What does your network think about trans people?

[deeter]

Immediate family think it's all a bit silly, trans people should be treated well but you cannot change sex. Women's spaces should be protected etc.

But interestingly all of my university friends think trans women are women (did go to a London uni with well to do sorts).

I'm 31 btw.

@gannett A point I am constantly amazed the TERFs never acknowledge is that trans women are aat as high a risk of cis male violence as cis women.

I'm not sure that this is true, though yes, I expect that there is bullying and/or violence against trans people, which is never OK.

But, that doesn't mean that transwomen should come into women's spaces for protection. What about other vulnerable groups. Gay men? Disabled men? Boys at school who are bullied by the other boys? Should they all go into the women's toilets/changing rooms/prisons instead of the men's? Of course not.

The problem isn't with trans-people, the problem is the idiotic worship of gender segregated sport.

Sorry, what?! Male bodies have physiological advantages over female bodies. That's why they are segregated by sex. Sex btw, not gender.

Are there actually adults who don't get/understand this? Or is it silly season on MN as the schools are out?

And does anyone have any stats on attacks on transwomen in male toilets? Anyone?

My family think I'm a bigot and referred to me as a transphobe. After a conversation about how I feel it's important to safeguard women's spaces. It came up in a conversation about policies at DC's school. I said nothing offensive but made my position very clear. It's a view shared by most on here. They said they hope I'm not trying to groom my children into thinking like I do. I haven't spoken to them since. I'm heartbroken.

That you cannot change biological sex. Ever. And all the rest of it is either attention seeking nonsense from people who would still likely be miserable even if they identify as a unicorn, cat or tree. Or, it's just sad, bastard men with a fetish for sharing Marks & Spencer's changing room with young girls.

Our DDs and their boyfriends are sick to death of the whole shebang. They were forced to pander to this nonsense at school. One person in DD's A Level Art classes yo-yo'd between genders so often that everyone just gave up trying to accommodate them. Tiresome.

@ThisIsSaltySally

'The trans people' want gender segregated sports. I agree they have an unhealthy obsession with this when they already have access to fair competition and equal opportunity.

Women and most men want sex segregated sports in order to maintain fair competition and equal opportunity.

Though I'm not sure this is what you meant.....

The outcome of accepting someone is born in the wrong body, is the complete acceptance that someone should be allowed to use extreme body modifications to resemble the body they ‘feel they should have’.

Again, when you consider the implications of this and extend it to outside this particular group, what does it impact. Should all cosmetic surgery be available on the NHS? what are the limitations on this?

Should doctors immediately remove other body parts that a person feels is wrong? A leg amputation for the physically healthy person who believes they are disabled or who just wants that leg gone?

There are people who seem to honestly believe they are lizards and pay for body mods to resemble a lizard. Should we treat them as a lizard?

The research on whether these ‘gender affirming’ surgeries improve mental health is also inconclusive. Despite all the assurances from some heavily invested people. One study, that I am happy to link up was discredited as making conclusions that the data simply didn’t support.

Clinicians have been raising the alarm for years that the surgeries don’t seem to be delivering the mental health improvements that patients were hoping for. Yet, the discussion around any negative result is stifled. In fact, we have been told from trans people that they are threatened with being ostracised from their groups if they discuss negative outcomes.

Let me clarify: worshiping competitive sport is idiotic. All bodies are different, some advantaged over others. The problem here is when mid-wits feel the need to intensely tally and benchmark sport. Just enjoy physical activity in the company of anyone.

Because they can never explain why they are the opposite sex (or even, why they feel like the opposite sex), and they certainly can't explain why their desire to invade the spaces or sports used by the opposite sex should override the wishes of other people to segregate by biological sex.

So, instead of putting forward reasoned arguments, they resort to insults, hyperbole and nonsense like "be kind".

My friends and work colleagues are outwardly respectful of adopting ‘they them’ if they’re not sure if John or Jane likes to be known as a woman or a man, but deep down think this pandering to a tiny minority will, at best, blow over and at worse, is an erosion of women’s rights.

Lots of interesting comments to think about.

I do wonder though why talking about sex/biology etc is being reframed as right wing. I imagine across the political spectrum everyone has a physical body, if you get my drift?

I take it you are not interesting in competitive sport then ... good to know.

Yup this.

I’ve been heartened by how the reactions of the teens/young adults I know have developed over the years. My eldest was very much TWAW three years ago. Now she’s much more critically engaged with the issue as are her siblings and peers.

Agree. Never thought of myself as right wing until the trans debate. But I fundamentally don’t believe you can think yourself a woman.

I don't think the young girl near me who was raped by a "woman" will see it as a non issue. FFS can't people see how dangerous it can be to pander to this?

What about the elderly woman raped on a women's ward? She was told it couldn't happen because there was no males on the ward. There was a male, pretending to be a female. Is that a non issue?

Is it a non issue when girls and women get pushed out of sport when males take over?

Wear what you like, it doesn't change anything. I'm wearing jeans and a jumper from the men's section of M&S this morning. Still a woman, through and through.

Yes, of course there will be a small minority of people who want to dress up as the other sex and mean no harm but their reputation is being damaged by all the others.

I'm not sporty or interested in doing or watching any sports. What I am interested in is fairness.

How many women would get a gold medal in any sport if all sports were mixed-sex?

