Anyone in the middle?

[piesforever]

All I see on here is GC rants. I am in the middle, I support trans people but do agree they shouldn't take part in gender specific sport, and there needs to be more caution in "changing gender" for sure, especially hormones and surgery for young people. I do agree some are troubled or young people, who are hating puberty or have had some trauma. Let's support them overall though, it must be horrible whatever the outcome. Anyone else feel a bit of sympathy to both "sides"? In fact, why are there sides, we need to find common ground and help each other!! Instead of being furious all the time. It's not healthy.

Most people I've specifically spoken to agree on the sports thing and are unsure on the rest.

This is genuinely one of the things I find most depressing in this. People who can see that males competing against females is unfair but seem less sure that females being incarcerated with convicted male sex offenders (and that's not a hypothetical - it is part of the (unchanged) Scottish Prison Service Policy) is also obviously unfair and unsafe.

Vulnerable women in prison (as an example, 80% of Scottish women prisoners have suffered a previous head injury, mostly due to domestic violence) seem not to be worth the concern.

I am quite open about the fact I believe you cannot change sex but support gender non- conformity and abolishing stereotypes. I have had a lot of men and women speak to me on this issue and there is a lot of concern about the gender identity movement. However most will not say it out loud

Wear a skirt. Wear make up. Get yourself some fake boobs and chop your willy off. I'll call you her/she and Julie if you'd like me to and work alongside you quite happily.
But you're not a woman, and never will be and I don't want you running against me in the 100m dash

Perhaps then you are in a lucky position where it simply doesn’t impact you at the moment. How lucky are you.

Meanwhile the rest of us with primary school age children and adolescents, particularly those with female children, ARE impacted and are discussing it regularly. We are discussing it with our schools, with scouts and guide leaders, with sports teams and such.

And we are asking for advice because it is our children who are questioning.

But not only that, there are workplace issues such as friends who are fearful of their jobs as teachers and academics, GPS and nurses and many other professions, for saying anything that might result in complaints and job losses. There are people
on this board who have to deal with unique situations where employees get special treatment because of their gender identity and as colleagues and staff they have to negotiate this, sometimes to the detriment of the team because a large corporate employer cannot risk being taken to court by that employee getting special treatment.

The impacts on people’s lives are growing. You asked about ‘middle ground’ yet seem to have much the same opinion as most posters. Yet you still seem to think you are different.

Maybe it is because your life is not yet impacted. Perhaps since you consider it a non-issue you won’t even realise that others you seem to (still not clear as to what you consider ‘middle’ vs ‘extreme’) think are not middle have done the work for you already for when you are in a situation when it might have or it will impact you.

Why start a thread you don’t seem to be interested in? Or engage with?

Have you even read it?

@piesforever

What is the middle between a woman being any personality in a female body, and a certain type of personality in any body? Because it seems to me any "middle" here means agreeing at least some personality traits can turn a man into a woman, or move him to a"middle ground" where he is a bit "womanny".

The assertion that some mental traits make a man more like a woman than he is other men isn't a nice neutral middle, it's a bad sexist middle. Because one end of your scale is the sexist belief that certain personalities align with each sex, and one end is the belief that they don't. Every step you take away from the latter and towards the first is a step into sexism, a step into delegitimising female experiences and female voices.

We told you a billion times already: the "template" you are trying to force on women, is an outdated, misogynist, dangerous stereotype. Stop it.

You are a trans woman (that is: Man) and you need therapy to accept the reality of your life.

I’m a man. I don’t like a lot of what is often expected of men in our society - though I am more free to be a relatively gentle man than I was in my youth, because, largely thanks to the better aspects of second wave feminism, gender stereotypes had become less powerful by this century. As for history, yes, men have been responsible for a lot of very damaging behaviour.

My response to that is to try and recognise when I am behaving, or about to behave, badly (and indeed when I have behaved badly in the past) and to modify my behaviour. How would trying to be, or pretending to be, a woman help with that? I am the same person whether or not I adopt feminine stereotypes. I suppose it might make a tiny difference round the edges. Perhaps wearing camouflage and carrying a bowie knife would marginally encourage ultra masculine behaviour. But it would not alter my fundamental personality. In fact I would look a complete prat, because my personality is not a macho one.

