My daughter was assaulted tonight - why I'm against self ID

[JudgeFlounceRedRugBlah]

Been around since it was all fields etc. but name changed as this concerns my children.

So, one of my children is transgender. My child is wonderful, kind and strong. I've struggled with the transgender debate because of this. They have no obvious signs of wanting to pervert womanhood just to emulate it. Imho as transgenderism should be.

I've also got daughters and, as a women, am well aware of how vulnerable a girl or woman can be when singled out and this has been borne out today. My (underage) daughter was working at her first workplace taking orders at tables in a restaurant. The staff have known her since she was born. They care for and look out for her - thank goodness. Tonight a man followed her to the toilets, pinned her and told her "he knew he shouldn't but he couldn't help himself.." sadly too many women know how this goes.

Luckily another person in the restaurant noticed a man go into the womens toilet and that neither of them came out in a reasonable amount of time. Instead of being scared that the man was a woman and they'd be in trouble with the police for hate crimes they alerted staff who got to my daughter before much more than clammy mauling had happened.

I'm angry at the sleaze who did this to my CHILD. But more I'm scared that we are fast approaching a world where that person could have felt uncomfortable raising their concerns. Perhaps they'd have hesitated just a bit longer, a bit too long. Perhaps the staff would have had a training course about jelly babies.

As it is they did say something, staff did react and my daughter is shocked, a bit scared but mostly disgusted. I can't tell you how thankful I am that she lives in a world where people are, currently, free to say "erm... that doesn't seem right".

My transgender child is going through hell in so many ways, they are battling on a frontier - I can see that - but, much as I support them, I am not prepared to sell my daughters out for it.

I'm aware I may get some backlash from posting this so I apologise now if I have to ask hq to remove. I really just wanted to say thank you to those who are not against trans people but also recognise that not against doesn't mean they have to drink the kool aid. Those who are fighting so hard just to have a proper discussion about it all. Thank you

Redtoothbrush it may be worth remembering that your experience is not the only experience. The fact that your mum got it wrong doesn't mean all mothers will. Also that you didn't "challenge" you confronted, quite aggressively. You have managed to turn a thread about the real world negatives of self ID into a thread about you, your own personal soap box.

The reason I decided to post about my daughter in this specific context was that the feminism threads on self ID so often are aggressive and hard line making them inaccessible and scary to many people. I wanted to present in real, every day life, this may affect you, terms one of the ways self ID could impact. You have, single handedly, turned this into yet another aggressive, bullying soap box.

People like you are the ones preventing this message getting to a wider audience. You are not furthering the cause you are hampering it by making people think it's just a fight between two sets of extremists.

Going on about people in prison or rapists and murderers doesn't speak to people because most people don't come into contact with them and there are hundreds of threads about them already. Most people however do come into contact with the skeezy blokes of this world. This is where most people will see the effects of self ID and why I felt it was important to tell my daughter's story.

I've thought long and hard about posting my side of parenting a transgender child and a female child as said up thread but I have decided against it at the moment. I may come back and start another thread for that but I don't think this is really the place for it seeing as it is about my daughter and self ID not about my transgender child. If I do I'd welcome your input if you think I'm missing pitfalls or messing something up as a person who has been on the other side of it however, on this thread, in this context, it is not relevant. I included the information simply to make the point that I do see more than one side of this argument and I can't be written off as a TERF quite as easily as many TRAs would like.

You have managed to turn a thread about the real world negatives of self ID into a thread about you, your own personal soap box.

And I will remind you that children can only self identify and this only possible because adults enable it through the use of their language.

You've already set the course by use of language. That's the problem.

Wtf are you on about and precisely what relevance does it have here, on this thread, about this situation? Not every thread about self ID has to be about your interpretation of it. You are fighting someone who agrees that there are problems that need to be addressed properly because they will disadvantage women in real terms. What exactly are you hoping to gain here because it seems to me that you just want to stomp about alienating as many people as possible which is unlikely to achieve much towards the aim of protecting women.

You really don't see it do you?

shrug

If you don't want to hear it, I can't make you listen.

See what? I am completely at a loss as to what you're trying to say. It just seems to be "YOU'RE WRONG" "YOURE THE PROBLEM" "IT'S YOUR FAULT" I'm still not sure what though.

The thing is the transgender issue is here and its something that has to be dealt with. Jumping up and down with a pet lip shouting that it shouldn't be isn't going to change it. People are having to deal with it day to day and all the shouting and screaming just creates noise that leaves the people in the middle confused and unsupported. Shouting "you're the problem" at anyone who comes along is just going to drive people back into their hole to try and blindly fuddle their way through. It doesnt help and it doesnt change anything.

Cognitive dissonance.

Just that.

