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?

She's 14. Surely she can just be this person's friend, why does it matter what she/they/he wants to be called. That's what I like about this generation, they're so accepting, non judgemental and just go with the flow. Tell your DD to just be a friend. Your DD sounds quite immature and uptight. Are they neurodiverse?

You are making all kinds of unsafe assumptions after 2000 years.

There's much arguing over the character and actions of Richard III. Despite it being a much closer era. For similar types of reasons.

You also have not addressed the previous points raised by another poster about Roman sexuality and ideas of sexuality and how they are massively different from today. You are not contextualising. You are assuming.

At best we can speculate at what is going on - that's a good long essay talking about sources, weaknesses of sources and the wider context of what we know about the role of women, sexual relations and power within Roman Society. And even then, even if you could present a case for behaviour you would not necessarily be able to make a direct comparison between present day trans and what was going on in the head of an ancient Roman. What if he had some sort of brain injury and was a particular outlier that wasn't at all representative of the era in any way? You'd need a pattern of evidence, with several examples, in context.

Given what we know of Roman Society and sexualisation, if there is some truth in it, it's more likely to be an example of fetishism rather than innate trans identity. That opens up a whole different bunch of conversations. Nor does this necessarily legitimise trans for today given we know that sexual use of children and slaves was totally acceptable and that concepts of equality certainly did not extend to women. Those conversations are potentially difficult and actually this might be an attempt to deflect from those less pleasant aspects of Roman society (or conversely to try to pave the way to legitimise the return of less pleasant aspects of Roman society) depending on your sexual politics. Either way = Massive.Can.Of.Worms.

Reducing all this to a single like that 'transwomen existed in Roman times' therefore is fundamentally a dishonest and deliberately misleading concept.

And one you make by saying 'least someone of it must have some basis in truth' which is piss poor historical analysis and skills.

As I say, massive assumptions and jumping to wild conclusions to fit modern understanding rather than a serious attempt to help us understand the Roman world.

But yeah it sounds intellectual, cool and as if it has credibility because it's those educated type people finding this stuff. But scratch it a tiny bit and it falls apart.

The one dimensional repeating of the idea that transwomen existed in Roman times just isn't 'Good History'. In the same way that transactivism is riddled with 'Bad Science' and poor journalistic standards.

It needs to be pulled up on. Hard.

Absolutely classic gender critical logic

You might have a hope of understanding gender critical logic if you actually read and responded to what was posted rather than making stuff up and misrepresenting and losing track of the words we are discussing.

You have used three separate terms as if they were interchangeable in your post - trans, transgender variance and trans variance. Each of these terms should have a meaning (although Lord knows what, we seem to have abandoned the whole concept of meanings) otherwise that would be ridiculously inefficient and confusing.

The question ACTUALLY asked didn’t claim that ‘trans’ can’t be real, it was this:

Marshmallow
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?

Then you acknowledged that there was a difference between your concept of ‘trans’ and Marshmallow's point about historical drivers of reported mismatch between sex and social behaviour but produced a huge list of examples that demonstrate a great selection of those drivers which entirely backs @marshmallowpuff s point.

Tandora
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.

It’s not ‘circular’ - you have used terms and concepts interchangeably and ended up in a completely different place to where you thought you were.

Could I suggest that you decide on a term you want to use for specific groups of people and then stick to it. Then consider how your claims of a biological basis (as opposed to social drivers of different historical periods) for ‘trans’ fits for each of the different groups that all lay a claim to be ‘trans’?

I’m looking forward to actually getting somewhere with this.

She is trying her best to be this child's friend. Including trying to go along with her demands. It's the other child who is not being accepting, because she is punishing the OPs DD for forgetting on occasion to call her Ron and use male pronouns, which all the rest of the group do too. There is nothing whatsoever to suggest the DD is uptight or immature. The thread is about anxiety she is feeling because her friend is angry with her. The mention of the word trans is causing you to be biased, and you are unfairly maligning the character of a child.

Wow. For a start you know that OP DD is a daughter so the correct pronoun for a girl is ‘she’.

