What exactly do you mean when you say 'Trans people have always existed'?

[RainWithSunnySpells]

I'm hoping that people who genuinely believe this will explain it to me.

I would like to know:
(1) how are you defining 'Trans'?
(2) what is the evidence that convinced you that this was 'always' the case?

I just want to understand this phrase as it genuinely confuses me and I saw it again on a current and sensitive thread that I do not want to derail.

Thanks to everyone who answers.

I didn't say anybody hated me or my child. The hatred is generalised and applied towards all trans or gender non conforming people. There is plenty of hateful speech on this board in my view and it doesn't help anybody or anything.

I also did not say that she has changed sex. My child has not changed sex. It's not possible to change sex. This is a male person who identifies as a woman, and acepts the reality of that situation. Trans women are not women. They are trans women. I never said otherwise.

But you know better don't you?

There is so much ignorance on this board. It's not OK - it's descending to the level of the worst TRAs and is exactly the sort of thing that gives the trans movement oxygen.

But hardly anyone is listening or cares. You're all SO sure that you're right.

I'm out.

But hardly anyone is listening or cares. You're all SO sure that you're right.

In fairness, I came to the point of being fairly sure I'm right only after I spent months and months listening to the trans side of the argument. In the end I concluded that there were no coherent arguments there, only spurious analogies ("homosexuality is fine therefore transgenderism is") and sidestepping of explanation ("it's not my job to educate you", "you don't really want to understand").

But there will be lurkers not posting so no matter what previous posters including myself think, it's always worthwhile to explain because one of them might find your argument persuasive.

Then I'll be clearer, nobody on this board hates trans people, whatever that means.

This is a male person who identifies as a woman.

What does "identifies as" mean?

It's descending to the level of the worst TRAs

Come back and let me know when you see the equivalent of "decapitate TERFs" and I'll begin to believe you are discussing in good faith.

You can't possibly know how everyone on this board feels.

Are we not allowed to talk about the paraphilia that dare not speak it's name? My last post was deleted.

I'm new to Mumsnet again after a hiatus of more than a decade.

So you're the exception that proves the rule. Cool.

Care to add anything constructive?

Welcome back! I didn't see your vanishing post, but believe we can say autogynephilia. Some MNers have wittily dubbed it Malaga Airport.

@ChristabelHolloway with respect you are invested in the ideology. You have skin in the game.
You don't want to hear other perspectives because it doesn't fit your view.
Nobody has to believe in the trans ideology much as people don't have to believe in god.
You do. That's fne. But don't expect everyone else to.
Trans ideology its belief streams the impacts have been brilliantly debated on this thread. Your arguments have been rebuffed.

Hindu religion believes in reincarnation. The immortal soul, which generally has a male or female "essence," settles into a new body usually congruent with that essence. But not necessarily. So given essences in noncongruent bodies is an expected phenomenon.

I'm pretty sure they don't see themselves as smashing any sort of gender binary. Although maybe in recent years they've imported being cool that way from the US.

In any case, TRAs taking the Hindu-based situation as some kind of validation for the Eternal Transness seems like quite a stretch.

www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders

Thank you so much for the welcome back post, Garlickest. I was smiling and "awwing" at that and then I clicked on the link and after an initial bout of confusion and having to scroll up, I cackled out loud. Hahaha. So fkn funny!

Well, the Goths did manage to sack the city of Rome in 410, showing that they have been around for a while...

(Yes, a joke, but it shows the problem of language, and how it changes over time, and the consequent effect upon discussions and defining something throughout a large-scale span of history.)

This is a really good point, and also suggests one way out of the confusion: if we look at the contexts in which people say "trans people have always existed" we can get a feeling for what exactly they mean by it. Just as if someone mentions goths and The Cure, we know they're not talking about the sacking of Rome.

For example, it's said in response to claims about rapid onset gender dysphoria. A girl thinking she's a boy can't be doing this because of social contagion, because trans people have always existed. So here what's being claimed is that "trans" is a reliable stable and inescapable identity which even young people can recognise practically infallibly. In this light we can look at examples like fa'afafine and say that these boys would probably have grown up to be gay men if they had been accepted and supported as such, and in most "third gender" cases individuals are pushed into that category by societies with very narrow roles for male and female.

It's said in response to claims that it infringes on women's rights to open hitherto women-only spaces to males. In this case it means "we can trust that only men who are "really trans" will use these spaces, and these men don't pose the same risk as other men." But of course in history and other cultures, these "third genders" were not seen as being the same as women, they were understood as separate and not given access to women's spaces for the most part. Nor did they simply elect themselves to the role.

Concepts and phenomena evolve and change over time so of course today’s ‘transgender’ did not exist in exactly the same forms and understanding as in previous eras. Cultural contexts change. Just as to be homosexual in ancient times was different to how it is understood now. ‘Government’ and ‘medicine’ don’t mean exactly the same as they did 2000 years ago but they existed in some analogous forms.

In Roman times the terms homosexual and heterosexual did not exist. There were those that were sexually dominant and those that were submissive regardless of sex.

