What is your least GC belief and why?

[PermanentTemporary]

Just thought I'd start this thread for no particular reason. The range of views interests me.

I have a few that may or may not be typical. I suppose they are summed up by believing that transition is always going to exist, that it's part of the human condition, and also that what sex we are is much less important than it used to be in daily life (I think this is a good thing).

'We can always tell' - this as a blanket statement is obviously not true, and worse, it's unprovable - if I can't tell, then I'm not going to know. Voice training can be remarkably successful for some male people (I'm a speech therapist). There are also quite a lot of stories by posters on here referring to people they know where they didn't realise they were trans for some years.

Public toilets are self policed and will be used based on someone's self perception. Making them a battleground doesn't help anyone, least of all women. Conversely, I do think awareness that abusing unaware women in public toilets by use of cameras is a specific perversion/porn category needs to be much greater.

Use of neutral pronouns (they/them) and using Mx as an honorific are perfectly reasonable things to do and fit in happily with my feminism. I think this will end up spreading, in fact they already are.

If I think of some more I'll add them.

Yes, this attitude baffles me. Personally, I don't suffer the after-effects of any old trauma/abuse or have any pertinent religious or cultural background, and I'm old enough and ugly enough that I wouldn't care if a man were in the loos or were to see me with nothing on in a gym shower etc.
But why should that mean other women should just grin and bear it?
And I agree about some trans people being happy to go along with using the facilities for their sex. I don't know what's wrong with the others, who insist on not doing so.

@Borogovia middle aged men who want to transition to womanhood have a calculation performed, based on their age and whether or not they have been married / had female house mates or live in girlfriends, as to how much housework they owe womankind. They also have a calculation on how much work admin they owe and how much overpaid salary they owe. They then have to pay the hours of housework and the £££££ in salary to a central women's fund, which is distributed to women who need the money for important things like getting divorced from lazy selfish men, and childcare for nights out and holidays and any damn thing they want. When they have paid this - only then - they are at STAGE 0 of their transition process. I haven't decided the rest yet.

@JoodyBlue I think all the bandwagon jumping has made me get to eye roll point too. It’s not about non-conformity or challenging norms now, it’s about wanting to conform to a new orthodoxy with a lot of social capital - wanting to take advantage of all the benefits of male privilege unfettered by gentlemanly codes of self-restraint.

As regards language use, your opinion is so based on monocultural, monolingual and able-bodied norms that you haven't even considered the many, many problems changing pronouns creates for multilingual speakers (not all languages use pronouns in the same way as in English!) or those of us with language processing disorders. You haven't really thought about anyone outside your somewhat privileged bubble tbh - and it shows.

@trytopullyoursocksup Thats a tempting idea!

I am intrigued by seeing the relationships of the gender fluid youth up close and it challenges internalised sexism I didn't know I was still carrying.

Goodness me. Didn't you experiment with roles and relationships when you were young? Young people have been tiddling around with gender roles and relationships since the 1960s. Whether they call themselves nonbinary or hippies or all the other groups and identities that came and went in between. Though sadly the sexism usually resurfaces sooner or later.

How did you miss out?

Sex is always going to impact us, this is because men and women are different. Reproductive role is really significant and the idea that the "bar" should be set at no differences in anything but the gross anatomy elements is completely unrealistic. No one is making a claim that there are no differernces.

But it's pretty deeply naive to think that we are in the same position we would have been without the technological ability to control fertility, or in, say, an unmechanized agrarian or hunter gatherer society.

It allows for a kind of equality, and really a vision of equality, which would, without tech, be totally impossible.

”believing that transition is always going to exist, that it's part of the human condition”

I believe that distress over which sex one is will continue, and also that cross dressing as a fetish will continue (though hopefully that might return to more private places, rather than being paraded round in public as it should) but I suspect there will be a complete change in how the former group are treated (in terms of medicine). I think medical transition will come to be seen as a huge medical scandal and will likely be replaced with psychiatric treatments, which hopefully will improve over time.

Yes, I wonder about this idea that transition will always exist too.

I think there have been plenty of cultures where it hasn't existed, so I can't see where this idea would come from.

I have wondered if it doesn't tend to arise once there is a certain amount of complexity around gender roles attached to sex, or maybe around reproductive role generally, but I don't think there is a lot of evidence that there will always be people who abstract the relationship of their bodies to their reproductive role.

My least GC belief is actually that I don't really care about Drag Queen Story Hour - its not the hill I'm prepared to die on. Don't get me wrong - I think there are many better ways of telling stories to young children which introduce them to diversity, and I'm not a massive fan of drag culture generally. BUT, given the environment that it takes place in, and the usual age of participants, I don't think that children are actually going to be exposed to very much. They're at well-supervised events, and they're usually so young that the chance of them nipping onto the internet by themselves to find out more about the louche background of those performers isn't going to happen. At the moment, they're a bit of a thing, which is being jumped on by performers who desperately need the money, and in a few years, it'll be something else. Protesting against it is making GC people look rather silly.

‘ Sexual misbehaviour’ isn’t dressing up. It’s rape, sexual assault ,harassment, paedophilia. They are all already illegal, it doesn’t matter whether you or I think they are lovely or disgusting. The law says they are wrong. Until recently, most people supported those laws.

The problem is not some random GCwoman screwing up her face and being dismissive of stuff she doesn’t approve of, it is that the current activities of quite a few MTF such as using female spas, showers, hospital wards etc tend to give an enhanced opportunity for any of the above illegal behaviours.

