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?

It’s almost like they don’t exist.

yes I just explained why.

The word “transexual” was invented when sexual transition surgeries/ interventions first began as a field of medicine/ science . It doesn’t mean that there was no means of describing trans experience, there just wasn’t a specific scientific medical terminology for it , because there wasn’t a field of practice medicine.

“Autism” was first used as a term in the 1940s I think; this doesn’t mean there weren’t any autistic people before the 1940s.

That’s just your theory though. I have an opposing theory which, based on actual facts, appears more plausible.

Why would all these women who identify as men be so keen to hide their light under a bushel? Why not join their ‘transwoman’ brothers earning all those lovely appearance and training fees? Did they have to keep a low profile during campaigning around the SC judgement in case anyone twigged that a win for women in the SC also benefited them?

There are loads of trans men campaigning on the SC judgement. 🥴

Why would all these women who identify as men be so keen to hide their light under a bushel?

What an absolutely bizarre thing to say.

Most trans people really aren’t in the business of outing themselves . Trans men pass much more easily and people tend to leave them alone as they don’t find them nearly as offensive. That’s really all there is to it .

So what did people say when they wanted to articulate the experience of being transgender? There’s plenty of writing about same-sex desire and sex before the word homosexuality was invented (in the late nineteenth century). Why isn’t there the same about “trans”?

There are also plenty of descriptions of and by people who were probably autistic (though autism is a rather different thing: “neurodiversity” activists like to treat autism as an identity, but autism is not just an identity - it can also be a profound disability, and so it isn’t always amenable to being treated as an identity in the same way as “LGBT” is). In fact, “identity” in the current sense is a throughly late twentieth century concept.

There are also loads of descriptions about transness and literatures/ writing describing trans experience (!) - only you have decided / declared these aren’t actually about trans people/ trans experience, but actually about something else. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Just as even today, people try to reduce trans experience to “putting on a dress” or trying to access rights and entitlements of the opposite sex, or (most bizarrely) just gay people in denial.. specific terminologies or not the denial of trans experience - and the attempt to reduce to social roles, presentation or sexuality (none of which it is reducible to) is the same.
The specific scientific/ medical terminology came about in the context of medical practice in the early-mid 20th C, at the point when doctors began using new medical technologies to help “treat” trans people in significant dysphoric distress. It was not invented by kids with blue hair in the 90s experimenting with fashionable ‘metaphysical’ ideas and identities , (or indeed preverted Middle aged men trying to get their rocks off by terrorising women and children).

But there aren’t, though - there are writings about people being same-sex attracted, and by girls and women who want to be men because they want to be free of the restrictions of life as female, but where are the writings and poetry and so on about “trans” that isn’t actually about sexuality or stereotypes? We’re going around in circles here, but where is it all? Give me examples!

(And no, I don’t mean Enid Blyton-style ““Oh I wish I was a boy”, said George, “Because boys are so much better and have more fun! You only like dolls and keeping house, Anne!”)

Right now I’m reading a trans biography- the hidden can of Ewan Forbes, born 1912. I’m sure you’ll try insist this isn’t about a trans person either..

Or how about the Roman emperor ,ElagabaluS C.E. 218 to 222., who wore female attire , asked to be referred to as she and sought out genital surgery.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67484645.amp

Im sure you’ll be one of the historians who argues this isn’t evidence of trans experience either.. .

This is current politics using the past to 'prove' and legitimise a current political point.

This has happened throughout history.

It's propaganda.

Here's a list put together by someone else. (Further down are also mention of Hijra and two spirit people who I know you have already declared to be out of bounds 🫣. I personally don’t know anything about two spirit people, but I do - as previously stated- know a fair amount about Hijra, and although the community is diverse and there is a specific cultural history that can’t map on exactly to western constructs of “transgender”- there absolutely are many Hijra who are trans women and many undergo surgeries etc. Hijra communities absolutely are an example of gender variant experience in a specific cultural/ historical context. Similar for the Kathoey in Thailand with whom ive also personally done research. )

Anyways here’s the list.

