How did people start to believe in this trans stuff?

[IsThereAnEchoInHere]

I’m talking about the ’allys’, the one’s who believe in all this?
How did it make sense to them that women have penis’ now, that transwomen can compete with women, that men who were so oppressive yesterday can today be the most oppressed transwomen?

How did they get to that point?
How did it make sense to them?

To be complitely honest, I tried/ am trying to ’be nice’ and understand, but the more I read (from trans people, allys) the less it makes sense.
I wanted to understand, but my brain won’t let me.

I guess more simply I'm asking, if you are e.g. female but think you have a male mind/ mentality, what specific things do you think constitute a male mind/mentality, to the point where you think "I am the opposite of female"?

There's never an actual answer to this one...

Well, there is, but it can’t be given, because it just demonstrates that it’s all harmful, regressive, sexist stereotypes….

Hope I'm not coming across as interrogative just tea has been quite game in replying (altho it's a fast-moving thread so apols if I miss stuff) I always do want to see if I'm missing something. If it turns out it's just a difference of belief as to whether there are discrete categories of "man brain" and "woman brain", and that adhering to that should always override physical sex, then that's fine. I'd just like that to be explicit. And also to find a list of the characteristics of each, so I can identify my gender!

👏👏👏👏👏👏

Also, if other/historic cultures had actually believed that TWAW, TMAM (using T here to mean their whatever their specific culture's understanding of gender non conformity to be rather than the very specific 21st Western culture's concept of Trans), we'd not even know these people were "Trans" because they'd just have been recorded as men and women. The very fact anyone now can point and say "historic person X was trans" is in fact proof they were seen as their actual sex not their gender presentation.

I disagree.

Educating people about food safety is IMO far more likely to work as people stand to lose nothing by following best practices (unlike a violent coercive male who loses what he perceives as control/power).

I can't see many parents saying "how dare they try and prevent my child from choking".

But, either way, an epidemic is by definition not something that affects a tiny proportion of the population and isn't growing crazily fast.

I’ve never really understood the 3rd gender debate. I thought in societies that recognised different genders (for the right or wrong reasons) they recognised that they were different and as such treated them differently. It’s the opposite with trans as society is trying to treat a transwoman as if the person is the same as a woman. It’s all very confusing.

Not read the thread but I don't think anyone believes it. Not really.
Different people will have different reasons for pretending to.
I've never believed it, or needed to pretend to, i was never be kind go along I just knew.
I was brought up in a matriarchal family and was what in those days was a tomboy, I was allowed to be who I am and we were all treated the same, brothers and sisters, loads of childminded kids, cousins, same toys, same chores, same go out and play in the woods and don't come back til dinner.
So much more freedom than what kids get today.
One thing I do think has made a massive difference to my personality and being able to say what I think even when maybe I shouldn't, I was always around the table after a Sunday dinner, with my grandad and uncles, listening and talking politics, I was taken to rally's and protests from about 3 or 4 and I could always speak and be listened to, I wasnt talked down to or over because I was a girl I was just another voice, I was treated as an equal around that table from a very young age, my brother would be making puddings, all good there was never any comment about it, we both were quite vulnerable and could easily be trapped in trans now.

So, maybe an odd question but I keep wondering how the trans community would react if I decided I was trans? Still a heterosexual female but identifying as trans.

Surely if a bloke with a penis can be a woman a heterosexual 'cis' female can be trans?

Tigofigo

Now competitive sports, this is a very tricky one IMO but I have seen various studies or medical information / Dr quotes etc that suggest in some cases there is no natural obvious inherent advantage for over sex over another etc.

That's absolutely ludicrous. All serious studies have shown precisely the opposite. A very, very small number of doctors and academics have written some risibly badly supported articles, complete with dishonest statistics, which excluded anything contra to their positions.

In reality, men taking oestrogen for over a year will see their muscle mass decline by about 5%. This is compared to other males. Compared to women, they will still have an insurmountable advantage in muscle density, heart and lung capacity, oxygen carrying capacity and skeletal geometry.

