School sports

[AlphaTransWoman]

Do you think it is ever acceptable to force a child assigned male at birth to participate in contact sports at school such as football or rugby. If so do you appreciate the distress this may cause to children born with a male body who have a female gender identity?

You're clearly not listening to a single one of the women on this thread (total mystery as to why), so here's Professor Sir Robert Winston, who says your sex is embedded in every single cell of your body. Including brain cells.

Quite.

the only thing that makes my brain a female brain is that it’s inside my female skull, which is attached to my female body.

@SpiderMaam

Genuine question for you if you think there's no such thing as a male or female brain.

Why do you think gendered socialisation sometimes "fails" and produces individuals who feel they belong to the opposite sex?

The OP filled a previous thread where he also just went on and on about the same thing, completely ignoring everyone who bothered to respond.

In the end it comes down to clothes, hair and make up, as it always does.

He no more has a human female brain than my cat does.

OP's previous drivel.

People feeling they don't have to fit into ridged roles based on thier sex has been the hard fought battle of feminism for a very very long time. It doesn't mean that a person is born in the wrong body.

I think you were made to feel that you weren't 'good enough' at being male, that you couldn't meet the stereotypes and that this has caused a disconnect between you and your body, men are good at /enjoy rugby, I am not/ don't therefore I'm not a man. I want to make daisy chains but that's what girls do so I must be girl.
I think we need to stop forcing stereo types onto children and acknowledge that their sex is their sex regardless of their likes and dislikes.
I certainly don't think that when an embryo is created by a sperm meeting an egg that some extra force reaches into a box of brains and pops one into said embryo but that sometimes this mystical purveyor of brains gets it wrong and pops a girl brain into a boy embryo or vice versa because that is not how the process works the body and the brain develop together from the same two cells so they can't not match.

Wizards?

I am really not sure you can get more offensive.

You have a male brain in your male body. Unless you can produce the evidence that you have a female brain, I would stop repeating this pseudoscience. Even physiologically your brain is male and that doesn’t change. It is shaped differently to fit a male skull and it has more robust brain fibres.

And you don’t have any of the genetic coding that female brains have that then control hormone flow throughout the body etc.

People get all sorts of wrong ideas about themselves. Look at the glass delusion, or anorexia. An anorexic is in no way fat, they're dangerously underweight, there is no grain of truth in their self-image. They don't have a fat brain, they have a mistaken brain, they've got a wrong idea stuck in their heads in such a way it feels like a deep truth and it's incredibly hard to get rid of. And obviously nobody ever actually had a body made from glass, or even a glass brain.

Is it a failure of male socialisation even? Sometimes it seems /very/ male socialisation. Trying to mansplain what being a woman is, to women. Treading all over women's boundaries and never stopping to think how that will affect others. And very much a male gaze idea of what a woman is.

Then my idea of being a woman is just getting on with being a person while inhabiting a female body. The less concessions you make to female socialisation the better really, it tends to be oppressive.

I didn’t say that at all.

I said I HAVE a female brain, in my female skull, attached to my female body.

Sex is made up of chromosomes, gonads, genitals and gametes.

My brain has the same female chromosomes as my female heart has.

Female brains exist, because female bodies exist.

But having a female brain and a female body doesn’t mean you don’t want to play rugby, it just means you play rugby with and against other female people to ensure safety and preserve fairness.

Female brains ONLY exist in female bodies and having a female brain doesn’t mean you automatically like pink frilly crap.

As for why some people believe things that are patently untrue, I don’t have a scooby doo.

But obviously people are prone to believing in made up stuff or we wouldn’t have religions.

I’m a gender atheist - I feel the same way about men with imaginary lady-brains as I do about people who believe that the earth is flat or that some bloke managed to get two of every animal on a home made wooden boat.

I think you should be able to show you are exercising outside school.

I hated PE but I went to Ju-Jitsu twice a week (3 hours total) and swimming afterwards. There should be a way of a sport / martial arts instructor to sign off on exercise.

