How to react re children telling you about trans friends

[plainwhitecheese]

Dd14 tells me she's going out tomorrow, I ask who, she tells me (I've changed names) Lucy, Beth, Sarah and Josh

I know of the girls but ask who is josh

She says oh it's my mate who you know as Laura, he's trans and goes by Josh

So. I feel bad because I feel like 20 years ago people were dismissive of people being gay etc and I don't want to be ignorant and transphobic. But, much against how I wish I felt, I find it hard to stop my eyes rolling a bit.

I don't want to be ignorant, and bigoted. It almost feels to me like the pure amount of people proclaiming to be trans almost makes a mockery out of those with genuine body dismorphia. Or do I just need to get a grip and realise it's not up to me to feel a certain way about how people identify

@Discovereads - but even if there are these female brains and male brains (and I really stress the even if) - so what?

sports are separated on the grounds of different brain types. They’re separated on the basis of different body types. Prisons are separated on the basis of different body types (in particular that one body type is typically physically stronger than another and a potential threat of sexual violence).

If (and I repeat IF) there are brain differences I can’t see that makes a difference to what public policy approaches should be.

Is it possible to identify the sex of a brain, based on scans/activity?

Yes it is with 80-84% accuracy. Per a few of the studies I posted.

Sports aren’t separated….

And how sure are you that this won't affect your children, as in they start identifying that way?

@nightwakingmoon

On another thread, for example, s/he was arguing that pornography was more prevalent in the Classical world than today,

No I did not. I was saying that pornography today is no more prevalent than it has been in the past. And it was to a poster that was trying to argue that womens bodies are now more commodified than ever before. Which is a ridiculous assertion when you consider for thousands of years women were literally chattel to be owned, bought, sold, rented out, etc .

Yes has nothing to do with sex segregation.

If anyone can furnish me with any genuine evidence of the existence of any form of gender ideology pre-1860 I would be extremely surprised.

I don’t see why it would surprise you. Modern gender ideology is just a case of new English vocabulary to express what are actually enduring concepts since civilisation began. Have a look cross culturally too and you will find it can’t be explained away by homosexuality. That there have been various people identifying as and living as the opposite sex or as a third gender.

So.. no it's not possible, in about 1 in 5 cases you would make an incorrect conclusion. Assuming those results are replicable and applicable across all cultures. Because there is significant overlap between male and female, as per many human features. Making it a nonsense to say a particular brain feature is male or female.

Every single brain in a male body is a male brain. Every single brain in a female body is female. People are different, having brain differences compared to some other people within your sex category doesn't make your brain opposite sex.

Ah, so today everyone in possession of a phone has the ability to watch hardcore filmed explicit sex; but somehow, pornography is no more prevalent than in the Classical world, because of a handful of people in Ancient Greece watching a play in stylised verse where a man wearing a mask and a full body suit makes a joke about “women’s triangles”.

Aye, that’s right.

You do realise that pornography is not the same thing as the legal status of women? They are not one and the same thing. The idea that pornography is somehow less prevalent today, and that this is somehow positively correlated to the fact that women now have legal rights in the West, is just very, very confused.

I don’t know how you can read 80-84% accuracy and conclude it’s not possible. It’s more accurate than using an MRI scan to diagnose autism.

That’s like saying it’s not possible for condoms to prevent pregnancy because they’re only 85% effective.
“in real life condoms are about 85% effective”
from www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom/how-effective-are-condoms

Brains don't have sex though. (sex is a term pertaining to reproductive biology)
Bodies are sexed, not brains.

-I am not implying all women have babies or can have babies, just that a womb is part of female anatomy, and this remains true even while some women don't have them.

Just like humans 8 fingers, even though some have 9, or 6, it's still correct to say 'humans have eight fingers.'

If you want to stop calling people with penises male and people with vaginas female, that's one thing, but you haven't prevented the two distinct categories of people existing, proved by the fact you still refer to these two distinct categories.

There's still two "sexes if you will" (people with penises, people with males) and these two are still the only two sexes people transition to via surgery etc.

What is the point of changing the name, when you haven't changed the situation at all?

@nightwakingmoon
The idea that pornography is somehow less prevalent today, and that this is somehow positively correlated to the fact that women now have legal rights in the West, is just very, very confused.

Yes that is a confused idea, thank goodness it isn’t my idea at all but something you’ve desperately pulled out of your arse to fling at me.

Surely you dint make any comment and just follow it up with how you would if it was just the others going. Eg ok do you need picking up ?

It really isn’t.

I wondered when all the two spirit/hjira stuff would appear. This is a really offensive and highly reductive form of cultural appropriation, that circulates around Tumblr and Twitter — a highly Westernised and colonial misuse of half understood ideas about what are and were highly culturally specific forms of communities who were/are often prostituted or homosexual (and often highly inflected by caste and social status). Hjira communities, for example, are nothing to do with modern forms of gender ideology, despite the fact that a few modern hjira have used Western gender ideology as a way to escape social and caste stigmatisation.

Hjira are no more evidence of some kind of immanent nature of transgenderism than Elizabeth I’s famous speech about wishing she had the heart and stomach of a man is, either.

your middle paragraph there reminds me of growing up on a council estate and the term you would get called if "you didn't fancy anyone" which was "frigid"

It was a horrible label. It was meant to shame you into letting boys do things to you.

My kids are fed up with it too, the school push alot of it with their dedicated days and months and their activists educational resources they teach to them.
Posters all round school and LGBTQ clubs.

I have taught my children about consent as unfortunately this all gets muddied with this ideology when the students think it's transphobic if you don't want to have sex with a person outside your sexual orientation, as the school resources aren't factual and use gender when talking about sexual orientation.

I do think it's good to have a conversation with your kids about it personally, not just for consent reasons but because the schools are pushing this too.
Teachers who are in trusted positions and most of them aren't dealing with this correctly.

My kids know alot of kids that say they are trans, nonbinary, pansexual.
My kids dont believe in any of it and notice all the things wrong with it, they can see the damage it's doing to the children, it becomes their entire existence.

male sex brain - dick head?

@nightwakingmoon
I wondered when all the two spirit/hjira stuff would appear.
I wasn’t referring to two spirit/Hijra.

May we ask who you were referring to then please?

YANBU 80% of ‘trans’ youths end up not trans. It is a trend, and I agree - it takes away from those poor souls who genuinely are suffering in the wrong body

That’s the part that I don’t understand. It used to be acceptable to be a tomboy and still be a girl, and yet now it must mean that you’re gender-fluid or something like that. I’ve also notice the transwoman I’ve come across, have a bizarre way of dressing as a woman. It’s almost as though, they assume that to be woman, you need the big hair, really high heels and little dresses. Women don’t always dress like that

I’d say have fun but at other times (unrelated to friend) talk about the biological reality that you can’t change sex

Two thoughts. Firstly, what has happened to the idea we are all on a M to F spectrum brain and charactersistics wise? My DP who is male is empathetic, interested in people, gossip, clothes and shopping. And aaargf, always late for everything as he titivates. Alas for him, I am antisocial, more interested in books and argument, and have no interest in shops. He is deffo male but with characteristics deemed feminine and I am female with characteristics deemed male. I will definitely be interested in the research showing the trans brain apparently shows the "sex" the person believes they are as opposed to the gender. Does Eddie Izzard's brain fluctuate every day?

Secondly, how is medical science explaining the high preponderance of girls who want to trans? Is it because most want to escape society's gendered norms and the pressures of SM porn and harrassment?

Bless.