First time poster - question about GC beliefs

[lovelycosyslippers]

This is my first time posting on this board. I am trying to work out what my position is in the trans/gender debate.

If you hold gender critical beliefs, do you accept that some people firmly believe they are born in the 'wrong' body, and have a right to live as the other sex (up to but not including the point where it would impinge on the rights of that other sex), possibly taking hormones and undergoing surgery? Is this a coherent position to hold?

Or do you believe these people should not ever be supported to live as the opposite sex? That doing so is always wrong?

Hope this question makes sense!

You should read Dr Em's latest essay:
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/understanding-your-nigella-the-harms-of-transvestic-paraphilia/

Even if people do believe this, they need to come to terms with the fact that they are factually wrong. Like anorexics believe they are overweight. They need help to change that.

Saying anyone can be born in the wrong body is an insult to those of use who live with disfiguring illnesses and disability. Where is my support to change my body? Nowhere! You get what you get and you live in it.

We all know the difference between men and women and it changes how we relate them in ways that are socially significant and not always negative.

Can.you give some non-negative examples, @TempestTost? I can't think of any that are not either based on sterotypes (and therefore harmful), or based on the reality of sexed bodies (and therefore irrelevant to somebody with a body of the other sex).

I think that there are coherent arguments to be made that even requesting wrong-sex pronouns is an imposition on others (forcing them to play along or take a stand), and that if we believe in universal free healthcare we need to reduce the amount of money spent on unnecessary "healthcare", including opposite sex cosmetic surgery and undoing the damage of wrong sex hormones.

I'm critical of gender. This means that I object to society's attempts to force gendered expectations and value judgments onto inanimate objects and concepts like dresses, makeup and housework.

Doing the laundry isn't women's work and wearing a dress doesn't make you a woman, any more than me wearing trousers or enjoying a track day in a fast car makes me a man.

It's not possible to be born in the wrong body because bodies aren't right or wrong, they are just bodies. It's entirely possible to be uncomfortable that you're one sex when you really strongly wish you were the other sex, but no amount of hormones or surgery will do anything except alter the appearance a bit.

So, how should society handle some of this stuff? The following are my opinions and may be subject to change as my thinking develops.

It's ok for anyone to wear anything.
It's ok for women to be the breadwinner and men to be the stay at home parent and any other combination that works for any couple.
It's ok for adults to seek to permanently alter their appearance, whether with tattoos, piercings, drugs or surgery. Not ok for children.

I'm yet to be convinced it's ok for that to be publicly funded on the NHS.

We treat anorexia with therapy, not diet and exercise plans.
We treat drug and alcohol addiction with therapy not drugs and alcohol.
Maybe we should treat dysmorphia with therapy before drugs and surgery?

None of this alters the fact that your biological sex is set at conception and remains throughout your life. Also, where it really matters in law and in public policy, decisions should be made on the basis of sex not gender. Sex is immutable, gender is conceptual. Let's keep the law based on fact and evidence.

I think that you need to ask Trans "Rights" Activists lots of questions, and if they cannot or refuse to answer then they have nothing, and if they do answer then you can judge their words, which I can assure you will be waffle and ignore any and all reasonable concerns.

I think this is very important.

Even if you don’t want to engage with the TRAs who post here, read what they respond with, what they respond to and see what their take is. Because I find it’s not what we’ve all been sympathising with for years, it’s something completely different (whether that’s always been the case or whether assumptions have always been made I do not know.) and it’s very instructive. and they have no answers to any suggestions of compromise.

No disrespect to any of the women (or the few men) but my views have been solidified much more by the TRAs who come here.

For me the other major sticking point is the expansion of what we call trans.

It may have once been someone wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, changing pronouns and getting on with life but now it’s anyone who says they’re trans. Male presenting but she pronouns? Sure. Female presenting, super femme but they pronouns? Why not. Basic cross dressers every other day? You’re in! Tomboyish girl with nerdy interests? Ok!

The very widening of the definition (if there even is a definition) is making the term meaningless. Yet the arguments still rest in the idea of a post op transwoman who passes so well it would be shocking to out them.

