I found this slightly reassuring - re girls IDing as boys

[QueenPeary]

Until recently despite engaging in the gender debate a lot and having a VERY full-on TRA family member, I hadn't had much direct experience of trans-IDing children.

But recently 2 of my DD's female classmates (year 6), one a close friend, have started IDing as boys, have boys names etc and this is being embraced by the school. My DD knows my GC views and we discuss it, but I have agreed to be respectful in using the right names etc (though I avoid using he pronouns).

Anyway - what I found reassuring is that both have discussed it with my DD and said they know they are not actually boys, and are not interested in taking drugs or having a penis. So despite the school being captured and going along with the full TWAW/TMAM etc, the kids (sometimes) aren't. They seem to realise it's an identity to try on, akin to a fashion or music tribe, and so maybe - I hope - there's a way in which girls (and maybe boys too) can go through this without it having to involve the long-term risks to their health.

I still don't think they are a "he" and I don't think it's going down a very healthy or feminist path to ID as a boy instead of just being a girl of whatever type you want to be. But I am kind of heartened that maybe this trend could default back to something more akin to good old 80s "gender bending" and away from the idea of actually changing sex.

Of course many kids still are at risk of both harmful medicalisation and anti-science ideology and I'm not minimising that – but wondered what people thought.

TheFairPrincess

You have been admirable and pretty fucking tough staying on this thread to debate when you have felt hated and belittled, although I don't think we have meant to do that.

It is hard to get your head round all this. It is complex. It is a morass of misinformation and misrepresentation and emotion. There are a lot os aspects to it and a lot of arguments, and many of us have arrived at our views through long debate and discussion that's still going on. I have disagreed with you but I appreciate you staying on the thread. And it's OK to disagree. Disagreement isn't hate.

@TheFairPrincess

Well first of all I feel like as feminists we could do a better job of separating transphobia from genuine concerns. Politics is about optics and not just information, misgendering and deadnaming trans women is undermining LGBTQ rights that have come so far. It doesn't help when places like mumsnet are constantly debating the very idea or nature of "trans". Surely it would be more prudent to focus on the fact that there are trans people, and what this means within the context of society.

Second, some people are sick, bad people and will join ostracised groups or far leaning political movements in order to use their perceived victimhood in order to justify being absolute degenerate human beings. The literal only thing to do is to ignore such hate except to prosecute where possible. The internet is full of absolute weirdos, no matter what you do people will send hate to public figures when they think they can.

It's an absolute shit storm. But you can't use twitter to represent normal people.

Well first of all I feel like as feminists we could do a better job of separating transphobia from genuine concerns.

You need to understand that genuine concerns, indeed any attempt at all to discuss what may be different between female lives and what female people need as a group separate thing to trans women's lives and what trans women want, are being cynically and deliberately labelled as transphobic.

And I do suggest you read up on the fast growing porn sector of males who identify as women. They are certainly fully functioning.

If there was a prevalence of males who could no longer ejaculate in the past, I suggest that might have significantly changed.

@TheFairPrincess I'm desperate to get my head around how and why people hold the views you hold so I'll add that I also appreciate your contributions

As far as I'm concerned if you have a penis you're male and a vagina you're female. If you feel you are born in the wrong body and go through medical transition e.g. sex change, at that point only do you become the other sex. That's it. Nothing more nothing less. It's been like that for billions of years and I have no intention of supporting anything else.

As far as I'm concerned if you have a penis you're male and a vagina you're female. If you feel you are born in the wrong body and go through medical transition e.g. sex change, at that point only do you become the other sex.

Which sugeries do you believe change a person's sex?

@Mantlemoose

As far as I'm concerned if you have a penis you're male and a vagina you're female. If you feel you are born in the wrong body and go through medical transition e.g. sex change, at that point only do you become the other sex. That's it. Nothing more nothing less. It's been like that for billions of years and I have no intention of supporting anything else.

A neo vagina or a penis created from arm or leg flesh doth not a person of the opposite sex make. A transsexual person ie someone, who has completed a sex change is still transsexual. And as others have already pointed out can at times prohibited from certain sex segregated spaces.

A transsexual person ie someone, who has completed a sex change is still transsexual.

As a person cannot be made into the opposite sex by surgical means, what then is a 'completed sex change'?

It’s what it’s called isn’t it, sex change surgery? Obviously it’s not a real change of sex. Just an appearance of one as the surgery doesn’t actually make a person change sex.

