General Trans thread part 2

[ChiefClerkDrumknott]

Following on from this one General Trans thread
Because I'm not Elsa and can't let it go

Even a quick read of this thread suggest there is a lot of anger. ..
Some examples...

You don't need examples. I told you that we are angry

This "debate" between radical feminism and the trans community is being seen by mainstream as a particularly nasty fight with some issues, risks and fears (on both sides) being deliberately exaggerated.

And who do you think started the fight? I think you'll find some rad fem fears stem from being threatened with death and rape when they bring up objections to some of these 'issues' you glibly dismiss. Do you not think that's an understandable reaction? By the way, have you popped over to Twitter or Tumblr yet to plead with 'TERF' killers to be less aggressive?

As mentioned earlier, I may be completely wrong. Perhaps the best solution is to get even angrier, even more offensive and aggressive...

You know what, as I said we are angry and we are 'aggressive', if you term defending women's rights vocally and loudly and consistently aggressive

Is there any solid research/stats on the sexuality of transwomen and transmen?

Just had a look and the most credible answer I could find was -

Transwomen - 38% attracted to women , 35% bisexual and 27% to men.
Transmen - 55% attracted to women, 35% bisexual and 10% to men.

73% of transwomen identify as 'not straight' (for want of a better phrase) as opposed to 2.4% of women?

Not sure what to make of this, well I have some first thoughts but need to ponder and read a bit more.

'Because they come at it from this starting point that transwomen are women, just that they happen to be women with penises. It's truly baffling. Last time I tried to talk about it with her she ended up crying, to my shock and distress, because it made her feel so bad for all her TW friends who would be cut to the quick by hearing me say they're not actually women. '

I find this all so strange, but am glad posters are describing what is happening.

Of all the terrible things that are actually happening in the world, why would someone cry over an imaginary event? They're not actually going to hear you say it. Why is she so distressed?

Something very odd is going on.

Almondpudding, that article is horrifying. 12 year olds being given hormone blockers wtf?
What is all this coming from? I've been watching lots of wonderful Prince stuff on Youtube, now there's a man who messed with gender. My formative years were spent having an almighty crush on a very hairy heterosexual superstar who wore frills, heavy make-up, high heels and wrote songs like If I Was Your Girlfriend where he fantasises about being a woman, a man who invented an alter ego called Camille. This didn't have to have labels like "nonbinary" or "genderqueer" slapped on it; Prince just WAS. (see also Bowie of course). What is it with these special snowflakes that they think they're different or new? Can you imagine anyone suggesting to Prince that perhaps he was in fact a woman and should identify as one?
I know I'm an old codger and apparently don't get it. But I'm sad that the younger generation are so regressive about gender roles; so fucking old fashioned and depressing. I'm sad that they act as though feminism and even gay rights are old hat, or that the trans thing can be lumped unthinkingly in with these. I'm sad that this nonsense hogs so much media bandwidth that could be used for far more important causes.

I don't know.

I think perhaps we underestimated how much more sexist the world had become for teenagers.

I was just reading that the proportion of women sexualised on Rolling Stone thirty years ago to now has risen from 44 to over 80%.

That increase seems to be replicated everywhere. I can see why if that is the perception of women, young women don't want to be perceived that way.

The cause of gender equality for young people has become one of how men and women must collectively relate to each other as if we are all equal with no differences between us. That's great; it should be the end result of feminism.

But we're supposed to go through that process without ever confronting the actual inequality, which means the two main subordinate roles of women - unpaid worker and sexual object still exist, in many ways more reviled than ever.

And one way of distancing yourself from those roles is by declaring yourself non binary.

The whole thing stops younger women and older women engaging in joint activism as well.

Yes, so it could be some kind of weird escapism? Reminds me of Virginia Woolf and her obsession with androgyny in her writings- she had had a difficult adolescence ( it's believed she and her sister were sexually abused as children by a relative) and seemed desperately to want to reject the trappings of a female body. What about the mtts though, where does that fit in? Genuinely just thinking aloud here.

I mean if they too are reacting to oppressive gender roles what's in it for them if women are so reviled? Or are they just taking the bits they like and leaving all the messy menstruating and childbearing to the hated cis women?

(The MTTs I mean)

It's women that are reviled.

They're not actually becoming women and everyone knows that, despite the elaborate pretence otherwise.

Why would they be reviled as women when nobody really believes they are?

I can see anger in Victoria Darbyshire when she deals with trans issues. The way she is protective towards the trans movement and gets angry at having to even ask questions that don't fit. I have considered putting in a complaint about her actually as my opinion is I see her partaking in child abuse and encouraging it. I don't know how to phrase it though.

