Please change my mind : trans

[lurker33]

I've been lurking in the feminist boards for a while now, watching the discussions on trans. I am generally a live and let live kind of person, as long as it's not affecting anyone else adversely. Unfortunately I am coming to the conclusion that transgenderism is not a good thing; mainly because it appears to be reinforcing gender stereotypes. Why can't we have boys that like traditionally girls things and girls that like traditionally boys things?

Recently I was at an event where there were people who were talking about their experiences in a technical, male dominated area. 5 speakers were billed, two of which were women. Oh, well done organisers of said event I thought, for providing a well balanced panel of speakers, including two women who I could hold up as role models to my 8 yo daughter who had attended with me.

On further reading it transpired that one of the women billed was actually a transwoman.

How can I hold up a transwoman as a role model for my daughter, especially one who has transitioned late in life? My daughter won't have the same opportunities that a boy growing up will have, won't have to put up with the casual sexism us women all have to deal with, and quite frankly my daughter has nothing at all in common with this speaker.

It made me quite angry, which surprised me, and it dawned on me that calling transwoman a woman is actually an insult to women. I'll get flamed for this I'm sure but I can see a similarity to blackface where it's insulting for a white person to pretend to be black as white people are opressors of black people. It's insulting for a man to say he is a woman when men are opressors of women.

I do acknowledge the transwoman's struggle to be accepted for who they are, but that struggle has nothing in common with the struggle that women go though every day. Transwomen should be free to live their lives as they see fit but please don't think they have anything in common with women other than being part of the human race.

Transwomen are transwomen and are of the male sex, women are women and are of the female sex. There is nothing wrong with excluding people from a group if they don't have any attributes of that group. If you are insulted by scientific fact then perhaps you need to think again.

I am not sure what I am asking really. My female socialisation means that I feel slightly dirty for having come to this conclusion. If there are any transphilic people out there, I am happy to have my mind changed if you provide me with some coherent arguments as to why I shouldn't feel this way.

The entire country should be up in arms over this abuse of children by the very people responsible for safeguarding them.

Some of us are up in arms about it and we have safeguarding responsibilities in schools. It’s not we who are buying into this bullshit.

As I’ve said on many of these threads, I’ve been told I can’t tell a child that a “trans girl” isn’t a girl and I can’t share the Transgendertrend school resource pack with school colleagues because “it goes against the Equality Act 2010.”.

We haven’t had a “trans child” at school but I know we will and I know it will be a total shitstorm if we have to adhere to this madness.

‘Gender identity’ is horseshit.

Is anyone saying gender identity doesn’t exist?

People are saying gender identity is a different thing to biological sex.

That if we are to protect everyone from sex based discrimination AND gender identity based discrimination then it is necessary in law to distinguish between the two concepts.

I was exploring a trans page on reddit just yesterday.

Ah yes, the crossdresser's delight. They could be anyone. A lot of transvestites fantasising all over the internet. I'd stop constantly reading about it all if I were you.

The phenomenon of people posting sexual images of themselves is by no means restricted to trans people, men or women.
www.quora.com/Social-Media-What-is-the-psychology-behind-people-posting-explicit-images-of-themselves-on-social-media

Unfortunately teenage girls are doing this as well, something many schools and safeguarding boards are having to try and prevent and discourage.

Lol... well obviously some people do. But IMO obviously it exists to the same degree that Catholicism exists in that there are people who believe in it.

This is autogynephilia.

‘I spent many years dreaming about (my vagina), imagining how it would feel to reach down and discover an opening, to feel right. I had sexual dreams about having a vagina from my teenage years onward. I dreamed that a hand would slide into my knickers and find a moist slit. That a finger would push in and then a phallus – plastic or real, would push in slowly and deeply and make me gasp. I carried on dreaming that dream until the night before surgery. The same faintly naive dreams that my vagina would work like any natal females. My surgeon told me he would make me look realistic, with a vaginal opening, a sensate clitoris and lips; inner and outer. I was told I couldn’t have sex for at least three months. For 4 days after surgery I didn’t have sex dreams as I fell in and out of morphine-consciousness. I only wondered what my vagina would look like once the packing and bandages had come off. People post photographs but they tend to be the ‘butterfly’ ones. “Look at me they” they say “I’m a beautiful pussy fuck me.”’

