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actually publishing a young trans person's own words on the subject of their own existence and how the government's draft guidance is likely to affect the people it directly pertains to.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

When claiming to be the opposite sex allows boys to wedge their way into girls changing rooms, showers, dormitories, sports etc, no wonder they get pushback. Nobody should be encouraging children to breach the social contract or to believe that boundaries involving privacy, safety and dignity are there to be breached.

100% and it’s a lesson all kids need to learn from a young age that someone else saying no to you isn’t bullying, it’s real life.

Yea kids being polite to Alice is a really nice thing but allowing Alice into the girls changing rooms shouldn’t be enforced upon anyone.
All children’s rights should be considered, not the vast majority expected to bend over backwards to accommodate one child. And that child needs to understand and respect the normal social boundaries and not demand the world revolves around them

Very much this, and the child in the article and those similar from media like the Guardian and similar and likely their parents have been encouraged to believe they have a special status, everyone will applaud them, and be in awe and their every wish shall be granted and fulfilled.
When they actually realise the school and world doesn't revolve around them, it must be a shock!

Yes, but are these adult men mature? Physically, perhaps, but if they are on hormones or on a surgical pathway, I question their emotional maturity.

What about the ladyfeelz?

Won't someone think of the ladyfeelz?😥

Absolutely agree with both these posts.

It is bullying to force your own self belief onto someone else and compel them to conform to it which is what you are doing @ButterflyHatched

Furthermore @ButterflyHatched you casually dismiss the real life lived experiences of women and girls, insist that only your lived experience is relevant. You do not and never will experience life as a woman or girl you will only ever experience it as a male who wants to be his idea of female. The idea that you are a feminist is laughable at best.

@ButterflyHatched i would echo pp’s that there are NO psychological aspects which are common to all women, but no men. However, you seem clear that there are. What would they be? What does a trans woman mean when they claim to ‘feel like a woman’?

bleeding Nora - there are NO psychological behaviours that make one a woman. The only way to be a woman is to be born with a body designed around the production of large gametes. That’s it, that’s all.

Quite.

A cosmetically, chemically or surgically altered male is not and never will be female. A piece of paper doesn't make it so either.

Woman is simply not a feeling.

It’s ridiculous that we ever have to say this. I am a woman because my biologically sexed body makes me one - as does my social and cultural experiences of living in the uk as someone with a female body.

It is not an emotion or a feeling. Comparing it to sadness is so insulting and dismissive.

It is so frustrating to have someone being openly dismissive of women’s lived experiences while insisting everything must centre around their own feelings (and the feelings they share with people ‘like them’).

If a person has a belief that defies the direct lived reality of others and demands that they be treated in a particular way due to their genital configuration, ignoring their interiority and any hint of nuance or subjectivity because of an ideological adherence to the concept of an immutable sex essence, why on earth should any person believe anything else they say is credible and based on a balanced view of the world?

My son has a belief that defies the direct lived reality of … both his parents (and many others). And he demands that he be treated in a particular way, due not to physical reality, but due to his own internal view of himself. I saw him being born; I observed evidence of his sex immediately following his birth. His mother observed that same reality within a minute. For the next twenty years there was absolutely nothing to indicate that we had “assigned” him incorrectly. There is still no evidence that he is anything other than a slightly unusual male, gentler than most, on the autistic spectrum, struggling to negotiate relationships in a healthy way.

I have enough experience of other people, and indeed of myself, at various times suffering from irrational thoughts - “negative automatic thoughts” for example, which threatened to undermine my ability to function at work - to look at the “evidence” of people’s own internal “lived reality” with considerable scepticism. Where someone’s self view contradicts verifiable physical attributes, I do not assume that their self view, or “identity”, is real, and that their bodies need to be changed in an attempt to fit. Especially when each person’s identity is not theirs alone, but is formed in relationships and in community. My son wishes me to use a different name, and feminine pronouns. But to me, he is the same son I worked for and tried to guide for decades. He has not told us that he is now our “daughter”, thank God. We know him by his male name that we chose for him. He can think of himself differently, but he cannot rewrite our shared history, and it is not reasonable or in any way “kind” of him to demand that we write off his childhood, adolescence and young adulthood because he feels more comfortable wearing dresses, or adopting any of the other gender stereotypes we call feminine.

