Trans and losing my mind...

[bluepetergeneration]

Posting here in good faith. And I'll leave that at that.

I'm a TS. I was born male. I don't normally post on mumsnet but I started using it as I have a 1 year old DD. I won't tell my whole life story, that would be self indulgent, so I'll just say what I came here to say.

I'm sick to death of my community. I'm sick of the misogyny. I'm under no illusion that I'm a woman or ever will be. I transitioned when I was very young so I pass, but I still now only use female bathrooms when there's no other option (such as a disabled bathroom- I would feel unsafe in the mens). What I have is a disorder- it was crippling- and now I live my life so that I can actually enjoy it and not feel 'wrong'.

The idea of self-ID sickens me, and I'm tired of having to have the same conversations over and over again with other trans people who accuse me of being some kind of self hating transsexual just because I care about the safety of women. I also care about the safety of my kid. Partly because I'm worried she'll be in danger because I'm trans, and also because I don't want her to get caught up in all these weird messages that being trans isn't a disorder around dysphoria (which it is).

I guess I'm posting this to say that in this fight, trans people with genuine dysphoria who aren't delusional will be standing right beside you.

Also a plea to not paint all of us with the same brush. You can fight for the rights of trans people (like me, I should be able to present female and not get attacked, and when I was in my late teens and still looked a bit male I did get attacked) and also be gender critical

...I'm fairly sure a man who's just lost his partner and is trying to raise their baby alone would point out that he and his child have suffered a massive loss and they will never stop missing her. They will do their best around that loss but it wasn't their first choice. Just as parents going to training to qualify for consideration as adoptive parents are told, explicitly, adoption is no one's first choice. Not the parents' and not the child's, it is rooted in loss, and that loss has to be faced and acknowledged if the adoptive parenting relationship is going to work for them all.

Nothing to do with whether men are the best choice for raising a tiny baby, but a bereaved dad and child is not really the best choice of advert for 'who needs a woman'.

Miranda Yardley and Fionne Orlander certainly were two who had launched a campaign for third spaces, though that was a few years back. I'm sure there are others.

That it is incredibly hard to ever compensate for that lack?

I'm going to be blunt here. Are you a robot? The difficulty of growing up without a mother after her death in childbirth or one's own infancy has been a constantly revisited issue in fiction since forever. What on earth possesses you to tout it as some kind of pastoral ideal?

Seriously WHAT THE FUCK?

Are we now pretending that parental bereavement is fine for children, ackshurely, as some sort of Kindness Initiative?

Because I will tell you now, pretending people aren't experiencing pain and grief because it makes you feel better, is unkind. Deeply so.

Anything else you'd like to try your hand at obscuring today, with some more amateur sophistry? Perhaps you could be dismissive of the impact on children of living in poverty? Lack of access to dental care?

So much of this is all about being able to have the really difficult conversations.

Who would want to say to a bereaved dad, 'there's a loss here and you and the child will always feel it' when you'd want him to have confidence and faith in his parenting. Happy kids in successful adoptions with gay couples, it's a great thing when adoption works.

Does that make surrogacy absolutely ok from all points of view or are the questions and ethics involved? Does that make the maternal relationship and bond something that a child can be deprived of without consequence (and will those children all grow up to agree?)

And who would want to say to a distressed, vulnerable male, 'no, use the space you're afraid of, we won't help you' - because on the surface who would be that mean? Except it is far, far, far more complicated than that, and the voices of the women behind the decision to put the male person's needs and feelings first are lost behind louder, stronger, better supported ones. There are much more complex, careful and thoughtful solutions needed that involve facing up to the difficult conversations and everyone's input. Including women's and children's. Which involves facing the social conditioning that values men first.

I get that...but to effect any political change at all is going to require broad support and greater public consciousness and education. First of all blocking Self Id and making far clearer, and more explicit, that sex refers to biological sex and not to legal sex ( GRC) or gender identity.

Once you have established that sex means biological sex you can start to distentangle the gender/sex conflation that is widespread and leads to confusion and downright nonsense.

Also, of course, people need to be made conscious of what is being taught in many schools and of how radical and ideological it is in nature. Only with greater public consciousness will the push-back be significant enough for it to become a major issue and talking point. We're getting there........but deconstructing the whole ideology and its impact and influence is going to take a long time for the reason it has become generational and has drawn in so many people.

deconstructing the whole ideology and its impact and influence is going to take a long time for the reason it has become generational and has drawn in so many people.

Isla Bryson's pink leggings. Peaked a nation in about four seconds flat.

As I said. It's very common for transwomen to say they want women's spaces to be upheld, as long as they, and only they, get full access.

And I thought it was because the OP passed and nobody would know?

But now that's moved on because they don't pass and other men will apparently put two and two together.

And they're short.

And weak.

And What was the other reason? Oh yes, longevity.

That's often the reason. The fact they've been violating women's boundaries for a long time appears to be a justification to continue.

Many are reading the writing on the wall, with the horrifying turn of events with rapists in women's prisons, etc, and are wanting to roll it all back. Well it's too bloody late. It only happened in the first place because no one asked us, and the numbers were small

But if there's one thing that this wholesale demolition of women's rights has shown me it's exactly how many men genuinely think it's women's role in life to be the support human and just roll over.

And appear baffled, and apparently 'can't take it' when we say no! 🙄

Any man who thinks women spaces should contain him, because he's special, is demonstrating all the reasons why he shouldn't be in them.

I have much respect for Miranda's writings. I suspect, from what I remember of context, that one of the reasons for Miranda initiating this campaign - that didn't really ever go anywhere or garner support - was to show that this really was not about having safe accessible spaces. It was about using women's spaces with women in them.