Then you suggest that she is ‘immature and uptight’ or ND for not wanting to be bullied by her ‘friend’ into pretending said friend has turned into a boy and changing her whole way of speaking (using wrong sex pronouns in front of her - highly rude to normal people) to suit friends demands?

Could you be any more wrong?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because someone dresses in some way doesn't mean something else.

We have Shakespearean Actors dressing as women. Oh so there were transwomen in Shakespeare's time? Nope we had an exclusion of women from public life - due to sexism. The only way you could represent women as part of life was to have men dress as women.

We had WWII prisoners dressing up as women. Again because women were excluded from the camps as they weren't servicemen. And they acted to relieve boredom but wanted to represent women as part of normal life.

Both are examples of men dressing as women because of the exclusion of women for very different reasons. These are not men becoming women, but a reflection of power dynamics within society.

So it's really important we don't go around making massive assumptions that relate to modern times for many reasons.

We should perhaps, at this point, talk about types of porn around today that are about power dynamics between men and women and the sexualisation of this - that involves men dressing as women. Thats one of those interpretations that perhaps isn't going to go down so well in pro trans circles too. It's not one that has such positive vibes in modern society but is definitely a reflection of modern life.

In the modern day context I can well see why it's preferable to make a nice comparison with 'innocent transness' rather than start talking about male sexuality and male power and dominance over women and exclusion from public life which is ingrained in multiple ways into sexism and sexualisation.

There's some huge assumption making going on here in saying 'there must be some truth'.

The reality is a) there may be no truth b) it might be about sex and power not identity c) it might be really rather unpleasant in the context of modern understanding.

Instead we have this very sanitised and one dimensional packaging which is a world away from a decent academic standard of historical analysis.

Why is that we don't see this as possible evidence that fetishism of women is a male sexual behaviour that goes back centuries because men see women as lesser status within society and get off on it?

Why wouldn't that interpretation be one that would be tolerated in today's society?

Instead the framing has to be sanitised for modern audience as 'evidence of transwomen' because our modern values don't want to address the presence of AGP in modern society and some transwomen.

This matters because control of the past is control of the present and future.

The idea that there is a cohort within the trans community that uses teenage girls and history as a shield isn't one that anyone wants to address 'because transphobia'.

Unfortunately this is the massive elephant in the room we should perhaps reflect on.

Huh? I called OPs DD 'She'?! If a friend of mine decided they wanted to be a boy or a rabbit, I would think they were weird but still be their friend. OPs DD is 14 and not 4, so seems very immature to me, she's hardly being bullied. What is even the issue, talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

'But history says cos there's a small amount of shit evidence' isn't the argument some think. By a long shot.

“Your DD sounds quite immature and uptight. Are they neurodiverse?”

It sounds like it may have been inadvertent in your part. You may not be aware but there is a trans activist push to use ‘they’ instead of he or she in as many situations as possible to undermine the sex binary.

What is it about the daughter’s behaviour that you think is immature? Don’t you think it’s quite a mature thing to stand up for what you believe? In this case that her friend hasn’t changed sex and that it’s rude to use pronouns in front of the person you’re talking about which is what us being demanded and punished by her friend for failure to comply. Have you heard the phrase ‘who’s ‘she’, the cats mother?’

Don’t you think the friend is being extremely immature in making unreasonable demands and being nasty to her friend when she doesn’t comply? That’s bullying isn’t it?

It’s quite amazing how many adults in this thread are coming out in favour of child who is bullying another.

@Tandora But even leaving aside that claiming someone wanted to be a woman was a well-known Roman insult, and that cinaedi often dressed up as a woman to role-play gay sex, none of any of the account suggests anything close to the description of “gender dysphoria” you posted upthread, does it? A man who likes sexual debauchery pretending he’s a female prostitute in a brothel or expressing once that he wants to be penetrated “like a woman” doesn’t mean he has anything like “gender dysphoria” in the modern sense.