It's absolute rubbish for people to be pretending that oestrogen-taking men are at physiological parity with women. It has absolutely no truthful basis.

Appeal to how "trans is a social construct" perhaps, and you could probably make as convincing a case as they can.

The transitioning of historical female figures in this way is showing ignorance of the negative sexist discrimination women faced at the time. It is well known that not one female surgeon would have been allowed in that era. Particularly not on a military ship.

There is NO evidence that Margaret Bulkley was trans. There IS evidence that she wanted to study medicine. The reason she got to sit her final exams was because someone from the aristocracy knew who she was and vouched for her. The same person who helped get her a job in the military, so I believe.

I have seen people try to trans George Elliot too.

Retrospectively transitioning female historical figures without any evidence that they were dysphoric females instead of women escaping sexist society to do the things they wished to do is dishonest. I must admit to being surprised to see someone do this on a feminist board.

I did notice though just one name was mentioned. Well Google brought up Wikipedia so we can look at more ‘Western’ female people they theorize could have been trans.

Albert Cashier - her male guardian is noted to have dressed her as a boy to work in a male only role. Moving to the United States from Ireland, all ID there was as a male person. Theorists use the persistence and of identity for transing Cashier. Yet as a military veteran, Cashier was dependent on their pension plus on getting further work.

It was noted that hundreds of women joined as men in American Civil War. It was not unusual. Many returned to their lives as women after. But it needs to be noted that Cashier had stowed away from Ireland and was an orphan and needed to work.

Joseph Lobdell - a female who also understood very well about the realities of women’s employment. Even wrote about the injustice. Then decided to work as a ‘man’. As a lesbian, Lobdell also married a woman, and therefore had to maintain their life as a male.

Karl M Baer - a male with hypospadias who was wrongly observed as being female at birth and had a surgery for hypospadias. This was on a penis that had already developed yet is categorised as a sex change surgery.

Alan L Hart - is someone who was a well documented transitioned female in early 1900’s. Again, Hart found employment prospects better as a male person and was a lesbian.

I find the transitioning of historical women very concerning when it has been done based on ‘persistence’ of identity. Particularly when that identity has been the source of employment or military service/pension.

I understand that it adds credibility to the statement ‘there has always been trans people’. However, it is highly dishonest to do so by ignoring the realities of these cases and the ignoring the importance sexism and homophobia played.

As far as men cross dressing as a fetish, of course this has always been in society. I doubt any person on this board would doubt this.

I got that information directly from some indigenous people so I've no need to explain anything to the source

@Ilovetea42 What tribe?

To be clear Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g, I of course agree with you.

Please tell us what your sources have said about two spirit people? Did they discuss whether homophobia, where potentially homosexual people as being ‘other’, played any part in the existence of two spirit people?

What did they tell you about two spirit people? How did they describe that group?

Men have decided they are trans and still look very male with beards etc so I don’t see why you’d be much different

I find the transitioning of historical women very concerning when it has been done based on ‘persistence’ of identity. Particularly when that identity has been the source of employment or military service/pension.

I can understand men doing it. They're totally ignorant of women's history, don't especially care to find out and are hostile to the belief that oppression of women existed.

Women though? Boundless contempt for women who nod along with this erasure of women's history - an erasure motivated by a wish to remove women's boundaries.

I think there's a belief that history moves in the direction of improvement.

After all, in general as a society we acknowledge now that slavery is unacceptable, and some people are gay and they shouldn't be killed for that. And men are allowed to cry and have feelings. And women CAN be intelligent and are not beneath men, and should be allowed to do what they want, and study and work if they want and not be married and pregnant at age 24 as the pinnacle of her life. People of different races are not inferior. And Europeans plundering their countries, committing genocide and oppressing people was a Bad Thing. It is now in the open that some institutions like the church have a big problem with child abuse and covering it up. Women can vote and have bank accounts.