My one 'fun' moment though was when the PE teacher told us to do 10 sit up. A couple of mins later she asked me why I'd stopped, I said I'd finished so she told me to do 10 more, so I did.

As part of a Ju-Jitsu warm up we regularly did 20-30 sit ups.

I have to admit that I don't know a lot about chess but I assume the decision to have separate categories for men and women has nothing to do with body strength and everything to do with other factors relating to "gender".

The majority of chess players are male. Chess is a strategy game where the goal is to eliminate members of your opponent's army until their king is fatally exposed and forced to surrender. It involves symbolic killing, which was long regarded as inappropriate for girls, and logical thinking, which girls and women were deemed incapable of. It's the same reasoning which resulted in little boys being given toy soldiers to play with and little girls being given toy dolls.

Of course, there is no prohibition on girls playing chess today, but the perception that chess is a boys' game remains. Men who were taught to play chess by their fathers and grandfathers are more likely to teach it to their sons than their daughters. Women are less likely to have been taught to play chess by their parents or grandparents, and more likely to have been taught to sew or bake instead.

So where do trans people fit in?

Well, somebody who was born male was not socialised as a girl from a young age. If anything, their father might have said, "Trevor, put those dolls down and come and learn to play chess."

For what it's worth, I think the concept of there being "boys' toys" and "girls' toys" is completely wrong, and if there was no stigma attached to little boys playing with dolls, and little girls were given equal opportunities to play chess, there would probably be fewer people with early onset gender dysphoria. I would very much like to see a world where toys are just toys, in which there would be no need for boys' and girls' chess categories, because girls would be just as likely as boys to have been taught to play chess at a young age.

But that is not the world we live in, which is why girls still need specific encouragement to play chess and study STEM subjects and, yes, compete in sports.

And although this is no criticism of you and individual trans people, who I think are victims of gender as much as anyone, I fear that this latest incarnation of gender identity theory is causing society to go backwards, not forwards, in this respect.

A hundred years ago, it was "Dolls are for girls and toy soldiers are for boys, everyone stay in your box." And clearly, girls were being "trained" to be mothers and boys were being "trained" to go to war.

In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s feminists were saying, "No, there is no such thing as girls' toys and boys' toys. Let children play with whatever they like. Boys who play with dolls might be fathers one day and we want them to bond with their kids better than their male ancestors did. Girls might grow up and join the army. Hopefully none of them will be needed on the battlefield. So let children be children and let toys be toys."

And now, in 2023, it's, "If you were assigned male at birth but you like dolls, you may actually be a girl. If you are actually a girl it is vitally important that you get access to drugs to stop your healthy puberty and then as soon as you're a legal adult you can have your penis chopped off."

WTF. How on earth is this progressive?

I'm not even exaggerating, that is literally what happened to Jackie Green.

oh be flippin' told won't you?

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LADY BRAIN. Except the lady brain that resides in the body of an adult human female.

the signal to noise ratio is catastrophic too

I don't think you have a female brain in a male body.

I think you have a male brain in a male body, and a mental health condition which causes you great distress and manifests itself as a belief that you should have been born in a female body.

I believe, but obviously can't prove, that if it were possible to wave a magic wand over you while you sleep tonight and have you wake up in a female body, you would still have dysphoria. I don't know whether it would manifest itself as you believing you should be in a male body, or in some other way, but it would still be there. Because gender dysphoria is a condition which only exists in the mind. Prior to hormones or surgery, your body is utterly unremarkable and no different to that of anyone else of your sex. So why would changing your body fix the problem?

The things you say, and the ideas you express, do not say to me, "This person is a woman." Although I do not believe there is any such thing as a "female brain", per se, I think that broadly speaking there is a shared understanding between female people about what it is like to be female. We can either acknowledge or deny it, but we all understand it on some level. I do not think that someone who had lived their life in a female body would say the things you say about womanhood.

This is important, because even people expressing the same point of view about gender, i.e. trans women, trans men and "trans allies", even as they express these ideas about gender identity and male and female brains and being in the wrong body, they express them differently. The males still come across as male and the females still come across as female.

