Gender and pronouns

[Wyki]

Before I start, the daily mail and other papers can all fuck off

I’m prepared to be flamed for this as I’ve been here long enough to know how it all works but….

aibu to tell my son he can’t have his partner over any more

It’s a new relationship. My son is 21 and the new partner is 18

He barely works and is consequently on a low salary however he does help me with childcare (that I pay a minimal amount for)

the new partner is a very petite pink haired “girl” that does ballet and dance but uses the pronoun he/him

my 11 year old daughter is finding it confusing and asked if her brother is gay. I replied with “no because the partner is very feminine and is a girl despite the pronouns” (I couldn’t care less if he was gay, sexuality isn’t important)

So am I being unreasonable in saying the partner doesn’t come over as it’s just too weird and I don’t want that example being set for my daughter

No doubt Laws, rights and duties regarding freedom of expression, sex separation, and protected beliefs can like wise be dismissed from the public sphere by denial too, thus the complete discombobulation caused to magic-thinkers by the wrong-think on MN.

MN is a terrible place where women form 'strong opinions' on things like 'other people's bodies' or how a woman or a man or a sex is defined even though it's clearly 'no concern' for women - because of course other people's bodies never have an impact women, and women are what ever men say they are, so shut up and be kind.

edited for sp

I know! Right? Such a fucking disgrace of a place so we are told so regularly.

Usually by people who have their own personal definitions for words that are different from established meanings, such as 'kind', 'respect', 'woman', 'female' and well.... you get the picture. It is such a good thing though, isn't it, that there are people on this thread to keep us all in line.

(and obviously, I am joining in on your sarcasm)

When they accuse us of denying the existence of trans people, what they actually mean is that we don't believe in the existence of male women, female men, or people who are neither male nor female.

That is true. I don't believe in that.

But that's simply not believing that trans women are women. It's not believing that trans women don't exist.

And the problem for trans activists like Tandora is that nobody actually believes trans women are women. Not even the people who pretend they do.

Of course people believe in the existence of gender non conforming people.

They just aren't prepared to pretend that men can become women.

It is really something to watch though. People try to present a convincing argument that male people can be female and therefore those with a specific philosophical belief should have their philosophical belief prioritised.

And that an 18 year old female person’s choice of pronoun should be respected when it is the pronoun used by English language conventions for the opposite sex.

With the bonus of there being something medically testable to define someone’s belief in their transgender identity. I wonder how someone is tested for gender fluidity to correctly categorise them into that group? And Neptune gender?

When I got through this thread this morning, I was surprised that we hadn’t reached the dishonest deconstruction / reconstruction of the term ‘biological female’. You know, the ‘I am biological and not a robot, and my ID says I am female’ breakdown. From a medical Dr working in psychiatry.

Then I wondered if Dr Upton’s recent use of it has finished that one off and we won’t see it again.

I mean, I expect it from someone with a gender studies doctorate. But hearing that from an NHS doctor was a shock for many, I think.

So you ignore and attempt to discredit the PP on here that actually has a DSD and has requested many times that you stop misusing their condition in your arguments as it is not related to trans in any meaningful way, yet you insist that we all
accept the assertion from any man that they are really and truly a woman (or one of 100+ ‘genders’) and that we accept them unquestioningly into our spaces despite the repeated harm caused.

It has been pointed out many times before, DSDs are a verifiable medical condition. ‘Trans’ is not. You admit yourself there is no medical test for ‘trans’ (while claiming that there is in the same post but providing zero evidence).

The Algerian boxer had previously been banned from another boxing league after chromosome tests showed him to be male. The trans activists at the Olympics decided to ignore that and knowingly inflict him on female boxers. It is an interesting demonstration of your contempt towards women that you support that.

It is over though. Even the trans activists that briefly popped up in this thread couldn’t dredge up any actual arguments. Everyone knows the truth.

This is nonsense, being 'gender bending' is nothing new in the 90's men who liked to wear makeup never claimed to be women and they certainly didn't presume the right to enter women's single sex spaces.

I dated a guy who was gender non conforming. We didn't claim to be lesbians.

Complete bollocks as usual from you.

Exactly.

Oh yes, Tandora has shown themselves repeatedly to be somebody who is quite happy if more women get raped in what were once safe spaces, just as long as any men aren’t unhappy.

Exactly. It's like accusing people who don't believe in God to be denying the existence of religious people. Its quite possible to accept the existence of people who believe different things from ourselves and live alongside them with respect, provided their beliefs cause us no harm and/or we are not compelled to share them. Where any belief system strays into the latter, its completely understandable there will be push back from those who don't share it.

I genuinely don't know anyone who believes that one may choose ones sex and change it at will. However I also don't know anyone who would deliberately set out to throw that in trans people's faces, no more than they would go into a church and shout 'There is no God you fools!'

