"Transphobic bullying is rife": 15 y/o trans boy's view of coming out at school

[ButterflyHatched]

A rare and refreshing example of the mainstream media actually publishing a young trans person's own words on the subject of their own existence and how the government's draft guidance is likely to affect the people it directly pertains to.

‘Transphobic bullying is rife’: a 15-year-old trans boy’s view of coming out at school | Transgender | The Guardian

Thing is even if a child who is questioning their gender is a very vulnerable person (and I agree, many are. I would absolutely say the 3 kids I’ve known who fall under the trans umbrella were all vulnerable, at least one very much so) what has that to do with making girls/women accommodate them against their own feelings of privacy or dignity or just because they want/need a female only space?

I’ve worked with some of the most vulnerable kids in our town. Extremely dysfunctional families, abuse, the lot. ALL of them were vulnerable, NONE were allowed to overcome the rights of others. Solutions have to be found, sometimes that’s really difficult. But it’s important to balance EVERYBODY’S rights and needs.

However vulnerable a boy is is NOT an excuse to shove him in with the girls when it isn’t actually appropriate. You wouldn’t do it for a young gay lad who was experiencing bullying, you wouldn’t do it for a boy experiencing racist bullying from other boys so why should you do it for a boy who believes or wants to be a girl?

Vulnerable doesn’t mean give someone everything they want. That doesn’t always help them and it certainly doesn’t always help those around them.

Let's dispense with the emotive word salading. Any adult that argues for teenage girls to be forced to undress in front of males needs their hard drive checked.

Yes. It is absolutely appropriate that we mention again the lack of symmetry that is very apparent from the perspective of this special male group compared to all other vulnerable male groups.

No ‘you are welcome to pee next to me’ male campaign for non conforming males or any other vulnerable male people has been started. Absolutely fucking nothing.

instead, all this hinges on one special group of males getting access to female single spaces. It is asymmetrical and it becomes apparent the longer discussions continue.

No other group demands this.

Yet this group leverages so many other group’s very real oppression and harms to support their demands. And they are demands. Because alternative solutions could be found to accommodate the needs. Making access to single sex spaces a demand. We also know that there is a proportion of people who do better living their authentic self as a gender dysphoric person living as their own sex that will also negate the demand for affirming only treatment too. Once these are removed, and once the demand for people to ‘perform’ belief that someone has ‘changed sex’ to allow another to live in a constructed world has also been removed, it exposes the harms here.

When did the medical world change their approach so dramatically that they insisted that a special group got to live as what they want to be rather than who they really are, and that everyone had to applaud that group for living ‘authentically’. When it is the absolute opposite of authentic?

The discordance starts clanging there and it doesn’t stop.

It is always worth remembering that someone who demands they are a ‘woman’ when they are male is only ever living their perception, sometimes very obviously a misogynist perception, of what a ‘woman’ is. It is never, and can never be anything nearing a female lived experience. If they have not sought the support they need to live with their dissonance, they need to go and seek further support.

It was NEVER up to others to be non-consenting support humans for those who have decided they need to be accepted as something they are not.

I have had to hide what I am for 20 years to escape being pushed out of society.

I've been thinking about this statement, and I was reminded that 40 yrs ago there was a transwoman in the town where I lived, this was when you had to get a diagnosis of dysphoria and "live" as the opposite sex for three yrs (I think) before doctors would even think about hormones and surgery.

No she had more balls (pun not intended) that a whole host of the the current "trans" people today and she had (and probably still does) have the respect of loads of people for being who she was.

So this BS of having to hide really doesn't wash, it just means that it wasn't easy enough for you to do.

There really seems to be many disconnects with the posts of this poster.

Apparently they are also hugely successful, living a great life travelling the world for work. And they are an ‘elder’ type figure in their local community, advising all the young people.

What is true and what is not?

Trans contradictions identify as not contradictions.

I do worry about Butterfly's sense of reality.

