Continuously willing to discuss in good faith: part 3

[BonfireLady]

Continuation of thread: part 3. Hope those tagged below don't mind.

@catiette and @arabellascott, you both mentioned possibly starting a continuation of the thread so please forgive my keenness! I couldn't see anything when I started writing this so I thought I'd kick it off.

I watched the video that @spookyfbi shared, then read the transcript excerpts (thank you @helleofabore) and comments.

Long post alert! But I wanted to share my thoughts in full. Although I feel very embarrassed sharing this on an FWR board (I am fully prepared to get shot! 😂), I want to do so because I think it helps illustrate how an opinion can be formed. In order to explain myself, I'm going to frame it with some excuses context:

As I said in the previous thread, my daughter had told me she thought she was transgender and asked her dad and me for puberty blockers so that she could explore everything. To support her, I unturned every single stone I could find on the subject of gender identity in autistic girls (there's not a lot of info so I had to piece it together). By now, I had read on the NHS website that the effects of puberty blockers and brain development were unknown so that was a hard no. We weren't going to let her do that to her body but we were still open minded that one day she may be our son and we knew we would love her just the same.

I immersed myself in everything I could find relating to gender identity. Science papers, news articles, Benjamin Boyce detransitioner interviews, a therapy book on gender dysphoria etc etc. I also spoke with people from the LGBT+ community so that I could get an all round view. I've said on previous posts that I still value these conversations.

I didn't come here as it was nowhere near my radar. I also didn't read the Daily Mail or Telegraph as I had been brought up on the Guardian and frankly, they were evil publications in my head. And as for Glinner...... No way. I'm not on Twitter but I'd seen some copies of his Tweets in the Guardian and Independent and I didn't want that kind of input. I couldn't imagine how anyone like him could help me find information that could help my daughter. I just thought he was a nasty rude man who enjoyed taking the piss out of marginalised people.

(Suffice to say I have since I overturned everything I've just said in the last paragraph 🤦‍♀️).

Even though I had done soooooooooooooooo much research in to autism and gender identity in children, it never occurred to me that JKR's infamous Wombund Tweet had any connection to my daughter's situation. She just sounded a bit ranty to me and I couldn't see what was so important about declaring yourself to be a woman. I was aware that people were calling her transphobic but that made me even more certain that she was just a nutjob (sorry JKR 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️) because gender identity (as I saw it from my research) had nothing to do with her status as being a woman. I thought "of course you are. And?" and moved on. I eventually read her essays, because it kept coming up in the press and I concluded that she had written nothing transphobic (in fact she said she stood by transgender people so I was pretty baffled as to why people were so angry) and so I ignored her again.

Then... along came Isla Bryson and the Nicola Sturgeon. I slowly started joining the dots and lurking on here to inform myself. By now I was already reading the Daily Mail when it had articles about gender identity and children but still no Glinner. I felt that he was a massive step too far. I balanced out my guilt at reading the Mail by also reading Pink News. I was still very targeted in what I read about. If it didn't help me to directly help my daughter, I skipped past it.

So what has this got to do with the Mica video from the end of the last thread? I'm sad to say that there is a time when I would have believed pretty much all of it if it hadn't been for my shift in focus thanks to Isla Bryson, Nicola Sturgeon and (retrospectively) JKR.

In fact, I'll go further. I would have been really hooked from the start of the video because I find the suffragettes fascinating. I know a fair bit about the story and I always make sure I vote because of what they did to secure that right. I didn't know anything about Sylvia Pankhurst though, so that bit was so interesting. By this point in the video I would have been hungry for more. I know we've come a long way in equality of the sexes but we're not there yet. I would have seen it as a really interesting immersion in to lots of facts about what I could be a part of to change the world for the good of women. I'm not stupid. I have good critical thinking skills (if I didn't, I wouldn't have been able to support my daughter as I have done) but it would have appealed to the militant side of me. I'd have probably skipped or filtered out the weird bits in the middle with the guest (?) speaker (Caelen?) as I found them difficult to follow. But I'd have tuned back in again for all the bits about why today's feminists were the equivalent of the suffragettes in (how it is described as) their exclusion of everyone who didn't meet their standards of a "real woman". I would have assumed everyone on this board and everyone at the LWS events were just bigoted women who couldn't stop talking about the word woman. I'd have conceded that JKR did have a good point that "people who menstruate" sounded wrong, I would have seen it as an odd obsession to be talking about women's rights and the "erasure of the word woman". Sorry
everyone 😬😬😬 Obviously I never did assume that because I came here first, just to be clear!! 😬😬😬😬
I'm just imagining what could have been, if I saw this video at a different stage in my exploration of gender identity. I think I'd have been as disinterested in all the things on this board as I was about JKR's Tweet: just a passing nod while I got on with my life. Worse than that, there's probably a chance that I'd have just found everyone very ranty. I'm not sure if I'd have tried to join in or just dismissed anything you were all talking about. I have no idea because I was so disinterested in the subject of women's rights (I thought we had our rights so all was good) that I'd have filtered out anything important that was being said.

