Worrying Increase in Transphobia

[PorcelinaV]

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/09/transphobia-uk-press-media-negative-coverage/

An increase in transphobic sentiment among the British public has been fuelled by hostile coverage of trans people from the right-wing press, argues data journalist Ell Folan....

Unfortunately, newspapers still have a great deal of influence on the public and political agenda in Britain, and nowhere is this more obvious than in how perceptions of trans rights have changed.

As recently as Feburary 2021, an absolute majority of British voters (51 per cent) agreed with the statement “a transgender woman is a woman”, including 6 in 10 women. Just 34 per cent disagreed. But after years of negative coverage from the press, those numbers have changed.

In April this year, only 33 per cent of voters agreed that trans women are women, with 47 per cent disagreeing....

It is clear that the media plays an important role in shaping public perceptions, and unless their negative coverage is corrected and refuted, public opinion will continue to worsen.

Harassment legally is in the eyes of the victim. If I feel harassed by somebody's actions, that is harassment. It does not depend on what the harasser intended.

The use of 'cis' to describe someone who doesn't agree to be described as such depends on their choice. Not the user who says they do not believe it to be offensive. In the same way as a harasser can claim not to intend harassment. If women are offended by it, then it is offensive.

Theer goes the 'trans folk' again.......I can't bear it.

Sorry I forgot trans folx. Got to be an "x" in there somewhere.
Is that better?

@Talltall - I think you may be mistaking the email alerts automatically generated from Mumsnet when someone quote or replies to you as someone messaging you.

That's not the case.

If you don't like getting the emails, go to your Mumsnet account settings and turn that off.

No one has bullied you on here. You have made statements on a discussion board that don't seem to stand up to scrutiny and have reacted to that scrutiny with insults and accusations.

No one thinks "trans people don't exist", as you have claimed on this thread. We just don't believe they can change sex. They still exist.

Thinking "people who claim a trans identity cannot change sex and remain the sex they were born" isn't hate, it's material reality. Ask Lord Professor Robert Winston.

@Talltall, you mentioned earlier the idea of transness being ‘diagnosed’. You mentioned medics. If something can be diagnosed by a medic, then it presumably has symptoms. What are these?

I think what you’re probably referring to is gender dysphoria. Is that what you meant? If so, you should know that it is commonly accepted now in the trans community and amongst trans allies, that one does not need to be dysphoric to be trans. In fact this idea is seen as transphobic by many.

Child abuse is nauseating, yes. Women and girls recounting their abuse may be upsetting but it is abhorrent to try to silence them.

The culture of silence aids abusers, and attacking victims for speaking up perpetuates the shame and suffering.

The Right Side Of History

[a written history of killing and conquest (of the UK ) because once you killed all the people who did not agree you their culture language and oral history dies with them and you get to be the only side that is left speaking]

Sooooo ....what will AI say about humans. 🤷

This is why I love it that these posters are working so hard at fighting the Righteous War for Good People Glory. They think they're spreading SUNLIGHT - and of course, they really are

The first rule of trans club is that trans people get to decide which words used about them are offensive (even factual ones like male or female), and trans people also get to decide which words used about other people are not offensive (even if we disagree).

No, not that either......sorry - not 'folk' at all. Not trying to control your speech or anything....but it is a recent addition that has a more insidious purpose.

i find the whole "cis isn't offensive" narrative and the "so I'll continue to call you that" really absolutely hypocritically vile, tbh

Because it is like saying "i don't care if you don't believe in gender identity, i will still refer to you as if you do, even when you ask me not to"

but referring to a bearded guy in lipstick who claims to be a woman as "he" results in shrieks of "literal genocide" and "you must respect my pronouns"

Maybe i will if you respect my lack of belief in your silly gender stereotypes that we 2nd wavers thought we'd just about managed to stamp out.

@LizaBizza ”Cisgender simply means someone who isn't trans. It's not "offensive".

Again, look it up.”

”cisgender” was added to the Cambridge and Oxford English dictionaries (U.K.) 8 years ago and to Miriam Webster (US) a mere 7 years ago — both nano-seconds in the history of the English language.

Urgh this tactic of “you are shouting at me/bullying me” is beloved of teens asked to pick up their wet towel / unload the dishwasher in anything other than a fawning tone. It’s very tiresome. Thankfully my 17 year old has now grown out of it. Odd to see it on a thread for adults!

In my ~15 years of being on MN, I have never seen a gender ideologue stick around on a thread and convince anyone of their position.

It’s always the exact opposite - they slink off threads, completely unable to defend their position.