I am a licence payer and I don't see VD reporting with impartiality , she has a biased agenda that shines through.

"Transwomen - 38% attracted to women , 35% bisexual and 27% to men.
Transmen - 55% attracted to women, 35% bisexual and 10% to men.
"
Well, labeling sexual orientation according to sex (not gender), and assuming (which is not necessarily true), that hormones/transition etc don't effect your sexual orientation in terms of the object of your orientation, we have 90% of transmen transition from being non-straight women. And a hefty 55% transition from being lesbians, to being straight men. Which is kind of from the bottom of the tree to the top in one bound!

Whereas 27% of transwomen transition from being gay men to straight women, whereas a hefty 38% are trying to go from being straight men to lesbians.

If those figures are still true, in fits in fairly well with an analysis based on the relative positions in the social heirarchy of males versus females (based on sex NOT gender), and straight folks versus gay (again, based on labelling orientation in terms of sex, not gender).

Either way, the figures would seem to heartily disprove the claim that being trans and sexual orientation are not linked, because if they weren't, we would expect, as others have noted, that most transwomen would be attracted to men............

Overall, we could take both figures and say that only a relatively small number of transpeople are solely interested in sleeping with men, because frankly women are probably going to be more accommodating (as we have always been trained to be!).

But that's just me being all old-fashioned rad fem (and a bloody good thing too, frankly! :-) ).

SomeDyke

I cant find the link now but it was from the University of Minnesota. I couldn't find the actual research.

I will have another try at finding it as I have a feeling this type of statistic is going to be increasingly difficult to find. There is so much obfuscation around anything trans-related. Such an effective way to shut down debate - make it a crime/socially unacceptable to use simple factual descriptions/ask simple questions.

I couldn't find it either -- looking through University of Minnesota Program in Human Sexuality publications page, a whole load of it seemed to be about trans, SEM (sexually explicit material, a new acronym for me!), HIV, men who have sex with men etc. Bugger all about old-fashioned lesbians, or even women. Trans is definitely SEXY in terms of Human Sexuality research at the moment.

Tada!

Bit concerned about the way they recruited participants. Still though, makes sense when I thinkabout it.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076785/

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/obama-public-schools-transgender-access-restrooms

"All students must have access to facilities consistent with their gender identity, even if others object"

Poor girls.

Shins
Thanks for that link - horrific
“As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students...”
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't 'the desire to accommodate others discomfort exactly what is happening if men who' feel like women' are allowed in female spaces because they fear using male spaces

I think the reasons why FTT and MTT transition are very different. For FTT it is about avoiding the prejudice against lesbians and gender-non-conforming women.
There seems a trend that there are almost no gender-nonconforming (butch) lesbians left because they all transition.

For some MTT it is this, I suppose especially the young ones, but a big portion of what is counted as transwoman is probably just autogynephile and as such attracted to women.
Would be interesting to read statistic split up for age.

Different question: Does anybody know how many of those "sex is a social construct" pro-trans libfem types do any gardening or animal breeding?

It is just a theory, but could the genderism partly be a symptom of the separation of many people from nature and its facts?

Like, if you go on a gardening forum and ask how to cross two tomato species, no one will think that the sex of a flower is socially constructed. They're very clear on which parts are male and have to be removed to avoid self-pollination, etc . No one asks what the flower identifies as.

And then there's the genderist community some members of which apparently believe that a "female penis" (with testicles!) cannot get you pregnant, or that transmen become infertile as soon as they identify as male (not as soon as they have a hysterectomy), or that testosterone will make a woman grow a (functioning?) penis.

There has, of course, always been a tradition of seeing humans as fundamentally different from any other mammal on earth, but those are usually the religious types, ironically enough. (Though genderism and religion do have a lot of overlap...)

Yes like blind articles of faith. If I believe it it's real. I know atheists who utter statements such as "transwomen are women"; they might as well believe in transubstantiation while they're at it.

Re the schools; I feel especially sorry for the girls at the mercy of teenage boys. Adolescence is painful enough. When I was a teenage girl we weren't even comfortable changing in front of other girls, it would have been horrific to throw boys into the mix as well.

Today's Financial Times has a long article written by a woman about how the better companies are making it easier for employee to transition in the work place. It features such gems as "Xxxx struggled for 45 years with the fact that he is female ". A what?

If even FT has lost sight of the meanings of the words fact and female, I'm wondering if Newspeak has well and truly taken over the place of English.

Oh bloody hell.

It's just getting worse.

I am beyond disappointed at Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch, two people I thought were both inspirational and admirable.

As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DISADVANTAGES TO THE CLASS OF STUDENTS THAT IS BIOLOGICALLY FEMALE????? That class which is already, you know, HUGELY discriminated against?

