12 ways to gently respectfully challenge pro-trans arguments

[Ladyof2024]

I thought this might come in useful to those just beginning to take on the opposition.
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Twelve Ways to Voice Opposition to Daft Ideas Without Losing Friends or Alienating People, by Joanna Gray.

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How to get better at objecting to unedifying ideas

Ask the person suggesting an obviously daft idea if he or she would mind if you shared your opinion about it, rather than foisting it on him or her uninvited.

Respect others’ intentions. Most people are good and are trying their best, so avoid a heavy-handed aggressive disapproval.

Ask questions: “That’s such an interesting idea Chancellor, what are you hoping to achieve by it?” Often, that is sufficient: if the idea is flawed it will unravel itself in no time.

Remember your Aristotle: to win debates you need ethos, logos and pathos. Ethos is your good character and your authority to speak on the subject – most crudely used by those who say “as a mother…”. Logos is the truth of the matter. Pathos is your ability to persuade your opponent. Emotion alone is insufficient to win the point, it must be backed up by truth, but an ability to connect with and respect the emotion of your opponent is vital.

Remember you are debating the idea not the person. Don’t make him or her feel threatened, belittled or ill-informed.

Just try it! You don’t need to present a fully formed Douglas Murray-style-gotcha speech, initially it might just be sufficient to say, “I’m not yet sure why, but this idea is making me feel uncomfortable, may I have a think about it and get back to you?” If social or career disaster doesn’t follow, then you may feel emboldened to make a more spirited and researched objection later.

Be prepared to flatter. “You will know more about this than me but have you thought about…”

Listen to your opponent. Don’t stand there rolling your eyes, tutting or guffawing,

Remain calm and never shout.

Be prepared to use their own language. “Chancellor, this act of removing artworks of men might be considered by some to sit adjacent to sexism…”

Be satisfied with having planted a seed of doubt in those who listen to you, rather than furiously fighting for decisive victory.

Remind yourself why making a stand is important: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

This exactly.

Fuck all that noise, let’s tell it like it is.

showed more people who answered as male confirming they were trans (ie trans men) than people who answered as female (trans women).

That would fit with the social contagion aspect of how young women are drawn into it. I suspect if you drilled down further above the age of 30 the difference would be stark.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/census-transgender-data-ons-gender-identity-b2443686.html

Before anyone asks for "receipts"

When some posters post about how horrific it is that people deny that ‘trans children’ exist it seems to me to be a very narrow view and misrepresentation of what people are saying.

There is no proof that ‘trans children’ do exist outside of an ideological view point. Children with dysphoria and mental health conditions exist. Children with adverse reactions to sexism and sexual abuse exist. Children voicing concerns about puberty in many varied ways exist.

Children voicing the adult led points about being ‘trans’? I doubt that they exist without adults leading the child to voice those words. And that is adults shaping those children’s thoughts. And their fears.

I'm very angry, I promise. Particularly so given some of the choppy waters I'm currently navigating on the education side of things. The CAMHS side of stuff is less choppy (for now).

I channel my anger in to working out how I can support my daughter. I go through phases of intense activity and stepping back. Being on MN to share ideas and listen to others - including views that aren't always completely in line with mine (obviously nobody sees the world the exact same way as anyone else) - is one of the ways that I make sense of what's happening and have the breathing space to stay sane. Personally, I find humour (when appropriate, obviously) also helps with that.

Agreed.

Children voicing the adult led points about being ‘trans’? I doubt that they exist without adults leading the child to voice those words. And that is adults shaping those children’s thoughts. And their fears.

The same can be said for any belief: Methodist, Catholic, Jehovah's Witness, Scientology etc etc etc
Adults are teaching children to make sense of the world in the way that it makes sense to them including the fear bit (e.g. god's wrath).

