I am Janice Turner's No 1 fan - another excellent article

[Stopmakingsense]

This one picks up in particular the huge rise in women identifying as men, and the increasing inability of anyone being able to question it:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/even-asking-questions-is-now-transphobic-ztk3rlrfk?shareToken=1f64a5116171eb54a9a866590e6432ec

They are attempting to appropriate a female hormonal state which is unnatural for their bodies. This is completely different to HRT.

YYY.

Did you know that the average pre-menopausal woman has more testosterone in her bloodstream than oestrogen

Yes and what does this mean in the context of your post? Absolutely nowt! Testosterone and oestrogen are important hormones in male and female bodies - for differing reasons.

1 ng = 1000 pg

Reference normal testosterone ranges:
Males: 300 - 1,200 ng/dL
Females: 30 - 95 ng/dL (30000-95000 pg/mL)

Estradiol (highest estrogenic activity during repro years - E2)
Males: 10-40 pg/mL
Females: Mid-follicular phase: 27-123 pg/mL
Periovulatory: 96-436 pg/mL
Mid-luteal phase: 49-294 pg/mL

Basic endocrinology also covers that in order for hormones to elicit a response, they bind to specific receptors in target cells modifying the cellular response. These receptors are found in differing amounts, in different tissues found in male and female bodies. When trans people are treated/managed by endocrinologists, their endogenous hormones (the hormones determined by the person's sex) can be suppressed and hormone replacement therapy prescribed to levels within the normal range for the person's desired sex. These levels have to be monitored as do they risks of metabolic disorders and bone degeneration.

In addition to my exasperation that these GOTCHA! SCIENCE! tropes are peddled about (I am a life sci post-grad researcher - though not endocrine). I am a woman in my twenties who is now unable to have children. I am not no longer female. As well as being under the care of my surgeons, I also have a geneticist and a endocrinologist. I have had a rebalancing of my hormones and and my DNA run. At no point was it ever for discussion that I wasn't female.

Cross-posted

They are attempting to appropriate a female hormonal state which is unnatural for their bodies. This is completely different to HRT

Yes absolutely, my post might be unclear on that. Terminology has become problematic as sex and gender are often used interchangeably in some disciplines of science as HRT and cross-sex hormone therapy, also.

I'm concerned that the UK government wont create specific legislation to make gay conversion therapy illegal. Transing kids is gay eugenics, its a form of gay conversion therapy.
Changes to the Equality Act, and subsequent attempts to conflate sex and gender dont give me much hope that the current govt is being honest about its long term intentions.

The anorexia comment is bang on the money. I'd never equated it with teenage girls declaring themselves trans before. In many respects they are mental health issues with the same root: namely not wanting to have a post-pubescent female body. Of course I'm over-simplifying, but fundamentally they are the same issue.

Great post Hingedspeculum. Unfortunately, or perhaps naturally, after posting a google search that absolutely does not substantiate her arguments Strangeadventure has run away. ...

Not content with appropriating womanhood, telling women we're doing it all wrong and we need to shut up and be told how to be a woman, Strange adventure has nicked half of my mumsnet name.

TRA's are trying to take our identity as women away from actual women, because they're so special and better at being women.
Getting a bit lost there, too angry. It's same old, same old. But instead of just being told to STFU we're told we don't exist as women because the language to express that is being taken away.

I had a form to fill in yesterday which said 'gender' on the tick box. I struck it through and wrote"you mean sex' next to it. If it's computer read that will fuck it up because it was outside the box. If not, maybe if women started doing this en masse the message might get through.

I can't stand the word gender being used instead of the word sex. It's just lazy and unthinking. And inaccurate.
We should definitely cross out gender on forms and write sex. Whoputthecatout is right.

Using the term "HRT" for cross sex hormones is inaccurate and gaslighting.

This is a very important point, SirVix.

Transgenderist terminology is a kind of Newspeak which has the overarching aim of linguistically erasing the reality of the sexed body. All the terms they use are directed towards this goal and it's worrying how uncritically they have been adopted by the media and, often, even by critics of the trans movement.

