Yay! I've finally found my gender label

[QuentinSummers]

AFAB non-binary femme apparently. Who's with me??!!
www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/d3x8m7/five-queer-people-on-what-femme-means-to-them

Yup, another trans bashing thread...

We're trying to understand a phenomenon that we find puzzling. Although these transtrenders are silly (as our parents thought that we were!), there's a serious point here. These trends coincide with a big increase in mental health problems for young people, which I don't think is entirely due to changes in diagnosis.

Is it conducive to well-being to have one's entire existence depend on the validation of one's invented pronoun? While it's fun to try on different clothes and makeup with your mates, is it conducive to well-being to spend hours each day on tumblr searching for a Special Gender Identity that fits you?

I don't have kids so I don't know. But these are significant social trends ...

Speaking of puzzling, don't click on the link for the poet the last person mentions. I'm soo confused.

Her most troubling dilemma is whether to shave her body hair or not.

I suspect many of us would be happy to lead a life where this is our most troubling dilemma.

Although it's not actually something I have a dilemma about, on account of CBA.

Datun

Definition of feminism: the belief that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.

I do recognise the faddish element of the trans ideology, the need to carve an identity etc, but it's a slippery slope. I remember people talking about lesbians being a high school fad and how the majority were doing it because it was edgy and would grow out of it - pretty offensive stuff. These type of threads seem pretty similar in many ways and seem to have come about due to the recent GRA discussions - before this there was nowhere near as much hostility to trans people on here.

It seems to me like a genuine issue (self ID etc) which brings justifiable concern has paved the way for a lot of unjustifiable snarkery and, to be frank, outright bigotry.

Although it's not actually something I have a dilemma about, on account of CBA.
That's exactly what I thought when I read that paragraph! My thought process isn't "do i need smooth legs today?" It's "can I be arsed to shave today?"

stig being a lesbian is a describable "thing" e.g. you are female and you exclusively want sex with other females.

Being a "femme" isn't a describable thing, as the article shows. It means different things to different people.

A better analogy would be people who are Goths/punks/Emos. They got told it was a fad and they were doing it to be edgy. Adults didn't get called bigots for not recognising their oppression on account of being Emo.

This whole movement reminds me of the most tedious aspect of parenting toddlers - the constant demands to play "let's pretend", which is really boring (the ability of the average toddler to sustain a let's pretend narrative which could engage the imagination of an adult is pretty low, and they constantly shift the goal posts with cries of "no, you're doing it wrong mummy...") But with toddlers, they're really cute so you put up with it, and you know it's a necessary developmental phase.

With goths, emo, punk, etc. adults not only rolled their eyes and muttered "kids today", they were expected, as adults, to roll their eyes and mutter "kids today". This gender as "sparkly special soul which fluctuates on an hourly basis between being pink and smooth shaven and blue and manly" shite is infuriating precisely because we're expected to get in the play pen with the narcissistic over-grown toddlers.

We now have people being told they ought to start work meetings by swapping pronouns, on pain of disciplinary action in the workplace. New York and Canada (a whole country gone bat-shit crazy) have legally sanctioned fines for misgendering. Instead of doing the sane thing when someone announces they want to be called "Xie and xir", which is simply say "that's nice dear" and get on with life, we're now expected to remember all these daft made up words or "face the consequences" - and these consequences can be real world ones which matter. All to validate some daft numpty's post-adolescent rebellion.

For the record, souls do not exist. There is no reality behind this supposed internal sense of gender, which can be in the wrong body or suspended somewhere between "maleness" and "femaleness" or switching between the two. It is a fiction, just like the idea of eternal souls which get reincarnated in new bodies or go to heaven (delete depending on your preferred flavour of god-bothering), or the idea that bread and wine gets turned into the body and blood of Christ when the priest says the magic words over them. There is only the material reality of our sexed bodies, and people's individual personalities.

My pronouns are "fuck", "off" and "grow up".

I do recognise the faddish element of the trans ideology, the need to carve an identity etc, but it's a slippery slope

As far as I can make out at least 2 of these people are natal women who like girly things. Big deal-that makes them no different from the posters in the MN style and beauty forum.

By their definition (as far as I can make any sense of the stream of conscious narcissism) I am "femme" and always have been. Again- big deal and who cares.

Prickly, isn’t that adolescent-post/adolescent rebellion supposed to be developmental stage too, though, coinciding with changes in the brain?

