Still Genuinely Willing To Discuss In Good Faith

[Catiette]

I've taken the plunge and started a new thread. In the interests of good manners, an addendum that I may be disappearing to work for a while myself, as this has all been far too interesting to allow me to achieve any of my urgent weekend work to-dos today - I hope that, in the light of that, creating this follow-up thread isn't bad form. I just thought other people may want to continue discussing these issues (mainly, now, the redefinition of woman, and statistical trends re. women globally), and I'd definitely dip back in when the urge to procrastinate overcomes me next. No worries, of course, if people think we did it all to death on the old thread - we were fairly thorough, methinks(!), so can also just let Good Faith Discussion #2 rapidly fade into Mumsnet obscurity. 😀

Biological sex isn't nuanced either. There are two sexes, you need one of each to reproduce, your biological sex is whether you are the one with the hole or the one with the dangly bit that goes into the hole. Men are the ones with the dangly bits.

I am curious about the people who so desperately want to find nuance where none exists. It's like they don't want to confront the idea that humans are just animals, and have these things in common with other animals. The French don't use the words "male" and "femelle" to refer to humans, only animals. It's like they are determined to believe that humans are different and special.

In a way I see parallels with religion here. Humans are different, we have souls, we were created in God's own image to rule over the animal kingdom. In many ways I think gender has captured a lot of people because it has stepped into the void left behind by organised religion. People need to believe their lives have meaning.

When you do come back to it Bonfire, have you thought about the future repercussions (and this could be distant future) and if there will be any to anyone who does socially transition for a time.

And by that I mean coping with people that you met as that socially transitioned child who got to know you as that child meeting you a decade later as an example and how that might make for a reawakening of dissonance or anything else that comes about many years down the track. Or is there any lasting impact on a person who as a child adopted a complete change such as full name and belief that they were the other sex, even changing school records and having the opposite sex pronoun used that may cause issues in later life. Including how that child feels about the people that enabled that.

I don't believe I have ever seen any research on this. Is there any?

Versus just letting a kid adopt a nickname, and presenting how they wish etc but not making it a 'social transition'.

'Social transition' probably needs to be defined properly for this to be a useful conversation.

Well, also, I'm a bit startled that the fantastically fascinating and intricate processes involved in biology, the delicate balances, complex sequences and all the many unknown details, are seen as somehow lacking.

Yes, this is all there is! It's fucking amazing!!!

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1653439989080784916?s=12

Sadly, sometimes it comes down to the colour of the vegetables they eat.

When I see this type of statement being made to a law making body, in this case the Louisana House of Representatives, I worry just what some people believe should be taught in schools, and what 'therapy' for this child should look like.

And I wonder why there are some people who hear this and didn't immediately think 'what else is going on with this child', rather than jumping to affirm these parents and their child. My thoughts immediately thought there are several other issues that would cause these very 'symptoms'!

If 'gender identity' is something nobody can describe, with no definition, and has no relation at all to biology or our bodies, how is it a useful concept? What on earth does it mean?

It's useful if your intention is to rebrand transvestic cross dressing and homosexual transexualism for public acceptance.

It removes the sexual aspect and can therefore be taught to young children at an early age. This is not a secret.

The rebranding has gone horribly wrong. The product remains the same and now new market segments are buying it for all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons with buyers remorse increasing as a result.

It's a 20th century idea, from a time when male homosexual repression had years of history and sexist ideas of femininity making it unacceptable for men who should always wear dark suits.

These ideas don't land well in the 21st century when sexism and homophobia is on the wane.It's out of it's time.

We are literally doing the time warp.

"With all of the complexities in the world and in humanity, how can such a simple and straight forward philosophy that lacks any nuance - boys have a penis and girls have a vagina - really be all there is to it?"

Because it is material reality, and not philosophy! The sex category you belong in is proven science no matter how philosophy might like to frame it.

Saying that sexed bodies lack nuance is a false premise. There is a great deal of nuance. What there is though, is no third gamete or no person ever producing both gametes. The nature of those sexed bodies can be simplified but the bodies themselves are not.