Recently we’ve been told we haven’t thought how dangerous third spaces would be for TW (it’s on the 15 year old says bullying is rife thread) as though half the males claiming to be women/she/her pronouns are considered anything but men.

once you start digging into it the only solution is to stand with women and girls first.

Interesting how nearly all this discussion is focussing, probably unconsciously, on female - presenting XY chromosome persons , when the majority of people actually applying to ‘change’ their sex are XX chromosome people. Most of them very young…..but the focus even in the pre puberty people is on the XY children , not the majority , who are XX.

These seems to show two things: first, that the consciousness of sex, embedded in every cell of a person’s being, is at the base of our perception of each other, and is intrinsic and insurmountable.

Secondly, that XY people are just more…..important.

Remember even among TRAs and the trans community there is a sort of division.
Those who believe that being trans is about wanting to be the opposite sex, and as much as possible emulating that.

And those who believe being a man or a woman is solely about how you feel, and that simply saying you feel you are a man/ woman is what makes you one, literally - not figuratively, literally. All women are people, male or female, that "feel like women". No description of what this is, although obviously you need to know what a woman is to decide if you feel like one. That question is never, ever, answered.

(You sometimes get "there are thousands of ways to be a woman!" yet naming even one is impossible)

I don't disagree with you there.

The important point to recognise here is that people with gender critical beliefs are not a hive mind. We all have slightly different views on things, whilst all essentially sharing the same belief that biological sex matters and should not be secondary to an individual's subjectively experienced gender identity.

My personal red lines are the following:

• We need to have words to clearly define and discuss biological sex. This means we need to have words for members of each sex which expressly include all members of that sex and exclude all members of the opposite sex, regardless of the feelings of members of that sex who wish to identify out of it or members of the opposite sex who wish to identify into it.
• It is particularly important for women and girls, and to a lesser extent men and boys, to have access to single sex spaces from which members of the opposite sex are excluded, in situations where there are issues of safety, dignity and fairness. Not having these spaces results in the exclusion of some people, particularly women and girls, from parts of society, which is unacceptable. I am not conceptually opposed to the provision of additional neutral spaces for trans people, provided that such spaces supplement and do not replace single sex spaces, and provided that trans people then actually use them and do not continue to use single sex spaces for the opposite sex. I would go so far as to say that it should be made a criminal offence to use a single sex space for the opposite sex where an alternative space is available, if people cannot respect these simple rules.
• People with gender dysphoria deserve compassionate, evidence based healthcare. They should have access to support and counselling, but not to hormones or surgery until they are well into adulthood, have undergone extensive therapy, and doctors are satisfied that all other treatment options to help them manage their dysphoria have been completely exhausted.

These three issues, for me, are completely black and white. As far as I'm concerned, all the other issues around gender have shades of grey and should be open for discussion. My feelings around pronouns, or men wearing skirts in public, for example, are not fixed in stone and may evolve depending on arguments put forward by others.

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen possibly because many XY people don't bother "applying" to do so... that's a lot like asking permission!

There was a AMA from a trans woman a few months ago. I tried to sum up their position and they agreed this was a good summary. I'll copy it:

"As this thread is running out of space, I'll just reiterate where we got to in terms of OP's beliefs and why OP is so fixated on 'men being like THIS, women being like THAT' - in terms of personality and their minds. (Copied from a previous post mid-thread). I make no comment on whether this makes OP a 'good' or 'bad'. It's rather a moot point in a way because I know it to be factually incorrect.

I think it lays out what a lot of people sort of believe but very few will outright say. Gender stereotypes persist and affect people's entire lives and identities."

You acknowledge (I think) that there are male and female bodies. You believe there is an incredibly strong, almost one-to-one correlation, throughout all of humanity with having a female body and having some sort of checklist of psychological traits (and with a male body and 'male mind' traits). You have also referred to "the way they feel about themselves and wish to live" without giving any more information on what this actually means.