It’s what it’s called isn’t it, sex change surgery? Obviously it’s not a real change of sex.

Well, I think it's obvious now, but a misleading name doesn't help.

This confused me the first time I heard the term as a child.

Can't imagine how confusing it must be now, with all the added postmodernism.

@TheFairPrincess

I understand. It's so difficult. I go back and forth all the time. It's a horrible dissonance because I absolutely LOVE people like Contrapoints and I really have a problem with the idea of excluding already marginalised people in such a cut and dry way.

But I really do understand the inherent and undeniable dissonance, the fact that these people are not women, and have not lived womanhood. I don't know what society should look like, but the public discourse between "TERFs" and "TRAs" is very upsetting and I understand that it must be awful to feel like you don't belong. Where society accepts you just enough to acknowledge you but to still always be treated in the background really as your bio gender.

I think trans women should live their lives as trans women and be fully integrated and supported in that. Maybe dedicated single sex spaces for vulnerable women should never be accessible for non bio women and should be treated as completely separate to "normal" society. I still can't ever imagine forcing TW to use mens toilets. Maybe Unisex. But isn't that cutting off our noses to spite our face and just inviting more men into those spaces?

I don't know. I'm fucking tired, my DC have gone to bed and I've barely seen them, I've been typing on here for hours.

Just read the thread. Massive kudos to you for trying to get to grips with this, and I hope you have gone away and will take some time to decompress. There is an awful lot to take in, and you seem like a decent sort.

For when you come back, I'd just like to add a small thing in response to this post of yours here -

I don't know what society should look like, but the public discourse between "TERFs" and "TRAs" is very upsetting and I understand that it must be awful to feel like you don't belong. Where society accepts you just enough to acknowledge you but to still always be treated in the background really as your bio gender.

I'm a lesbian. I recently tried to find some local support from an advertised local LGBTQ+ group. It was very, very clear that there was nothing at all for lesbians or gay men. Everything was focused entirely on trans people. It was another kick in the teeth after coming out again late in life, and the area in which I live, I do get verbally abused with homophobic slurs.

So yes, I don't feel like I belong, and the groups which supposedly exist to support me barely acknowledge me while pouring their focus on trans everything. I'm in the wind, basically, as a woman and as a lesbian. I am glad trans people have support, naturally. But any notion that they are in a worse position than woman, and in my case specifically lesbians, is just not borne out in reality.

It's really illuminating when the same discussion thread has people on the same side saying "of course people can change sex" and "obviously it's not a real sex change".

It must be awful to feel like you don't belong. Where society accepts you just enough to acknowledge you but to still always be treated in the background really as your bio gender

I'm not sure there is such as thing as bio gender. I guess you mean the gender "label" (according to TRAs) or "stereotypes" (according to GC feminists) associated with your birth sex. Maybe you just meant bio sex and mis-phrased it, which is understandable after so a very long thread!

But honestly, whatever the intended meaning, the solution is simple and it's the same whatever you meant.

It is simply this. Fully separate sex and gender.

Not this mealy-mouthed genderist thing where they claim sex and gender are different, then in practice just want to redefine everything single-sex as single-gender, thereby entirely eradicating sex as a socially relevant factor and making it impossible to deal with the actual, body-driven sexism that is the reality of most of the disempowerment and danger faced by female people, but a full on commitment to sex and gender as different things.

Just do that, which after all is the idea at the heart of genderism anyway, and treating someone as their actual sex in the contexts where sex is important can have no impact whatsoever on their self-defined gender identity, because the two will have no connection at all.

Where society accepts you just enough to acknowledge you but to still always be treated in the background really as your bio gender

When trans people have health issues it's often vital that their bio sex is taken into account. If we can't keep a record and understanding of everyone's bio sex, how do we know who is trans so we can support them? If we don't classify things like pay, crime statistics and directorship by sex, we can't tell if people are being discriminated against on the basis of sex.

We need to still know what sex people are. Of course they can also be recorded as trans and those discrimination stats can be recorded too.

If gender isn't sex, which it isn't, why does it matter if you have a gender identity but can also acknowledge your sex? Plenty of trans people do exactly this. It's only the extreme TRA ideology that insists that any mention of a trans person's sex is blasphemy.

@TheFairPrincess I'll add another voice to the others that have said it was good of you to stick around and debate. Most people who come on here to argue that TWAW don't. They just shout transphobe and leave.

