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?

The only strong medical evidence present for trans ‘causation’ is that is it is closely linked to autism, adhd, eds. There is probably also evidence that it is linked to experience - specifically and neglect.

Well, that's simply just not true at all. There is absolutely a large body of evidence which points to a durable biological underpinning to transness, and studies which have evidenced a likely hereditable polygenic underpinning driven by sex hormone-signalling genes responsible for virilization.

There is no evidence whatsoever that transness is caused by neglect.

“We do not yet have the science” and yet one of the battle cries of your side is that the science is settled, that only people who never got behind high school biology don’t get this, etc etc.

I call bullshit.

AFAIC “trans” is either a mental health issue or a fetish. Possibly sometimes both.

And even if your quasi-scientific bunkum were true, the reality of biological sex would remain. A male person is immutably male his whole life, ditto a female person, female.

And given the reality of the differences between the sexes, the long running and ongoing oppression of female people by male people, the particular vulnerability of female people to male people wrt to physical and sexual violence and possible pregnancy, there is no argument on earth that justifies male people appropriating for themselves those things that have been set aside for female people as a means of enabling us to participate in society and public life on as equal a footing with male people as possible.

However much a man may believe himself to be or wish he were female, he’s not; and it’s up to him to find a way to resolve whatever issues he has, not to put the responsibility for doing that onto women and girls, at our own expense.

And bringing it back to the OP’s situation, I think Sally and OP’s DD are both victims of the push to normalise men in women’s spaces, which I see as the fundamental aim of transactivism.

The explosion in young girls identifying as boys is entirely a consequence of that very well funded activism. And the middle aged men who get gratification from being in women’s spaces couldn’t care less about the damage being done to these girls.

OP, you said that your DD tends to avoid using her name full stop, and yet it sounds like that’s not enough for Sally - she actively wants the validation of being addressed as Ron and referred to as he. She’s making other people, including your DD, responsible for her mental/emotional well being, while not taking any kind of reciprocal role herself. It’s a one way system, apparently very common in this kind of scenario.

I think given they’re part of the same friendship group, all your DD can do is continue to do what she’s doing, and try to focus on her other friendships within the group as much as possible. I absolutely second Octavia’s advice that you “encourage your DD not to give more to this friendship that she is getting”. Things could (almost certainly will) change a lot over the next couple of years anyway.

And she’s absolutely not being a “bad person”, as TRAs would have you believe, by not “affirming” and calling her Ron and he/him at every opportunity. You never know, one day, Sally might even thank her for it - as a pp’s story upthread of a tragic attempted suicide showed, it can be important for those who identify as trans to have a safe route back to accepting themselves as the sex they are if/when they desist.

Perhaps you would like to share your opinion on the appropriateness or otherwise of middle aged males changing/showering alongside women and girls, Tandora, seeing as Horseebooks is so reluctant to give us theirs?

Hint: it’s because claiming that adult men should be able to undress next to very young girls and children is the creepy thing. Not the people pointing it out.

There's nothing whatsoever creepy about trans people as a group , and nothing creepy whatsoever about supporting trans inclusion and rights.

There's nothing wrong with being trans and it is not a fetish.

“Gender dysphoria” is itself a historically invented and specific term. Roll back three or four decades earlier, and you have “neurasthenia” and “moral insanity”, both of which covered “gender non-confirming” behaviour in their diagnostic criteria.

Why shouldn’t we revert to “moral insanity” as a term for “gender dysphoria”? Or are you so confident that the twenty-first century has got it all absolutely right?

What happened to transvestites, then? Did they all disappear around 2005? Genuinely interested to know.

Where’s this evidence? The one study that doesn’t actually show this at all, and then was debunked because it didn’t replicate?

Still avoiding addressing the issue of middle aged males undressing/showering alongside women and girls?

How very surprising.

And it sounds like you need to educate yourself about AGP. Quite a few high profile trans identifying men, such as Andrea Long Chu and Debbie Hayton, have been very clear about the fetishistic base for their feelings of being “trans”.

Understanding and kindness need to go both ways. If your daughter slips up, her friend should be understanding, just as she is trying to be understanding of Ron's feelings. Ron doesn't own all the rights to consideration and thoughtfulness.

Which study are you referring to here?

studies which have evidenced a likely hereditable polygenic underpinning driven by sex hormone-signalling genes responsible for virilization

Can you post links to these studies^^, and then I’ll point it out?

