another trans thread

[transandconfused]

I have been reading mumsnet as kinda a guilty pleasure for a while now, but not as a mum, as a bored teenager. I have noticed a recurring theme in the threads and that is a lot of amnosity towards the trans community. It's coming across as that you guys think that all mtf trans people are perverts with massive beards and all ftm trans people are faking it for attention. But this is not the case.

I have been out as ftm trans for about a year. I never really came out to my parents as they were there from the beginning of me discovering my gender. Even so, they aren't very comfortable with me physically transitioning and i might have to get a job to pay for private gender therapy. At this moment in time i bind, present as male and am out to my teachers and most of my friends. Tbh i'm just trying to live my life and make the most of what comes . So the point is that i want to know where this hatred and blatant dislike of trans rights and the trans community comes from. Most of us just want to live like anyone else.

@transandconfused sorry to hear your experience initially wasn't good. I do know some schools are trying hard to work on their approaches. I hope the Provision you are in now is supportive 😊

You're very young.

I have to say, at your age I didn't believe in sexism or gender bias or anything like it, I didn't believe in perverts or people who'd misuse a system for their own gain.

So I don't blame you for being surprised that people could object to the concept of self-ID.

You think everyone's as sincere as you and so that's what people here object to. This isn't the case.

Wishing you well, OP. Everyone should be able to feel safe and comfortable in their bodies. The debate is, I think, getting so utterly poisonous in some online spaces because the pot is being stirred by people who are neither feminists nor supporters of trans rights - in fact, they may well be people who wish harm on women and transpeople. I think there are some elements whose aim is simply to get rid of sex-specific protections because they hate women and hate the idea of things like all-women shortlists or grants/support to encourage women into tech, for example, and the 'what is a woman' stuff is a good way to fuck the whole concept up.
Because it's not, and never has been, a matter of women vs transwomen. There are many, many people who have different views on gender presentation, gender roles and gender identity, and reject the idea of a gender binary. Some of them suffer a lot of bullying and confusion over this, and some are vulnerable. Most just want to go about their business without being harassed, and that's fair enough. We do need unisex/gender-free spaces. But one big issue is that it should be men who move over and make room, not women.

18 or 21 is still very young for life changing surgery.

I expect most of us here didn't sort out our feelings about how we choose to present to the world until our late twenties. At least. It changes throughout your life too.

Sweetheart, almost all girls are troubled by puberty. This won't get any better if we lose our language to describe our lived experiences.

Feminists don't think either sex should perform any gender, bollocks to that, you be you. Girls can be whatever they want, wear what they like, love who they like.

Most of us have been fighting sex/gender stereotypes all our lives. Please forgive us if we feel sad that the younger generation seek to enshrine those sex stereotypes in law and use them to define our sex.

Not on my watch, girls and women are worth more than that.

I do believe that you cannot be trans or non binary unless you have gender dysphoria

Congratulations. You are now a transphobe according to the transactivist rules.

Op it's genuinely good to have you here. I hope you stick around and join in with the debate where you can.

I absolutely hated my body as a teenager. I wasn't trans but I'd gladly have had surgery to remove my breasts. I like them now, twenty years on so it's great to hear you will wait before getting any surgery. I hope you come to feel more comfortable in your own skin. The human body is a really rather incredible thing in all it can do.

Thanks for posting transandconfused.

I am gender critical in that I think gender is largely social conditioning and not necessarily innate. I believe rigid ideas of how men and women should ‘be’ are damaging to everyone. However I completely support the right of any individual to go about their life as they wish, as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others, and would absolutely respect pronouns, names etc.

I am anti self-ID as I believe gender disphoria should be diagnosed by a professional, and the current system allows for that.

Self identifying as a man or woman is fine day to day (as I hope you are discovering if it’s easier for you to live happily as yourself now that you are identifying as male) but should not be enshrined in law without the negative effects on women’s rights being considered first.

Wishing you peace and love 💕

i didn't wear one i'd be in constant distress due to hatred of my body so i figure that i'd rather be happy in presenting as male than be suicidal

Yes, but it's not always an either/or.

I don't have experience of transgender teenagers (well, not in my own kids, anyway) but we have - twice - been through the joys of CAMHS for suicidal ideation in teenagers, one through bullying, the other for more profound reasons based in OCD.

The second one may be the more relevant here. (Or I may be talking bollocks, but let's give it a whirl.)

In OCD, something can start from small, innocuous beginnings - for example, fear of bird flu for my child - and build to an obsessive pitch. At its worst, it spread to encompass all birds, however distant, all feathers, all mentions of the word even in books, and anyone who might have touched a bird.