I think you're like many of us who believed that trans people were all dysphoric and suicidal and had "sex changes" and hormones, etc. You should definitely do some reading about that and realise that dysphoria isn't even needed to be trans anymore, no changes at all are necessary.

I know you think we're all transphobic here, but you'd be marked as transphobic too if you said you had doubts about self ID, or that certain TW shouldn't be in female prisons. Nothing less than total capitulation would save you from the mob.

Here's a thought experiment for you...

I think you said up thread that you're married to a man.

Now imagine tomorrow he announces to you that he's a woman and he's going to go swimming at your local pool which has communal changing rooms.
He's not going to change anything about himself at all, he's going to dress in usual clothes, etc but he's going to use the women's changing room because... well why wouldn't he? He's, sorry, she's a woman after all.

I assume you know he'd be safe and not harm anyone, but do you think it would be OK?

Do you think that's fair to the other women that go there?

Would the women in the changing room be transphobic if they complained?

I can see that you're conflicted about this but seriously think about it logically.

I think you said that a male running a female rape shelter didn't seem right to you. Listen to that voice. You're so close to actually getting what the problem is.

I hope you'll come back here again

I think Blair White is interesting & funny.

White is very frank about retaining male genitals.

Shit nails, mind you, not that Blair has dropped by for my opinion lately.

Actions of individuals do not justify discrimination
I mean I dont call safeguarding discrimination, but you do you, and of course we do discriminate every day , every time a DBS check is done, discrimination happens. We do this because previously people have found ways to be near children/disabled adults to assault them. So each high profile and low profile sexual criminal creates changes to the system to attempt to keep them away from the vulnerable.

Theres plenty about it in the news, just look at Ian Huntley et al.

@Mummyoflittledragon

It’s what it’s called isn’t it, sex change surgery? Obviously it’s not a real change of sex. Just an appearance of one as the surgery doesn’t actually make a person change sex.

It was called "sex change surgery" and the consequences of the uncritical use of that euphemism are immeasurable.

Interview with Dr. Paul McHugh
MAY 20, 2021BY MATTHEW J. FRANCK
(extract)
"Dr. Paul R. McHugh is University Distinguished Service Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he served as Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001. (continues)

MF: In your own career, you’ve been standing athwart this for a very long time. In 1979, a few years after you came to Johns Hopkins, you directed the closing of the university hospital’s gender identity unit, responsible at that time for what we then called “sex-change operations,” and now it’s fashionable to call “gender-affirming surgeries,” after finding that such surgical transitions did not improve the overall mental health of patients. For this alone, you have been on the “enemies list” of transgender advocates for a long time. (Such surgeries were resumed at Hopkins in 2017.) (continues)

MF: In one respect, it almost seems as though psychiatry has confessed its lack of any answer to the problem of gender dysphoria and farmed out the solution to the endocrinologists and the cosmetic surgeons. They’re inviting those specialists in other fields to tinker with the body to conform to a dysphoria in the mind, rather than treating the dysphoria in the mind, which is the province of psychiatry.

PM: Exactly. And by the way, when I did actively close down the psychiatric role in permitting the gender surgery—after all, I couldn’t stop the plastic surgeons from doing it if they wanted—I just was saying that we in the department of psychiatry were no longer going to endow it with our permission. One of the plastic surgeons came up to me and did say, “Oh, thank goodness. How would you like it to get up in the morning, Paul, and face the day slashing away at perfectly normal organs, because you guys don’t know what’s the matter.”

MF: That’s interesting! So what you had the power to put a stop to was the referral to the surgeons.

PM: That’s right.

MF: And the surgeons would not proceed without it.

PM: That’s right. And the reversal [in 2017] was that the plastic surgeons came and said we’re going to take this up again. They didn’t wait for our permission to open a clinic at Johns Hopkins. In psychiatry, I was no longer the director, and our department didn’t fuss about it.

MF: So the resumption in 2017 was not owing to a decision in psychiatry but a decision over in surgery.

PM: That’s it, a decision over in plastic surgery. The nice thing is, the director of plastic surgery came and told me he was going to do it. But it was their decision, not ours." (continues)
www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/05/75886/

No, they're not sexes, they're gender identities built around sex

Nope.

You're correct that when people talk about women and men there's a whole load of baggage that comes that, - society's gendered expectations of what a woman or man should be like i.e. femininity and masculinity i.e. gender.

That's the social construct bit.