Juno Roche

Men can wear makeup and dresses.

Absolutely! Men, as men, can wear whatever they want. We were getting there in the 80s and 90s then something went wrong. So I wish they would. Kurt cobain used to do a mean tea dress.
But dressing in a dress is not what makes a woman, or a transwoman. If I made a men in dresses comment I’d be shouted down as a TRANSPHOBE....
Womanface is not simply putting on a dress, any more than wearing a nice African wax print fabric top is blackface.

Ah so you acknowledge AGP exists and is not the main driver of genuine dysphorics wanting to transition? Yes I’d agree with that. Genuine dysphoria is not the same as fetishistic transvestism.
The latter exists - and is more prevalent. And problematic.

Supermatch, have you completely missed that Eddie izzard does identify as a woman and that you have just openly misgendered Eddie Izzard.

Also that it is transphobic to call people transvestites because they now come under the more ‘appropriate’ umbrella term ‘transgender’. That actually one of the ways the language has changed is that transsexual has become offensive and trans has been renamed transgender in order to accommodate transvestites, amongst other groups.

Ah yes, the crossdresser's delight. They could be anyone. A lot of transvestites fantasising all over the internet. I'd stop constantly reading about it all if I were you.

So we have to just pretend the TIM who don't fit your definition don't exist?

It is appropriating the male primary sex characteristic for sexual pleasure.

Let me get this straight. Rampant rabbits are women appropriating the penis. But AGP doesn't exist as the appropriative primary driver behind transactivism. Ok then.

Christ on a fucking bike.

Why are you not so bothered about trans men who grow beards, wear man clothes and call themselves men?

The reason why this is not 'man face' is the same reason why black people whitening their skin is not 'whiteface.' It's about the power dynamics. When the oppressed class mimmicks the characteristics of the oppressor class there is a very different motivation - to escape their oppression. ROGD makes people me incredibly sad. It's not as some people on Twitter have accused me of thinking that they are betraying their sex class, it's that they've been conditioned to hate their sex so much that they want to escape through transition.

Supermatchgame, 'Womanface is no different to blackface'...
If a man wears a dress simply because he likes dresses then I wouldn't see this as womanface. If a man wears a dress and announces he is a woman that is womanface.

Stonewall's defintion of trans.

Tara Hewitt's defintion of trans.

All include cross dressers and transvestites.

How the fuck are we to know who's definition of trans is currently in play when you're talking about 'trans'. You keep changing the goal posts. The 'official' bodies speaking on behalf of trans include everything: drag kings, drag queens, cross dressers. Tara told us it includes people with sexual fetishes. A TRANS EDUCATOR TOLD US IT INCLUDES PEOPLE WITH SEXUAL FETISHES. Stop moving the fucking goal posts.

PS Miranda: Thank you. Sorry to hear about the shit you've experienced. I too love your town - it's beautiful and I send you and it peace.

Who actually started this thread and were they hoping to cause a bit of a fracas?

The 'official' bodies speaking on behalf of trans include everything

No, I've mostly posted medical references. I'm talking about properly transitioned people.

How the fuck are we to know who's definition of trans is currently in play when you're talking about 'trans'. You keep changing the goal posts. The 'official' bodies speaking on behalf of trans include everything: drag kings, drag queens, cross dressers.

^This. It's incredibly frustrating. When you speak online it's impossible to have a discussion about this issue without first clarifying what you mean by trans.

Organisations like Stonewall are deliberately obfuscating the debate. They know that most people think of trans-sexuals when they hear this word when it means literally anybody who doesn't conform to rigid cis-gender norms. I support transexual rights but get so frustrated by transvestities on Twitter (i.e. obvs 5 o clock shadow and male pattern behaviour) who act like a woman and get a million sjw's jumping in to defend her and call me a sexist bigot for laughing at their beard.

Regardless of the OP, SMG, as you'll know from Mumsnet, threads weave and wend their way often away from the original OP.

As to my question above.

How are we meant to know the defnition of trans when official trans-bodies include 'everything, including sexual fetish, drag kings'

And yet you are telling us to ignore transvestites, and that sexual fetishes aren't really relevant? Look the other way, everything good?

You're not really on-message right now as to the official trans line. And therefore risking straying into transphobic territory, if you think transvestite and sexual fetish cross-dressers aren't trans.

