Please help me understand the transgender issue

[Flippetydip]

I fully admit that I don't understand this issue fully at all. I consider myself fairly liberal but I do not feel that this is fair. It seems to be the Emperor's new clothes. The fact that the comments towards JKR on Twitter are so full of vitriol does not persuade me towards the thinking of those shouting them.

So my questions:

Emma Watson saying on Twitter
"Transwomen are who they say they are"
If I say I am a size 8, intellectually brilliant woman, does that make me so? (Currently size 12, edging towards a 14 and intellectually fairly mediocre).

What is the difference between appropriation of sex and appropriation of race?
If I say I am black and I'm not, why is that so horrific, and yet if I am a man and say I'm a woman, that is OK?

Why is JKR wrong to say that women menstruate? Surely that is just biological fact.

But what if I'm a transblack? I was assigned white race at birth, but I identify as being black.

No I didn’t drop it. You spoke for me by defining me and mumsnetters as largely transphobic. HTH

Try again. I didn’t describe you as transphobic. I haven’t defined you as anything (as you know, because if you could point to an example of this you would have by now).

I said mumsnet has an anti-trans slant; an expression of my own reasonably held opinion and clearly not the same as saying ‘everyone on mumsnet is transphobic’, since mumsnet obviously also includes myself and other posters who are supportive of trans rights and trans people.

You have chosen to take a very general statement of opinion as a personal attack directed at you specifically; a disingenuous and unfair tactic.

Rather than citing a handful of examples as evidence that transgender people aren't who they say they are why not campaign against those particular examples but not deny transgender human beings the basic right to be themselves.

Who is denying transgender people 'the basic right to be themselves'?

do we accept transwomen and transgirls - who still have male bodies and in many cases male genitals - into women’s changing rooms? Women’s hospital wards? Women’s prisons? (Several biologically male prisoners are now identifying as women and wish to be transferred to women’s prisons) . Women’s sports teams (where they tend to outperform and therefore exclude natal women)? Girls’ boarding schools? Girls’ dorms on school trips?

Girlguiding is more than happy to accept boys and men into girls' dorms, toilets etc on residential trips. Any member who objects is expelled from Guiding.

Any girl or woman who doesn't want to share with a man or boy must be offered her own, separate accommodation and washing facilities :(

[quote Flippetydip]@zscaler - there is also a lot of pro-trans people on here as well. I was hoping that they are going to come and answer my questions in a reasoned manner or that someone will come and point me to reasoned articles.

The pro-trans lobby that I see on the internet in general make me terrified to ask questions as I will automatically be labelled "anti-trans" and a TERF (I had to look that one up....).[/quote]
And where else have you been frightened to speak up about your experiences for fear of threats and sexually aggressive language? Where else are you shut down by being called a feminist? Where else do you find women scrambling to distance themselves from other women for fear of receiving this kind of treatment?

Marsalimay skincolour dysphoria.is not a thing. It just makes you look unsympathetic if you completely fail to acknowledge the agony people with gender dysphoria go through.

Men who identify as women have already been placed in female prisons. Men who identify as women have already been allowed to enter shelters for extremely vulnerable women.

Men who identify as women have already raped and assaulted women in prisons.

It’s not something that might someday happen. It is happening now.

Who is denying transgender people 'the basic right to be themselves'?

Jkrowling

very few transgender people benefit in terms or money or statue from transitioning. The only benefit to them is the ability to live authentically.

Tell that to the women who have lost in their sports to Rachel McKinnon or Laurel Hubbard. To the women who have missed out on 'women's' sports scholarships to males. Tell that to the woman who was moved out so that Pip Bunce could be 'included' in the top 100 women in business list. Tell that to perspective Labour women's officer candidates who lost out to the likes of Lily Madigan. Tell the victims of Karen White that the only benefit to Karen of transitioning was 'the ability to live authentically'.

Jkrowling

How exactly? What exactly are rights is she denying them of?

@Frozenfan2019

Who is denying transgender people 'the basic right to be themselves'?

Jkrowling

She explicitly accepts and acknowledges that right in her essay, more than once. You clearly have not read it.

How exactly? What exactly are rights is she denying them of?

The right to be acknowledged as men

Correct me if I’m wrong, please, but iirc girl guides policy states that as far as they are concerned there is absolutely no safeguarding issue in having mixed sex sleeping arrangements, nor in cases where a leader (or whatever they’re called) who, for example, identifies as female is placed with girls and young women. It also further states that parents do not need to be told about such circumstances.

Have I got that right?

