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.

This is another thing where I don't agree about what it means to be "in the middle". As if being "in the middle" is a nice comfy place where we can all be reasonable and agreeable.

I'll tell you who has really been dropped right in the middle and that's the parents. This middle is a horrible place to be, full of conflict and contradictions and fears. Mothers don't get to say they don't care about boys and men who become transwomen, mothers don't get to say "I don't have time to indulge males", because mothers don't get to not care what happens to our own children. And mothers don't get to stop caring about ourselves and other women, our daughters, sisters, friends, mothers, either.

This is not a nice calm reasonable place. This is a mindfuck.

Some mothers get to imagine that their son "really is" the other sex especially if their child has been saying this for years, which must be a kind of comfort if they can ignore or reconcile to the physical consequences of transition. But other mothers raise a little boy like any other who decides he's "really" a girl later on and then backfills the past. And no matter how their children got there, mothers who remember the past and fear for the future are stuck right in the middle between being rejected as transphobes by one side and despised as child abusers or dupes by the other.

There now, I have had my rant, and it wasn't even a GC rant. piesforever has never been "in the middle" of anything at all. As you were.

Yes.

Women ought to try liberating themselves from people pleasing once in a while. It's genuinely astonishing how much difference it makes if you even try it.

The thing is that we are so far squeezed into the naice box that it feels hugely rude to just not pander.

It's very difficult, but I do think this is the key to feminism - women finding their way to owning power. I think unlearning the damaging effects of socialisation can take a very long time. And progress might be uneven and back and forth.

Noticing all the baked in messages that pop up to tell you you're rude, bossy, unreasonable, unpleasant, unlikable, not a good girl, not nice. And learning that many of them are diminishing and inaccurate. Women genuinely occupying the middle ground is rare. We often do an awful lot of smoothing, checking, peace-making, social frilliness. Most of the time this is fine and oils the wheels, but it's worth looking at how it sucks time and energy, and what it does to our self image. And worth wondering about how life might look if we just .... didn't.

I find it difficult to trust the trans narrative because over the years the reason has changed, but the solution has stayed constant.

Distress with their own genitals, a dsd, childhood trauma, gender identity, brain sex different to sex, sex as a spectrum, personality traits, sex is impossible to define, therefore can only be self defined.

All different but all requiring that the man be treated as if they were a woman by everyone around them, never anything else.

Now even trying to establish a diagnosis is seen as conversion therapy and wrong. They couldn't be stating more explicitly that there arent reasons, just that some men should be treated as if they are women.

Women ought to try liberating themselves from people pleasing once in a while. It's genuinely astonishing how much difference it makes if you even try it.

The thing is that we are so far squeezed into the naice box that it feels hugely rude to just not pander.

It's very difficult, but I do think this is the key to feminism - women finding their way to owning power. I think unlearning the damaging effects of socialisation can take a very long time. And progress might be uneven and back and forth.

Noticing all the baked in messages that pop up to tell you you're rude, bossy, unreasonable, unpleasant, unlikable, not a good girl, not nice. And learning that many of them are diminishing and inaccurate. Women genuinely occupying the middle ground is rare. We often do an awful lot of smoothing, checking, peace-making, social frilliness. Most of the time this is fine and oils the wheels, but it's worth looking at how it sucks time and energy, and what it does to our self image. And worth wondering about how life might look if we just .... didn't.

Completely.

@ArabellaScott

Women ought to try liberating themselves from people pleasing once in a while. It's genuinely astonishing how much difference it makes if you even try it.

The thing is that we are so far squeezed into the naice box that it feels hugely rude to just not pander.

It's very difficult, but I do think this is the key to feminism - women finding their way to owning power. I think unlearning the damaging effects of socialisation can take a very long time. And progress might be uneven and back and forth.

Noticing all the baked in messages that pop up to tell you you're rude, bossy, unreasonable, unpleasant, unlikable, not a good girl, not nice. And learning that many of them are diminishing and inaccurate. Women genuinely occupying the middle ground is rare. We often do an awful lot of smoothing, checking, peace-making, social frilliness. Most of the time this is fine and oils the wheels, but it's worth looking at how it sucks time and energy, and what it does to our self image. And worth wondering about how life might look if we just .... didn't.

Yes. It doesn't really matter if we call it people-pleasing or being agreeable (as in psychological measures) or wanting to be inclusive and kind or fair and noble etc. This behaviour does make a difference when it is more common among women than among men, and contributes to unfair final outcomes on the societal level.

