How should we treat trans people?

[coffeeplease16]

I have been browsing the feminist thread with interest and been reading lots of arguments that accepting trans = encroaching on women’s rights and women’s only spaces. If you yourself believe that you can’t change sex, and being a women = having a vagina - how do you think we should include trans people in our society? I am genuinely interested, and not meaning to be goady. What is the ideal - how can we protect the rights of women without ostracising trans people from our society?

I think some people may just be unusually bad at spotting sex and assume that their normal is the same as everyone else's.

Radical meninism = "I was born with this innate feature that is not my fault"

Radical feminism = "I was conditioned into this pattern of thinking and I'm bloody pissed off about it"

Feeling begins in the gut. bd's IBS flare-ups caught my eye. Her body is showing the strain of what she knows is true being at odds with what men are telling her is true. If it weren't IBS it'd be coming out somewhere else - and the meninists would tell her she was born with that fault and try to make her believe that was the source of all her problems.

Solution: single-sex spaces in which to heal. Lack of single-sex options = giving males a psychological boost and not giving a shit that the direct consequence is physical illness in females.

Doyoumind I don’t disagree, you can see hundreds on twitter who don’t pass at all and some irl.
Great you can tell. Your experience is your experience.

Does it matter if you can tell (you pretty much always can)?

Men shouldn’t be trying to annexe women’s spaces and services, full stop, the end

‘Passing’ is irrelevant

Yet again no one can explain why someone else's inner essence trumps my identity, every time.
The rights of one group override the rights of another, thats how you tell this is not about human rights.

As for this:

Some people want (need) to be perceived as the opposite physical sex to which they were born.

It's a psychological want that has become entrenched to the point that the self interprets it as an immediate survival need.

I have a psychological need to be perceived as solvent by the ATM. Doesn't mean everyone else has to make it happen, no matter how distressed I am by lack of cash.

I also have a psychological need to know that women and girls are safe. Because I am female, it's a psychological need for me.

So, why does the male's psychological need take precedence over the female's psychological need?

Could it be that we're scared of what the male might do if his psychological needs are not pandered to?

When I was younger I used to have dreams about vampires when I was around men who were dodgy. Took me a while to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me and that it wasn't "change your late night reading habits". When I did figure it out and cut contact with those men, the dreams stopped. I bet the IBS would too if the cause of the discomfort was removed.

Nonny yes I agree with a lot of what you say. We can see quite a range of different trans types and behaviours, some more pathological than others.

"Some get treatment and move on with their lives in their acquired sex. They simply see themselves as a man or a woman. Like any medical condition you get the treatment and hopefully move forward, you don’t keep identifying as that condition. Although they’ll always be someone who went through it of course, it shouldn’t have to define them."

You can't acquire a sex it is fixed and despite them viewing themselves as the opposite sex other may not and this seems to be a problem for them. The fact that after medical treatment they still feel their are the opposite sex suggests that they are still suffering from the same medical problem. Their medical conditions is not cured and so they still suffer from it.

You can't really judge anything from tv show contestants. There was one where the women contestants believed they would get a date with Prince Harry (I Wanna Marry Harry anyone?). It was a fake Harry...

It's a psychological want that has become entrenched to the point that the self interprets it as an immediate survival need.

It’s a theory. I didn’t not know what the mental health care profession community would make of it or whether it could be used as a basis for new successful treatments but yes it’s a reasonable sounding hypothesis.

Could it be that we're scared of what the male might do if his psychological needs are not pandered to?

Maybe sometimes, yes.

Probably treated rather than cured 3mks

Some people want (need) to be perceived as the opposite physical sex to which they were born.

It's a psychological want that has become entrenched to the point that the self interprets it as an immediate survival need.

I think it is important here to distinguish between needs and wants. This is a want, not a need, but that doesn't gain enough sympathy and support, because we all have wants which are not fulfilled. What is happening here is that people are being encouraged to think that some 'wants' should be elevated to the category of 'needs' and the rest of the world should help them achieve what they 'need'.

No I don’t think think that.

What do you think then? Because, quite frankly, you seem to think that male wants trump female needs.

I don't. And I don't give a flying fuck what the males think about that.

But then they would still have the condition, just like a diabetic for example who is treated with meds/diet but still has the condition. If you stopped or reversed the treatment they received and they are suffering again they are not cured and never have been. Therefore the condition is part of their identity.

It’s a theory. I didn’t not know what the mental health care profession community would make of it or whether it could be used as a basis for new successful treatments but yes it’s a reasonable sounding hypothesis.

