Royal College of Psychiatrists Statement

[dorade]

What hope is there when respected scientific organisations uncritically adopt phrases like "sex assigned at birth" and use "two spirit" people as evidence for the need to mutilated bodies to a facsimile of the other sex?

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Okay Lang, you can't think of an example, I get it.

Thanks Barracker, my battery's on the way out so I'll read and digest your post when I get home.

there are no words to describe what is a kind of ineffable inner state
...and yet you use 'woman' for it (adult human female)

a sense of something inside saying 'this is wrong'
...and yet you call this 'woman'

something wonky in the settings that attach some kind of gender identity to biological sex in parts of your brain
...these settings don't exist, there is no match to ovaries in your brain - you don't have ovaries.

I have said that I do not believe you can or do change biological sex.
...and yet you have chosen to have 'female' on your documents

For many, many years up to 2004 with no legal recognition
...you say it was about your body, so you altered it. You say you know you remain male, and that you demand nothing from women. And yet, what you ARE demanding is that you be recognised in society as what you have just acknowledged you are NOT. As female. And you know that legal recognition overrides the rights of actual females to distinguish themselves from you, even though you, and we, know you are male, and we are female.

We know the biological limits of sex and what can be changed and that we had to accept gender was being reassigned not sex changed
...what does this mean? If you use a word you HAVE to know what meaning YOU are trying to convey to others when you use it. How does modifying a body not change sex but does change 'gender'? What is this 'gender'? Is it a feeling? Can it be described? a perception YOU possess? A facsimile of sex? A perception OTHERS have? What is it? I don't care for the legal definition, but HELL, it means something to you. If you had to use another word in it's place, what would you use?

Do you know the root of the word gender, jaycee?

gender (n.)
c. 1300, " kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits ," from Old French gendre, genre "kind, species; character; gender" (12c., Modern French genre), from stem of Latin genus (genitive generis) "race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species,

IT MEANS GROUP. CLASS. FAMILY. SHARED TRAITS.
And this is why it is so horrifyingly wrong and unfair to use it the way you and all transactivists do.

What you say is that it is unique to you, hard to define, your personal identity, who are we to question...
But what lies beneath these words is the truth - that it GROUPS you WITH an entire CLASS of people with whom you DON'T share traits. It makes the claim that we are a family, all, women, all females, when the truth is the opposite.
Your identity, and the identity of every man who wants to be recognised as a woman, involves my participation as integral to all your claims. You're not asserting your right just to be yourself. You are asserting your right to be US.

Your desire to separate yourself as a male, from the rest of the male class (to which you do actually belong) has been granted
At the expense of MY right to separate myself as a female, from you a male.

You have gained an unfair right to be recognised as the 'same' as me.
By every objective measure of my existence we remain categorically different.
I have lost the fair right to be recognised as different from you.

What you have gained, has come at the my loss.

I think what Jaycee meant to transition to was a person who could go about daily life looking like, being treated like and behaving like a woman. That's it. It's what I do (as a woman), most of the time, so I get it.
If that's what makes the dysphoria more bearable, I understand why it's done.

Okay Lang, you can't think of an example, I get it.

Oh don't be bloody ludicrous. How can I discriminate against you on the basis of your gender identity if you cannot define what a gender identity is? Like I say, you cannot legislate to either criminalise something or protect something if you cannot define what it is.

Well, you can, but then your law would be a bad law.

It. Is. Not. Rocket. Science.

Looking like?
Being Treated like?
Behaving like?

Can you give examples of what that actually means? Because it sounds very sexist.

Ah - yes, sexist I suppose. But easy to understand.

I will restate.
Looking like an unacceptable stereotype of a woman.
Being treated in an unacceptably stereotyped way as a woman.
Behaving in a way that is unacceptably sterotypical of womanhood.
Convoluted enough for you?

so............a man insisting on performing and being validated in unacceptable sexist stereotypes and making sure they are further reinforced and conflated with 'woman'?

Why on earth would women have a problem with that...

I didn't say women wouldn't have a problem with that (though evidently, for many years they didn't). I said that was what I thought transsexual men wanted to transition to, in order to partially alleviate their dysphoria.

I didn't say women wouldn't have a problem with that (though evidently, for many years they didn't).
You can't speak for all women. What evidence do you have for saying 'for many years they didn't'?

borntobequiet you may have missed 1st and 2nd wave feminism then, which were about resisting the confining and restrictive definitions that men impose upon us. Fair to say that many women have had a problem with this for a very long time.

And I think most of us understand the desire of transexual men. Their alleviating their dysphoria comes at our cost. Their need to act out stereotypes and insistence that this be celebrated as part of being a woman is where a great deal of the conflict lies.

And I think most of us understand the desire of transexual men

Increasingly, I find I don't really care centrally about transsexuals.