@JudgeFlounceRedRugBlah
I really appreciate you posting this thread. I could engage with the tone, and I think it's REALLY helpful and important to hear from people who have a trans identifying child, it strengthens the point that we're not transphobic, we're just not willing to throw women's rights under a bus.

@redtoothbrush
I think your point of view is really important to be heard too. You clearly have personal experience from another very important perspective that should be heard. I do wish though, that you hadn't chosen to be confrontational to the OP in the way that you did, and derail this particular thread. I know you feel very strongly. I get that. It just doesn't seem to have been a very productive way of doing it. It's turned a thread that was one tone into another tone, one which I nearly have up on and stopped reading half way through, so I imagine there are others who did give up and stop reading. OP was considering sharing her experience and seemed open minded to discussion - as a result of your posting style she has decided not to, which I think it's the right call, but what a shame. Your posts seem to have shut down healthy open minded conversation, with people who would have been amenable to persuasion.

Very few things in life are truly black and white. Trying to do the best thing for your children when one is a girl and another is insisting they are trans is a really unenviable difficult position to be in. I defy anybody to walk it perfectly.

Translation. Be Nice and Shut Up.

No, translation; engage don't overthrow.

I get your point about cognitive dissonance but life isn't neat little boxes. There is a path that needs to be trodden. Finding the right path is hard - as you've clearly experienced. My aim is that my children don't have the experience you did. I'm not sure what you find so insulting about that?

It's a really difficult position to be in because of the cognitive dissonance which has been explained already.

Acceptance without exception has been adopted without any logical reasoning or thought. The transgender person is suffering and their pain is real but telling them that the pain will go away and they will feel better if everyone colludes with their delusion is never going to work is it. In reality, no-one truly believes that humans can change sex or that being female is purely a feeling.

So OP has chosen to have child A live a lie to make child B feel better. The fact that this might make child A feel unhappy is less important at this stage but there is a real risk that it could be damaging them.

There are plenty of grown women on this site who feel hurt, angry and defenceless at the erasure of women's identity, rights, safety and presence so it must be even harder for a child or young adult to just accept having to budge over and bow down.

Very difficult situation OP, I think I would find a way to get some therapy sessions for your transgender child to help them unpick the underlying causes of their pain. In fact both of your children or indeed your whole family. Perhaps you are already.

Sorry to hear about your child's situation, it's awful to be assaulted in such a way, sadly, I understand it all too well.

On the toilets issue and seeing men go into them, the other day I was reminded of something.

So about 10 years or more ago me and my mum were in Morrisons toilets. There was a really big and slow moving queue, we were waiting for over 15 minutes.

One door had been locked, and we assumed it was out of order. All of a sudden the door opens and a man quickly walks past. He was older, around 55 or so. And he ran away.

We were all in shock and felt quite shaky. After chatting with the other ladies in the queue we decided to report it. The woman on customer services couldn't believe it, she was shocked and was going to go through the CCTV and see what could be done. Everybody felt vulnerable.

Cut to now, and we was discussing if we could even report this, and if we did would it be considered a hate crime?
We'd probably be told he had every reason to use our loos as he sees himself as a woman!

You are aiming to avoid the experience I had, by doing the exact same thing...

That's my point.

The point is that you can't conflate sex with gender and pick and choose over it. Gender ideology is inherently sexist.

You can't say that you are supportive of your daughters AND say that gender identity is a thing that you are supportive of because it is inherently sexist.

You have a son who is displaying sexism which you are supporting in the form of gender identity. You refer to it in your child as being trans which legitimises that sexism. Being a feminine boy isn't in the vocabulary.

It's all about toxic masculinity and how you support that. Its just the other side of the same coin.

It's all about the entitlement of boys to define what 'woman' and removing that power of girls to define themselves.

In that single nutshell you place your son above your daughters.

Either your daughters will realise this the hard way or be victims of that sexism.

Oh come on. I made it very clear that I think you experience and voice needs to be heard. I'm disagreeing that this thread and the tone you are using is conducive to convincing anybody. I think you have really good points and as a socially and emotionally intelligent person with a high degree of empathy and will to inform myself, I'm finding it very hard not to throw my hands up and say F you I'm disengaging and discounting all your points. If I in my position am really struggling to stay engaged and open minded in dialogue with you, I'm almost certain there are several other readers who have already switched off and left the room having made up their opinion that we are all nasty TERFs who can't even play nice among ourselves. That to me seems like an own goal.

I think there are plenty of times in this battle that we need to speak out strongly against things. I have no wish to silence your voice, but as somebody who cares about ultimately how effectively women's rights are upheld I'm pissed off with your choice of actions on this thread as I think it's harmful not helpful towards our shared ultimate goals.