From this thread:

There are 14 countries in the world it is illegal for me to exist in on account of being a trans woman. I cannot go to these places without facing incarceration or mortal harm. One of them is a country my father served for years and lost his best friend fighting for. He cannot bring his own daughter with him when he is invited there for commemorations because it is illegal for her to exist there.

From the Will Gender Ideology influence how you vote? thread:

Even my lifelong staunch Tory-voting Wellington-schooled straight-into-the-army father is so disgusted by this government's demonisation of minorities, catastrophic mishandling of the country and constant brazen dishonesty that he is no longer voting for them.

These statements could be true if Butterfly's father spent many years serving as a mercenary in the army of one of the world's worst despots.

Both statements could be true though.

However, the casual leveraging that Butterfly’s own personal decision to transition should be used again to claim victimhood in this way, as an issue against ‘his (father’s) daughter’, is something to see.

And again no concern expressed for the trans people in that country at all. No indication what campaigning is being done, no. Just leveraging the situation to gain an emotional response.

Datun · Yesterday 11:35

Every time we've had a long running TRA post here, they've displayed the same traits. In fact, I can't think of a single TRA, here or anywhere else, who doesn't.The initial attempts to appear 'reasonable' can't be sustained.

Yes, they all say something like: I just need to use the ladies, because I'm frightened in the men's.

A number of women explain that, if the TW goes in the ladies, (for example) they're uncomfortable, intimidated, or frightened and the TW ignores, or else claims that they're a real woman with every right to.

A number of women try to explain further, with more details and possibly some personal anecdotes and are ignored, or lectured that they're awful and making life difficult for the TW. Never mind the difficulties the TW is making for any and all women in the toilet.

All whilst claiming to be entirely reasonable and the victim of awful bullying from women. Whilst claiming to be a real woman.

What has your fathers best friends death got to do with me not wantong men in womens spaces? Its always poor me im so down trodden i should be able to take over womens spaces.

No. Just because you think you're a woman doesnt mean you are one. Men cannot become women even if they have plastic surgery. I don't want me or my daughter to share womens spaces with men, and in that i include trans women as they are and always will be men.

It's a transparent appeal to sympathy, entirely irrelevant and calculated to distract you from the, erm, "argument."

According to Human Rights Watch only 8
countries criminalise ‘forms of gender expression’ (not 14). This is a far shorter list than the countries where homosexuality is illegal. The countries and laws are:

Brunei (‘man posing as a woman’ and vice versa)
Malawi (this is actually a law against long hair: "Every male person who wears the hair of his head in such a fashion as, when he is standing upright, the main line of the bottom of the mass of hair (other than hair growing on his face or on the nape of his neck) lies below an imaginary line drawn horizontally around his head at the level of the mouth.")
Malaysia (‘male person posing as a woman’ and vice versa)
Oman (imitating the opposite sex is illegal)
Saudi Arabia (although there is no actual law against being trans according to HRW)
South Sudan (‘Male person dressing as a woman in a public place’)
Tonga (‘Male person impersonating a woman "whilst soliciting for an immoral purpose"’)
UAE (‘any male disguised in a female apparel and enters in this disguise a place reserved for women or where entry is forbidden, at that time, for other than women’)

Which of these did your Wellington educated straight into the army father spend years serving and he can’t take you there for commemorations?

I know quite a few families who have a far longer list of countries they can’t visit due to them living in poverty and holidays being unaffordable.

Some of them have daughters if that makes it sad enough for the retention of single sex facilities.

Am I doing the emotional l blackmail right, @ButterflyHatched ?

If anyone says they are a feminist first up us listening to women

There are many on this thread and other threads like it, it should be easy to read and try and understand what women are saying

I know quite a few families who have a far longer list of countries they can’t visit due to them living in poverty and holidays being unaffordable.

Quite. 'I can't go on holiday to such and such a country' isn't the mark of terrible oppression Butterfly fondly imagines.

I'm worried about visiting lots of countries because I don't speak the native languages fluently. Why those bigots don't learn English so I'll be comfortable is beyond me 😉

To quote the late Chandler Bing “my wallet’s too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight!”

