Transgender Couple with Children making me rethink

[IloveHolby]

This link was in Glinner's twitter this morning www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11190271/Meet-mum-dad-whove-swapped-gender-just-second-child.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#reader-comments

Seem like a lovely couple, I'm still trying to square a circle in my head - I absolutely think Self-ID opens up women to risk from men who have paraphilias and that sex does matter, but I have empathy for transpeople who just want to get on with their lives.

A few things came up for me in this article - the hospital ward; why would
Hannah Graf need to be on a ward when Hannah was not the one who gave birth? Probably not really relevant but I'm curious about that. I know that Debbie Hayton has said she (has GRC so I'm using she) is given a private room, and I'm pretty sure Debbie has had SRS but doesn't feel she should be on female ward.

Sport - Hannah says Hannah doesn't feel comfortable going to play sports because of the current furore - this raises my anger actually, along with the TWAW, TMAM t-shirts - they are public figures as transgender, they acknowledge they are different in this respect. Why can't people be proud of their difference and their transgender status? Hannah went through male puberty, are there are non-competitive sports Hannah could participate in without having to come out as transgender?

At the same time I think which changing rooms and toilets should they use when they appear male (but bio female) and female (but bio male)? I watch Blaire White and have read /seen interviews with Debbie Hayton and Miranda Yardley but haven't seen anything where they discuss this. Which do they use?

Then of course there is the issue of using a surrogate - not something I'd ever thought deeply about before the thread on here about it, but that's a separate issue. This post is really to ask for help to square the circle - it really doesn't seem we can differentiate between people with a GRC who do 'pass' and those with paraphilias but it seems unfair to the transgender people who do just want to get on with their lives.

what adoptive mothers have you ever heard of cosplaying at being in labour and taking beds from women in labour when receiving their adopted children?! Ever, in the history of mankind?
They seem a bit confused about the naming, but I think they actually mean a postnatal ward - they say after the birth - so the patient is the baby not the adoptive parent, cosplaying or not. The adult is just there to look after the baby.

A very narrow idea of masculinity and a lot of homophobia.

Disabled people and charities fought for many years to get their own accessible toilets. They don’t want to share them now. They don’t want to wait in a queue with a disabled child whilst an individual uses their toilet. Please don’t offer up disabled toilets / they are not your to be given up. We need a fourth toilet anyone.

Toilets are simple ... label the disabled one "individual" and take the radar key off. This would benefit families too, where small girls are taken into the male toilets by Dad, and exposed to sights which - if they saw in the local park - would be reported to police.

What would you like those of us reliant on accessible toilets to do?

I suspect that the vast majority of trans females

There is no such thing as a trans female. Female is a biological fact, not an identity. You mean transwoman, a male person who has chosen an identity of woman.

TW would have no particular reason to assert their "right" to enter the female toilets and would use individual too out of respect to others

Oh dear. You must be new to this discussion. There's unfortunately at this point vast amounts of evidence that this is really exceptionally naive. I'd refer you first of all to India Willoughby's recent tweet (a well known TW) talking to other TW chuckling about having found a women's toilets in an airport relabelled gender neutral with a direction for a female only toilet some way off at another gate for those who needed it.

Willoughby was tee heeing about having walked all the way to the female only one and used it on principle. There is zero 'respect' for females in this. None. Absolutely none.

Jake went all the way to the high Court trying to be named the father on the birth certificate, denying the child knowledge of their mother. They are a journalist, very much a tra and in no way want to be out if the limelight. Jake also accuses the nhs of not making clear they wouldn't be able to breast feed after srs, but almost immediately tried to get pregnant as a man.
Hannah seems troubled, agree about the army and homophobia.

Yes Rachel from Glo bal Butterflies is ex army too we were told when Rachel visited my workplace.

Jake also accuses the nhs of not making clear they wouldn't be able to breast feed after srs,

Having your breasts removed means it's highly unlikely you'll be able to breastfeed. Being male will likewise make it highly unlikely you'll be able to breastfeed.

What on earth do these people want from the world?

A pear that is cutted up and also whole.

Was that not Freddie? Of the Seahorse documentary.

Oh maybe? Didn't realise there were 2 straight trans couples with babies!

Yes I think Freddy had the birth certificate case and even planned to give birth in Sweden so they could be listed on the birth certificate as the father (according to Wikipedia). They ended up giving birth in the UK. I think Freddy is currently a single parent, I don’t know whether that’s always been the case.

I just cannot understand why that transwoman in question needed a private bedroom in the labour ward. That is all kinds of weird. To demand to actually be in the labour ward, as if a mother; rather than booking a hotel room nearby for the occasion.

I also wish to register my disgust at them using a woman as a surrogate for the pregnancy and birth of the child that they bought. And wish to ask if they have any ongoing care plan for the woman they paid, and whose baby they've taken?

And, indeed, why any transwoman* would need a private bedroom on a labour ward?!

Women in labour and giving birth are most undoubtedly women, and if ever there's absolutely no doubt about it, it's in the labour ward.

Words like, "well, sex and gender are really complicated and complex", really don't work, on a labour ward. No men have ever experienced pregnancy and giving birth from the sharp end.

