So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

As in, when a baby is born, how do you identify whether it belongs to the group more at risk of prostate cancer or the group that may need smear tests?

Or , more importantly as it can happen unexpectedly at a very young age, the group who has blood dripping out of whatever the acceptable name for a vagina is.

The issues you mention only apply to adults who, whatever you call them, are likely, at least in the western world, to have access to reliable information about these issues before they have to deal with them.

You don't get it, do you? The point was that not every social change stands the test of time

Not every change does last. I was simply pointing out a massive social shift that has happened pretty recently.

Now I would say there is a lot of attention on trans / gender issues at the moment.
No I don't know if it will stick, or how much it will change society but neither do you.

Oh yes, the olden days when people who wanted to have relationships with someone of the same biological sex were seen as delusional and bad.

As opposed to now, when people who want to have relationships with someone of the same biological sex are seen as delusional (there's no such thing as bio sex remember!) and bad (You are a transphobe if you won't have sex with a lesbian with a penis):

therealpornwikileaks.com/lily-cade-gender-warfare-sexual-entitlement/

If people are brought up to think they are what they identify as, and their actual bio sex isnt recorded, then they may not realise that they can be affected by certain disorders.

I got a letter through inviting me to a smear test when I was 25. I presume that wouldn't happen in a future where bio sex is considered meaningless.

If you are expecting me to agree with every crazy thing a trans activist puts on social media you are barking up the wrong tree.

It's a bit like selecting the most bonkers rad fem blog you can find and assuming all feminists must agree with it.

You asked for examples of language change having an impact on women's issues.

I don't think anyone has suggested no one records someone's sex on medical records.

And I've never said there was no such thing as biological sex. This is a thread discussing transgender not the 98-99% of people who it is easy to define the sex of.
I said I can't think of a definition of biological female that would work for 100% of women.

Ah, I see Dementor I hadn't thought of that. I suppose then we would have to target all preventative care to everyone , although that could be done relatively cheaply , at least in imparting information, by online means

WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid don't want to pick on you and off to bed now anyway (sleep tight) but have you read 1984?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

There is a real danger to not calling an object or person or animal the thing which it is.

If we categorised all cats together and just called them cats, because I really cannot think of any way of totally defining a lion I mean some have got manes, some may not, some are yellow but some are white etc etc)

www.kpbs.org/photos/galleries/nature-white-lions/

some are quite tame really, not so ferocious etc etc.

Then we could end up with the lion population dying out, because every time we counted cats we came up with millions of millions of them, except they all looked like this instead of this.

Now that is a flippant example but we need to be able to say what things are. Double speak means we cannot say what things really are. I think the reason we are getting ourselves into this emperor's new clothes scenario is because trans people want to be taken seriously, and not discriminated against and want to feel valued etc etc, and I want all that for trans people too. But I don;t want words used for female or males or our bodies to be disrupted to the extent that we cannot speak about anything in a meaningful way.

And I firmly believe that for the sanity and protection of trans people (such as counting the murder of trans women, especially trans women of colour) it is vital that we are honest about who people are.

This news story makes me so sad, but if we could not identify this woman as a trans woman, than we would not have the full story and I suspect that the hiding of information could go both ways in terms of being unhelpful to women born women and unhelpful to trans women.

www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/07/31/florida-man-charged-murder-transgender-woman-india-clarkes-death

Anyway, night all.

Thanks italian no time to read that - I need sleep.

The threads moved on a bit from does gender identity exist? To how should transexual people act? How should society respond to them?

Whole different topic but very interesting.

Dementor, yes, agender is under the trans umbrella, so women who say they don't have a gender identity are trans. Not all agender women choose to identify as trans.

Oh my goodness, I've been misgendered! Violence! Hate crime!

Thinking about it - I can work this. If I'm trans, I'm being misgendered all the time by people assuming I belong to either the F or M gender. And since I don't identify as trans, I'm also being misgendered by statements like the above. I think I may choose to identify as trans, though, because it'll get more legal protections & concessions than I have as a plain old woman.

I guess I need to join the ranks of trans people who also think a lot of this is a load of old shit, and misogynist shit at that, and get called a terf on twitter and all the rest of it.

This, too I'm becoming more trans by the minute. A TERF trans, which apprently is not an oxymoron.

Apologies for not keeping up with the thread. After Xx very kindly posted the extracts about young transfolks, my brain blew up. It was all the mentions of Barbie & pink princesses ...

I now suspect transgenderism was invented by Mattel and Disney. There's no more logical explanation for the uniformly accepted belief that a small plastic doll with unfeasibly large breasts determines the sex of human children.

