Gender swap situation

[TenThousandYears]

I know you're all probably fed up hearing about this subject...I just need to vent.

DD has been friends with "Sally" for 10 years. (Both 14) Since nursery. In the last few months Sally has decided to change gender and now wants to be called " Ron"

DD just can't wrap her head around this. If she slips up, she gets nasty looks from "Ron" and so she's treading on eggshells.

Ron's brother still refers to Ron as Sally so DD is very confused by it all.

I'm on DDs side. Personally, I would hate to be in her shoes right now. I think if you meet someone and are introduced to them as whomever then that's easier to accept than having to change names and pronouns of someone you've been friends with for 10 years. On TV shows people just accept this straight away and move on but I'm not convinced that it's really that easy.

I also think 14 is a bit young for these changes but that's just my personal opinion.

Are me and my child horrible people for not being able to accept this right away?

Well you clearly have zero understanding or empathy.

I think if you spent some more time getting to know an actual trans person (I don’t mean kids experimenting with identities) and listening with curiosity and without judgement, you very well might acquire more of both those things . maybe you just don’t have that capacity 🤷🏼‍♀️ (but most people do).

Bullshit. But you know this.

Aw, c’mon, is that all you got?

I know many friends, family and colleagues dealing with incredibly difficult traumas and sad situations — bereavement, terminal or serious illness, child loss, awful personal circumstances, addiction, suicide, rape, assault — some really awful stuff. I have huge empathy for them. Many women here will have experienced the same themselves or in supporting others. People all around us are often left to ‘get on with it’ and deal with things that are unimaginably difficult and sad, with little or no support. So, unfortunately, forgive me for finding the self-indulgences of “identity” issues rather less weighty than the really awful things that can happen to a person. Many of these are things that people live with life-long as pain or trauma that never really goes away.

So I have some empathy for young people who are sucked in to silly fads and discourses online; but what makes you think that “identity”, especially gender identity, is actually deserving in reality of all of this rhetoric about “empathy” and “vulnerability” and “my lived experience”, and “no-one else can understand me!” and so on?

Wanting to be something you aren’t is an everyday fact of life for most people. Most people also have a lot worse to deal with in life than that. Not only for the actual young people, but also for the (largely) middle aged men who come out as trans, all of this has the quality of teenagery self-absorption, of believing that your self and your appearance and how people see you is everything and the centre of all the world (and much of “trans” discourse is very very shallow, all about clothes and makeup and appearance and me-me-me, and a fair amount of whining about how mean mummy is for not going along with it all).

So forgive us if we reserve more of our “empathy” for people who have much worse problems in life than “identity” ones, whether as actual teenagers; or as older middle-aged men. In the grand scheme of things, really, quite a lot of it is self-delusion and dwelling too much on the self overall. And the most “empathetic” thing to do with that is really to say come on, let’s get things in perspective, get off your online “communities”; and think about reality a bit more, and things that aren’t just about what you want to be real, but how you accommodate yourself to how your life actually is, and all the things you can do with it and for other people, not just yourself.

Oh my. 😂😂😂 Did you hurt yourself when you landed after that leap?

Show me where I said anything about the number of sexes or whether anyone can change sex. You won't be able to, because I have said precisely nothing about that.🙄And I am not trans myself, nor have I ever experienced gender dysphoria, I just happen to be capable of accepting that different people have different experiences. Glad we got that cleared up.

This thread started off as being about gender identity, not whether there are more than two sexes, and personally it irks the crap out of me when people hijack the more troublesome aspects of the gender debate as an excuse to be intolerant about anyone who struggles with their gender identity on any level. My posts were not attempts to get into the wider gender debate - there's a whole bloody forum on which to discuss that.

What irks me about this thread is, yes, the absolutely breathtaking blind arrogance, by which I meant nothing relating to sexes, spaces, safeguarding, or any of that. Those are separate, wider debates imo, which also need to be had. 'Blind arrogance' was specifically a reference to pps baying that there's no such thing as deadnaming, no such thing as gender dysphoria, no such thing as living as a member of the opposite sex, 'correcting' pps' wording, the placing of quote marks around terms that are in the actual dictionary ffs, the overall trend on this thread to state opinions as hard facts, and of course let's not forget the the oh-so-edgy 'hides head in hands' emoji repeatedly being used to invalidate opposing perspectives (which imo says something completely different about that particular poster than they presumably think it does, but let's not get sidetracked here.)