• Ashurbanipal (669-631BCE) - King of the Neo-Assryian empire, who according to Diodorus Siculus is reported to have dressed, behaved, and socialized as a woman.
• Elagabalus (204-222) - Roman Emperor who preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, presented as a woman, called herself her lover's queen and wife, and offered vast sums of money to any doctor able to make her anatomically female.
• Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286-1328) - French Jewish philosopher who wrote poetry about longing to be a woman.
• Eleanor Rykener (14th century) - trans woman in London who was questioned under charges of sex work
• [Thomas(ine) Hall](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)Hall) - (1603-unknown) - English servant in colonial Virginia who alternated between presenting as a woman and presenting as a man, before a court ruled that they were both a man and a woman simultaneously, and were required to wear both men's and women's clothing simultaneously.
• Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810) - French diplomat, spy, freemason, and soldier who fought in the Seven Years' War, who transitioned at the age of 49 and lived the remaining 33 years of her life as a woman.
• Public Universal Friend (1752-1819) - Quaker religious leader in revolutionary era America who identified and lived as androgynous and genderless.
• Surgeon James Barry (1789-1865) - Trans man and military surgeon in the British army.
• Berel - a Jewish trans man who transitioned in a shtetel in Ukraine in the 1800's, and whose story was shared with the Jewish Daily Forward in a 1930 letter to the editor by Yeshaye Kotofsky, a Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn who knew Berel
• Mary Jones (1803-unknown) - trans woman in New York whose 1836 trial for stealing a man's wallet received much public attention
• Albert Cashier (1843-1915) - Trans man who served in the US Civil War.
• Harry Allen (1882-1922) - Trans man who was the subject of sensationalistic newspaper coverage for his string of petty crimes.
• Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886–1954) - socialite, chef and hostess in Oxnard California, whose family and doctors supported her transition at a young age.
• Lili Elbe (1882-1931) - Trans woman who underwent surgery in 1930 with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran one of the first dedicated medical facilities for trans patients.
• Karl M. Baer (1885-1956) - Trans man who underwent reconstructive surgery (the details of which are not known) in 1906, and was legally recognized as male in Germany in 1907.
• Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962) - Groundbreaking radiologist who pioneered the use of x-ray photography in tuberculosis detection, and in 1917 he became one of the first trans men to undergo hysterectomy and gonadectomy in the US.
• [Louise Lawrence](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Lawrence(activist)) (1912–1976) - trans activist, artist, writer and lecturer, who transitioned in the early 1940's. She struck up a correspondence with the groundbreaking sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey as he worked to understand sex and gender in a more expansive way. She wrote up life histories of her acquaintances for Kinsey, encouraged peers to do interviews with him, and sent him a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, personal correspondences, etc.
• Dr. Michael Dillon (1915-1962) - British physician who updated his birth certificate to Male in the early 1940's, and in 1946 became the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty.
• Reed Erickson (1917-1992) - trans man whose philanthropic work contributed millions of dollars to the early LGBTQ rights movement
• Willmer "Little Ax" Broadnax (1916-1992) - early 20th century gospel quartet singer.
• Peter Alexander (unknown, interview 1937) - trans man from New Zealand, discusses his transition in this interview from 1937
• Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) - The first widely known trans woman in the US in 1952, after her surgery attracted media attention.
• Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (1940-present) - Feminist, trans rights and gay rights activist who came out and started transition in the late 1950's. She was at Stonewall, was injured and taken into custody, and had her jaw broken by police while in custody. She was the first Executive Director of the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, which works to end human rights abuses against trans/intersex/GNC people in the prison system.
• Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer and community worker in NYC; co-founded STAR, a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women
• Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer; co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera

And while until recently there has been no place in modern US/European culture for people with gender identities and lives atypical to their sex at birth to exist publicly, that isn't true in other times and cultures. Throughout the middle east and Asia there have been Hijra visible in public life for hundreds or even thousands of years. The same is true of Kathoey in Thailand, Muxe in Zapotec culture in Mexico, various two-spirit identities found in indigenous American cultures, Māhū in traditional Hawaiian/Tahitian/Maohi cultures, the Fa'afafine of Samoa, Tongan Fakaleiti, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans, Femminiello in traditional Neapolitan culture, the Galli of Ancient Rome, etc.

And some limited degree of physical alteration has been possible for literally millennia. Castration/emasculation being one of the most common, and this was/is practiced by many including Galli and Hijra. And 2000 years ago Ovid wrote about ἐναρής (Eng: enaree or enarei) - Scythian shamans who appeared male at birth but who lived as women and used a "potion" made from pregnant horse urine to feminize their bodies. This may have actually worked, and modern Premarin estrogen supplements are still made from pregnant horse urine - "premarin" = PREgnant MARe urINe.

