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?

How does the full context help? You made the statement.

As Mumsnet regularly remind us - posters online may not be who they claim to be. Hence some of the more incoherent, far fetched nonsense women on this board get treated to. Especially by those using the Humpty Dumpty mode of communication:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

In fairness there's a LOT of homophobia displayed by numerous prominent transpeople. Glaringly so. But it rarely gets challenged.

Yep language doesn't matter, as long as we understand the meaning. Apparently.

Except when we don't agree on meaning cos fuckwits come along and try and corrupt language so they can control us and exploit us and remove our legal rights from us.

Humpty Dumpty alright.

The context was- what is important is that we established a shared understanding and are able ti communicate about the thing we are actually talking about.

These are stigmatising and harmful representations that are imposed on trans people to over sexualise them and make them seem perverted.

It’s not us over sexualising these men - we’d rather they under sexualised themselves but sadly they refuse and sexualise all over the place. Even in corporate training courses by all accounts.

Is Ron a boy now? Likes doing boy stuff?

When I was 14 I liked my bf being a girl.

It’s a pretty big thing we had in common.

But in order to do that we need words with a meaning we all understand. You dismissed that as an idea. So we are currently not able to communicate effectively.

No response to my previous post around the social and historical aspects unless I missed it?

Basic logic seems to be be a challenge for many PPs.

Being trans is not about having a cross dressing fetish. Being trans is not about being homophobic. Being trans is not about having blue hair. Being trans is not about flying planes.

It does not follow that if you have/ do any of these things you cannot also be trans 😆.

For some it is.

you don’t speak for all people under the Trans umbrella.

How very trans phobic of you.

Right. I’m out. There was a somewhat substantive exchange earlier but we have descended into “trans people are all gross, hyper- sexual, homophobic, dangerous , perverts, and I’m not interested in hearing anything else” territory, and engaging with this sort of poison is neither not a good use of my time, nor good for my mental health.

Ta, ta.

Again context is important when Tandora says it is.

Otherwise it's not.

So — what is trans?

What does it consist of? What are its definitive qualities?

This whole thread you’ve been talking around trans, but not telling us what it is.

Is it the same as the criteria for gender dysphoria you posted upthread from the DSM?

If we want to distinguish the fetishists from the “true trans”, what criteria would we use?

How would we tell if Elagabalus really was trans, or if he wasn’t? So far we have, in the original sources, descriptions of his erotic interest in women’s clothes, which you say isn’t trans. We have him reportedly saying he wants to be carved a vagina so he can be penetrated: but that sounds like erotic male sex fantasy, so that isn’t being trans either. We have descriptions of him having sex with men, but that isn’t being trans. So what is there left to tell us whether he was, or not?

Only you have said this, not anyone else.

I don’t know much about trans, trans ideology, trans movement.

I’m coming from the point of view of teen / tween trends, belonging.

Will old friends (those that are teens now) be saying, in years to come…

”Oh my God, remember that time you wanted to be a boy?”

Much like anything before, teen-wise…

”Oh my God, remember when I thought I’d marry Damon from Blur, and you thought you’d actually marry Alex!”

Or does it really go deeper than that?

I think the Internet / smartphones make this so much bigger / dangerous than it could be. I don’t think anyone should blame ordinary mums & dads for questioning it, worrying about it.

I’ll answer this-

Being trans is to have a powerful, pervasive, visceral , uncontrollable understanding of self as being other than the sex one was assigned at birth.
i can’t say whether that Roman emperor was trans or not as I don’t have a window into his psyche, but evidence of trans experience in historical literature would include exploration of/ accounts of the experience/ desire of individuals who take (or try to take) extraordinary action :
•to change their social and legal sex; •to modify the sexual parts of their body (eg severing genitals);
•to insist on being addressed as the opposite sex ;
•to pervasively / persistently declare themselves to be the opposite sex , and such like.

'Being trans is to have a powerful, pervasive, visceral , uncontrollable understanding of self as being other than the sex one was assigned at birth actually is.
•to insist on being addressed as the opposite sex ;
•to pervasively / persistently declare themselves to be the opposite sex , and such like.'

So you agree trans women are indeed men and visa versa. Opposite sex.

Opposite as in opposite to the sex they were assigned at birth.

Opposite as in opposite to the sex they were assigned at birth are. Reality and language matters.

Are you talking sex or gender?

Okay. So look back at the list you posted of supposedly trans people in history. According to these criteria, most of them don’t then qualify as trans. If they don’t, who does? Are you just left claiming that some people probably were trans, but we have no real evidence of this apart from conjecture about their mental states, which, as you’ve admitted in relation to Elagabalus, we can’t actually know anyway?

And if gender variance was such a hidden and dangerous enterprise that we have no real records of it, isn’t its existence at all in the past just pure conjecture? (And, if so dangerous, why isn’t there any evidence of it being suppressed, either? People getting hanged or burnt at the stake for being trans?)

(Not to mention that trying to sever one’s genitals in the pre-antibiotic, pre-modern medicine age would have not only been taken as evidence of mental illness, but a pretty reckless act of self-harm in itself. But that’s not evidence of mental illness? Or is it? But that’s not “trans” either?)

So much contradiction. So little time…

you have truly exhausted me with this. The examples provided do contain evidence of these things- as does the biography I am reading now. I recommend it. Yes it’s a relatively rare history- it’s a very hidden form of diversity , and it’s rare, but accounts are there.

You are reading the historical evidence through the lens of your gender critical beliefs- eg the assertion that people who appeared to be trans were actually gay, etc, and your attempts to conflate contemporary ideas of transness with gender stereotypes , sexual perversion etc.

Wikipedia provides a great overview en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history and there are lots of historians and anthropologists who have written about trans people in different parts of the world and at different points in history. I know that you are insisting that these literatures aren’t actually about trans people but about something else. The authors disagree and so do I.

Anyone who is interested is free to do find their own references.

To be clear they contain evidence of this:

Being trans is to have a powerful, pervasive, visceral , uncontrollable understanding of self as being other than the sex one was assigned at birth.
The examples above were not intended to be an exhaustive list but merely examples- eg the emperor offering money to someone who could make him anatomically female.
Genital severings performed by Hijra etc.

So NOW you say you don't know if the Roman emperor was trans after previously saying he's evidence that transpeople have existed since Roman times and its not a new invention!

You can't even be consistent in the same thread.

You don't know what was going on in the head of the Roman guy, anymore than you know what's going on in the head of any contemporary trans person.

The idea that they might lie about fetishes because it enables a certain cohort to break boundaries if they claim their are trans seems to be a bit of an awkward inconvenient truth. You don't want to talk about anything that is a bit difficult. Instead you try and change definitions every time that happens to avoid the point.

This shifting sand is the very problem that a lot of women complain about. Precisely because in terms of how it affects women it's very much a case of women losing out every single time in favour of men.

And that's why we wanted the Supreme Court case to stop this fluidity of language that always works against women.

It's amazing isn't it?

Truly exhausted at being asked to be coherent.

Then you go "I can't be arsed anymore, here's a wiki link to educate yourself because it's too complicated for me to argue anymore. If I do I might be faced with confronting my own completely contradictory nonsense".

Right O.