You haven't said on what data you have concluded this, or even given a list of these traits other than "men are more competitive and rational" and "like to be assertive and in charge of things", and women are more "cooperative, empathic and emotional, more likely to to be kind and take a supporting role" - or said how you would measure them, or what it means if someone's ability/personality changes over time, or what even it means to 'be emotional'.

Let's say you think female people are 'above average' on these traits and there is therefore a distinct gap between how male people do on these and how female people do (so you wouldn't really see any overlap, because you claim that the traits are what distinguishes a 'male mind' or 'female mind'.)

You acknowledge there are 'some outliers' - males and females whose mind doesn't 'match' your list of traits. How many, we cannot know, but presumably millions worldwide.

Those with 'woman mind' traits are women, and this includes male people with those traits.

Those with 'man mind traits' are men, and this includes female people.

The fact that millions of female people can have 'man minds' does not suggest to you that in fact psychological traits can present equally in both sexes, but you conclude instead that their bodies are the wrong sex for their mind.

Based on this alone, you believe that 'man mind' people should be treated as male in all situations bar a very few, and same for women minds being treated as female. Bear in mind you say as a woman you are less rational than 50% of the population yet think it is fine to advocate for both sexes on this.

You think that the female body is a visual cue that the person has 'woman traits' and so appearing as a female, or taking on some female physical or social factors like she/her pronouns, female names, gendered clothing etc, tells society that 'this person has a woman mind and must be treated as such', hence your linking of appearance and psychological traits.

I think a big part of the issue is that a trans XX harms one XX person, whereas a trans XY harms lots of XX people.

Allthegoodnamesarechosen said: 'Secondly, that XY people are just more…..important.'

A transman (female) in a male space just doesn't have the same potential danger to the men in there as a transwoman (male) in a female space potentially has to the women in there. It's that pesky reality of the biological differences between the sexes again.

Do TM film themselves masterbating in the mens loos in the same way that TW do?

Do TM destroy mens sport the way that TW in female sport does?

XY people are more powerful and dangerous, and I assume that most here are XX people to whom GI is a threat irl. I for one do see early transitioning females as more of a MH problem and very worrying - not to say I don't also feel sorry for small boys who get transitioned. What are their parents thinking?

Generally I'm of the opinion that what other adults choose to believe about themselves, how they choose to live their life, the choices they make, what substances they put in their body and what bits about their body they feel compelled to change and how they present themselves to the world is entirely up to them.

on a personal interaction level with another individual I'm only bothered when the other person's choices or actions affect me. Whether that be, for example, a priest insisting I believe in his God, a guy who hasn't washed for a week stood behind me in a queue assaulting my olfactory organs, a person who is driving so fast they can't brake in time and crash into the back of my car, or a man with the inner feeling he is a woman being put in a prison cell with me.

To answer your original questions:

do you accept that some people firmly believe they are born in the 'wrong' body

Yes. But I also think they should be helped to understand you can't be born in the wrong body. Your body is your body. You can do all sorts of things to it, but at the end of it all its still your body.

a right to live as the other sex

No one can live as the opposite sex. You can only live as the sex your chromosomes are. You can 'present' yourself to the world in whatever way you wish, but no one has a 'right ' to live as the other sex as that is impossible.

Going back to the OP's questions, I think they need to answered piece by piece.

And to answer them we first need to define our terms (something the TRA side is frequently reluctant to do).

So, some definitions.

Sex. The biological differences that divide humans (and all mammals, and many other animals) into 2 reproductive classes. These are encoded into every cell of our bodies and cannot be changed. There is male and female, and everyone is one or the other.

Some people have medical conditions that affect the expression of 1 or more sex-linked characteristics, but that doesn’t make them either a different sex or an 'in between' sex.

Some of the differences between the sexes are obvious - penis or vagina, testicle or ovary. Some are less obvious- proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibres, how oestrogen affects immune response. Some characteristics are on a spectrum (height for example - on average men are taller than women; but there is a ranglenof heights for both and there is overlap - some short men are shorter than some tall women), but that doesn't mean sex itself is a spectrum.

