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.

I really do see it as equivalent to supporting colleagues who want celebrate Easter even though I'm not religious, for example. Or going to their church wedding.

That’s not equivalent. What would be equivalent is if at Easter you said “Christ is Risen! Hallelujah!” In order to support your colleagues or read out a religious text at their wedding.

It isn't about me at all. It's about them.

You are right up to a point, but I would go further and say “it’s about me not mattering at all, because it’s all about them”.

The difference between this and
’supporting religious belief’ is that you don’t have to proclaim you also believe it in order to affirm them.

No trans person has ever asked me to affirm I believe they have changed sex. If they did, I would say no.

That makes no difference to whether or not I call them by preferred pronouns or their new name.

I have been in one of those situations and hope never to be again. And I am a GC feminist. As I said in my first post, I'm literally answering the question. There is no need to be hostile to me.

Then I am sorry for your experience, and sorry for my hostility.

Well, yes, society can be organized to help women manage their reproductive role, and often it has been. But it still makes women vulnerable. They are dependent in a way a person who is not subject to pregnancy is not.

And frankly even if there is a very supportive society, it still is going to affect the shape of their lives profoundly, it will be very different from the shape of the lives of men.

I think you will find many pre 20th century societies do more than 6 hours of work a day, and many of them have some pretty spectacular set-backs too. There are whole peoples who did not survive. Whole hominid species, for that matter.

"They liked it, Jane didn't"

I've noticed recently, possibly because of having to think about this, that even without considering trans issues at all I often repeat a name rather than use a pronoun.

It's partly the "who's she? The cat's mother" mantra but often using names rather than pronouns gives more clarity. I may very well in this situation say

"They liked it, Jane didn't"

That JKR isnt actually transphobic! lols

I think it's possible to not object to something like using pronouns as a matter of politeness, especially if the underlying recognition is that it is a social nicety, but to strenuously object to an obligation to do so or insistence on true belief.

We do the former in some other contexts. I work in a library and generally we accept whatever names and stories and such patrons tell us, even when we know or suspect they are fibs. Because it's not really our role to challenge them on these things. Of course in certain scenarios we have to be accurate, and that's a different story.

Most people are really quite used to this sort of thing socially, a kind of standing back from others. I think that's why a lot of people are ok with the concept of accepting social gender for a few people, up until it starts to cross the line of a social nicety. Once there is more at stake people feel differently.

Why on earth does a practising Christian need a ( presumably) non believer to ‘support’ them in their observation of Easter? What sort of support? Buying an Easter egg ( hint: not really relevant) ? Taking the bank holiday on Good Friday which is meant for the observation of a holy day? Thanks , but that was decreed when England was still a Christian country. If you were in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and you were prepared to die for the right of someone else to celebrate a Christian festival, that would be different.

Thats just nonsense , im afraid, ill -thought out whataboutery. And it costs you nothing.

Whereas naked and sexually aroused men ‘identifying’ as women in front of nine year old girls in what is supposed to be a woman only spa costs someone else plenty, of fear and disgust and trauma . That is indeed ‘about them’. And they, and you, are not the ones paying.

I agree about bathrooms and self perception - I’ve seen a number of passing individuals, either trans woman who I would never have guessed were trans and wouldn’t think it was appropriate for them to use the men’s, or trans men that again I would never have guessed and would have felt very uncomfortable seeing them in in the woman’s.

Interesting thread and interesting replies OP

Thank you. I'm sorry for triggering you.

Use pronouns, preferred names and don't comment on their appearance basically! It seems pretty minimal to me

Thank you @AdamRyan . Getting back to the discussion, I think what took me the wrong way was your word "minimal". Actually that's the maximum someone could expect social acquaintances to do for them. And it's a polite favour not a right, as soon as there's a good reason people should feel free to drop the polite favour.

Absolutely, Amaryllis. All those older men with wives and kids who decide, later in life, to live out their fetish — we owe them nothing at all, not even politeness.

