R4 on detransitioning 8pm tonight

[bumpertobumper]

File on Four on Radio Four tonight at 8 will be exploring those who detransition and whether enough is done about other factors before transition.
I'll be tuning in...

Tavi rep: [on the huge increase in girls accessing GIDS] "I've looked at the numbers and thought about it, and I think the most likely cause of referral cases going up is that the service is more accessible and there are social reasons it's more acceptable to tell your family"

See I do agree with that to an extent.
For example in the past there were not nearly as many openly gay people as there are now. This isn’t because there are more gay people but because it is more socially acceptable for people to be openly gay.

However I do think that only so much of the increase can be explained in social acceptability. Other factors are at play.

I just came looking for a thread after stumbling upon the BBC article. Glad the BBC are presenting the other side of this.

And even a positive quote about feminists

At 26, Thain sought help from the NHS and was prescribed testosterone. But after two years, she decided to stop taking the hormones and detransition.

"It wasn't until I discovered a community who were affirming to gender nonconforming people, which is the radical feminist community, that I really made the decision to stop," Thain told BBC News.

It wasn't until I discovered a community who were affirming to gender nonconforming people, which is the radical feminist community, that I really made the decision to stop,

Well I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs. There you have it.

Cannot get my head around those who wish to trans or not.

It is legal now, so go for it. Cannot understand the issue anymore.

But for the record, I do not want a self identifying woman in my changing room or my toilet area. Thanks.

Absolutely Flamingo - there's something in the fact that it's become much more widely discussed in society.

(Though a sociologist better than me might want to look at the conjunction of tumblr-culture/lack of other youth tribes/porn culture/adult perspectives on sex and gender/lobbying strategies by adult, mostly male to female trans activitists, to even investigate why that factor is happening.)

And, as you say, there are likely to be other factors at play. Which some prominent groups seem reluctant to explore.

Thain's wisely protected her Twitter, given the likely incoming-onslaught, but she's written some interesting stuff for Feminist Current in the past.
www.feministcurrent.com/tag/thain-parnell/

Yet another person certain TRAs will want to be picking apart for not being 'trans enough'.

Tavi rep: [on the huge increase in girls accessing GIDS] "I've looked at the numbers and thought about it, and I think the most likely cause of referral cases going up is that the service is more accessible and there are social reasons it's more acceptable to tell your family"

Is that her explanation for why the number of girls accessing GIDS has increased so much more than the number of boys? If accessibility and social acceptability were the reasons, the number of boys should have increased at the same rate, and the male/female ratio would have remained approximately the same.

I thought it was an interesting programme. Started with detransitioners and went on to how are people transitioning in the first place.

OldCrone exactly. No further thinking explored. Even when she'd looked at the numbers and thought at bit.

For girls being a ‘Tom boy’ has always be socially acceptable. Many women who today may well have been trans lived quite happily as ‘Tom boys’.

For boys there isn’t even an equivalent term that isn’t an insult.

Therefore I would have assumed that there would be more boys wanting to transition now it is more socially acceptable.
As a woman I can walk down the street tomorrow in trousers, a shirt, men’s shoes, short hair and no make up and no one would look twice.
For a man or boy to walk down the street in a dress would still garner comments and looks.

So, given that a trans boy could be trans in plain sight but trans women couldn’t why aren’t the numbers of boys going up?

The question I have is, if the number of girls accessing GIDS has increased solely because "the service is more accessible and there are social reasons it's more acceptable to tell your family" where are all the middle-aged women doing the same? If "gender identity" is immutable ("born this way") then there should be a lot of middle-aged transmen coming out of the closet now that transitioning is more socially acceptable.

Instead it's mostly teen girls and middle-aged men. Hmmm....

I have such respect for Debbie, Thain and Charlie. I hope that they are getting the support they need. I can only imagine the personal cost of speaking out. I am so happy that with Charlie’s help support networks are beginning to form for other people in their shoes. It is profoundly changing the landscape that these networks now exists for anyone who needs to access them but also that some detransitioners are also lending their voices to the fight back to reclaim women’s rights is immense, and for all women. So thank you again.

That is a damn good point @NotYourCisterinAus. Especially women whose children have left home and who have established careers. I can see how things like that would force you to keep it secret.

I’m surprised R4 had anything about detransitioning at all. Last Saturday and Friday (both around 10.50am) there were programmes about trans agenda: the Friday one was talking about Drag Race (I think it must have been Beyond Today but not sure) and Saturday it was Life Lines - ambulance dispatcher’s conversations with some one waiting for an ambulance - dramatisations, not real phone calls. It got real bad teal quick when the dispatcher was assuring the trans person that he sounds very feminine and the bloke was saying that men do less small talk about weather because they’re afraid.

^ ^^ Also what pombear said, empathy for everyone, the UK landscape is being shifted permanently by detransitioners and by desisting women speaking out.

Charlie’s network and her and the other women going public with their stories is going to have such a huge rebalancing ripple effect and prompt some important and uncomfortable thinking for a lot of people.