Indeed, I suspect that every bit of affirmation feeds discomfort with his male reality and pushes him further into feeling that he needs oestrogen to be his “true self”. Our bodies are our true self, and do not need to be modified to match our feelings. If I wake up some days feeling young again, I cannot change my body to match, and it will soon remind me of the inescapable physical reality that I am not in my thirties any more.

”Interiority”, my fat arse! Emotional maturity is accepting the truth that I am an adult male mammal with all that implies. My human ability to fantasise that I am somehow female is not proof of some gender essence that contradicts my sex. It is not “sex essence” that makes me male, it is the fact that my body is fundamentally configured to produce sperm, for the purpose of one of them meeting an egg and conceiving a new life. When this happened and produced our firstborn, it was a sperm with a Y chromosome that joined up with an egg, and from that moment our son was destined to be male for life, whether he likes it or not.

“If a person has a belief that defies the direct lived reality of others and demands that they be treated in a particular way due to their genital configuration, ignoring their interiority and any hint of nuance or subjectivity because of an ideological adherence to the concept of an immutable sex essence, why on earth should any person believe anything else they say is credible and based on a balanced view of the world?”

Oh dear. Material reality is such that it doesn’t change with someone else’s say so. If you honestly believe that all your body modifications, all your falsification allowed by some governments of facts to suit your demands and people bending to your demands to affirm your choices changes material reality and matters a jot outside of philosophical theory, I feel sorry if someone let you believe that. It seems steeped in desperation to make your choices somehow more legitimate than simply you choosing to transition for your own reasons. The material reality is, you are a male person who has made modifications to your body and make demands on society that are beyond what the majority of people make. You demand that people treat you as the sex you wish to be perceived as, not that you are.

So, really this paragraph about somehow me pointing this out diminishes my credibility because of your ‘internal truth’, actually continues to uphold my statement. Well done.

As I said, material reality is the pits.

“Especially not when your argument about how (some people’s) subjective reality is the only thing of any ontological significance is so unbelievably problematic. It’s not just solipsism; it’s actually closer to narcissism.”

This has been pointed out quite a number of times much to some posters upset. It is so fucking clear to many of us. It is a feature of that particular movement, not a bug at this stage. At least for a particular sex subgroup of that movement. But wait… the denial will come (I have not read the end of the thread so I might have missed it already !)

The kind of behaviours that go with growing up in a female body.

Actually, I think it is worse than supposed word salad, it is completely understandable but it is just plain bollocks.

Or should I say the typical male genital configuration, which usually is a good and sound indicator for misogyny which is not hidden even when said misogynists bollocks may or may not be removed or atrophied.

Exactly. How can a male know this? They can’t

Maybe. Maybe not. They certainly may face some challenges in self awareness. One thing for certain, they are male and have no fucking idea what female people of any age face in life. No matter how much they believe they have experienced even a close approximation of that reality.

The same way people had to learn to accept there will be limits to other people's ability to accept LGB sexuality and won't want to share changing rooms and toilets with them? That was the 'common sense' of several decades ago and rightly has no place in the cultural landscape of 2023.

The meaning placed upon the words we use and the ideas those words represent can change. Mindsets can change. People can change. We can do better. We do not have to live locked in the past, and we do not have to force every generation that follows us to inherit our baggage.

There are certainly parts of transitioning that it is possible to have unrealistic expectations about, and some of them are limited by very raw and very brutal practicalities we do not currently have the technological means to overcome. There is nothing sacred or axiomatic about these, however - they're simply the result of physical processes we haven't yet developed the right tools for controlling, and many of the social issues are things we can actually do something about - and have been trying to for decades now, making slow progress despite resistance.

We teach kids about how the world 'should' be and how to behave all the damn time. We teach them not to steal or murder. We teach them to respect others. We teach them not to talk with their mouths full. We teach them not to shit the bed or microwave metal cutlery or stick their fingers in an electrical socket. Most kids are doing pretty well learning how to respect trans people - of course there will be contrarians and edgelords and those who have been exposed to bigoted social paradigms, but many already know how to do this and do it just fine.

There is nothing unreasonable about transitioning and I'm sorry you think that there is.

I dunno mate, I’m older than you and I can’t remember anyone campaigning to prevent lesbians using changing rooms or gay men using toilets.