I will go a bit further for the dysphoric, as I would for anyone with mental health issues, but even for them pronouns would be the maximum and would be withdrawn if there was an expectation.

I meant it's minimal effort to me.

I could refuse entirely which is more consistent with the "GC beliefs" as per the thread but I would find that harder due to socialisation to be polite.

I'm not looking forward to the day where I'm asked to add my own pronouns to something as in that case I will refuse.

@AdamRyan Out of interest, how many people are we talking about? How many trans people? Because for me it's not actually minimal - I literally can't remember them all even if I wanted to!

I really don't meet that many trans people in real life (work, social events etc). So it's no biggie.

I would however be horrified if the law was changed to self ID. What I hate about this whole thing is it forces polarisation. So although I'm happy to treat trans people as their identified gender in a social context (names, pronouns) that doesn't mean I'm happy with the direction of travel to self ID. And then it's almost like the self ID debate forces everyone into the far ends of the conversation where we start feeling our reality is being denied (I think that actually applies at both ends of the debate hence the "you are erasing me" comments).

This is being driven by TRAs not GC feminists but it has now turned effectively into debates about whether people are GC "enough" in GC groups too.

@AdamRyan as far as I remember it, the vast majority of people were thinking along the same lines as you - opposite sex pronouns and names, basically being a polite courtesy. This was all the while women’s rights were being stripped away from under everyone’s noses. This happened because making the argument to retain women’s rights looked really confrontational, rude and unkind, in a climate where everyone was courteously using opposite sex pronouns and names and never mentioning real sexes of people.

From the get-go a pretty small minority of feminists could see what was happening and had the courage to come across as rude, impolite, confrontational and unlikeable in order to stop women losing all their legal sex-based rights (this happened around the time the hard won Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was subsumed into The Equality Act 2010 with its woolly wording around ‘gender reassignment’ being a ‘protected characteristic’, just as the Labour government were on the way out).

Magdalen Berns famously said “I’d rather be rude than a liar”.

Quite a lot of mileage was gained by these feminists, but then mumsnet was being constantly threatened with legal action by TRAs until they created new rules where posters were no longer able to mention the real sex of people, which meant that the conversation was effectively stifled.

The game-changer was when a Mumsnetter wrote this post, which got deleted:

Pronouns Are Like Rohypnol

And lots of people started to twig why all those ‘rude’ feminists saw it as politically essential to ‘name men as men’ and started to manage their own conflicted feelings between being socialised to #BeKind and the urgent importance of being able to clearly see and understand what is going on.

So when you say “it has now turned effectively into debates about whether people are GC "enough" in GC groups too” it is mischaracterising what is actually going on.

You surely can't deny its a big cognitive effort to restructure sentences? The main reason it's a cognitive effort though is because Jane is quite obviously female.

I second all of this.

Lots of interesting points here. Thanks.

You surely can't deny its a big cognitive effort to restructure sentences? The main reason it's a cognitive effort though is because Jane is quite obviously female.

I don't think in the scenario given upthread there would be any 'restructuring'. We're accustomed to using, and not using, pronouns appropriately- many situations where there's multiple possible 'shes', 'hes' or 'theys' (plural and/or unknown sex) , as soon as there is an ambiguity we naturally revert to a noun. As you say, there can be an effort in not automatically using a correct-sex pronoun.

About the least GC that I’ll get is using pronouns that don’t correspond with sex as a courtesy. This does not apply to sporting cheats, attention seekers, criminals, Eddie Izzard or Sam Smith

I used to have a few areas I thought were not that important.

Toilets
Changing Rooms
Pronouns
The whole non binary etc etc
Flags
But…
The more that I saw the negative effects, the more I realise that this is just so negative, so insidious, so regressive, so oppressive particularly to more vulnerable people like women, autistic people, lesbians who don’t want to date men, that I am hard pressed to find anything. Especially with all the bullying if you express an opinion as a woman.