I have no choice about being a man, and neither do you, no matter how much we wish that we were not associated with all the other men. So our real options are all about how we actually behave as men. If you find it helpful to dress more like most women and less like most men in our society, that’s no great problem. But you will be fooling no-one, not even yourself. The transgender people I know, transmen and transwomen, appear to be trying to fool themselves. Even that level of attempted deception causes some damage to those who love them; my own family is being messed up. But when transgender people try to deceive those around them, the damage can be much greater. This is why the Scottish transwoman butcher who abducted and assaulted a girl was excoriated by the judge for abducting her while dressed as a woman.

So I see this thread has turned into me, me, me part 2 by Alpha. Same old regurgitated shite. There's also a reason why they keep insisting they love the way women's clothes feel and it's been mentioned already.

I meant to ask on the other thread why they used the name Alpha if they are so against Alpha males (and the bizarre people they quote when referencing male traits) but I dont really give a fuck any more cos I'm not kind and lovely and fluffy and whatever other shit I'm supposed to be.

It boils down to narcissism. Alpha mentioned upthread that they lacked emotional intelligence. Aye. And self awareness. The sort of thick skin I've only ever seen on blokes.

There is no middle ground here. The TRAs have made sure of that.

Alpha, I'm going to say this as kindly as I can. I understand that you see that there are too many men who've wreaked havoc on the world, assaulted others and cared only for themselves. What you don't understand is that you could have chosen, and still can, to be one of the men who does things differently. There are plenty. But by trying to force and insulting, narrow and unfounded assumption of stereotypes and by trying to emotionally manipulate your way onto women's short lists, you are being one of the men who care only for themselves. You have talked in some detail about your feelings but have completely ignored all the feelings of the women here. Go back and properly read their posts.Answer their questions in respectful ways (which means never using stereotypes or telling us what women feel like). If you want to be better than the men you despise, some prioritising yourself and start thinking of others. You are acting out male privilege. You can do all of this in whatever clothes you want but unless you accept that you have no right to any female space ansld no right to ever ever ever speak to the female experience, you are just another male aggressor.

On the AMA there was (I feel) a very key post.

That a young boy was told to stop doing something because “men don’t do that.” By an adult, I assume a teacher.

from an outside perspective it seems that an adult, authority figure, one who we look to to give FACTUAL information was making a direct link that a behaviour exhibited by a boy was not, in fact the behaviour of a boy. The next step seems to have been to assume if not a boy, must be really a girl.

I find this really reductive and harmful.

We don’t say to kids “nice children don’t pick their noses.” Why? Because all kids pick their noses and even though it’s gross we don’t want to reinforce the idea that a behaviour has any bearing on whether the child is nice or not. We give positive affirmations to make kids feel better about themselves and we are careful with our language to not stigmatise ordinary things, because kids take stuff to heart and internalise negative comments and then view themselves negatively.

So I would not say to a kid “girls don’t do that!” Or “boys don’t do that!” Because I don’t want that child to think there’s something wrong with them.

Yet we seem to be moving ever closer to a time where clocking a little boy doing something associated with femininity requires us to affirm that means they are a girl. This is the total opposite from what we should be doing and have been doing for a relatively short while.

How different would your life have been had the adult said “that’s a lovely daisy chain, Alpha! Well done!” rather than gendering it? We can’t know, just another way of looking at it.

It’s very rare that you see entire threads discussing women’s view of themselves. Their relationships, yea, but their personalities, rarely or never.

Good point.

Looking at this poster's MN history, they post a lot about this issue, always saying there are more important things & we must get the Tories out.

How very surprising.

from an outside perspective it seems that an adult, authority figure, one who we look to to give FACTUAL information was making a direct link that a behaviour exhibited by a boy was not, in fact the behaviour of a boy.

Boys clearly do do that, because the adult said it to a boy doing it.

The seed of dishonesty - denying what is in front of you by explaining it away as not what appears ( a boy being sensitive, for example) but what other people claim to know is the "real" situation ("real" boys don't do that) - is planted early on.

"Trust in me when I say what a boy is, not what you know yourself to be"

I recognise that lifelong, visceral gender dysphoria is real, & respect that may be your experience, Alpha. But I find it fascinating how conditions that are psychological, maybe physiological, interact with society & culture.

This is true of depression & anxiety, for example, which may be catalysed, or aggravated, by an individual’s response to largely arbitrary societal & cultural constructs - I must feel this / do that, or I’m in some way inadequate.

A thought experiment I find helpful in distinguishing between what society demands of us & who we fundamentally are - how artificial & ephemeral some of the demands we perceive as „real“ are - is to compare today‘s values with those of 50, 100, 500 years ago.

