Could we ban "transvestigating" threads on here?

[Christinapple]

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5225715-ilona-maher

This one for example. Transvestigating is an informal term given to when people play detective and try to determine if a given person (usually a woman) is transgender or not from how they look e.g. photos.

I've seen it more than a few times on Twitter anytime a woman who is tall or muscular or "masculine looking" appears. Quite often, women are wrongly mistaken for being trans.

As well as being transphobic, IMO this harms all women and reinforces stereotypes of what men/women should look like. And the idea of obsessing over people's appearances like this just doesn't sit well with me.

It does feel manipulative. As though the need for making someone feel better supersedes reality and we must conform.
The idea that ideology should not be discussed but accepted is also quite controlling.
I'm glad it can be challenged in the UK.

if our governments, the NHS, HMP, the armed forces, the civil service, the press and all sporting bodies start categorising, recording and referencing people’s sex properly we won’t have to keep drawing attention to the obvious males intruding on female spaces, services and sports categories.

Perhaps you could start a petition Chris, after all, the sooner the world returns to reality, the sooner we’ll be able to stop pointing out all the blokes we see in places where they aren’t allowed to be.

Good point. Surely Chris has been here long enough to know that threads about threads are against MN rules?

Or maybe Chris just generally doesn’t give a shit about what is and isn’t acceptable on MN and is just here to scold us nasty women?

I think there is a constant misunderstanding with the phrase ‘you can always tell’ . And that some posters who need to believe that if is untrue will try to convince as many people as possible that it is false. They will even assert convoluted logic to say that ‘dispelled’ it when they didn’t at all.

The phrase ultimately is a valid reason for why no male people should be in female only spaces.

Has any person ever claimed to know immediately from looking at an image whether someone is male or female? Not that I have seen. And with all the tricks of imagery, and post production manipulation, that would be rather foolish.

Has any person declared that 100% of people can tell from interaction which person is male and which person is female? Not that I have ever seen.

There are many reasons why a person cannot tell even from
interaction who is male and who is female. One major reason may be that they simply are not interested. Or they have sensory conditions that mean they aren’t processing the information. Or they are influenced by medication or drugs or alcohol. Or the interaction is very brief and doesn’t involve seeing a range of movement, listening to someone speak or even what they are saying.

There are plenty of reasons that at any time or even just one time they don’t identify someone’s sex immediately or over time

For the concept of single sex spaces, over time, there will always be female people using the space who ‘can’ tell. That is the point.

We can always tell. Because as a collective group, among the people interacting with a person someone will correctly identify the sex of an adult in their presence. They will not likely say anything. However, someone will have identified the body cues, mannerisms, language and speech cues even sub consciously.

In female single ssx spaces, there are likely to be female people present who ‘can tell’ and who are distressed knowing that a male person is present. It may not be every time that male person enters a female single sex space. It may not be every female person ever met in the space. As a concept, it doesn’t have to be 100%. And the distress and the impact of that distress can be post event, upon finding out too.

As to the state of the world where now female people have to analyse others female people to identify the sex of others and evaluate the information we are being told is ‘true’, well being in this predicament is not something worthy of celebrating, in my opinion. At all. When you have male people entering into sports categories that should be excluding them, of course people now have to look further to understand what is materially real and what is being obfuscated. When you have a male person celebrated as being the ‘first female person’ to achieve something, how fucked up is it that a female person has lost that place reported in history.

I also think that if someone feels they have gained any sort of moral victory in claiming that their potential sex partner doesn’t know the sex of the person they are about to have sex with, as ‘dispelling the myth’ it says all we need to know about that person claiming that victory.

‘We can tell’ is not a thing that can be dismissed as some people need it to be.

Imagine thinking that female people’s needs for single sex spaces and opportunities should be ignored for the sake of a few male people’s benefit!

And that those male people are merely an ‘inconvenience’….

Operation: Lef them speak highlighting misogyny again.

Just to add, this post was in regards to correctly identifying the sex of male people.

Has anyone ever said that they can correctly identify the sex of female people who have taken testosterone with perfect accuracy through interaction ?

“We can tell someone's sex by looking at them, 99% of the time”

Yes. However The thing is, due to everyone being individual it is also possible and logical that while one person will not accurately identify the sex of one particular person (call them X) , but will correctly identify the sex of other males who have gender identities, another person will accurately identify the person labelled X’s sex correctly. Therefore, collectively the statement hold’s true.

The issue is in attempting to use a statement that for a collective group is correct and logically robust to disprove the statement at an individual level. Which is what is being attempted here.

It is false logic to declare that just because ‘some’ people cannot accurately identify a person’s sex, that the statement doesn’t hold true collectively. Because in the group it is highly likely that ‘some’ people will accurately identify a person’s sex from wider observation.

TRA talk about having a transdar - where trans people can spot another trans person who would pass to everyone else. It's talked about it a lot online - 'do i mentioned that I'm trans too to a colleague who is also stealth?' questions pop up a lot.

