If you're GC, what should trans people actually do?

[AmaListening]

I'd like to understand what someone with gender critical views thinks trans people should do.

Maybe let's make it specific with a couple of famous examples: Laverne Cox (trans woman), and Elliot Page (trans man).

Imagine you had it exactly your way. What should those human beings, who feel and identify the way they do, do about every aspect like: names, pronouns, surgery, clothing, relationships, social spaces, work, sports.

How should Laverne speak about her own identity? Should Elliot not have had top surgery?

I'd really like to understand what the world looks like for trans people if we carry GC views through to their end points.

I identified as a boiled beetle at age 4. Not a girl beetle or a boy beetle, but a boiled beetle!

Children identify as all sorts of things. It's up to their parents to manage their expectations. I could no more have grown up to be a boiled beetle than I could a man.

If dc dress however they want and adults don’t impose anything on that then they wouldn’t be sad

Just a happy five year old boy in a skirt with hair clips, no issue

You'd need a world like the one we all lived in until about 15 years ago, where hair length and clothes style and colour were just hair length and clothes choice, not immutable markers of some new but immeasurably important thing called gender.

OP have you ever asked a trans person why they feel like they are the opposite sex? Ever considered what it means to feel like a woman or a man? I wouldnt say I feel female, I'm not a gender stereotype, but I am female. I dont feel male either. People here ask this question often and it usually goes unanswered. If anyone does venture an answer it's always related to stereotypes.

"Woman" is not a dress, it's not a costume, it's not a choice -it's just reality.

I recommend you add "The Gendered Brain" to your reading list. It's not particularly about trans issues but about the scientific quest for understanding the difference between male and female brains, and measuring all the differences in socialisation that male and female children are exposed to. The research as to how that socialisation was applied in the case of children who later identify as trans hasn't been done. But it's reasonably clear that society in general is so sexist that by far the biggest influence on "gendered" feelings and behaviour come from sexist socialisation rather than genetics. If we could rebuild society so that boys and girls were truly treated equally then it would be possible to identify what the real differences between male and female are, but it's very unlikely we could ever do that.

As I said, trans issues aren't particularly the point of the book but it helped me to understand the concept of "gender" more. I think it's a useful read for both sides of the debate.

You don't hear much about trans men.
Is it because they can read the room.

There have been too many awful stories about trans men of late.

That being said , I have a revulsion of trans folk who decide that their infant school child is also transgender. Particularly where the child rails against it.

@proudofmydd I can't see that it's fair for a natal man to compete alongside natal women, no.

There have been sensible alternatives suggested on this thread which I'm grateful for as it was a sticking point for me previously in understanding options for those who identify as trans.

I think you mentioned earlier that your DD is an elite athlete - what has her experience been with this issue? Sorry if I missed this.

I haven't. Would anyone be able to answer that?

OP you said "I've never questioned that I'm a woman. I felt I was a girl growing up. " What did you mean by that? What does Elliot Page mean when saying they felt male?

Someone claiming to be a different sex should be able to answer that.

“So when someone else born with XX chromosomes and a vagina writes that they've always felt like a boy, that's fascinating to me and I "believe" them because they're telling me their experience.”

How does this work logically?

Someone who has a female body can only truthfully say they feel like how they imagine or interpret how a male person feels. They have no idea at all what that ‘feeling’ of being male is actually like.

To be blunt, it is their own projection of what they WANT being male to be like. There in lies the issue. Yes, it is fascinating. As much as reading about how someone really wishes it was like to be something they can never be.

That is why it is an often misogynistic portrayal of women that males choose to identify as.

And that is why Cox is not correct when Cox says Cox has no male privilege. FFS. That would mean that Cox would actually pass and I am sorry if anyone honestly believes that Cox passes. Because it is as clear now as it ever was that Cox is male.

Yes. I don't "feel" that I am female. I just know what sex I am, and there are lots of things which go with that, because there are stereotypes and socialisation as a girl and then a woman.

If my 3 yo had looked in a mirror she'd have seen a kid in jeans and a t-shirt, hair however she pleased, playing with whatever she wanted and whoever she wanted. Why on earth would she want to be exactly the same but called 'boy'.

Only children who are sold very rigid gender roles would even vaguely think about this. Maybe don't enforce rigid gender roles!

@AmaListening

If you look at photos from the 90s, or the 70s (even more so), there were lots of women with short hair. They were still women. In my own mother's netball photos, a huge variety of hairstyles. In her school photo, you can guess quite easily the two girls who became gender non conforming lesbians (who are now both mothers, separately, and grandmothers - if they had been called trans men in the 70s, maybe they would now be infertile with advanced osteoporosis - is that definitely the "more enlightened" option. You have to be damn sure it is!).

Point is, whilst we think that we live in "more enlightened" times, we are actually more gendered than we used to be - most teenagers nowadays have a very similar look on the hair front. If you identify as a girl, you are almost obliged to be Uber feminine. I'd say it is the selfie/social media culture we live in.

And we have compounded that by not saying to kids "no, you're actually a girl, John, but that is a great thing to be. You can still wear dresses and like barbies, that is fine for a boy". I know autistic boys, by the way, who wanted to be a girl because they have spent lots of time with their mummy and want to be a mummy too and understand that only girls can have babies. The best response is surely "well, only mummies can carry babies, but daddies can do so much too - they can feed with bottles, change nappies and, most importantly, they can give amazing cuddles and play games like mummies"

When trying to figure out why women end up believing they are men, or why men think they have a feeling of being a women, I think it helps to read their own words on the topic.

For example here's a recent post from Reddit's "MtF" forum, note that most of the replies are in agreement. Many more examples like this if you browse through this community.