Gender. A grammatical thing we can ignore for this discussion. Also a social concept that codes some behaviours, traits, interests, roles, fashion choices etc as either male or female and expects people of each sex to follow the relevant set of 'rules'. These rules are almost infinitely variable through time and space, but almost always include at least some components that disadvantage women.

Gender identity. The idea that gender is not simply* *an external social construct but also some sort of intangible inner reality that you can 'have' rather than an external concept imposed on you And - for those who believe in trans gender identities - this inner sense of a sex-based concept can be other than the one matching your actual sex. (It's a logical fail, on that point - as set out above by popebishop).

Dysphoria/dysmorphia Often used interchangeably, but actually different things - '-phoria' relates to feelings (as in 'euphoria'), '-morphia' to shape (as in 'metamorphosis').

So gender dysphoria is being unhappy with your 'sex/gender/gender identity' in general (or with the contradictions inherent in the concept of both attaching gender to sex and wanting to do/be 'other sex' things).

Gender dysmorphia logically doesn't exist - gender doesn't have a 'shape'. However, body dysmorphia can attach itself to sex-differentiated aspects of the body.

That's quite a long post so I'll do the questions as a separate one.

I have a different perspective on the role of gender norms, meaning the current local cultural norms associated with each sex.

Many think that by adopting cross-sex gender norms, trans people are endorsing those norms as having some independent sex-based reality, which is kind of insulting to those of us who think that everyone should be free to be GNC if they want to be.

I think that trans people do it for a different reason. They think they belong in the opposite-sex club and they see adopting its gender norms as the price of admission, as well as a disguise which will force people to treat them as a person of that sex.

Your AMAer is fooling herself if she thinks she naturally epitomises feminine gender norms. She can wear pink if she wants, but she's unlikely to want the drudgery, danger and powerlessness of the average woman's life, and she's as likely as the next man to have those psychological traits that are genuinely sex-linked, like aggressiveness.

Stonking article from Dr Em there, thank you for sharing it.

Wow, pope, that’s fascinating.

This just shows how nonsensical the whole thing is.

“Those with 'woman mind' traits are women, and this includes male people with those traits.
^^
Those with 'man mind traits' are men, and this includes female people.
^^
The fact that millions of female people can have 'man minds' does not suggest to you that in fact psychological traits can present equally in both sexes, but you conclude instead that their bodies are the wrong sex for their mind.
^^
Based on this alone, you believe that 'man mind' people should be treated as male in all situations bar a very few, and same for women minds being treated as female. Bear in mind you say as a woman you are less rational than 50% of the population yet think it is fine to advocate for both sexes on this.”

do you accept that some people firmly believe they are born in the 'wrong' body?

Body dysmorphia is a thing. Some people with entirely unremarkable noses firmly believe they're huge and ugly. Some people starving themselves to death are sincerely convinced they're disgustingly fat. Some people believe they have the wrong number of legs and are deeply distressed by the extra one.

But believing something, no matter how firmly or sincerely, doesn't make it true. You are born in - and as - your body. You can't accidentally end up in someone else's, because then you would be them instead of you.

and have a right to live as the other sex?

You can't. It's not a matter of rights, it's a matter of reality. You cannot change sex, therefore you cannot live as the opposite sex.

How about gender? Well ... that's where it gets complicated. Because gender shifts, and is made up of 2 artifical boxes that nobody really fits into.

My grandfather smoked a pipe and fought with the Gurkhas. He also embroidered beautiful floral tablecloths and taught my mother to knit.

My grandmother was also keen on knitting and embroidery, she also joined the army. In common with most of her regiment, she rejected the uniform dress in favour of trousers, because when you're clambering in and out of trucks on the front line of the liberation of France a dress is impractical and the male soldiers can see your knickers. In later life she reverted to skirts and taught herself quantum physics for fun.

My other grandmother was never in the army, was obsessed with housework, and I never once saw her in a skirt or dress - only trousers.

Both grandmothers had short hair and wore flat shoes.

What gender were any of them living as?