Do they think they think they have different skills to everyone else, or are they forgetting that they have created an environmental where its rude to comment?

This thread is the same - they are trying to make women questioning socially unacceptable. Any comment about trying to maintain single sex spaces is reframed as being dangerous to 'all' women. Being wrongly accused of being male isnt dangerous to women - its embarrassing, but its 'dangerous' to men because it exposes their lies.

What the danger is to men is that they know if women can question in the women only space, we can question anywhere, and their delusion of stealth disappears.

Absolutely, I encountered 2 trans women within the space of an afternoon a couple of weeks ago when out and about in London.

Both probably thought they pass because I wasn't going to tell them I knew they were trans women to their faces. One was waiting staff in a restaurant, for all I know I might have been removed for remarking on it!

Add to that the fact the power dynamic. We know these are males and we know that angry males can get aggressive.

So it's a self fulfilling fallacy. In an environment where no one can comment for fear of reprisal these males truly believe they pass.

you could have saved a load of keystrokes by saying "STFU women!"

FWIW: this is a feminist board on a site set up to support women. OF COURSE we are concerned that men come into our spaces by claiming to be one of us.

also: that thread was interesting in so many ways, pity it was deleted tbh. Especially because there were several challenges to women being referred to as "cis" and asking people not to do it as it's a slur. MN don't remove it so that's the only way we can challenge. Ho hum.

haha yes - because they have always been there using our facilities!

I do not agree especially when it is about a crime and everyone is possibly being lied to about the sex of the perpetrator by the police and the media.

Why, if they blend so seemlessly in with the opposite sex, are trans identified women always portrayed in imagery as topless with mastectomy scars? Is it because trans organisations want to be clear that these women are not men?

I think it's because of the subconscious theme in our cultural that men achieve worth through action while women achieve transcendence and value through suffering and endurance. Scars prove that the person is genuine.

Yeah it's everywhere and makes me feel a bit queasy. Self harm glorified. Even on Hunted recently they made sure to edit in an entirely gratuitous topless scene with the transman contestant.

The messaging Is very confusing. Obviously topless men are acceptable when topless women aren't. Yet women tend to wear less clothing in advertising than men. Is the message like "see women, this is what you have to do to your breasts to make them non sexual and therefore acceptable" or is it because it would be terrible if anyone mistook a transman for a naturally flat chested women? Is it a weird religious thing, a parallel with stigmata for Christians?

Despite the fact I must have seen the mastectomy scars on 50 or so transmen by now, they are still an oddly silent voice in the media (with one notable exception).

Edit to add: you also only ever see young freshly transitioned transmen too. Whereas transwomen of any age are championed in the media.

It suits the TRA narrative to state that we ‘can’t tell’ because the alternative makes them angry/invalidated. I think it’s the equivalent of a child putting their hands over their ears shouting ‘blah blah blah’
Of course we can tell but I would not challenge anyone because I don’t want verbal or physical abuse directed at me. As would many of us who have have been on the receiving end of such treatment
Why can’t they just be kind- women only want to pee!
(Or change a tampon/pad. Or cry. Or fix underwear. Or refresh make-up. Or escape from a boring date. Or text a friend etc etc)

Young women can be bad for policing each other. I can easily imagine a social pressure that unless you go for top surgery you aren't really committed to your transness.

Also, women's bodies carry more cultural weight than mens because it's what we have historically been valued for. So again, a man's self actualization is carved into the world, his locus of control. A woman's is carved into herself, her locus of control.

The John Lewis thread was embarrassing with people kicking off over the "man" modelling women's clothing and all the masculine features of the person, invasion of women's spaces etc only for the thread to drop dead as soon as it was pointed out that the model was female who had recently returned to modelling after pregnancy.

In that horrendous Guardian article a few weeks ago about mastectomy one of the people featured talked about how she gets abuse because her scars aren’t that noticeable, as if it’s some form of privilege. It’s an ideology that devours itself.

As for discussing the reality of a person’s sex, maybe once posters agree to acknowledge the sex of themselves and everyone else that would be a start. There are still many people who claim that Khelif, Semenya, and killers and rapists like Scarlet Blake are women, and female as well. Pack in that nonsense first.

People under threat will overreact, that is well understood surely?

Is it a weird religious thing, a parallel with stigmata for Christians?

Well spotted! I am sure it must be something like that.

Stigmata is not part of mainstream Christianity in the way mastectomy scars are for transideology though.

Embarassing. Not dangerous.

The idea that we can't question anything because its embarassing is the most ridiculous excuse. Men are using the idea that false accusations are as dangerous as their inclusion in womans spaces.

What environment would you rather girls be born into - where mistakenly speaking up is seen as too embarassing to contemplate or men having free and easy access to their spaces?

I think androgynous female models are being deliberately used to 'muddy the waters'.

It really suits trans activists to point to times women have got it wrong.

Same with the OP, Ilona Mayer's look is being used by trans activists whether she likes it or not. I've never seen the image of another female rugby player on social media I don't think, yet she is everywhere.

Agree with @lifeturnsonadime