Even modern transition-related medical care, meaning treatment provided in recognized Western medical clinics and intended to alleviate dysphoria by changing the patient's body to match their gender, is not new. It literally predates antibiotics. The first dedicated clinic offering transition-related medical care was founded in Berlin in 1919. And its founder, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, had been providing treatment to patients for many years before that. In 1907 he and Karl M. Baer co-wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about Karl's life, Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years).

It’s really not. It’s just evidence of trans people in history.

I feel it’s helpful here to read what is actually said and by whom.

Do we believe a Cambridge University classics professor who backs her position with clear reasoning and after gaining her degree in Classics and Ancient History has been lecturing on Roman History since completing her PhD in 2013?

Or do we listen to ‘councillor Keith Hoskins’ who has recently had a convenient lightbulb moment and knows better than numerous highly regarded academics that Elagabalus was definitely trans? Tricky one.

You have certainly misrepresented the facts here. It is clearly not settled.

Dr Shushma Malik, a Cambridge university classics professor, told the BBC: "The historians we use to try and understand the life of Elagabalus are extremely hostile towards him, and therefore cannot be taken at face value. We don't have any direct evidence from Elagabalus himself of his own words.
There are many examples in Roman literature of times where effeminate language and words were used as a way of criticising or weakening a political figure.
"References to Elagabalus wearing makeup, wigs and removing body hair may have been written in order to undermine the unpopular emperor."
Dr Malik added that whilst Romans were aware of gender fluidity, and there are examples of pronouns being changed in literature, it "was usually used in reference to myth and religion, rather than to describe living people".

However, councillor Keith Hoskins, executive member for Enterprise and Arts at North Herts Council, said texts such as Dio's provide evidence "that Elagabalus most definitely preferred the 'she' pronoun and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times, as we believe is standard practice elsewhere".

No it’s not. It’s the past being rewritten to suit an agenda.

I haven’t “misrepresented the facts”. I shared the article which you directly copied and pasted from 😂, which clearly sets out how it’s disputed. Like all things that happened long ago, there are differing perspectives from different historians, but the evidence is there.

Oh dear! The “evidence” isn’t, in fact, there. Relying on the accounts of Elagabalus as evidence is like using JD Vance as an accurate source for Biden’s medical records — ie., no real reliable evidence at all.

This representation of Elagabalus was put about by his political detractors, and uses standard tropes well known in Roman political writing, by painting a picture of Elagabalus as roleplaying as a female prostitute (in a caricature of cinaedi, or effeminate male prostitutes). It’s a standard way of undermining a Roman opponent, by implying he is less masculine than a manly Roman and thus unfit to rule (Elagabalus was foreign); a manly Roman would have been of course the one penetrating cinaedi, not being penetrated!

Roman ideas of sexuality and sex roles were really radically different to contemporary ones. Men did not “identify” with women — that would have been like “identifying” as a slave or an animal. (And at least slaves often had the opportunity to purchase their freedom: women did not.) Women had almost no freedom or status at all in Roman society. Being any man, even a slave, was better in Roman eyes than being a woman. Even the very idea of dressing or pretending to be a woman is a convenient slur on a political opponent, not evidence of “trans”, which is an anachronistic concept overlaid on a very different kind of society that would simply not have recognised the idea.

Similarly, many, many of the figures in your list above were actually just gay or bisexual, not “trans”. Even Sylvia Rivera/Marsha Johnson have been repeatedly debunked - they were gay. James Barry dressed as a man because she wanted to practice medicine, and not be subject to the social roles women, especially middle and upper-class women, had to occupy. Many lesbian women dressed as men because sexologists like Ellis and Kraft-Ebing claimed that was why they were attracted to women. “Sexology” of the time told gay men and women they were spiritually the other sex, and also that if they wanted a relationship with someone of the same sex, one of them should role-play the “man” in the relationship and the other the “woman”.

Hirschfelt was primarily interested in homosexuality, and wrote about what he called “erotic transvestism” as a sexual fetish: crossdressing and “sex changes” were both largely understood as fetishes. Many gay and lesbian people of the period found theories like “inversion theory” profoundly disquieting and were often extremely ambivalent about sexological ideas of sex and sexuality. Some were guinea pigs for medical experiments - like Lili Elbe, who died in horrendous pain from brutal surgery that was unethical and had no chance at all of success.

Instead of reading and understanding the way that people thought about sex and sexuality during different periods, and feeling empathy for those who were just same-sex attracted but had to go along with very regressive social and medical ideas of the time about masculinity and femininity, you want to anachronistically retcon them as “trans” instead. Why?