Or are you so confident that the twenty-first century has got it all absolutely right

Oh my goodness no. we have a long way to go. But do I think "gender dysphoria" offers a significant improvement in scientific understanding relative to "moral insanity". Absolutely, of course.

It would take me significantly longer to compile a long list of research for you, than for you to share one specific paper that you so cryptically referenced.

I wonder why you insist that I "go first"? Is it possible that you don't actually know which study you are talking about? And you want to reserve the right to retrospectively declare it to be whatever I happen to share?

In that case, do you want to engage with my post on the history of homosexuality?

Is it your contention that in the past, lots of people were transgender in the modern sense (despite leaving absolutely no trace of this at all, in any writing or personal self-expression or in the millions and millions of diaries, books, records etc.), but only now and since around the 1970s have we understood this phenomenon exists that there’s no evidence of in the first place?

Or were the people in the past wrong in thinking that they were same-sex attracted/frustrated by not having the vote or any education or power, and actually they were secretly “trans”, a concept they had no knowledge of?

The reason people aren't answering your "question" is because they entirely disagree with the assumptions that form it's logic and there is no way to answer it without endorsing that logic.

Do I think that trans people should be allowed to use changing rooms and toilets in accordance with their gender? Absolutely.

Do I think that trans women should be banned from all women's services? Absolutely not.

Do I think that there could be a narrow set of circumstances in which it would be permissible to restrict women's services by birth sex? Yes. Just like there are services that might cater to disabled women, or black women, or mothers, or older women, or lesbian women or many other specific groups.

Is it your contention that in the past, lots of people were transgender in the modern sense (despite leaving absolutely no trace of this at all, in any writing or personal self-expression or in the millions and millions of diaries, books, records etc.), but only now and since around the 1970s have we understood this phenomenon exists that there’s no evidence of in the first place?

Yes trans people have existed throughout history and there is absolutely plenty of 'traces' of them, in writing, diaries, books, records, etc.

Or were the people in the past wrong in thinking that they were same-sex attracted/frustrated by not having the vote or any education or power, and actually they were secretly “trans”, a concept they had no knowledge of?

I don't understand this at all. Being trans is separate to being frustrated about not having the vote, education or power, and it's also separate to sexual attraction.

Ah, okay 😆

Yes trans people have existed throughout history and there is absolutely plenty of 'traces' of them, in writing, diaries, books, records, etc.

I’n a historian. There isn’t. Please read my posts. There is plenty of evidence of same-sex attraction, of crossdressing for all sorts of other reasons, and plenty of evidence of women and girls wanting the same freedoms as men. There’s no evidence of “trans” that is not part of one or more of those things.

I don't understand this at all. Being trans is separate to being frustrated about not having the vote, education or power, and it's also separate to sexual attraction.

Why don’t you understand this, if you’ve been reading my posts? There is no evidence of anything like the modern idea of “trans” in the past that wasn’t part of ideas about sexuality or “sex roles”. It simply wasn’t available to people as a concept. Dressing or performing like the opposite sex was thought of as either evidence of homosexuality, or of simply wishing you could adopt a different role in life.

How difficult is it to understand that the way people think of themselves is historically and culturally specific to particular times and places? If a metaphysical concept didn’t exist, people didn’t think of themselves in that way. “Trans” is not a material fact, but a metaphysical idea. It’s like saying that the Ancient Greeks “really” believed in Catholic transubstantiation in 500 BC, even though they had no concept of the Christian God.

I disagree with you entirely. You may be a historian, but you clearly understand very little about transness, what it is, or its history.

Of course how people interpret different forms of human diversity and experience will be affected by the historical and cultural context of the time and place, but that doesn't mean that certain forms of diversity didn't 'exist' in the past as they exist in the present. There have always been gay people and there have always been trans people, although how these differences were understood, written about, how people lived with these differences at the time, etc, will be different.

What is your area of expertise?

I’m a cultural historian working in the history of ideas, feminism, and gender studies/history of homosexuality.

Go on, then. You show me some concrete evidence in past historical records of “transness” that isn’t at all linked to or part of ideas of same-sex desire, sex roles, gender stereotypes, rhetoric, medicine/mental illness, religion or magic.

