3 questions for GC women

[ChirpyFinch]

As the title says, three questions for the women in this chat.

1. Do you think the majority of people are gender critical, and why/why not?

2. Globally, the right wing is more vocally gender critical than the left. They are also far more likely to be regressive on a range of women’s issues like abortion and anti-gay. Why do you think they agree with GCs on this one issue but disagree on so much else (if you think they do?)

3. How many trans people do you estimate there are globally?

Absolutely devastating 🙁

I don’t think any of you are less intelligent etc for holding an alternative viewpoint. But let’s all be respectful of others POVs.

Really? I don't have much respect for flat earthers or people who believe in the Loch Ness monster or the Da Vinci code. I just roll my eyes and wonder at how credulous some people are.

I don't think all POVs are equally valid. Some POVs come with reams of research and data to back them up - such as the POV that says sex is binary and unchanging in humans. You've said that you don't intend to offer any evidence for your belief. I believe in free speech so I'm not going to try and stop you from saying what you believe, but you can't expect me to respect it. I acknowledge that you think what you think, but that's as far as I'll go. Respect has to be earned.

If you could back your flaky idea up with an evidenced argument that makes more sense than my argument, I'd be happy to consider changing my mind. I fairly frequently shift my position when someone who knows more than me, and can evidence their argument, shows me that my conclusions are founded on inadequate knowledge or thinking. But if you can't or won't do that, tell me why I should respect a view plucked out of the air with nothing to support it apart from the fact that you hold it?

I don't think this is true. At least 3 of us had posts deleted, but I don't think anyone was banned.

You completely missed the point of that quote.
It's saying intelligent people can become stupid in effect because of their blind adherence to ideology, even though they are intelligent.

Horrible. Your poor friend must be gutted.

Such a good question. I'll have to remember that one.,

Yes, they tend to delete anything that gets reported. I've seen innocuous stuff get deleted just because somebody reported it.
I suspect a moderation bot does the actual deletions. If you rack up enough deletions you can get a time out. You may be able to come back if promise to abide by TOS in future. The problem is that TOS is incredibly subjective.
There's no judgement about who was in the right and who was in the wrong when it's moderated by AI. They probably have some human mods, but the scale of reports they would have to deal with would take a veritable army. MNers seem to make a ton of reports. AI is just cheaper and easier.

Distraught doesn’t begin to cover it.

And though mine is intact and has not been allowed PB/Xsec hormones so far, I know there’s always a risk. That said, I made sure that I am her contact/appointee on everything (PIP, NHS etc) so they’d have to get past me - and whatever legal resources I could muster - before I let it happen.

I heard of pedophile using it as a defence. He claimed that since he identifies as a minor, sex with another minor is not a crime. I kid you not.

I'm sorry you're going through that. How stressful it must be.
Thankfully my daughter has shown zero inclination to want hormones or surgery. She does not want to be a man, she just wants to be a "they."

Hoping mine is gradually retreating from the edge - the Khelif stuff really triggered/peaked her and she had a real feminist rant one morning, so am hoping that a year out of college/school away from the TRA cheerleaders has given her space. She hate needles/doctors and has spent 18m trying to find the right ADHD meds, so I have been hoping this offers some level of protection against going for surgery or messing around with x-sex hormones.

I don’t care how she dresses, how short her hair is, who she dates - I just want the damage to be limited to the scars on her arms as they may one day fade… hoping the appeal of this stuff fades sooner, though, as she begins to realise that life, uni, a career, earning a living is more important than pronouns or breast binders.

There's definitely a connection to being ND.
I think they feel alienated because they are different, and popular culture teaches them that this means they are either another gender (there are many genders, apparently 🙄) or non-binary, so they just go with it. One well known TRA said there are "at least a thousand" genders on Real time with Bill Maher. 🤡

Madness. The whole stinking lot of it.

So we have categorisation 1: women are people with female bodies, men are people with male bodies.
Or we have categorisation 2: women are people who hold an innate belief that they are women, men are people who hold an innate belief that they are men.

Put aside for the moment the large number of us who hold no such innate conviction and just make a physical observation to determine our sex.

There is an immediate logical problem with categorisation 2, and that is circularity. When children grow up learning the language, under definition 2 they'd observe no consistent difference between the group of people labelled as 'women' and the group of people labelled as 'men', so they would be able to attach no distinct meaning to the words 'women' and 'men' in order to know which they were.

