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?

DSM-5 Criteria for Gender Dysphoria (20)

A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and natal gender of at least 6 months in duration, as manifested by at least two of the following:

A.
A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)

B.
A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)

C.
A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender

D.
A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s designated gender)

E.
A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s designated gender)

F.
A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s designated gender)

The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Specify if:

A.
The condition exists with a disorder of sex development.

B.
The condition is post-transitional, in that the individual has transitioned to full-time living in the desired gender (with or without legalization of gender change) and has undergone (or is preparing to have) at least one sex-related medical procedure or treatment regimen—namely, regular sex hormone treatment or gender reassignment surgery confirming the desired gender (e.g., penectomy, vaginoplasty in natal males; mastectomy or phalloplasty in natal females).

So you said It very likely has a durable and heritable polygenic underpinning.

but then you said:

This doesn't mean they will settle on being trans,

So is it inherent with a fixed diagnostic criteria used by doctors or not??

and then this old chestnut:

It's not that the number of trans people has increased dramatically in the UK, it's that with growing awareness and recognition/ visibility, more people have felt able to "come out".

Yet the TRAs spend a lot of time complaining that ‘transphobia’ is rampant. And why do none of us know any kids who must have been committing suicide at epic rates because they weren’t able to transition (and obviously the TRA claim us that if kids are not affirmed and allowed to ‘transition’ they will commit suicide)

And why is it that now the young ‘trans identifying’ cohort is mostly young girls but in this ‘trans’ supportive new world there isn’t the equivalent proportion of older women ‘coming out’ and it’s mainly just old men?

So many questions…

I think you don’t get out much and have been avoiding all news and social media for several years.

Ever heard of Isla Bryson? What are your thoughts on the policies and people who forced teenage a female beauty therapy student to strip for tanning practice in front of a man who was facing charges of double rape at the time and was subsequently convicted?

How many examples of harm to women any girls will be enough for you?

What is the friend “going through”. It feels like the prevailing view of the #bekind brigade is that trans people are to be pitied?

What other things should OPs daughter go along with in the name of respect?

OP has every right to view this situation from the impact it is having in her daughter. Encouraging her daughter to act against her own instincts is not being kind.

"So you said It very likely has a durable and heritable polygenic underpinning.

but then you said:

This doesn't mean they will settle on being trans,
So is it inherent with a fixed diagnostic criteria used by doctors or not??"

Being trans likely has a durable and heritable polygenic underpinning, yes.

The "they" in my statement "this doesn't mean they will settle on being trans", refers to young people who may be experimenting with identity, as young people often do! E.g. clothes, names, even sometimes pronouns. E.g. the old trope of about sexual experimenting in uni etc - doesn't mean people are actually gay.

(Btw it's also likely that being gay has a durable biological underpinning)

Yet the TRAs spend a lot of time complaining that ‘transphobia’ is rampant.

Yes with the increased visibility of trans identity, and advocacy for improved recognition and rights, there's been a huge transphobic backlash.

And why do none of us know any kids who must have been committing suicide at epic rates because they weren’t able to transition (and obviously the TRA claim us that if kids are not affirmed and allowed to ‘transition’ they will commit suicide)

Yes there's a lot of evidence on transness, closeting and suicidality.

And why is it that now the young ‘trans identifying’ cohort is mostly young girls but in this ‘trans’ supportive new world there isn’t the equivalent proportion of older women ‘coming out’ and it’s mainly just old men?

There could be lots of reasons for this - but most likely it's because the teenage years is an exceptionally punishing/ dangerous time for trans girls to 'come out'. There's a huge amount more flexibility and less judgement/ bullying of birth-assigned females dressing like boys - acquiring masculine attributes and identities etc. - the other way around invites much more fear/ anger/ hatred/ derision, etc. It's more common for trans girls/ women to come out either very early in life (pre-pubescent) or much later in life when they feel much safer.

@Tandora Well, I’m back from my meeting now, but honestly, talking to students who think they have more expertise than they do is also my job, and it’s the end of the year so I’m honestly too exhausted to continue much longer with all this.

If you don’t think scholars with decades of experience can read papers extremely quickly and extract the conclusions, how do you think most science/social science/history gets done?

