The dreaded issue arose with my son…

[HeadAgainstWall0923]

Today my 9 year old son told me that boys can change to girls, and girls can change to boys, and they can choose whether to be a boy or a girl whenever they want.

When I asked him where he’d heard that he said he’d been told it at school.

I feel so disheartened.

Gender and sex have different definitions therefore I don’t use them interchangeably.

Nobody should be encouraging children to think about gender full stop, unless they can actually explain what gender is and why anyone should care.

There is no 'normal' understandings of those words though.

So, please. Be very clear about this thing that you are advising others to tell there children.

Be very clear what it means to live as a man or a woman. If you cannot be clear, why are you discussing this with authority to a child or advising others to do this?

As far as body modifications, do you believe that a male person who has lost their penis and testicles due to injury or disease, who has a name that is considered feminine who wears unisex clothes is 'living as a woman'? No? Just pronouns? Just some words that they say such as 'I am a woman'? Is that it?

You telling us to 'do our own research' is somehow missing the point that you are posting on the feminism board that is labelled 'sex and gender discussions' and many of us have read the research over many years. You on the other hand, seem to have not really thought this through and believe that telling a child that they can 'live as a man/woman' is acceptable.

What particular safeguarding issues are you concerned about? Can you give examples that have actually materialised?

By the way I don’t know why but the reply functionality isn’t working for me…

But the gender recognition act uses them interchangeably.

And the reason it does so is because gender is not an actual real thing that people have, and so allowing people to legally change this entirely imaginary thing that nobody actually has would have no actual consequences, so what the legislation does is allow people to change their legal SEX (which is obviously nonsensical because nobody can change their actual sex) but they have called it gender in the hope that everyone just nods and says "that makes sense" because they're too embarrassed to admit that it doesn't make any sense to them whatsoever.

People's biology remains with them through life. Chromosomes don't change, bodies revert if you stop hormone treatment.

By law, some people transition to be legally considered a different sex to the one they were born as.

So I believe people can change sex legally and socially, but not biologically. Other people believe biology is irrelevant, I'm not one of them.

If you teach your child people stay the same sex throughout life then Uncle Julian becomes Auntie Julia, what are you going to say? That's wrong and a lie and don't talk to that person?

Please give the definitions. Really, you continue to be very vague about this. Why?

You have been advising people on how transphobic the UK is and this is a discussion thread on how to discuss gender identity with children. If you actually cannot put these things into words on this thread, why do you expect any parent to be able discuss these issues with children appropriately?

The fact that we have now lost the ability to keep male people (any male people) out of women's spaces, for a start.

You say that Uncle Julian would like us to refer to him as Auntie Julia and pretend he is a woman from now on.

I think most here are more than aware of the reasons and motives for transition. We've been researching, meeting, listening, learning about this for years.

The issue we have is the impact of this concept on the rest of society - and particularly on women and and girls, and on children more generally. This is not a nice, fluffy kind movement. It is potentially deeply damaging and most often rooted in mental health struggles or in struggles with life generally. It requires'safe spaces' and continual validation. It is not secure in itself. It requires everyone to conform to its edicts. It is inherently fragile. And very authoritarian.

For some ( an increasing number) it is about sexual fetish. And that is a major problem for women and girls. This is an ideology with radical and transgressive intent.

'they’d look like a woman (if they were born a man'] - they don't though. So this is lying to a child, and encouraging them to mistrust the very deeply ingrained ability to differentiate between the sexes.

We recently had a male (with just altered hair and skirt - is that what you mean by gender?) proud to be walking through teen girls changing rooms

A parent on here raised it on here as their Dc did not have the power to say anything

It was picked up by the press and thankfully safeguarding was put in place

I don’t know where you are but we cannot check who has GRC or not. Males who haven’t agonised over the big changes you list or been through checks can enter female spaces and do

You don’t have to be an expert to give advice or participate in these forums, evidenced by many of the comments. You asked me what I think it is to “live as a man”, and I shared my thoughts. But, as said a first person account (or several) would of course be more accurate - because I’m not trans.

Despite denials, there is a transphobic undercurrent in this thread. If people cannot accept the difference between gender/sex as literally defined, then this discussion is fruitless.

Continue in your echo chamber 😊

Gender has always existed and has always been played with and always been interesting and always will be.

Eg in the Middle East, many men wear perfume and hold hands with their male friends in the street. These things are seen as entirely compatible with being manly, in the UK they would be seen as non-conforming with a male gender identity. Nothing to do with biology.

In many cultures historically, women were the ones to wash and prepare bodies for burial and this was seen as being a female-gendered task. Again, nothing to do with biology. In more recent history undertaking was gendered as a male profession and female undertakers are non-stereotypical.

You might as well tell children not to look at the world around them as not to notice gender roles, it's just part of culture.

You may be interested to read this - written by an 'old school' transsexual:

"The term transsexual was defined as a medical one and was what appeared in all my early medical files when I was sent from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital and into psychiatric units.

By the time I got to the point of surgery - always the end of the process and after several years of other therapy first back then - something had shifted. As you were asked to sign a waiver before they consented to do the surgery that you understood that it was not changing sex but reassigning gender.

