How Long Before We Look Back In Amazement

[TheShellBeach]

..................over the fact that we had to go through all the transwankery. That we had to fight and fight over such an issue. That some men were allowed to do this to us. That even a lot of women could not see the harm this was causing women and girls.

I mean, surely there will come a time when we can look back and say "I remember that - it was awful - thank goodness people saw through it eventually." How long will it be?

Yes, I feel the same. Changing the sex on people’s birth certificates, so the public record contains known and deliberate lies. Somehow I found that more gobsmacking than all the assaults on women’s rights. Women’s rights are always under attack, that’s not new or unusual. But the state colluding in the destruction of its own infrastructure — that defies reason.

I don't find this so surprising.

I'm not in the UK, and there was a big fuss about, I think, 10 years ago here around birth certificates for children born to same sex couples. So mainly lesbians where one of the couple was the birth mother, but also gay men where one was the biological father.

The argument was that the other partner should automatically go on the birth certificate as if he or she was the other biological parent, rather than an adoption model as it had been previously. And that it was discriminatory not to do this as it treated heterosexual couples differently, as the partner was assumed to be the biological parent unless the mother said otherwise. No testing or anything needed.

This was almost universally pushed by people with progressive politics, and anyone who pointed out that the difference was that we know for sure, in fact, that this person is NOT biologically related, and the birth certificate should record the reality, that was characterized as a homophobic, conservative position.

So it has been clear to me for some time that progressive social politics absolutely thinks facts can be bigoted. And that we need to create systems to suppress those facts in order to create equality of outcome.

It's funny as the left has always been susceptible to this kind of group think that leads to authoritarianism of the left. Think PIE in UK, kindergartens in Germany and USA now under Biden. Not to mention Ireland and Malta trying to be Liberal!

So the concept of gender will probably stick and over time we will get used to categorising people by different types of self defined gender at least socially. The body modification will become less common as the roles become more everyday.

Then body modification is likely to become more common, not less. Because for many young people a change of "gender" appears to be a downhill pathway towards physical transition, a slope they slide down faster the further they go. It's one thing to let boys wear a frock or play with dolls or play with the girls while still confirming that they are boys and will grow up to be men. It's a whole other thing to allow them to believe they are, or can ever become, girls; to tell them they are now "she" not "he", they can use the girls' facilities and be treated as if they are "really" girls. (And vice versa for girls.)

Because telling young people (some of them - we still don't know how many!) that they can change their gender only increases their urge to become more and more like the other sex and to feel wretched because no matter what they do it's never enough. If they're lucky they come to that realisation before they have done massive physical damage to themselves. If they're not lucky, the realisation only comes afterwards.

Sometimes that's because changing "gender" was a grabbed "solution" to a different problem, a solution which gave temporary relief which young people then obsessively cling to, even while it fails to work in the longer run so they have to do more and more to achieve another temporary sense of relief. And sometimes because this "solution" was affirmed by the people they trusted and other solutions were dismissed. (e.g. listen the interview with Teiresias on the latest "Gender A Wider Lens" podcast 99 for an example of both - and this is a young man who went through the supposedly gold standard Dutch protocol.)

This is a huge stumbling block that trans activism will struggle to get over. Parents do care what happens to their children - even if some parents use the same "it wont happen to my family because..." magic thinking that other women apply to rape.

"Woman" may never return to a single sex group.

I hope it will. "Cis women" was one of the best moves trans activists ever made, and one of the most self-destructive for the women who use it. Define yourself out of existence. Smart women, foolish choices, eh?

So when you're elderly, or vulnerable, or incapacitated, you'd be happy to be denied treatment by a woman if you requested it? Because I think that could affect many more of us tha we think.

I'm seeing little things ... for example, I was trying to make a booking in a hostel in Scotland for a young family member the other day. She's young, brought up outside the UK, but wants to travel and see the UK a bit (where she was born but not raised). All I could find were mixed dormitories, which she feels VERY uncomfortable about, even though rationally, she knows her safety will probably be OK. But as she said to me "I have the right not to feel uncomfortable."

We did find one or two hostels which had female dorms, but guess what? twice the price & a little further out of the city centre.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons this could be, but I wondered if it were a trend given public policy over single-sex spaces in Scotland is so woke its brains have dropped out.