All these are big changes. Apart from slavery becoming illegal, they have all happened in living memory.

So this is a new Big Change. People want to be on the right side of that and not be the racist grandad who thinks boys shouldn't cry, or wear pink, and that feminism's gone too far and you can't even give a compliment these days.

They don't want to be that person.

I agree. I'm completely boggled that any woman who is honest with herself could be unaware of the patriarchal oppression of our sex for millennia, and what would have happened to most women who openly pushed against those constraints.

Yes, but you can't build your movement around the fiction that the past didn't happen. Transing women and concealing the context in which some women may have pretended to be men so that they could fulfil their ambitions in a time when there was no other way to do it isn't progress. Well, not for women, anyway.

Great post. Completely agree

But retrospectively attributing transition status to women of history is not moving history towards improvement.

Just as you cannot erase that historical events did happen, you cannot erase the sexism and the homophobia that may have, and did, prompted the decision for these women to adopt male personas. Retrospectively transitioning those women is done based on a modern lens to suit a modern political agenda.

However, that being said. If they are claiming women who did so to escape sexist discrimination and homophobia in the past, what does this say about the modern female cohort? They cannot have this both ways.

They cannot say that adolescent and adult women today are not transitioning due to negative sexist discrimination and homophobia when they conveniently claim these historical women. It is almost as if they understand that this is a motivation, but don’t seek to address it as a cause.

Would they rather support transition than address the cause of girls and women wishing to not be considered female ?

The same needs to be asked about this motivation to claim cultural ‘third’ genders. Due to the fact many of these cultures were ‘othering’ homosexual males. Based on stereotypes. They understood this person was male but they ‘othered’ them for being gender non conforming and homosexual.

So, are those claiming those cultures as examples of past trans people saying that also applies to many trans people’s motivation still today? And therefore rather than focusing for the past decade on making society more accepting of these people by accepting them as the sex they are, activists have instead focused on supporting medical treatments and supporting transitioning those people.

And forcing laws and policies to prioritise gender over sex, when in fact sex matters to protect all female people.

The logic seems rather flawed. It seems inconsistent and when you start scrutinising it, it doesn’t stand up to that scrutiny.

Imagine if these extreme trans activists had campaigned that gender nonconformity was normal and no transition was ever required. Imagine a campaign that men accept all male people, however they dress and however they present, and that all male people were welcome.

But no that didn’t happen. I suspect many of us can work out why.

Imagine if these extreme trans activists had campaigned that gender nonconformity was normal and no transition was ever required. Imagine a campaign that men accept all male people, however they dress and however they present, and that all male people were welcome.

I would very much have preferred that! And personally, I think society as a whole would benefit from it. Whether it would be achievable is another matter. It's a bit like the argument than women shouldn't have to be on their guard when walking home alone - it's the men who should stop being predatory. Yes, they should, but is it ever going to happen?

To answer your other questions to me, OP, I can only say that I never understood that. I did read some of the articles that people wrote trying to explain why you could be transgender but not transracial (with an open mind, really wanting to see what I was missing) and to be honest they pushed me further away from the ideology because they were absolute cobblers.

I gradually came to see that the confusing nature of it all was a feature not a bug. It's presented as unknowable, which in a way makes sense, how could I know what it means to be transgender if I'm not? (Later of course I realised the obvious - how can someone know what it means to be a sex that they are not?) To be a good believer, you have to listen to the priests and accept that they are privy to mystic knowledge that you cannot access. They understand it but you never will, all you can do is accept what you're told without question and "believe people when they tell you who they are".

The final straw for me was when I saw a man being counted as a woman in a discussion about representation of the sexes on a local political committee. Not even such a major thing but suddenly I just realised that a parliament that was 100% male could theoretically be counted as 50% women under this ideology. It all fell away very quickly after that, when I actually let myself think about it all honestly without censoring myself.