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actually publishing a young trans person's own words on the subject of their own existence and how the government's draft guidance is likely to affect the people it directly pertains to.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

"Margot is rejecting the lived experience of an entire minority group from base principles"

How often is this this pompous, tone deaf claim made. The nerve of scolding women that the only arbiters of womanhood are..... men.

The tragedy is that adherents of this ideology have been allowed to influence the young, before their critical faculties and sense of self preservation are fully developed. As can be seen from the sad child in the article.

‘Transphobia’ is what you call anything other than submission to your demands.

Having to use the correct sex toilets does not exile anyone from public life. This is exactly the kind of reverse CBT nonsense that’s been highlighted as a reason why so many young people have such poor mental health.

Not accepting your ideology or narrative is not a denial of the existence if a (heterogenous - a point you also want to ignore!) group of people who would prefer other people thought of them as the opposite sex. Thats just more catastrophic hyperbole.

There is no existential threat here. You just aren’t getting the validation you want.

It really is. I'm guessing Butterfly hasn't done a very good job of 'hiding their true self for 20 years', when they are incapable of doing it on a single thread.

Yes! And when it is then combined with the overly sexualised and objectified versions of women and girls in media and social media it is very concerning. When women and girls then deliberately objectify themselves on social media under the malign guise of ‘empowerment’ it is really a toxic mess.

Plus there is the constant flow of carefully curated wonderful life posts, from friends and everyone, and it makes it even more tough to be a girl or women.

I regularly have this very same conversation with friends with teens who have declared trans identities. Our children are suffering under this weight.

To be fair to @ButterflyHatched, I am indeed "rejecting the lived experience" of all trans women. I am rejecting the idea that it has anything to do with womanhood.

That's not to say that it isn't valid as the lived experience of being a biological male with a transgender identity.

But clearly it isn't the same lived experience as that of a biological female, with or without a transgender identity.

The idea that we have any kind of shared identity is ludicrous.

@ButterflyHatched has demonstrated time and time again on this thread and various others that they have absolutely no "lived experience" of being a woman, and absolutely no frame of reference for what it is like to live in a female body, which is what living as a woman actually is.

I would think not. I gave up asking questions of this poster. Because there was never an answer that wasn’t either laced with so much hyperbole or emotional manipulation, or resorting to repetitive misinformation. If it was even answered.

The only existential threat here is to women as a political class.

Obviously we will continue to exist whether we are allowed to have words for ourselves or not, and males with a transgender identity will never be what we are no matter how sad that makes them feel or no matter what changes they make to their bodies.

However, I suspect they do not actually want to be. They certainly show no signs of actually wanting to be treated like women. Indeed, if society treats them with even a fraction of the contempt it has for women, they complain of "transphobia". No, they absolutely want to retain their male privilege.

But as long as we aren't allowed to have any words for ourselves which exclude them, or any spaces or sports which exclude them, that's fine by them.

So who is trying to erase whom, exactly?

Do you know what would do most to rid the world of so-called ‘transphobia’?

Society accepting that male humans are men however they like to dress, whatever their interests are, however they comport their bodies.

Challenging the regressive stereotypes that constrain both men and women.

Eradicating homophobia and particularly the kind of internalised homophobia that makes young people feel that their problems would be solved if they were only the opposite sex

Sorting out the issues with misogyny and male violence that make puberty so dreadful and challenging for young women to the extent they’d like to opt out of being a women.

But Butterfly doesn’t want that. Butterfly loves the stereotypes that underpin trans ideology. And Butterfly loves scolding women and claiming that the hostile reaction Butterfly receives is some sort of phobia rather than a reasonable response to Butterfly’s problematic behaviour on threads.

Even here Butterfly is trying to DARVO @RedToothBrush - rather than apologising for being rude and quite nasty in response to information about her ‘lived experience’. Earlier it was @Helleofabore that Butterfly was determined to cast as the villain in the ongoing drama of ‘poor persecuted Butterfly’.

@MargotBamborough I think I get it now, as the same thing is happening to me on this thread.

I think we’re ghosts.