Male prostitutes often did so in eighteenth century “Molly houses’ (from the Latin molles, effeminate or unmanly) — but that didn’t mean they had “gender dysphoria”: they were engaging in sex play. Ditto gay men in the last couple of centuries dressing in drag: it doesn’t mean they are all “trans”. A desire to make them so is projecting back onto them something that they themselves would not have recognised. Men in Roman culture had sex with other men, and some acted out “feminised” sexual roles, but under cultural circumstances in which they would have rejected the idea of this meaning that they really wanted to be women. (In the same way that many gay drag performers reject the idea that they actually really want to be women.)

I am not suggesting that somewhere in the past, individual people never had some kind of desires or experiences that one might recognise as an antecedent to the contemporary idea of “transgender”. But if they did, they have left remarkably little evidence, despite tons of evidence of same-sex sex. You are talking about eras when it would have made very little sense to people even to talk about the idea of “gender” being different from sex. Homosexuality as a concept (indeed, sexuality itself as an identity rather than a set of natural behaviours or an immutable, divinely ordained way of being), did not quite exist in the same way as now. It’s pretty difficult and a matter of conjecture even determining what made up same-sex orientation in the past. There is a huge amount of work going back decades on how homosexuality as an identity is not recognised as such in large parts of the world, or the past, despite people always having engaged in same-sex sexual activity.

These are all malleable and changeable concepts, that differ across time and place, not transcendent givens. For example: it’s only very recently that homosexuality has been widely considered “inborn”: as recently as the 1990s this was extremely widely debated (with many gay and bi people more drawn to “spectrum” models of sexuality, for which there was a reasonable amount of evidence). This may well change again in twenty years’ time (after all, as I said, people have been looking for biological or neuroscientific markers of homosexuality for 140 years with no success - this idea of “virilization” in the womb still remains conjecture, and how in any case does it explain homosexuality in both sexes plus bisexuality?)

Transgender as identity makes much more sense from the early twentieth century onwards, when ideas of sexuality and “gender” start to become available in new ways. But cross-dressing and gender nonconforming behaviour did not necessarily mean “trans” in the current sense at all: largely because people who experienced same-sex desire were told they “must” be the opposite sex (“inverts”), and cross-dressing was one legitimate way of expressing sexual orientation. (Many gay and lesbian people were actually very resistant to “inversion theories”, but they were quite often the only available understanding of homosexuality, and came with a veneer of “science”.)

Saying these people must have been “trans” is imposing your contemporary ideas on them in ways that flattens out and appropriates their own “lived experience”. Instead of looking at AI summaries or BBC articles or Wikipedia, why not actually go and read some of these actual texts — start with Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld, and the diaries and writings of people like Radclyffe Hall and EM Forster, and some of the substantial amount of scholarship on sex, gender and sexuality that’s been produced since the 1960s — and then start on Freud and Klein (hint: Freud actually had a very different understanding of sexuality, sex and gender than the sexologists of the time).

Then come back to us with your understanding of these ideas deepened and broadened, and then we can talk.

What the DD believes? Would you say the same thing if the friend were gay? DD sounds like the bully here. I think you're projecting to be honest given you thought I was trying to push some agenda by saying they, I meant nothing by it. Chill out. I'm also anti-trans when it counts, but can recognise an unfair situation when I see it. I would be very disappointed if my DC was treating anyone, let alone a friend in this way.

This post made very little sense to me.

It really doesn’t matter what specific words we use- words are just words. What’s important is to be able to describe/ communicate and understand the type of diversity as it exists in the world.

throughout history and across cultures there have been people who have expressed a profound desire and/or taken extraordinary action to change / deviate from their social, legal and anatomical sex. Accounts of this can be found in (historical and other) literature , mythology and art from across the world and as far back as ancient cultures/ times.

In the early 1900s medical practitioners in Europe started to use new medical technologies to perform interventions on people in acute distress as a result of a longing to change their anatomical sex. This was when the word “transexual” first appeared in Europe- originating n Germany in the 1920s to describe the group of patients being treated by these practitioners. Later in the 60s the word “transgender” appeared- and was adopted as the more inclusive and less stigmatising terminology.

