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?

Some hijra people are absolutely trans, but the hijra community is diverse. I've actually personally conducted research with hijra people in India. How about you? Or have you just read second hand stuff and incorporated/ interpreted the information you absorbed through the lens of gender critical dogma?

@Tandora Oh dear! I’ve read quite a lot of these, and:

(a) none of the scientific papers say anything like you’ve suggested. Some are about sex development and have nothing at all to do with “trans”. Some are highly suggestive and do things like analyse the chromosomal data from a few transgender people and “possibly identify some genes for further research”, but have no conclusions at all, or certainly none that say anything like you’re suggesting — much less a proper large scale study with any kind of hard conclusion about clearly identified “polygenic” causes.

This all rather weakens your case a lot more if those are the only things you can come up with from the science side. And they are all from very low-ranked journals.

2 - on the social science side. Did you get an AI to put these together? It’s clear that you’ve not actually read most of these yourself, as many of them actually disprove your claims. Others are highly tendentious. And the ones which have got anything meaningful to say about “trans” history are in exactly the time period in which it’s an emergent concept!

Some of us on here are actual academics in the field who read this kind of material for a living and have done for twenty years, and a few minutes with ChatGPT isn’t going to find a magic bullet that we haven’t seen before 😆

Oh have you really? Can you post here a link to your peer-reviewed published research so we can read it?

Haha, that took you all of -what - 10 minutes did it? To acquire, personally read, and absorb complex information, from over a dozen scientific papers?

They are a highly diverse range of papers , which contribute to different parts of the conversation/ puzzle, on the following:

1. biomedical evidence on genetic, hormonal and structural brain differences in trans people, people with gender dysphoria; as well as the influence of sex hormones (both endogenous and exogenous on structural brain factors). Several of these make a specific case for a biological basis for transness, underwritten by sex-hormone signalling genes, others provide broader information of relevance (e.g. how sex hormones influence structural brain factors/ MRI imaging of brains in people with gender dysphoria etc).

2. biomedical evidence on sex development, it's vast complexity and variations - which is very much part of the conversation.

3. psychological literature on gender cognition development amongst both gender typical and gender variant children.

4. historical, sociological, anthropological and cultural literatures about trans people at various points in history and across various cultures.

These are just a snap short of the huge diversity of resources out there of relevance to explaining transness and evidencing it's universality as a form of human diversity.

Please go forth and further educate yourself.

It used to be an implication that you were a man, or a trans woman. Not sure if it still is

Oh dear, thread derailed op @TenThousandYears!

Oh I see! Well I also get called 'male', 'a man' and 'trans' on mumsnet all the time 😂(I'm none of these things of course).

To go into more depth on some of the social history books in your list, most of them just perform the manoeuvre of finding some people who self-identified as gay or lesbian, for example the “female husbands” of the Skidmore book, and simply call them “trans”, when they already had a well-understood set of social meanings at the time which allowed same-sex attracted people a degree of slight social and normative acceptance if they claimed they “spiritually” were the opposite sex. In reality, they were lesbian couples of the time, living their lives according to the prevalent idea that the emergent notion of same-sex or lesbian desire was permitted if it seemed like it fitted into an understanding of sex “inversion”.

These were the very cases that led doctors and “sexologists” to come up with the notion of “sexual inverts” in the first place, and allowed the idea of homosexuality as a differential psychological identity to take shape in the first place. Going back and re-terming these people “trans” is not only completely anachronistic, but it reinterprets their lives in completely different terms to the ones they articulated them within. It’s a form of circular reasoning. The fact that it’s fashionable amongst some publishers does not actually make it true or convincing. Still less is projecting contemporary Western ideas of “gender identity” on other cultures which have an entirely different construction of subjecthood.

More useful are studies in the twentieth century which show the idea of “gender identity” emerging out of a network of understanding about sexuality and new psychologies of “identity”. But there’s often a lot of over-enthusiastically anachronistic misidentification and projection going on. Just because something looks like it “ought” to be like “transness” doesn’t actually make it so, and a lot of current students in the field really could do with some long reading in a near-century’s work of social and intellectual history before they conflate past and contemporary concepts.

Oh and I also included a paper on the intersection of gender variance and other forms of neurodevelopmental diversity.