I'm not influenced by online influencers. I make my own mind up. But there's a good chance that the suffragette bit combined with the modern fight for women's rights bit would have helped me form exactly the type of opinion that the video was created for.

Interestingly, as far as the video goes, the bit about the "sterilisation of kids" was such a tiny throwaway comment that it may as well not have been there. If I didn't know better (thanks to my obsessive research in this area I know lots on this subject!!) I'd have assumed it was a conspiracy theory, rather than the sad medical scandal that I believe is currently unfolding in most western countries.

In other words, I'd have been the perfect candidate for being convinced that the women on this board were bigots. Sorry again to all. Obviously I don't think that now at all!

Also, a final sorry goes to Glinner. I eventually started reading his substack when a friend (at the time the only GC person I knew, in real life or online) sent me a 3 part story that had been published by Glinner which was written by a mum who helped her gender incongruous daughter navigate everything. I still think he's blunt in his style but I also think what he's doing to help raise awareness is amazing.

Sorry for the length of post.

I have no idea because I was so disinterested in the subject of women's rights (I thought we had our rights so all was good) that I'd have filtered out anything important that was being said.

Personally I think this accounts for a lot of the viewpoint that women are bigoted over this issue - generally, not just you bonfirelady.

If you don't see women's rights as something really hard for for, across-the-board, with opposition or apathy almost everywhere, and that the rights are fragile, and constantly under attack, you may not understand that erasing the concept of womanhood, or changing it to include men, is so dangerous.

And, it has to be said, certainly for me, it was reading these boards that made me realise it.

Your post made me want to dig up this extremely good series of articles

https://quillette.com/tag/when-sons-become-daughters/

Both sexes, and parents of both sexes are profoundly impacted by this and this article series is a superb insight for parents of boys.

The troubling experiences are as important to parents of boys as our girls and I believe this is a good read which assists in the understanding of how boys are damaged on the way to becoming angry young men with an identity.

It's all so avoidable and so malign.

@Datun

If you don't see women's rights as something really hard for for, across-the-board, with opposition or apathy almost everywhere, and that the rights are fragile, and constantly under attack, you may not understand that erasing the concept of womanhood, or changing it to include men, is so dangerous.

Yes. I have come to realise that many young women take their rights for granted and that even the time twenty or thirty years ago sounds like something which happened in prehistory to many of them (I read a young person state that white 'cis' women face no discrimination at all though perhaps they did ten years ago...)

That those rights were very hard-won does not seem to be part of education systems in any country?

That they might be fragile is not brought up in any of the online conversations I have seen. Perhaps it should be, because they, indeed, are fragile, and several developments in various parts of the world do suggest that we are at least stalling on women's rights or possibly going backwards.

And it doesn't help at all that biological women are now recast as the privileged group in the new gender identity category 'women.'

I watched “I am Leo” on CBBC with my children and sent it to an online friend who was transitioning FtM. It never once crossed my mind that the NHS would not be following a safe protocol, based on good evidence, as I thought the NHS were generally obliged only to provide good, evidence based treatment.

Had my daughter come to me and told me she thought she might be trans, I’m not sure where we’d have ended up. I don’t think I’d have allowed medical treatment without extensive research, but I suspect decent resources and reading materials would have been very rare. In the end, I probably would have trusted the medical staff.

This ideology has reached levels of institutional capture that I would never have imagined possible. I think it’s very possible to see why parents could find themselves going along with it in good faith and then find themselves in a defensive position. Not so much now, perhaps, thanks to thousands of women speaking up and making ourselves heard, but a few years ago, it would have been very easy.

I’m still not sure how anyone can hang around here and continue long term to argue against the women here in good faith as I think the arguments here, though often harshly expressed, are convincing to anyone whose mind is genuinely open. That said, there are a few posters who argued on the transactivist side for a good long time before finally coming to the conclusion they were wrong, so it can and does happen.