I meant what I said above; I think part of what is driving the mental health epidemic is because because we climb into the play pen, instead of providing some nice reassuring eye rolling. Instead of saying, “Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as monsters!” we join in shouting, “Monsters! Everywhere! Aargh!”.

-/ mix-up there, but hopefully makes sense anyway!

So, you think you're not rude because you claim to have no gender identity but then say the gender binary is a load of bollocks

Sorry, I know the thread has probably moved on but I want to respond to this. Gender is bollocks! It's a load of made up crap. It's no more real than astrology. There was a time when astrology was taken very seriously, monarchs and politicians used it to make decisions about how to run their countries, it was taught in universities, it influenced all aspects of peoples' lives. Fortunately, the Enlightenment happened and people began to realise that astrology was not real and it no longer had any influence.

Gender is no different. It's as ridiculous to say that being born with two x chromosomes means you have an inherent love of pink and baking as it is to suggest that being born on August 26th means you are a great singer*. We would not take someone seriously if they suggested the latter, so why are we giving any kind of credence to the former?!

*Disclaimer, I know nothing about astrology so that may be wrong.

Instead of saying, “Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as monsters!” we join in shouting, “Monsters! Everywhere! Aargh!”.

ROFL that's perfect - but yes, that rings true - mine is only 7, but there's a huge element of him pushing something and needing me to put my foot down and stop him spiralling off into overwhelmed emotion because he's not figured out how to do that for himself yet. If I were to join him in his doldrums about whatever it is now, commiserate, agree with him then he'd be lost, scared, and in real trouble mentally - rather than say that he's feeling that way, but it's not really the case, I bet if he has a biscuit and brings up his blood sugar he'll feel better about everything (he's really terrible when he's hungry!)

stig

Definition of feminism: the belief that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.

Equal rights and opportunities do nothing to address the imbalance.

Stig. The current validation of identity over biology is doing immense harm to the vulnerable teens and young people whose actual mental health problems are going untreated because of a magic bullet called transitioning. There is no secure evidence that this treatment is effective for this new cohort (rapid onset, teenage, mostly female, often on the autistic spectrum), so if you had a child who believes that they need to to amputate healthy body parts and take artificial hormones to be their authentic self, I expect you would be horrified too.

genever pfft! Bloody show off!

Stopmakingsense.

So many of our friends are being hit by this sodding movement.

I'll rephrase my earlier question seeing as it obviously wasn't terribly clear:

How come "Ms" isn't special snowflaky glitterpants? Demanding that companies change their databases/forms/etc to accommodate YOUR snowflake identity bullshit about not wanting to be IDENTIFIED by your marital status. How much more special snowflake is that, if judging by the same criteria here?

Note: have used Ms since I was a young teen, and I can make an argument for why it's important. What I can't do, currently, is see any good arguments for why this thing over here is snowflake, and this thing here is Right And Proper Feminist You Know.

If we cannot make a decent argument about this with all the combined intelligence of the Feminist Chat board, then how are you going to convince teenage girls?

You can't see the difference between these two different concepts? Yet you claim to be able to make a case why the use of Ms is a good idea?

Consider how the idea of Ms, and it's uptake, has been effected, compared to this modern identity politics. The same, or different?

So it's not at all the thing itself, but the GRA and similar legislation? So WHY the big focus on mocking this then?

slightlyglittermaned How come "Ms" isn't special snowflaky glitter pants?

The trans equivalent to Ms is Mx (i.e. gender-neutral title), which is now used on university applications. I've no problem with this. No one is compelling me to address them by it, just as well as I wouldn't know how to pronounce it.

Did feminists ever say that using Miss or Mrs rather than Ms was should be punished as a hate crime (in New York, misgendering is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000)?

Pronouns are different. They are deeply embedded in grammatical unconscious.To demand that someone speak using artificial pronouns or pronouns that contradict physical appearance is a very onerous demand.

It’s about asking people to believe in gender.

How gender can be innate, when for one human being it is fixed and it belongs to their sex, for another human being it is fixed but belongs to the opposite sex, for a third human being it can change on a daily basis, and a fourth human doesn’t have one.

It’s mocked because it’s ridiculous.

It also misses the point that gender is a hierarchy with women at the bottom. It’s a damaging system. Not an identity.

I was reading those accounts as essentially playing with gender. Pretty much in the way people I knew did back in the 80s/90s.