They / them at work

[pootlefump]

I've just written a long post and it's disappeared so in brief - how do you deal with staff who are they/them at work? I will really struggle to call a very obvious biological male 'they'. I also can't loose my job and do want to be respectful but also can't change my view on this nonsense !

Well, I guess if you don’t believe that trans people’s feelings about their sex are true, then I guess you would resent using their pronouns. I can see that I’m flogging a dead horse here.

Because many people are living in fear about accidentally getting it wrong and then being accused of mis-gendering the person or whatever other terrible crimes they think they'll be accused of.

I think the hate comes from the extremely intolerant people who use they/them pronouns who launch into a tirade when someone makes a mistake.

it doesn’t cost anything to do it

I have a religious obligation not to tell lies, and feeling socially compelled to tell them is distressing for me in any situation. I am also a former victim of repeated gaslighting and I still doubt my self perception from time to time.

And I am comparatively privileged compared against e.g. a woman with learning disabilities, a second language English speaker, or a woman who lives pay cheque to pay cheque and cannot afford to be out of work.

@Belichtofalicht you're very naive, have you even heard of Autogynephilia (AGP)? Many men transition as they get turned on by themselves in women's clothes then progress to getting fake boobs etc.
Also you say that transitioned people are happier, I've not seen evidence of this, can you share it? I think you've just assumed this. Most teenagers that have gender dysphoria desist by adulthood if they do not transition.

I am sure some people, like @Belichtofalicht says, feel they should have been born the opposite sex. I am sure many, many more don't and are doing this for a lot of different reasons, be it trauma, be it a fetish, be it a way to get attention or to harrass women. Remember, all you have to do is say you are trans, no diagnosis or medical intervention required. And Belicht is just as gender critical as most on here saying that men shouldn't be in womens sports, prisons etc. But just still on the 'be kind it might be a true trans person' side. Be nice until you find out you made a mistake in being nice.

I am more on the 'not play their game' side as I have seen that being nice means you get taken advantage of or worse.

Interesting though about the 'everybody starts out female' statement, but I am wondering if the writer knew what phenotype means: a set of observable traits of an organism. Unless the writer thinks being female is being a blob, that sentence is untrue. The phenotype is not visible/not there yet, as the environmental factors (hormones) haven't triggered the devlopment path based on the genotype yet.

Belichtofalicht clearly believes in true trans people (and presumably by extension, not so true trans people).

Who knows? They could be right. Maybe one day there will be a test and it will turn out some distinct group of people will have some distinct biological marker that means they have an innate (as opposed to inner) feeling that they are the opposite sex.

It won’t matter. They still won’t be that sex. And if there was a test to identify that group of people, you can bet that basing anything on that test would be deemed extremely transphobic against the other (majority) group of trans people, and we would still be expected to bend over backwards for any trans people, whichever group they were in (but more so if they were in the male group, of course).

I agree. They'd still not be the opposite sex. It would mean that we should expand the bandwidth of the actual sex they are and nothing else.

Solzhenitsyn would agree with you about lies.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4382551-Live-not-by-lies-Solzhenitsyn-no-tambourines-involved?msgid=111900052

At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? Gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense—and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want, and they put sane people in asylums—always they, and we are powerless."

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me—I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally—since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence. And violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies—all loyalty lies in that.

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me.

https://honestyculture.com/alexander-solzhenitsyn-live-not-by-lies/?

Pronouns are sex based. So this person thinks they don’t have a sex? Uhuh.

@Belichtofalicht has their faith based belief and has worked backwards from there on the basis that there must be a "rational explanation" why that belief is true. It's taken as axiomatic that the feelings are exactly what the people claiming them report, a demonstration that they are more aligned with the opposite sex than their own.

A while ago, a TRA started shouting very excitedly about how a test would soon be available to prove that people were trans, and THAT WOULD SHOW THE TERFS.

All the other TRAs were horrified & the shouting stopped, very quickly.

I’m not looking up and sharing stories and research; it’s exhausting. You can always look up positive stories of transition yourself if you want.

A few aberrant folk with AGP doesn’t mean that all trans people are like that. You’re tarring all of them with the same brush.

I believe them when they say they feel all wrong as their born sex and much better after transition.

What? We all know that blokes living their fetish 24/7 and being called stunning and brave for it are going to feel happy.

A few aberrant folk with AGP doesn’t mean that all trans people are like that. You’re tarring all of them with the same brush.

To defend that last assertion, it would be helpful for you to cite your source for asserting the attitude that you claim is more than your personal strawman.

I don't believe in transition because you can't change sex. However, some people do seem to feel better after having surgery on their private parts, taking artificial hormones and dressing in ways which they believe to be more normative for the opposite sex. De transitioned horror stories, however, also tell us that some people feel a whole lot worse.

Correct; I think there are true trans people and not so true trans people. Regarding the latter, I’m appalled by Lia Thomas ruining women’s college swimming in the US.

How do we work out who is 'true trans'?

Is there a checklist?

I don’t understand your sentence. Cite a source for an attitude? I don’t even know what attitude you mean. Attitude that is more than my personal straw man? I’m sorry; I just truly don’t understand what you mean there.

I’m not citing any sources. I’m not writing a dissertation. There’s plenty of evidence for the things I’m saying, if you care to look for yourself.

People who are genuinely trans and not pretending to be in order to win more medals or gain access to women’s changing rooms because they’re pervs. Surely what I wrote is not that hard to understand?

Yes, there are some stories of people who regret transitioning. Also lots who feel right in their bodies for the first time.

I guess you believe that there are no genuinely trans people (ie those who simply want to change and then go on with their lives as regular people, just the opposite to what they were born), and that all of it’s down to a fetish. I, personally, don’t believe that it’s all fetish, but obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And maybe you are correct! I’m just espousing what I think. We don’t know anything for sure regarding this issue. None of it’s facts, like we know for sure that we need oxygen to survive.

I’m religious too, and I think that Jesus would have loved trans people bc he loved everyone. He was approx 2,000 years ahead of his time.

Omg, the prejudice on here is unreal. What an eye-opener! If I were a trans woman who had taken all the hormones and looked just like a biological woman (as most do after transitioning) I would be absolutely terrified to tell anyone.

Whether people want to admit it or not, happily transitioned people living as the opposite sex to their biological one exist, and mostly, you’d never know. They are among us. Mwah-hah-hahhh! 🤣🤣🤣