Someone posted a video on another thread of a prominent transwoman delivering a lecture to HCPs in which the lecturer explicitly mentioned the fact that some people's reasons for identifying as trans might be sexual.

FermatsTheorem

I think this may be the video you're referring to.

Tara Hewitt's 'Trans people and cancer' training session

Hi DJ Lippy - massive fan of yours on twitter by the way :-) Lovely to see you here.

No substantive argument as ever.

Ah so you acknowledge AGP exists and is not the main driver of genuine dysphorics wanting to transition? Yes I’d agree with that. Genuine dysphoria is not the same as fetishistic transvestism.
The latter exists - and is more prevalent. And problematic.

Yes Bowl. So I'm not sure what we are disagreeing about then?

have you completely missed that Eddie izzard does identify as a woman and that you have just openly misgendered Eddie Izzard.

Offred no he doesn't. He's recently described himself as a 'straight transvestite or male lesbian'. I'm guessing the male lesbian bit is for comic effect.

No, I've mostly posted medical references. I'm talking about properly transitioned people.

No one cares what your personal line in the sand is. It's not the same definition policy makers are using.

Glad you posted those links, supermatchgame because they perfectly illustrate my point.

There isn't a definition of 'gender' in most of them.
The definition of 'gender identity' thus becomes utterly incoherent.
You can't have an identity of a if that noun doesn't in fact exist and has no definition of its own.
Can you have a deeply held blarg identity without defining blarg?
Can you insist that others share a blarg with you, when you can't tell them what blarg is?

I have noticed this glaring absence in every glossary of terms provided by mermaids, GIRES, WHO etc.

'gender identity' is defined, and 'gender' isn't.

This is not an accidental oversight.
It is at best - the incompetence of professionals in failing to realise they are conflating, then separating, then conflating two terms.
At worst - a deliberate attempt to obscure and confuse two completely different concepts to achieve an aim.

The psychiatry link is hilarious in that it doesn't define sex. Or male, or female. But it vaguely references 'sex characteristics' and 'sexual anatomy' without explaining what these concepts might be. You can have a gender identity though, apparently, and it's a' deeply held sense' of being something they are a bit too coy to define: male/female.

The apa document is fascinating in that it does, in several places literally state that gender is pure cultural stereotypes. But then contradicts that by having it refer to sex. And then once again distinguishes it from sex by referencing performances of masculinity and femininity again. And then throughout the rest of the document has nonsensical references that correspond to the stereotype definition yet refer to fictitious events such as doctors 'assigning' such stereotypes at birth?
Pure, unadulterated conflict, confusion and contradiction.

That's all this ideology has.

It's literally "non-sense."
You can have a 'gender' but we won't/can't explain what this thing called gender is. It's not sex, except when it is and then isn't again.
You can have an identity about that gender, because, see above, we can't explain what this concept 'gender' is that your identity relates to.
Sex exists, sometimes, but only for as long as it takes for the message to self-destruct, leaving no evidence we ever acknowledged it.
You can have a deeply held sense of being female, but only so long as female doesn't mean 'two XX chromosomes and ovaries' because hey, you'd sound nuts if you had a deeply held sense of having a reproductive system that you actually don't possess.
In one context, when we're not paying attention, female means cultural stereotype, except when you the reader noticed we just said that, in which case we never said it.

Fair's fair, it was you who said this was a coherent ideology, no?

If you replace that tricky little word 'gender' with whatever you believe the true definition should be, then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

It's just a great big word game with no actual stable meaning anywhere to be found.

Meanwhile, sex exists.

Supermatchgame, it was me who started this thread, and no, I didn't want a fracas. I was hoping we could have some coherent debate without mud slinging.

The conclusions I have come to so far is that:

1. It needs to be clear what trans actually means. Some people think it's just gender dysphoric people, others think it includes cross dressers and sexual fetishists.

It sounds like most people have similar views regarding dysphoric people, that they are vulnerable and need support. I think most people are happy with this if it does not impinge on the rights of women and girls.

The problem is that it appears that Stonewall's definition includes all of the other sort, some of which would seriously put women and girls in sex segregated spaces at risk if they were to be allowed to enter.

2. I believe it is an insult to women in the same way as blackface is to black people when men dress and behave in the manner of stereotypical women, and call themselves women. I haven't been dissuaded of this yet.