Can someone please explain... (trans)

[WednesdayAllTheWay]

So I've been trying to follow this trans situation for a while but now having skin in the game in the form of a child (and also noting through work how more and more people are identifying as the opposite gender) I need to understand it better.
Feel slightly embarrassed asking but:

1. How exactly do the words sex and gender differ in this area?
2. What reasons do trans people give for wanting to change their physical bodies? As in what do people believe they will get from this that they couldn't get in the body they were born with?
3. What are children being taught at school about this?

Thanks!

Could it be that you feel ‘not male’ so by default you must be female?

This is what I always wonder. It is such a BINARY way of thinking, and odd in a group of people who talk about 'fluidity' and 'spectrums.' [ach, 'spectra'?]

And it's also about gender, not sex - somehow, a man at odds with his male body (a really Cartesian mind/body split) sees stereotypes of femininity as 'female'? And then claims he is female, rather than feminine. It's rather confused thinking.

Then add to this the specifics of @Positrans ' tendency to call herself a 'girl' (from what they say about themselves, Positrans must be in their 50s or so?). I'm older than that, but we 1970s feminists stopped calling adult women "girls" a long time ago. IT's demeaning.

But it suggests something interesting about transpeople's possible fetishisation or fantasising about 'girlhood.' Little do they know or understand about what it is really like to be raised a girls.

That is, if you're one of the lucky girls in the developed world; if you're of the female sex in the global South, you may not ever reach being born, or live beyond childhood.

No, you misunderstand her tweet.

Claire Ainsworth clarified there is only two sexes. The spectrum sits within each sex. Ie. There is a spectrum of body variations for each sex. Only two sexes. Each with their own spectrums.

""The biology doesn’t say there are two sexes,” Andrea Ford, a medical anthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in an interview."

mashable.com/article/gender-definition-science-trump/?europe=true

The same old sources that always get wheeled out conflating gender identity and DSDs

telling me I don't have a gender identity when I do

Who did that? No one told you you don't have a "gender identity." I can't imagine that anyone cares whether or not you have a constellation of feelings and ideas and fantasies that you label as "gender identity."

I'm sure your "gender identity" is quite real in your subjective experience. But it doesn't, and shouldn't, mean anything to anyone else. The rest of us shouldn't be expected to redefine "woman", a category that exists in material reality, to conform with your subjective experience.

Claire Ainsworth clarifying her piece:

twitter.com/claireainsworth/status/888365994577735680?s=21

This is getting silly now. Human beings come in two sexes and Positrans is male. However, Positrans has had lots of surgery and can according to them fool people into thinking they are a women. This means that Positrans now considers themselves to have changed sex which everyone knows is impossible. All the guff about trans people who had their bodies irrevocably stunted by puberty blockers is totally irrelevant.
If it helps Positrans get through life by believing that they have truly become female then so be it. However, just as nobody can force me to believe that the Moon is made of cheese ,nothing that Positrans can say will convince me that they are a member of the female sex.

It's quite something watching a male telling a group of women, most of whom have had a lifetime of periods, many of whom have been through pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, many of whom will have run the gauntlet of contraception for many years, some of whom will have had miscarriages and abortions, some of whom have PCOS or endometriosis and everything else, that 'we all have a mixture of sex characteristics'

Do we now? Do we?!!!!

This is just a response to one thing a couple pages ago, but wow. I just have to say it is absolutely disgusting to think that people have no right to know the biological sex of the person they're about to have sex with. Wow, just wow. I am appalled. Do you have no understanding of how human sexuality works? I'm a straight woman, so I don't want to have sex with someone with a vagina. I don't want to have sex with someone with an artificial penis. I want to have sex with someone with a real, actual penis, which used to be known as a "man". This is the basics of how sexual orientation works, and yes, I would feel deeply violated if I had sex with someone who turned out to be a transman under the pretense of them being male. You can talk about "female gender identity" all you want, but surely you have to admit that at the end of the day, on a biological level, there is a VERY big difference between a transwoman and a "natal woman" and a transman and a "natal man", and this difference has a profound impact on sexual intercourse.

I'm older than that, but we 1970s feminists stopped calling adult women "girls" a long time ago. IT's demeaning.

I find it infantilising too. Have done for decades. Seems to be a lot of males who perpetuate it though.

