To be unhappy about this transgender loose application of science?

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Now don't get me wrong, I am 100% on board with the idea of gender and sex being different things and that gender is primarily a social construct as its per formative not characteristic.

HOWEVER, I have recently undergone a Diversity training course in work where we were informed that "there are more than two sexes" and that people are often born as "a woman in a mans body" and vice versa and that there are numerous different variations. I get that can be true from a gender role perspective, but when this point was raised we were told no, its a biological reality as well. Apparently this is due to extra XX and XY chromosomes being present in some people in configurations such as XXY, XXX etc.

Now my issue here is that configuration of chromosomes is only a characteristic of sex in mammals (and not even all mammals at that). It seems we are redefining an entire classification system used in a huge area of natural science on the basis of what exactly?

If it was really true that there are "more than two sexes", surely this is something that biologist would have identified years ago?

Out of all of them, male violence is the only problem I can see transwomen having to deal with

There's things transwomen have to deal with and things that tranwomen care about. It is possible to be trans and to be feminist and to fight for those things mentioned.

Which part

Trans people have a pay gap in the same way there's a gender pay gap, a BME pay gap, a disabled pay gap

While I am very sympathetic to transgender people, I am not sympathetic to the never-ending tedious transgender threads on Mumsnet which explore every minute combination of trans jargon which seems to be invented all the time. Some people clearly just want an online argument about hypothetical crap.

CorrectingBigots

The research literature shows that from the day they are born girl and boy babies are treated differently. From the day they are born.

It's why my three year old daughter thinks 'we need to find a man' to move the bin bags out of the house. It's why she tells me I'm beautiful, but not her dad.

To suggest that any child can avoid this massive, insidious gender conditioning and start with a clean slate aged six is a nonsense. Someone who has spent the first six years of their life socialised as a boy can never experience those very formative years as a girl. Those years, which form the foundations of your understanding of who you are, of how you should be treated by other people, of who and what you should care about, the lessons you absorb without knowing it: that is what a transgender person will never, never have. Their fundamental first experiences of interacting with the world will be as their natal gender, because that is how the world sees them.

I do understand that it's very hard for transgender people to feel that the world is treating them as a gender that they don't understand themselves to be. But that doesn't mean they can lay claim to experiences they haven't had, or to identities that have, for them, formed in fundamentally different ways than those who were born into them.

Hi Saga. Transwomen have male size and strength. For instance hands 90% stronger than a woman. Hormones don’t change this (as you know many trans don’t take them anyway). Trans women are at no greater risk of murder than anyone else in the UK according to monitoring. A transwoman is not at risk of male violence like I am. The biggest risk factor for male violence is to be in a relationship with a straight man, like most women are (but very few transwomen). Women are murdered at the rate of 2 or 3 every week. Follow Counting Dead Women on Twitter. Women are raped in their thousands every year.
Most transwomen (90%) have a penis so could be raped anally but not vaginally and can also rape and do rape. Transwomen make up an inordinately large part of the prison sex offender population and prison guards have tried to warn the government about it.

There's things transwomen have to deal with and things that tranwomen care about

I'm sure this is correct. However, the struggles that trans identifying people face are different to those that women face, and both women and transpeople would be better served by trans identifying people fighting their own battles for their own specific needs - and I'm sure many women would wholeheartedly support them in this.

ferntwist

Well done for dismissing the fear of male violence by transwomen. I've been beaten up men. I had years of male violence before transitioning.

So I am afraid of male violence. I've experienced it.

Argh paragraph fail, so sorry, stupid phone.

tl:dr, socialisation begins at birth, you can't opt out and if transgender you are socialised as the gender you appear to the world.

Doesn't matter how you identify or how hard the process is of recognising your inner feelings about your gender don't match up with the way the world treats you.

You can never go back and form the basic building blocks of your identity in the same way as a person born into the sex with which you identify.

Sorry.

what make you feel you are a women?

Period pains. Rest of the time I just feel like me.

As for sex being considered as a social construct, this tweet nails it in that empirical phenomena existed long before we had scientific knowledge to name and classify said phenomena. XX people and XY people had baby XX & XY people who in turn had babies, the earth turned and apples fell from trees millions of years before the concept of social constructs was conceived.

"Granted, for most of human history, being a woman hasn't been defined as having XX chromosomes. But for most of human history gravity wasn't defined as 6.674x10⁻¹¹ m³⋅kg⁻¹⋅s⁻² and people still knew the difference between up and down."

ferntwist

And when I am walking home late at night, I also worry about men. I worry when there are sex assaults in my city. I alter my behaviour.

Saga we need to join forces against male violence. Why are trans/non-binary men like Travis Alabanza and Eddie Izzard trying to take away women and girl’s safe spaces with the support of trans women? They aren’t frightened of male violence in the least, they just wanna feel sexy.

Saga I’m sorry you were the victim of violence.

I totally get that transwomen have male violence to deal with and yes transwomen do feel very vulnerable in this respect.

What I don't get is why so many trans activists feel like it is women's job to sort this problem out.

Me too - and it extends to excusing and gaslighting any violence carried out by transgender males like at Speakers Corner or by trans rapists like Martin Ponting - now Jessica Winfield.

