Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Looks like an interesting watch, that does not just accept the trans children or they will kill themselves rhetoric. I just hope the BBC actually do show it and aren't bullied into not showing it.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088kxbw

The blurb:

Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?

In this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue.

gendertrender.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/uk-attorney-sean-shon-faye-libels-ken-zucker-on-national-television/

Footage of Trans activist attorney Sean “Shon” Faye libeling Canadian sexologist Kenneth Zucker with fabricated and unsubstantiated claims of abuse of minors. Clip has been removed from BBC website pending litigation.

I wish Ray had got the chance to say "but Shon, you just did on national television" when Shon tried to claim that nobody is scaremongering to parents about suicide stats.

I hope that "pending litigation" quote is correct. I'm not usually one shouting "sue" for every percieved slight, but what Shon said was so far over the line that even the BBC presenter was desperately trying to shut her down.

That gendertrender article also shows that shon Faye is very late to the transgender party. I read his guardian article and the comments underneath are unbelievable. All saying how wonderful he is for wearing blue eyeshadow. I'm misgendering btw, at the time of the article shon was a man.

Cool, one pitfall to beware of is that the word "gender" now has 4 distinct meanings (which may contradict one another).

There's the meaning as used in linguistics/grammar, to denote the gender of a word (so, for instance, German has masculine, neuter and feminine word endings and articles - e.g. der, das, die for the word "the" as applied to singular nouns). We can probably ignore this in English (though as a poster noted in connection with an article in a French newspaper, it's leading other countries to get in all sorts of linguistic knots when they talk about tans issues).

As the word has traditionally been used in the social sciences, including feminist theory, it has meant "socially sanctioned, socially policed and culturally acceptable roles, activities, dress etc. pertaining to one biological sex or the other." Hence in Medieval SW England, weaving was a man's job: among the Navajo of what is now California, weaving is/was a woman's job. Soccer in the USA is predominantly a women's sport, football in the UK is predominantly a men's sport.

Trans activists typically use the word "gender" to mean "internal, mental sense of being a woman or a man."

Then, just to really mess things up, in societies which are coy about the sexual act, and by extension the word "sex", "gender" has come to be used as a coy euphemism for biological sex. Hence in the US you have the (to my mind rather bizarre) cultural phenomenon of "gender reveal parties", where the sonographer at the 20 week scan puts the details of the foetus' biological sex in a sealed envelope, which is then given to a cake maker who produces a cake iced in neutral icing. The parents-to-be then throw a party in which they cut this cake in front of family and friends, revealing a blue or pink cake beneath the icing (I told you it was bizarre). IMO, this coy euphemism plays into the hands of those who want to deny biology and use newspeak phrases like "assigned female at birth" when in fact they mean "observed to be female at birth though may decide at a later date they're not happy about this."

One is a sexual orientation and one is an identity.

Madelyn Berns had a YouTube video addressing the difference. I'll see if I can find it.

www.transgendertrend.com has useful material. The document 'Creating a welcoming school for gender non-conforming pupils' may be useful to you CoolJazz. I don't envy you the job - it's a minefield

I don't think there is much science that supports differences in male and female brains. As a spectrum, there are very few at either end and most people are in the middle.

The innate difference between men and women, apart from biological sex is understood to be down to hormones, I believe.

Transwomen, say, claiming innate femaleness, but then needing to replace their male hormones with female hormones shows up the contradiction.

And as gender stereotypical roles have changed across time and place, it's difficult to argue that they are innate. Even down to many people thinking the colour pink is feminine when it was largely regarded as a masculine colour, 200 odd years ago.

Wanting to perform the roles of the opposite gender is entirely different, and a lot more understandable. If people feel constrained by their gender role, it's entirely plausible to want to peform it differently. The problem is with the stereotype. Reinforcing gender stereotypes is damaging, and is the very thing that makes people want to change from one to the other - by making one set the provenance of women and one the provenance of men.

I suppose, sexuality is verifiable and knowable. A person can easily know which sex they are attracted to, by the verifiable experience of being sexually attracted to them. Of course, it's not verifiable to anyone other than the individual, but it's still objectively verifiable. If we could invent a machine that could read sexual attraction in brains we could run it and verify which sex attracts a person.
Being a woman when you're a male person isn't a verifiable feeling. It's a person claiming to feel something of which they can have no knowledge. Sexual attraction is pretty much universal, being a woman isn't. Males can't experience being a woman because the condition of being a woman excludes males.
It's difficult to explain - but I bet someone with a better understanding of scientific and philosophical concepts could put it better than I did.

Cool. An article that really helped me sort out my head on the gender issue is this

aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

Its fairly long, but brilliant at tying up all of the knots.

I have absolutely no idea why homosexuality is always brought up in relation to transgender as they are not alike at all apart from the fact that people may experience discrimination due to being either/both of them. That is where the similarities end and infact, much of the trans ideology is deeply homophobic in itself...mainly the push for transing of children, who if left alone are extremely likely to just become gay 'cis' adults. Trans must be distanced from LGB. Especially for the sake of lesbians who are being thrown under the bus in all of this and battered from all angles.