In case you missed it, Field - I've experienced severe gendered dysphoria since very early childhood. I'm speaking from personal experience that checks out with every trans or AGP person I've ever known.

It only sounds like bollocks if you think a gender identity is a fixed thing that is inherent in the developing blastocyte.

Only difference with me and them is, no one told me I was behaving like a boy and that this was wrong. But they did tell me I was fat and that this was wrong. So my bodily dysmorphia revolves around my perception of fatness rather than my genitals.

Gendered trauma's at the root of it. All of it. Gendered trauma and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

Could it be that we're scared of what the male might do if his psychological needs are not pandered to?

Maybe sometimes, yes.

So by treating him as a woman, we're actually treating him as a man, because if he was actually a woman we wouldn't be scared of him.

What we end up with is men who say they are women being pandered to and 'treated as women' out of fear, and women who say they are men having their wish to be treated as men ignored because they're not scary.

So we still end up treating men as men and women as women.

But then they would still have the condition, just like a diabetic for example who is treated with meds/diet but still has the condition.

No.

Gendered dysphoria can be cured.

A prerequisite is the patient and the therapist believing it's curable.

And then you just have to smash the hell out of all the conditioning and work out where it came from, so you can establish new coping mechanisms for social reality.

So by treating him as a woman, we're actually treating him as a man, because if he was actually a woman we wouldn't be scared of him.

What we end up with is men who say they are women being pandered to and 'treated as women' out of fear, and women who say they are men having their wish to be treated as men ignored because they're not scary.

So we still end up treating men as men and women as women.

Exactly. Transwomen are treated to, and are benefitting from, male privilege everywhere.

Sorry Tyro didn't explain myself well. Physical treatment eg hormones, cosmetic surgery etc will not cure the person as the cessation or reversal of this would cause the issues to worsen. However councilling to change thinking could cure them as stopping the therapy if successful would mean they no longer thought that they were the opposite sex.

Some people want (need) to be perceived as the opposite physical
sex to which they were born

Ok well here I have a conundrum. And it's real.
I have an abiding need to be perceived in real life and in law as old enough to draw my pension.
I have got to somehow give up work, its killing me. I am beyond tired, I cry at the thought of getting up on a morning, I really struggle to do my part time job. If I could just retire this would all go away.
Sadly I am 20+years away from real retirement. But if I could just get a new birth certificate that said I was born 20 years before I actually was, and people when they looked at me saw a little old lady. Then all my current problems would disappear. I could happily claim my state pension and live a life sans working.

Of course it's just the menopause, it will pass, I will one day feel better. But just for right now, I wanna be a pensioner.

. Like any medical condition you get the treatment and hopefully move forward, you don’t keep identifying as that condition

Wait, I thought being trans was no longer a disorder. If it is not a disorder why does someone qualify for elective surgery and hormones on the NHS to treat it.

However councilling to change thinking could cure them as stopping the therapy if successful would mean they no longer thought that they were the opposite sex

Agreed.

The trouble is generally that it's very very hard for men to accept the need to dig through their past to see what's influenced the emergence of their sexed/sexual identity.

And even if they do, there's still the underlying problem of needing some form of coping mechanism to mitigate feeling impotent in other areas of life.

If it's no longer classed as a disorder then there's no reason for anyone to analyse why they feel the way they do, and so the basic human need to feel in control of our environment gets funnelled into the typical vocal/violent demands for validation as soon as the person feels they're powerless.

And there's never any reason to work out what the underlying control issues are all about.

So, no impetus to find alternative, healthier means of feeling in control of one's life.

I'll even cut my tits off if it helps.

There is a very long history of female self-mutilation to avoid rape. The Catholic church has at least one saint who is in part glorified for just this. I see parallels with the glorification of female saints who self-mutilated or fought back and were murdered by their rapists, preferring death over violation, and the "brave and special" narrative surrounding transitioning youth, most of whom are female. Many female Catholic saints were persecuted because they refused to marry and in doing so were "womanning wrong".

• Female Catholic, "does womanning wrong" by refusing to be sexually available to men, takes death or mutilation over submission, is canonised as a martyr and glorified.
• Young lesbian, "does womanning wrong" by refusing to be sexually available to men, takes death via suicide or mutilation via mastectomy over submission, is pronounced brave and special.

Cleverer people than me have spotted some parallels with the trans interpretation of queer theory and religion. Now I'm seeing more and more parallels.