For those who believe in Gender Identity over sex: why do you still need to believe in Men and Women at all?

[FlirtsWithRhinos]

One thing I do not get about Genderism is that they reject the belief that it's the physical body that makes a human a man or a woman, yet still believe some humans are men and some humans are women.

But if we hadn't had the example of two physical sexes, why would we have come up with the idea of Man-people and Woman-people in the first place?

I find it very weird that they can't or won't tell us what definition they use for Man, Woman etc ("it's a gotcha" , "blah blah blah" etc) yet demand such very specific provisions for Men and Women. How can they be so certain "trans women must use women's spaces/compete in women's sports" when without a definition of woman it's impossible to even explain why women need women only spaces or women only sports?

They won't go to that much effort. It'll just be pics of an erection against an unmade bed. Probably with the offers to show me what they can do, though, failing to mention their need for Viagra to do anything.

Not sure this is entirely relevant to the thread, mind you.

Given a certain poster’s consistent rudeness, I’m not going to engage.

I do think hormones are fascinating, though. When I had IVF a few years ago, I developed a new-found admiration for my body (as frustrating as it was when it didn’t play ball). For example, I learnt that when a woman ovulates, her ovary develops a large, temporary structure called a corpus luteum, which secretes progesterone in order to support the potential pregnancy. I thought that was pretty clever. The ancient idea that women are incomplete men is so, so far from the truth.

On the subject of foetal development, I don’t think we fully understand all of the effects of oestrogen and testosterone in the uterus. The balance of the two might even determine the length of a person’s index fingers in relation to the length of their ring fingers. Can a person reverse these myriad effects by taking cross-sex hormones as an adult? Some, such as hair growth and body fat distribution, definitely. Others, unfortunately not.

"But the thing is we do have people saying it, a lot! There's someone saying exactly that on this thread! And this exact "if she says she's a woman she's a woman and that's that, the body isn't relevant to anything" idea is used by some very big hitters (Stonewall etc) as the justification for male bodies in women's sport and safe/private spaces."

Are you really so arrogant you think you know better than I do what the community that I am part of is saying and doing? Have more respect please! Also, go back and read what I actually wrote, your reading and comprehension clearly aren't up to snuff.

"And perhaps that's part of the problem. You aren't exposed to people making this sort of argument in the name of the trans community, but we are. So when we talk about it and the problems it raises you think it's GC strawmanning. And undoubtably the other way as well, the really nasty transphobic attitudes that I see in some other places may not get a look in on FWR but the trans community does experience them, and so we in FWR get tarred with attitudes we don't have as well."

Yeah, one little problem with that; your behaviour in this this very post. If you can't stop yourself from engaging in vile behaviour when you are, seemingly, trying to be nice, I'm really not going to buy this attempted whitewashing of "FWR," whoever they are...

"I would consider myself a man who used to be a woman. (I'd also be bloody furious and possibly psychotic, but that's a different problem!)"

So you would allow then medical establishment to control your perception of your own gender by manipulating what medical resources you had access to? You clearly don't understand just how much abuse the medical community has done to the trans community and how horrific that abuse was and, in to many cases, still is. If you did have the slightest clue you would understand exactly why the idea of "let the doctor control your gender" would make any trans person run away screaming.

Also, your attitude is very much at odds with the majority. The majority of people would view the "psychological" self as the true self, regardless of the physical self. To be quite frank, I strongly suspect you have adopted this attitude to support your other opinions, not out of any natural feeling.

"Again not the first time I've thought about that!

I think I'd fuck up a lot as a man at first, but assuming it's a one way street, I'd accept my new reality and get on with it. I'd likely find it fascinating to learn first hand how the world really works for men. I hope my experience as a woman made me a better friend and ally to women than many men.

I'd DEFINITELY write my name in the snow!"

Are you sure you're not trans? 🙄

"That's important when we flip the scenario and consider a woman who used to be a man. Some of women's protections/rights are due to purely physical differences but many are to protect us from the entitlement of men - they perve at us, they speak over us, they encrouch on us, and they dismiss and belittle us. A woman who used to be a man has grown up as the encroucher not the encrouchee - and for that reason even in the fantasy where the body can truly be flipped to the opposite sex, I would put limitations on treating her exactly the same as women who were always women. Not because of the body as it is today, but because of the journey taken to get there and what that means for the person in the body."

And there we have it. You just couldn't resist the urge to air your vile bigoted fantasies, could you. Since you have behaved respectfully until now I will ONE chance to display the appropriate level of contrition and go back to being respectful and appropriate.

Here's the most important fact you need to impress on your mind:

Transgender children do not get treated like cisgender children. Transgender children do not get male privilege.

Let me repeat that:

Transgender children do not get treated like cisgender children. Transgender children do not get male privilege.

Demonstrate an appropriate understanding of that, or, at minimum, a willingness to learn and an appropriately respectful attitude and we wont have any more trouble. But if you ever dare to lecture me on what my childhood was like, or make presumptions about what I experienced as a child, I will have words to say to you that you will not like. Is that clear? >:(

Wow. Overbearing, didactic, rude and ... wrong on so many verifiable points.
Just like a man. Not the nice sort. The misogynist sort, who likes to demean & bully women.

I’m sure that most trans people just want to quietly get on with their lives.