He was happyish when avoiding birds and all mention of them. But avoiding doesn't cure this sort of thing, and instead it started to spread further to include other illnesses, poisonous chemicals, poisonous plants, you name it, and then the outside world in general.

The treatment wasn't to hide the thing that was troubling him and to forbid all mention of it. The treatment was to help him cope with it, by tiny degrees (such as a word on a page), and wait for the fear to reduce in intensity.

It's harder when the thing you fear is your own body, but honestly, I would be advising a child of mine to reduce the binding, a tiny amount at a time, while riding out the fear and seeing if it reduces in intensity.

In a very few cases, it seems likely that transitioning is the only option. But it's so drastic a measure that I think all other courses should be properly explored first.

(I'd probably remove the word bollocks when advising my own child, come to think of it.)

Other than as a social construct I don't believe in gender. Especially an innate gender
Dysphoria is awful for people and they certainly need help. Unfortunately the trans movement is preventing any proper, non biased, research
I believe people reject the gender roles associated with their sex for a variety of reasons. A man cannot feel like a woman and a woman cannot feel like a man because we have no idea what it feels like to be another person
People can feel like their idea of the opposite sex
Young people subjecting themselves to a lifetime of hormones saddens me and I would love for them to find a way to be comfortable without wrecking their bodies
Testosterone does terrible damage long term

Btw, on the Girl Guides thing, my main concern there is that puberty and teenage years are a melting pot of sexual and emotional self-discovery, and it’s not too hard for me to imagine someone on the end of the trans spectrum with little disphoria about their body who might enter a ‘lesbian’ relationship with one of their friends in the GG, and that that consensual experimental sexual experience might result in pregnancy.

That worries me because your generation are being taught that to question anything related to biology and gender and sexual preferences is wrong (bigoted/-phobic) and so it makes the issue of consent very murky. I worry for my children on that score.

Absolutely not because I think all trans children are a threat and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in normal activities. Just that the way we safeguard everyone should be well thought through.

When I was a teenager I kind of thought sexism and abuse happened because older women let it happen, they weren't as good at being feminists as my generation would be. I thought the older generation of men were ghastly sexist beasts unlike my lovely enlightened young right-on male friends. My role in society was definitely not going to be like that, especially because I was/am a strongly gender non-conforming girl who "thinks like a man".

Well, now we are those older women and men. Some things are better than they were. A lot is the same though. Biology and society force people into gender roles against their wills.

Perhaps read the threads assuming that we are all like you, not some weird other species. See if you can work out why nice tolerant people like us are getting all of a tiz about self id. Assume we are nice. Assume we do not hate trans people. Assume none of us want the gender roles society forces on us as women. Perhaps that will help you to work out what we really think and what we are really upset about.

Your opening post suggests you've been reading assuming we are old fashioned blue rinse gay and trans haters who vote UKIP and are rather uneducated about modern society.

I’m just going to leave this here as well, OP.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/214118

Please don’t sign if you’re unconvinced/think we’re all mad and frothing bigots who hate trans people. But if you think changes to the laws that affect you as a trans person could do with being debated widely, not hidden away, then please sign and talk to your friends about it.

Crikey, yes. I hadn't thought much about sexism and gender roles from my nice academic protected girls' school (where everyone did maths and most of us did physics A-level, and nobody assumed we couldn't) or my scruffy mob of Girl Guides, where you damn well map-read or got lost.

Real life, and especially pregnancy and the assumptions that your brain fell out partway through, came as quite the shock.

RunRabbit, I think blue hair signals something else to the younger generation (gnashes gums and ponders who the Beatles are).

Hi all.
Sadly, despite containing useful insight and support, we will have to remove this thread as it has been posted by a known troll, someone who has already been banned from the site several times.

Good point lancelottie. 😀

@HelenaMN OH FFS!

But this thread should be stickies somewhere to show that actually MNers are wildly sympathetic to young teens struggling with a trans identity.

FFS!

We could lock it for now? We could at least give that a try, what do you all think?

Go for it, MNHQ.
There have been some very measured and considerate posts here, as well as useful advice. It's been calm and v respectful. It would be a shame to lose it all.

Lock it and keep it for future posters to search.

Please lock it!

Yes, this seems like a good case for locking. I was about to bother to sympathise and write a long and insightful post comparing teenage girls becoming anorexic with identifying as male - I'm convinced that these are, for many people, fundamentally two ways of coping with the same problem. I won't bother now, if it was a troll. Maybe next time.

That's a surprise

I agree, lock it
also Lancelotties v interesting comment re anxiety/OCD which I think v pertinent