Anyway. FWIW knowing the research methodology from up close, I have a pretty low opinion of Baron-Cohen’s work on “gender” to start with. His “male brain” theory of autism managed to hold the entire field back for decades from realising that autistic girls present differently; and thankfully, now the field has moved on, autistic girls are finally getting the research and help they need. In any case, his gendered autism schtick is now so out of fashion that it looks like he’s trying to work his stereotyped gender ideas back in via a different route. (How did his group measure your “gender identity”, may you well ask? By asking you to recall whether you think you played with “boys’ toys” as a child, twenty years or more later. I used to love swords, Lego, books and sewing as a child, so sometimes I went in a study as having a male “gender identity” and sometimes as a female one! Hahaha. Don’t you just love science?)

Anyway, regardless of that, that particular study certainly doesn’t show deep innate roots for transgenderism. It simply shows that there are connections between them, which we already know; but it doesn’t show that trans is innate, as opposed to cultural: how could it? What’s it using to measure “trans”? Subjective self-identification. (There isn’t as yet any solid agreement on biological and genetic markers for autism after decades of research; so how do you think there are for “trans”?)

The connections between autism and identifying as “trans” are well known, and they’re also perfectly well explained by social construction: people with autism are more likely to find metaphysical or pseudo-scientific explanations for their feelings of sex role incongruence personally plausible.

I keep a close eye on this kind of output because one of my research areas is on the social and historical construction of forms of psychogenic illness and the historical formations of disease pathologies. “Trans” is just one in a long line of similar conceptual formations, which we’ve seen many times before. You’ll never go bust banking on the fact that lots of things which people think are innate givens in life, turn out a bit later to have been social constructions of the time.

If you do want a piece of advice which is genuinely meant to help your research, here: start with a good read of some Thomas Kuhn, and some well-worn but important works in SSK, before you begin thinking about how far the social and medical sciences are presenting you with any kind of “durable and heritable polygenic underpinnings”. Your research will be all the better for it.

Oh and finally, @Tandora — you might want to read this before you place much faith in the authority of the diagnostic powers of the DSM:

https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/dsm-history-psychiatrys-bible?srsltid=AfmBOopl-SK3oES7ZuFWc_rXBRuPmpm2o9pli0hy32qsZPj_mQU6cnjg

And if you think that the most recent version of whatever discursive fad is in fashion is the most final and best, you will need to start thinking about all the assumptions encoded in your own thinking. In thirty or fifty years’ time “trans” may well look as much a transient historical curio as ‘neurasthenia” or “FSD / female sexual dysfunction” or “erotomania”.

The "they" in my statement "this doesn't mean they will settle on being trans", refers to young people who may be experimenting with identity, as young people often do! E.g. clothes, names, even sometimes pronouns.

So you agree that it’s not helpful to immediately affirm a new identity and make it really hard for a young person to back out of a teenage decision they may come to regret (as per terrible story upthread which resulted in a suicide attempt because the child didn’t know how to tell everyone they weren’t actually trans) and as per the Cass review, affirming a trans identity may well be a mistake.

Which is where having some sensible diagnostic criteria which have to be applied before any social transition takes place to weed out those who will desist from their temporary ‘condition’.

Follow me to your post on diagnostic criteria if you will.

There could be lots of reasons for this - but most likely it's because the teenage years is an exceptionally punishing/ dangerous time for trans girls to 'come out'.

Mind blowing as it may be, I wasn’t actually asking about the boys. I was asking where is the similar proportion of older women coming out as ‘trans’?

Well that might have been helpful if gender was an actual thing.

So B,C,D,E boil down to “because I really want to”

At F A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s designated gender)

What, pray, are the ‘typical feelings and reactions of the other gender’ if not a stereotype?

And at A, how does one ‘experience/express’ a ‘gender’ without stereotypes?

so I’m honestly too exhausted to continue much longer with all this.

The feeling is quite mutual I assure you.

If you don’t think scholars with decades of experience can read papers extremely quickly and extract the conclusions, how do you think most science/social science/history gets done?

Well you seem to struggle to properly read and understand the content of my fairly simple mumsnet posts (e.g. reading into them statements I haven't made). so, no, I don't take seriously your claim that you are able to - in a mere matter of minutes - collate, read, and properly absorb and evaluate information across a dozen scientific papers, covering a vast diversity of complex scientific disciplines.

