AIBU to think that this child should be allowed to compete as a girl? Transgender topic.

[Cassort]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/48800075/transgender-skater-fighting-to-compete?ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3SHOZZproHs8lkaYi9tz5VcKPnE9xQRt7AR8m8rRPu5lPTJkp1m1808Os

It's an 11 year old (born male) ice skater. There's a little video where to me she looks female.

I daren't put this on the feminism board, but AIBU to think that in 20 years time we will look back in shame at how we have treated transgendered individuals?

I just put myself in those shoes for 5 hours. What on earth would I think? How much hate would I feel? How fucked up/strange/weird would I feel?

I have a very uneasy feeling in my soul about the vociferous opposition to transgenderism on MN currently. It doesn't sit comfortably with me.

I came across this story just now and it's typical of I suppose what the feminist MNers want transgender people to face. I.e. that they can't...

Should she compete as a girl? Or AIBU?

I stand by my assertion that giving children under 18s puberty blockers would be abusive. What I feel.and thibk and my developed sexuality as an adult is completely different to how I felt in my teens, with the angst of puberty and working out your place in the world, and that was without all the societal and social media pressure kids have today.

I am really sorry you amd your child find yourself in this position, to the PP. I think its disgusting that they won't help you without a full assertion that your child wants to fully transition. How can they possibly know that at this age? I still think the drugs, with their life long side effects and implications should require adult consent to be used, so there is time for it to be a considered and adult decision. When I was 15/16 I had ocd and thought that every plate and piece of cutlery I used had to be washed and rewashed before I used it. I dont think that now. I'm glad now that miserable state of affairs wasnt made permanent for me by my parents, though at the time, I thought it was absolutely right and fitting to waste hours a day cleaning things.

I hope you and your child can get the help and guidance you need and deserve, without having to succumb to activist pressure to medicalise the situation until/if they are ready.

And if your child is self-harming and has been diagnosed with depression, I would definitely go back to the GP and push for a referral for therapy to support your child’s mental health.

I have, so many times they wont even refer me again, it all comes back to being transgender, which goes back to the clinic, whos solution is to give my child blockers.

This is why I went private. I work a minimum wage job, I cant go for a different job because my work are very supportive of my appointments and commitments and are great at working around it, I can't afford private therapy, I truly struggle every single week to afford it.

It's so easy to read articles, look at statistics, and see things from one side. The fact is there are a lot of people in a very complicated situation and having people fighting against this rather than looking at ways to support the people who do feel this way is detrimental to everyone in the long run.

Training through periods is something all female athletes have to heal with.

Of course it will make a big difference to 11 and 12 year old girls who are learning to deal with it all. You dont go from nothing tonally of a sudden having well.managed predictable periods and being on top of pain relief. So no it's not just about whether the boy has a physical advantage or not and his lung capacity red blood cells being larger are present from day one not just puberty.

It also about the extra layers if difficulty young girls will also face while developing.

If we are purely talking about sport specifically then no, trans athletes should not be competing in women's sporting events because they have the unfair advantage of muscular and lung development that biological females don't have and cannot hope to compete with - regardless of whether later in life they reduce their testosterone levels and take female hormones. It isn't fair - that is the truth. If that wasn't the case then I suspect people would have no problem with it, but to disregard the facts in favour of not hurting people's feelings is crazy.

Yep, this should be in a poster somewhere. No idea why these are concepts people just don’t get.

That child will never be female. They can present as and identify however they wish but you cannot change sex. They will always be male.

I wonder if all the OP will take from this thread is, “All these mumsnetters are SO MEAN - they want to STOP this pretty little boy who looks like a girl from SKATING!!”

That’s the gist of all of the OP’s posts in a nutshell.

In Rosa Parkes' day

For someone so keen to use Rosa Parks as their exemplar 'gotcha' reason, you'd think OP would at least know how to spell her name.

Annabel Croft is one of the few elite athletes who has spoken about the problems females face in sport as a result of their periods.
graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/sportswomen-periods-suffer-silence-says-tennis-pro-annabel-croft/

I was a moderately talented athlete who gave up sport in my teens because of such problems, as was my much more talented daughter.

as did

If, in the future, my child does go down the route to become the sex they wish to be they will 100% have earned the right to be respected as the person they want to be

No one has said that trans individuals are not deserving of respect as individuals. They’ve said that natal females should not be expected to obligingly accept second place in order to ‘play nice’ with natal males who feel that they don’t fit the commonly accepted societal gender tropes.

Your child will never become ‘the sex they wish to be’: surgery and chemicals may allow their body to be altered in such a way that it superficially resembles female physiology to a greater degree than it did previously, but the magical ability to become a different sex is a complete fallacy.

