Compulsory trans awareness training

[invinoveritaserum]

Apparently all staff (public sector role) have to go on compulsory trans awareness training. We have already had to do online training, but this is a half day training course. It is NOT being run by in-house training, which makes me wary of who will be running it. (I should find out later this week).
I'm worried by this. I simply cannot sit there and swallow the usual woke bs. I refuse to lie about biological fact. I refuse to be called a cis woman. And yet I know I risk being called a transphobe.
Any advice as to what to do/how to get through this?

saraclara's problem (and I apologise if this puts words in her mouth, not meant to be) is not so much that this girl rejected female stereotypes but went further and seemed to accept every male stereotype: “She accepted every single male stereotype out there, she chose to look just like a boy; she can’t have just been a tomboy, she was so far gone it was unreal!”

I imagine feminist analysis will tell her that the patriarchy is such that some women will do anything to get out of the position of the oppressed – start from there.

Havent rtft so apologies if this has been suggested but when they do the inevitable pronoun round and get to you look confused and say "well my name is X so if you want to talk about me just use that if you like"

A colleague said similar on a workshop and it gave most of the other 'secret' gcers the courage to respond the same and have a mini debate about gender being bollocks, meaning the woke introduction to get us all in the gender mindset fell flat on its arse as did the rest of the session

Very true comeanddance.

It can't be pure co-incidencw that the same companies with aisles and isles of sex segregated pink and blue toys for the past 20 years are now waving the rainbow flag like crazy and jumping on the 'lgb'T bandwagon now, when they were noticably silent over s28 etc.

First you create the myth that girls and boys MUST HAVE different clothes and toys, then when some children decide actually they like the toys in the other aisle better, thanks very much, you fund a mass panic about these poor mis-bodied children won't somebody please correct their pronouns/hormones so they can buy the toys and clothes they like without being 'wrong'!

@Redshoeblueshoe

It was like being in the twilight zone. We had to write on pictures of gingerbread people how male and female we are

When the trainer talked about offensive language used by the cisgender towards transgender people I said that I'm offended at being called a cis woman. There was a silence and some murmured agreement, so the trainer moved on v quickly. It's difficult. I'm v low down the pecking order and I didn't feel confident to stand up more.

@littlbrowndog Would you genuinely not consider calling trans people a cult to be transphobic?

For the word transphobia to really mean anything - you have to buy into the ideology. Transphobic is a cultish term of dismissal and oppression for anything which does not concur with the ideology. Simple!

You can't live your life concerned about speaking the truth just because some adherents and assorted others wish you would.

I don't think her body "changed" sex, but I do believe that something happened in her development in utero, that led to her brain and body being mismatched.

Didn’t you consider that she’d been sexually abused? That’s a far more likely explanation, isn’t it?

All I know is that I once taught a kid (aged 12) who was biologically a girl, yet dressed, and clearly thought and acted, as a boy. She was also probably the most unhappy child I ever taught

Have you been watching 'Gentleman Jack' - about lesbian 'Lady of the Manor', Ann Lister. Lesbians and gender non-conforming children and people have always been with us. And no, it isn't easy when you simply can't or don't want to conform to gendered expectations.

Didn’t you consider that she’d been sexually abused?

Yes, sexual abuse can also lead to extreme dissociation from the body and the gendered role. There is no such thing as "being born in the wrong body". The only thing that is " wrong" are feelings about the body; & around gender and gendered expectations. Body/Mind integration has always been the goal of psycho-therapies and counselling.

Curbside - thank you for your courage

I'm older now and don't have much to lose. I think I could manage a breezy 'Well, of course, I'm not cis'. (It's only just occurred to me, but Jan et al do seem to me to be assuming that their audiences are) and it's the truth (I wasn't assigned anything at birth and don't have a gender identity either).

Maybe acting a bit baffled as well - 'Oh! I see! ' Gender identity' is just a new way of saying 'personality'. Cue lengthy reminiscences about how most girls had shorter hair, the different colours for clothes etc etc when we were young...

Personally I'd go in and listen, and decide at the end what I thought of it

Some of us are just too outspoken for that, though. I know I would be. I just couldn't sit and listen and nod my head and agree - if I didn't.
So much or trans awareness 'training' depends on the trainees unquestioningly accepting the premises of transgenderism in the first place.

But this girl wasn't one of those girls. And now I'm going to stick to what i said about not discussing her further. She's out there somewhere and I shouldn't be talking about her

Maybe she had an undiagnosed inter-sex condition like Caster Semenya? Semenya also dressed and 'acted like a boy' when growing up. Nobody knew she had been through full male puberty until years later.

Charlie Your post is brilliant and I'm going to bookmark for future reference. Thank you!

I think this bit especially needs to be posted on every thread about work/Trans "awareness" training, as it encapsulates what most women are worried about.

During the session, ask how their recommendations on how to treat people who identify as trans fits into your work's established safeguarding procedures.