The OP is a voice, among several other MNetters who identify themselves as TS (and often garner TQ+ abuse for doing so, in the same way those who defiantly call themselves homosexual do) saying that third spaces would be welcome because the option is wanted. However if and when there are mixed sex 'women's spaces' plus a female only space so that all women have an accessible and inclusive option too, the biggest challenge will be dealing with male people some of whom are the highly transitioned people the GRA was designed for, who will on principle insist on using the female only space because of their need for a validating space as opposed to an accessible one, and believe that their male need means it is ok for them to exclude women. India Willoughby for example has tweeted about doing this on principle when gender neutral and female only facilities are available: they quite literally pee on the female territory to prove they can and will and female need will never stop them.

Females need protection in these situations, and it will involve a hard no to men. Because this is what oppression and inequality looks like.

And they're short.

Well, not compared to most women, of course.

5 foot 7 is tall in any women's space.

I'll do my best to contribute to deconstructing the ideology by refusing to have anything to do with the word 'gender'. Nobody had one until the mid 1960s, hardly anyone had one until the 1990s, nobody needs one now.

Or young boys. And then there's elderly men, disabled men. All at more of a physical disadvantage than our op.

It’s shockingly misogynistic and anti-mother to suggest a father is capable of being to a child everything that a mother is. And fucking outrageous to say it on this forum.

It’s this transhumanist agenda Brave New World, where we are all meat sacks, no worse off for being made in test tubes and incubated by machines, our biological relationships, families are pointless, runs through transactivism.

It is essential to devalue that primary relationship to push the Overton Window and pave the way for surrogacy and novel sub-optimal family set ups, so that men can have whatever they want with no thought of how others are affected.

I have a friend whose mum died just after she was born and her dad did everything he could for her, managed so well, in spite of his grief. My friend is seriously needy and clingy and has attachment issues to this day though.

Just as parents going to training to qualify for consideration as adoptive parents are told, explicitly, adoption is no one's first choice. Not the parents' and not the child's, it is rooted in loss, and that loss has to be faced and acknowledged if the adoptive parenting relationship is going to work for them all

I’m an adoptive parent, I know very well the losses involved in all sides. It still doesn’t answer the question of why babies need a mother, as opposed to a nurturing, loving parent of any sex. A previous poster said men, or trans women could be considered for older or hard to place children but not babies or infants. Again, what would a mother bring that a male parent couldn’t?

Are we now pretending that parental bereavement is fine for children, ackshurely, as some sort of Kindness Initiative?

Where did I say that? I asked what a mother gives a child that a father can’t - where a father has no option but to raise their child alone are we saying the quality of his care is less than?

Of course it’s ideal for children to be raised in a loving home with both their birth parents but for many children that isn’t possible for reasons of bereavement, family breakdown, the need for safety. Some posters are saying male carers shouldn’t be considered for babies or infants, what are male parents lacking that they shouldn’t be eligible to adopt babies or small children?

The OP said she had her child through adoption after some posters commented they reckoned surrogacy because she wouldn’t have been approved for adoption, why would that be the case?

Babies and small children prefer women and get more comfort from them than men.

It reminds me of that guy who was screaming at KJK’s thing in NYC about being able to get a man better than a woman, or some such thing. This notion that being a woman is some sort of competition that a man can win.

Babies and children know what a woman is. A man can’t beat a woman at being a mother.

It did, but there is still a long way to go to educate people and make them aware of all of the many insidious ways in which trans ideology has taken hold; revealing all of the real life examples and cases and incidents.

I think once the tide is turned in the U.S it will gradually start to unravel all over the world, even though Britain is, in many ways, leading the charge.

Spain has just passed Self Id, Germany is about to next......different places and organisations are at different stages in the cycle.

adoptive parents are told, explicitly, adoption is no one's first choice. Not the parents'

No we aren't. Lots of adoptive parents choose adoption, myself included.

Where did I say that? I asked what a mother gives a child that a father can’t - where a father has no option but to raise their child alone are we saying the quality of his care is less than?

Why are you repeatedly and repulsively using bereaved babies and children as a glib gotcha if you don't mean to say that being bereaved of a parent has no effect on a child, then? If you have another end in mind, now the time to express it.

The thing is, @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision there seems to be a stubborn inability to see things from the baby/child’s perspective.

A dad can’t become a mum, no matter how hard he works, tries, how much effort he puts in. The baby/child will always have a need he can’t fulfil. The baby needs a mum and the mum is a woman.

Women, eh? Totally useless. We won't say that men can replace them, because that would imply our deaths mattered at all. We are apparently superfluous. I presume it's sexist to men (the only form of sexism that matters) to say that children have worse lives if their mother dies in childbirth.

I presume it's sexist to men (the only form of sexism that matters) to say that children have worse lives if their mother dies in childbirth.

Yes, I definitely get that impression.

Yes, and you can see how people like the OP are now going to play it. 'Criticise those trans people over there, because they're not true trans and they can't be trusted, but I'm the genuine article, I pass, I have a child, I'm too scared to use the men's loo so I have no alternative but to use yours so do be kind, won't you?'

No. Because that's where all this shit started.

No. Because that's where all this shit started.

Quite. We have destruction-tested what happens when women selectively give an inch to some exceptionally unusual male people. Some other males come along and take 63,359 further inches on the strength of that inch, to make up the full mile. "You let him her in, so why not me?" they say. (Remind you of anything, by the way?)

When we undo this, we will fully undo it. We will not simply rewind time back to halfway through this narrative arc, because if we do, it will simply play out exactly the same way, all over again.

Miranda Yardley and Fionne Orlander certainly were two who had launched a campaign for third spaces, though that was a few years back. I'm sure there are others.

Yes they have and how many transexuals supported this?

And unlike the OP Miranda Yardley and Fionne Orlander walk the walk and don't use female single sex toilets, they use the male toilets.