When i see people challenging trans ideology it's not based in cruel needless interference with how other people live their lives, simply to control or hurt, its based in a genuine concern that they themselves are being forced to actually participate in things they find uncomfortable,
like OP being expected to confuse her daughter by incorrect pronoun use. In my experience outside of forums where the issue is discussed in detail, I find this reflects the majority view. Harm none, do as you will.

I still can't get over the absolute brass fucking neck of people who accuse others of "denying the existence of trans people" whilst simultaneously denying that there is a category of female people which can be defined according to objective criteria and for whom we need a word.

Yes. It's as staggering as demanding everyone agree that sex is impossible to distinguish and label clearly, ever, in anyone, while doing this in order to try and enforce a binary hierarchy that one group has absolute power and the other group must submit and enable on their sexed basis . Proving that whatever they say they absolutely believe in binary sex, and the power hierarchy of quite extreme sexism.

The 'denying existence' thing is a very worn out trope by now. I am very sorry for someone who feels provoked into existential crisis by others being unwilling to enable their personal views, but I'm not a therapist and I'm not their mum, I can't help with that. I'm sure there are services that can.

Nailed it. As did @MissScarletInTheBallroom .

I'd also point out the usual basic double standards:

It is wrong to deny that GI exists because so damaging and hurtful - but absolutely fine to repeatedly deny that your biologically sexed identity exists, or your homosexual identity, or anything else providing inconvenient boundaries and if it's damaging and hurtful then tough

It is wrong to use the wrong pronouns and language of people's choice, it's unkind and offensive - but absolutely fine to compel and bully those who wish to use their own chosen language and pronouns and that's ok offensiveness and unkindness

Why should anyone healthy want to enter into a one sided, one way, non reciprocal relationship like this?

Exactly this. It’s seemingly acceptable, and even preferred, to refer to women as “chest feeders”, “cervix havers” “birthing parent”, “menstruators” anything, in fact, except women.
Yet conversely, there mere act of having misgendered someone will cause them untold trauma and must be avoided at all costs…
Someone is being erased and it isn’t trans people.

Nobody psychologically and emotionally healthy would enter into such a relationship.

Only pathological people-pleasers who believe themselves to be inherently subordinate to another class of people, with self-esteem so low or non-existent that they’re in a state of self-loathing, would enter into such an abusive relationship.

Tandorra's posts are abhorrent.

I hope you are OK.

It's the relentless dishonesty of the TRA discourse that gets me the most.

The denial of sex's obvious importance and its binary / immutable nature. The refusal to even define what they mean by 'trans' while simultaneously lecturing us all on how we should centre it. The fraudulent attempts to connect trans identification with DSDs with zero evidence. The constant dismissal and gaslighting of women's genuine and legitimate concerns. The willingness to argue any old crap if they think it will muddy the waters.

The whole discourse is a moral, intellectual, logical and emotional dumpster fire - driven by people whose hatred of women is palpable.

Ignoring Tandora, and thank you to the posters who have supported me - it's worth pointing out that trans people have always been able to use the toilet associated with their chosen gender. The difference being that people used to make a conceivable effort to "transition". All of us have undoubtedly been in the loo with a trans woman. Some of them have been pretty obvious but most of them haven't because of the extreme amount of work they put into their transition. It isn't something they do easily or half-heartedly. This aggression and demand that women capitulate or else, the demand to compete with women, didn't exist twenty years or so ago. When I first started discussing this with friends I was shocked by their strong reactions to the subject as I hadn't read much about it and only had my own experiences to go on.

Nowadays simply "identifying" as x or y is enough, and that's what is frightening. I see the female loos as a safe space that men can't get into. If they can get in there simply by identifying as a woman, and I'm apparently a bigot for being frightened of this, it's a massive step backwards for feminism and humanity.

The issue I have with the statement that "trans people have always used spaces in accordance with their gender identity" is that women were never consulted about this.

Even decades ago when it was just a tiny handful of men who made a real effort to pass as women and didn't mean any harm, it was still a problem, because they will still have been using single sex spaces for members of the opposite sex, in the presence of members of the opposite sex who didn't consent to them being in there. They were still unilaterally changing a single sex space into a mixed sex space, without the permission of the people that single sex space was actually for.

It has been a problem since the very first time a trans person decided it was OK to do this. What is different today is the scale of the problem, and the pure aggression towards anyone who say, "Actually, this isn't OK."

That's fair enough , indeed.

Quite.

The GRA was the attempt at making the compromise work. The original plan was - as MissScarlet says without any consulting of women or regarding them as relevant in any way - that a very small number of men would use those women and spaces, but they would be in the process of full medical transition and the numbers would be so small that the impact on women was somehow dismissable.