Part 1 starts like this, you do have to register with a free account.

When Sons Become Daughters: Parents of Transitioning Boys Speak Out on Their Own Suffering
Angus Fox
Angus Fox
2 Apr 2021 · 10 min read

What follows is the introductory instalment of When Sons Become Daughters, a multi-part Quillette series that explores how parents react when a son announces he wants to be a girl—and explains why so many of these mothers and fathers believe they can’t discuss their fears and concerns with their own children, therapists, doctors, friends, and relatives.

When I ask Rene about what these risks entail, he does not trade in euphemisms. Transsexuals who have undergone vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina) often suffer fistula, the rupture of the colon. This can be triggered by vigorous sex, or simply by a bowel movement, and results in fecal matter being discharged via the neo-vagina. It is a serious medical problem that sometimes is discussed in the media in the context of obstetric fistulas, which typically afflict women in extremely poor areas of Africa and Asia; but whose gruesome details are very much off-message from the glamorous, made-to-order bodies that young men think about when they imagine their transition. How many of them would hesitate if they knew they might defecate—in extraordinary pain—from their neo-vaginas during sex?

I don't understand that. How can fecal matter be present? No food passes through.

I know that it can smell, because someone explained that to me. The smell is produced by hormones in the skin of the colon, which is triggered by eating. But that is a smell, not actual matter.

Fistulas are a break between the bowel wall and the new canal. They leak fecal matter through holes that form and join the two evacuation routes.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/anatomic-problems-lower-gi-tract/colonic-anorectal-fistulas#:~:text=A%20fistula%20is%20an%20abnormal,the%20outside%20of%20the%20body.

An explanation.

Got it. Thank you.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2173578621000196#:~:text=RnVF%20after%20sex%20reassignment%20surgery,injury%20during%20the%20initial%20surgery.

If those who wish to discuss good faith arguments about parents of boys standing back to avoid transphobia accusations would like to read about the "up to 17 percent" incidence of fistulas before hand it would be appreciated.

Calling parents bio essentialists gets a new perspective in this scenario.

I do think that there are probably a lot of people out there (and this doesn’t apply to anyone I talked to in the other thread) who call themselves gender critical but are just uncomfortable with trans people because they’re uncomfortable with gender non conformity. They would be just as uncomfortable about a trans woman even if she wasn’t called a woman and didn’t use the women’s bathroom. I think this is probably the perspective of the woman who paid her daughter to shave her legs. So I think it’s not surprising that the core beliefs of the gender critical movement are so misunderstood.

Is there a "gender critical movement"?

I read about this apparent "movement" from people who want to categorise the millions of people that know who transexuals are as an activist group.

It's another fantasy. It's just people. People that know what is happening. People that are perplexed by a very damaging phenomenon that has morphed out of something we all knew about anyway.

There isn't a "gender critical movement" .

It's women saying no, parents saying please help, professionals saying get a fucking grip.

You spooky seem to have a need to slice and dice people into categories of thought like a rubic cube.

That's not people.

That's "identity".

Try to stop every thought ending up with a category you have to slot everything into. It might help.

How can I put this in its simplest terms.

I'm going to cite Christine Burns.

Burns is of the generation of men I grew up with who dominated the sexist society I was surrounded by. Within that sexist society Burns was apparently a gender non conforming vanguard.

Not by being gender non conforming, but by claiming this presentation was female.

At the same time actual females were changing the actual basis of how conforming was understood by entering adult life on the same basis as men.

Meanwhile Burns stayed stuck in a 1950s upbringing, and in a parallel universe drove forward the opposite idea that non conforming required us to believe that presentation mattered more than what we actually did or could do.

You believe this spooky, you believe that presentation is gender non conforming. You believe this sexist 1950s perspective pushed by this person from the 1950s.

It's astonishing!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Burns

When I say non conforming, I mean non conforming according to the norms in the society/culture that they’re in. If a man wears a dress because that’s what he wants to wear, but he still identifies as a man and doesn’t see it as feminine, I agree that there’s nothing inherently feminine about that. But a lot of people still do. He would still face judgement and ridicule (wrongly) from a lot of people because he is doing something that breaks our current culture’s gender norms. He is gender non conforming according to the culture he’s in.

