The lawyers have arrived!

[FannyCann]

The lawyers have arrived at last. Hopefully the brakes will go on.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tdu2PbARVs9uvCPXFubss63jV2Ka4N/view

There also needs to be some acknowledgement that the developmental path for trans identity in males and in females is very different. This will be impossible to understand for anyone who doesn't fully comprehend the damage that patriarchy inflicts on girls. You can always see it in these conversations, which people understand what gender really is and what it's designed to do to women and which don't.

Hmm, I agree, Fieldofgreycorn does not understand the clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

I met the diagnostic criteria of both gender identity disorder and the new, stricter diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a teen, completely without seeking to be male. I may meet it now although I am nowhere near what Tyrotoxity describes.

Wanting to be the other sex or identifying as the other sex is not a requirement for diagnosis although can one of the symptoms. It is a requirement for a diagnosis of transsexualism though.

Seeking to identify out of being female is actually the one thing almost all females who identify as trans have in common. If you talk to them, if you read their blogs, watch their videos that is painfully obvious.

Developmental path, that's the phrase my brain keeps losing. Ta muchly, Kittens.

Different but mirrored paths. I'm at the limit of ability to word I think. They mirror across the sex axis but it's not equal resulting pathways but that only becomes apparent if the sex axis is understood as an unequal power. It boils down to gendered trauma but what "gendered trauma" actually is and how it functions on individual and societal levels isn't just widely misunderstood but also widely denied and derided.

That was my understanding of it I’m not claiming to know everything. There seems to be a held belief here that trans men only transition to escape the patriarchy (by trying to join it). That doesn’t resonate with many trans men’s life stories and experiences. Not the ones I’ve come across anyway.

I certainly hope I haven’t displayed a lack of empathy. Always willing to learn more and think things over. Will leave it there before this goes more down personal comments path.

I felt even as a child, reading accounts of transsexuals, that the diagnosis of transsexualism was an appallingly homophobic thing, and I understood 'born in the wrong body' was a metaphor even then. But I never wanted to be male. I just wanted the pain to stop. It mainly came in along sexed and gendered channels with weight/size falling under the gendered aspect because expectations and stereotypes. I was always aware that if I somehow weren't female they'd only find something else so that initial idle flight of fancy held no appeal. So, I'm not trans and I never have been - I still have gender dysphoria to manage on an ongoing basis. It's a work in progress.

Glad you weren't so severely affected, Charlie.

Right, I'm paranoid I've just derailed so I'm shutting up for a bit.

It was immediately and instinctively obvious to me from the first encounter that the third gender category for males in various cultures was a societal adaptation to homophobia. I'm not sure what men who're AGP do in those societies, probably keep it private.

I'm not sure what men who're AGP do in those societies, probably keep it private.

I'm not convinced that the development of fetishes is very even across cultures. I suspect our culture has created a situation where the development of fetishes is much more likely for a lot more people.

This is in some way also related to the idea of trans kids. How people explain or understand their "lived experience" is so determined by culture, by what they hear around them. Many mental illnesses or personality issues are culture specific or have culture specific element. The fact that the narrative or culture around kids is telling them that trans kids are a thing shapes the interpretation of their experiences.

I'm not convinced that the development of fetishes is very even across cultures. I suspect our culture has created a situation where the development of fetishes is much more likely for a lot more people.

Agreed 100%. It's rooted in emotional crippling of children, which is not limited to one sex but is applied and functions and results along sex-specific pathways because of that patriarchal power imbalance it always comes back to; and it's also rooted in the learned propensity to treat sex as a transaction that occurs outside the bounds of that power imbalance.

I'd clarify that mental illnesses / personality issues manifest differently according to variables within the particular culture, but the underlying psychology is broadly the same, just understood through very different analytical frameworks. But all our experience of reality is being generated by basically the same hardware ie the human brain; so it's largely the words that differ, from the inside. I expressed that really badly I think so apologies if it makes no sense.

No, I get you. Even though the underlying processes are the same the expression is shaped by culture. Gender in general is shaped by culture - it's one of the things that doesn't work about genderist arguments actually, the idea that there's some sort of universal idea of what's feminine and what's masculine, so we can tell that someone has an inner gender essence based on them wanting to perform an idea of sexy lady or macho man that's actually specific to the genderist's culture, and often to a particular timeframe too. High heels were for men at one point in European history...

Yes, I did express it badly! I was trying to make a comment about the commonality of qualitative experience which exists underneath the intellectual word-layer - the qualia as it were but if I use philosophy-language it's unhelpfully alienating and gets dismissed as academic stuffy white men studying a niche area, which is unhelpful because it's actually about what it means to feel empathy. It would be a remarkably salient point if I could get it down to words.