We need to read the Handbook of the Recently Dismissed

Indeed. Women, their actual lives, needs, rights, are completely irrelevant. They are just repurposed as a prop for a men's sexual rights movement.

In fact it's not even the concept of a woman, it's the concept of their oppression. It is their oppression that is fetishised. (See the excitement over 'forced feminisation.' )

Hence the absolute rage when women pop into these mens' consciousness as actual beings. And actual beings, who then go and spoil it all by saying no.

This is why they absolutely love to come to mumsnet. It's hate posting.

Some of the posts are quite upsetting in their blatant disregard for women and safeguarding of dc

They have helped me understand what we are facing though, in a way I wasn’t aware of in even a few years ago.

I just need a vote on all of this. Let’s assess how people think the GRA is going twenty years later

Yes.

There is an epistemological threat here that is politically motivated. Making it impossible to speak of and think about women as a sex-based category is the explicit intention here.

Women will continue to exist, but it becomes far harder to fight against all the societal conditions that marginalise and oppress women and girls. It becomes impossible to identify male violence or to celebrate female achievement.

Who benefits from this shit? It is not women and girls.

It is a rather distinct cycle, isn’t it? We see it all too often. And it is always male posters who do this cycle.

Same old, same old.

It feels like so much deja vu.

I see the makeup trend is all ‘selfie ready’ but looks like women copying drag makeup. Very odd.

Young adults seem to be fed a diet of ‘end of the world’ angst (remembering nuclear war/AIDS fears of my youth, actual war of my parents childhood), online bullying, constant questioning/demanding sworn alliance of their gender/ sexuality from primary school, glorifying labels and self harm, tok tok, etc etc etc. Crying, having hissy fits, attention seeking behaviour, dress up, trying to ‘outrage’, lack of basic respect for anyone apart from themselves and oh the melodrama is rewarded with clicks and likes… constant demands to feel safe and be ‘validated’.

How are these kids ever going to navigate real life issues?

Nailed it!

Yes. It's eye opening. To see the egocentricity, the manipulation, the self victimisation. And the utter refusal to address any of the issues that affect women and girls. And children.

On a website for parents, and populated mostly by women!

Some of the more self-involved TRAs are often drawn here, under the fond impression that they, and they alone, will make a big difference in the 'lions den'. As the meme referred to above so accurately puts it, it positively emanates 'behold, a man has arrived'. 😁

But they're incapable of being anything other than what they are, and therefore, no matter how hard they try, no matter how many wiles they employ, their agenda is always crystal clear.

It's very useful for people who weren't quite convinced.

@ButterflyHatched Any chance of you answering my question before the thread closes?

You denied that I had asked one just now, but everyone can see that I have so you look a bit silly pretending otherwise.

This is pretty interesting and I wonder if some of the reason that academics don't look at early internet culture is because it in itself was niche and that maybe the bad experiences were also niche, within a very niche community. I started using chatrooms in 1995, when I was 16, and it was always a largely positive experience. But I knew one other person in real life who used the internet. Neither of us had internet access at home in those first years and we used to have to go to web cafes to get online. As we had the same interests, we'd pool our money and share a computer.

Our experience was that it was largely assumed that everyone chatting was male but when we'd point out that we were girls, the reaction was just pleasant surprise. I used a lot of forums where my username was gender neutral and people were assumed male unless it was a largely female forum. But I never hid being female and never had a bad reaction if I pointed out that I was a woman. On certain sites, I used specifically female names and never got a bad reaction to that either. While I know that many women and girls had horrible experiences, they weren't necessarily the norm. It depended on what parts of the internet you used. I was never into gaming, which obviously helped. Just being online in the mid-90s meant you were part of a tiny minority. Being female online made you a minority within that minority. And being harassed made you a sub-group of that minority of a minority. So while it's worth examining to see how that toxicity was there and how it grew. The impact it had on society as a whole was negligible until 05 onwards when broadband started to become available en mass and the internet started becoming very cheap to stay on for as long as you wanted.

Let's talk about identity.

TRAs would have you believe it's only individual. The movement is neo-liberal individualism.

Yet they also understand how this is not true. And demonstrate it with the attempts to crowd control women.