What I am saying is that some people on this thread seem pathologically incapable of grasping that they cannot simply browbeat others into agreeing with them. And that merely because they believe specific things around gender (as opposed to sex), it doesn't make them right. And that, nothing more, is what I meant by blind arrogance. HTH.

Cult think. That's given me my best laugh of the day so far. 😂

it irks the crap out of me when people hijack the more troublesome aspects of the gender debate as an excuse to be intolerant about anyone who struggles with their gender identity on any level.

But there's no logic to responding in this way if you do struggle with personal identity. Why choose first to frame your identity within the boundaries of narrow stereotypes (often of your own making) and then get upset when you don't want to live within those rigid stereotypes - when nobody was ever forcing you to do so in the first place?

Suppose your name is Alex, but you look at the other people called Alex whom you know or recognise, but decide that you really don't identify or wish to live, dress, talk, look like or present in the same way as Alex Jones, Alex Scott, Alex Brooker, Alex Horne, your friend's mum Alex or your brother-in-law Alex.

Great news! Nobody is ever telling you that you must try to live as a carbon copy of any of them. They are them and you are you. You're Alex Robertson, an individual like nobody else (even other people who also happen to be called Alex Robertson). You only need to identify as you - and the vast majority of how you identify is very much determined by what you want you to be.

Everything you’ve posted here is part of the “cult” discourse @ruethewhirl

Example:
anyone who struggles with their gender identity

Imaging going back even just twenty years and saying that. It’s such a contemporary thing to say - the rhetoric of “struggle”, which then was reserved for physical illnesses like cancer - and the idea of “struggling with gender identity” at all. Gender was thought of as external social behaviour - so someone might “struggle” with gender roles, but not really with their own “identity”! And why struggle? Lots of people in the twentieth century weren’t keen on how gender roles were, or the fact of them at all, and they just wore their trousers or studied Engineering or played with Meccano and nobody thought they were “struggling”.

Plenty, in fact almost all, of the rather conventionally “feminine” women also didn’t much like the gender roles they were offered, and wanted jobs and equal pay and not to be sexually harassed, and they weren’t “struggling” with “gender identity” either: they were trying to overthrow sexism, which is what it was quaintly called at the time.

Finally, though, and you’ve rather hoist yourself on your own petard here: we all know that the whole point about “gender identity” in contemporary gender discourse is its relationship to sex. People who are trans are not “struggling with their gender identity”. They’re struggling with their sex - and precisely with their “gender identity” (so-called) not fitting their sex. Otherwise, why would they be struggling? If gender identity is an internal sense of “gender”, it can be whatever people want it to be. It’s the inconvenient sexed body aspect that is the struggle, as we’re constantly being told — the hurt feeling and dysphoria are all about not being the “right” sex/in the “right” body.

Just another example of the daft snits and snares gender ideology gets itself into. It’s all incoherent and inconsistent. Gender and sex are completely different except when they aren’t. Gender is socially constructed, oh no it’s not it’s an innate feeling, oh it’s not it’s a magical something else. People know instinctively who they are, and what gender they are, except they also don’t, and it’s a mental illness, except no it’s not, it’s gender dysphoria, which is a mental illness except it’s not a mental illness, no it’s just their body doesn’t match who they know they are, no it’s not it’s the gendered soul, and so on and so forth.

It’s exhausting. And philosophically and practically incoherent and logically contradictory. That’s why we say, as upthread here - that it’s just not true. And none of it can even all be true at the same time even if you’re sympathetic to the whole business. The genderist posters on this thread can’t even agree on what gender and sex are, or what is an “identity”.

Oh and @ruethewhirl, using quotation marks around words and phrases is normally commonly done when quoting others, even when the words are in fact, “in the dictionary”!

That’s why I use them. I’m quoting other posters (you, amongst them). That’s why the quotation marks are there. Around the words. That are from the dictionary. Hope that helps.

Totally agree.

Have you listened to women’s concerns especially but not limited to the safe guarding of children?

You know as well as I do there's sometimes more to people putting things in quotes than that. But your other post has shown that you have zero openness to seeing any perspectives other than your own (and as for the accusation of cultism, I can't even), so I'm not wasting any further keystrokes arguing with you. Have a nice day.