Both the quizzes linked to have said I am a man. Should I be worried? That how old are you thing said I was a man too (even though I had long hair at the time).

It just shows how rubbish all this gender crap is really. I am a woman, mother to two children, breast and vagina too. I'm just more stereotypically masculine than feminine and reject gender stereotypes. I am still comfortable to be referred to as 'she' although I'm not massively annoyed if someone accidentally calls me 'he'. She is the usual pronoun for a woman and I am a woman.

Oh and I wasn't a pregnant individual when I was pregnant, I was a women. In fact it was one of the times when I really really identified with other women as it's such a strong and unique to females shared experience. The idea of denying that seems just bizarre to me.

I don't really understand why a movement that affects such a small number of people is so dominant at the moment in what seems to be a very destructive way. Women have so many other things to fight without having to fight to be recognised as women still.

I don't really understand why a movement that affects such a small number of people is so dominant at the moment in what seems to be a very destructive way

So what is good trans? Some good examples of trans activists acting like idiots.

But trans people do exist and want a place in society. What should that space look like?

In the comments someone identifies the source as a person who gets income from trolling the internet making social justice posts

You can get paid for trolling? Not looked into that cupcake thing much but it sounds insane.

I clicked the link and he (I'm certain this is simply a troll) has an account on a website where you can donate to people, monthly. So you donate to him so he can spread his wisdom on the internets. Wow, should I also get an account like that? Donate, otherwise I couldn't possibly write more posts on the internet?

So there's people (trolls) out there trying to set feminists and trans against each other?

brair do you have PayPal?

I had a google of the MANA core competencies (with regard to the midwife letter that Whirlpool linked).

I've only scanned it briefly but I can't see any mention of pregnant individuals. But woman is meantioned quite a lot.

Is this another troll thing, or did MANA change pregnant women to pregnant individuals and then change it back after complaints?

mana.org/about-us/core-documents-of-the-midwives-alliance

Dunno - a doctor's page who was going on about changing all her practice to not mention women at all (this was in relation to abortion)

rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/03/18/cisgender-women-arent-people-seek-abortions-activists-language-reflect/

Then she twists knots around how someone my present as cisgender but actually be trans without knowing it. It all seemed a bit patronising if I'm honest.

I've just skimmed the core competencies and found these early on:

The biological wisdom to give birth is innate, it has been held throughout time, and is experienced across cultures by all pregnant people.

Pregnant individuals are the only direct care providers for themselves and their unborn babies, thus the most important determinant of a healthy pregnancy is the pregnant person.

Could be new guidelines that the midwives have seen but not published more widely yet
Could be a draft out for consultation
Don't know i don't work for them!

Do you think the letter might be a hoax?

In what sense is this person a troll?

They have a fairly long history of trans activism, other trans activists have written articles supporting them prior to this cupcake thing and defending their masculine appearance.

Isn't the work of an activist to campaign against stuff you disagree with? In the case of trans activism, that is often feminism.

And getting people to pay donations to you if you're a blogger is really normal now. You don't have to be blogging about social justice to do that.

I also think that disregarding anyone with views that you consider to be rather extreme or "out there" as a troll is not sensible.

It's all very well saying oh well that's a niche viewpoint it won't have any effect in real life and ignoring it and then all of a sudden it does and it has and you've missed the boat on putting any opposing views across.

Chunky I read that (well skimmed it ) and the comments and I am at a bit of a loss as to how to refer to people who when they are born people say "it's a girl". The aim is to totally disconnect the terms male, female, man, woman, boy, girl from anything to do with biology. But I think we need to be able to identify these two groups. It seems that many people don't.

I thought her point about it's not just people who identify as trans or are obviously trans who can be trans and so language needs to include that. People who aren't on a gender binary. But we know from on here that many many women aren't on the gender binary and so her point means that the term "women" excludes lots of people who would previously have been thought of as women. But I don't mind being called a woman, and this is on the basis that I am a person who has a female reproductive system. The discomfort in using women from her, is really to do with trans women only because I don't think that many women (I may be wrong) mind being called women on the basis of biology.

So all of this really is to accomodate one very small group of people by changing the words used about a large group of people, and then justifying it by saying well actually the large group of people will benefit from this as well, when they won't.

Say you have a country where 100% of boys are educated and 0% of girls. That's boys and girls in the sense of when they were born people said "it's a boy" or "it's a girl" and proceeded accordingly.

The new way of messaging this, or understanding it, would be that 50% of children are educated.

This is the logical conclusion of where these changes in language take us.

We really need words to describe the people who are born with cunts vs the people who are born with dicks as without that we have literally no way of discussing any of the huge problems faced by people all around the world because of that fact.

It bothers me that so many people just don't seem to care about this at all.