@ElleWoods15, how do you get around the circularity problem of your innate feeling definition of men and women? As someone who's thought deeply about it?

Yikes @CautiousLurker that's scary. I hope your DD comes through ok with no irreparable consequences.

This is helpful in that it's not a logical contradiction. So the idea is that you can have a female or male brain which is often but not always aligned to sexual biology?

Leaving aside the question of any actual evidence for this, I would question why it is deemed to be more important what kind of brain you have as opposed to what kind of body.

It may well be the experience of some trans people that their different brain is very important, but it's the experience of a lot of biological females that people with penises are threatening/ not sexually attractive to them / etc yet they are being coerced into silence.

Why should one set of experiences trump the other?

Chicken or egg

Autism means some people struggle with gender stereotypes because they effectively believe them to be hard and fast rules. Rule breaking causes a state of anxiety. Thus a male who breaks gender stereotypes feels anxiety because of it. This has an effect on the brain.

Perhaps it is a feeling. But it's not a feeling of being a woman. And the first line treatment should not be to enable and reinforce that someone is female because this makes the problem worse. It is doing harm not helping because it increases the anxiety related response. An anxiety related response often results in a fight or flight mentality - and we are seeing this manifest as anger and threats. Precisely because of the nature of what's going on.

And of course surrounding yourself in an echo chamber creates extremists and perhaps alters brain responses again. Not because someone 'is a woman' but because they've ended up in a doom loop. This may hold off some feelings, but at some point there will be an issue because when someone looks in the mirror they can't escape their sex and they will still see it especially as they've increased their sensitivity because they've fed their negative anxiety response.

It also explains the whole over compensating and ott dramatisation feature of dressing up as a woman because it triggers a response in other people and often it has this sense of promoting confidence because you have to fake it and this gives a certain response within the brain. Again not being a woman and this isn't maintainable because of the level of effort required to sustain it and that lending itself to trigger autistic meltdowns.

Then when you go through the process of medicalisation and it doesn't deliver on unachievable promises and you have a bunch of significant negative side effects you are either going to regress even further into a denial state lashing out and blaming everyone else because of your own unhappiness or you will reach a total rock bottom crash point - which may result in negative consequences of its own.

If you look at it all through the lens of autistic issues with rules breaking and an anxiety response then the whole thing makes perfect sense.

And it also highlights why the ultimate and absolute thing you shouldn't do is facilitate it because it only leads to spiraling responses in line with anxiety led responses.

But no one can actually study this hypothesis because it'd be deemed to be offensive. Even if it ultimately has a hell of a lot behind it to suggest it might well have merit. Because ideology has eroded and corrupted scientific good practice.

There is no evidence though that there is a male or female brain. There is evidence of physical differences of brains being slightly different between male and female bodies due to shape of skulls that are different between the sexes. But at this time, there has been no evidence that this has produced differences.

What does produce differences regardless of sex is repeated activities, experiences and what a person in interested in. And hormones. There was a study that I read that London Black Cabbies have particular pathways of the brain developed. This is consistent though with other studies that show the concept that pathways develop through experience, reactions and activities. So therefore, someone who has adopted certain actions they consider to be female but they are male, may well show they have similar pathways after time. Not necessarily before.

And if the brain has changed due interaction with particular hormones, well it is still a male brain who didn’t show those reactions to hormones prior to the person introducing those hormones. In other words, the hormone interaction only started with the introduction of artificial hormones. It is not a ‘sexed’ difference as such because a person taking a hormone treatment that is different to the hormones their sexed body needs or produces naturally. It is an introduced change and would not have been present at any scan prior to the change. Certainly not at any diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

If brain differences were present in those who believe they are the opposite sex, wouldn’t it be a great diagnosis tool? But it is not a diagnosis tool because it is not a predictor.

And as you say, the male person who believes they are female is still male and their experience shouldn’t not trump a female person’s needs when sex matters.

Yes…. This or similar has been mentioned before on a thread this poster was on. There seems to be an expectation, this is a general observation not targeted, that an opinion should be simply accepted at face value and that evidence should be believed to exist because someone said so.

