Frank Maloney - Gender Reassignment

[CKDexterHaven]

Lived over 60 years with full male privileges - Check
Rose to the top of a male-dominated profession - Check
Right-wing political candidate for UKIP - Check
Homophobic public comments - Check
Believes in family values and traditional morality - Check
Believes in a 'female brain' (like people used to believe in a 'negro brain' and a 'Jewish brain') - Check

Nasty radical feminists are meant to be the reactionary ones but, to me, it is the transactivist movement that is conservative, homophobic and longs for the days when homosexuality was criminalised and men were men and women were women.

On the biology and language points that have come up:

Of course animals display behaviours that are a result of socialisation, all the time. Socialisation just means social learning (often in animals there are psychologically sensitive periods that assist socialisation). Just one example: chimpanzee mothers in captivity who haven't had an opportunity to observe maternal behaviour are often very bad at appropriate maternal behaviour, particularly if it is a first infant. Often the infants have to be human raised. No such thing as an inborn maternal instinct there. So I have no problem believing that an awful lot (if not all) of animal sex behaviour difference is the result of socialisation. And there are plenty of other studies that suggest that sex behaviour differences can be manipulated by social and environmental factors in a way that suggests they're almost certainly not innate.

Also language ? socialisation. Language may be a form of social behaviour, and a medium for socialisation, but you can have socialisation without it, as demonstrated by the animal kingdom 24/7. (Language is structurally and functionally qualitatively different from any form of animal communication tho)

There's a set of studies in my field that are trotted out regularly by people who quite certainly haven't got the background to interpret them as evidence of functional brain difference between men and women. And there is a tiny measurable difference - on one specific kind of task, testing one tiny sub part of a sub-system of a hugely bigger and mind-bogglingly complex cognitive process. It's not in itself particularly interesting or significant. But reporting on it always extrapolates this into 'Yes, Men's and Women's Brains Are Different - Science Tells Us What We Have Always Known!'

This is such an excellent thread, very thought-provoking, thank you! I haven't read all of it yet though.

Vezzie, that analogy is brilliant, it has really helped me see what you mean. It has reminded me -as an irrelevant aside- that we can definitely say the letter e is not required to describe youth activism .

I've just read that culturallyboundgender blogpost. Wow. What a brilliant piece of writing .

It would seem that Kellie has managed to keep her homophobic views, at least about same sex marriage. I find this a little odd to be honest, if she is saying that she has merely transitioned and has always been a woman, then presumably she has been involved in more than one same sex marriage herself?

She also doesn't think that people in same sex relationships should have children. She has children. She had them with another woman.

Not only is she a bigot, but she's a hypocritical one.

Linky

It's not a big surprise, is it? Or at least it isn't if you have a brain.

I'm feeling furious for all the thoughtless 'woo, what a victory for LGBT rights' articles I'm seeing. Don't people take a moment to think what that must feel like for the people she's treating this way? Oh no, they're too busy feeling smug about their 'tolerant' promotion of homophobia.

So surely the implication from that, Capt, is that Kellie/Frank is saying that her image/feeling of being a woman is just not the same as an FAAB woman otherwise obviously she is condemning herself. Also presumably therefore she is now attracted to men as she is so against homophobia.

It's a mind fuck.

God alone knows, it's blown my logic circuits!

From reading the comments, she's not getting much in the way of back slapping from the LGB community. She's always been a divisive character, with very questionable morals, so who knows what's next on the agenda.

I've just read that culturallyboundgender blogpost. Wow. What a brilliant piece of writing

I absolutely love that blog - she is incredible.

So surely the implication from that, Capt, is that Kellie/Frank is saying that her image/feeling of being a woman is just not the same as an FAAB woman otherwise obviously she is condemning herself

That's exactly what I thought too. Surely this amounts to an admission that Kellie is not and never has been a woman?

One of the comments there noted that the homophobic comments are a massive kick in the teeth for the LGBT campaigners who have put themselves at enormous personal risk for her benefit

Of course having certain genes can make you more likely to be violent or suffer from depression! That's exactly how genes work.

As for penguins, I imagine the males keeping the eggs warm while the females go off to get food is socialised behaviour but it's there for the very good reason of the females (and therefore the foetuses in the eggs) would die if they didn't eat.

I am a lurker on mumsnet and have done a lot of research and reading into transgender issues, and I just have to say ...

Do any of you suppose that Maloney was present when any of the three children from Maloney's two marriages were born?

I ask this because, try as I might, I simply cannot comprehend how a biological male, socialised and defined through masculine context from birth, who has fathered children presumably through penetrative sex, can experience the reality of a biological woman giving birth to a child and still think that the "feminine" aspects of their psychological state have anything to do with "womanhood" or the reality of the state of being female.

I have absolutely no problem with gender performance. If a biological males wants to dress as women and engage in stereotypical "feminine" behaviour, it is none of my business. But what concerns me deeply is that such gender performance has now become an avenue to legal recognition as a genus that, for time immemorial, has been coded through the reality of biological sex.

I do not use women's changing rooms because I culturally perform as a woman; I use them because I have a vulva and breasts. I do not use women's health services because I have a female name and wear feminine clothes; I use them because I have breasts, a vagina, a cervix and a uterus.

Surely seeing a biological woman give birth would challenge a biological male's belief that they were, inside, "really a woman". Surely.

I was reading on Trans issues and TERF and trying to get it all clear in my head and came across Tumblr. Anyone else been on there?

Article on this issue here -

gendertrender.wordpress.com/

Have you read the Paris Lees piece that it links to? Bloody hilarious bit of cognitive dissonance going on there.

Paris Lees isn't very bright (I am slightly boggled at her suggesting that for 'hundreds of years' in the West, if you were homosexual you were an 'invert' ... yes, because obviously sexuality has always been understood in a late-Victorian/Edwardian fashion. Way to erase several centuries of people's lived experience there ....).

I get that Lees feels frustrated on behalf of someone she thinks has a similar experience to her. But the lecturing is just so crass.

It also links to my other favourite Paris Lees article where Paris goes on about loving street harassment but has a little wibble when thinking about how a rape victim might feel about it. It's as if the only women who have a problem with street harassment are rape victims. If Paris Lees has a woman's brain then I've got a rhino's penis. Paris exudes male socialisation.

That's the one CK, the one where she says that she wasn't brought up to be a 'victim' to street harassment. No love, that's because you were brought up to be a perpetrator of it, in other words, a MAN!

She really isn't very bright at all!

Kellie is now in the celebrity big brother house...

I saw that. I might start a book to see how long it takes for her mask to slip. It's going to be car crash TV and I feel slightly sorry for her.

It's certainly going to be interesting...

Oh dear, are we finally going to have to have the FWR Celebrity Big Brother thread? It could be interesting.

I don't quite see how Kellie can complain about being outed if Kellie was planning on going on Big Brother anyway.

Looking on some mainstream sites it's interesting how many people (generally supportive of Kellie) are misgendering Kellie or making other comments that would get them rape and 'I'm going to set you on fire' threats from transwomen if they had been made by feminists.

There are also lots of 'how brave' comments. Isn't calling a transwoman 'brave' an acknowledgement that you don't, in fact, believe that they have always been a woman because what's brave or remarkable about a woman wearing make-up or a dress?

So this happened...

metro.co.uk/2014/08/24/celebrity-big-brothers-kellie-maloney-warned-after-calling-leslie-jordan-a-queenc-4844275/

That lady brain of his is making him threaten to knock out a gay man then?

Reads a lot like heterosexual male privilege being exercised there, not ladybrain.