Personally, I find the sexism, homophobia and enforcement of a stipulated doctrine too much in pretty much all of it. That's one of the reasons why I became an atheist - that and the fact that I realised I just didn't believe the answers any more when I spotted what I saw as inconsistencies in what I was told at church and what I learned in science etc.

Have at the UCLA data. Again roughly similar numbers of trans women and trans men @Circumferences . Or any other number of data reports.

Is there any data at all that supports @lifeturnsonadime’s intensely transphobic assertion?!

Ellie, my daughter is a girl. Human's can't change sex.

She knows she's a girl who is free to wear, dress and act how she wishes (so long as it is in confines of the law).

It is absolute nonsense and sexist for you to assert that she might really be a boy 'were it not for parental pressure'.

I'm not transphobic I just don't believe that society should be divided by gender rather than sex because that harms female people.

I also would like you to point to stats that say autistic middle aged females are transitioning because I don't believe that they are!

We know more young women than young men are transitioning. Isn't it awful that they feel that if they don't conform to stereotypes they should have their breasts chopped off. No one will see them as men. They still will face discrimination because of their sexed bodies.

I sincerely hope that is how Ellie would also describe the situation.

Sorry I was telling you Elle, I misspelt your name.

Yes my daughter would describe the situation that way.

She has come through to the other side of puberty now and is not feeling the same stresses that she was with her developing body and sensory needs and anxiety all causing her major mental health challenges.

She still prefers things that are stereotypically male. She can do that as a young woman.

It is absolutely abhorrent that we are putting notions in the heads of young girls and women that if they don't behave in certain ways, wear certain clothes, or act 'femininely' enough that they might be boys and the answer is to harm their healthy bodies.

This ideology is vile. Pure and simple. All adults who have enabled it ought to be fucking ashamed of themselves.

“Transphobic” isn’t really an apt term, as I am neither afraid of trans people nor hate them. So I don't accept that label.
I think I am more of a trans sceptic. Certainly gender critical.

I think there are a tiny minority of dysphoric people who truly believe they are the wrong sex, and many more who have paraphilias, are attention seeking, jumping on bandwagons, or have been encouraged, if not coerced.

This has had the effect of disrupting womens' rights. And it does make me angry. But it is about women, not anti transpeople just anti the horrible behaviour of some of them.

There is no proof that ‘trans children’ do exist outside of an ideological view point.

Do you remember the vogue for "Indigo" children? They were very fashionable for a while amongst a certain type of middle-class parent. The trans child similarly seems to be a new must-have accessory, particularly among celebrities.

Almost every female autistic child in our area is now identifying as a boy or non binary

We're not quite at this stage but it's certainly a notable number. What I would say is that out of all the female children I know of who identify as non-binary or male (the number keeps going up), every single one so far has been autistic.

I'm aware of one who isn't autistic who was gender questioning when 13/14, so not actively identifying as non-binary or a boy. She's now 15 and I think this is all resolved, although I'm not entirely sure. Because our children know each other I tried very tentatively talking about the whole subject ages ago with the mum but I respected her lack of interest in discussing it and stopped. Observably, the daughter still has short hair and she seems happy in herself, aside from "standard" teenage angst stuff. I understand from my daughter that she has a girlfriend, although this may now be old news and no longer the case - it was a long time ago that she told me about this and I don't fish for gossip from my children about other children's love lives!

At the weekend, my daughter told me about a female in a sports group she's in who uses he/him pronouns. This person is relatively new in to the group and at this stage I have no idea re autism - it's entirely possible that this child will be the "exception to the rule" in my experience so far, by being a neuro- typical female who identifes as a boy.

Do you remember the vogue for "Indigo" children? They were very fashionable for a while amongst a certain type of middle-class parent.

I was young when they were a thing (90s), but yes I remember reading about them! And yes "my child is different, special, more highly evolved".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_children

I do wonder why some women have the default position that women's rights (to be clear, by women's rights I mean the rights the female of the species has because they are female, not rights that male people claim they are also entitled to simply because they have appropriated the label Woman for themselves) are less important than trans rights?

