Woman attacked by transactivists at speakers corner - part deux

[BeyondNoone]

Here's the link to thread one
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/3033126-London-meeting-to-discuss-Gender-Identity-attacked-by-transactivists

I'm just going to sleep, if someone else can add the news links for me please? Thanks :)

Hello, sorry my intersex question seems to have provided an in for those who like to obscure the issue. Sorry! What's his/her face is helpful to me though as his attempts are better than those who pop up on these threads & then flounce.

And there points still make no sense when countered with reason. Hope other lurkers are still here!

This is what happens when I post in a rush & don't proofread. Hope the above makes some sense despite the various spelling/grammatical errors.

That's ok user1496587010. The intersex question always comes up.

Transactivists use it to try and demonstrate that there are more than two sexes.

I probably have read more about intersex conditions in the last couple of years than I ever thought I would need to!

It's also the very definition of clutching at straws. The intersex society has repeatedly said not to include them in the argument.

I don't understand the leverage anyway. Transgenderism is not intersex. Being born with an ambiguous set of genitalia or a chromosomal abnormality is not what trans people have. And intersex people can't change sex. If they are born intersex, they remain intersex.

Like men. And women.

Sorry all shouldn't have taken the bait.

(Ps, I'm a regular poster with name change)

Ultimately, it doesn't matter exactly what trans people believe. In a free society we can all have our own private beliefs and we must all decide how those beliefs guide our public actions. What matters is how we, collectively, balance the rights of people with competing beliefs for the benefit of society as a whole. We might have to work it out in the courts, and that's ok, that's the common law process, but we do need to be able to work it out, which means we need to be able to discuss these issues publicly and we need to be able to organise politically.

We have confronted these challenges before with abortion; we are confronting them now with things like FGM, forced marriage etc. As a liberal society based on Enlightenment values we are equipped to draw these fine distinctions, but we cannot do it without freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. That's the real looming danger in all of this, imo. The state is funding groups that are openly advocating the violent suppression of civil society. They are doing it openly, repeatedly, and with impunity. And because it's all so silly from the outside (and it is silly! female penis! hairstyles! wee wee!) the actual problem is not really even perceptible to others.

Another place I see people making arguments based on the other side not being able to prove the non-existence of X is in the field of religion.

Once you engage with this you are having a discussion about faith. These discussions go nowhere. And that's not accidental.

Some hopeful news though - science is fighting back - The a Royal Society Prize for book of the year went to Testosterone Rex - debunking male / female brain nonsense! www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/18/testosterone-rex-review-cordelia-fine

I think for me, the issue with conflating intersex people and trans people is similar to conflating multi ethnic people and transracial people. In both cases the latter group rely on conforming to a stereotype in order to 'fit' their adopted personal. However, the former groups are individuals who just want to be themselves and have no wish to be placed into a box which would result in them losing the ability to genuinely be themselves. Therefore the wishes of one group will be detrimental to the needs of the other.

Not a great comparison I know, but as someone is of mixed heritage it has occurred to me that there is a similarity, at least in the sense that society seems to expect people to be easily categorised.

Ohyes: I was delighted to see that Testosterone Rex had won. I read Cordelia Fine's earlier book, Delusions of Gender, and it was excellent.

Brilliant. I'm reading Delusions of Gender at the moment. I'm finding it very readable, easy to understand and pretty mind-blowing.

Don't know if anyone follows 'feminist current' on FB, but it is fantastic! There is an article there today about the trans community protesting a women only festival in Sweden, someone in the comments posted a link to this Swedish study (hope link works) it found MtF crime rates to be significantly higher than the control female population. They don't discuss this point much, in fact they blur it a bit - but it is written in the results in black and white.

Well put saskia . It then comes a case of why should 'I am' have to accomodate and bow to ' I want to be' ?

That's currently unanswerable without a whole lot of highly confusing invented language and fallacy about privilege (guilt and shame), reminders of victim hood and threats (bid for sympathy and fear), and a basic have-not kind of resentment, anger and increasingly a voiced desire for revenge against 'i am'.

Actually thinking that through further, my beef with TA is that it is less 'I want to be ' in truth and more 'I want the cherry picked bits that benefit me' .