It has been destruction tested. It has not worked for women. That some men have been able to treat women in this way and get away with it for a long time does not equate to it being ok for them to crack on, and for any and all other men to join in. And to continue to push the boundaries of how far women and their spaces can be abused.

It might have worked had the men involved respected and cared about women, and behaved appropriately. They chose not to. They have in fact proven exactly why women must have absolutely water tight strict protections in law that cannot be wangled or abused by any man, and that while it will be nice when men can just treat women appropriately and we can relax some of the sex based boundaries, it won't be in this century.

It is always that lack of consent from female people that started this entire issue. From what I have read, a couple of male doctors told their male patients that of course they should use female single sex spaces. They said this without female people agreeing.

This has hit the nail on the head. I remember as far back as my teens (long before a trans identity was widespread or popular). There was a much older male hung around with us as teenagers on the music scene.Us girls were already incredibly wary of him as he was known for being “handsy”. The boys treated him with a mixture of pity and ridicule.At some point, he declared himself a woman, and would turn up at events in leopard print and wearing a tiara.He would follow us girls into venue toilets as though he had a right to be there, making us all incredibly uncomfortable but no one was brave enough to speak up. He was a MUCH larger man maybe 15 years our senior. But now allegedly he was a “girl”, just like we were. He was not, as far as I know, on any hormones and most definitely had no desire for any type of surgery as he made repeated boastful mention of his “snake” as he called it. It was vile then. Although rare. It’s still vile now. Although much less rare.
At no point were women or girls consulted on whether we wanted these men in our spaces. They just appeared, alongside a concerted public campaign to decry anyone who wasn’t happy about it as a vile bigot.

There are a couple of significant issues with the argument that these male people have always used the female single sex spaces. These are in no order, by the way.

Firstly, just because some people decided female single sex spaces should become mixed sex and that this special group of male people could access the space, didn't make it the right decision for society. There was no consultation, just the decision made and female people had to put up with it.

Then, the argument is falsely premised that it was 'just a few' so female people shouldn't mind. And that action then was used to leverage in more and more male people so this 'just a few' argument is used to disguise a slippery slope issue. We are also seeing it used as we speak for leveraging in some male people into female sport.

Then, there is an inherent element of reward for effort either directly stated or indirectly implied with 'those male people who 'pass' / made great effort to 'pass'/ had surgeries etc had access or should have access. No male person who has a transgender identity should be accessing the female single sex spaces at all. Extreme body modifications do not make a male person female, and no amount of body modifications should be needed to access a space that is not and never was for them. It is not a reward to be gained by any level of effort at all. And any person declaring that if a male person has had surgery they can enter, applies pressure too to go that step further to 'earn' being considered 'female'. When this is just not possible and those male people should simply accept that they should not access those spaces and find their own solution that doesn't mean accessing spaces that are female only.

This argument about 'passing' also resolves around the 'you cannot tell' argument as we have seen on this thread already.

Then there is the argument that there is danger to male people in the male spaces because of their presentation as a female person. Yet, we also know that there are some male people with transgender identities who do use the male toilets without an issue. Even so, if there IS an issue with safety for any vulnerable male people in male toilets, where are the campaigns to fix this societal issue? Where are the programmes designed to make male single sex spaces safe and welcoming to all male people? There are quite a large number of groups of male people who are similarly vulnerable to come to harm in male single sex spaces. Should ALL those male people also have access to the female single sex spaces because they face what really seems to be the same risk to their safety? Why is this group of male people so special? Female people, it can be surmised, are just human shields.

There really is an issue too with the argument 'some male people really are transgender and should be allowed into the female single sex space', Who arbitrates which male people 'pass' and which ones don't? Who arbitrates which male people are 'really transgender' and which male people are not 'really transgender'.

Then there is the argument about mental health of those who are excluded. But again, this puts female people in the position of mental health support for a group of male people. Again, without consent. There are plenty of things in life that people are legitimately excluded from. If a person is legitimately excluded, then that needs to be accepted.

Of course, not all male people are going to cause female people harm to female people. Still, using safeguarding risk assessment on a collective group basis, male people continue to be excluded from single sex spaces. Yet, some people argue that male people with transgender identities should not be excluded and should receive special treatment for having a transgender identity (ie. a philosophical belief is the only commonality between those people with transgender identities).

It defies strong safeguarding principles. Because there is no evidence at all that in the UK a male person at any stage of transition is less of a risk of committing a sex offence than the rest of the UK male population. There is certainly no evidence at all that that group of male people have the same or less risk of committing a sex offence than a female person. So, there is simply no basis for them to be separated out for special treatment.

It is irrelevant that some male people historically access female single sex spaces. Because those male people should never have been there in the first place. There was no and still is no argument to support their presence.