@zcaler
Actually I don’t have time to look up. I’m writing this in between homeschooling my dd so excuse me if my last response was not 100% accurate. You did say mumsnet is a bad place to get these answers and called this place anti trans. Basically you have proclaimed we, natal women, are not up to the task of answering questions on trans, a subject which deeply affects us and our families. It really isn’t a big leap to surmise the inference that the users of this site to be transphobic.

You understand it op.
It's all a bit emperor's new clothes.

skincolour dysphoria.is not a thing. It just makes you look unsympathetic if you completely fail to acknowledge the agony people with gender dysphoria go through.

I don't mean just my skin colour, I mean in every way.

Also, I am very sympathetic to trans people and strongly defend their right to live as they want to live with acceptance and freedom from violence or prejudice.

I just believe that sex is a biological fact.

Yes, I still don't understand why I can't identify as a black person if I am white? How the logic is different?

If I paint my face black, wear my hair in corn rows, change my name, wear gold hoop earrings and a headscarf, listen to hip hop music and , do I get to declare that I am black? Do I get to tell black people that centering discussion of their skin colour and their oppression based on that skin colour is excluding me? Do I get to take awards, scholarships, posts in charities that were meant for black people? Do I tell black people that I am just as much of a black person as them, and in fact I am more oppressed than them because they have the 'privilege' of being 'cis black'? Do I define what 'being black' means, and tell them that their definitions are wrong and 'exclusionary' and that they enormous bigots for ever questioning what I say?

I nearly wrote this this post the other day. Not to be goady at all but because I really cannot make sense of it. I am not anti trans. I am pro woman. I never thought I would find those two things in contradiction with one another. I just keep standing there catching flies every time I think about this.

@Ninkanink

Correct me if I’m wrong, please, but iirc girl guides policy states that as far as they are concerned there is absolutely no safeguarding issue in having mixed sex sleeping arrangements, nor in cases where a leader (or whatever they’re called) who, for example, identifies as female is placed with girls and young women. It also further states that parents do not need to be told about such circumstances.

Have I got that right?

You are absolutely correct Nikanink.

And any girl who identifies as a boy or woman who identifies as a man (so transboys and transmen??) are asked to leave GG.

A boy or man who puts a skirt on though, with no gender recognition certificate, doctor's note or anything can happily join in on any residential and share sleeping arrangements with a girl.

Although it's (rightly) discouraged, this sometimes involves Leaders physically supporting children to get dressed, toilet themselves, injure
themselves, wake up homesick in the night etc

She didnt say all women menstruate. She said women menstruate. As in, all the people who menstruate are women, but not all women menstruate. Same as all thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs.

skincolour dysphoria.is not a thing. It just makes you look unsympathetic if you completely fail to acknowledge the agony people with gender dysphoria go through.

I do acknowledge the agony that people with gender dysphoria go through. But I don't think that gives males with gender dysphoria the right to encroach on our sports, our refuges, our female only spaces. It doesn't give them the right to silence us when we want to talk about our reproductive systems and how they are used to oppress women all over the world. It doesn't give them the right to redefine woman when we are telling them that we don't want to be redefined.

Anyway, I thought talking about gender dysphoria was transphobic these days, because being trans isn't a mental illness?

That’s how a certain faction with a very specific agenda want you to feel. It is in their interests to continuously muddy the waters. Their whole cult relies nothing but an elaborate house of cards built on magical thinking, negation of biological fact and erasure of material reality.

But it’s actually very simple and straightforward. Binary, in fact.

I have very similar questions to the OP and I would sincerely love for somebody to explain it to me rationally and help me come to an understanding, because at the moment I often feel divided between complete support for trans issues and some kind of unsettlement from feeling as though my gender is no longer 'valid'.

The thing that recently unnerved me was a thread started here on the Feminism Chat board - Scotland (I believe) have recently updated their legal explanation as to what a woman is, to include trans women. But they haven't done this for men or trans men. That made me feel very uncomfortable.

I asked very similar questions at the time Rachel Dolezeal (sp?) was big in the news - why couldn't she 'identify' as black if a man can identify as a woman? I still wonder this.

I have difficulty believing that an entire huge section of the population is completely unreasonable, I don't think that's the case - I really hope to find more answers and understanding about these issues and come to a place where I can feel both comfortable and protected as a woman, and supportive and sympathetic towards trans people.

OP got it perfectly right in the OP.

Also, everyone with any common sense is backing JKR.

My above comments refers to the confusion felt by those who are perfectly aware of the absolute truth of biological fact but are trying to understand how that squares with a certain ideology.