How is pointing out the inconsistencies in your own posts not “seeing any perspectives other than my own”? I’m engaging with your own stated perspective.

If you can’t respond to logical argument, I agree, don’t waste your time trying to.

I don't consider my posts on here to have been inconsistent in terms of context, nor lacking in logic, and as for the quote marks thing you're being disingenuous. I suspect your definition of logic is anything you personally agree with. Bye now.

👏👏☝

Or indeed being able to explain how a man “lives as a woman"

Are you able to define how a man “lives as a woman”?

Just a sentence will do?

You wrote about how people struggling with their gender identity is not about sex, or questions of sex and gender as a wider debate. Yet why would they struggle with it if it wasn’t? If their gender identity wasn’t believed to be at odds with their sex, they wouldn’t struggle with it, would they?

As for cult language, the very phrase “gender identity”, especially framed in context with the idea of “struggle”, is part of a very specific gender ideology and only remotely makes sense within that. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people outside of that, as you’ll find if you try using it widely in conversation with people beyond a very narrow demographic. There’s no material or scientific evidence of “gender identity”, or where it might be located. It’s completely at odds with how both sociologists and laypeople understood “gender” before about 15-20 years ago. It’s not remotely a consistent or widely agreed concept. Using the term at all is evidence of having “bought in” to a very specific understanding of gender that comes directly out of the discourse of gender ideology or trans ideology (another reason for putting it in quotation marks: because it really isn’t a neutral or uncontested term). So how are you using it, if you’re not taking it as part of that discourse?

By “women” you mean a subset of women with certain ideas about gender, sex and transness.

Yes I’ve heard their concerns, they are based in an unjustified fear (/phobia) , prejudice and misunderstanding of others.

If you don’t think this is possible why are you working so bloody hard to fight/ prevent it 😂😂😂.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

@Tandora I have listened to many TP and detransitioners and as a result I feel very sorry for people experiencing gender dysphoria. I cannot imagine how bad things must be for someone to feel like the only answer is cutting off healthy body parts. It is luckily a very rare condition. Those with adult GD deserve sympathy and the best psychiatric and medical support.

But not everyone who identifies as “T” has true gender dysphoria. There are also teenagers with neurodiversity, or histories of abuse and trauma, and/or struggling with their sexual orientation, who adopt a T identity because it’s a means of achieving a tiny bit of control in a world that seems very difficult for them. The answer for this group is sympathy, time and mental health support, not irreversible surgery and experimental drugs.

The. finally we have the AGPs. They are nearly always male and almost never want surgery, because they don’t have GD. For them, dressing up and behaving as their fantasy of what a woman should be is a sexual turn on. Fine in private, but then that’s not enough for them. They want to be exhibitionist in public and in single sex spaces because it gives them extra thrills. They do not care if they make actual women feel uncomfortable - for many AGPs that’s the whole point. It’s having their cake and eating it - living out their fantasies while also retaining their male control over women. They get very nasty when they are told they can’t have what they want. These are the T people who end up in jail, and why T identified people statistically are so over-represented among convicted sex offenders. And I am afraid, @Tandora, that I have zero empathy for them.

So you can’t define it then.

I thought not.

You answered that perfectly.
You don’t understand how this affects ALL women, especially those who have been through trauma. Slow hand clap for your lack of kindness

It doesn’t affect any (non trans) woman . Trauma or otherwise.

I’m not afraid of trans people: I just think that the idea that they “really are” or can become the opposite sex is metaphysical nonsense, and they remain the sex they always have been.

And so, I don’t want a man in a changing room with my young daughter, no matter whether he’s wearing a dress and thinks he’s a woman — or not. I also don’t want a man on a medical ward with my mum, or doing my smear test, or being in the sleeping quarters of my daughter’s school trip away, or whatever (name your single sex space or service of choice) — whether he’s wearing a dress and really truly believes his penis is a “female penis”, or not. I’m not “misunderstanding” him: I don’t care about understanding him or not. I just don’t want him and his male body there, thanks very much. HTH!

Yes a perfect demonstration of your misunderstanding, phobia and prejudice.
By the way not all trans women have penises.

Maybe there is a reason OP's daughter doesnt have many other friends.