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?

So what are these indicators that are so difficult to disguise?

The indicators we use to identify sex differences in adults. For the purposes of reproduction - if we are still talking about evolution. Smell, particularly sweat or body odour is one example.

We don’t reproduce pre puberty.

They put gendered accoutrements such as hair style and make up onto faces. Then participants were asked to sex the faces. Sex recognition was consistent. And women were better at it than men.

But that isn't what we are necessarily talking about anymore. In the past, transsexual people would have gone through puberty and then, as an adult, had re assignment surgery on genitals.

Now, medicine is able to prescribe puberty blockers to pre pubescent children so that they don't go through the normal changes that develop characteristics of their sex. There are also surgical techniques to alter facial structures to remove or add characteristics associated with the sex they want to identify as.

Have studied been conducted into this?

Of course it would be more obvious if you took a photo of a male or female, photoshopped on a hairstyle of the opposite sex and then asked people to identify the sex.

Like I say, forty pages.

You've had your answers. Detailed. From several posters. You're simply filibustering.

The indicators we use to identify sex differences in adults. For the purposes of reproduction - if we are still talking about evolution. Smell, particularly sweat or body odour is one example.

But those characteristics develop as a result of puberty and the action of hormones.

If you block puberty, remove the gonads and then give opposite sex hormones isn't it the case that the person will develop secondary sex characteristics of the sex they identify with?

So smell, facial features etc will develop in accordance with the sex hormones that are being administered rather than the sex hormones that would have been released by the body.

If you block puberty, remove the gonads and then give opposite sex hormones isn't it the case that the person will develop secondary sex characteristics of the sex they identify with

10 year old we are talking about

Being experimented on

medicine is able to prescribe puberty blockers to pre pubescent children so that they don't go through the normal changes that develop characteristics of their sex.

Puberty blockers that leave bones weaker, as the women who were given them for precocious puberty will testify. Your argument is basically "if we commit medical malpractise on impressionable children who aren't even old enough to consent to sex, they might pass as the opposite sex".

I once, on a night out, couldn't understand why my body responded with sexual arousal as if I'd seen a man, to what I at first glance took to be a woman. Being bisexual, I'm attracted to both sexes but the arousal feels different based on sex. A closer look revealed that the person I'd initially read as a woman was male. I'd responded in an involuntary and visceral way to male pheromones even when my eyes were not registering maleness. My point is that eyes are not the only sense I use to sex someone. That was 15 years ago and I pay much more attention to what I see now because I'm aware that more men perform femininity and some wish me harm. This incident is part of why I defend lesbians' right to refuse all males. They smell different and emit differing pheromones, and that matters.

I’ll say, Decomposing, that you invest too much power in what is exceedingly expensive and fraught surgical technique as well as in the magic of hormones. Male bones are still encoded with male DNA, as are male sexual organs. Hormones can’t turn testicles into ovaries, and can’t reshape a male skeleton into a female skeleton.

Perhaps the thread could go back to my comment about Gender Euphoria, as opposed to Gender Dysphoria, and its implications as well as the issues it raises as to how we treat TW enjoying such euphoria, say, while in a cubicle in a women’s toilet.

About the male pounding on windows in Brighton as metaphor in action.

About rape culture writ large.

bd67th

I found my self sexually attracted to a male co worker

I was a bit up set because i lived my husband dearly and didnt really like the young co workers personality

Turned out he wore the same aftershave as dh, all my sexual experiences were linked to that smell

Smell is incredibly important

Even if 'they' passed, whoever 'they' are...

'They' are still a threat, as a class, to women, as a class. What with them being male.

Any male who thinks they are entitled to be in a space specifically for females, is automatically a threat as they are unable to identify that they, as a class, are a threat to females, as a class; and that females know this and will automatically, in some way or other, be at increased risk. So they, knowing this, should stay out.

All this nonsense of passing or not; that's not the issue here.

You are describing extensive and highly invasive surgical removal of genitals and other sex organs. Administration of cross sex hormones.
Facial surgery, body modification surgery and associated follow up surgeries (these would be required as the child’s body continues to grow)
Huge doses of antibiotics.
Life long medication.

All this to a pre pubescent child. (So realistically would need to be completed by 10. Possibly earlier)

And all this to make a point that we can’t necessarily reliably recognise sex in adults?

I’m not sure I want to continue propping up your theory by exploring the idea of actual real life tests.

I'm not saying whether these things should happen.

I'm not saying that puberty blockers don't cause serious side effects.

I didn't say that hormones turn testicles into ovaries. I said if you remove the gonads - so either orchidectomy or oopherectomy and then give hormones you effectively develop the secondary sexual characteristics of the sex that you identify with.

Yes, at the cellular level the DNA is unchanged but the differences in the skeleton of males and females before puberty is not as obvious as after.

Trans people don't "pass" Never. I can spot them a mile off, however much surgery they've had and however many hormones they've taken.

HumberElla

But this is what is happening already. That's why there's the push to get younger children onto puberty blockers.

There is a market for cosmetic surgery to remove or enhance secondary characteristics, to change brow and jaw shape, to shave the larynx to remove the Adams apple. This is the way this process is moving.

All this to a pre pubescent child. (So realistically would need to be completed by 10. Possibly earlier)

No, you don't need to have conducted the surgery and hormones on a pre pubescent child. Thats why puberty blockers are prescribed - to stop the body from developing more pronounced secondary sexual characteristics.

IsadoraQuagmire in fairness if they do pass you won't know and so won't count them

As a step to what?

Yes, there’s a push to mutilate, sterilise & medicate gender non conforming children at an increasingly young age.
Why are you arguing this so hard, Decomposing? Are you playing devil’s advocate?

It's quite difficult to differentiate between pre pubescent boys and girls so if you arrest puberty how does that alter sex differences?

I'd say that is very easy to distinguish boys from girls, even when babies, let alone later on.

It’s odd because when I was a child there was definitely a push for ‘you are perfect being you’ - mostly aimed at kids with disabilities.

What this sounds like is experimentation on ‘not perfect’ kids. Now that’s sinister.

Yes, there’s a push to mutilate, sterilise & medicate gender non conforming children at an increasingly young age

Absolutely

And its not playing devils advocate either

But who is telling these kids that they are ‘broken’ or ‘wrong’?

Of course it would be more obvious if you took a photo of a male or female, photoshopped on a hairstyle of the opposite sex and then asked people to identify the sex

Photos are one thing...real life is another. So many elements in a living, moving person give away their sex.

Don’t forget phone filters....

Why are you arguing this so hard, Decomposing? Are you playing devil’s advocate?

I'm simply saying that many transpeople do "pass" and that, if the trend to block puberty continues, that the numbers that do pass will increase.

I'd say that is very easy to distinguish boys from girls, even when babies, let alone later on.

I completely disagree with that. I think many mums have been in the situation where strangers comment on their baby boy and girl but have got it completely wrong.

Decomposers your original point I think was Re how we recognise sex in adults.

You are becoming very insistent on the idea that this is no longer possible or likely, because of early interventions that are already being used on children and are highly effective.

This is still very unusual, controversial and in some cases has been done illegally with one country changing their laws to prevent it.

So statistically very very very unlikely that we will meet an adult who has received such interventions and has since grown to adulthood. Hopefully even less likely in the future as society realises what is being done to those children.