Am I GC?

[GCornotGCthatisthequestion]

I have been looking into the trans issue for a few months now, looking at sources from both "sides" to try and understand the issues properly and form a view. I think I have come to a position that would get me called a terf in some spaces but also falls short of the view that most on on this forum hold. I would be interested to hear if you would consider me gender critical.

I don't believe that people can change sex, however, I do think that for some people, taking hormones and having surgery to resemble the opposite sex is the right thing for them.

I don't think that women should be forced to compete against transwomen in sports, particularly when prize money is involved or in sports like boxing where the risk of injury is high. I don't think it is reasonable to expect volunteer-run events like Park Run to be able to police whether or not someone who registers as a woman is a transwomen or not. While I understand the frustrations around women being beaten by transwomen in this race I can't see how they could stop this.

I have a close friend from childhood who identifies as non-binary, takes testosterone and has had their breasts removed. While I don't understand their decision I can see with my own eyes how much happier their life is now and I believe that this was the right decision for them. I care about them deeply and I am happy that they were able to make these changes and live a happier life.

I think children who have distress about their sex should receive exploratory therapy to try and understand what they are feeling and why. I don't think they should be given puberty blockers or any kind of hormone therapy until they are adults. I do, however, think most older teens have the capacity to decide how they dress and what name they want to be referred to as.

I will generally use the pronouns that someone asks me to about them. I don't look down on or sneer at people who add pronouns to email signatures. I don't agree with companies mandating that people have it add them.

I think people should be able to ask for a female doctor for intimate medical care and it mean biologically female rather than a transwoman.

I have felt uncomfortable with some of the content on this forum. The "tranvestigation" threads that seem to target black female athletes because they don't fit European standards of what a woman is meant to be. The overlooking of terrible behaviour from people because "at least they know what a woman is".

Would you say I was GC?

And I would love an answer about why people ignore the rest of the 130+ genders. It seems that people who declare that gender identity should be prioritised (whether that is sometimes or all the times) only seem to focus on two. Or three.

Why not the others? Because if you say two or three should be respected, why not the rest?

Why the discrimination ?

I think we all know why that is. And why the question is studiously ignored.

There's also another condition which is very similar to transgenderism, in which people think that some of their other body parts (usually one or more of their limbs) don't belong to them and should be amputated. Someone posted a link to this article earlier in the thread.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

It covers the similarity between transablism and transgenderism. It also mentions a Scottish doctor who was carrying out amputations of the limbs of some patients with this condition until he was prevented from doing so. His defence for carrying out these operations was that the patients were happier afterwards. Sound familiar?

And look at who else was involved in this idea:

In 1977 the Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money published the first modern case history of what he termed "apotemnophilia"—an attraction to the idea of being an amputee.

And another familiar name:

Psychotherapy "doesn't make a scrap of difference in these people," the psychiatrist Russell Reid, of Hillingdon Hospital, in London, said in a BBC documentary on the subject, called Complete Obsession, that was broadcast in Britain last winter. "You can talk till the cows come home; it doesn't make any difference. They're still going to want their amputation, and I know that for a fact."

Article about Russell Reid. He's better known for his involvement in treating transgender patients.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/may/25/health.medicineandhealth2

These two conditions are very closely linked. Why is radical treatment for one encouraged and the other banned?

I have never worked out why people who say they are the opposite sex or no sex have had success in having their demands met while others which have similar identity issues have not. I can only assume it is because of the strategies like the Denton’s document that we know about. And because of postmodernism where something is what we say it is.

And just as importantly for me though, is that some people will even go part of the way. And will change their own language to comply with someone else’s philosophical belief that they are what they say they are. And will say ‘if we just configure single sex spaces, if we just make this language accommodation, if we just let this person have access because they deserve it’ while all the while acknowledging that it is impossible to change sex… but will act as if the identity is based on material reality. And I am speaking more generally here as these ideas above are really very common.

But it is just part of the progression. That mostly goes one way and rarely (unless there is some kind of personal investment somewhere ) back.

Just think how many people were deriding others because those people refused to use female pronouns for any male person before Upton spoke vs after Upton spoke?

Do you have any sympathy left for the wives having to call their husbands of decades and fathers of their children "she" and pretend they are women? How about calling out the cruelty of that headfuck? Don't you dare lecture women living with hellish situations you can't even begin to imagine.

Scotland forged ahead with surgery for BIID.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/625680.stm

Well, to be fair, one doctor did.

Yes, he's the surgeon mentioned in the article in the Atlantic. But he only carried out two amputations before being stopped, and these were private patients.

It's hard to understand the contrast in attitudes between this and the treatment given to people who want to look like the opposite sex. They seem like very similar conditions.

One of the best sayings to come out of the (general) debate is: men run towards things, women run away from things. In the 80s, my androgynous self would've embraced non binary, short of surgery; but I fear your friend needs to work on why she felt the need to cut off healthy breasts.

It’s so bizarre how quickly they cracked down on limb amputations and yet they are more than happy to surgically injure the genitalia of people (often with serious mental health issues) which arguably has far more serious consequences than a limb removal. I wonder why trans abled didn’t succeed when trans gender did?