I'm detecting some considerable intellectual arrogance, which btw is a significant hindrance to good theory and science.

have a pretty low opinion of Baron-Cohen’s work on “gender” to start with

I am certainly not a fan of BC and not endorsing his work in general. But that particular paper has numerous authors, and is an excellent paper. For the third time (hopefully you can read and digest this) the only claim I made about this paper specifically is that it provides powerful evidence on the co-occurrence of gender variance and other forms of neurodevelopmental diversity , specifically autism. Which is exactly what it does.

Recognising and understanding this intersection is an important part of the empirical puzzle for making sense of transgender variance and its aetiology.

I entirely disagree, of course, with your interpretations/ theorisation of the connection ("more likely to find metaphysical or pseudo-scientific explanations for their feelings of sex role incongruence personally plausible") which is seeped in erroneous pathologization of both autistic people and trans people.

As for your other comments - I entirely agree with you that science is a socially and historically constructed/ situated system of thought.
At the same time, all the best available bioscientific, medical, psychological, social and historical evidence and theory (of which there is an extensive body across multiple scientific disciplines), is consistent with a position that transness likely has a durable biological developmental underpinning, with a role for both genetic and environmental factors, similar to other aspects of diversity like autism, sexuality, etc.. Meanwhile this body of evidence is not at all compatible with multiple tenets of "gender critical theory", including the idea that the transgender variance as a field of human diversity is a uniquely western, contemporary, 'metaphysical' construction.

For Pete's sake I'm not here to defend the DSM from all critique, but just as ASD is in there with specific diagnostic criteria based on self report symptoms, so is gender dysphoria.

There is nothing wrong with young people exploring aspects of their identity, including through changing their name etc.

I do not think there is any feasible or reasonable means of thinking that we could somehow medically gatekeep' 'social transition' that's absurd.

There's nothing inherently wrong or dangerous with aspects of social transition, compared to living in one's 'birth sex' role.

Mind blowing as it may be, I wasn’t actually asking about the boys. I was asking where is the similar proportion of older women coming out as ‘trans’?

I answered your question already. Whereas birth-assigned males are more likely to come out either as young children or later in life, birth-assigned females are more likely to come out in adolescence. This is for the reasons already described. (In terms of coming out in early childhood, this is also likely because - again - there is much more flexibility for trans boys to already engage in multiple aspects of 'social transition' without necessarily having to directly 'come out'- e.g. young female-assigned kids can wear "boys clothes" but as a society we get much more wound up if we see an assigned-male in a dress. Just check out the recent mumsnet thread on the mum who wanted to send her four yr old boy to school in gingham shorts!

If I understand correctly, the question is, where are all the middle aged transmen? Either they didn't feel comfortable coming out before it became more acceptable, in which case you'd see a similar rate coming out in middle age as you do transwomen. Or, they felt comfortable coming out when young because there's less stigma, so we'd have had loads more transmen for years, many of whom would now be middle aged. Yet we don't. Which is puzzling.

I think there are a lot of middle aged trans men- but again they are more likely to go “under the radar”. At the end of the day there is a huge amount more flexibility for birth-females to adopt masculine roles and forms of expression without much notice - and it’s easier for them to “pass”. The other way around invites much more attention, fear, derision, anger , etc. and it’s much harder for them to pass.
The political rows we are having at the moment are basically about trans women. When it comes to trans men- people just ignore them.

@Tandora There just simply isn’t anything even remotely resembling “an extensive body across multiple scientific disciplines) […] consistent with a position that transness likely has a durable biological developmental underpinning, with a role for both genetic and environmental factors, similar to other aspects of diversity like autism, sexuality, etc..” You know it. I know it. We all know it.

Not even nearly 140 years of research into sexuality and homosexuality has come up with any consistently replicating research that shows anything close to “a biological developmental underpinning” to homosexuality, let alone gender identity of any sort. Sorry, but it’s not our problem if you would like things to be true that aren’t. As with every aspect of the “transgender” movement, it’s just wishful thinking, magical thinking and pretending, all the way down.