Why are people peddling that lie instead of challenging societal gender cliches? Follow the money: there are a wealth of shady characters profiting from this charade (rogue doctors, ‘support’ organisations, etc.)

My DS are rugby players. Rugby is mixed until around U13 then moves to sex segregated.
Some girls are similar size and strength to my 11 yo DS.
Very very few women would be similar size and strength to my 15 yo DS and he is still growing.
If DS1 decided he was female I wouldn’t be happy about him playing rugby against biological females he could really seriously injure someone.

It would be harmful to this child to allow the lie to stand. Humans cannot change sex. Sports are sex-segregated for reasons of fairness and safety. Certainly any sexism in the rules which prevents a male child from competing wearing tutu, frills & sparkles are wrong. Likewise any female child should be able to compete without such decorations if the simpler outfits more usually chosen by male skaters are preferable to that child.

Unless this child is going to be a victim of an abusive unsafe medical experiment of puberty blocking medications - which can't be condoned by anyone with a child's best interests at heart - then a male puberty is just around the corner. A puberty which will bring with it physical and mental developments which are likely (more than 90% chance) to resolve the dysphoria and leave the child able to accept themselves for who they are. This would be a good thing. If the dysphoria is not resolved after puberty then transition may be appropriate but it is very wrong to cause psychological and physical harm to the 9 kids whose dysphoria will resolve, in order to potentially improve the outcome for the one kid who won't have that experience.

Certainly we should work out how to help that one kid. It would be great if some science could be developed to predict in advance who that one kid will be. Damaging 9 other kids is not the way.

Nope. The child is male and should compete as such.

And this is already on FWR as trans ideology is a huge threat to the rights of women, and children.

Look at the England Men's rugby team.

Look at the England Woman's rugby team.

Are there really people who can't see the problem with biological men competing against females?

If one child is told she can't compete, that possibly is the end of the world. Particularly if she is also going through the hell of being othered, hated, ridiculed, bullied, picked on etc. That sport might be all she's got.

Kids are told they can't compete all the time (as are many adults). Like many adults, there were plenty of things I couldn't compete or take part in as a child for reasons entirely or mostly out of my control - I moved after the season started or was going to move soon, I didn't make the team, far more girls than boys tried out so more of the girls didn't get a part, I didn't have the grades to be allowed to take part, and so on. If a child struggles to cope with that, the answer is therapy and an environment to better develop coping strategies beyond just one sport, not changing the rules thinking that somehow will automatically improve someone's wellbeing. It really doesn't work that way - sports can do a lot of things, but for kids going through hell, it's not the fix being described. That hell just changes, even taking over the initial high of being able to take part, without a lot of support that sadly not enough people are getting. Just bending the rules is a cheap, heartless attempt and pretending to care, in my opinion, it doesn't really do anything for any of the issues described.

There was a time wrestling was pretty much the only positive thing for my life (which, with the general culture in wrestling being brutal and my team nickname being Miss Worthless which was probably one of the nicer names going around, probably says something), but if I hadn't been allowed to compete because of my sex [and there were times I was not allowed to compete due to my academic standing], the answer was for the adults in my life to help me cope with that, not pretend my horrible circumstances which did involve bullying, neglect, othered, being violently hated, and a lot more meant the rules shouldn't apply to me. This was difficult because I was a messed up kid with a lot going against me and I'm not sure I'll ever entirely heal from it, but that doesn't mean I deserve to be part of it without meeting the rules. My pain and circumstances give me a particular perspective, but it doesn't change that competitions aren't a right. Being respected, living publically without fear, yes, but not sports competitions.

Mixed-sex competition and the training for them starting from around the age that child has more risks than the single-sex competition. It's well known that it's hard to get the best out of girls training for mixed-sex competition because of those risks - we have to push harder to keep up which means injuries are more likely. It seems far more unfair to let the child to compete as a girl now and have that taken away later. While I'm not against mixed-sex competition as an option, single-sex sex should be the standard, especially going into and through puberty, and it would be unfair to the girls to make it mixed sex solely based on how a male child looks. I knew plenty of waif feminine looking wrestlers in my day and see plenty of them now that could still throw anyone in their weight class across a room and did so merrily, something even at my peak I was never able to do safely due to my female muscle-to-fat ratio and skeleton.

And, as a mixed-race American, the misuse of Rosa Parks is horrible in appropriating the black and American civil rights experience - there is enough shit in this country that is actually relevant (and, no, it was not everyone, maybe learn more than the snapshots of civil rights history. Rosa Parks was not the first to not move and she only had an impact because she was a long-term activist with a whole community of people able to support her and the bus boycotts that came after with replacement services and care) . Women have fought for ages to have women's sports. Look at the history of women's exclusion from sports in this country. Look how long the FA banned women's teams from their fields and stadiums - it's well within living memory. Look at the fight women are still going through for the same standing in sports in the UK. It's absolutely disgraceful to use something White people in power put on others as any sort of comparison to something women are still fighting to have around the world.