Gender non conformity has always existed, but so has the phenomena of people wishing to present or appear as the opposite gender or sex. For a variety of reasons, many of which are assumed or interpreted. I assume that’s what people mean when they say transgender always existed.

https://time.com/6338587/u-k-museum-roman-emperor-trans-woman/

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/lgbtq-history/the-galli/

TRANSGENDER AND INTERSEX IN ANTIQUITY: DIFFERENCES IN ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN GENDER NORMS THROUGH RELIGION, RITES, AND NON-HETERONORMATIVITYo
https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/6395wg151

https://notchesblog.com/2017/11/14/of-gods-emperors-trans-experiences-in-ancient-rome/

https://www.routledge.com/TransAntiquity-Cross-Dressing-and-Transgender-Dynamics-in-the-Ancient-World/Campanile-Carla-Uhink-Facella/p/book/9780367874346

https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/betancourt_transgender_lives.pdf

Erotic target location error has probably always been a thing. As has attraction to aspects of the lifestyle of the other sex, or being born with traits that lean towards the norms for the other sex. None of this actually makes you the other sex, not does it place on an onus on society to treat you as the other sex.

Malaga Airport. Love it.😂

Gender non conformity has always existed, but so has the phenomena of people wishing to present or appear as the opposite gender or sex. For a variety of reasons, many of which are assumed or interpreted. I assume that’s what people mean when they say transgender always existed

No, I don't think this is what they mean. The feminists opposing the current claim that we all have an innate gender identity, and that we should organise society by gender identity and not sex, have no problem with gender non-conformity or even people dressing as the opposite sex. In fact we often support it. What we object to is the claim that gender identity must replace sex in how we organise society, as it is gender identity that makes you a woman (or a man).

Those saying transgender people have already existed are using it to try to shore up their claim that gender identity exists and can be found throughout history.

What their examples actually usually show are ways for societies to accept gay men or ways for women to escape the social constraints placed on their sex or for lesbians to find ways to live as lesbians by one faking a male persona.

Elagabalus clearly didn't view himself as a woman, @Fieldofgreycorn, as women couldn't be emperors.

During my long and rambling perusal of ancient cultures, I've noticed that castrated priests are invariably coupled with "ecstatic" rites. When you look carefully, you find that ecstatic means "orgiastic" in these cases. I suspect these feminised devotees were, as in other cultures today, men who were available for sex with intact male guests.

I mean, sure, integrate gay men into your patriarchy by cutting their balls off and calling them spiritually female. Definitely something for a modern, open-minded society to emulate 🤨

According to this article, it was his enemies who claimed that he thought he was a woman.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/20/trans-roman-emperor-hitchin-museum-claim-pronouns-woke/

Elagabalus has been given female pronouns on the basis of classical texts that claim he asked to be called “lady” - but historians believe these accounts may simply have been a typical Roman attempt at character assassination.

This pronoun choice is based on the account of Roman chronicler Cassius Dio, who claims that Elagabalus was “termed wife, mistress and queen”, told one lover “‘Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady’,” and even asked for female genitalia to be fashioned for him.

However, these claims were written by a chronicler who served the emperor Severus Alexander, who took the throne following the assassination of Elagabalus, and the accounts use his reputedly deviant behaviour as a justification for this political murder.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, a Cambridge classics professor, said: “The Romans didn’t have our idea of ‘trans’ as a category, but they used accusations of sexual behaviour ‘as a woman’ as one of the worst insults against men.”

Pentheus in the Bachae by Euripedes dressed up as a woman to infiltrate a woman only event. He had a whole conversation with a "helpful stranger" who reassured him he looked just like his mother only younger and prettier.
He could be a trans icon of Ancient Greece although unfortunately in the play it did not end well for him.

But either the rumours about elagobalus were made up by his enemies to discredit him - so he wasn't trans. Or they are true, in which case he isn't exactly portraying a positive image of trans women.

I am finding this very difficult to follow.

This is your first comment on this thread and you are referring to something that you wrote.

The only thing that turns up in an internet search for your name is an issue of "The Lifeboat" from 1925 when someone called Christabel Holloway (aged 12) submitted an essay to a competition.

I understood that name changes are not allowed within thread. So, unless this has changed, have you got another Mumsnet account that you used to write something earlier in this thread - and what was it?

If name changes are now allowed within thread, what was it you wrote earlier in this thread and under what name?

Or are you saying that you authored the Wikipedia page that you linked?

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IMHO these are good "debunking" references covering the appropriation of so-called "trans identities" from other cultures:

Toward an End to Appropriation of Indigenous “Two Spirit” People in Trans Politics: the Relationship Between Third Gender Roles and Patriarchy
https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/toward-an-end-to-appropriation-of-indigenous-two-spirit-people-in-trans-politics-the-relationship-between-third-gender-roles-and-patriarchy/

(There are several other very good, relevant articles on that blog)

How to Have (a) Sex: The Appropriation of Cultural Practices to Fit Postmodernism
Donovan Cleckley
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/how-to-have-a-sex-the-appropriation-of-cultural-practices-to-fit-postmodernism/

1./ How did this remarkable woman, Running Eagle, of the Blackfeet People end up labelled as 'two spirit' by the LGBTQ+ lobby? It's a bizarre story of fake science, ideological over-reach and regressive sterotypes. It starts with the influence of a creepy, white, gay man.
1/of 19
https://x.com/TwisterFilm/status/1681335378681159683

(archived X thread by Malcolm Clarke)
archive.ph/piLeM