It's odd that the two conditions are treated so differently. Having a limb amputated actually does make you an amputee, even if the limb was healthy to start with, and you are indistinguishable in terms of appearance and disability from someone who had the amputation because of genuine medical need.

Whereas people can't change sex, no matter what they do to their bodies.

Why are doctors prepared to damage the bodies of physically healthy people, including children, in a quest to make their bodies look like the opposite sex, but they refuse to amputate the limbs of people who want to be amputees and declare that people who want this as mentally ill? It doesn't make sense. If the people who want amputations are mentally ill, surely so are the people who want body modifications to look like the opposite sex. What's the difference?

I respect your view, but as the parent of an adult on the autistic spectrum who sees himself as transgender, I profoundly disagree. My son is vulnerable to voices telling him that he should try to make his body match his self image. He seems to be naive about the ethics of medical professionals involved in "gender affirming care". It is impossible to even question these voices, as that is seen as bigotry. I do not believe he would be making a free and informed decision. I am trying to make a stand for physical reality, but am having to tread very carefully.

How do the surgeons performing amputations stemming from mental disorders not get struck off? Surely it's a breach of The Hippocratic Oath.

Can a person demand the NHS change the colour of their skin to meet their mental needs?

I'm sorry to hear you and your son have to navigate such perilous path.
I'd like to ask you a question, I think your situation might give your answer more insight.

I don't want to derail. RFK Jr in the USA. His mission to try and make Americans healthier again. The US spends enormous amounts of money on health and are one of the unhealthiest countries. The US will have to research understand why to address it. A primary suspicion is diet and artificial additives in US food. Do you have any opinions on the question: Might diet and food additives be a contributor to what seems like rising rates among young people of mental challenges like autism?
I personally also suspect the internet, social media, and mobile devices have significantly changed the way brain pathways form over our lifetimes.

I wish you and your son the very best of luck, Rapid. I hope the day comes very soon when this insanity is seen as what it is, and those who took part are held to account.

Food, especially highly processed with suspicious additives? Possibly, but I don't think I'm in a position to judge.

Social media? Yes, in my opinion. My son was very sceptical of anything that he considered "woo" and devoured Dawkins, Ben Goldacre, Pinker, Dillahunty and many others. Now he seems to be trapped in an echo chamber and has closed his mind to anything else, so my views on women's rights are "propaganda" and he would see any mention of "genderwoo" as transphobic bigotry. In other words, he's fallen for a secular religion, and a fundamentalist form of it.

In my experience, many members of established religions are not fundamentalist in their outlook, in that they recognise that they cannot prove their beliefs to be true, and are open to perspectives from outside their faith, and though they would be happy for other people to find what they've found, they don't want their beliefs to be forced on everyone else. Fundamentalist sects insist on narrow rigid dogma, and treat people who question that dogma as heretics. Fundamentalist sects can be attractive, because they claim to have all the answers, and if you are a member you can feel very 'at home' and supported - until you have doubts.

Social media encourages echo chambers, particularly where moderation stops being about removing real nastiness and becomes about protecting a belief system from challenge. I take some care to hear other viewpoints, including by reading books that I can be sure will challenge my thinking. I feel as if he has stopped doing that. It is people who deep down know that their thinking is on shaky ground who try to avoid being challenged.

I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy for adults.
The price of living in a free society is that others can use that freedom to do thing you find monstrous. I think it's a price worth paying.

In theory I agree with you, but the older I get the more I have to accept that theory and the real world don't always match up.

People do make bad choices. Sometimes they very deeply believe things that are not true. About themselves, about others, about the way the world works, about what is and is not possible. Sometimes they misattribute their own motivations and try to solve their pain with things that smother it instead of things that heal it. They do things to be accepted by others, or because they feel they backed themselves into a corner or into a public image and can't back down without (what they feel to be) an unbearable loss of face or status, or because they do not want to let down others who believe in them. And that is just what people do to themselves without even starting on the ways others can, for their own fucked up reasons either deliberately or accidentally influence people to make bad choices. Or Inauthentic choices, if "bad" is too loaded.

So because people do make choices in good faith that turn out to be mistakes, the more damaging the choice, and the more irreversible, the higher the bar should be.

But even if we do agree that eventually, once all reasonable checkpoints are put in place, medical adjustment of the body to visually approximate the opposite sex is still a decision people need to be allowed to make, there is still absolutely no justification to then treat those people as the opposite sex, because they are not.

Their choice to appear to others as the opposite sex, allow others to believe they are the opposite sex, even lie to others about their sex, is theirs. That does not, and IMO must not, place any moral obligation on society to play along by giving them any legal or social right to access provisions or rights of the opposite sex.

Firstly, because that makes a mockery of the reason those provisions and rights exist in the first place, which is because the people who actually are that sex faced challenges, risks or disadvantages that single sex provisions mitigated. Single sex protections and provisions were not put in place out of some arbitrary whim or fashionable affectation for sex specificity, they were put in place as a response to the specific disadvantage or damage of women by men. They aren't there to be some sort of magic sorting door to prove ones womanly credentials!