The main part of 'trans' is apparently this feeling that one has of being a woman/man. However, I do not have this, nor does anyone I have asked about this. People simply feel like themselves. They ARE male or female, but have no internal feelings of being male or female, if that makes sense. You also cannot ever know what it feels like to be something you are not and never have been. So...even from the very start the argument falls down. I have spoken to some transgender people on reddit about this and the conclusion was that I, and others I know must be 'a-gender' or 'gender queer' as we do not have this internal sense of being a woman rather than knowledge that we are women. I would be really interested to hear if anyone on here has this womanhood essence that is claimed...as otherwise, everyone is actually trans? Which is a bit ridiculous.

I have no connections to the LGB community, but from an outsider's point of view, T seems to have been accepted as part of them. Are the concerns about T on LGB community very visible, and been given a high profile, within that community- or is it still a marginal voice and most LGB have not yet woken up to the implications of T?

Most of my friends are gay or lesbian so I hang out a lot in 'gay bars' and such and the general tone seems to be gay men don't care much as they aren't affected at all. And lesbians seem to really dislike being associated with transgender...because (and I am not saying this is true of all..but in my group it seems pretty common) they are pressured into accepting males as partners. One woman I know was actually assaulted. You can imagine the story really. Chatted up, took this woman home..discovered a surprise penis. Said no. Transphobia!!!! And whacked across the face. I didn't know about any of this until months after it happened as I used to blindly accept the transwomen are women rhetoric and never thought any deeper into it. It was MN that opened my eyes to this all and because of this I had conversations about it with friends and discovered that she had gone through this. She also too a lot of shit afterwards from various people who had been told by the transwoman how transphobic she was and how she was interested until she saw the penis and she is focused on genitals...yadayadayada. Basically, lesbians are no longer allowed to exist. As sex doesn't matter apparently. Gay men can't exist by the same token, but they don't know this as transmen do not do shit like that.

Went off on a tangent a little there, apologies. But yeah, tone in my group is gay men don't particularly care. Lesbians do care very much but are ignored.

CoolJazz
I only ever seem to de-lurk to recommend the work of Dr Rebecca Reilly-Cooper who is very clear and easy to understand on sex and gender.
sexandgenderintro.com/

CoolJazz this is a brilliant website to help organise one's thoughts on transgenderism.

thenewbacklash.blogspot.fr/2015/03/thank-you-for-visiting-my-blog.html?m=1

Finally saw the documentary and was very impressed - not just at the stuff I personally agreed with, but at the way it brought many viewpoints into it.

I was particularly struck by the 17 year old who has now transitioned, and who talked a lot about never fitting in as a child amongst boys. There was then a long session of her applying makeup, and I thought if you had been around in London about 1970-1981 during the New Romantic thing, you'd have been fine, as some of the boys I knew wore more makeup than the girls, and while it was def playing with gender presentation, there was no implication that a boy with shimmery eyeshadow on was not a boy. She perhaps would have fitted in just fine, have found her in-group, without having to feel she wasn't a boy at all.

Oh, WankingMonkey, that's just awful to happen to your friend. And the idea now that a lesbian can be assaulted for saying no to sex, and that our own community will think that's just fine and dandy, is the cherry on top of the horror-cake. At least in the 80s when you got bashed you got sympathy from your fellow benders.

"How is one accepted as innate identity and not the other?"
As regards homosexuality, we have the interesting case that I remember from the 80s-90s where the safer sex campaigners realised that there were men out there who had sex with other men, BUT who didn't 'identify' as gay (whatever that meant, but I think more in terms of the whole social scene and 'acting' like a particular type of gay man.). Hence a separation of the objective 'who you seek to have sex with' bit, and then the 'who do you feel like inside' identity stuff. It wasn't really an issue, just that groups realised they had to be careful about their wording in material, else the men who had sex with other men but didn't identify as gay would think it wasn't aimed at them..............

As regards 'innate' and homosexuality, first I think the 'I was born this way, I can't help it scenario', was a tremendous cop-out, even if it did enable gay marriage and decriminalisation. I would have preferred, ......innate, a choice, who cares! What is it to you even if I did chose this? In fact, if I mythically had a choice, I would still chose being a lesbian!.............
Indeed, why most people are heterosexual, and exactly how they all get trained into being that way, and the social construction of sexuality, are interesting areas of study. There is no straightforward 'gay gene', even though it seems to be impossible (as well as distinctly unethical) to try and change someones sexual orientation.

I guess for me the whole difference is that 'sexual orientation' is, kind if by definition, focused outwards onto other people. It's not a case of 'I feel like a lesbian' inside, but I either fancy other women (as opposed to men), or I don't. Many women anyway have found that their sexuality is more fluid, with many women being married etc for many years before falling in love with a woman. You can feel like all the other women around you, you might not identify as anything 'different', but fancy women as opposed to men.

It's objective, rather than the magic, purely subjective 'I feel like a woman in my head' of supposed gender identity. Some women do, some women don't, and seems some males do as well. Only becomes a problem if you insist that women are supposed to 'feel like women' in the head, and that that means something significant (or means something signifcant if they don't!).