I want them to be able to live their lives unmolested, without violence, and without facing discrimination (as long as they themselves are law-abiding).

My central concern is for and with women, and women's lives and experiences, and women's rights to live without sex-based discrimination.

And @BarrackerBarmer you hit the nail on the head when you write Their [transsexuals'] need to act out stereotypes and insistence that this be celebrated as part of being a woman is where a great deal of the conflict lies

Let transsexual men get on with living as they need to live, but stop effing requiring women to step aside, deny their own experiences, and centre you.

Yes, I detached from feminism at the point where biology seemed to be being denied, late 70s/early 80s, so I have no idea what these waves consisted of. I'm sure someone will be able to list the benefits feminist theory has brought about for women, over and above benefits that came about through advances in medicine, improvements in education and improving standards of living in general.
Over many years I have encountered transsexual people in female spaces (so public toilets) from time to time, who quietly went about their business largely ignored by women, who nevertheless were quite clear about who and what they were.
I don't claim to speak for anyone other than myself, and currently I'm most concerned by the flat out denial of fact articulated by transactivists and their supporters and the dangers presented by a small number of predatory men if gender self ID comes about.

Are there any other delusional mental illnesses that males suffer from that we should expect a requirement of public affirmation to be codified into law?
I could be wrong but I think this is a first.

Over many years I have encountered transsexual people in female spaces (so public toilets) from time to time, who quietly went about their business largely ignored by women, who nevertheless were quite clear about who and what they were.

Zombie lies never die because people are relentless in repeating them. It was not uncommon for men who identified as women to be arrested for trespassing and voyeurism when they refused women's demand that they GTFO of women's private spaces.

That's probably a personal pathology combined with an excusable inability to define gender - who can?
I can.
Gender is the requisite performance of dominance and submission displays designed to regulate and maintain the social order of sex, class, and race in all cultures.

borntobequiet
I don't claim to speak for anyone other than myself
But you said that for many years women didn't have a problem with men performing and being validated in unacceptable sexist stereotypes and making sure they are further reinforced and conflated with 'woman'?
I have always had a problem with that. Hence my comment that you don't speak for all women.

Self ID means ascribing somebody who can make a certain noise 'I am a woman' or write down a set of letters 'I am a woman' a set of rights that were originally ascribed to another group entirely. The features of the original group that were described by 'woman' are now neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to be ascribed thudcword, but nothing has replaced them.

All one now learns when someone says 'I am a woman' is that the person can make a certain set of noises. That's it.

Sound like a prat but I don't care. Saying 'I am a woman' is now just making a set of noises because NOBODY will ever say what it means.

@Jayceedove. Thank you. It seems to be a horribly ineffable problem and that's why I get annoyed with the unwarranted certainty of the critics here.

Mental illness is an ineffable problem. As has happened before, the treatment is as much of a problem as the illness.The co-morbidity of gender identity disorder with NPD makes it very difficult to treat. Affirmation so called therapy makes it even more difficult to treat.

There's nothing ineffable about being a human female, humans both male and female have been able to recognize which humans are female (and treat them as lesser as a result) for millennia.

As far as an individual's inner sense of self, well, there are about 7 billion of those, and it's not really practical to make laws based on which group each person kind of thinks on some existential level that they ought to belong to.

There's nothing ineffable about being a human female, humans both male and female have been able to recognize which humans are female (and treat them as lesser as a result) for millennia.

I see you left out the word "adult" from the "woman" description (adult female human), probably because that's the ineffable bit.

Someone was always going to notice.

So here's the thing, "adult" has a biological meaning, as in the age of sexual maturity. It also has a legal meaning, an age in years, which varies by country and is not the same as the age of sexual maturity. It also has social and personal meanings; behaving like an adult, feeling like an adult, what it means to be an adult; and quite aside from the legal and sexual side of things there is a wide understanding that it can be some self-identified point in an individual's own life that could not objectively be defined.

Perhaps I became an adult when my mother died. The concept of that certainly isn't alien to anyone. No-one's going to shout at me that "Adult is the day you turned 18! There is no internal sense of adult! Legal adulthood is a social construct!" - because that would be silly, and in complete denial of what we use the word to mean.

The law seems to work just fine with that.

It's a complex and nuanced concept, but we're coping it would seem.

To me, "woman" is the same thing. It has a biological meaning, a legal meaning, a cultural and social meaning AND a personal, internal meaning for some; and the reason I know it has a personal, internal reason for some is that they tell us so - and that is how we come to know these things.

Um, what? Isn't it a bit early to be hitting the gin, Rat?

There's nothing ineffable about "adult" either. Most people would understand that "woman" implies "adult" and if one was referring to a woman one would use "girl" instead.

Except you, apparently.

Referring to a child, rather.