I‘ve applied this to standards of masculinity & femininity before, but something just struck me reading an early post re: the hard-as-nails women of the Relationship boards. It’s so obvious, we all know it, but somehow staring it in the face just now brought into stark relief for me how utterly artificial these ideals of softness & delicacy in particular are. 99.99% of women in the history of the world have spent their lives doing intense man-(see that there?)ual labour, wading through mud & shit, up to their elbows in sweat & blood. The idea that the ideal woman is in diametrical opposition to this is a class-& culture-driven male-gaze fairytale we’re still labouring under now - a grotesque distortion of what domestic responsibilities & bringing up a family really mean.

I've just read through that AMA thread.

It's enlightening in one way. If my autistic teenage girl self had read it, she'd have been screaming that she must be a man or non-binary or just anything other than a woman, because she did not have an emotional submissive ladybrain and the idea that adults out there might assume she did because she was wearing a dress ('presenting as a woman') would have been absolutely abhorrent.

She wouldn't have realised that almost any other woman would say the same. But if young women today are exposed to this kind of sexist nonsense at an impressionable age, no wonder so many want to opt out of womanhood.

What on earth is 'being treated like a woman'?

from upthread:
-getting dragged into a dingy room and having one of the most sensitive parts of your body cut off with less-than-clean scissors/rusty razor blade
-being paid 13% less for doing the same job
-vulnerable to rape at all times
-not being allowed a mortgage in your own name despite earning more than your husband (my mum, in the 70s)
-not being allowed your own bank account without a man signing it off (father or husband. my mum in the 70s)
-having to give up your job for being pregnant (my mum in the 60s, several of my mates in the 80s in the military)
-not being allowed to be around men who are not related to you (several religions even now - and these women are excluded from public life when people like @AlphaTransWoman - who is oh so kind - state they will use the women's toilets. Women who are subject to these religious constraints are now stuck at home with no outside interaction.)
-being blamed for being drunk/wearing a short skirt/being out at night, especially if something happens to you
-when something awful happens, knowing that you will be investigated as much as if not more than your rapist, who will likely not get as far as court and if he does will probably get off, and if he is convicted will get a ridiculously light (maybe not even custodial) sentence
-overlooked for promotion
-placed on the "mommy track" even if you never have children and never want to
-are talked over in meetings

ad nauseam ad infinitum

@piesforever well done for plopping with your ridiculous OP. We have yet another chance to show that "be kind" and "compromise" only hurts women and only gives men an even bigger slice of the pie than they already have.

I thought I recognised the name. I am all up for a robust and evidenced debate.

But this seemed to be just another way of dishonestly saying, I kind of agree but you are all so blunt and seem to be obsessed that I cannot be seen as anything like you. The complete lack of interaction then seemed like they were expecting to be have all those ‘extreme’ posts but realised that so many were saying that the OP was actually like many of the regular posters whether they wanted to admit it or not. It is all then about the ‘how to achieve the outcomes’ and then no input from the OP. Just a cheery ambiguous post to flounce away leaving the impression that they are some kind of unique moderate.

That's what I find so disingenuous about trans women saying they want to be treated like women.

What they mean is:

• they want people to respect them and their identities
• they want people to care about their feelings
• they don't want to be discriminated against e.g. in the workplace because of who they are
• they don't want to have to worry about being particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual assault
• they want people to address them using the names and titles they have chosen for themselves, rather than the ones others in society feel are more appropriate

This is not being treated like a woman.

This is being treated like a man.

What they mean is they want everyone to say they are women whilst continuing to enjoy the respect and privilege that men enjoy.

They do not actually want to be treated like women. The treatment they complain about and claim is "transphobia" is actually more like the treatment women have to deal with every day only we don't get any special sympathy because of it.

Great post Brefugee. I'd also add that as soon as you are considered as no longer fuckable by men, you become totally invisible.

I don't accept that a man who claims to believe men are awful so I must be a woman is demonstrating any honesty or decency by then subjecting women and girls to a man in their changing rooms
Only the most naive would believe that bullshit

AlphaTransWoman said 'I know I'm not a man. I don't fit that template.'

What is the template of being a 'man?'

I would argue that it is pretty simple. 1, you are human. 2, you are male. 3, you live long enough to become an adult.

As I have read others say, everything else is just personality.

While it's unrealistic to want to be treated as a woman when you're a man, (I assume the meaning here is to be legitimately seen as a woman and yes that will involve different treatment in certain ways), I don't think there is anything wrong with the desire. I mean yeah, sure, it may be a mental health issue, but other than that.

I don't doubt that at least some trans people, if they magically could, would make the switch, even if they have to give up certain male advantages.