Sometimes I think that watching the gender identity debates online is like having a seat at the audience of the initial origin play How Women Were Subjugated In The First Place. It's not the whole story or even the main plot of that play, but it must have contributed to the sex-based hierarchies that are still so visible in this world, in some countries glaringly so.

And I do know that being assertive or defending one's own rights is judged differently when the person doing this is female. We are expected to be nice (and not selfish or cold!) and have permeable boundaries (or none), and if we deviate from that expectation we are punished more harshly than most male people are. So speaking up can be tough, not trying to be the soother or peacekeeper can be tough. But it might be good to pay more attention to when these roles are unfairly assigned on a permanent basis.

I'm finding this thread really interesting, and it's giving me lots of pointers. Particular thanks to @BonfireLady and @FlirtsWithRhinos - I am hopeful we can get somewhere positive if we keep talking to each other.

On the question of finding middle ground, I have a tentative suggestion. To put it mildly, I'm getting the impression many of you don't equate the kind of "womanhood" I aspire to with membership of the female sex. I get it. So my perception of what I want to be maybe needs a new name because "woman" already means something else.

However, there's a difference between me claiming someone else's social label and rejecting one I really don't want to wear. In my case, the idea of being "male" or a "man" has so much negativity attached to it that it is a burden I simply cannot bear. It's a cage I need to stay out of in order to thrive.

Which comes to a kind of third identity - a species of non-binary, I suppose. In other words a space where people who don't want to be men or women can find a refuge, and then campaign for recognition, third spaces and dignity. It also doesn't come with any rules about what sort of body you have to have or what clothes you can wear within the reasonable. But the "man" and "woman" box are reserved for people born there who are happy with those identities.

Obviously there's a lot of side issues around that to resolve, but in principle is it something that could work?

Personally I think that sounds like a very reasonable middle ground.

Think the trans community would go for it?

Bits of it might, particularly if it becomes clear the status quo is unacceptable to women and we need a viable alternative. It's certainly worth exploring.

This is pretty much what Germaine Greer described in the Female Eunuch in 1970.

She talks about how 'femininity' has nothing to do with women, per se.

Safeguarding depends on knowing the age and sex of everyone.

For this reason, men shouldnt get to hide their sex behind a false identity.

@ZuttZeVootEeeVo

Suppose third gender people were regarded as being in the same risk category as men from a safeguarding perspective, while being entitled to separate accommodation from men in hospital etc. Where's the additional risk in that situation?

I'm with @MargotBamborough
Definitely worth exploring.

It's incredibly tough because it involves two different core beliefs sitting alongside each other: a) the belief that we all have a gender identity and b) the belief that we don't (or the legally protected belief that sex is immutable, following the Forstater case).

From each vantage point the belief is an absolute truth. One of the reasons I use religious belief as an analogy is because faith involves the feeling of certainty: "I have faith, I am certain, it's a truth". However, each religion acknowledges that not everyone believes in this "truth" and instead, laws are organised around what is obervable, measurable without bias or statistically proven.

That's a very roundabout way of me saying that the "middle ground" is only achievable if laws are organised around sex (observable at birth) and not gender identity (a belief that some people hold to make sense of why each sex has noticeably observable stereotypical patterns).

Accommodating anything like this culturally would be a huge shift for ALL concerned. To say the least. The "demands" from each side are pretty concrete. I'm happy to be corrected if I've missed something but think the GC side can be summarised pretty easily: gender identity belief can't be enforced as a truth and the words woman/girl and man/boy are taken. It's the enforced belief that results in transwomen identifying across women's boundaries (sports, refuges, toilets etc) and in children being confused about their bodies.

As for words: personally I'm happy to use transwoman. Because a) according to my belief, transwomen aren't women and that creates a separation between women and transwomen b) it accommodates the space to respect a belief in gender identity (should a non-believer in gender identity wish to do so, similar to how I can choose to write God or god as an atheist).

It's rather utopian imagining that this could be achieved but to even be batting it about online (in what is a pretty full-on thread in places!) is interesting in itself.

This sounds fine to me, with the caveat of actually being able to provide it. Let's say in a hospital you have men's respiratory wards, men's cancer wards, women's cancer wards etc - how can this reasonably be provisioned for the tiny numbers of trans people who would fit in each category?

Why do men need to two separate spaces?

When a man is a risk to other men in hospitals or prisons, that man can be isolated for the safety of the other men.

Suppose third gender people were regarded as being in the same risk category as men from a safeguarding perspective, while being entitled to separate accommodation from men in hospital etc. Where's the additional risk in that situation?