The trans activists also use the nastiest most violent threats against women Online - see www.terfisaslur.com - then tell women they should be allowed in our spaces.
Daniele Muscato (woman with a penis) tweeted that we should suck his dick on International Women’s Day. Why?

@ferntwist that website is very scary.

The research literature shows that from the day they are born girl and boy babies are treated differently. From the day they are born.

Even before; oh, they're very active, always kicking - must be a boy.

This is just another case of trans issues appropriating from intersex issues - something that many intersex individuals and organisations have repeatedly asked trans activists not to do.

Spot on. Its ridiculous the way activists insist on blurring the two when they are nothing alike.

There are two sexes. Some people being intersex does not mean there are more than 2 sexes. Its bullshit.

what make you feel you are a women?

Now if we are going to exclude obvious stuff like pmt, having a vagina then this is a dumb question as I don’t know what it feels like to not be a woman.

It’s like asking someone what it’s like to be a twin. You can’t say as you don’t know what it’s like to not be a twin.

What I was thinking about the other day is how we attribute gender stereotypes to animals. For example male cats will tend to have a larger territory than female cats. This is true even if male cats that have been castrated. So if gender stereotypes are true of animals then why not people?

I work in the public sector too and can see this bullshit coming my way as well.

Like this op stated, if you don't agree then there is the very real possibility that you would get disciplined and lose your job. That's not scaremongering, that is the climate that we live under.

I'm not sure I would be able to keep my mouth shut though...

L3 courses (BTEC/A-level) teach examples of males with Klinefelter's and females with Turner's and how those affected may appear different to others of their sex. No suggestion they are 'additional' sexes.

I work in public sector and it's shit getting expensive outside trainers in (?) who then 'teach' crap.

What's interesting are cases like that of David Reimer who was a boy raised as a girl after a botched circumcision mutilated his penis. His experience seems to suggest it is not just a socialization thing - he was female socialised until his teens, fed hormones etc, yet claimed to have always identified as a boy.

YANBU.

What's interesting are cases like that of David Reimer who was a boy raised as a girl after a botched circumcision mutilated his penis. His experience seems to suggest it is not just a socialization thing - he was female socialised until his teens, fed hormones etc, yet claimed to have always identified as a boy.

I'm not sure that case is the best to measure this though. All sorts of fucked up shit happened there including sexual abuse by the doctor treating him, and he killed himself in the end. It's a horrible story actually.

Interesting talking about a transgender gender pay gap.

This guy decided, after a successful career in his sector as a male, to sometimes turn up to work as Phil and sometimes as Philippa depending on how he feels that day. He won an award for 'FT Top 50 Female Champions of Women in Business'. He claims that because he is already very senior (which he achieved as a man) that his transition has not really affected his career and everyone is very supportive. Which is nice.... I wonder how the women he works with (many of whom I imagine have experienced the discrimination which is rife in this sort of sector) feel about this guy showing them the way when it comes to being a successful woman in business.

www.fnlondon.com/articles/mistranslated-i-split-my-time-as-pippa-and-philip-20171002

Those seeking to co-opt the struggles of intersex people to somehow legitimise the transactivist agenda need to back the fuck off. It's got so bad that Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG) have had to issue a statement:

'Trans' Terms

Intersexuality is not the same as a transsexuality (gender dysphoria) and is not a transgender state. Neither of the latter terms is one that we recognise as belonging in any general discussion of intersex. We are not happy with the recent tendency of some trans groups/people to promote transgender as an umbrella term to encompass, for example, transsexuality, transvestitism and intersex. We object to other organisations/individuals putting us in categories without consulting us, especially categories that imply that interexed people, of necessity, have gender identity issues. See the paper by Mazur et al cited at foot of this page.

The problems this causes...

We are constantly trying to get away from the idea that intersex is necessarily to do with gender identity, a notion that others (including the press/media) like to impose on us. Moreover, the prefix trans- infers a "moving across", and although a few people with intersex conditions may choose to change their gender role, the vast majority never "go" anywhere in terms of their sex or their gender, but are happy to stay in the status in which they grew up.

XY females may suffer various problems on finding out their diagnosis. Problems such as:

- confusion
- anger at secrecy and paternalism (withholding of diagnostic information)
- shame and stigma
- an existential type of identity crisis
- low self-esteem
- difficulty grasping how this biological phenomenon can come about
- grief at being denied fertility and rites of passage (e.g. lack of menstruation)
- a feeling of freakishness and isolation compared to their peers
- a fear that others might see them as 'male'
- a concern regarding their ability to function in a relationship (e.g. vaginal hypoplasia)
- the burden of keeping a secret, or uncertainty over who to tell and how
- a retreat from medical care leading to failure to take HRT with a risk of osteoporosis
- etc., etc.

These are the issues that are of major concern to most of our members; and none of these necessarily means that their inner sense of gender identity is compromised.

This trend towards 'muscling in' on intersex issues seems to be a initiative on the part of certain politically-minded people in the 'trans' community, to bring intersex under their banner (for whatever reason - it lends more credibility to their cause?) or even to actively interfere in clinical issues relating to intersex. See Announcements for an account of the problems we had in 2000 with a gender dysphoria/transsexual organisation trying to interfere in protocols for 'gender reinforcement' surgery in intersexed infants with so-called genital ambiguity.

Here's the link to Announcements where you can read all about the shoddy behaviour of GIRES in 2000.