It's funny how Butterfly, like pretty much all people saying they are supporting trans rights, comes out with transphobic utterances. It's always 'transwomen should be able to use women's spaces as to deny them is transphobic', but only ever 2 genders that deserve this privilege.

If toilets and other sex segregated spaces should be gender separated, what about all the other genders? Why do you hate the cakegender, cloudgender, astergender, etc people? Denying someone's gender identity is transphobic so you can only sort something by gender if you include ALL genders.

As a male, you should be using the gents and campaigning either for male and female strictly biological sex plus a third space for anyone, or spaces for biological males of any gender and spaces for biological females of any gender.

If you don't see these other genders as valid then why should we see your gender identity as valid?

You would be safe in Iran by the way, they trans away the gay there left, right and centre. If you wanted a relationship with a man there you would be much safer in your woman costume than your natural maleness

Yes. No one ever addresses the rest of the gender’s needs. It highlights the complete lack of logic and the lie behind the tolerance demands.

And they all wonder why people point out the discrepancies.

Oh absolutely, the list of countries that generally outlaw LGBT people is very large indeed, and as a bisexual woman, most of those apply to me as well - no accidentally escaping by flipping polarities here!

A subset of 14 of those countries who already count trans people as being in violation of their LGB-phobic laws about sexuality by default even have extra legal categories to justify brutalising trans people. While most don't acknowledge transness at all, some see us as especially deviant and worthy of criminalisation. It's a pretty rotten venn diagram of awfulness.

Nobody wants you to be worse off than you are now or give up existing protections. The existing legislation in this country that protects trans people from discrimination already allows them to use the correct facilities. If this legal protection were to be removed, it would actively harm a minority group.

Thankfully the periodic attempts to chip away at these protections - which were desperately hard won and have only existed for less than half of my life - haven't succeeded yet. Time is running out before the Tories are out of government and the general window within which it is considered appropriate to debate the validity and rights of this particular minority group in parliament, let alone in general public discussion, is slowly closing.

I wonder if we will we see the same degree of contrition in the decades to follow as we have done from past opponents of the fight for LGB equality and protection? While it would be nice, it won't undo the harms being caused right now.

Allowing people to socially transition at school does present challenges to the way we currently handle things - largely because it highlights how inadequate the existing system is and how antiquated many of its underlying assumptions are. It shows us that we can - and must - do a lot better at protecting children from harm - something that many of the posters here have been all too aware of throughout their lives.

It isn't misogynistic to support children who are experiencing gender incongruence; to protect them from bullying; to help them work out what they need and how to best negotiate their situation, and to teach those around them how to be sensitive and compassionate.

Fortunately, butterfly, as soon as gender identity theory is taken out of schools, there will be far fewer children who think they've been born in the wrong body just because they like a sport that you think they shouldn't be playing.

And fortunately for you, butterfly, you can quite easily visit any country who doesn't like men to cross dress simply by presenting as your actual sex.

Women however cannot identify out of their sex in order to enjoy male privilege

The existing legislation in this country that protects trans people from discrimination already allows them to use the correct facilities.

there's no legislation that mandates which facilities you can use.

And fortunately, again, the government has been quite explicit that school children should use the facilities of their sex, in order to protect them and preserve their privacy. Especially girls.

Nobody wants you to be worse off than you are now or give up existing protections. The existing legislation in this country that protects trans people from discrimination already allows them to use the correct facilities. If this legal protection were to be removed, it would actively harm a minority group.

No, @ButterflyHatched, by "the correct facilities" you mean the WRONG facilities.

You are talking about trans people, alone among all groups in society, being allowed to use single sex facilities for members of the opposite sex, and screw the impact on anyone else or whether this renders the point of having single sex facilities in the first place completely redundant from the point of view of their female users.

Why do you think trans people should have this right?

Why does anyone think this?

Trans people aren't more important than everyone else.

There is no such thing as a toilet which matches your gender identity because gender identity does not objectively exist. There are toilets which match your sex, and which you, for some inexplicable reason, refuse to use.