I was wrong

[Lezbehonest]

I have name changed for this because it feels major for me and I'm honestly a bit scared of being identified.

I'm a 27 year old lesbian who is starting to realise I am gender critical. This feels like a major step to even type as the friendship groups I have and the online world I inhabit is very very pro-trans. I have always blindly accepted the doctrine, TWAW, protect trans kids, all genders are valid blah blah.

It's only since I started reading more here than I started questioning it a bit more. I became uncomfortable with the resolute lack of debate. I started eye rolling when yet another celebrity came out as non binary, I started having conversations with my wife about it (she's largely in agreement.) Ive stopped prefixing every conversation with 'I know I sound terfy but...' i realised that my academic side who has always sought evidence and argument wasn't compatible with these conversations. I started wondering where all the butch women I know and love have gone. I started fearing for the trans people I know (many of whom transitioned long before it was a 'thing') whose validity in society is being undermined by this shitshow. I had a conversation with the cleverest woman I know in an Uber (felt like a clandestine meet) where we acknowledged without saying the words that we're both uncomfortable with the way the wind in blowing.

Where the fuck do I start? What can I read? How do I uncondition my brain and can I keep those of my friends who will hate me for even having these thoughts? I'm already exhausted.

Any advice on where to start much appreciated. I'm very prepared to put in the time to read, understand and absorb opinion.

The "fuzzy" sex thing really is a red herring because 1) sex is still a binary 2) I guess she is talking about dsds which have nothing to do with being trans 3)women are still discrimated against around the world due to their sex, "fuzzy" or not.

They're the ones who would disown me if they knew.
You might be surprised OP. I think a lot of people are only waking up now to what they are actually supporting and realising that women's rights are under attack and we are not actually anti-trans at all!

If you're a woman and your friend is claiming that sex is fuzzy, perhaps ask her how you could produce sperm and father a child.

Is "fuzzy" a technical term?

As I always say in these conversations, people who think sex is "fuzzy" should call their mothers. We all know what a woman is as we all came out of one. One of the things that effing infuriates me about trans ideology and the people that spout it is the outrageous lack of respect for their own mothers; the female human beings who gave them life.

@Serenissima21i think red herring is a good way to think about it! Thanks.

Like she can be right on sex in a technical sense (though she did explicitly say it wasn't a binary) but that still doesn't mean that trans women are women

whenever I look up what the science/academia says in response it's always siding with trans talking points.

@GayzedAndConfused you were asked for evidence of this, and all you have is a single casual conversation with a friend? This might be enough to convince you that she's right because you think she's really smart, but if you want to convince anyone else you need something better. Preferably something published and peer reviewed.

But she was like "Oh, theyre not wrong, when you study it sex is a really fuzzy thing thats made up of a lot of other really fuzzy things"

If an academic said this to me in response to a question about "sex is a spectrum" I'd think they either didn't know what they were talking about or they thought I was too stupid to understand even a simple explanation.

This is an excellent blog which breaks down the gender critical position in a very logical and accessible way.

thenewbacklash.blogspot.com/?m=1

[quote GayzedAndConfused]@Ereshkigalangcleg

like I was asked a friend who is a biology PHD about sex because of the whole "sex is a spectrum" thing that trans people trot out. Like expecting her to laugh along with me. But she was like "Oh, theyre not wrong, when you study it sex is a really fuzzy thing thats made up of a lot of other really fuzzy things"

and like, shes really smart and literally has a phd in the topic so Id have to be really far up my own arse to tell her shes wrong right? but thats just one thing where what i read in all these arguments and what im told by someone who is actually an expert just dont line up[/quote]
If it’s so “fuzzy”, could you ask her to describe the third gamete and name the people born from it?

Just as some scientists also follow a religion, so others adhere to gender ideology. They’re all just belief systems in the end. They then have to believe the thing they’ve studied (in the case of biologists) is “fuzzy” now, in order to live with the cognitive dissonance in their head.

"you were asked for evidence of this, and all you have is a single casual conversation with a friend?"

I was just trying to empathize with the OP and tell an example, not deep dive sources for an academic debate, it's 7am! Why so aggro!

@GayzedAndConfused did you not feel tempted to ask for more detail? It's not exactly a satisfactory answer is it? (It wouldn't be to me anyway.)

@musicalfrog

Oh I did! We had a whole conversation about it, what she said definitely makes sense in a weird way.

I can try to explain it? But I feel like people are itching to shoot the messenger 😅

@GayzedAndConfused I'd be really interested to hear, if you have the time

@GayzedAndConfused

"you were asked for evidence of this, and all you have is a single casual conversation with a friend?"

I was just trying to empathize with the OP and tell an example, not deep dive sources for an academic debate, it's 7am! Why so aggro!

Aggro? I don't think I was aggressive.

I don't remember seeing your username before, so you might not realise that on this part of MN posters are often asked to back up their arguments with some sort of evidence that others can evaluate for themselves, rather than just 'my mate said so and she's really smart.' Any published source will do as a starting point though. It doesn't have to be in an academic journal - a newspaper article would do.

I assumed you had read something about this already because you said 'whenever I look up what the science/academia says' which implies you have read a few articles. You could just link to one of them.

They're the ones who would disown me if they knew.

I bet at least one of them is thinking the same thing about you.

This sort of nonsense survives by "preference falsification" - everyone thinks that everyone else believes it.