It seems somehow performative, patronising even.

"Oh these rights? Gosh I didn't even realise we still had them! I certainly don't need them, everything is so equal now I hardly even know I'm a woman these days [tinkly little laugh]. If they will make you feel better I insist you must take them, you poor poor thing".

If however your DC was expressing of their own volition to CAMHS that their gender is other than the sex as assigned at birth (ie in this case your DC was expressing that they are a boy and wanted to be treated as such), then that’s different. And if that’s what happened, I consider it would not have been medically sound for CAMHS to just dismiss that and say ‘don’t be silly, you’re a girl’. Nor to say here’s some counselling to make you feel differently (aka conversion therapy)
If you can’t trust a trained clinical psychologist to be honest with a vulnerable child then there’s no hope!
Of coursed CAMHS staff should not lie! Alluding to the overused and disproved theory that if we don’t agree then theses children may harm themselves is dangerous.

Politely and kindly explaining to people that their rights should be removed, or they shouldn't exist in a sane world does not work.

I wonder if that's why David Tennant ranted about women being "little whingeing fuckers" for having concerns about the erosion of women's rights and that it would be better if Kemi Badenoch didn't exist.

Do you think he started off saying it politely and thought this ranty route was better? Fair enough to try a change of tack I guess.

If someone tried politely telling me that I needed to accept males identifying in to women's sports, it wouldn't work on me. The only flaw I see here in changing tack though is that ranting about it instead isn't really going to change my position on it either 🤦‍♀️

What are equal rights and what are additional rights that have been forced through without due consideration of the impacts on others?

Why would any society allow a group to continue to have additional rights to the majority of society where another group is being harmed through those additional rights being granted?

It is a dishonest plea using emotional manipulation to frame it as a group is having ‘rights removed’.

I wonder if that's why David Tennant ranted about women being "little whingeing fuckers" for having concerns about the erosion of women's rights and that it would be better if Kemi Badenoch didn't exist.

Do you think he started off saying it politely and thought this ranty route was better? Fair enough to try a change of tack I guess.

Good point. I certainly have no patience with "explaining reality to fools" any more, to paraphrase a well used phrase.

Sometimes it does, see descriptions of first hand experience of recovery from eating disorders on this thread and elsewhere. Similar for some other mental health issues. What makes gender dysphoria different? Apart from some psychiatrists rejecting it as a diagnosis.

...or using disengenuous arguments compared a protected characteristic with a mental disorder. That doesn't work, either.

I guess it's helpful in some ways to empathise with David Tennant here. As a believer in gender identity, his reality is that everyone has one and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. His ranting certainly would suggest he's tired of explaining himself to those that refuse to listen.

Poor David. If people refuse to accept his reality he doesn't really have many options : ranting and calling for people to be "cancelled" (lose their jobs, drowning them out with noise when they try and speak etc) or targeted in other ways is probably just about his full range of choices.

A few centuries ago there were way more options for anyone who was angry about others not accepting their (belief as) reality. Also, it was completely flexible depending on what belief was en vogue. Until Henry came along with the brand new reality of the Church of England, the Pope was the one who told everyone what was real. Then came the Purists like Cromwell and the protestant reality got tightened up even more. Anyone pushing back on reality got burned, drowned, their heads chopped off and more besides. It must be very frustrating to only have variations of rant in your arsenal of choices when pushing for acceptance of reality.

I'm so glad you finally understand why women (in the original sex based meaning) are so angry that women's rights (assigned to women under the original sex based meaning due to the challenges and needs we have because of our sex) are being removed.

You are correct. It's not right and it's not ok. It was never right and it was never ok. And it doesn't work.

Are you saying you don't believe gender dysphoria is the root of the wish for gender transition?

You appeared to be arguing that it is on another thread this morning - 9.44 on the supporting siblings thread - It would also help if they received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (if they have it) and to get some CBT.