But, where as something are entirely a social construct (e.g. it's arguable that a table is a social construct because the concept didn't exist before humans) the state of being female or male is not only a social construct. Underneath gendered expectations, sex still exists whether humans notice and name it or not.

There have been female and male animals on the planet (sexual dimorphism) since before the dinosaurs and in humans for 300,000. We didn't invent it, it's not a social construction. Society did not construct it. It existed LONG before society and is unchanged by our perception of it.

The thing you're talking about, the social construction bit, is what feminists have been talking about for fucking decades. It's not news to us. It's what we call gender. (And we've been using gender to mean the socially constructed bit since long before it was confusingly also used to mean an inner gender identity akin to a gendered soul).

But underneath any social performance of gender, we are our bodies. THAT is reality. And we are affected by being in these bodies both by the physical reality of them (e.g. bearing children) and because of society's gendered expectations.

Feminists have been trying to break gendered expectation since long before you were born, mate. We know a thing or two about this.

And we can see, clearly, that - sadly - in a sexist society, you can't get rid of sexism by pretending that sex doesn't exist or believing that it's a social construct, no more than you can deal with racism in a racist society by simply saying you "don't see colour".

Sex matters in a sexist society. One day, with a hell of a lot more maturity under your belt, you will probably understand that all this nonsense you're swallowing about puberty blockers being harmless and transitioning being a human right is a smoke screen obscuring serious abuse of children and women so that men can get what they want (a story as old as time, sadly).

Feminists can see this clearly. It's a shame you can't.

300,000 years, I mean!

Oh shit, I didn't realise how long this thread is! She or he is probably long gone by now?!

I know what you mean, there are ways of doing things and saying things, but the point is, it is either valid or not valid. if it is valid, it is not transphobic. It is a legitiamte point. Trans people should be treated with respect but the concept of self ID should not. The attack helicopter trope is crass (and imo not effective) but it is not attacking trans individuals but the ludicrous idea that saying you identify as something(anything) should automatically render what you say sacracent and immune to critisism

@R0wantrees
Ok get what you’re saying. We know people are being referred for surgery and hormones with little or no input of psychology or psychiatry, which is be the equivalent of chopping off a limb for a person with BIID. I didn’t know the background to the reasons why surgery has been separated from psychology / psychiatry. So that was interesting.

This is elective surgery to changes the look of a certain parts of person’s body. So what should be used as a descriptive? Surgical transition? I imagine some people won’t know what that means. I don’t like the term gender reassignment (surgery) as this indicates gender was assigned in the first place. And that would be at birth, I presume, and perpetuating a lie as sex is observed at birth.

I was citing the terminology used by a pp and note the objection. But still don’t know really what to call it.

A couple of statistical points:

First, on the question if trans women, as a group, are different from men who are not trans, as a group, in patterns of criminality:

The only study that I know of (the topic now cannot be studied) was done in Sweden and used fairly old data. It found that the criminality patterns of post-surgery trans women matched that of men in general and that the criminality patterns of post-surgery trans men matched that of women in general. It's not a perfect study, but lends to some credence to the belief that being trans does not in itself reduce the likelihood that a male-bodied person becomes less likely to commit crimes. Of course it is important to remember that most men and most trans women do not commit crimes at all. But the percentage that does may not change with transitioning, i.e.,, taking female hormones doesn't affect it.

Second, on the assertion that the UK prison data about the higher percentage of sexual crimes among trans women (as compared to the general male population of individuals who never transitioned) perhaps being affected by the fact that prisoners with more minor crimes were excluded from the statistics: This would alter the case only if there are a lot more trans women in the group that committed lesser crimes. If the percentages of trans women and men who never transitioned remain the same in that group as in the group of prisoners who committed more serious crimes,, then nothing is altered about the conclusions.

As an aside, I detest 'cis.' It turns the clearly oppressed sex class 'women' into a privileged sub-group of the new gender identity class 'women' and thereby suggests that what these 'cis' people might say should be discounted due to their privilege. Also, 'cis' is actually defined as referring to a person whose abstract gender identity just happens to coincide with her or his physical sex. It does NOT allow that identity (in a looser sense) to be based ON the person's physical sex, including the embodied experiences of living with a female body and how others treat one due to that body not being a male body.

This is a fantastically clever sleight of hand,, because it apriori excludes the way most people (in my opinion) actually 'identify.' That way is erased so that no 'cis' woman could possibly be at all upset when 'woman' is replaced by 'people' or 'menstruator.' After all, her identity is stipulated to be separate from her body,, too.