But they collapse fast when everyone realises that no-one really believes it, they were just going along with other people.

sex is a really fuzzy thing thats made up of a lot of other really fuzzy things

Compared to what? It's less fuzzy than anything else biological I can think of. Every single human - no, mammal - has exactly 2 parents. One male, one female.

It's less fuzzy than species, race, height, number of fingers, number of eyes, number of legs, any medical condition.

Or even the alive vs dead distinction.

It's also less fuzzy than most non-biological things.

So we have to ask ourselves - why is THIS particular concept receiving the full bore of the postmodernist "what is reality anyway?" attack?

Could it possibly be because it uniquely disadvantages the people on the female side of this obvious class division, while being totally beneficial to the males?

This was one of the best responses to this self-serving nonsense:

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190421015205/medium.com/@JonahMix/an-open-letter-to-the-guy-on-twitter-who-wonders-if-biological-sex-is-real-58d2cb4403f5" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real

Okay, that archive link didn't work. (MN screws up URLs with an "at" sign in...)

Here's a live copy of the text:

An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real

@musicalfrog

Ok I'll try paraphrase it, but I also wanna say that she's both a PhD and a friend so I'll be upset if y'all start calling her stupid or uneducated on the topic. Even if you disagree, no need to go after her personally

So she said that when she needs to talk about sex she needs to be more specific about what she says. Because sex on its own causes different people in different fields to assume different things

So if she was trying to talk about chromosomes rather than saying "the sex is male" she'd have to say "the sex is genotypically male"

She said sex is most often described of being made up of 3 categories. chromosomal sex, phenotypic sex, and hormonal sex.

However if she had to talk about a group of men, she wouldn't just say "they're all male" because weird biology stuff makes those 3 categories not line up sometimes

A genotypic male might have some genetic traits that mean his system is flooded with estrogen so if she was trying to refer to this guy specifically she'd say he's hormonally female and chromosomally male, and like if that estrogen made him grow breasts or something he'd be phenotypically a mix of male and female traits

And because these things don't fit neatly into 2 categories it's not technically right to call sex binary even if it seems that way most of the time

So to like try and put it in a sentence, in the science community sex is a mix of a few different things and because these categories can mix and match in weird ways sometimes they're not able to call it a true binary

I hope I explained that ok and didn't mangle her words too much 😅

You might want to search for posts by sapphosrock, she's had a similar journey.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3936970-To-find-it-really-difficult-to-support-trans-women-now

Your friend is confusing sexual characteristics with actual sex.
Sex itself is binary and immutable whereas the characteristics vary.

Gayzes

I get it. Your friend might also be referring to the erroroneous view that sex is a spectrum.

I follow Dr Emma Hilton on twitter. She has some very food thought provoking conversations about this. She also has some expertise in Differences of sex development which is used for the ‘fuzziness’. (And yes, I read your recent post which is exactly what Dr Hilton counters)

If you are interested, she is Fondofbeetles on Twitter.

I can completely relate. I'm 27 too, and almost all of my friends and family are very "trans women are women" types. When I first joined mumsnet, I couldn't believe the stuff I was reading on the feminism boards. I immediately thought that everyone here was transphobic! I have no issues referring to someone by their chosen name and pronouns, how someone else chooses to present themselves is up to them. But the more I read on here, and then going through pregnancy, labour and having a daughter really opened my eyes.

The idea of a man getting changed in the same room as my daughter, examining her intimately etc is terrifying. The erasure of the word woman and mother is disgusting. I am not a birth giver, body with a vagina or whatever else they want to call us. I'm also not cis, I am a woman. I am a mother. Language can be inclusive without pretending that women don't exist. The rights of trans people to safe spaces doesn't override the rights of women to safe spaces.

I am so very grateful to the feminist mumsnet boards for making me think about these things critically rather than just accepting what is pushed on us by the mainstream media

Gayzed

Does this help if she is believing the sex is a spectrum concept?

twitter.com/sexdefined/status/1281576034593374208?s=21

Good point in that article. If you say "X is a spectrum," you either mean an actual spectrum like the electromagnetic spectrum and, er, the elecetromagnetic spectrum and, er, yes, nothing else.

Alternatively, you may be using this actual spectrum and applying it to something else as a metaphor, which is maybe fine, but not scientific because, like the political spectrum, this is about values and as such is subjective.

But they collapse fast when everyone realises that no-one really believes it, they were just going along with other people.
It only takes one person to point out that the emperor has no clothes for the pronouns to suddenly start vanishing from signatures.

Development of sexual characteristics can be a complicated process but sex itself is binary. I think PhD can get quite excited by the complexity and forget that in the real world we've always known which type of human is which without much of an issue.

PhDs*

Hi OP, and welcome.

Isn’t the point really that social policy should be based on practical needs of the largest number of people, with respectful and sensitive provision for those who fall outside of that majority. So in a sense the specifics of what we call “sex” in a biological sense are moot here. The arguments are all about language, and social provision and the way we recognise each other.

For me the essence of the argument is whether females potentially become pregnant. If the answer is yes then recognition of that is essential and protections put in place, because pregnancy is one of the most binding of conditions and carries into generations to come.
So the arguing about “fuzzy” characteristics of sex is simply muddying the waters. I think this is how we got to this position in the first place. People quoting “the science” without thinking about how “the science” should be applied in a social context. Law is quite blunt, sometimes I think it has to be.

BTW I have 2 very smart PHD biologist friends. One said what your friend said. The other directly contradicting her, said she was confused about DSDS. PHDs usually focus on their subject of expertise and don’t necessarily see everything in the round.