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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

When, oh when, will the tide turn?

169 replies

IchbineinBerlinner · 18/04/2020 10:39

I've been waiting and waiting for people to wake up to trans ideology. I've had complaints against my work. I've been blacklisted by organisations I used to work with. This is all coming to a head for me professionally speaking and I am so tired of waiting for people to understand what is going on. I have a tendency to be over-positive, so I'd like to hear Mumsnet's views: am I mad to think that this madness will stop soon?

OP posts:
Goosefoot · 19/04/2020 14:03

In contemporary, liberal, individualistic societies individuals have been free to explore a wide range of expression and behaviour....and civil equality laws have enabled that regardless of one's sex, background, race, culture etc

In more conservative, traditional societies the roles of men and women are heavily prescribed, and shaped by assumptions based on biological sex alone. It is the social unit or the group that is more important than individualistic expression.

I think we have to be careful not to underestimate the role that technology plays in this difference. If for just a moment we imagine that we had a pre-20th century ability to control reproduction, ( not to mention identify parentage, or prosecute crime, or treat STIs) what would our liberal society look like in terms of freedom from sex based roles? I think we'd not see nearly as much difference from traditional societies. In a real way it's the inability to suppress or manipulate the biological situation that gives us the ability to give people as much freedom to express themselves as they have.

I think this is very much connected by the tendency to see progress in terms of a science-fiction kind of thinking, a domination of nature rather than working within it.

nauticant · 19/04/2020 14:33

As a note of caution, this article:

www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joan

from this thread shows that in the late-90s the "scientific" underpinning of gender identity ideology was shown to be largely fraudulent put together by people having harmful motivations and even though a scandal erupted, somehow the ideology was able to start regaining lost ground and then far exceed the lost ground not many years afterward.

Thinkingabout1t · 19/04/2020 20:24

OP, stay strong. Transgenderism is well-funded and it cleverly hitched a ride on the LGB movement, which no decent liberal would oppose.

It took off at astonishing speed and was entrenched in government departments, charity, academia etc while most of us were still saying WTF???

But the more people read and hear about it, the more the rest of the population is noticing that this isn't the harmless oppressed group they had imagined. The propaganda can no longer counteract the reality.

As others have said on Mumsnet, it's the cleansing power of sunlight. So let's stay strong. People are slowly waking up to what's happening.

IchbineinBerlinner · 19/04/2020 22:54

Thanks @Thinkingabout1t that's really lovely x

OP posts:
ThriftStoreSpeciality · 20/04/2020 00:52

from this thread shows that in the late-90s the "scientific" underpinning of gender identity ideology was shown to be largely fraudulent put together by people having harmful motivations and even though a scandal erupted, somehow the ideology was able to start regaining lost ground and then far exceed the lost ground not many years afterward.

That didn’t show the idea of gender identity to be fraudulent though, just that you can’t forcibly change someone’s gender identity anymore than you can change their sexuality.

NonnyMouse1337 · 20/04/2020 01:17

This Twitter thread explains the background of the concept of 'gender identity'.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1224766770805866499.html

It is related to people who are perfectly healthy and able bodied but claim to have an 'innate identity' of a disabled person and therefore need to have their limbs amputated.

Seethefairfromtheair · 20/04/2020 01:29

@DJLippy Professor Sarah Gilbert on Andrew Marr using clear language to describe why her Oxford team believe more men than women have died because of covid, a possibility of genetic differences in our immune systems, only the terms men & women used, no cis, no spectrum of sexes, cant find her being branded a terf for it on twitter but you never know, Harrop could be hunting her down as I write this. Even the Guardian has given up with the cissing, right now we have the return of our words & their meanings but for how long? If it was more women than men in the fatalities do you think the language obfuscation would have carried on? Headlines like non men more affected, some women & lots of cis, I think so. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/07/coronavirus-hits-men-harder-evidence-risk

Aesopfable · 20/04/2020 08:28

If it was more women than men in the fatalities do you think the language obfuscation would have carried on? Headlines like non men more affected, some women & lots of cis, I think so

I doubt there would be headlines as they wouldn’t be bothered or if they were it would still be ‘women’ and they would wheel out a selection of transwomen to say how worried they were and how they needed more rights to be treated speschul

Lamahaha · 20/04/2020 08:53

The "be kind" thing is beginning to really annoy me. I see it parroted everywhere now, in every second Facebook post about any issue whatsoever; it's become a virtue-signalling slogan you drop into conversation to show how very compassionate you are, and by women especially.