When trans women express why they feel that they are women, or why they want to be women, they still seem to come across in a very male way. When trans men express why they feel that they are men, or why they want to be men, they still seem to come across in a very female way. Not, I think, because of their brains, but as a result of the fact that they have lived their lives in a particular body and, at least as children, been treated by society as a member of their own sex, and that leaves an indelible mark on them, however much they might want to erase it. And when "trans allies" who identify as "cisgender" express these ideas about gender identity, the men seem to approach it in terms of "trans women should be entitled to whatever they want" whereas the women seem to approach it in terms of "we should all be kind".

It's almost impossible to escape that socialisation. And just look at how women in particular are treated when they try to shed that social obligation to "be kind" and say, "actually, no, what you want is not more important than what we want". They get absolutely vilified.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that although I feel for people suffering from gender dysphoria, a male person with gender dysphoria has nothing in common with a female person without gender dysphoria. Even if these two things were identities, which I dispute, they would not be the same identity. Would they?

how about you work it out for yourself. Over several (tedious) threads now you have been told again and again that gender is a made-up social construct. It has been used as a way to opress the members of the sex-class known as women for millennia.

Feminists say: there is no such thing as gender. If a woman likes martial arts, horror films and rare steak that doesn't make her a man. Even though idiots people who believe in gender would say those are male characteristics. If a man likes fluffy kittens, nail varnish, long hair and silky dresses that makes him a man who likes those things. Not a woman, even though the gender woo idiots some people think those attributes are only for women.

So now. Why do YOU think "gendered socialisation" sometimes fails? (hint: because it's made up)

OP I'm sorry you had such a shit time at school. But don't you think by going on to define yourself by a set of tired old tropes and living a life rigidly ruled by reductive stereotypes that you're aligning yourself with the bullies and proving them right?

It's like telling a kid who's being picked on for wearing glasses that "actually, the bullies have a point! You are a speccy nerd and literally the only career options available to you are IT Guy or librarian!"

Sorry @AlphaTransWoman, I quoted the wrong post there. I meant to quote your 21:26 from yesterday about trans women having lady brains.

As for your follow up question about why gendered socialisation sometimes "fails" and produces people who were born in the wrong body, I think that's the wrong question.

The question is, why do we have gendered socialisation at all?

I think it's very obvious that girls are socialised to put others first and be kind and nurturing because they are the childbearing sex. Before reliable contraception and abortion, girls could expect to spend much of their adult lives pregnant and postpartum, meaning they could not easily occupy other roles in society.

In 2023 I think we should be able to recognise the fact that although it will always be women who get pregnant and give birth, once the baby has been born and particularly after the first few months, it is entirely possible for the baby's other parent to play an equal role in its upbringing. And that women are now more likely to have one or two children, or none at all, than ten or twelve.

With this in mind we should be growing up as a society and recognising that the reasons for gendered socialisation no longer apply to the extent that they once did, and that all children, male or female, should be encouraged to pursue any activities and nurture any talents or interests they like, and NOT be subject to gender stereotyping in this way.

If we lose the stereotypes, children can't "fail" to conform to them. They will be too busy realising their potential in other ways.

As you can see it was established back in the 90s that 1/5 of Girls are Sporty.

I do disagree with the recent decision to exclude trans women from women's chess though - surely upper body strength etc is not a factor there?

No body strength is not the issue, male socialism is. Chess clubs at school are dominated by boys. Often taught by male teachers. Local chess clubs again dominated by men with male coaches. Chess tournaments are male dominated. Even the audience is mainly men!

Lile you, my teenaged son doesn't see it, because he's male. So I did an experiment with him and we set up an online chess account with a girls name. That was an eye opener for him.

blimey, what happened?

Brilliant, incisive, compassionate summary.

Will be entirely wasted on OP, but excellent for the lurkers.

So now. Why do YOU think "gendered socialisation" sometimes fails? (hint: because it's made up)

And in this particular instance it was wildly successful.

Someone who disregards women's consent and boundaries, is sexist, ignorant of women in general, and feels entitled to enter their spaces no matter what, is absolutely socialised male.