What's it really like for girls when one of their classmates is trans? A short film.

[Shizuku]

What involuntary physiological responses to gender identity can we measure

You don't even need to measure it for pain - you can see it. People signal pain to other people, and we have an extreme response to observing it. We can intensely see and feel pain even in other animals, and them in us.

It's extremely easy to empathise with this. And we can also get our heads around emotional states like anger, love, hate, sadness, and we can have a reasonable stab at identifying them in others, and hence we become able to name them in ourself.

I can also discern the masculinity/femininity difference that tends to align with sexuality, making some lesbians somewhat masculine and some gay men somewhat feminine. If there was a gender identity, it would be that - I can understand the terms "masculine" and "feminine", even if some feminists would deny them - but genderologists are not talking about that either.

All of these things can be seen to the untrained eye. I don't need scientists to tell me they exist. would suffice, and maybe do a better job.

But "gender identity"? I have no idea how to detect it in others - I can see nothing in people claiming "opposite sex" gender identities that I can associate with the opposite sex. I have no reason to think that anyone claiming a gender identity is using the same meaning as anyone else.

So whatever it is it's so subtle that it cannot be clearly detected in others, unlike pain, anger, sadness, happiness. And if I can't detect it in others I have no way to identify it in myself - nothing I can correlate and say "oh, I can see him acting like I do when I feel X - he says that's his male gender identity, ah, so that's what they call that feeling X".

Maybe there is a connection here in that the autistic tend to have difficulty understanding emotions in others, and the autistic are over-represented in the transgender community.

Maybe this "gender identity" seems as real to them as any other emotion - just another abstract thing they can't properly grasp? Whereas to us it clearly does not seem real in the same way as things we actually feel.

If you don't understand emotions or feelings fully, then a made-up emotion/feeling to explain your discomfort with your body is going to seem as plausible as any real emotion.

(Excuse my cod psychology and no real grasp of proper autism.)

You can force a trans person to live according to the sex they were assigned at birth

Can you explain ''sex assigned at birth'' to me please? It's just that my brother and his pregnant wife have recently found out they're expecting a baby girl...how has her sex been ''assigned'' when she isn't anywhere near being born yet?

What the hell did the midwife do to my SIL to assign her baby's sex whilst baby is still in her womb? 😱

Think about it more

Misogyny can be externally seen and measured ... it's physical harm, reduced wages

Not internal offense taken

So equivalents nought be refusing jobs to trans people or giving them harsher jail sentences

Refusing to take someone's word for something that can be proven incorrect is rather different

So to sum up;
Op doesn't know whether there are two sexes.
OP says gender indentity is gender dysphoria and to be trans one must have this biological marker - presumably you can't identify as trans if you don't have it.
Op doesn't know which gender identities match with which sexes, so has no way of knowing if someone is trans or not using this method.

Op doesn't know whether sex can be changed by someone's actions.
Gosh, what a muddle!

You can only force someone to live accordingly to sex if you think peoples lives should be steered by their sex .., aka gender boxes

Throw away the box , live free

Relax - trans kids go through puberty too - that's what happens when they stop the blockers

Except most don't" Most go on to cross sex hormones.

This was recently exposed in the case against the Tavistock clinic, and which is why the prescription of puberty blockers to young people in Britain is now outlawed.

@Justhadathought

Are you saying that women can't be misogynistic? If so why has GC "feminist" Julie Burchill just apologised for making “racist and misogynist comments"

Julie Burchill is not Julie Bindel. I'm now imagining you are a U.S based poster, who does not understand British social and political contexts. In Britain we have not signed up to identity politics in the way you have in the U.S.

I think OP is American. Too many non UK versions of the small things!

I'm not sure Julie Burchill would call herself a "GC feminist". She ofc knows males aren't women like most of the world's population, but it's not the same thing as being a gender critical feminist. She is a provocateur, and she went over the line on this occasion as she has on others.

You can force a trans person to live according to the sex they were assigned at birt

This is meaningless outside of gender stereotypes.

You can force a trans person to live according to the sex they were assigned at birth and measure hormones associated with stress, anxiety and depression.

But then you're only measuring the physiological response to stress, anxiety and depression, not gender identity. Plenty of people have stress, anxiety and depression that is entirely unconnected with gender dysphoria.

www.bioedge.org/bioethics/uk-high-court-bans-transgender-puberty-blockers-for-under-16s/13645

@Shizuku
Thank you for the Scientific American article
But I do wish when asked for evidence you provided the papers these journalists write their think pieces on
I'm about to read the actual papers used for this piece and I'll get back to you with my thoughts

I'd like to express my admiration for you women who tirelessly and patiently take the time and trouble to dissect and analyse the types of arguments and claims made by the OP. There have, as always, been many excellent and insightful posts, so thank you

Incidentally, I really really hate the word 'tomboy', being labelled as such caused me pain and confusion as a child.

Gender stereotypes need to end.

We know there is a biological component

We don't 'know' there is a biological component to gender.