I don't get why there are all these assumptions being made. You have no idea what I have or have not said or to whom because you've not asked you've assumed. You cant tell me what I have or have not done because you have no clue what I have or have not done. Your only clue is that I used the word transgender. From there you have run off on your own.

I repeat, your experience is not everyone's experience. Your mothers actions are not every mothers actions.

But OP how can you say in your thread title that you are against self ID when you allow your own child to self ID and go along with it?

I don't understand that.

@Fairenuff

Acceptance without exception has been adopted without any logical reasoning or thought

Do you mean by the OP of this thread? Because I don't see how we can possibly know that from her posts on this thread.

So OP has chosen to have child A live a lie to make child B feel better.

We have no idea if this this true or not, we have insufficient data. OP could have extensively talked with all her children about sex and the gender, living presenting as opposite gender and what that does or doesn't mean. Or she could have "brave and stunning-ed" the son with no thought about the daughters. We don't know.

I agree about therapy for the son and family.

They have no obvious signs of wanting to pervert womanhood just to emulate it. Imho as transgenderism should be.

You could argue the fact he is 'emulating' what presumably is a stereotype of womanhood is exactly the same as perverting it.

Men defining what it means to be a woman, is kind of perverting it and allowing them to define us.

Yes, I am a woman who loves to wear a dress, at home I wear sweatpants, no bra and no make up. Does this make me a man when I'm at home? No, because I am a woman and there are many versions of us.
Trans people define us in one way alone.

No I mean generally. It used to be #nodebate but even TRAs have dropped that now.

OP could have extensively talked with all her children yes. However, I doubt it was framed in a way that the other child had a choice on whether or not to accept their sibling's new identity.

OP may have said 'We're going to call x by their new name and use their new pronouns but you can carry on using the old ones if it makes you feel better'.

But I doubt it. That's not how it works in families where self ID is accepted. I imagine it would be explained how important it was to accept the new ID.

Red is right. It's a circle that can't be squared. It's a zero sum conflict. Acknowledging that is hard and unpalatable.

And it doesn't mean that OP isn't a mother who is doing her absolute best in difficult home circumstances and in an external sociopolitical environment that's making it even worse.

Child may be a bit misleading as they are really a young adult and beyond the age where I can dictate certain things. Obviously they are still my child, hence the wording.

Choosing to wear clothes, make up, have long hair, short hair or whatever is just how you dress or style yourself. I have no issue with men wearing skirts or make up or women wearing jeans and baseball caps (or whatever they feel comfortable in) my issue is believing that there are things that can give you rights to spaces or treatments that could endanger others. I don't believe that clothes or styles are sacred to one sex or another.

My child is choosing to present themselves in a certain way. That's up to them. It doesn't mean I have to swallow the kool aid or that I have to ostracize them.

This issue isn't going away and parents are going to have to navigate it whether they like it or not. None of us have all the answers, none of us are going to get it right all the time. All parents can do is try to find balance. My children are well aware I don't believe sex can be changed because, well, biology. They are also aware that I won't reject them because they choose a path that is not perfectly aligned to my personal beliefs.

Oddly I found the conversations were a lot like the ones about religion when they were younger. Lots of "some people believe x y and z. I personally think a, b and c. These are some of the challenges around that thinking and some of the issues as I see them"

Sorry, thread has moved on.

Fairenuff, I certainly didn't go down the route of "we must all bow to the ideology" as I have said I presented the situation, my understanding and my thoughts around it. Luckily my children are old enough to be able to think though things themselves and research if they choose to so it's not like telling a 3yo a girl is now a boy. One member of the family uses the given name, others use the preferred name. That's their choice and I don't think it's right to ask anyone to go outside their comfort zone so long as their choice is not designed to bully/belittle.

Oddly I found the conversations were a lot like the ones about religion

It's not odd, it's perfectly in line with religion. It's a belief system.

Yes, I think it is too, hence going down that route to discuss it.

If you accept that families can discuss and resolve differences around religion why do you think a family couldn't have a reasonable conversation about trans ideology? Admittedly it is more difficult, because it's been so ramped up by extremists, but I believe it is possible.

It's different to religion though, as there is an answer, 100% proof that women are women and men are men.

With religion, there's no proof. I'm an atheist, but I cannot show proof there is not god, likewise nobody can show evidence of a god.

I'm a woman, I exist. I'm XX and have a vagina. It's not pie in the sky.

Maybe I'm extremely insensitive, but I honestly don't see what's so confrontational and awful about RedToothBrush's communication.

It seems straightforward, direct and clear to me.

That's often seen as confrontational in women and I think that's what's happening here.

Anyway OP really sorry about what happened to your DD and hope she's feeling OK today. Also good luck with walking the minefield that you're in, I hope you feel you can engage and get support here. Whatever the ideology, at the end of the day it's your child you want to support, whatever form that support takes.