@marshmallowpuff
I actually don’t disagree with almost all you have written here, except for the highlighted statement below:

”I am not suggesting that somewhere in the past, individual people never had some kind of desires or experiences that one might recognise as an antecedent to the contemporary idea of “transgender”. But if they did, they have left remarkably little evidence, despite tons of evidence of same-sex sex.”

That is where we deviate.

throughout history and across cultures there have been accounts of people who have expressed a profound desire and/or taken extraordinary action to change / deviate from their social, legal and anatomical sex. Accounts of this can be found in (historical and other) literature , mythology and art from across the world and as far back as ancient cultures/ times. I believe it is you who is failing to recognise these accounts because
you are imposing your own contemporary lenses and logics related to sex, sexuality and gender- and your evident distaste for the (trans)gender politics of today.

These accounts are certainly not as common as accounts of sexual desire, but nor should we remotely expect them to be.
while sexual desire is a universal human experience , transgender variance is both rare and has been a much more hidden / considered especially dangerous variety of diversity- particularly in European history (as it continues to be viewed today hence this thread). The histories of trans people are hidden in the same ways as the histories of intersex people- it doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

I am currently right now reading a biography of a trans man- Ewan Forbes born in 1912. Records of the British legal case involving his transition were destroyed.

I have a degree in media and history (with a splatter of art history).

Words have meaning and very much matter. They can contain propaganda, politics and power.

Language matters - the law rests on tightly defined legal definitions.

And I could go on about symbolism for hours.

Orwell wrote a couple of books on some of these concepts.

It's also funny how words seem to suddenly have importance and meaning to transactivists when it comes to the concept of using pronouns and cis, cervix havers, and accusations of transphobia and dehumanising language. But not the other way round.

You are always selective in your interpretations.

Ironically transpeople need legal definitions of sex or they lose certain protections in law due to sex and gender being different things and having difference definitions in English.

Saying language does matter is an absolutely absurd thing to say.

After all if it didn't matter, why are so many transactivists throwing a tantrum about the Supreme Court Ruling?!!!

Sorry I meant to quote this post above

@Tandora

throughout history and across cultures there have been people who have expressed a profound desire and/or taken extraordinary action to change / deviate from their social, legal and anatomical sex. Accounts of this can be found in (historical and other) literature , mythology and art from across the world and as far back as ancient cultures/ times.

Except there really haven’t been, no matter how much you keep repeating it as a mantra! What there are are a few isolated accounts, most of which, like the Elagabalus example, are hearsay, and/or don’t actually work at all when you look at the detail, or are actually about either gay men or lesbian women. “Legal sex” doesn’t even make sense as a concept for most of history. “Anatomical sex” is a pretty historically contested idea, too: people were well aware of the existence of what are now called intersex/DSD conditions, but often thought of them as aspects of disability, race, or magic, rather than as variants of sex.

Closer to today there are some slightly more plausible accounts, but even they don’t always really fit in to the current idea of “trans”, largely because these people were for the most part also same-sex attracted, or saw presenting as the opposite sex as the only permitted way to live with a degree of openness in a same-sex relationship (eg the “female husbands”).

Even in the early twentieth century, people largely did not actually see themselves in the way that is understood by current gender activists as “trans”. (Just as camp gay men still have a culture of calling each other by female pronouns, but this doesn’t mean at all that they are trans, and to read this as such would be completely erroneous.)

I’m not saying words never matter 😂. I’m saying , for the purposes of this conversation it doesn’t matter what specific terminologies we use - trans, transgender, gender variance etc (I know certain terminologies are “triggering” or easily misunderstood by people with a particular ideological/ political position and I’m not attached to any specific terminology in particular)

• what matters is that we can communicate/ agree about the actual thing we are talking about.