"I have the right not to feel uncomfortable."

Exactly. Women should not be made to feel uncomfortable for not arguing against mixed-sex spaces and for not wanting to sleep/change in mixed-sex spaces.

@EasterIsland

well, that’s odd because a 2 second google “single sex hostels on Scotland” reveals that the official “Hostelling Scotland “ has a very explicit statement on the issue ALL their hostels offer single sex accommodation

Oh and that’s over 60 hostels in Scotland 😐

Given that their terms and conditions cite single gender and mixed gender rooms and not single sex, I am going to take their claim about male and female rooms with a bit of a pinch of salt. Male and female used to be good indicators of sex categories before definitions of words were played about with - as we've seen most recently with the (Cambridge?) dictionary change of definitions.

I'm not sure what point you think you're making. Perhaps if you'd spent less time googling and more time ^reading the post you were quoting, you would have seen this.

We did find one or two hostels which had female dorms, but guess what? twice the price & a little further out of the city centre.

EasterIsland did not say there were no female only hostels in Scotland. She said they had been harder to find, were more expensive, and less conveniently located than the mixed-sex hostels.

I'm not sure how small you think Scotland is, but you must think it's very small if you assume a network of 60 hostels is going to be sufficient to serve all the women who might ever need cheap overnight travel accommodation anywhere in the country!

What is a female though?

In hospital wards the nurses are being told to day it is female only even if there is a male on the ward.

A Trans Activist referred to himself as an Adult Human Female the other day at Edinburgh Uni.

They took the word woman so we started using Female. Now they have taken female too and many organisations enable them.

For Hostelling Scotland it seems that a female person is someone who has an F on their ID. Once the booking has been made it's almost impossible to police these situations and desk staff can't be expected to deal with it. They can only really rely on the integrity of male people not to push their way into these spaces which for obvious reasons is no longer working.

forwomen.scot/26/11/2018/hostelling-scotland-caledonian-sleeper-northlink-ferries-update/

A very good point!

Hostelling scotland comprises more than 60 hostels across Scotland

These forums can never seemingly ever compromise remotely on their stance.

and when it looks like they may have to its “taken with a pinch of salt”

another poster over and out as others have done.

Oh and that was the first site that came up

The following Dozen sites that followed made clear that only single sex OR or mixed. I didn’t look further than the first dozen i concede 😂

What a bizarrely disingenuous take on my point about taking the use of 'female' with a pinch of salt, given the organisation's use of gender rather than sex in their terms and conditions.

I take it you aren't going to actually address the issues raised regards the terminology before you go 'over and out'?

Yes. You said about the more than 60 before.

Note: if they say more than 60, that means less than 70. If it was more than 70, or any other number, they would have said that. How small do you think Scotland is?!

I understand that you believe that finding (or thinking you have found) some single-sex hostels in a google search for the country of Scotland, that means another poster must be able to find reasonably-priced single-sex accommodation in the specific city where she is looking.

Let me put this in simple terms. If someone tells you she can't find a reasonably-priced single-sex hostel in Aberdeen centre, your google results for Glasgow aren't relevant.

Re. the hostels - I was doing a very quick check via Booking.com as I had the app on my phone. I did say to my young relative that I thought we'd better do a better search via Hostelworld or the like. But I know that the YHA doesn't guarantee single-SEX (ie natal sex).

As I said, it was a very limited search, and I could be wrong. Indeed, thank you for pointing me to the Hostelling site. It's very helpful!

But it does lead to a larger question - if Scotland continues the way it's going legislatively, and in the 18 other countries internationally that legally allow self-id, then the safety & comfort of thousands of young women like my niece is compromised.

It's tricky enough for young women (she's an older teen) who want to go off adventuring on their own, but at least they can rely on the refuge of the women's loos, or the women's dorms. Or so we think ...

Also, should have added: I really didn't want this thread to be derailed by the specifics of the increased difficulty of finding cheap safe overnight accommodation for a young woman travelling on her own.

That was simply a recent example of the way self-id, and the muddle of gender/sex and the obfuscation of the meanings of 'male' and 'female' and 'man' and 'woman' are causing.