This post cannot be posted often enough.

I remember when Laverne Cox did this. I remember they had no fucking clue that they prioritised a rapist murder over the 13 year old female victim. I suspect that that compulsion to dismiss the female victim is a feature not a bug.

I remember when Laverne Cox did this. I remember they had no fucking clue that they prioritised a rapist murder over the 13 year old female victim.

Yes, I don't think Laverne was particularly bothered, apart from about the optics of it all.

OP if you say that you don't think men should compete with women, then you are GC. You don't think a TW is always a woman or at least not like the 'other' (natal?) women. So you are a TERF. Welcome.

Yes Eresh, I believe it was all about the optics of it all.

Cox’s rebuttal of Chimandra’s comment on why males are not ever going to be females because of male privilege, just showed Cox’s male privilege.

@AmaListening thankfully for now her sport has moved to a situation where to compete in as a female you have to have had your sex recorded as female at birth. But it's not been an easy situation to get to.

If a man plays with her team, they will put their own team and their opponents, who are natal females, at risk of physical injury.

They will also stop all females being elite athletes in the sport (athlete I'm using instead of sportsperson - I don't mean in any way to imply that my DD is a track athlete) - and I just don't think that's fair. If transgender women play in the women's category then there will be no natal women on the team at all. Men are taller, heavier, stronger and have greater lung capacity. The team will be all transgender women if that's the road that is gone down.

This is what I've been told.

I've been called TERFSCUM for saying I'd call someone by whatever name they chose, I'd use whatever pronouns they wanted, I'd even pee beside them in a ladies loo. They can dress how they want and present how they want.

But natal men had an advantage in sport that that wasn't fair. My red line began in sport, because my dd works bloody hard, she is in the gym just about every day at 5am, she has practice 3 nights a week, matches every weekend. And all that would be taken away from her and she would be at best a 2nd or 3rd town team player, if the categories are opened up to transgender women. And that is just fundamentally not fair.

But I was called TERFSCUM for that opinion.

Which didn't exactly endear them to me. And then I started to think about women's spaces, refuges, counselling, what about women with religious or cultural reasons for needing a solely natal female space, what about abused women who need a safe space, what about ....

And then I found I didn't mind being called TERFSCUM at all.

@proudofmydd I'm fine with being TERF Scum too. If believing that it's wrong to lock a woman in a prison cell with a male bodied rapist makes me scum then I'm scum.

I also think it's wrong to:

• relegate female athletes to losing female competitions so that men can feel included and validated
• refuse female patients single sex provision if they are in need of intimate care like the changing of sanitary products, assistance with toileting and washing.
• prevent children from being irreparably harmed through medical and surgical means in the pursuit of the impossible goal of changing sex

Oops that last point should be

• allow children to be irreparably harmed through medical and surgical means in the pursuit of the impossible goal of changing sex

yip @FatAgainItsLettuceTime absolutely agree.

the friend who said I was TERFSCUM asked me how I felt about being called TERFSCUM.

His face was a picture when I said I was fine with him calling me that. It's irrelevant to me what he thinks - he has nothing to lose. Me and my whole sex have a lot to lose. If he wants to miscall me and make up new terms for me, that's fine - when someone shows you who they are believe them and all that.

It was actually through sport that I began to realise the true impact of pronouns.

When MacKinnon/Ivy used the fact that people used female pronouns for male people as leverage for males to compete in female categories. It is all linked when you start to pick through it all.

It goes- because people use opposite sex pronouns they must fully believe that males can become women. And if that is the case, then those male people have successfully become women. And ‘women’ are female people. So therefore those males have become female people too.

Because people use opposite sex pronouns for those male people.

And once I saw that sporting federations accepted this and allowed males into female sports, I realised there is a reason pronouns are a problem.

Well that and the now constant stream of male crimes being reported as female crimes. And they even then put those males in female prisons. And female victims have to use preferred pronouns when talking about their rapists in court!

All because pronouns have to be ‘respected’.

That is where being ‘kind’ gets us.

(And I think that Elliot page deserves a lot of sympathy - his early life was shitty. Do I believe he is a male? no. I don't really believe anyone does, tbh - there is no question of him truly passing really. Do I believe that he knows what it is like to be male? No to that too. I'd use his pronouns, but I do feel uncomfortable that someone who clearly has so much sadness in them even after surgery etc is being held up as the poster person for this trend. I think that Elliot Page is a hugely vulnerable individual and has had a lot to grapple with. If I had been abused in the way he had and had to attempt to be gender non conforming and lesbian in the public spotlight at a very early age, I might want to opt out of female and seek to be male as a refuge, frankly. But would I make policy for kids based on what Elliot believes looking back on his life? No, I wouldn't.

Laverne Cox is unfortunately a bit of a misogynist and isn't an amazing example. I don't think laverne should share female safe spaces or compete in women's sport even at a recreational level - there are social mixed teams at grassroots level in some sports and otherwise she should be in the "open" category. This is, for what it is worth, a view that is shared by Caitlin Jenner, who understands that she could have won the women's heptathlon well
Into her 40s, has she transitioned. I am happy to use her pronouns, but I do not see her as female.

If laverne were raped, I would think that she would need specialist support that isn't focused on females, tbh. Just as an example, many females who are raped might need to consider pregnancy as an outcome - why would a trans woman genuinely want to join an all female support group, surely it would either be hurtful to be contemplating their obvious sex differential, or you have to have women minimise and pretend this very specific female experience (concern about pregnancy due to rape) isn't an inherently female one. Sounds shit, unless the TW actually gets off on everyone pretending that they are just like the rape victims in even this way).