Why the hell do we not matter? Why are women colluding in this? Why has everyone swallowed the bullshit that trans/non trans is the only axis of oppression? What has happened that everybody is in such denial of the male/female axis of oppression? Why is misogyny not seen in the way transphobia is?

Jesus fucking wept. I feel like the whole world has collectively lost its mind and the lunatics truly have taken over the asylum.

How do we unpick this construct that women are the power and privilege holders who need to be forced to accept this march towards equality, and reveal the truth that we are the ones being discriminated against by people who are members of the actual power and privilege holding class?

Fuck fuck fuck.

Cote it looks like it really has.

They really are completely erasing the distinction between women and transwomen.

It's unspeakable.

I've come to the conclusion that it's the gaslighting I hate.

Forget about transwomen for a moment. I shouldn't need to preface this with the disclaimer that I don't think transwomen are sexual predators, but for the hard-of-thinking, I will. Good, have we got that straight?

1 in 4 women is sexually assaulted at some stage in her life. The overwhelming majority of these assaults are carried out by men of the penis having variety. Work by criminologists such as David Lisak puts estimates of the number of men who rape round the 6% level. So it is perfectly rational not to want to share communal changing rooms where you are naked and vulnerable with someone with a penis.

Add to that the toxic culture of victim blaming surrounding sexual assault. How often are women told "if you put yourself into a vulnerable position - alone in a dark alley, alone in a man's flat- tgen you have only yourself to blame for getting raped or sexually assaulted."

So there's a double whammy there - the rational, statistically based inference that you need to be wary round people with penises (NAMALT of course, but given the hundreds of men I interact with every day and the 1in20 figure, frankly it doesn't matter much), coupled with the constant social pressure not to place yourself in a vulnerable position with people with penises...

Yet suddenly a group of, say, 14 year old girls is supposed to be totally cool with someone with a penis sharing communal changing rooms. And if they're not, suddenly they're painted as bigots on a par with the grat granny who won't accept a black care worker. And I'd put good money on the fact that if any of those girls went round to her boyfriend's house alone and got date raped, she'd still be victim-blamed, by exactly the same people who were calling her a bigot the week before.

It's horrifying. I actually can't believe that intelligent women are falling for this bullshit. All the 'stop whining, you're going to get raped anyway regardless of this law, you TRANSPHOBE' from other women is so disturbing and you just cannot reason with them as they are so brainwashed.

Why the hell do we not matter? Why are women colluding in this? Why has everyone swallowed the bullshit that trans/non trans is the only axis of oppression? What has happened that everybody is in such denial of the male/female axis of oppression? Why is misogyny not seen in the way transphobia is?

To be fair a lot of people are just uninformed about the issues. The problems aren't immediately obvious and nobody is being allowed to discuss them as certain elements of the trans community are using threats of violence and intimidation to silence those that speak out. I I also don't think the people that have been given a platform to speak out have done so particularly well. I feel Julie Burchill and Germaine Greer didn't present the most important points and I thought they were insensitive in how they chose to word things at times.

And a lot of people (even the educated intelligent ones) don't know what terms like transgender mean while thinking that they do know. Many first read about the subject years back when the term pretty much referred to people who had physically transitioned or were seeking to physically transition. And that's what they still think it means, not having kept up with developments or realising that the term has become more of a "catch all" these carrying far more wide reaching implications. There is also a huge deal of sympathy for people with gender dysphoria which I think is understandable as it is clearly a distressing condition for many of those that have it.

I think we could do with an article in one of the big newspapers or a major blog. Maybe I'll try and write one. Maybe that's unlikely to happen though. Should we all get writing for various publications? I think certain points are worth highlighting and certain points played down. For example I think the threat of rape in toilets is actually pretty low. Most rapists rape their own wives and partners in their own beds. Even if you did find yourself alone in the toilets with "your average rapist" he's unlikely to attack you given most rapists don't attack strangers and the ones that do are unlikely to do so in a setting where anyone could walk in at any time. But I think the act of men forcing women to let them into their spaces is in itself an act of major aggression when so many women are saying "no, we're not comfortable with you here". Although I personally think the issues are quite different regarding people who present as women and have physically transitioned due to gender dysphoria compared with the men who look like men and have full male biology and no plans to transition.

Another aspect of the problem is that a lot of people genuinely believe women have equality, because the inequalities that exist aren't observable having been a genuinely better candidate. (you will never know as a woman which opportunities you missed out on due to your sex- in any given case you may just not havegot a job etc due to there as they once were and it is no longer socially acceptable for men to say they think women are inferior in any way. I think the women's equality party could help by compiling some statistics and raising awareness about the hidden inequalities that saturate society.