I was told by the psychiatrist about to pass me onto the surgeon that this was a legal requirement because the law would not recognise any change of sex and he was sure never would as he had just gone to court to give evidence to help annul a transsexual's marriage to a man as illegal on those grounds.

So gender was introduced into the nomenclature not for any reason other than to give a separation from sex.

This is probably why transsexuals have always been realistic about this concept of changing sex. We had to get that before we passed that point. If we didn't then you were not taken further.

I would guess based on how many people today seem not to get this biological reality within the transgender community that it is not part of the treatment path nowadays.

After I was signed off by Charring Cross in the early 80s (they only did two or three years follow up after my final surgery) I was basically left alone and never really asked about the subject again, even by GPs, though, of course, I told them all every time I moved to a new area. I did not even see my notes until 2004 when my GP wanted to check them with me during the application for a GRC and I discovered that they wrongly claimed I had had breast enhancement. I had been offered it on the NHS in 1980 but had turned it down.

All the records still used the term transsexual. I never even heard the term transgender until all the stories started appearing on Digital Spy where I had posted regularly on media matters and the subject had suddenly become something everyone was talking about. But calling it transgender.

That's when I first started searching the net to find out what was going on, joined the only non fanatical forum I could find (Angels) and started catching up on what had been going on over the past decades whilst I was getting on with living.

Whenever I used the word transsexual I was reminded not to, just as I was told to use terms like Cis and Terf. I looked into what these meant as I had no idea and quickly decided they were needless or provocative so I was not going to follow that pattern. But transgender or trans for short seemed a harmless enough word and I thought, as transsexual emphasised the misconception of 'sex change' perhaps it was a sensible modification.

The reclamation independently seeming to happen now appears to be happening partly out of distancing to some degree, but also I think because it emphasises that in our case - whilst the biological reality is understood - it always was about changing as far as possible the sex characteristics of the body. And not about expressing a girly gender identity, or indeed any kind of lifestyle preference or interest in clothes or hobbies.

For some gender expression very much seems to be what it is about. I think for transsexuals it is about the body. Probably why there is very little interest in physical transition by those transgender and it is really more about expressing personality in a way they find more comfortable.

So without presuming different causes or origins as we are still guessing on those with any of us - I think there are two very different focal points of what we seem to be doing about it.

Reclaiming transsexual just seems to have occurred to a few people at the same time as a way to point that out"

Nicely conceding there

If you cannot back up your posts with definitions and reason bow out

Here is a direct result of forcing through the replacement of single sex toilets with 'gender neutral' toilets.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11873283/Traumatised-13-year-old-girl-attacked-boy-gender-neutral-school-toilet.html

I suggest you look up Loudon County in the USA but be aware it discusses a child being raped by a transitioned teen male in the gender neutral school toilets.

Other safeguarding issues arise with school trips away. Where parents of males who have transitioned, or even female children, insist that that child is accommodated with their 'gender' not their sex.

Plus there is the sport issue. And not just changing rooms where male people under 'gender' segregation are welcomed, by those not actually having to share the space, into the female communal changing room.

And there is a safety issue too

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12204921/High-school-volleyball-players-speaks-transgender-athlete-issue.html#:~:text=A%20transgender%20rival%20from%20Highlands,I%20am%20still%20recovering%20from.

I am happy to get you studies that show from 6 years old that male children are stronger and faster on average than their female peers. There are now three across school children studies from three different countries that all conclude the same.

We understand what you mean by sex and gender - but most here have an issue with the whole concept, and with its implications - let alone " accept it".

I wouldn’t say that trans women look like women.

I would say they change their appearance to try and look like women but speaking honestly, most of us can visually tell the difference between a trans-woman and a woman.

If you teach your child people stay the same sex throughout life then Uncle Julian becomes Auntie Julia, what are you going to say? That's wrong and a lie and don't talk to that person?

'People can't change sex, but they can have their bodies surgically changed to look like the opposite sex.' (This is more or less what my mother said to me when I read about Jan Morris's so-called 'sex change' when I was a child.)

It would be a lie to say that they can change sex. I think it would be wrong to lie to a child in this way. What do you think? Do you think that whether or not people can change sex is just an opinion and all opinions are equally valid?

Personality and self expression have always existed, and teenage rebellion too - now it is being re-framed as 'gender' as part of a larger post modernistic theory that is known as 'Queer Theory'. This arose in the late 1980 and 1990's.

Yes, gender roles vary across time, society and culture - but that doesn't mean that one has to conform to gender roles - certainly not in our society. We now live at a time of maximum personal expression; there are few hard rules for how males and females are expected to behave.

Sex remains, though, and has effect and consequence. This effects, consequences and implications are especially important for women and girls ( females).

I met a transwoman wanking in the ladies' toilet when I was aged seventeen. Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Oh, is that you away? Cheerie-bye, then.

I was going to ask:

'If people cannot accept the difference between gender/sex as literally defined'

'literally defined' - by whom, and where? The Scottish government says there is no difference between the two terms.

I think this is for @Justtochat

But that is hugely concerning

I have dc and yes I’d want safeguarding against that