You seem like someone who is pretty bright. But you’re simply bullshitting here, and that’s a waste of all our time. You must know perfectly well your argument and all this non-“evidence” are both thin and tendentious. My advice to you is not to waste your time any further on a losing proposition that’s going out of fashion.

If you turn your mind to critiquing the “trans” movement, and really doing some real historical and sociological work and thinking, rather than trying to magic up evidence that doesn’t exist, then you might do some exciting scholarly work and make a name for yourself. But in short order “trans” and “queer” will be out of fashion even on the academic left (and I am on the academic left. Even if you don’t like that).

Don’t end up blinkering yourself in the service of a short lived ideological fad headed up by middle-aged men with mental health issues. Good luck to you, though. Just try to extricate yourself from this daft set of ideas.

Which services in which narrow set of circumstances exactly would you restrict to birth sex only?

What about the specific issue of open plan changing rooms, with showers, used by women and girls? Should they be restricted by birth sex or should men who say they identify as women be able to use those women’s facilities alongside women and girls?

Still no clear answer from you on this.

Not sure if that’s because you don’t know exactly what you think about it, or you do know but realise your answer would look really, really, really creepy. So you’re avoiding giving it.

There does seem some logic in that. There doesn't seem to be any figures on numbers of TW/TM by age (that I can find anyway) other than a reference to there being 'more' TW, so it's hard to know. Certainly TW are much more visible. Both in terms of appearance and general presence.

There is nothing that demonstrates / proves a single biological cause to explain sexuality, but there is absolutely a body of evidence that is consistent with a position that sexuality is likely to have a durable biological underpinning, including genetic, hormonal and neurological factors. Same with ASD and all kind of conditions. By the way, we also haven't identified causes for all sorts of varieties of DSDs. These areas of science and medicine are incredibly complex - but the field of genetics is increasingly illuminating.

Things which you write like this: As with every aspect of the “transgender” movement, it’s just wishful thinking, magical thinking and pretending, all the way down. demonstrate just how wrong headed and out of touch you are on this subject, despite your confidence in your intellectual superiority, knowledge and experience.

"Trans" is not a "short lived ideology fad" , nor is it a "fashion" with an option to go in or out of. It's a fundamental characteristic of human diversity that has existed and as far as we can tell will continue to exist. This is coming from someone who has invested a significant amount of time and energy into turning her mind to plenty of real historical and sociological (and broader interdisciplinary) work and thinking 😊.

All the best to you.

"Trans" is not a "short lived ideology fad" , nor is it a fashion to go in or out of. It's a fundamental characteristic of human diversity that has existed and as far as we can tell will continue to exist. Coming from someone who has invested a significant amount of time and energy into

If it was, wouldn’t there be a widespread concept and term for it before around the 1990s? And there isn’t. Nothing even close.

There were absolutely terminologies well before the 1990s and various terms for describing different forms of transgender variance have existed in various languages across different cultures, but in any case, this could apply to so many things. language is constantly evolving - we find new ways of describing and classifying things - that is part of scientific development. In fact, I actually don't think the current English language terminologies for describing transgender variance are particularly helpful - one of the challenges we currently have in the realm of politics/ policy.

I'd be interested to know what her kids call her too if "mum" is off the table.

Nonsense - what were they? What words in any European language were near concepts or synonyms for “transgender”? If you can’t point to any, how can you say people existed who were?

interested that you restricted the question to European languages?

Well for a start I believe the term transsexual comes from German and originated in the 1920s. Transgender is a more modern term but I believe it dates back to the 60s.

How very convenient.

Why do you think it is that men who identify as women are platformed all over tv media, on the radio, constantly popping up in lobby groups at Parliament, whizzing around the country earning £££s for lying about the law and obliterating women’s rights to the police, CS and major corporations, leading topless moob protests in London, pouring bottles of piss over themselves on the steps of the EHRC offices etc etc? Deliberately drawing attention to themselves.

Why would society ignore all these transmen that supposedly exist? There’s just no hint of them in any numbers. No Transwidow stories that I am aware of involving older women who identify as men abusing their families, we don’t see them splashed all over the tv, we have very few anecdotal stories of such women. It’s almost like they don’t exist.

And so if trans people have always existed, what did they call themselves before the twentieth century? What terms or concepts did people use to articulate an experience that resembles the modern sense of “transgender”?