And that was in the era of cottaging so in some particular hotspots, you’d think they’d be a massive campaign about it.

sometimes it seems like the internet is a big ol game of broken telephone/chinese whispers, where people read untruths and half truths and then repeat them, endlessly.

Anyway, SINGlE SEX facilities, the clue is in the name. lesbians are female so belong in the ladies (even the butchiest of lesbian ladies) and males with internal gender feels belong in the gents, regardless of how much surgery they’ve had.

Because humans can’t actually change sex.

I worked for a gay man’s lifestyle magazine that shared offices with a HIV/AIDS charity so I would definitely have heard about campaigns to prevent gay men using men’s spaces.

So if we can teach people to do all those things, can we teach misogynists like you to respect women and stay the hell out of our spaces? Or is bowing down before the mighty penis more important?

You talk about lesbians but have no idea what lesbians are. PIV sex fir you could be a straight couple, 2 lesbians or 2 gay men. Sexuality is meaningless to you due to your homophobia.

There are certainly parts of transitioning that it is possible to have unrealistic expectations about, and some of them are limited by very raw and very brutal practicalities we do not currently have the technological means to overcome. There is nothing sacred or axiomatic about these, however - they're simply the result of physical processes we haven't yet developed the right tools for controlling,

Do you not find the concept of this quite scary? What can be a force of good can also be a force of evil? With lots of medical procedures just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

I am currently listening to a podcast about rogue doctors, scary stuff - unnecessary treatments (especially in the US with insurance based delivery of care) and wild poor researched human guinea pig treatments. Trans care is at massive risk of exploitation, many doctors and scientist do not have the interest of the patient at heart.

There are certainly parts of transitioning that it is possible to have unrealistic expectations about, and some of them are limited by very raw and very brutal practicalities we do not currently have the technological means to overcome. There is nothing sacred or axiomatic about these, however - they're simply the result of physical processes we haven't yet developed the right tools for controlling, and many of the social issues are things we can actually do something about - and have been trying to for decades now, making slow progress despite resistance.

But here’s the thing @ButterflyHatched , it will never be possible to change sex. It will never be possible for a male to have a real vagina because a vagina is a female organ. All of medical transitioning is about unrealistic expectations, not parts of it. All of it. And this will never be possible to overcome. It will never be possible to reverse the process that starts at conception. It’s amazing that you’ve had decades to think about this and still don’t realise it.

Well for example, the trans woman threatening Ben Shapiro in a discussion doesn't come off as authentic behaviour to me.

There could be various reasons you wouldn't expect this from a woman:

(1) women are socialised differently.

(2) women have the reality of living in a female body, which is typically weaker than a male body, so depending on context, they normally know not to be aggressive towards males.

(3) there could just be typical, "on average" differences in gender because of biological reasons.

The issue with transgenderism, is that if someone doesn't have the biology, and they don't have authentic gender either, then all they can claim is "gender identity"; and I don't see why identifying as something is enough for you to be "taken seriously" that you really are that thing or should be treated as that thing.

It's not a case of denying their feelings.

It's a case of recognising that their feelings, even if accurately reported, don't support their ideology.

I would think that gender differences do make a bit of a difference here in theory.

Imagine that some women get accidentally "mind swapped" into male bodies, and we can't switch them back. What we can do, is use cosmetic surgery to get them looking very close to biological women so that they "pass" in normal circumstances.

Should they be allowed in women's sports? Probably not.

However, it seems reasonable that because of their "authentic gender" they should be allowed in women's changing rooms for example. Unless maybe you could argue that their new male biology would change their psychological characteristics.

“The same way people had to learn to accept there will be limits to other people's ability to accept LGB sexuality and won't want to share changing rooms and toilets with them? That was the 'common sense' of several decades ago and rightly has no place in the cultural landscape of 2023.”

And this readers is how extreme trans activists have leveraged the lesbian, gay and bisexual community to progress the harmful agenda of forcing society to allow male people into female single sex spaces. Using this narrative that you see right here.

“There is nothing unreasonable about transitioning”

There are plenty of things unreasonable about an extreme transgender activist agenda that demands unreasonable things that are harmful to others. Such as demanding preferred pronouns be used and that laws be shaped around prioritising gender over sex causing harm to women and children.

This blanket refusal to acknowledge those conflicts shows the evangelical nature of that activism. And we have seen on this and other threads.