Sorry YABU. I am a huge supporter of trans rights btw, and LGBT myself but there is an issue with transwomen competing in women's sports. They have a natural advantage - way beyond the 'advantages' that women like the Williams sisters have for example for their height and strength - and it is an issue that needs to be addressed. I don't have the answers btw but allowing male born athletes to compete in girls and womens sports will change womens sports forever and I'm worried will put girls off competing.
If the sport this transkid is involved in has already split by sex then there's a reason for that.

If one child is told she can't compete, that possibly is the end of the world. Particularly if she is also going through the hell of being othered, hated, ridiculed, bullied, picked on etc. That sport might be all she's got.

This is happening already to girls, who are being bumped off the podium and out of teams. They're being horribly bullied if they so much as raise an eyebrow about it. This is what is shameful.

No-one is telling trans kids they can't compete, just that boys can't compete in girls competitions regardless of whether they appear 'feminine'. Sport is segregated by sex not gender, because humans are dimorphic.

If one child is told she can't compete, that possibly is the end of the world. Particularly if she is also going through the hell of being othered, hated, ridiculed, bullied, picked on etc. That sport might be all she's got.

Being told "you can never win" might possibly be the end fo the world for many biological girls. That sport might also be all they've got. And "you can never win" is exactly what they are facing.

Last week she cried for 20 minutes when she found out you can’t marry dolphins. lyralala that did make me laugh!

Anyhoo - so they let the boy skate as a girl. What happens when ‘she’ is a 6”2 grown up and has the build of a man, and the agility and grace of a rugby player? Will we need to change the scoring system? Pretend that they are a graceful and elegant as a woman?

That sport might be all she's got.
Telling girls they have to suck it up and stop winning shows how misogynistic this is.

Fix mens sports so trans women can compete in them or create a third category instead of removing sport from women.

I daren't put this on the feminism board, but AIBU to think that in 20 years time we will look back in shame at how we have treated transgendered individuals?

I have a feeling that the OP knew full well what they wanted to happen on this thread. And I guess they've had a bit of a shock.

Funnily enough, it's not just feminists who understand biology and the advantage of male physiology. Perhaps the OP also wasn't aware that many women, on a site called mumsnet, are actually also athletes. Including skaters. Incredible, I know!

lyralalala

My sister was the ultimate Tom boy.

...I have a 4-year-old who is exactly the same. Full on tomboy. I’ve already had two friends comment that maybe she is a boy. She’s not a boy, she’s 4. Last week she cried for 20 minutes when she found out you can’t marry dolphins.

It’s quite staggering to think if she expressed at 4 that she thought she was a boy that I’d get support from people in going down the medical route that would irreversibly change her life forever, yet I’d quite rightly be castigated if I let her decide that she was old enough to cross a road by herself. Frightening.

^^ this is genuinely what makes my heart lurch. I'm seeing it happen more and more, and it's only too plausible.

The rigid gender boxes that children are being backed into as a result of the trans ideology will result in the two categories of masculine and feminine.

And only boys can inhabit masculine, and girls, feminine. And stepping outside puts you on the path of transition. You must change your body to fit.

It is truly frightening. Especially when transitioning is seen as something to celebrate and fete. Which is being taught in schools.

Transitioning is regarded, in many places, as almost aspirational. Cool.

Which, as pp have explained, is very, very far from the reality.

What they need is a single all competitors category. Then "women" will never win anything, and everyone will be satisfied. :)

Sad thing is when I see a little girl in trousers as part of the school uniform I wonder ‘does she think she is a boy?’.

Erm no, I want questions asked as to why all of sudden we have pre-pubestcent children not wanting to identify as the sex they were born as. And why are people telling them that they can change sex?

Both of my girls have girls in their circle who "identify" as male. The oldest (now 16) is no happier now than when they were 'female'. It has changed nothing, except the loss of a strong female support network who they turned their back on.

I just wonder what we will think in 20 years time and what damage we'll have done in those 20 years... To be honest, I wonder what damage we will have caused these children in 20yrs time when they all start to discover that the puberty blockers and surgery their parents so willingly allowed them to undergo, made them infertile and then some.

^Sad thing is when I see a little girl in trousers as part of the school uniform I wonder ‘does she think she is a boy?’*

Why on Earth do you think that, rather than thinking ‘there’s a girl who wants warm legs’?

I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress or skirt, but that’s not because I think I’m male.