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 am quite sure that when I was quite young (five years or so) I knew that I was a girl the same way that I knew what colour my eyes and hair were: I learned these things by other people telling me and, by mirrors.

But what I felt inside me was just that I was myself/me. Being a girl only became restrictive later when it was used to deny me things I wanted to do or to push me into things I didn't want to do.

I also remember playing imaginary games on my own, outside, where I pretended that I was all sorts of people, including men (Robin Hood was one), and didn't feel any sort of dysphoria about that.

Thinking of the topic of this thread it occurred to me that the reverse thread could also be informative: What kind of world do the most fervent trans activists, say, want to create for women? Would we be allowed to have a name for the female sex etc.?

A world in which s transwoman who has a child is a mother, but a woman is a 'birthing parent '

Where a transwoman can take hormones and breastfeed, but a woman is referred to as a chest feeder

A transwoman can have a fake blood period but women having periods are menstruators.

Total takeover

@AmaListening, thanks for living up to your name & reflecting on replies.

I think this thread represents, for the most part, a powerful rebuttal to some of the more extreme clichés & misrepresentations of so-called TERFs.

(One to archive, if I only knew how!?)

@nepeta

Yes, OP, that would be great if you could try to find this out for us. Should women be allowed to talk about what being female is, or should this be banned for exclusionary thinking. Should all women have to refer to themselves as "people who are pregnant", "people who have vaginas" etc as a matter of course?

This has been an interesting thread and I would like to thank @AmaListening for asking the question and listening to the answers.

Agreed!

@AmaListening what would you do if your child thought they were a tractor or could act like a tractor up until age 11 and then again at age 30?

Absolutely agree.

The world they are trying to create is dystopian in the extreme.

I can't discuss Laverne Cox without thinking about the time Cox spoke in support of a child murderer.

'Laverne Cox launches media campaign in support of transwoman Synthia China Blast: convicted for the rape, murder and abuse of the corpse of thirteen-year-old Ebony Nicole Williams'

Extreme content warning, the crimes Synthia carried out were absolutely horrific.

Cox later withdrew support, but tbh, I think that's too little, too late.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/skarlan/laverne-cox-reads-a-letter-from-a-transwoman-currently-in-pr

"Laverne Cox partnered with us on our End Solitary campaign by reading a letter from SRLP member Synthia China Blast in a video, but has since requested that we remove the video from our site because of her concerns about Synthia’s convictions. We understand her decision is based on concerns about violence against children. We also understand that it is challenging to respond to the reality of violence within our communities, and is an ongoing challenge many of us face in our lives and work. While we understand this struggle, we also reaffirm our support for Synthia China Blast, and our position on prison abolition and transformative justice."'

My thoughts are with Ebony. May she rest in peace.

Ebony would be 43 year old probably with children and maybe even grandchildren now if some sick twisted bastards hadn't murdered her. And Laverne thought her murderer was a good person to champion?!? Bloody hell.

Infiltrate and colonise, a perfect Trojan horse manoeuvre by the patriarchy.

As if ‘restorative justice’ can ever be adequate for the
murder of a child.

Shoplifting? Sure, sounds good.

Child rape, murder, desecration of the child’s corpse? Not enough hours in a day or days in a murderers life to repay that debt with community service.

Ebony 💐

In this kind of case, I think we can find a suitable alternative to prison...

This article has more coverage of the case. Again, extreme content warnings.

https://reduxx.info/violent-transgender-killer-completes-sentence-for-1996-torture-murder-of-13-year-old-child/

'In 2015, Jezebel published an article condemning Blast’s treatment while in prison, noting that he had been in involuntary protective custody (IPO), or solitary confinement, for almost two decades. The article followed a petition launched by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SLRP), a trans activist legal organization, which sought to pressure New York State into releasing Blast from IPO. The SLRP had, at one point, used Orange is the New Black actor Laverne Cox to speak on Blast’s behalf.
The Jezebel article slammed “trans-exclusionary” feminist Cathy Brennan for calling Blast a “man who now identifies as a woman,” and glossed over the details of Blast’s crime in favor of giving him a platform to claim innocence.'

