The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity

[Ingenieur]

An interesting article in The Atlantic today, and a sign the tide might be turning in the USA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-dishonest-gender-conversation-2024-election/680604/

Most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

Baby steps

That's precisely my thinking Red.

You'd think that for anyone keen on stopping this right wing takeover, and seeing that feminists are increasingly unwilling to just put up and shut up about women's rights "for the greater good", the solution would be for the left to stop pandering to this tiny minority and make itself more appealing to feminists and women in general.

I did intend to reference it and acknowledge it with compassion but once I started vomiting up my annoyance I forgot to circle back and do this.

I'm not surprised @CautiousLurker1 , either to hear that you had intended to circle back (I've seen a lot of compassion in many of your posts, including for people with transgender identities) or that you ended up forgetting to do this.

I'm going to borrow "vomitting up my own annoyance" for myself. It's a great metaphor to describe my own rants. Most of the time, like you, I post "neutrally" and without emotion. But every now and again something really rattles me and I either vomit up a rant or spit out sarcasm.

That is a genius idea. I'd love to see it here.

Personally, I don't think that it would have mattered much in the end. I think that there are two main reasons that Trump won. First off, he was shot. That is something that everyone hears about, whether they follow politics or not. An assassination or an attempted assassination has swung more than one election in the past.

Secondly, people didn't know who Harris was or even that Biden was no longer the democratic nominee. Unless a candidate manages to get a lot of attention in both mainstream media, as well as social media, they won't win elections. Attention matters, and Trumps antics always draw attention. 2020 was also more a vote against Trump than it was for Biden. Biden also became the nominee because people wanted a "safe" candidate, like a mediocre white man who has been in politics forever.

Although, I do hope that left wing parties will finally have honest debates about transgenderism that goes beyond "anything someone says it valid, except from those who disagree".

Ironic that your "but what difference does it really make to you for the law, politicians and society to be openly seen to validate a few lying men's pronouncements and demands instead of the truth?" Came directly after such a great post about how state sanctioned lying degrades the political and cultural landscape for all.of us.

Because of course it's not just about immediate physical safety in the supposedly "women-only" spaces that already exist (though that is important as well of course), it's about women's right and ability to name and describe their own lived experience as female, to the language they need to name and justify and fight for the new rights and protections they may need as the world evolves and the threats and pressures on female people change, to the political voice to speak for ourselves and our needs and our right to our own destiny.

(Plus to your actual, limited vision point, (1) most people don't believe the way a man thinks is what makes him a woman.so your belief in "real trans" is at best differentiating between men who believe their genderist delusion and men who just fake it, and (2) come back when you have a way to differentiate between the harmless men and the harmful ones before the latter cause harm and we can have a sensible conversation about whether the physical (because single sex spaces are about the unthinking harm men do to us socially as well as physically) protections for women should be more subtle than "no open access to men at all no matter what they identify as". Because until you can back your proposed distinction up with a practical implementation you are just blowing smoke around.

Which of course you well know given how many times you've said similar and been given the same response.

In fact, linking two derails, one of the clearest indicators of a bot or troll is the groundhog day effect whereby no matter what responses and indeed discussions followed their post last time, next time they start with exactly the same arguements,.never evolving or acknowledging previous discussions if only to say "I know the argument against me is X but I disagree because...." like a good faith actor would.)

..... this potentially proving I'm not a bot. I think.

Who knows. There seem to be multiple parallel universes going on in this whole thing. In one, I'm a faceless bot, in another I'm an ordinary parent who cares deeply about what's happening to vulnerable children and young people, in another I'm apparently a nazi.

I'm pretty sure I know which of these is real.

Sadly, that sounds too boringly logical and sensible as an approach. Thus automatically rendering it right wing in origin, regardless of your own politics 🙃

Thank you @BonfireLady It’s not like me to be quite so blunt and not to take a moment to empathise with another parent walking a difficult road, so I appreciate it being noted as out of character and underline my apology for seeming dismissive of PP’s circumstances… but, yes, at least it shows I’m not a bot either! 🤣

Can you provide us with the evidence that any male person, in any stage of transition, has the same degree of risk or lower than female people of committing a sex crime or a violent crime?

And if not, can you please explain what the process is that those male people go through that removes their risk of committing sex and violent crime.

I mean considering the publicly available statistics of the male people with trans identities in UK prison, you must have some ability to use that population for the basis of your evidence and your explanations, no?

I think we are all bots!

And there are only six real people and the rest of us on FWR are socks puppet accounts.

I would love to see a study of the overall mental health in cohorts of children from genderist vs non genderist schools. Remember, secondary school is 5 years of being in that environment - critical developmental years when puberty happens (or at least should happen).

There are plenty of teachers and groups of teachers in schools who've quietly been the adults and rejected genderism and carried on safeguarding children properly according to KCSIE rather than persistently emotionally abusing them by telling them they have to subvert their perceptions and beliefs and pretend some people have changed sex. They've had to do it quietly because of the capture of institutions but there are many schools which have quietly done the right thing for children's health and well-being.