It misrepresents the real cultural and historical specificity and complexity of real people’s lives, by reducing them to some kind of advert for identity politics avant la lettre. The real truth is much more complex, and much more interesting, and requires much more work to uncover than simply slapping on a label that doesn’t really fit.

This is an interesting account from 1879 of a famous male ‘spiritualist’ who was discovered to be female while at sea. He/she had toured the world with no one the wiser up to that point, and had apparently grown and curated an impressive natural moustache and whiskers to help the impression.

trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/70973538

@marshmallowpuff

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.

This is an exceedingly odd thing for a supposed academic to write.

Le sigh.

It’s completely circular. On the one hand you insist that being trans must be a modern phenomenon because there is no trace of trans people before the 90s (which is obviously bollocks) . ( Where is trans experience in literature and history you say! If it were real they’d be there.)
On the other hand whenever examples are pointed out you insist they definitionally can’t be examples of transness, because they existed in a different historical and social context, where ideas about sexuality and sex roles were different!

I wholeheartedly disagree with / reject your attempts to explain away/ disappear transgender diversity- both in the present and in the past- and subsume it all within expressions of sexuality- As do the vast numbers of well-regarded historians, social scientists, medical and biological scientists, psychologists etc, who have written extensive cross-disciplinary literatures on the subject.

There are vast historical, cultural and anthropological literatures documenting gender variant people in different parts of the world- and in different stages in history. Of course all of these manifest in different specific , localised , cultural and historical contexts, but they are all examples of a fundamental axes of human diversity, which is the existence of people whose psychological / cognitive experience of gender runs counter to their sex at birth, and / or who have undergone/ attempted some form of social or anatomical “transition” or deviation in sex.

By the way, gender diversity also fundamentally intersects with sexual diversity and in some eastern cultures the two are regarded as existing on the same spectrum of difference rather than constituting two separate /
distinct constructions. The latter is a specifically western, contemporary framing, and actually fails to recognise how sex and sexuality are fundamentally assimilated including in language - eg the word “sex” which refers to both being male and female and to the expression of sexual desire .

Also I find it deeply ironic that you accuse me of “misrepresenting the complexity of real people lives” and slapping a label on them for political reasons, when you are the one trying to disappear trans / gender variant lives, both in the present and the past, and assimilate a whole spectrum of diversity into your fixed (localised) narratives about about ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ , because of your political beliefs!.

and / or who have undergone/ attempted some form of social or anatomical “transition” or deviation in sex.

Should have also added legal transition to this !

Also this

Men did not “identify” with women — that would have been like “identifying” as a slave or an animal…“trans”…is an anachronistic concept overlaid on a very different kind of society that would simply not have recognised the idea.

You sound like an old , male Cambridge professor who once tried to mansplain to me that women literally didn’t experience sexual pleasure in Roman times, because of x,y,z (Roman ideas about gender/ Roman gender roles).

Regardless of cultural ideas about gender, gender roles, sexuality, there have always lived people who, for example, were born with male genitalia, but who had a powerful sense/ understanding of self as female- a sense so powerful that they sought to change sex socially, legally and physically.

just as , regardless of cultural ideas about gender, gender roles, sexuality, there have always existed people (of both sexes) with sexual desire.

No really it's not.

We also have to be sceptical of what contemporaries or slightly later commentators say.

Trying to suggest someone is a woman in ancient times would also be a way of discrediting them and their legacy. It happens throughout history. Such ancient sources also have to be taken with a pinch of salt because they took can be yet more propaganda.

But yes the biggest danger is applying current policy ideology onto historical figures - control of the past is control of the future. There reliability of 'evidence' of this nature is poor. It's very poor quality sourcing which is something anyone who studies history at GCSE level starts to learn. It's the core of journalistic integrity.

Why didn't the Victorian pick up on this? Why didn't early twentieth century historians look at this? Why this miraculous revelation in this era?

Hmmm.

the biggest danger is applying current policy ideology onto historical figures - control of the past is control of the future.

It’s the gender criticals on the thread who are doing this. Not me.

Why because you are doing the one thing that is taught at GCSE level that all historians should avoid?

It's got fuck all to do with trans and everything to do with basic practice of understanding sourcing and bias.

You literally are doing the most heinous of things as a historian. Trying to prove your own point rather than assessing the actual quality of evidence and understanding things from the cultural period they came from. You are looking with a thought process and ideology of today, not looking at this from the lens of the Romans.

That matters.

Sorry. But go back to school.