Also how an experience is framed depends on what concepts and ways of interpreting it are available. Until relatively recently the concept of changing one's genitalia or of attempting to change how one's fat is distributed by taking artificial hormones wouldn't have been part of anyone's self conception because those just weren't things that could happen or that anyone expected to be able to happen. The whole concept of the transsexual involving hormones and cosmetic surgery is really very new. The roleplaying and crossdressingmodel in some cultures is much older and is pretty much exclusively confined to same sex attracted males.

Oh bollocks, I've just re-read that and I'm rejecting identification with male-stereotypes, aren't I? If my communication triggers man-stereotype in someone else's unconscious, in this place, yet again... Doom! Disaster! Run away!

Bloody brain. I am a mess. I'm not running away.

I confess I yearned for liposuction when I first learned of it. Even though I knew it wouldn't actually help in reality, it would just be a way of kidding myself that I was less of a target. My psychological experience of self&weight has always been 'innately and eternally destined to be fat'. Fixed point, psychologically speaking. To the point my brain applies it to its ongoing visual field generation regardless of sense data coming in.

It flickers on and off sometimes now though. It's an odd yet fascinating phenomenon to experience from the inside, but then, I always did enjoy visual field generation bugs.

Liposuction would be letting the side down. The anticapitalist streak within me will happily cling to that mantra even if I didn't have the feminist analysis to back it up.

Also, as a relevant example, cellulite. Presumably women have always had it but I don't remember it being a thing that anyone talked about until maybe the mid to late 80s? And then suddenly we were all self monitoring about it. Culture frames and influences perception.

Agreed 100%. It's rooted in emotional crippling of children, which is not limited to one sex but is applied and functions and results along sex-specific pathways because of that patriarchal power imbalance it always comes back to; and it's also rooted in the learned propensity to treat sex as a transaction that occurs outside the bounds of that power imbalance.

I was thinking much more directly, although to some extent it comes to the same thing. Fetishes seem to develop at leat in part through exposure to certain situations, particularly unusual sexual or sexualised ones, especially when the individual is at a particular developmental stage.

Maybe it makes sense that this is a capacity, because it means individuals can become sensitised as they enter adulthood to the sexual practices of their particular culture, which may be adaptive to the environment in some way. Because most of the time, in human evolution or even historically, what people would be exposed to would just be other pretty standard sex practices for that cultural group.

In our culture though, through a lot of wealth and leisure time, and the media, we've created a situation where young people are exposed to a lot of different sexual stimuli, at a very impressionable age, and often too they are not actually having sex until later on. So porn obviously, but even things in novels and regular tv and film, or advertising.

It's kind of an unusual situation historically. Even if we think of supposedly decadent societies, most people would not have been exposed to that kind of variety of images. Not to mention people often didn't have the privacy to spend much time on such things.

Yep.

I lucked out on cellulite - couldn't visualise it from the descriptions so that avenue wasn't opened to my unconscious. I make the picture in my head out of words, I see the words, not an actual visual. Again rooted in early experience.I

I might have it but I'm incapable of picking it out among the incoming visual data so I can't find anything to fixate on and call cellulite. Thus my mind is inoculated by being too broken to absorb the intended message. There's always a silver lining I suppose.

Still agreeing, Goose. But the visuals are the tip of the iceberg. There's much more goes into the psychology. It's a much more expansive problem not just focused around coitus.not

But men get the fetishes under patriarchy. Women get a sex-flipped mirror experience - they get the body with no mind-connection we get the opposite. Neither is innate, both are contingent on the sex-axis of power.

(Ignore random misplaced not in previous; I hate the touchscreen and the touchscreen hates me and autocorrect is the devil's work.)

Criticism of cellulite started in men's raunchy novels in the late sixties and seventies as a result of them comparing human females with the retouched pictures they masturbated to in lad mags. Not long after that it became an issue in women's magazines.
The reason I know this is because during those years I read anything and everything that came to hand and some very misogynistic work was being produced by best selling authors.

Men had raunchy novels? I shouldn't be surprised given the technological state of the time but it's a frightening reminder of how quickly things evolve. They must have had something filling the space where open goes now in the psychological makeup after all.

I was going to ask is raunchy novels for men still a thing but then I remembered literotica and felt very cross (again) that they really can't let us develop anything outside their guiding influence. Patriarchal conditioning causes women to show greater preference for word-based erotic storytelling; men get in there to make sure we're training ourselves to respond to the words and power dynamics that best meet their needs. Typical.

The Hannah Jones case the Grumpy Gran posted about is interesting because she changed her mind age 14 (won legal battle to refuse treatment aged 13). I watched that documentary, the girl who said no to a new heart and saw a child making decisions out of fear (of the surgery, pain, interventions by doctors etc...). She is now an adult living a full life,Hannah Jones now, it could have been so very different.