If they have any conscience at all, and genuinely do exist to provide public benefit, as they are legally required to do, then the LGBTQ++, transgender people’s and child transition megacharities should be offering to meet with Charlie and should offer her network a no-strings budget to operate independently.

Flamingo I totally agree about the fear/likelihood of losing established community and support being a deterrent to detransitioners and desisters, especially if needing a bit of support and acceptance was part of the complex reasons for them to identify under trans umbrella in the first place. Which can it take some self-acceptance to accept. (and Everard, I could have written your post).

Hopefully in future there will be a split off within the trans movement of less-idealogically driven people, who will accept that identity can fluctuate or change and this is a normal part of life and OK. And that specifically in the case of young people and gender identity, this would require fully funded psychological support freely available and ‘watch and wait’, no blockers, caution around social transition, nothing else permanent before age 25, and special care also being taken with vulnerable adults seeking transition etc. Talking therapy always as the first line.

That split off and acceptance inside the trans community can only happen though if the beleaguered position and culture war calms down and children stop being used as political objects with potentially dire consequences for them. And while angry AGP misogynists and their supporters are at the helm and are also aggressively encroaching on lesbians and other women’s spaces, opportunities and language, that culture war isn’t likely to cease any time soon unfortunately. Which is awful for everyone.

In the meantime though, Charlie’s network is invaluable and rad fems are providing support, a wider community and hopefully a way to make sense of all this for women and I am really happy to see that happening.

Side note: And also respect to Peter, a man recently who was speaking on the BBC and elsewhere regretting his social and surgical transition and now finding support in his local church community:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3729264-Detransitioner-on-5Live-this-morning-massive-failure-of-medical-profession

I hope there is or will be an equivalent detransitioners network for men, but that’s another issue.

Yes @NotYourCisterinAus this is what I've been saying for a while!

If it's because it's so much more acceptable to come out as trans now then where are our peers all declaring themselves to be transmen?

I have plenty of old school friends who have come out as lesbian as adults, after heterosexual relationships, but strangely none who have suddenly turned into men.

It's all teenagers and middle aged men. 🤔

I would have swallowed this whole as kid who was gender non-conforming and desperately wished to be a boy my whole childhood. I found puberty so so hard and wished for a mastectomy. I'm probably autistic so always felt I didn't fit in. I would have found a group to finally be part of. I can see how some kids think this is the answer, and it's very scary. It is a cult.

I understand completely, OhMsBeliever. I spent most of my childhood and adolescence feeling like I was stranded on an alien planet, and if this had been around then, I would have grabbed it with both hands. Oddly enough, though I'm still pretty gender nonconforming, I have not taken advantage of the new social norms and rushed out to get a mastectomy and a prescription for testosterone!

Listened to the programme on de-transitioning and wanted to know more about the rep from the main organisation - who was the represented speaker on behalf of Gip or Gires (?)

Also - heard a mention of radical feminism in the contet of someone who was prepared to say they de-transed, and a mother who felt that her child was bullied into transition because of the 'gay' stigma that resulted in her child's coming out experience (shocking/sad). Was a good effort I thought to be bring the real concerns to the table , would have been even better if they had offered a balanced view by someone else professional, from another group offering views, not related to the NHS or medical opinion. This discussion is curently far too narrow for fear of back-lash in speaking out !

NotYour I brought up this exact point while trying to raise concerns at school when they started working with one of the trans orgs, but a woke female staff member was basically arguing with me (quite aggressively) that I was wrong and there were actually equally high numbers of middle-aged women transitioning now (despite all evidence to the contrary). Claimed transition rates had increased across the board due to increased acceptance, but that I probably just hadn't noticed as they all "passed"

Just caught up with this programme. Good effort, I thought.

On the point of where are all the middle-aged trans men, where indeed? It's pretty clear the government and the NHS are not keeping reliable records, and it's hard to see how they could, when we consider how many people fall under the Stonewall umbrella, but anecdotally you'd expect women on this board to be mentioning female friends, relatives, colleagues, neighbours who are transitioning and I can't recall a single instance. Have I missed them?

Oh, I should add that right at the start there was a brief clip from a woman in the late 20s who identifies as nonbinary and was about to have a double mastectomy. There was also a clip from the surgeon who said that his patients often brought relatives along with them. He claimed that he often heard 'she's a much better sister than a brother' and 'he's much better as a dad than he ever was as a mother'. That second one struck me very forcibly. Really?

I noticed that too Gasp and I don't really believe it was a genuine example, more a general example of the type of thing someone might say. Wouldn't it be interesting to get a break down on the surgeries for sex and age and gender identity?

We all know what sex the patients are for mastectomies. How many middle aged women decide they feel like a man enough to transition in all ways?

I'm happy to be corrected and see the numbers of late-stage gender dysphoria in women who are already mothers and find out their reasons for transitioning socially and surgically. We don't hear from this group so do they even exist? If they do exist I'd like to know more and hear from their children and their husbands or male partners as if they continue in a marriage they would legally become a 'same-sex' couple.

An article about the regretter featured on this weeks New Night programme in yesterday's Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7731427/Woman-reveals-shes-living-female-unhappy-transgender-man.html?ito=email_share_article-top