Blast is reported in glowing, admirous terms in this article in the New Yorker: 'with her tweezed eyebrows and her handmade dresses'

https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/crimelaw/features/n_10181/

'Synthia, ... was convicted in 1996 for a gangland murder she says she didn’t commit'

And is now out of prison and threatening women, specifically 'terfs'. Again, content warning.

https://twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1601267936345620481

I feel sympathy for any women in prison who face being locked up with someone like Blast.

JK Rowling was attacked on Twitter for 'misgendering' Blast.

A world in which s transwoman who has a child is a mother, but a woman is a 'birthing parent '

Just listened to a science journalist report on the new drug just approved by the FDA for post-partum depression (it is a potential game changer and great news for women and mothers). The entire segment was about how PPD differs from other depressions, how it manifests, what this treatment might mean. All without saying the words "woman" or "mother" once.

So a discussion of post partum depression and how it affects fucking "People".

😲 I shouldn't have read those articles just before bed!

I won't reiterate pp's explanations of the true facts of the case referred to here but will just point out that the falsehood that the legal action is to reduce services rather than add one is being desperately pushed by various individuals and groups because they realise that saying, out loud, that they believe that women should not be allowed any single sex services at all is bad optics.

Take as an example Edinburgh Rape Crisis. Even putting aside the 'reframe your bigotry' viewpoint of the CEO, before the introduction of Beira's Place, there were no single sex female rape crisis services in the Edinburgh and Lothians at all. JKR set up the service with her own money meaning that the organisation wouldn't be taking any of the funding available to such services from the Scottish Government. No other services would be reduced. So the backlash against Beira's Place has focused on how a single sex service (which is entirely legal as a provision under the single sex exemptions of the EQA2010) can be 'policed' because those leading the backlash know that saying 'women should not be allowed to have just one provision for themselves' will be rightly viewed by general members of the public as unacceptable, and if those members of the public have been previously unaware of the discussions around this subject, it will focus their attention quite sharply.

And to expand on optics, the Scottish Prison Service's policy of placing males in the female prison estate(including males who are convicted sex offenders) has been in place since 2014. The policy was heavily influenced by the Scottish Trans Alliance who have been quite open about the fact that they have pushed so strongly for prisons to be mixed sex so that this can more easily be implemented in other provisions. The Scottish Prison Service didn't bother to speak to women's groups or female prisoners when developing such policies. Their viewpoints just weren't considered at all.

So, since 2014. And the policy in Scotland still hasn't been changed in any material respect. But 'Isla' Bryson's pink leggings has certainly sharpened the general public's opinion.

I'm with you on that. I have read about the case once and was absolutely sickened. That poor wee lassie.

I mean people called me "good girl" or referred to me as a girl and that sounded right. Nothing felt jarring about that, ever.

When girls went over here and boys went over there (eg in primary school), it felt totally fine for me to go with the girls.

When I developed breasts, when I started my period, it felt congruent, natural, the development of a body I felt at home within.

Elliot Page (and I'll keep using that example because I'm reading his memoir) says he felt so very different from this. Wanting to rip his skin off. Looking in the mirror and not knowing the person he was looking at. It always feeling jarring, incongruous.

So I take from that he wasn't a girl/woman in the same way that I was. That there was a mismatch between his body and inner sense of self.

Which leads to my original question (but I'll add nuance now I've read all the thoughtful replies): what does a society to support a person who has that experience, whilst also honouring the needs and rights of, and safeguarding, cis women?

THIS.

So I take from that he wasn't a girl/woman in the same way that I was.

A girl who doesn’t like or feel comfortable being a girl is still a girl. (And many girls don’t like or feel comfortable being girls, for very obvious reasons.)

I don’t know why this isn’t obvious to you (can guess), but try substituting any other aspect of the human condition in there. Race, disability, height, sex… whether we appreciate these aspects of ourselves or not doesn’t change the reality of them.

We shouldn't lie to these people. We shouldn't accommodate their imagined reality. Children need a framework of facts to understand how the world works. We tell them right from the beginning that it is fine to dress how they want, do hobbies that they like etc... but materially they are this sex, or that sex. We should provide them with strong gender non-confirming role models so they understand that they are not wrong in how they present themselves - but we should NEVER lie to them.

I say this as a parent of a non-conforming child. She is a very healthy and happy tomboy. She is growing breast buds and understands that she will soon get periods but as she has known this from the beginning this is not a huge problem. Of course she doesn't like the idea - but who of us did???