@Shizuku

"I'm sorry, you're implying transgender people are transphobic?"

Are you saying that women can't be misogynistic? If so why has GC "feminist" Julie Burchill just apologised for making “racist and misogynist comments"?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/16/julie-burchill-muslim-islamophobic

Think about it.

Julie Burchill was being outrightly Islamophobic. And I was v glad to see the courts rule against her. What she said was appalling.

But a feminist being islamophobic is not the same a feminist being misogynistic.

I don't understand how conflating the two is some sort of intellectual victory for you. But interestingly, you never answered my point much further back, which I asked twice, which was what happens to Muslim girls who cannot be with members of the opposite sex, not gender. What happens to their protected spaces? Or are you only interested in islamophobia when you can use it to make a fallacious point?

@MaudTheInvincible

I'd like to express my admiration for you women who tirelessly and patiently take the time and trouble to dissect and analyse the types of arguments and claims made by the OP. There have, as always, been many excellent and insightful posts, so thank you

I’ll second that!

Except most don't" Most go on to cross sex hormones.

Have we actually identified any such children who have been on puberty blockers, then came off without taking cross sex hormones?

I think they really must be incredibly rare. There are at least dozens, probably hundreds, of detransitioners active on the net now, but all of them that I'm aware of either desisted before undertaking any physical treatment, or desisted after cross-sex hormones.

The "child who comes off puberty blockers and undergoes normal puberty" seems to be almost a mythical being.

GIDS didn't have any proper data in the Bell case. The only data was from the Dutch clinic - Dr de Vries said "only 1.9% stopped the treatment and did not proceed to CSH."

You can force a trans person to live according to the sex they were assigned at birth and measure hormones associated with stress, anxiety and depression.

Can you expand a bit more on this @Shizuku? How does someone 'live according to' the sex they were born as? How does someone 'live according to' the opposite sex?

If I wished to start living as a man, what would I have to change in my life? I am assuming that I currently live as a woman since I am one.

Shizuku
Enjoy my engagement, won't you.

It would be churlish of me to do otherwise than apologise, Shizuku. I confess I thought you did not have it in you. I am sorry.

I do not have much time just now, but I thought I ought to say that straight away. And, yes, I will enjoy it, I hope. At least one of us might learn something from it, and, yes, it could be me.

In brief: pain, yes. (I thought someone might think of 'love'). But this looks like a point you can make.

Much discussed in philosophy of mind and epistemology, of course. A colleague used to begin an undergraduate lecture course by asking the students if they were all clear exactly what pain was ...

Of course any serious group of philo undergrads will contain several smart-alec sceptics (nothing wrong with that, of course); usually one or more of these would claim not to know what pain was, precisely. At this, the lecturer would pull his long stiletto out of his briefcase, carefully examine its point, and invite the sceptic to the front of the class. 'OK,' he would say, 'I'll show you ...'

Do you have anything analogous to show me what my gender identity is, or to convince me I have one?

Much more can be said, of course. I have not the time just now. But again yes, indeed I am pleased to see you confounding my expectations and trying to engage with a contrary view by arguing a point like this.

I still think you are wrong, of course. There is no such thing as gender identity in the sense you need it. Have a look again at that Alex Byrne piece.

"Or are you only interested in islamophobia when you can use it to make a fallacious point?"

I would say that the answer to that question is yes advices.

This is a great thread for the lurkers, I will say that.

The analogy between internal gender ID and feeling physical pain is... Interesting to say the least.

Gender stereotypes need to end.

Yes.
I'm not sure it's stated clearly often enough, but the primary idea of being 'gender critical' is being critical of gender stereotypes, of gender roles being imposed on people. I'm sure I first came across the term and decided it fitted me in discussions which were absolutely nothing to do with transgender people. Maybe it was about the time of the inception of Let Toys be Toys, I can't remember now. It's gender critical, not 'transgender critical' except insofar as the stance of a subset of transgender people is to reify rather than oppose gender stereotypes and roles. 'Gender critical' is completely in support of people being gender nonconforming because there should be no 'gender' to conform to.

The thing that sprang to my mind was what can happen with leprosy.

'Leprosy does not cause body parts to drop off, despite some people affected by leprosy missing fingers, toes or limbs. The loss of body parts is due to infection in injuries caused by lack of sensation in the hands and feet.

People often do not realise how bad an injury is because they cannot feel pain, which may then lead to it getting infected. This sometimes results in people having to have limbs, fingers or toes amputated to stop more serious infection.

The damaging of nerves on hands or feet that leads to reduced use of muscles also leads to shortening of the fingers and toes.'

Are you sure you want to casually say 'Nor can physical pain. Of course there are some people who don't experience physical pain, and they might claim that it's a delusion and it doesn't really exist, but all the rest of us who have experienced physical pain know that it does.'.

Not being able to feel physical pain results in huge problems for people.

You just throw this stuff around without a second thought don't you OP.

This is a great thread for the lurkers, I will say that.
So true. It educates in a way op never intended.