I know someone who did this when they got public sector training on trans awareness. They couldn't answer and this person then made a complaint to their boss about the training being completely inadequate and unlawful as it violated both the law as per the EqA and conflicted with existing safeguarding procedures. The bosses agreed and did not invite the training company back for the scheduled second session.

saraclara I think you missed the point in the question about the religious training in the workplace scenario.

We’re not talking about being made aware of the beliefs/practices/cultures of different groups here.

Instead, imagine that someone was coming in and promoting the actual beliefs of any particular religion, and saying anyone who didn’t subscribe to or challenged those beliefs was a vile bigot.

Imagine that you risked being condemned/ostracised/losing your job for saying that you didn’t believe transubstantiation was a literal reality.

That’s the comparable scenario.

I'm an atheist, and I'd go to training on religious stuff with an open mind, too. The last school I worked at was predominantly muslim (and fundamentalist Christian African). So of course I needed to understand the culture and beliefs of both groups. Neither of which were out to convert me.

Trans training is always 'out to convert' the trainees.

Would you be happy to do training on religion if the trainer called you a heretic or an infidel because of your atheism?

Exactly.

when people set out to be awkward rather than listen to training that might help them understand people llike her

No, this training is designed to alienate her further. To ignore any reason why she might want to break stereotypes, to lie both to her and yo everyone else. To tell us and her that it would be wrong to accept her as she is.

Training in the case of trans awareness training is basically indoctrination. As we have seen - there is never really the opportunity to freely debate or question certain 'basics'. It always comes down to 'Trans women are Women'.

The hint is in the word ''Training. Training is about teaching people how to respond and how to behave ( appropriately). Training only permits questions about how to achieve the desired behaviours; it does not set the scene for questioning the ideas in the first place.

Trans ideology permits no questioning at all. Every one has to sing from the exact same hymn sheet.

Thank you for the feedback everyone. My list of suggestions is far from complete, though. I forgot a really important one:

When they - as these transgender ideologues inevitably do - bring up people with differences in sex development (DSDs, aka intersex people), you could ask the following question:

Are you aware that the Scottish Government recently apologised to people with DSDs for conflating their issue with trans issues?

They said they should never have conflated the two and promised not do this again after intersex advocates and intersex rights organisations protested about the Scottish Government lumping the two groups together as if their issues had anything in common. They also find the appropriation of the language people with DSDs have created to describe their trauma (sex assigned at birth) deeply offensive.

(On the treatment of children alone, their interests are diametrically opposed:

Intersex rights orgs are campaigning for as little medical intervention as possible, as late as possible for children.

Trans rights orgs are campaigning for as much medical intervention as possible, as early as possible for children.

The former argue that children cannot give informed consent until they are adults who can truly understand the longterm consequences, the latter argue that informed consent can be given by children young enough to believe in Santa Claus.)

People with DSDs are only ever brought up as a gotcha to argue that sex is not dimorphic and immutable. While those intersex people exist who do reassign their sex because it was indeed wrongly assigned at birth, statistically speaking, for the UK this amounts to one person every two years.

So you might ask them to please not appropriate the complex and often traumatic medical issues and language of another vulnerable and marginalised group to raise awareness of an unrelated group whose trans status and related issues we are always told are not medical conditions, after all.

I think my head would explode if i had to sit through such 'training'.

And like you said, Just, the inference behind it being 'training' is troubling, in the extreme.

I know that I'd be compelled to offer my tuppence worth, if the trainer was talking bollocks and it's likely that I'd get into all sorts of trouble for it.

I would ask innocent questions about how this will affect the rights of women and girls tbh. And if it turned out to be Mermaids doing the training, I wouldn't be able to help myself bringing up the ridiculous jellybean thing. From the recorded session though, it appears comments and questions are absolutely not wanted, its expected that you sit and nod silently, and only speak up if its to praise.

Very interesting thread thanks have got my training starting on Monday

I'd ask for a copy of the slides. It's pretty standard for a trainer to let you have them, and if they were reluctant I'd want to know why.

Amazing posts, CharlieParley, really good resource.

Thanks also for that link, bluebluezoo - very useful.

And thank you TeacupDrama for setting out that argument so clearly.

And everyone else arguing the case, bringing light to this murky topic.

What a lot of wonderful women there are on here.

And good luck with the training of course, OP! 🍀

I hope you feel emboldened to ask some difficult questions, that’s if you feel safe enough to do so.

These bloody “training” organisations are a scandal.

I will definitely be asking for a copy of the slides!

I haven't RTFT so this will be a random musing no doubt. I just don't recall EVER having to go on a disability training or awareness day despite there being so many more disabled people and despite working in both universities and councils. Why might that be?

Indeed - and when you think of how inaccessible most places are to blind, deaf or wheelchair-bound people (let alone how awful they usually are for autistic people, who are a bigger proportion of the population than trans people), it highlights how just much work is going in to accommodating men-who-want-to-access-women's-spaces. It's not about kindness and inclusion really.