I believe that distress over which sex one is will continue

Perhaps though, this distress will return to being understood in the context it arises - ie seen as a psychological self-defence against trauma, such as childhood abandonment, bereavement, sexual abuse and so on, or against confusing internalised homophobia, or dissociative feelings experienced by autistic people. In other words it will be seen as a symptom of complex issues, rather than a standalone ‘thing’ which needs its own name.

and also that cross dressing as a fetish will continue

Again, with all fetishes, perhaps it’s not helpful to consider this particular need for sexual totems as distinct from others.

that might return to more private places, rather than being paraded round in public as it should

Hopefully if the distress is dealt with in the privacy of psychological services instead of being foisted upon everyone and fetishes return to being something for the privacy of the bedroom - probably kept to oneself, instead of being foisted upon everyone, then feminists can get back to trying to end sex inequality.

I think some of that distaste comes from many women having come to the conclusion that, for the most part, regular men who go out in public in women's dresses and women's make-up etc, are not just men who like those things for themselves. They are men dressing up as women.

There seem to be exceptions in cases like entertainers or certain fashion trends that are clearly pushing boundaries as a a kind of fashion thing, often designed to create attention. But overall, you just don't get a lot of men who just happen to like wearing dresses so much that they do it. Not least, I think, because they are usually poorly tailored for men's bodies. A dress that was truly meant for men would look quite different.

And with men who are imitating women, the question in your mind is always, why?

And with men who are imitating women, the question in your mind is always, why?

Yes. And even comedy can be extremely uncomfortable. Like with the Little Britain Bubbles and Desiree prosthetic naked costumes, the line was crossed. Which then makes you look back and question all of it.

@rocky4321

with respect, Elizabeth I didn’t reject female stereotypes. She was famous for having an enormous wardrobe of female clothes, extorting endless hyperbolic compliments on her beauty and feminine achievements ( dancing, playing instruments usually associated with women) from her male courtiers. The convention was that she was so beautiful and desirable that they were all in love with her, ( when one disproved this by marrying someone else, exile or imprisonment was a common consequence).

she rejected the ‘stereotype ‘ of getting married, because she believed that she was the best person to rule England, and that a husband would prevent her from doing this successfully . Given the example of her sister, and of her cousin Mary Stuart, she was correct.

I don't know that I consider performances with actors as inherently problematic.

They can clearly cross lines in all kinds of ways, but what is not crossing a line to me is a person pretending to be another person who is not identical to whatever characteristics or group memberships the actor has. It's what every actor does in every circumstance and if I believed it was wrong, that would mean I did not believe in theatrical performances.

Which is a real position some people hold, but not me.

Yeah... maybe the point re QE I was that despite her very obviously being a woman, her transgressions against a few stereotypes plus her famous 'I may have the body of ....' speech are enough for a few idiots to declare her nonbinary or trans.

The same 'academic' who wrote a piece about I, Joan that was on the Globe's website also wrote in the same place about Elizabeth I maybe being NB or trans. I use the inverted commas because their knowledge/scholarship seemed to me (decidedly not an expert, just a layperson mildly interested in Elizabeth I and the Tudor period) sketchy at best.

I don't know that I consider performances with actors as inherently problematic.

@MangyInseam i was being specific about that Bubbles and Desiree skit. Two men basically rubber-dolling on screen, without much in the way of jokes. The line was crossed by them simply poking fun at women’s bodies, and my spidey senses were set off by it. It had the ‘in plane sight’ thing all over it. That made me wonder about the motivations of other crossdressing entertainers.

I couldn’t care less about actors playing roles, but comedians/entertainers who write their own skits are a different matter. They are choosing to imitate women and I don’t believe it is all in the name of entertainment.

‘ Transition will always exist’ : I don’t know, will it?

I think one of the problems is that this one word covers a multitude of stages. Putting on clothes traditionally associated with the opposite sex is one thing (although much harder for women , I can’t remember the last time I wore a skirt), cutting your breasts off and your womb out is quite another. I think it very likely (though I am a hopeless optimist) that removing healthy parts of one’s anatomy or ingesting other sex hormones which will seriously damage your health in later life will be regarded with the sort of disbelief that we now regard bleeding or applying leeches.

Of course, male children have been subjected to gelding for millennia ( although only removing testes , removing the penis would have been fatal until modern surgery). Eunuchs were prominent in several ancient societies, one of Justinian’s most successful generals and administrators was a eunuch. The castrati are a well known musical phenomenon. However, no one ever referred to them as women, or used female adjectives or pronouns about them, except possibly as an insult. They were men, albeit incomplete men.

It is far more difficult to perform a similar process on women, FGM is not intended to make women less like women, only to control their likelihood of infidelity. The Amazon s were reputed to cut off one breast to improve their use of a bow, but there are no actual examples even in ancient literature. Given that their Queen married a great hero and king Theseus, and bore him a son it seems ….inconsistent.

But ‘ transition’ now seems to be a simple matter of declaration. For male bodied people, this means that restraining their ability to exert sexual pressure on women is down totally to their own volition and self control. If they are allowed free and unconditional access to female spaces, that’s a big ask for some of them.

I suppose I don’t really have any non GC beliefs.

Yeah, the social roles of eunuchs and castrati were nothing like that of women.
It's also known that castrati really weren't physically like women - tended to have long limbs and powerful lungs for instance, the latter of course being important for their singing.

Regarding 'passing' I think it's fine for people to say "we can always tell" because statistically speaking I think we can. It's something that is essential for our survival as a species and studies back this up, showing that from very early ages we can tell the difference between men and women.

I think social media has a lot to answer for with lighting, filters and carefully posed photos meaning people can 'pass' very well online, but in the cold, hard light of day it's a different story.

I’m GC. I also believe that biological factors influence the way men and women generally behave, and not everything is down to ‘societal conditioning’.

Regarding 'passing' I think it's fine for people to say "we can always tell" because statistically speaking I think we can.

In the words of Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

(Though there are some people who don't ever fool anyone, of course).