‘It's a 20th century idea, from a time when male homosexual repression had years of history and sexist ideas of femininity making it unacceptable for men who should always wear dark suits.

These ideas don't land well in the 21st century when sexism and homophobia is on the wane.It's of it's time.’

exactly - all heteronormativity is seen as oppression and all labels/ words (woman) must be stripped of their original heteronormative oppressive meanings

I suppose we can say that 'gender' has a lot of nuance - in as much as it means 'personality' or choices, interests, etc. It's as unique and complex and varied as every individual human. A constellation of genders! Limitless in number!

Has no bearing on sex, though.

Absolutely.

It's what I find so astonishing about the criticism by self-proclaimed feminists that we are "reducing" women to their reproductive role.

Firstly, I think it says an awful lot about your real attitude towards women if you use the verb "reducing" to refer to the fact that we have collectively grown from scratch and given birth to every human who has ever lived. This is an amazing, incredible thing. Even if you don't want to or can't do it yourself (and for quite a while I thought I couldn't do it), the female body in particular is incredibly complex and does something at once ordinary and extraordinary, and that deserves respect.

Secondly, you think it is reductive to define women as the childbearing sex and you want to define us as, what, people who have at some point worn a dress other than for fancy dress? What? Get in the bin.

I think it may dip into physical safety in the case where a trans person has been rejected by their family, friends and community and could potentially sink into depression and suicide due to a lack of community and support.

I do need to understand here. Is this really saying that women should accept a male's identity as being 'just like them' so they don't get depressed or commit suicide?

Spooky, this is emotional manipulation and a very clear example of it.

Women are not support resources for any male who wishes life were different and that they could be a female person, or even just accepted as a girl or a woman.

This is exactly what that deliberate perpetuating of the misrepresentation of suicide and the deliberate perpetuating of 'all or nothing' solutions delivers.

Whether you understand that it is emotionally manipulative, or whether you posted it knowing it was emotionally manipulative, it is emotionally manipulative in the way it has been used here. Maybe you meant to limit how that community support would be so that it was not just fully acceptance? That would make some difference.

There are many other ways to help males with dysphoria that do not include their demands to be accepted as being a woman being met by everyone. When extreme trans activists insist on women accommodating these male people for that male person's well being, it is purely emotionally manipulation at work. Putting that responsibility for that person's welfare onto all female people to accept something that has been shown to be harmful in some ways to female people of all ages.

I'd like to add my thanks to Spooky, this is a brilliant thread and your posts have been invaluable in allowing other posters to present their views passionately and articulately.

I have also found the insight into your perspective a fascinating one, Spooky, and although I don't agree with you and am not persuaded by your arguments I have hugely appreciated your contributions. I hope you have not felt under attack, I'm certain everyone posting here has the same goal in mind - that people should live safely, freely and fully in a society that works well for everyone.

WRT the question about why same-sex attraction is (or should be) supported but a desire to transition questioned, for me this just comes down to a false equivalence between sexual attraction and an individual's sense of self as one sex or another (or neither).

The conflation - driven primarily by Stonewall's adoption of "T" for reasons that we might want to consider separately - is deeply problematic and has fuelled much of what I consider to be the poisonous trans ideology.

In theory, who I am attracted to should have nothing to do with 'who I believe myself to be,' in terms of biological sex. I have yet to hear a coherent explanation of a link between the two.

In reality, where a correlation exists it seems inevitably to be that the idea of being same-sex attracted is so abhorrent to some young people that the only alternative is to 'change sex' - hence the large numbers of girls who pass through the 'trans phase' and come out the other side as lesbians.

This is why I and many others believe that trans ideology is fundamentally homophobic. That there are many same-sex attracted people who seem unable to see that is baffling.

One question to ask, I think, is 'Who is benefiting from this movement?' It doesn't take much intelligence to see that, as is often the case, there are groups of people making A LOT of money out of this - primarily big Pharma, who have a vested interest in people taking drugs for life.

With same-sex attraction, people just get on with their lives loving the people they're drawn to. With the rejection of biological sex the ramifications are enormous, and frightening.