The trans rights movement is different though. And once you’ve seen the wide streak of misogyny running through it, you can’t unsee it.

I'm sure you say that to every trans woman who sets boundaries you don't like. 🙄

With the magical mind swap stuff, I have sympathy for both sides. So I can see why people could answer in different ways.

Here is one response:

Let me guess, another biology denier? 🙄

Get back to me when you find someone who understands what hormones do... 🙄

Well they dont rewrite DNA do they. Your genetic code as in sequence of base pairs in your chromosomes is fixed and same in every cell. (disregarding chimerism and transcription errors during cell division or damage)

BSc Hon Anatomy by the way, University of Edinburgh

Well taking hormones doesn't change your sex buddy...

Go on then. What do they do, exactly? 🙄

Keep going, you'll figure it out... 🙂

And the gendercritter response is "things that happen all the time don't happen cos I say so..." Typical... 🙄

Barring mutations every human has the same genes. Therefore you have every last one of the genes that make men men. What you don't have is sufficient testosterone in you body to activate those genes.

But I'm sure that went over your head, ofc... 🙄

Funny how cross-sex hormones don't stop the (incorrect) mansplaining and condescension.

Switching off some genes and switching on others...That's your idea of cosmetic? 🙄

The whole point of the David Reimer experiment was to prove that gender identity was not biological and could be changed by the type of forced conversion therapy he tried on David Reimer. If it had worked out the way he wanted the next step would have been a mass campaign of forced conversion therapy to "convert" every trans person to cis. That didn't happen ofc because gender actually is biological and so his sick experiment with David Reimer ended up proving exactly the opposite of what he wanted.

Just so it's clear, John Money was highly misogynistic and highly transphobic. His entire career (and that of most of his peers) was based on treating trans people as a problem to be controlled, and, ultimately, made to go away.

Pandering to bigots is a mistake but people do make mistakes. You can change sex, this is a well known fact, that's why they were called sex changes in the first place. Some people decided to humor you by parroting one of your favorite falsehoods, that's all...

Good to see at least one reasonable person on here... Thank you for that... :)

Sorry, but if you don't like women having boundaries you'll just have to go somewhere else... I do wonder, though, why gendercritters are so insistant that woman are never allowed to stand up for themselves on pain of being declared a man... Almost like it's internalised misogyny or something... :)

So is it right you started out a boy then man with a male body, but your brain inventory thought you had a female body, so then you took hormones and possibly surgery which has made you a woman?

If thats is the case, quite a journey and I hope that the modifications have made you happier. All the best in any case.

Well faff, what is notable is that not one peer reviewed paper has been posted yet. And your post has been completely ignored.

I am very much looking forward to reading the studies and papers that support the claims made on this thread tonight because I expect that those studies and papers will change the world as we know it.

So the Reiner twins are who you are posting about? No one else?

@ancuruadh

Are you really so arrogant you think you know better than I do what the community that I am part of is saying and doing? Have more respect please!

Right back atcha. You've happily told me, a GC woman, what GC women say and experience, and suggested I personally don't think what I say I do. Are you so arrogant you think you know better than I do what the community that I am part of is saying and doing? That you know better than me what I think and why?

And as you mentioned reading comprehension, you seem to have missed that I very deliberately did not say "the trans community" are saying anything, I said it's being said "in the name of the trans community", and I phrased it that way exactly because it's often not trans people coming out with this stuff but "allies" who claim to speak for them.

On this thread, another poster said:

Because a person's identity is not as clear cut as that. One thing I don't get is the rejection that a person's psychological self makes them male or female regardless of the body they were born into. The insistence on conformity to one or the other is astounding.

That's what I was referring to. You said your understanding of being trans is biological, a body map that doesn't match the body. This person thinks ones identity as male or female is nothing to do with the body. Your model requires body sex to give meaning to gender, theirs doesn't.

So you would allow then medical establishment to control your perception of your own gender by manipulating what medical resources you had access to?

Well, you set up a scenario where it was forced upon me so no, I would not "allow" anything. But this question is meaningless to me. Yes, if my reality changes, my reality changes. My perception of myself is not a separate authorative thing that exists regardless of the reality of myself. If I lose a leg, my self image of myself as bipedal will likely persist for some time, maybe all my life, but that doesn't make me a bipedal person in a one-legged body. I'll be a person who used to have two legs and now has one. And if somehow my body is rebooted into an actually male body, I'll be a person who used to be a woman and is now a man.

I'm sorry you don't like my answer, but this is the truth of it.

Are you sure you're not trans?

Do I have a faulty body map that tells me I'm really a man? No. Do I feel my body sex is somehow wrong? No. But do I feel a deep inner sense of womanhood that would persist even if my body was male? Also no. So I'm not trans by your model, but there's a lot of ways of categorising people's gender out there and I'm certainly not cis by most of them. Honestly, very few people are, that's why it's so annoying to have that label assigned to us.

But I'm out. I treated you with respect and you responded with abuse.

It's a real shame. I genuinely thought you were engaging and interested in finding common ground, that there was a possibility of finally honestly talking about the disconnect between the transgender experience you describe, the pain of not having a woman's body when your mind says you should, which I think most people have sympathy for, and demands that are made off the back of it which go far beyond that.

But I see the demands are yet again what it comes down to. The demands and the rage if someone questions them.