@334bu "Positrans now considers themselves to have changed sex"

Actually, I was always female - that's why I had to transition.

Actually, I was always female - that's why I had to transition.

Which bit of you was female, if your entire body was male?

""The biology doesn’t say there are two sexes,” Andrea Ford, a medical anthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in an interview."

..But then goes on to conflate sex and gender and use the existence of DSDs to try to support a non binary hypothesis. And doesn't tell us what these mysterious other sexes are, or how they fit in terms of reproduction.

I’m loving the idea there’s all these other sexes but scientists haven’t named them yet. Is this normal behaviour for scientists? Those people who named a dinosaur after Mark Knopfler?

Anyway Pluto was named by a school girl so if they’re struggling to name all these other sexes maybe Blue Peter could run a compo and give out a badge.

I can’t wait. Maybe I’ll find I’m something else entirely! Exciting!

“The biology doesn’t say there are two sexes,” Andrea Ford, a medical anthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in an interview."

That article goes on to say this:

For example, babies with male chromosomes (XY) can can be born with testes but ambiguous genitalia, which can raise questions of gender assignment. Some women naturally produce lots of testosterone. People born with two XX chromosomes — who are typically female — may have a specific gene for male genitalia. And some people live for decades unaware that they share attributes of both sexes.

So again, using people’s differences in sex development as the basis. No one. No one is saying that people’s bodies are not complicated and may have many differences. But to continue to treat them as ‘other’ sex is cruel.

If sex is not binary and we all have a mixture of sex characteristics, then how come in the entire history of humankind, its only ever been the female class who give birth?

Honestly, imagine trying to spout this horseshit on Mumsnet of all places!

We all know what a woman is - we all came out of one.

And don't I fucking know it.....

[quote Positrans]**@334bu* "Positrans now considers themselves to have changed sex"*

Actually, I was always female - that's why I had to transition.[/quote]
Of course you were positrans, of course you were. There there.

That's a different argument. Trans girls have accessed estrogen at puberty in the UK and across the world, so the possibility still stands.

Your sense of ethics is really impressive, in condoning illegal cross sex hormones being given to prepubescent boys to prop up a false idea that it's possible to change sex. Sex is not defined by what a person feels. It's about which of two reproductive roles your body has developed to perform, even if it is not ever capable of producing gametes.

[quote Positrans]**@334bu* "Positrans now considers themselves to have changed sex"*

Actually, I was always female - that's why I had to transition.[/quote]
Nope.

As for the existence of gender identity, as I said above, trying to explain what it's like to someone who doesn't have one is like trying to explain what red looks like to person born blind. It can't really be done.

So you need to look elsewhere for evidence. Ask yourself why it's such an uncontroversial observation in science - there are many papers discussing the influences on gender identity, but none questioning its existence.

Just to give you an idea of how broadly acknowledged it's existence is, here is a link to a page on the development of gender identity from the Amercian Academy of Pediatrics (an organisation of 67000 professional paediatricians):

www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/gradeschool/Pages/Gender-Identity-and-Gender-Confusion-In-Children.aspx

As for how many non trans people experience it, the best I can give you is this study which found that about a third of people are at least a little vague on it and at least some of those can be assumed to be agender. That means two thirds of people are fairly clear on it. And notice how it doesn't question the existence f gender identity - that's a given, it only measures how it expresses itself in people:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19419899.2013.830640#.Vu7-AXpxqCg

The interesting question is why is it so strong in some people, and so weak in others. We don't know.

Of course you are entirely free to say that you still don't believe it exists - that's entirely up to you, but it's not a view that is taken seriously in the wider world.

All these organisations are politically captured by gender identity ideology, so none of their "studies that have gender identity as a given" are particularly compelling.

@titchy "Of course you were positrans, of course you were. There there"

You know, I'm told they take a bit of a dim view of people being patronising on this forum. I'm going to assume you are a man.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

All these organisations are politically captured by gender identity ideology, so none of their "studies that have gender identity as a given" are particularly compelling.

You're getting a little into conspiracy-theory territory there.

If anything, DSDs prove that sex is binary

This. Chromosomal mutations occur because of sexual reproduction.

This. Chromosomal mutations occur because of sexual reproduction.

YY.