Well, do you mean male third gender people or female third gender people? From a safeguarding perspective you can't accommodate them together.

And behaviourally you'll probably find the difference runs all the way through every social grouping, not just safeguarding. I don't know if anyone's sat and counted communication differences between nonbinary men and nonbinary women but it would be a surprise if there weren't any.

So that's four categories not three.

Are transmen going to be happy to be lumped in with transwomen and vice versa?

I suspect that female nonbinary-identifying people will face the same societal treatment as female people, in general, and male nonbinary-identifying people the same societal treatment as male people, in general, unless they take a lot of cross-sex hormones and/or have surgery.

So in something like the gender gap in earnings lumping all nonbinary into one category (if data was gathered only on gender identity and all of us would be forced to have one) the average for that group would probably come in the middle between average male and female earnings, but it probably would not mean that nonbinary people face some middle level of discrimination/privilege at work, but that the female people in that group earn less than the male people in that group. And so on for other topics such as sexual violence.

This is one of the reasons why erasing the female sex from language and law is dangerous for feminist work. Other than the erasure of only one sex in that way which is what we are still seeing, because that, in itself, shows how sexist the ideology is.

I realise I didn't talk about third spaces again in what I said above. I'm still in support of that as a principle that could be explored on a trial basis as per my previous comments.
Toilets are the easy bit as that's individual "accommodation" anyway.
The more difficult part is actual accommodation where this is sex- segregated, including hospitals. Finding a workable "third spaces" approach wouldn't be easy but I can't believe it'd be impossible.

In all cases, the first step would be the shared stated intention that this was the goal - that's the compromise and middle ground.

However distressed a male person may be by their reality of being male, that is the reality. And disguising and hiding that reality may make them feel better but causes all sorts of issues for everyone else once it gets beyond the inside of their head and onto paperwork and groups and spaces.

I am absolutely for third spaces - not every one is, that's fair enough - but to me that's the answer. Call yourself what you like, if you don't want to be with those of your own sex, I want you to have privacy, dignity, safety. Just not to remove resources from others and reduce their lives to improve your own. Accessible, comfortable spaces for all.

But the fact stands that male people are male, and this has to be recorded and clear and faced up to in situations where sex matters. Where this is a cause of intense distress for the male person I am not unsympathetic, but the answer is psychological support and dealing with the sources of that distress. Not requiring everyone else to run around trying to help you escape that reality.

My two pennies' worth, based on what I said above about basing laws on the observable (sex) rather than the belief (gender identity).

1. Dignity for gender identity should considered for accommodation in the same way as any other belief e.g. women who wear hijabs being examined in hospital as part of their treatment
2. everyone is covered by spaces segregated by sex. The choice is whether to "opt out" in to a third space e.g. a women (sex) who identifies as non-binary can choose whether to use the facilities commensurate with sex or the third space. This decision would be a personal one, with it being incumbent on the individual to weigh up the risks and benefits of opting out of the sex-segrated space
3. there would be some nuances to cover off e.g. a transwoman (identity/belief) in a separate space in a men's (sex) ward. Personally I'd use side rooms on a trial basis to see how this did or didn't work. I'm aware that there have been lots of discussions about this and there is no perfect answer

The idea that there is a group of men, who arent classed as men, and therefore cannot even use the same sevices as other men, is the TRA position. It doesnt matter what names they go by - transsexuals, trans, transwomen, trans women, enby, a new name.

This suggestion isnt a new middle ground, its the current demands of TRA.

But the fact stands that male people are male, and this has to be recorded and clear and faced up to in situations where sex matters. Where this is a cause of intense distress for the male person I am not unsympathetic, but the answer is psychological support and dealing with the sources of that distress. Not requiring everyone else to run around trying to help you escape that reality.

Yes. I am not in favour of any attempt to pretend males aren't male. Anyone else can, if they want to, but count me out.

Isn't the current demand to opt in to women's spaces (rather than out of men's)?

It still doesn't work for me. I don't have a woman identity. I genuinely don't know what it feels like to identify as a woman so where would I fit? plus the no rules re clothes, that's just for everyone IMHO. You may have internalised rigid rules about what clothes men and women can wear but don't assume everyone else has. I'd want that openess to applybto everyone.

Thank you for recognising how you've been trying to change the definition of woman and the reasons why that's so inappropriate.

@BonfireLady
How do you feel about situations where society treats males more harshly than females on account of (real or perceived) sex differences? Would the third category be entitled to "female" treatment - albeit in separate spaces to females?