unsure of due to people communication with strangers online.

You can be attracted to some elements of a person, and then on finding out their sex, lose or cease developing attraction to them.

Usually you know if the person you feel attracted to is male or female though.

Ok, so...a lot of the research is US based... The discordant sibling study:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077166/

"Our results suggest that much of the beneficial long-term effects typically attributed to breastfeeding, per se, may primarily be due to selection pressures into infant feeding practices along key demographic characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status."

This is looking at the ethics of breastfeeding awareness campaigns, but also looks at the evidence used to promote it:

jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/32/4/595.full.pdf+html

Finally this article, which looks at research as a whole

sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-the-benefits-of-breastfeeding-oversold/

And sadly yes, babies are dying in the UK and USA due to starving to death from insufficient breastmilk, they are also at increased risk of severe brain injury, developmental problems and other unpleasant things. This is why Fed Is Best as a movement began, and they have stories as well as research evidence to back up their recommendations.

fedisbest.org/about/

I will apologise for saying that breastfeeding is not important, that's not what I meant and I posted in a rush. Breastfeeding is and always will be of importance, and to those people who wish to breastfeed and are able it is very important. Also to premature babies breastmilk is much much more important as a 'medicine' as well as a food. However, for full term babies I don't think it is as important as it is being made out to be, especially in things like the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (which in and of itself is causing a lot of problems globally).

The research into the infant microbiome is really cool, and new, and exciting. But as it currently stands, it's basically impossible to tell a previously breastfed child/adult from a formula fed one, when you remove other confounding variables.

When I said BF isn't important, I meant in the context of sharing the child care, someone (sorry not sure who) said that sharing the care disrupts breastfeeding (or can do) which is fine, but that also suggests that BFing is objectively more important than sharing the child care...which it is not.

OT sorry, but didn't want to be like "I have no evidence" lol I am not an expert ofc, but I had to peddle the non-evidence based breastfeeding spiel as a student midwife so it's super frustrating to see it still being treated as fact, I find it an interesting thing to learn about, and women deserve to be fully informed when they make choices about their children. A lot of the experts discussing the 'problems' with the BF at all costs culture are doctors, or scientists, with years of medical school and experience, and I doubt the formula companies are paying them all off

But yeh, Shiny, I hope not? I mean, equalising using words, that's not really equality :/

' BFing is objectively more important than sharing the child care...which it is not.'

Evidence please, that shared care is objectively as important or more important than breast feeding.

And frankly terrifying that you are a student midwife, but don't treat maternity as a protected characteristic.

Soup why would it matter what sex a person was?

For the same reason Orlantinasays plus:
If I was sharing a room on a hostel I'd rather stay with other women. Ditto for getting changed etc. If I easvhabong counselling from a person. If I was planning on dating/marrying it starting a family with a person. If someone was giving e specific advice or information on what it meant to be female, it make, or intersex, I'd rather that person was that sex.

Bambambini O think trans men see. to pass better than trans women.

Loops whyvwoukd science based medicine do research in breast feeding?

Sorry I've not had time to read this thread but here's my take on the transgender phenomenon.

I think it's politically motivated propaganda born of cultural marxism to normalise something that is not normal.

I think this normalisation is causing the meme to spread, which is currently targeting itself at children and teenagers, who are vulnerable to indoctrination because of their inexperience and suggestibility. (check out the cultural revolution!)
Additionally many teenagers have a confusion about identity which makes them more vulnerable to these memes.

From my own experience:
I'm 48 now.
When I first got my period, boobs, body hair I HATED IT.
I did not what this adult female body.
I was a tom boy who did not care about fashion, make up or boys.
During my teens and twenties I thought I was asexual.
I was around 28 found myself sexually attracted shock horror to men!
It took me a few more years to develop the social skills to actually go on a date, I think I was 33 by then.
At 46 I was diagnosed with Aspergers.
With much reading I found that many Aspies can be 10 years emotionally and sexually immature compared to NT peers.

If when I was a very unhappy asexual tomboy teen and propaganda via MSM and social media had suggested maybe transitioning to actually being a boy, it might of appealed to me.

Fortunately due to my age I dodged that bullet.

I remember seeing a Horizon episode years ago about a ''scientist'' called John Money.
He theorised that gender was fluid and sort to prove it.
His twins study of Brian and Bruce eventually proved him wrong after both twins killed themselves before the age of 40.
Before Bruce killed himself he transitioned back to male but the damage was done. He shot himself in his late 30's.

Here's a link to that old BBC Horizon documentary

Another text link here

Dr Money and the Boy with No Penis

RIP David and Brian

why would it matter what sex a person was?

But on a day to day basis...? The person mentioned is a flat mate in, I assume, a mixed flatshare. Does a person have the right to demand to know the sex of another person? If it is an issue for them then they have the choice never to be alone/undressing/whatever with the androgynous person. It shouldn't matter what sex someone is on a day to day basis and shouldn't affect how people treat each other.