Which means that they'll use it - unthinkingly -- in support of trans rights as well, without giving a thought to the actual consequences for real women. How can you say anything when a woman argues for transwomen entering women's spaces just by smugly saying be kind?

And yet, instinctively we all know.

I was watching an old episode of 4 in a Bed the other day and the group was taken to a glamping site. Every single one of the rival B&B owners complained that the shower area was "mixed sex" (yes, that was the word they used) and that that was a huge no-no for them.

These were ordinary people who had probably never given a thought to trans issues before.

Lamahaha · 20/04/2020 08:53

We need to change be kind to be truthful.

nauticant · 20/04/2020 09:06

"Be kind" is often a synonym for "be uncritical". On the assumption that "being critical" means "being nasty". In reality, examining things critically is often a good idea. Also, some things really do need to be criticised.

Aesopfable · 20/04/2020 09:09

“Be kind” always sounds to me like a six year old bully trying to get his/her own way.

twoHopes · 20/04/2020 09:17

Even the Guardian has given up with the cissing, right now we have the return of our words & their meanings but for how long?

I read a Guardian journalist stating the importance of "recording accurate sex-disaggregated data" the other day and nearly fell off my chair. It's going to make it a hell of a lot harder for people to argue "sex is a construct" or "sex is a spectrum" or even "sex is irrelevant" with a straight face post-coronavirus. Turns out we all knew what male/female was all along and no it's not "assigned at birth".

stillathing · 20/04/2020 10:23

"Be kind" is invariably used by people whose beliefs have consequences that are not at all kind to underrepresented people such as female prisoners and rape victims. It is used to suggest that talking about bad things that have happened is worse than the events themselves.

R0wantrees · 20/04/2020 10:24

Fomation of important international group of professionals:

"Society For Evidence Based Medicine

About Us
We are an international group of nearly 100 clinicians and researchers concerned about the lack of quality evidence for the use of hormonal and surgical interventions as first-line treatment for young people with gender dysphoria. We represent expertise from a range of clinical disciplines.

Our objectives include evaluating current interventions for gender dysphoria, providing balanced evidence summaries, promoting the development of effective and supportive psychosocial approaches for the care of young people with gender dysphoria and generating good, answerable questions for research.

Young people with gender dysphoria deserve respect, compassion, and high quality care. Please join us in our mission to promote evidence-based care for children, adolescents, and young adults that prioritizes life (i.e. measures of mortality), quality of life, long-term outcomes, and fully informed consent. SEGM is free from political, ideological, religious, or financial influences.

We are currently in the process of forming a 501(c) nonprofit organization."

www.segm.org/

Justhadathought · 20/04/2020 10:34

That didn’t show the idea of gender identity to be fraudulent though

Maybe not, but having a 'gender identity' as a distinct & discrete psychological 'item' is simply not something that most people recognise; although if you buy into the idea that such a thing exists, then identify yourself with it - then that is another issue.

R0wantrees · 20/04/2020 11:14

From Malcolm Clarke's threadreader (linked upthread)

"A thread. The Scottish govt wants to enshrine the concept of 'gender identity' in law. But what is 'gender identity' and where did this seemingly innocent idea come from? Welcome to a dark tale of scientific malpractice, psychiatric abuse and...an epidemic of amputations.