Another useful study would be the number of transgender kids in schools where genderism was promoted by teachers and in those where it wasn't. That would be revealing too.

That is research that should be done (and I'd love to do it). My hope would be that children are more resilient than I think and there's no impact, but the research should be done to find out.

Most state secondaries have about 1000 children across 5 years, so plenty of data

Bleep Bloop, I agree with ~[insertfield:previousposter]

Secondly, people didn't know who Harris was or even that Biden was no longer the democratic nominee.

Yes and when Biden was no longer the candidate the Democrat media/social medha commentators all switched to how amazingly wonderful Kamala Harris was as if she had always been their first choice, it came across as extremely fake and gaslighty, I imagine it turned a lot of people off. As did the "first black female president" stuff.

Elon sacked 80% of Twitters staff, and they kept running, in fact they now make a profit. Expect him to do the same to the whole US government.

🤣

Ooh, can I be the thin, incredibly young bot version? Don’t see why I need to be the 50+ menopausal version if I can have a software and hard-drive upgrade?

Cloudflare in particular is so ubiquitous now, and call me naive (I'm from the early days of the internet when mostly it was a collective effort that prized openness) but I was shocked how much un-overseen power they have to impose censorship simply by dint of where they sit in the stack.

This is an interesting observation @FlirtsWithRhinos (my italics).

Is it wrong that I'm now hoping that Cloudflare mess up their code a la Crowdstrike (which was indeed the issue, by Crowdstrike's own admission) and we get a world heat map of exactly which parts of the internet, as well as which businesses, could be impacted by any censorship/limitations imposed at this level? Obviously I apologise in advance to anyone who would be inconvenienced by a failure like this and me wishing for it. It must have been incredibly annoying for everyone whose flight etc was impacted by the Crowdstrike fail. But it certainly would be interesting. And obviously I'm not suggesting that Cloudflare are doing any activism, it's more a business continuity/disaster recovery planning hypothesis to see how things could be impacted if a situation like this were to occur. Ideally scenarios aren't tested on live systems, but needs must 🙃

Perhaps the NHS can learn a thing or two - sack 80% of the managers and free up some of that money for more clinical staff and better pay for the ones who’ve stuck it out this far?

I just saw a post on another thread that leads me to think this post about not ‘meeting’ any people with transgender identities is you projecting your experience onto others. It is you basing your person life experience of ‘scarcely knowing that transgender people exist if not for the ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth over this issue in the media and on mumsnet.’

So, you have assumed your personal experience is the general experience and that others don’t have frequent, if not daily, contact with people with transgender identities?

Good to know.

That would be an interesting study.

My autistic daughter who was asked by CAMHS if she was actually a boy has been home educated because there are no schools that meet her educational needs which are complex.

I am really glad that she wasn't in school because I do think that peer pressure/ social contagion would have made her question this more. To a large degree she was shielded.

Most autistic girls in our area now either identify as boys or as non- binary. It's a travesty. CAMHS should also do similar research within its health trusts.

I was just listening to a podcast (americast I think, maybe not though) which said that most normal media was pro Harris rather than pro Trump. They said something along the lines of Trump achieved this historic and in US terms overwhelming win without the media, with far fewer celebrity endorsements than Harris, without Hollywood and without the support of the establishment.

They did say some of the relatively late endorsements for Trump by prominent women such as Megyn Kelly were important for some groups of women voters. Stopping the gender insanity was the main reason Kelly endorsed Trump IIRC.

Don’t know. Better ask RedToothBrush as she has identified herself as a bot. And being bot like we are all just botting along and replicating her actions. 😁

@EyeofOrion is not calling us bots (I don't think). They are saying don't underestimate the impact of bots and troll farms in fanning and feeding outrage, moving the Overton window, or to be more accurate splitting the Overton window in two and moving them apart, to inflame anger and division and encourage self-harming politics. The school litter tray for example.

We know this. We saw it with Brexit.

What I'd like from Eye as an expert in the area is practical advice. Because regardless of whether the person hitting you is doing it because they decided to do so off their own bar or because someone convinced them you are an evil threat, you'll still get hit so you still need to defend yourself.

It's interesting the comment that there are fewer left wing troll farms. (Also surprising that troll farms have a side t all rather than just going for whatever message leads to disruption)

I wonder if it's because the Left, being inherently progress principles driven, tend to amplify and fire themselves up anyway (ie "these vulnerable people are under threat and we must protect them! Everyone who disagrees with me is an actual Nazi and must be destroyed!") while the Right, being inherently conservative, needs to feel a much more direct threat to themselves to motivate?

The Democrats still need an honest conversation about gender identity though. It isn't helpful to blame it all on bots and deny that they've been in any way responsible themselves.

Yes I find it fascinating that we keep needing to come back to this.

Whatever the reason the Democrats need to engage some introspection.

I think that there are posters on this thread trying to detract from this.