So I would prefer to be as precise and descriptive as I can be- including using a variety of forms of expression- so that the actual point can get across rather than us just arguing because we have different investments / assumptions invested in certain specific terminologies.

transgender variance is both rare and has been a much more hidden / considered especially dangerous variety of diversity- particularly in European history (as it continues to be viewed today hence this thread). The histories of trans people are hidden in the same ways as the histories of intersex people- it doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

Except this just is not true. First of all, there are plenty of accounts of intersex people: many well known figures in European history and medicine wrote a great deal about this! And they had loads of theories about it, and loads of ways they attempted to fit this into the medical understanding of the time. Loads of secondary scholarship out there on this too, dating back decades.

As regards your first point — actually, gender variance of all kinds was very common and much more socially acceptable in all societies than same sex attraction, and is written about constantly from the Classical world on. How do you think there were girls who learned Greek, and were Queens, and wore trousers, and became mechanics; and men who were poets, and gay, and scholars, and artists, and women who explored the Middle East, and discovered stars, and worked for NASA? People who were same sex attracted often coded it as sex role variance to make it socially acceptable, not the other way around. None of them thought of themselves as transgender in the modern sense - otherwise just about anyone who didn’t rigidly stick to the sex roles of the day would be secretly “trans”, in your analysis.

And we all know that just isn’t true. It’s a good example of the tail wagging the dog, here. If you stick to this idea of trans being everywhere in the past it occludes the blooming obvious, which is that people have always seen sex roles as roles, and open to a fair amount of variance; but that didn’t mean they saw themselves as “trans” by doing so!

*largely because these people were for the most part also same-sex attracted, or saw presenting as the opposite sex as the only permitted way to live with a degree of openness in a same-sex relationship (eg the “female husbands”).

No no no, see this is you imposing your specific western, contemporary , gender critical, understandings of constructs of sex and sexuality, and assuming an account of people’s lives based on this. These are the very same logics currently being used today to deny , suppress and restrict contemporary expressions of gender diversity !

I wonder if you took any note of my post a while back about how the idea that “sex/ gender ” and “sexuality” are fundamentally distinct constructs / axes of diversity it’s actually a very historically specific one.

But they DO MATTER.

They absoluetely do matter.

I've said this loads.

It matters to how family members communicate and their own sense of identity when it comes to son/daughter mother/father brother/sister and how they relate to others for starters.

All relationships are, by definition, relational. We understand and relate to each other using these. Someone reacts to you differently if you say you have a sister compared to a brother, depending on their own experience.

They matter for ALL situations for this reason. Some times the effect is minimual. Other times its large. But the point is there IS an effect. And the effect MATTERS. And there is a ripple effect too. The erosion of boundaries absoluetely does matter to women. Some of these effects matter to some individuals more than others.

Language is power though. Anyone who understands this, absoluetely understands that you can NEVER say it doesn't matter because it matters in ALL situations.

And, not least, it’s always been extremely common for girls and women to say and write “I wish I were a boy/man — because then I would be able to…[be King/wear trousers/learn Latin/sleep with women/not get married/do as I want - insert desire of choice]”. Children’s books are full of it (eg Enid Blyton - stuffed full of tomboys who change their names to male ones). Virginia Woolf says it. Historical and literary writings are full of it. Philosophy and feminism is full of it. We on MN may have once said it ourselves. Doesn’t mean that every women who said this is trans. It’s a widespread expression of frustration with female sex roles. If you went about saying Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I or Bill in Malory Towers were all trans as a result (and people do), you just look a bit foolish, to be honest.

What you are struggling with here is that you really don’t understand what transgender diversity is. You may have an excellent grasp on historical literatures but you are never going to be able to identify accounts of trans experience within them, if you don’t understand what trans experience is.

Transness absolutely cannot be reduced to social roles - you are correct that just because you are a girl who learns Greek does not mean you are trans. HOWEVER, to transition socially does involve a change in social roles- it’s one of the ways that transgender variance is externally expressed. In history we would have to look for extraordinary accounts of this to be really able to say this person might be trans- but to do that was extremely hard, the barriers are enormous (still significant today) , the risks are huge and the histories of this are dangerous and hidden.

This was also @marshmallowpuff

Jesus wept.

You don't understand a magical mysterious concept that has no definable qualities other than a ideological belief in someones head

Therefore you are wrong.

Is not a coherent argument.