Should it be as unremarkable for a man to have long hair and wear makeup and a skirt as it is for a woman to have short hair, no makeup and trousers? Yes. It was good enough for the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, so why not now? Should it be OK for women to enjoy brewing beer? Yes - beer used to be considered a women's thing, not a men's one, in medieval Britain. Should people be allowed to do any job, have any hobby or interest regardless of their sex? Of course.

Is it OK for men to cry and talk about their feelings? Or for women to express their anger? Yes - much healthier all round.

But there's no ned or reason to pretend to be the opposite sex in order to do any of these things.

GC feminism is about breaking down those boxes so people can live how they choose, regardless of sex. Gender ideology is about keeping and reinforcing the boxes, but allowing a few people to jump between them.

possibly taking hormones and undergoing surgery?

Hormones and surgery are extremely serious medical interventions, with substantial adverse effects even if they go 'well'. When they go badly - which is often - the consequences are horrific.

So they absolutely should not be available to children. If they are in psychological distress they should get rapid and thorough psychological intervention to understand the source of and attempt to alleviate that distress. For the vast majority, this exploratory therapy (and for lower levels of distress, simply supportive watchful waiting) has been shown to be sufficient for it to resolve.

Adults? More difficult. We let people with body dysmorphia about their nose have cosmetic surgery (although rarely on the NHS). We don't give gastric bands to anorexics, or let people chop off a healthy leg - even privately.

So I think for adults - after extensive psychological assessment and therapy - there are some circumstances in which allowing it might be reasonable, and many in which it would remain unethical. Exactly where I would draw the line is tricky.

Certainly if done it should be with much better information and long-term follow up than is currently the case. And if long-term studies show an intervention is not effective (the small amount of data available suggest surgery doesn’t improve, and may worsen, long term psychological outcomes) then it should be reassessed.

Or [that] these people should not ever be supported to live as the opposite sex? That doing so is always wrong?

As above it's not so much a question of 'wrong' as impossible/illogical.

People should be allowed to live as they choose - provided there isn't an adverse effect on others. But there's no reason to give additional support to someone 'living as' the opposite sex (or gender) - whatever they perceive that to mean - than there is to support any other choices they make about their life.

I think it was Translucent who announced with great fanfare, that there was proof that being trans is a biological condition' and were eviscerated by TRA's who were horrified that there might be a way to 'prove' that someone is trans and therefore blow the concept of self id out the water.

If that AMA thread is still there, it's well worth a read.

I'm years down the road on this, but still learned plenty from this podcast, particularly the 2nd episode.
I think OP might find it useful.
gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/

This is what I asked my DC when we were debating the topic (DC is firmly TWAW from a bekind position) and DC said, “well it’s not wearing a dress or having a handbag” and then hesitated and stopped there.

Cognitive dissonance too great to process those thoughts whilst holding on to the belief that TWAW. So could not carry on the conversation any further. Maybe one day…

I don't think surgery and hormones are a good or effective treatment for body dysmorphia. That's for any type of body dysmorphia, not just gender dysphoria.

At age 17 I felt desperately uncomfortable in my own body and was desperate to be prescribed appetite suppressants. My GP wouldn't give them to me because my BMI at the time was 12. She found me a bed in a hospital instead and over the following months and years I slowly learned how to accept my healthy body as it was and how to keep it healthy.

That should be the treatment for all types of body dysmorphia. Not always inpatient but certainly psychological treatment not physical treatment.

In the UK we have a socialised healthcare system and so as a taxpayer I strongly disagree with our communal money being used on experimental surgeries with poorly understood outcomes and limited efficacy.

The whole thing is totally unstable. I saw recently some man getting himself tattooed mastectomy scars so he could roleplay as a transman. An FTM Reddit forum was very upset about him using them as their identity.

As more women do the "transman" or "nonbinary" thing, the "pretend to be female" urge many men get will increasingly start latching onto those "female enby" or "transman" style cues...

At some point it could totally flip, with ridiculous stripper-wear mainly being associated with men, hence insufficiently female-coded; so all the Malaga types could end up wearing lumberjack shirts, blue hair and trying to pull off wispy moustaches, as that's what all the women in their "Queer" circles are wearing...