Let's look at physical and biological reality. A transwoman is never ever going to need a labour ward. So - was the hospital in question being paid to indulge? And in doing so, did a birthing woman who really needed an individual room, get denied one, because there happened to be a transwoman in there, LARPing?

I wonder if a room was required because of the nature of surrogacy? Was the baby immediately removed from the mother, so no further bond could form and handed over to the trans couple. They, I assume, would have needed a space until the baby could be discharged.

Probably, as you say, IcakethereforeIam.

But I took the sentence from the report linked to in the OP:
"As it happened, Hannah was given a private room. But, says Jake, ‘I was dreading the possibility of her being alone and someone saying something upsetting.'

Some anonymous woman, not the transwoman, was there, actually going through labour and childbirth and all that it entails.

There was an actual woman, actually going through labour and childbirth.

And yet the transman was focusing on the possibility of "someone saying something upsetting" to the transwoman.

No.

Oh yes, the nasty terfy women in labour, grim

You are getting two people confused. Jake Graf and Freddie McConnell. You're referring to Freddie, not Jake.

Jake and Hannah do seem to be a lovely, genuinely happy couple. They make regular appearances on Lorraine's sofa and are putting themselves forward in the media as a positive vision of a transgender life.

But I resent them going on the Mermaid residential camps for children and young teens and making out that 'you too can have all this - it is possible to lead the kind of life we have'. The fact of the matter is that Jake transitioned in their late twenties, early thirties and therefore went through their female puberty. This meant that they were able to harvest their eggs, have them fertilised by donor sperm and then freeze them for later use. The kids they speak with and encourage through their patronage at Mermaids will NOT have this option if they go down the puberty blocker route and then on to cross sex hormones - which Mermaids is obviously very supportive of.

Hannah had never dated before they met Jake in their thirties which I find really sad. I'm glad they've obviously found happiness together. I do find it grating whenever they're interviewed how Jake refers to his 'good, lady wife' and is OTT in their 'perfect gentlemanly' behaviour towards them. Hannah was out in Afghanistan and high up in the Military - it seems ridiculous that Jake is trying to accentuate their 'femininity' all the time by enacting such stereotyped behaviour. Why do they feel the need to do this all the time?

As an aside - that photograph above of Hannah - was it taken in a shoe shop or are those all of Hannah's shoes? They appear to have about five times the amount of shoes than I have possessed in my entire life! And all the heels too.

I won't comment on the surrogacy because I can't find the right words.

ILoveHolby
It really doesn't seem we can differentiate between people with a GRC who do 'pass' and those with paraphilias

I am confused as to why you think people with a GRC who do pass and those with paraphilias need distinguishing between as if they are mutually exclusive, they are not

Hannah and Jake are not nice people, they still managed a dig a t**fs and at JK Rowling in that article and that was them trying to portray themselves as nice

Maybe that happens, however they said baby born in Ireland. The baby being born in Ireland doesn’t add up unless there was some serious special treatment involved. Private adoptions are not legal, the surrogate is the legal mother (if she is married her husband is the legal father). Currently what happens if the commissioning father is the biological father he can become a guardian and two years later the commissioning mother can apply to become a guardian. In this case the eggs were Jake’s however I am not sure if Jake can be considered the father.
From an Irish maternity perspective it makes zero sense for the birth mother and baby to be separated when surrogacy doesn’t really have much legal standing in Ireland and HSE resources are overburdened and it’s implied here that Hannah had a room ( they didn’t say it was for the baby) and therefore the birth mother did too as she is an actual patient in this scenario. The story doesn’t all ring true as it would be a legal mess becoming the legal parents.
There is a reason that Irish couples mostly used Ukrainian women as surrogates up until recently it made sense from a legal perspective.

Ireland: 5 minutes ago, church and state were colluding in the enslavement of young mothers in Magdalen laundries, trafficking their children and basically engaged in wide scale institutional misogyny. Now they are the "progressive" state we are all meant to follow with their lovely, harmless self ID laws. But still engaging in the exploitation of young women and their babies and keeping women firmly in their place with cries of "transphobia". Plus ca change.

This couple are pushed forward in order to reassure parents of trans identifying teens that a naice heteronormative future awaits them, in such a way that I suspect Beaumont Society involvement.

Precisely.

The rhetoric around 'Tefs is very similar to the rhetoric around the women the Magdalen Laundries tortured and traumatised, the same concept of 'human trash' for their beliefs and behaviours. The belief that human rights should only be allocated to 'people like me' and that a characteristic justified and makes righteous that you should call for them to be raped, kerb stomped, murdered on Twitter? How is it any different to the beliefs for example of the slave traders and plantation owners that there was a characteristic that made it ok for you to behave to a group of humans like this? And enjoy it and be proud of your inhumanity because they deserved it.

Nothing at all has changed for a group of humans too stupid to realise the trap they've fallen into: just the defining characteristic. What gets me most is that those most guilty of this kind of bullying and inhumanity would rant to you at length about the evils of colonialism and slavery for example without the faintest awareness of their own enthusiastic participation in exactly those values and behaviours.

Its as painful as watching MM's horrific naked homophobia and misogyny unleashed in a courtroom as a lesbian, all tangled up with their absolute faith in their own righteousness.