I challenge you. Just after you have posted all the links to those studies that show “trans” has a “heritable”, “polygenic” basis (which you brought up, not me, so you should produce evidence of them.)

(Oh and please, I beg you, don’t make me write a very very boring post about how “two spirit” is a modern fabrication, and “hijra” are not actually “trans”. It’s very dull indeed for everyone and it makes you look really culturally insensitive.)

Where is this body of evidence you speak of? Why is not referenced by wpath or the Cass review or the various studies on how the approach taken has worked - a recent one in the us, several in Europe? Please link.

Mumsnet users so often seem to think that I am there as a personal reference library for them. There are any number of search engines that people can use to generate their own references.

Some historical, anthropological/ cultural, psychological and biomedical resources for you. Just a tiny tiny TINY snapshot. I could do this all day. But I won't.

People, please do your own research. It takes a really long time to compile and organise just a few of them. There is an absolute tonne of information out there from all corners of the world and across multiple disciplines.

Biomedical and psychological research

Flint, C., Förster, K., Koser, S. A., Konrad, C., Zwitserlood, P., Berger, K., Hermesdorf, M., Kircher, T., Nenadic, I., Krug, A., Baune, B. T., Dohm, K., Redlich, R., Opel, N., Arolt, V., Hahn, T., Jiang, X., Dannlowski, U., & Grotegerd, D. (2020). Biological sex classification with structural MRI data shows increased misclassification in transgender women. Neuropsychopharmacology, 45(10), 1758–1765.

Foreman, M., Hare, L., York, K., Balakrishnan, K., Sánchez, F. J., Harte, F., Erasmus, J., Vilain, E., & Harley, V. R. (2019). Genetic Link Between Gender Dysphoria and Sex Hormone Signaling. J Clin Endocrinol Metab, 104(2), 390–396.

Juli, G., Juli, M. R., Juli, R., & Juli, L. (2023). Gender Dysphoria and DNA. Psychiatria Danubina, 35, 179–181.

Kiyar, M., Collet, S., T’Sjoen, G., & Mueller, S. C. (2020). Neuroscience in transgender people: An update. Neuroforum, 26(2),
85–92.

Kreukels, B. P. C., & Guillamon, A. (2016). Neuroimaging studies in people with gender incongruence. Int Rev Psychiatry, 28(1), 120–128.

Hare, L., Bernard, P., Sánchez, F. J., Baird, P. N., Vilain, E., Kennedy, T., & Harley, V. R. (2009). Androgen Receptor Repeat Length Polymorphism Associated with Male-to-Female Transsexualism. Biol Psychiatry, 65(1), 93–96.

McEwen, B. S., & Milner, T. A. (2017). Understanding the broad influence of sex hormones and sex differences in the brain. J Neurosci Res, 95(1–2), 24–39.

Mueller, S. C., Guillamon, A., Zubiaurre-Elorza, L., Junque, C., Gomez-Gil, E., Uribe, C., Khorashad, B. S., Khazai, B., Talaei, A., Habel, U., Votinov, M., Derntl, B., Lanzenberger, R., Seiger, R., Kranz, G. S., Kreukels, B. P. C., Kettenis, P. T. C., Burke, S. M., Lambalk, N. B., … Luders, E. (2021). The Neuroanatomy of Transgender Identity: Mega-Analytic Findings From the ENIGMA Transgender Persons Working Group. The Journal of Sexual Medicine. Volume 18:Issue 6 (2021).

Olson, K. R., Key, A. C., & Eaton, N. R. (2015). Gender cognition in transgender children. Psychological Science, 26(4),
467–474.

Kilpatrick, L. A., Holmberg, M., Manzouri, A., & Savic, I. (2019). Cross sex hormone treatment is linked with a reversal of cerebral patterns associated with gender dysphoria to the baseline of cisgender controls. Eur J Neurosci, 50(8), 3269–3281.

Kouri, C., Sommer, G., Martinez de Lapiscina, I., Elzenaty, R. N., Tack, L. J. W., Cools, M., Ahmed, S. F., Flück, C. E., Abali, S., Abali, Z. Y., Akin, L., Almaraz, M., Audí, L., Aydin, M., Balsamo, A., Baronio, F., Bryce, J., Busiah, K., Caimari, M., … Zelinska, N. (2024). Clinical and genetic characteristics of a large international cohort of individuals with rare NR5A1/SF-1 variants of sex development. EBioMedicine, 99, 104941.