...to ask what Jack wanted for Christmas and he took the phone out of the room and said can you buy me Barbie Rapunzel but can you please hide it because if mommy and daddy find it they're going to take it away and I realized that I was shaming my child and their toy choices and the toy embargo stopped...

He just wanted his toys back.

You put words into the mouth of "the Atheist" that she may well disavow. Most atheists I have known are a long way from saying "they don't have answers" to these questions. Far from it.

For example, "What is gender identity?"

(Atheist) answer: "A mythical concept inspired partly by long-discredited conceptual errors related to Cartesian dualism and partly in justification of misogyny-based political attempts by autogynephilic males and sufferers from various dysmorphias in pursuit of their own perceived interests, which has often been applied to disturbed children much to the latters' disbenefit."

It's the theists who deny there are answers to important question, most often suggesting faith is important where understanding is lacking. What do you, a true believer, say gender identity is, SpookyFBI?

Arabella said "We cannot confuse the word with the thing the word is describing." which I thought was just worth reiterating and emphasising for a moment. I am Magritte over Foucault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

Absolutely this.

Women and girls did not cause this problem, and it should not be up to women and girls to solve.

If you think trans women should be permitted free access to all women's spaces (and let's not forget that this is pretty much the reality at the moment), your position is that young girls should have to sacrifice their own safety, dignity and comfort in order for the safety, dignity and comfort of a small number of adult males not to be compromised in any way.

And yes, there is a safety issue. Because nobody is checking for gender recognition certificates or doing genital inspections on toilet doors. (And even if they did, most trans women have male genitals and no gender recognition certificate anyway.) And there is no gender identity detector test to distinguish those who genuinely believe they identify as women from those who are merely faking it.

So this means that as soon as you allow genuine, harmless, vulnerable trans women into women's spaces, you lose the ability to keep any male person out of those spaces. Because all someone like Levi Bellfield or Christopher Whorton needs to do is say, "I am a woman because that is my gender identity" and we must roll out the red carpet, no questions asked.

And frankly, even where there is no safety issue, if the presence of even one, genuine, harmless, vulnerable but sadly male trans woman is going to cause even one Muslim woman or sexual assault survivor to self exclude from a women only space, it is still a problem.

That's why they have to get the big guns out and say if we don't agree to this (not that we were ever asked whether we agreed or given the opportunity to say no), trans people will kill themselves and it will all be our fault.

Oh and I want to reiterate to @SpookyFBI how much I value your opinions. My queries are not intended to bludgeon you, just that it is really interesting to have an open discussion

One further thought on gay vs trans is that it just makes so much more sense, to me anyway, for sexuality to be resolved first before any transition. I mean, if you haven't worked out and come to terms with who you are attracted to (if anyone - fine to be asexual) and how you might want to have sexual relations with them, how can you possibly make decisions based on the idea that you might change your body to correspond with this, or you might not change your body but would hope that someone else would hide their own attraction to your own sexual features (eg lesbian teenager in a binder - are you looking for other women to see you as a man, or as an androgynous woman? Are you uncomfortable if woman are attracted to your female body?). This isn't something that adults should involve themselves in and counsel children in, it's something that most teens resolve on their own through puberty, rough as it is, and some people don't resolve until much later. The alternative is to perhaps remove helpful sexual body parts or perhaps render a person unable to experience orgasm before they have actually come to understand themselves from a sexuality perspective.

Those who firmly believe in 'gender identity' as a thing...

If me, a middle aged white straight woman felt that my 'identity' was to have dreadlocks, dress in bright clothes and to go round with a bong and a beat box on my shoulder blasting out reggae I'd be laughed out the village and it would be called 'cultural appropriation'.

Would you laugh at me, or defend my identity?

(Obviously I didn't mean by the below that children struggling to come to terms with their sexuality should be denied counselling from an appropriate qualified person but that adults generally, eg teachers, shouldn't be overly involved in issues of teenage sexuality)

Yes, but also his father had freaked out. There was a suggestion that the parents' separation was at least partly caused by this issue, unless I'd misunderstood.