E.g., 'bottom surgery' for radical alteration of the genitals; 'top surgery' for double mastectomies; 'assigned female/male at birth', which implies one's reproductive sex is a random assignation rather than a material reality.

I pointed out in the Helen Webberley thread that the word 'transition' itself is a kind of Newspeak, because it's a metaphysical term that throws a veil over the physical interventions being done to the body (especially the bodies of children), and implies that human beings can cross over from one sex to another, when in fact we can't.

It's very important that we resist using this language, because it impedes the ability to describe and, worse, perceive what is actually going on here (as it is designed to do).

Yes, agree Donkey and Morning. I am starting to become very aware of the slippery slope of language being deliberately altered. For the same reason I feel very uncomfortable about the whole pronoun issue.

Dead right, donkey. I've always thought that euphemisms like top/bottom surgery manage to totally skirt over the how radical and mutilating nature it really is.

'assigned female/male at birth', which implies one's reproductive sex is a random assignation rather than a material reality

Or, indeed, something imposed upon you by The Man which must be railed against.

I agree with all of that. And this isn't the first time that pronouns have had me wavering.

It is so massively entrenched at the moment that you don't misgender, that it can undermine your credibility amongst certain people, even allies.

But like you say, I believe it changes your perception. You keep saying she instead of he and unless you deliberately translate that in your head, it becomes almost as though they are a she.

I stopped doing it online, as much as I can. But, for instance, when someone likes curry speaks on here, I can't bring myself to call him, he. It feels like I'm making a point that is coming across as rude or cruel.

Maybe a disclaimer would work. "I don't agree with forcing people into preferred pronouns, but on this occasion I will, out of courtesy".

With "assigned female" or "assigned male" I get a picture in my head of the midwife with a clipboard saying "hmm, not enough males today, best quickly sew a penis on this one", or "best pop a uterus in this one, keep the quota up".

See I can't really respect anyone's sincerely held belief that they are a woman when they want to retain male genitalia. It's just BS and they are assuming we are too polite to say they are not.

I can bite my tongue over religious beliefs but this is calculated to steal my space, deny my experience and appropriate my physicality. So no.

I can bite my tongue over religious beliefs but this is calculated to steal my space, deny my experience and appropriate my physicality. So no.

I completely agree. I've never been in an abusive relationship, but I have learnt, from here, that one of the characteristics is do what I say otherwise you are harming me.

I think people are entitled to believe what they want, God, changing sex, whatever. The problems start when the rest of us are compelled, bullied and legislated to say that these beliefs are fact

Yes. Backing and Datun. That is how I feel. It is so absolutely ingrained in women of my age to be polite, and I'd thought of the pronouns in that sense (although hanging out in gay clubs a lot in my teens/twenties, the use of "she" towards any vaguely camp gay man really bothered me for reasons I couldn't articulate then) but now I feel it is actually dangerous to use the wrong sex pronoun in general conversation. It is like when we talk to our todders who are about to tantrum, and say "yes, yes darling you are a bear, of course you are, I forgot". We are used to placating and pacifying as women. Diffusing temper tantrums in tinies, sidestepping the anger of men. It is our default setting. But here this tendency to be polite and to sidestep is contributing to the erasure of women.

Females hormones fluctuate across the month as well as across a lifetime.
How do you mimic that?
Not with a daily dose of HRT or the pill, that's for sure.
Check out any physiology textbook.

She's right about girls' schools, too. Last school year, before she left, my 18-year-old daughter remarked that a lot of rather otherwise vulnerable girls were very suddenly saying they were trans, more than seemed statistically likely. It was a very academic school.

It's so depressing. Insecure young girls being encouraged to have mastectomies and render themselves infertile. It is a scandal of epic proportions. And if the kids being affected are from wealthy families, the legal fallout will also be epic

But at the lifetime cost of these poor young people.

With all that 'kill all terfs' business I would say many are threatening to kill us, though some aren't!