Please - I would love to be convinced. Convince me.

I hadn't realised that folk now had an insidious meaning.
What is the new meaning?

As far as I am aware it just means a general group of people.

No, harassment actually requires some intent on the part of the perpetrator. You cannot commit harassment accidentally just because someone is upset by you going about your life behaving or expressing yourself in a way that is perfectly lawful but which they find upsetting. That's why the police who visited the woman who was observed taking a photograph of a sticker were abusing their powers.

As to the second part of your post, the difficulty is that whether something is offensive may be subjective or objective, depending on what it is. Often they can pass from being subjectively offensive to objectively offensive if enough people find it subjectively offensive for it to become understood by society in general as objectively offensive. For example, there are probably still people alive today who use or have used the N word to describe black people without meaning to be offensive, and a couple of generations ago there were probably enough people who used it without meaning to be offensive that it was not considered objectively offensive, but now we recognise that nearly all people it is used about find it offensive, it has passed into our common cultural understanding as being objectively offensive.

I think there is language to describe trans people which should by now be understood by the majority of people as offensive and so could now be said to be objectively offensive (the word which rhymes with granny, for example).

The problem we have is that none of the words used to describe people who are not trans, or women who object to male people in their single sex spaces (e.g. "cis" and "TERF") are yet considered to be objectively offensive. And some trans people also feel subjectively offended by the use of factual descriptors such as "male" and "female", even though these words are not objectively offensive.

Returning to the harassment point, I think if you say something which is objectively offensive then that could form part of a pattern of behaviour constituting harassment, and if you say something to someone which they tell you they find subjectively offensive and you continue to say it without having any legitimate justification for doing so, that could also constitute harassment. So if someone tells you that they consider the words "cis" and "TERF" offensive you should stop using them because there is no real need for these words and there are other ways of identifying the people you are talking about which are not offensive.

And if someone tells you that they find being referred to by their biological sex offensive, I think it could be harassment to keep saying it just to taunt them, e.g. "You are male, you have a penis, you are a man, a MAN!"

But it shouldn't be considered harassment to use factual descriptors in a respectful way where it is relevant to the situation and necessary in order to make your point.

@waterlego

yea I mean gender dysphoria
and like all issues of the mind ie how some one is it's needs diagnosis in my opinion by a physiatrist in my opinion

the people in the trans community pushing for self identification have a point but not when weighed against the other issues.

that also does not mean that anti trans issues have been growing partly due to that mistake by some in the community but also as haters can get away with it more.

Thank you for asking a good point versus the other stuff I have been getting on here.

@LizaBizza Cisgender might not be offensive but it is a completely unnecessary term banded about when just plain man or woman will obviously suffice.

It's like referring to people with hair as 'non-bald' or men as 'non-women' or people with 2 legs as bipedal.

Eg Boris Johnson is a 50 something non bald, non-woman bipedal person vs Boris Johnson is 50 something blond man

Gender Dysphoria is no longer classed as a mental illness, or 'disease of the mind'.

@Talltall do you believe that people with gender dysphoria who were born male should be allowed to use female single sex spaces?

But you do see, don’t you, that it’s impossible to objectively differentiate between well-intentioned transwomen and predatory men?

Oh no! I'd have to feign illness and sneak off to the pub...

But how can it be diagnosed when it's someone saying 'I feel I should be a woman ' or some variant of it?
There are no symptoms as with other illnesses , it really is just about a feeling. And that is just self IDing ; I think I am something therefore I am that.

Thank you for clarifying @Talltall.

Like you, I feel that a person should only claim the label ‘trans’ if they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Unfortunately for you and I, that makes us transphobes.

When you see what actually qualifies as transphobia in the eyes of TRAs and some of the trans community, you perhaps can begin to see why ‘anti trans issues have been growing’, as you put it.

That is to say that, in reality, it’s very unlikely that there has been a huge increase in people taking to the streets to attack and abuse transpeople. Rather, that ordinary people are gaining more awareness of the flaws in the ideology, pointing out the inconsistencies and potential safeguarding issues, and being labelled genocidal bigots as a result.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48448804

'In the latest manual, called the ICD-11, gender incongruence is defined as a marked and persistent incongruence between a person's experienced gender and assigned sex.
In the previous version - ICD-10 - this was considered a gender identity disorder, in the chapter entitled mental and behavioural disorders.
Dr Lale Say, a reproductive health expert at the World Health Organization, said: "It was taken out from mental health disorders because and leaving it there was causing stigma.'