Ths was a young boy, wanting to play with certain toys, quite innocently - being met with what sounds like extreme rejection, familial conflict, and difficult responses. From his father. Because the child wanted a PollyPocket.

Well .... look at Ryan Webb.

Spooky, what do you think about the coming out of Ryan Webb from Indiana?

I think that the discussion around gender identity and Ryan's coming out is a practical application of the theory that has been discussed here.

I am troubled that so much is being based on 'gender identity' when we have no good working definition of it.

So. Here's the NSPCC's:

'What is gender identity? Gender identity is a way to describe how someone feels about their gender'

Okay. And what is that 'gender'?

'... gender identity is different from someone’s biological sex or assigned gender at birth.'

Okay. Assigned 'gender'? And what is that 'gender'? It's not sex, so what is it?

'While many people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, for others gender is more of a spectrum, with lots of different possible identities. Gender identity is a personal feeling, and a child or young person will be the best person to know what matches how they feel.'

Look, I'm not a hugely qualified or educated person, but I don't think I'm especially stupid, either. Average intelligence.

Why can I not understand what the NSPCC is telling me? This page is ostensibly for children. Why can't a grown adult person understand it?

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/sex-relationships/gender-identity/

I've been lurking for a while and this interesting, civil, discussion has helped me to solidify my thoughts on gender a bit, to the point I feel I can tentatively share them...

My current thinking is that gender might be a real thing and has limited use on a population level, but also that it is no more important for determining if you as an individual are male or female than your height is.

If you'll bear with me, I'll try to explain...

If you take 200 toddlers, half of them male, half female (sex not gender), and put them in a room containing cars and dolls, you might observe that on average, the males spend more of their time with the cars than the dolls and vice versa. However, if you take two individuals out, one male, one female, although it is more likely the male will prefer the car and the female the doll, you cannot be certain.

I think it is like this with many "masculine" and "feminine" stereotypes - they are based on what happens at a population level on average and not on an individual level.

I also think that there are 'true' stereotypes that are to do with our nature/biology and 'false' stereotypes that are to do with nurture /society and can be harmful. For example, the idea that men are less risk-averse than women may well be down to nature. The idea that women wear lipstick is down to society. But neither defines an individual as belonging to the population.

I think of it as overlapped population bell curves, to illustrate. And this even produces a sort of gender "spectrum" idea.

My issue with trans ideology is that it seems to draw a line down the middle and say one side should be 'men', one side should be 'women' (thus losing the original definitions of those terms).

The other trouble is, I can do this with height as well! Take the heights of 200 men and women (biological that is - I wish I didn't need to state that!), the men's average will be taller than the women's. But take one of each from the groups, and although it is more likely that the man will be the taller, it's not guaranteed.

On an individual level, height tells you nothing about their sex. And sex tells you nothing about their height. Only about probability. They're related, but they're not.

I wouldn't want to put a line on the bell curves and say "everyone over 5'7" can be a man, everyone below can be a woman". So why say "everyone who presents as masculine can be a man and everyone who presents as feminine can be a woman", as trans ideology seems to be doing with gender?

Worse still, it's now come down to 'feels like'. So this to me is the equivalent of saying if you 'feel' you're 6'3" you can be in the man category... even if you're actually 5'2" and have XX chromosomes...??! That's where it loses me altogether.

So, although I think gender exists in a way and is possibly relevant as a concept to describe population scale differences between men and women, (job preferences, for example), on an individual level it's completely irrelevant to what you are and what facilities/services you should use. That's down to your sex.

I guess what I'm confused by is that the description there says explicitly gender is not sex.

If it's not sex, it's just a 'feeling', then ... fucking what?

A feeling of having eaten too much haggis. A feeling of almond milk. A feeling of vertigo. A feeling of stomach pain. A feeling of mild disappointment in one's life choices. A feeling of quiet despair. A feeling of having been duped. A feeling of buyer's remorse. A feeling of queasiness.

WHAT THE FUCK IS IT.

Sorry, this always happens when I meet circular definitions.

Picalilli that sounds very sensible and about right. Thank you. I think I've heard similar (about overlaps and generalisations) when discussing 'the male and female brain'.