In 1955 Dr John Money borrowed the word 'gender' from linguistics to describe what had till then been known as 'sex'. The science of sexology was dominated by biologists and if an ambitious psychiatrist like him was ever to shine he knew he needed to elbow out the biologists.
He was also frank that 'sexology' was unlikely ever to be fully respectable if it sounded like it was obsessed with the S word. Money went on to invent the terms 'gender role' and our friend 'gender identity', as he became the global go-to expert in transsexual studies.

I came across Money when my colleagues at BBC Horizon made a heart-rending episode on the story of David Reimer. As a baby David lost his penis when his circumcision went wrong. His parents were sent with David to John Money.

Money argued 'gender identity' was a social construction that you could change in any child before the age of 2. He decided to give David hormones, create a surgical vagina and told his parents to bring him up as a girl. Here's the script for the show.
www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/boyturnedgirl.shtml

Money later made 6 year old David and his twin brother strip naked and play sex games which he photographed. Research apparently. He wrote the case up as a huge success and said it helped explain 'transsexuality'. A transsexual's identity he said was fixed socially..

..at an early age just as he'd fixed David's and doctors should do what he'd done: affirm the identity & make the body fit it. What Money didn't reveal was that David actually hated his 'girl' identity and later committed suicide. When this came out Money's career was ruined. But rather than David's case being seen as proof biological SEX was immutable experts now tweaked Money's view of transsexuality & argued instead that our inner sense of 'gender identity' was not formed by society but entirely innate. So innate you could never change it. " (continues)

John Money's abusive & unethical practice should be a core concern to anyone relying on his 'work' as a foundation for their beliefs and/or policies.
current thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3884596-award-winning-article-from-1997-on-david-reimer

see also other 'sexologists' eg Harry Benjamin:
stoptransingkids.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/who-was-harry-benjamin/amp/

Alfred Kinsey
thesexualdevolution.blogspot.com/2018/01/alfred-kinsey-was-american-biologist.html

Dances · 20/04/2020 11:15

I'm all for being kind to women and girls

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 20/04/2020 11:28

The people urging you to be kind always mean "to men", though.

R0wantrees · 20/04/2020 11:37

I'm all for being kind to women and girls

The lack of protection & respect for women's sex based rights & Safeguarding enabled transactivism to flourish unchecked. Its a consequence of systemic Safeguarding failure/failings & there are many others:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3301266-Safeguarding-girls-and-protecting-women-post-Jimmy-Saville-metoo

Winesalot · 20/04/2020 12:14

R0wantrees Thanks for the link to SEGM. I am going to watch that space as they seem to be a breath of reality. One that crosses international boundaries and all the #bekind rhetoric.

ChattyLion · 20/04/2020 13:34

Sorry that things are getting really difficult OP Flowers

Agree that reversing regulatory capture is the key to reclaiming women’s spaces and opportunities and to safeguarding women and children.

To speed that reversal of capture and to make solid new gains for women and children, we will also need Parliament to act.

This is around GRA reform but also to bring in new legal protections for children and young people. It seems that medical culture and current regulation isn’t sufficient to protect them at present as detransitioned people and whistleblowing staff have said.

So Parliament needs to have various select committee enquiries: on children and GIDS/insufficiency of CAMHS provision, on appropriate care and support for detransitioned people, on women’s sports, on prisons, on single sex public and workplace toilet provision, and many more issues.

These can gather evidence from as wide a range of views as possible, then with well-informed MPs, government can be encouraged to take up the committees’ report recommendations. Then we need well-informed drafting and debate in the Commons and the Lords towards statutory amendments or making new statute.

Court cases are key of course and can be used to force governments to draft new laws in reaction, especially if they get to European level, but that progress through the courts can take years.

My worry is that the pandemic and economic recovery and Brexit will understandably take up a lot of Parliamentary time (next ten years?) so none of this will get much time and the status quo will be normalised.

So we need to keep on writing to our MPs and ministers even if (like my MP) they don’t write back.

It’s not ideal if the GRA remains in force but with reforms outin the long grass for the very long term.