As said before, no one is queuing up to take on the many downsides of 'woman', that involve the oppression and disadvantage. Like that poor writer in the article saying he wanted to be 'objectified' - with very distorted understanding of what they though it meant - but only when it suited them, and not for example when they were at work.

Er, women don't get to choose . So wanting to stop women protesting or ending being objectified as transphobic aka preventing a wanted experience, is going to throw biological women and girls back under the bus as collateral damage.

I know that would be argued from a TA POV as deserved because of in born privilege women need to redress in centring trans issues.

There are some who definitely claim the whole female experience - I had a Twitter spat the other day with some who claimed that tw experience all the same misogyny as women do.

Blimey, try describing what feeling happy feels like without referencing synonyms.

Get back to us on this point when "happiness" is being used to create legislation.

What I don't understand is why if there is a mismatch between body and brain we accept treatment is to change the body, not the brain.

That's it isn't it? In most other areas where people feel a disconnect between their body and their mind, therapy is the treatment. Not surgery.

"What I don't understand is why if there is a mismatch between body and brain we accept treatment is to change the body, not the brain"

I've always wondered this. It seems to be incredibly offensive, almost unmentionable, to transgender people to suggest it, though, and I don't know why. We know it's impossible to change the sex we were born as, but it is possible to work on our mental confusions and unhappinesses.

Wouldn't it be far better to start all over again with this - because it's all gone the wrong way, what with giving hormones to teenagers, binding breasts, pretending we can surgically create a body of the other sex - 1) encourage people to wear anything they please (and freely adopt all the other trappings of "gender") and 2) sympathetically give psychiatric? help to those with dysphoria to accept their bodies as they are, as we gradually change society so that eg a man in make-up and a dress is absolutely unremarkable.

Therapy doesn't seem to work for many issues, why has therapy admitted it's a failure in this particular group?

The Guardian had an article yesterday about Testosterone Rex winning the Royal Society science book of the year:

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/19/testosterone-rex-royal-society-science-book-of-the-year-cordelia-fine

The comments are interesting and utterly predictable. Some men get surprisingly angry at the mere suggestion that brain differences between the sexes might not be significant.

I think it's failed because surgery somehow became an acceptable answer. We would never consider removing a healthy limb from someone with bd, or giving an anorexic liposuction and a gastric band but for some reason the surgical route caught on.

From there it turned in to validation and surgery/ hormones and now it seems like often we just validate with no real treatment or attempt to understand what's causing the issues.

Ha yeah, when I'm suicidal the Drs just hand me a load of pills and say "get on with it". They don't restrict my existing medication and give it to me a week at a time, while discouraging other therapies as "conversion".

It's so infuriating because ask pretty much any young feminist if think there's a difference between a female and a male brain in any other context and she'd probably reply, of course not.
I don't understand this detachment from logic. The women I see on my newsfeed championing the TRAs are the exact same women I see posting articles about supermarkets gender specific clothes and books for children about gender not existing.

It's so irritating

I agree, I don't get it at all.

We would never consider removing a healthy limb from someone with bd
That actually has happened at least twice:
www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/feb/06/theobserver.uknews6

But it attracted huge controversy (the surgeon was told to stop) and the patients were well into their adult years. Also note that it was a private operation, not provided by the NHS.

By contrast, in the transgender case society celebrates far more radical operations (drastically altering reproduction and sexuality) on 16-year-olds (I'm thinking of the Mermaids case). And in the US the age is even younger--a 14-year-old girl had a double mastectomy to affirm her masculine identity.

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/the-doctor-who-helps-kids-to-change-gender-xsw6dxc7n?CMP=Sprkr--Editorial--TheTimesandTheSundayTimes--Magazine--Imageandlink--Statement--Unspecified-_-FBPAGE&linkId=42465208

Article in the Times today.

Sentimental Exactly. I follow loads of fat activists - who are often liberal feminists. They are so so good at examining context when it comes to diet culture, understanding that the bombardment of messages in society that shape our actions, and explaining that we don't make choices in a vacuum.

But they just cannot (or will not) turn that same analytical eye on to gender.