I do think it’s useful to distinguish between a mother saying ‘no’ to her daughter not wanting to shave her legs because she still holds onto unexamined biases about what men and women should do, and a woman saying ‘no’ to losing a space she can escape to if a man is harassing her. I don’t think it’s useful to lump both of these things together because that’s where a lot of the misconceptions in the video come from. From my understanding, the first concern is not gender critical, but admittedly I’m still new to this. What language would you use to distinguish these things, or do you not think they should be distinguished?

I think it’s useful to distinguish between people who object to trans people because they’re generally uncomfortable with people breaking gender norms, and people who have no personal objection to trans people living their best lives and doing what makes them happy but are concerned about the legal ramifications

He would still face judgement and ridicule (wrongly) from a lot of people because he is doing something that breaks our current culture’s gender norms.

From who though? Most of us operate in a limited circle, we go out socially or work with our tribe and if our tribe is eccentric or knows us as flamboyant they care nothing about our clothes or love our style.

You are describing cross dressing, not a man wearing a dress and talking about that ridicule, and that ridicule has been socially sanctioned because it was a fetish.

We now have young men like the ones in the Quillette essays. What are they doing and how does that fit with breaking gender norms? It doesn't. It's a problem, because it's not a personal expression of a creative mind, it's a mind affected by the things that they document that are not intrinsic, but are induced.

Dysphoria however it starts is not the same as sartorial choice. African robes are not worn by cross dressers or people with dysphoria, they are worn by men in culture where those robes are normal.

You are too simplistic about this, you ignore the Christine Burns role model of old fashioned men that don't fit in a 21st century world where clothes are just clothes, because you will not recognize that there is psychiatric evaluation of why men of those generations did that and will only look at it through a one dimensional lens of bigotry on the part of the observer.

Most of us are tired beyond belief of listening to this.

You could read what Grayson Perry has written about this over the past 10 to 15 years as a man that frequents cross dressing fetish club.

You seem to be stuck thinking there is some big organised movement, there isn't.

What's happening is you are butting up against a fact (biology, humans have two sexes, it's how we reproduce) and because it's a fact people from every walk of life with a large range of opinions state it.

Those who agree the sky is blue are not part of a movement, are not aligned, they just agree the sky is blue (you probably share this belief with most of the population, even murderers). It's the same here.

I think it might be worth listening to a woman, who has been involved in trans health care for a number of years, who was a TRA and who has described what went on in a 'gender clinic' in Washington.

This was released yesterday.

I think the label ‘gender critical’ is an example of ‘queering’ in action, in a specific way.

It was a term that has been expanded to include the opposite of what it was intended for. The same way that people want ‘woman’ to include male people, that people use ‘tolerant’ for themselves or others who are not tolerant at all in the true sense.

In fact, it has been done by the same people who wish to change those same definitions.

However, I personally don’t use the label. Not for me and not for anyone else because it is now so changed it is meaningless and it can be used to dehumanise people and to denigrate people.

To be clear, it now has been misused to include anyone who doesn’t believe that people can change sex. Which includes people who embrace gendered roles and stereotypes! The opposite of what it was intended.

There are numerous groups being forced together under that umbrella. That is why it is meaningless.

Yes! It does include people who are transphobic! That is why it has been expanded by extreme activists. If you can discredit people who are transphobic, you can discredit all who are ‘gender critical’, supposedly. It is a dishonest tactic.

The groups are disparate except that they believe that sex cannot change. That is a universal truth. That is like saying ‘water is wet’. The concept of ‘Sex cannot change’ is true whatever the words around it are changed to.

So ‘gender critical’ has now been wedged open to include the majority of the world. When it was intended for ‘gender critical feminists’.

But removing that word ‘feminist’, made a huge difference.

There is no terminology remaining to describe the feminist concepts critical of ‘gender stereotypes’.

Hence, I flip it around and focus back on what I am campaigning for. The sex based protections needed for women and girls. For all female people, even those who reject the linguistic terminology for themselves based on their sex. It doesn’t roll easily off the tongue though.

Women’s rights campaigner doesn’t really cut it either, because I also campaign for children and adolescents too.

But this is a very good example of what happens when a term used to describe someone becomes so fractured because it includes the opposite of what was intended.

It leaves people without the language to describe themselves.

Being a new term, ‘gender critical’ wasn’t well established. Therefore it was very easy to take and forceably change. And so it was taken and it was changed.

And I believe it was done deliberately. Why else do it?