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?

Compete in the gender they identify as

No. Because they you put biological women at risk.

It’s not rocket science.

The phrase "born in the wrong body" is an attempt to communicate what having severe sex dysphoria feels like. I don't think the people who came up with it expected other, non dysphoric, people to take it quite so literally.

To take it literally requires a belief in gendered souls. You've got these souls with a sex of their own floating around. We're expected to believe that these souls sometimes for some unknown reason land in bodies of the wrong sex.

I find the concept totally preposterous. The Pope who, unlike me, specialises in souls says that God doesn't do random shit like that. Though he put it more elegantly.

They take hormones and have surgery to make their outside match their inside

And here we have the problem of western European philosophy: the maintenance of an articial split between 'mind' and 'body' - as if they can be different things.

Our brains are part of the system which is our whole body. And our 'mind' or sense of self, or whatever, is a product of very very complex interactions between our body, including our brain and our hormonal systems etc, and out environment, both social (interaction with people) and material (interaction with things).

It's amazing and complex and wonderful, but can't be reduced to mind and body in opposition. To do that is to drastically reduce an understanding of the amazing complexity of being human.

Oh god I knew I wouldn't be able to describe it well. I'm tired and it's been a long day at work.

I don't get why mumsnet is so anti-trans.

Ignore everything I said, as you were.

No. It doesn't matter what you look like. A male will always have a physical advantage over a female. To have him compete with girls wouldn't be fair to the girls.

I don't get why mumsnet is so anti-trans

Pro-women isn’t anti-trans. It’s disingenuous to suggest that.

Anti trans my arse. Pro women isn’t anti anything. Try again. With examples and show your working out.

But back to souls - I always assumed (from my Sunday school days) that souls were sexless, like shadows, and they were just slipped into the body at some stage. Somehow.

Ignore everything I said, as you were.

People are doing the exact opposite of ignoring you. They are engaging with you and trying to get you to expand on what you are saying.

After all, if your opinion is that men can be women and can take women's place in sport, have access to women's spaces etc. Then presumably you have something concrete with which to back up that opinion, that can withstand robust debate?

This is a glorious thread full of female solidarity. My takes from this thread are as follows:

*Our daughters need to know that the adults have got their back and that their sport is important and that it will be protected from male-bodied athletes.

All children should also know that it's not possible to change sex, and we need to stop this lie being taught to them in school.*

Thanks mumsnet for letting the thread stand.

Gender is not as simple as male / female. There are people born intersex.

Intersex people are still either male or female.

And in general don’t want to be dragged into this shitstorm as a ‘gotcha!’.

And in general don’t want to be dragged into this shitstorm as a ‘gotcha!’.

Yeah, that as well.

Assuming you accept the trans argument 11 is far too young for any such determination. Sounds more like child abuse. Surely it's acceptable to segregate sport by sex!

glorious thread full of female solidarity

Hear, hear!

Oh fgs all 5y olds want to be a girl/boy/dog/tiger/cowboy. My son wanted to marry me when he was 5 and swore blind he would never love anyone else. Does that mean he's going to be into incest when he's post puberty sexual adult? People have lost their minds, taking what 4/5/6/7/8y olds say literally. Bonkers. (He's not, he now wants to marry a little girl called Charlotte in his class at school, good thing I didnt hold him to what he said at 5 or make irreversible changes to his body based on it eh?)

Transgender people fundamentally feel they were born in the wrong body. They take hormones and have surgery to make their outside match their inside.

This is gender dysphoria. It's a condition. It doesn't mean they are literally in the wrong body. There is no such thing as an innate essence.

If you woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, yes of course you would be a man! Biological sex is a description of potential reproductive function. That's it.

It's not a description of the way you think, feel, or any sartorial preferences.

Back in the day, before this all kicked off, men had to sign a form to say they totally understood that they were biologically male, before they were given a GRC.

I don't suppose the medical profession wanted to encourage people in the delusion that they were actually of the opposite sex.

If you need further proof that the term 'being born in the wrong body', was just a stepping stone, it is now entirely transphobic to say even that.

Now the body is not wrong. The penis is female. As are the testicles. Or they are a genital abnormality, in some cases. Which need to be corrected with surgery.

XY people and XX people are both female, just with varying degrees of anatomy.

It's all nonsense.

And our children are being taught it.

We're back to definitions again. Always good to reiterate:

Sex: the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women
Gender: the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.
(source: WHO)

There is excellent scientific evidence that transgender people have brains that are wired as the opposite gender to their body.

No there isn't. Every time I've been told there's "excellent evidence" it's been very weak, based on tiny studies with no controls or an opinion piece.

However there was a relevant study. They scanned the brains of would be black cab drivers who were doing what's called The Knowledge, a prodigious feat of memory in which you learn every single tiny street in the whole of London and hundreds of potential destinations. They looked at the brains before and after.

The area of the brain that applies to map reading and geography was massively increased by the process. This is because the brain is extremely plastic and so how we live, what we do alters it.

HopelessLayout

Exactly.

It's amazing that people will determine sex based on an innate sense of something they can't describe, verify or prove, and, it's something that changes from person to person. Some people have it, some people don't. Some people change it on a daily basis.

But they won't describe sex biologically.

Even though, it's women, yet again, who are being asked to budge up. It's women who are being beaten in sport. It's women who are being assaulted in prison.

Funny that, it still seems to fall down on the biological divide.

There are people who believe - deeply and completely - that they want a limb amputated. It’s not as rare as you would imagine. Now what type of doctor would amputate a healthy and pain free limb?

Sadly I read an article where some were found who would do such a thing - obviously for the highest ethical and moral reasons (cough £££$$$$$ cough).

Has this person got a penis, that will answer your question.

Gender: the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

Which are historically & culturally specific, and can therefore change over time or geography.

Boys used to wear pink and dresses, people!

DSs school colours are black/charcoal and pink. His sports kit is white and pink. And I’m not talking raspberry it’s bright pink. Dear me.

ooooooo the whole school is really a girl, LordProfFekko !!! Totally woke.

I don't get why mumsnet is so anti-trans

It's not. It's pro women and against child abuse. I don't know why you'd find that surprising when the site is called mumsnet.