And that if someone declares they have a qualification or a career or a significant life experience that gives them special insight, that this should be believed and elevate their authority too. Yet we have seen people who should be the greatest thinkers in the world come out with the poorest quality research and support what has been shown to be philosophical belief over observable, robust evidence and well established and abiding science.

Those ‘great thinkers’ believe things like ‘sex is a spectrum’ for instance when this doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Because it is also a lazy mantra. There are two sexes and huge variation in bodies within those two sexes. Still two sexes. Never a third.

So these days, I don’t care how much someone has studied a topic or worked in a field. If they cannot link up evidence and cannot articulate the concepts they believe in terms that are not solely based on a philosophical belief, I don’t feel any inclination to merely accept their opinion. And if they wish to post it on a public forum, they should have no expectation that their posts will remain unchallenged.

This is a top notch post and these ideas make intuitive sense to me.

Of course gender is arbitrary and changeable, different across times and cultures. And there are infinite numbers if 'gender' because it's not a fixed/finite category for this reason, varies from person to person according to culture and personality.

The inner/outer and mind/body aspects are interesting. If an inner feeling of - what, disliking certain.stereotypes - is taken to mean we should change our outer appearance to try to mimic the signals of the opposite sex.

Only works if we rely on sex being dimorphic. 'If I'm not male because I don't feel an inner affinity with male stereotypes ergo I must be female'.

(Non binary and all the other made up genders become a heady pick n mix of secondary sex characteristics, a plastic surgery genitalia smorgasbord, and apparently endless flags and pronouns.)

So emotionally repressive ideas about sex - that boys shouldn't cry and girls shouldn't be loud - get internalised as judgements and assumed that our outer must be made to match our inner.

Holy Cartesian duality.

It is just a bonkers idea that anyone thinks that a male identifying as a female because that male believes they are female is based on evidence. It cannot even be based on logic.

All any of these male people can identify as is a male person who ‘believes’ they are female based on the parameters that they personally have set up as what defines female. But that is only their own conceptualisation and not based on a female life experience. Just what they want the female life experience to be.

But, apparently it is also mightily offensive to point this out. And the posters who declare this is offensive never then extrapolate that further… how fucking offensive it is to all female people
to have male people define what a female is. And that it is usually based on the fact that male person doesn’t feel like a ‘boy/man’. This means female people are the non-male position in that person’s mind.

How is that not misogyny? Yet, it is a question that never gets answered by those who demand we simply accept their philosophical belief has scientific evidence to support it and it is based in material reality.

I think the world has changed .

Three elements of that change:

The advertising industry realised that under 16s are a major market for fashion items including clothes, cosmetics, body care products.

The pharmaceutical industry (that created the opioid disaster) saw a way to push into that market, and assorted medics and therapists followed them.

The constant, highly visual but also highly faked connectivity that smart phones have facilitated.

The child and teenage market thing really took off from the late 1980s - more money, more fast fashion. I remember the first time I noticed a group of primary schoolchildren where the girls all wore pink and purple jackets and the boys were all in blues or grey. Not a school uniform, just the manufacturers push - 1993.

The pharma thing has intensified since the hugely lucrative opioid market began to be regulated - gender related medicine (and how you medicate for a feeling baffles me) is the nest big thing for them.

I don't know what mobile phone apps have been the real trigger for the worst of this, but I hear 2012 being identified as a year that saw a big uptick in child and adolescent mental health problems linked to phone use - not sure why? I remember the pro-ana sites being a concern well before that, but think they may have been accessed by home computers rather than by phone. Prescriptive gender stereotyping seems more of a smartphone thing.

But bottom line is, the world has changed for young people since the 1990s and before, and not in a positive way.

“How is that not misogyny? Yet, it is a question that never gets answered by those who demand we simply accept their philosophical belief has scientific evidence to support it and it is based in material reality.”

I guess I keep having to remind myself that if your basis for reality only extends to ‘transgender people exist’ and cannot articulate the details of how they exist except for ‘they are women because they say they are’, then your reality is only subjective and not material, objective and provable.

The first indication it is a philosophical belief is when someone declares that are unsafe because of people’s questions.

Interesting to consider how much of a 'trans' identity is about rejecting aspects of the self as much as being drawn to aspects of the opposite sex.

'Distress' at one's own genitals is apparently central to a dysphoria diagnosis.

Who decided that having a negative reaction to your genitals must mean you want to be the opposite sex? The logic fail is astonishing.