Secondly, because there should be no "reward" for extreme body modification that might influence a person's decision. If a person feels very strongly they want to exercise their bodily autonomy to make those changes, and has cleared whatever protections we think are proportionate, that is between them and their private life. It should not be turned into a socially or legally recognized actual change of sex.

The reason GRCs and their equivalents in other countries do not require any medical interventions is because it was considered to be unethical to require a person to undergo surgery. I entirely agree with that. But the logical conclusion should have been to recognise that the entire concept of a "real" (ie legally meaningful) sex change was flawed and should be dropped.

That TRAs managed to convince lawmakers that the solution is to turn legal sex change from something that recognised a person had done as much as could be done to change their physical sex (a certification that recognised the material state of the person) into something that accepts into law that whether a person is a man or a woman is an entirely mental difference and one that comes down to personal choice is IMO unconscionable.

If a person feels very strongly they want to exercise their bodily autonomy to make those changes, and has cleared whatever protections we think are proportionate, that is between them and their private life. It should not be turned into a socially or legally recognized actual change of sex.

Quoting myself to phrase it better...

The "bodily autonomy" argument cuts both ways. If bodily autonomy means the state/society has no business in what a person does with their own body, what a person does with their body has no business changing their legal/social status within the state.

Blaire White on 'trans abled' people. BIID often coexists with gender dysphoria, I seem to recall, though I can't remember where I read about it specifically.

Chloe Jennings-White, who Blaire White talks about, is transabled and transgender. He used to be called Clive. This article about him is written by a disabled woman.

Spinal column: no truck with transableists

There are some unexpected perks from my situation. One of them, if you possess a fertile sense of the ridiculous, is discovering the lunacy that lurks around the edges of disability. In this regard, one of the most spectacular bits of low-hanging fruit is a person called Chloe Jennings-White, a fake paraplegic who features in a National Geographic documentary to be broadcast next month.

When she’s out in the countryside, she happily gets out of her wheelchair and goes hiking. It is only in the company of others that she feels compelled to be seen as disabled.

Furthermore, she claims to want surgery to transect her spinal cord, so that she can really be a paraplegic. She calls it “Ability Reassignment Surgery”. Jennings-White, all in all, can best be described as the gift that keeps on giving. Often people who say they have BIID are transsexual or transgender men; Chloe, it has emerged, was apparently once Clive. Since becoming a woman in a wheelchair, she also claims to have suffered from selective mutism. (No, I don’t have a clue either.) On her own internet blog Jennings-White describes herself as “a disabled intersexed lesbian feminist with BIID… and deaf in one ear”.

Interesting that when Blaire White talks about him so disparagingly, there is no mention of the fact that he is also transgender.

Great question, and reminds me of the criminal law precedent around what can be consented to in the R v Brown legal case from 1993: a group of men who practised consensual extreme sadomasochism on each other were convicted of assault and the House of Lords ruled that consent was not a defence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Brown

What I think is important in this legal case, and missing from the current state of transgender surgeries, is the reasoning and consideration paid to the greater public interest. There are valid arguments to be made about bodily autonomy, the problem is that we seem to have sleepwalked into a situation where there is no thinking, reasoning or discussion about this subject beyond personal autonomy. The silencing of debate is the problem.

Here's a critique of the judgment to provide some balance :)

https://trinitycollegelawreview.org/criminalisation-and-consent-sadomasochism-in-r-v-brown/

And an interesting quote from the Trinity College Law Review article:

Consensual sadomasochism(SM) constitutes criminal assault in the United Kingdom.This comes from R v Brown,a House of Lords case in which a group of men were convicted for their involvement in consensual sadomasochistic sexual acts. The key issue facing the Court was whether consent was a valid defence to assault in these circumstances. The Court answered in the negative. Within the judgement Lord Templeman stated this question can only be answered through consideration of policy and public interest”.The aforementioned judgement has been called “autonomy-constricting moralism”while justified as an act to protect society by criminal sanctions against a cult of violence which potentially fostered proselytisation of young men”.

Thanks, yes that was hovering in the back of my mind, Veronica. Sado masochism has long been contentious because of very similar issues. When is self harm supportable? When is harm to others permissible? How far can 'consent' be taken?

One extreme of this was the law about choking during sex, which as MN readers will know led to several murderers of women being acquitted because they used the 'rough sex' defence. And the successful campaign 'we can't consent to this'.

"How far can 'consent' be taken?"

Wasn't there a case of two men, one who wanted to be eaten and one who wanted to kill and eat someone. They got together and despite the first giving full concent, the second went to prison as you cannot concent in law to someone murdering you. I think I have remembered that correctly.

Yes, in Germany.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes

These are all excellent points. One other thing to point out - based on something being shared on social media atm - is that almost all male or NB identifying women chose to still compete in women's sports. In prisons it's even higher - I don't believe there are any trans-identified females in the male estate.

If its ok for one sex, why not the other? What's the difference?