Take my friends. They raised two boys. When talking to new people one of the first questions they will be asked is 'do you have children?' and then about whether girls or boys. This is polite conversation and it's about developing a relational identity and finding common ground. If my friends tell the truth and say they have two boys and raised two boys, they get to identify with the person asking the question and it helps them develop a relationship. If they reply one boy and one girl it puts them into a position where it gets very complicated very quickly because they can't make those connections in the same way as they don't have those experiences. If they answer 'well it's complicated' they end up not making a connection too because they don't know the other party's politics and how they will react to them not being fully signed up to the ideology and there the whole minefield of someone asking a question that's polite and 'easy' precisely because they don't want to be bogged down in difficult politics and full on conversations at the point of meeting.

And then there's the fairly obvious point about the trans movement desperately seeking that relationship identity of woman by force which they can't because they aren't women and haven't had the lived experiences of being a woman. So they have to force the issue and remove women's capacity to explain that relationship and have that relationship.

Both are acts of trying to isolate another party from their own identity. It has an impact and it's harmful.

This is why I have one to the conclusion that I am not going to participate in this with my brother. My history is I have a brother. That is my identity. It's how I relate to others. By telling the truth. Lying isolates me and removes my identity. It is abusive to force me or to tell me that I have a sister.

I don't. That's NOT my lived experience. It is important to my identity and well being and my relationships to be able to have my own identity.

And why the fuck shouldn't I have my OWN identity based on reality? Why much I capitulate to the demands of others at the detriment and harm to myself.

If you want to be a trans-woman. Fine. Not a problem. But you aren't a woman. Nor can you have the lived experiences of a woman not the vulnerabilities of a woman. If you feel threatened by men, that's not for women to fix at a risk to themselves.

Women are women. And only females can be women. Females can not be trans-women. And that's the entire issue in a nutshell which can not be negotiated or compromised because material reality.

”I've just been under nearly 40 pages of inquisition over whether it's possible for a young transitioner with a genetic condition to experience misogyny and indeed whether it is possible for her to even exist at all.”

Reader’s Note:

Misogyny is the dislike or contempt for female people. Hence the ‘gyny’, it has its roots in Greek for female.

Just because a poster claims to have experienced misogyny, it is not appropriate as a description at all as that poster is MALE! And has already displayed across many threads that they are misogynistic in the way they treat female people, of all ages and whether that female person identifies as a woman or girl or not.

I know I have already said it on this thread, however this claim by this poster is misogynistic in itself.

Finally, no poster has denied that this poster ‘exists’. That is just more hyperbole and emotional manipulation. They exist. They post on MN.

They are a male person who seems to have a medical condition that may have or may not have been medically diagnosed, who declared a trans identity and now lives their life as a male with a trans identity, living what they believe is the life of a woman.

Which is materially not possible. No matter how much they wish it or demand it.

They can live their life as a male person who lives as they believe a woman would live. But they can never achieve the lived experience of a girl or woman.

Indeed. And I also see how they love to paint this entire thread of us spending 40 pages claiming they are not subject to misogyny.

When it is they who keeps bringing us back to it!

I would say this thread is actually characterised by butterfly's par for the course TRA agenda, and equally typical utter refusal to answer any questions concerning women and girls.

Margot

They don't want to exclude girls from the changing rooms. They want girls to be forced to be in there with them. A girls changing room with no actual girls in it is just an empty room, after all.

Yes, I understand entirely, but the reality, of course, is that many girls and women will self exclude. And of course, the Me, Me, Me's! will squeak about transphobic bigotry, in an epic failure of self awareness.

Or utter bloody selfishness.

So why don’t we just have women’s changing spaces/loos and ‘special women and allies’ spaces. We will see what happens quickly enough.

Everyone will just continue to use the women's.

The penis women will continue to use the women's even though a special space has been provided for them because the special space is "othering" and against their human rights.

And the allies will continue to use the women's because just like pretty much everyone else they actually prefer women's spaces, particularly if they get to use them whilst continuing to virtue signal.

Wasn't it India Willoughby who said that TERFs should have their own facilities and was surprised when loads of women said they would be very happy with that?!!!!