Remember this is a career for many women, and yet they're losing out to men who were mediocre in the male side of the sport yet are at the top of female sport.
Why do we think that is?

When did a certain part of society start believing that there are no differences in physicality between men and women?
I wonder if it's because of all the superhero stuff around now that shows women beating up groups of men with no problem.

except I don’t want to play sport against men and while some sports have reengaged their brain and said no men in women’s sport, other sports (looking at you England hockey for one) are still wringing their hands and enabling women being forced ti share changing rooms with men and at worst allowing women to be injured playing sport in order to pander to men

you may not give a fuck about sport but lots of women do

@ThisIsSaltySally if sports weren't segregated by sex, women wouldn't be able to compete at an elite level in most sports and wouldn't be able to compete safely at any level in many contact sports.

FWIW I'm male. When we became aware of the gender debate several years ago, my wife and I lost a few friends among our very left wing circle. Similarly to Salty, they used the argument that competetive sports were pointless and silly, as a way of justifying males in women's sports. And it's a pretty weak argument in my view.

Since then nearly everyone we've talked to in real life between us has agreed with our position that TW are not women, and sports and single sex spaces need to be separated by sex and not gender identity.

It's nice to see most people here have fairly sensible views on the issue.

All my working class friends and family think it's nonsense and obviously human beings can't change sex and men shouldn't be in women's spaces or sporting categories. Most don't realise how far things have gone. For instance, my dad was searching Google the other day for information on men's health and thought it was a joke that one of the suggested questions was 'can men get pregnant?' He told me in disbelief that Google's answer was yes. Destroyed his faith in the reliability of the answers it provides on anything else, I think.

I work in a university and I could not express this common sense view there; it's TWAW all the way. Very educated people coming out with absolute rot about sex being a spectrum and not questioning anyone's 'gender identity' - which they'll admit is distinct from sex but then conflate with sex for all practical and argumentative purposes.

It all feels a bit Emperor's New Clothes to me.

Yes, being assigned Tory/Lab/LibDem etc at birth is probably not a thing.

I work in FE. Most of the women in my department are very much for women only spaces.

Good point. I guess at 0 days old I had to trust in science to assign/label/dictate/name/document/calculate my sex.

This again comes back to the use of 'Gender Critical' and TERF that I posted pages back.

The framing of this as 'right wing' is the discrediting mechanism used by extreme trans activists (ie. those who demand that male people should be treated as female people in all aspects of their life) .

It is fuckwittery. Because some of the very first women who started to raise the alarm that the changes being demanded were harming women and children were the socialist feminists. The extreme activists realised that to keep those women silent, they could question their politics.

Then, as the alarm had been raised, other groups in society continued to raise the alarms. Remember that sex is immutable and should sometimes be prioritised is a universal belief. Some of those groups were conservative. That started to reinforce the activists narrative that campaigning to prioritise sex in law and policy was a 'right wing' issue.

Then it spread and more and more diverse groups started to discuss it. And the discussion spread to what some people call far right groups. Now, I have not had any poster yet prove that the groups they refer to as 'far right' are in fact 'far right'. That polarisation that has been mentioned comes into play here. Some people use the cognitive distortion of polarisation to position any group who they disagree with as 'far right'. I believe Sadiq Khan has resorted to calling people right wing or was it 'far right' in discussions of ULEZ. It is a tactic that is very dishonest when it is misrepresenting other's views.

It came to a head when people who might be right wing started attending events women held. Or groups who people describe as right wing, hold seminars and ask women to come onto panels to discuss the issue. Then extreme activists ramped up their name calling and started to call women 'nazis'. In Melboourne, a women's rights rally was somehow (no one has ever had police say why) Police allowed a group of neo-nazis into the area where women and other groups were holding their rallies on the stairs of Victoria's parliament house. The neo-nazis were wrongfully assumed to be aligned with the women's rights group but were actually supporting a group to the other side of the stairs who are fundamentalists. This was over looked to make false claims about the women. The neo nazis were also there to agitate the Socialist, ANTIFA and extreme trans activists who were there protesting the women's rights rally.

Now, media as well as extreme trans activists started to align women campaigning for sex based rights to be prioritised with 'nazis'. And that event also proliferated the media use of the term 'anti-trans campaigners'.

Seriously, what better way to attempt to make people feel that they cannot speak about the issue. What better way to attempt to portray any reasonable and fair minded person as being 'aligned with the far-right'. And so, here we are. I am happy to link people up with threads that highlight the progress of this false labelling.

TLDR: It is a very weak minded tactic to silence people who might disagree to call them 'right wing' when this mischaracterises that person and it means something to that person to be seen as kind, inclusive and on the right side of history.

Part of the problem is that in the same way that the trans lobby has tried/is trying to change the meaning of words, they have also changed the meaning of what it is to be trans and how to be trans.

I'm centre right, for context, so being called right wing doesn't bother me.

It seems to me that more and more to be considered a 'true' left wing person you have to buy into a whole package of beliefs, which not only includes actual left wing economic ideas, but completely unrelated stances like TWAW. Disagree on even one and you are 'not left wing', which according to the black and white thinking of purity culture, makes you right wing.

I don't think people on the right do this as much - they're more tolerant of disagreement and varied opinions. Short of claiming to be both right wing and Marxist or something you probably won't get told 'no you're not'.