There are already creeping areas of GRA scope being argued to be ‘grey areas’ (like whether parents with GRCs should be able to use their own GRC-assigned legal sex status on their kids’ birth certificates, as in the case brought by Freddy McConnell who made the ‘Seahorse’ film about their pregnancy)

Also as Keira Bell has pointed out, there are basic problems with GRA that make it unworkable: there’s no legal revocation of a GRA once granted, unless through ‘fraud’ or in the case of fluctuating identity.

So the holding of a GRA then denies the possibility of detransitioned people regaining their birth legal sex, unless they say things which aren’t true for them in order to comply with GRA requirements. This is totally unacceptable and hopefully will be subject to legal challenge by someone at some point.

Another part of the reason for trying to keep Parliamentary interest towards reforms current, is that there is a majority government in place. This makes change of this kind much easier to achieve if the will is there, although to sustain any such change long term there must be cross party support.

Goosefoot · 20/04/2020 13:50

I have found that when I talk to people who take the "Be Kind" approach, often, they don't really understand the consequences that are involved. They also tend to be the sort of people who think that self-esteem comes through telling people they are good and being nice to them. They don't tend to understand how struggle can be healthy.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 20/04/2020 13:55

Part of the problem with that is that some people aren't good. It isn't really possible to have any sort of adult conversation about ethics without acknowledging that.

R0wantrees · 20/04/2020 14:01

Agree that reversing regulatory capture is the key to reclaiming women’s spaces and opportunities and to safeguarding women and children.

To speed that reversal of capture and to make solid new gains for women and children, we will also need Parliament to act.

20/4/2020 Caroline ffiske for Conservative Woman:

'Trans takeover of the Justice Ministry'
(extract)
"ACCORDING to the Mail on Sunday, former Tory Cabinet Minister Rory Stewart has revealed that female prisoner officers have been raped by men housed in women’s prisons. These men were placed in the women’s prisons because they identify as female.

It had previously been reported that female prisoners and officershad been sexually assaulted by male ‘trans’ prisoners, but this was the first reference to rape. Perhaps Stewart has mis-spoken, mis-remembered, or been misquoted. I hope he or the Mail on Sunday will clarify. I have put in a Freedom of Information request to try to find out more.

According to the Mail on Sunday, ‘the Ministry of Justice recently said policies are in place to manage the risks that might be posed by male-bodied prisoners who say they are trans women’. Well might the Ministry wish to reassure us, following the debacle whereby rapist, paedophile, and biological and legal male ‘Karen White’ was housed in a women’s prison and proceeded to sexually assault women.

I decided to take a look at the ministry’s policy to see what it had learned since the White incident. Last updated this January, and titled ‘Care and Management entitled of Individuals who are Transgender’, you can read the whole thing here.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/863610/transgender-pf.pdf

The policy ‘provides staff with clear direction in the support and safe management of transgender individuals in our care, including managing risks both to and from transgender individuals, and enabling risk to be managed when an individual is placed into a prison which is different from that of their legal gender or where a Gender Recognition Certification (GRC) has been obtained’.

Firstly, I’m concerned that the Ministry of Justice misunderstands science. The document says that biological sex is ‘assigned . . . at birth’. This is incorrect. Sex does not miraculously appear at birth or rely on an observer’s arbitrary decision. Sex is binary, written into our genetic code, and is determined at conception.

Actually, it is an under-statement to say that this movement away from science and into metaphysics is concerning. It is also a sign that the Ministry of Justice is suffering from policy capture. How did this notion of sex being ‘assigned at birth’ make it into a policy document – and why did no review process take it back out?

Secondly, I’m concerned that a document produced by our Ministry of Justicemisrepresents the law. It says: ‘Where individuals have gained legal recognition [of a change in gender], they must be treated in accordance with their legally recognised gender in every respect.’ [My italics] This isn’t so. The Equalities Act explicitly provides for single sex (not gender) services, spaces, roles, and activities when it is a proportionate means to achieving a legitimate aim" (continues)

conservativewoman.co.uk/trans-takeover-of-the-justice-ministry/

conservativewoman.co.uk/trans-takeover-of-the-justice-ministry/

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