No. It’s noting that the idea that adult men should be able to change clothes with children or teenage girls, just because they say they are women, is getting perilously “child abuse adjacent”, as the young people might term it.

Yes, I just read it. It doesn’t say anything like you claim it does.

I completely disagree with your interpretations, as do the authors of the vast literatures on this subject.

No idea what you are talking about and I refuse to accept that you read it properly in 2 minutes. The arrogance is quite astonishing.

It is a paper which contributes powerful evidence, on the well known overlap between gender variance and other forms of neurodevelopmental diversity (specifically, in this paper, autism).

Don’t be silly. I work in this field: I know what’s out there, have read most of these before, and a few minutes certainly suffices to look at the others. As an academic, I am actually able to read and synthesise the rest extremely quickly! In ten minutes, yes? That’s my job! I do it every day!

Same, of course!

uh huh.

https://tenor.com/EAlg.gif

Ahh mumsnet...

Are you talking here about the Warrier/Baron-Cohen paper? I already know this one well, since I know that research group (and have acted as a non-autistic control in some of his group’s experiments in the past!)

It says nothing like the claims you’ve made. Not even remotely.

Yes I was referring to that one. I'm very well able to believe you're familiar with that paper, since it's a very well known paper, as are the team (who I also know fyi).
However I responding to your statement made just now

"Yes, I just read it."

I took that to mean you were claiming to have "just read it".

Silly me. :p

The only claim I made about that paper is that it provides powerful evidence of the empirical overlap between gender variance and other forms of neurodevelopmental diversity, specifically autism. Which is exactly what it does.
(I think this is an important part of the puzzle in understanding and explaining transness, hence my inclusion of it, although it doesn't quite fit into the four broader 'groupings' I outlined above).

As for your claims that you are already familiar with most of the other papers, and that you have acquired read, and absorbed the detailed and complex information (across multiple disciplines/ fields of expertise) from all the rest, in all of a few minutes. I do not find these claims serious or credible.

If you're not trans, why are you always on here telling other people what it feels like to be trans, and telling people who aren't trans to stop talking about being trans because they don't know what they're talking about? I thought you at least had lived experience.

I'm not convinced this is a genuine scenario, but I'm happy to contribute to the thread as I imagine this is happening up and down the country.

'Ron' is unhappy about something, and using this ridiculous Transgender /non binary trend to gain some power to make people feel uncomfortable.

You can guarantee it's a phase, something to help them find a tribe, to stick two fingers up at the system.

Isn't it strange who it's never the cool kids that want to go non binary or change gender? It's never the captain of the boys football team, or the chief popular girl with her entourage, is it?

Always seems to be the ones that lack popularity & attention that suddenly realise they are the wrong gender.

Lol you are telling me off for talking about / having ideas about transness when I am not personally trans?

I'm not telling you off at all. I'm merely expressing surprise as you post as though you're an authority, and have taken issue with people who aren't trans expressing views and showing an interest in the subject.

Can you list those diagnostic criteria because last time I looked it was a collection of entirely normal teen behaviours based on stereotypes and things like ‘or having many friends’ or ‘not liking their changing body’ or ‘grief’ or ‘not being happy in school’ or ‘wanting toys/hair/clothes associated with the opposite sex’ or ‘having more friends of the opposite sex’.

Do you have a new list?

I never claimed to be personally trans, in fact I've explicitly stated repeatedly that I'm not. However, I can speak with authority on the subject, as its a subject I know a huge amount about, and am qualified to speak on.

My concerns are the huge numbers of people who have developed very strong opinions about trans issues, when they clearly have zero understanding of/ insight into what being trans is/ trans experience. (Hence ideas commonly expressed on mumsnet, that being trans is a type of religious or philosophical belief/ reducible to 'wearing a dress'/ some type of sexual perversion/ a variety of really disturbing mental illness/ a group of predators who want to 'get access' to women and children/ a bunch of entitled males trying to steal women's rights, etc. etc. etc.)

I've suggested that people might want to spend time really listening talking to trans people in the real world about their experiences as the quickest and most effective means of acquiring more empathy/ understanding. And that they really should spend time doing this, before forming such strong opinions and spouting them all over the internet.