Polderman, T. J. C., Kreukels, B. P. C., Irwig, M. S., Beach, L., Chan, Y. M., Derks, E. M., Esteva, I., Ehrenfeld, J., Heijer, M. Den, Posthuma, D., Raynor, L., Tishelman, A., & Davis, L. K. (2018a). The Biological Contributions to Gender Identity and Gender Diversity: Bringing Data to the Table. Behavior Genetics, 48(2), 95–108.

Roselli, C. E. (2018). Neurobiology of gender identity and sexual orientation. J Neuroendocrinol, 30(7), e12562-n/a.

Uribe, C., Escrichs, A., Filippi, E., Sanz‐Perl, Y., Junque, C., Gomez‐Gil, E., Kringelbach, M. L., Guillamon, A., & Deco, G. (2022). Whole‐brain dynamics differentiate among cisgender and transgender individuals. Hum Brain Mapp, 43(13), 4103–4115.

Warrier, V., Greenberg, D. M., Weir, E., Buckingham, C., Smith, P., Lai, M.-C., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2020). Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals. Nature Communications, 11(1), 3959.

Furtado, P. S., Moraes, F., Lago, R., Barros, L. O., Toralles, M. B., & Barroso, U. (2012). Gender dysphoria associated with disorders of sex development. Nat Rev Urol, 9(11), 620–627.

Kumar, C., & Roy, J. K. (2024). Decoding the epigenetic mechanism of mammalian sex determination. Experimental Cell Research, 439(1),
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Gülgöz, S., Glazier, J. J., Enright, E. A., Alonso, D. J., Durwood, L. J., Fast, A. A., Lowe, R., Ji, C., Heer, J., Martin, C. L., & Olson, K. R. (2019). Similarity in transgender and cisgender children’s gender development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(49), 24480–24485.

Hamouie, A., Dwiggins, M., & Gomez-Lobo, V. (2019). 35. Case Series of Hormone Abnormalities in Term and Preterm Infants With Ambiguous Genitalia not Diagnosed With a Disorder of Sexual Differentiation. Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, 32(2), 208.

Piferrer, F. (2013). Epigenetics of sex determination and gonadogenesis. Developmental Dynamics, 242(4), 360–370.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2021). A Dynamic Systems Framework for Gender/Sex Development: From Sensory Input in Infancy to Subjective Certainty in Toddlerhood. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 613789.

Historical and cross-cultural research

Martin, J. I. (2025). Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

Ramet, S. P. (1996). Gender reversals and gender cultures: anthropological and historical perspectives.

Skidmore, E. (2017). True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1st ed.). NYU Press.

LaFleur, G., Raskolnikov, M., & Klosowska, A. (2021). Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern. In Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021 (1st ed.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Erlick, E. (2025). Before gender: Lost stories from trans history, 1850-1950.

Frantz, Linden, Vargas, Frantz, David Evans, Linden, Christina, Vargas, Chris, & Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, issuing body. (2024). Trans hirstory in 99 objects (2nd edition.).

Shuster, S. M. (2021). Trans medicine : the emergence and practice of treating gender.

Capello, E. (2022). Trans and White Trash: An Ethnography of Trans People in the Deep South. Anthropology and Humanism, 47(1), 69–84.

Nunn, Z. (2023). Trans Liminality and the Nazi State. Past & Present, 260(1), 123–157.

Erlick, E. (2025). Before gender : lost stories from trans history, 1850-1950.

Lowik, A. J. (2018). Reproducing Eugenics, Reproducing while Trans: The State Sterilization of Trans People. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 14(5), 425–445.

Arnal, K., & Stryker, S. (2015). Bordered Lives: Transgender Portraits from Mexico (1st ed.). The New Press.

Boyce, P., Brown, S., Cavill, S., Chaukekar, S., Chisenga, B., Dash, M., Dasgupta, R. K., De La Brosse, N., Dhall, P., Fisher, J., Gutierrez-Patterson, M., Hemabati, O., Hueso, A., Khan, S., Khurai, S., Patkar, A., Nath, P., Snel, M., & Thapa, K. (2018). Transgender-inclusive sanitation: insights from South Asia. Waterlines, 37(2), 102–117.

Sommer, M. H. (2024). The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China. Columbia
University Press.