I find it odd to conceal your sex but I do find it an interesting conundrum.

It shouldn't matter what sex someone is on a day to day basis and shouldn't affect how people treat each other

It shouldn't matter how someone is treated by another person. Ideally we should all be treated the same.

What I mean is - people should be treated the same - and their sex shouldn't matter.

So if you don't know their sex, just treat them like you would treat another person.

Sylvia WAS a student midwife lol not now, didn't agree with the slightly cultish feeling surrounding some choices. Is maternity a protected characteristic? Legally I mean.

I do hope you can see that attempting to say that breastfeeding is objectively more important (more important for society and everyone in it) than any other parenting choice (of which sharing child care is one) is super harmful to choice? Subjectively, breastfeeding might be the most important thing to someone, and they have every right to decide that (and that right should be defended forever, along with their associated right to BF in public and have a safe place to feed/pump) but equally they have the right to choose to formula feed, and formula feeding isn't a 'worse' choice than Breastfeeding.

Auit I'm glad you figured out your identity and didn't end up doing something you may have later regretted. The Money research was awful, but it doesn't prove that gender isn't 'real' it just proves that you can't make someone ID in one way just by 'raising' them a certain way, many trans people also harm themselves due to their gender ID not being recognised by other people.

The thread was going reasonably well, civil discussion, acknowledgement that biological sex was a thing, was binary, and was not the same as gender and then it all started to unravel. Sex became a characteristic that depends on gender, there was the business of non-human species, and then the frankly baffling recent pages in which as far as I can see the concept of maternity has to be suppressed and the value of breastfeeding denied. I can't help but suspect that the last two are being asserted out of fear of trans-exclusionary contagion.

Orlantina people would be a lot better off if we just treated others as 'another person' but the predominant argument seems to be that you need to know, so that you can treat them differently. You need to know whether the manly looking woman is trans (so actually a man) so you can complain that she's in the women's bathroom/changing room/brownie unit, if we just let people live their lives and responded to actual problems rather than potential for problems, 9 times out of 10 everything would be fine.

nauticant yeh it got a bit weird :/ sorry for contributing to that, made a thoughtless post on my way out of the house without explaining myself properly and it went off-track.

I still think that bio sex is a thing and is binary (intersex being a medical condition rather than a different sex or gender identity), and yeh I personally feel gender is not the same as sex and doesn't always align with an individual's bio sex, but I do see why some people don't agree.

'Is maternity a protected characteristic? Legally I mean.'

Yes.

How on earth can you claim to be into intersectional feminism and then not know what the protected characteristics are in the UK?

I'm not convinced by Fed Is Best.

I'm the first to criticize BF campaigns in this country. They're all guilt-inducing posters and slogans and no actual support. The upshot is that we have the lowest BF rates in the world and lots of women feeling like shit, either because they feel they have failed or because they are made to feel shit for choosing not to. We'd do far better if we put all the propaganda money into support services for women who want to BF and stopped being shitty to those who don't.

Child poverty is on the rise in the UK. 30% of children are now living in poverty.

Unicef: Breastfeeding is a natural 'safety net' against the worst effects of poverty ... Exclusive breastfeeding goes a long way toward cancelling out the health difference between being born into poverty and being born into affluence ... It is almost as if breastfeeding takes the infant out of poverty for those first few months in order to give the child a fairer start in life and compensate for the injustice of the world into which it was born.

BF is becoming MORE important, not less.

When I said BF isn't important, I meant in the context of sharing the child care, someone (sorry not sure who) said that sharing the care disrupts breastfeeding (or can do) which is fine, but that also suggests that BFing is objectively more important than sharing the child care...which it is not.

You can't make any statements about the relative importance of BF and sharing childcare. Different families will have different priorities and constraints. If you don't think BF is important you won't examine the constraints that prevent it and you will be letting down children in poverty and their mothers who want to bf but can't because they're working 3 different shit jobs to make ends meet.

Part of the problem for women in the workplace is that we are expected to shoehorn ourselves into a male work pattern which does not suit the demands of motherhood. Maternity rights, including BF, are important because without them the vital health- and life-risking work that women do to produce the next generation of human beings is totally denigrated.

I see you were a student midwife. I am astonished that you went into that field when you appear to have so little regard for maternal rights. Please tell me you left and found something more suited to your outlook on life.

That's OK Loopsdefruits. Just make sure that if you find yourself arguing with a group of people who are presenting apparently rational arguments that make sense, you reflect on whether they might have a point.

'I do hope you can see that attempting to say that breastfeeding is objectively more important (more important for society and everyone in it) than any other parenting choice (of which sharing child care is one) is super harmful to choice?'

I didn't say that. You said breastfeeding wasn't objectively more important than shared care.

So the onus would be on you to support that claim by demonstrating with objective evidence the relative harms and benefits of each.