Darling sister and pronouns

[CheeseFromTheNorth]

I know this has cropped up many times, the sense of sadness when a close family member or friend seems to have joined the #bekind brigade.
Had a forwarded email from my sister who lives in another country, from her work address and she used pronouns in her email signature.
I don't understand it. She is all for social justice (Aboriginal rights) across the board and proclaims to be a feminist.
I won't have a conversation about this with her until I see her in person. But when I do my line will be something along the lines of "I used to respect pronouns, as I saw no harm in it. But as I read more and more about male rapists wanting to be referred to as she/her and all institutions complying with it, I realised that something is very wrong.
Who do I decide "deserves" those pronouns? The trans identifying male that's kind but doesn't pass? The male rapist because he speaks of gender dysphoria, but forces his victim to use language such as "her penis" when testifying in court?
So I've drawn and line and will refer to a man who identifies as a woman by their name".

That's all I would say, it does share my opinion and shows the time line of thinking over the years. I have been overweight for many years (not anymore) so I don't think that me raising the sports issue rings true as a reason for me to be of the anti-pronoun brigade (of course no man should be in women's sports but sports is never something I've been interested in, so it rings false for me to be passionate about it), but I HAVE been sexually assaulted many times, so this is my hill.

Keeping discussions like this light and giving food for thought is the way to go imho.

But what has been troubling me is the "why"? Why has she not looked in to this? She too is a SA survivor and it was a particularly horrendous event that has very badly scarred her.

Sorry for the long post.

Women don't go around telling people we perceive as men to drop their trousers and prove their sex. We don't ask women to do it either, but we risk rape if we tell men to.

And just to add to what pps have said -

DSDs are well studied - we know what causes them and we know whether those factors affect male or female foetuses. DSD-causing factors affect either the male or the female. Not both.
Most DSDs do not present as ambiguous genitalia at birth
Sexual development in the womb is not a random accretion of sexual organs which may or may not add up to "female" or "male". It's one of two discrete pathways which can be disrupted or not fully realised.
There are no human hermaphrodites - that is to say, no humans who can produce both eggs and sperm either simultaneously or sequentially. Some people living with DSDs are sterile.

Can I just say, as a woman with high testosterone that can grow a beard to rival my husband's, you can fuck right off with using my (female only!) health issue to prop up transactivism.

‘Naturally elevated testosterone’ in a woman is nowhere near the male range.

If a woman is producing male levels of testosterone, you have to ask whereabouts in her body this is being produced.

Testosterone is produced in large quantities by testes, and in very small quantities in the ovaries (about 1/10 th of male levels). Ovaries do not produce male testosterone levels, but undescended testicles do. And some cancers.

So it really depends on what you mean by ‘naturally elevated levels of testosterone’. If these are in the male range, then there are some active testicles somewhere, and this person is male.

And there is no correlation whatsoever between DSDs - physical, observable differences/disroders in the reproductive organs - and the sexist, postmodernist non-scientific woo (largely developed in US humanities departments in the late 1980s) that is "trans" and "gender identity".

The only reason that transactivists feebly attempt to correlate them is yet another example of forced teaming, the purpose of which is to try and make "trans" sound more "sciencey" than it is, largely for the benefit of people who don't really understand science. It isn't science. It's a non fact-based ideology.About as scientific as flat-earthism, scientology, or the tenets of other religions.

There are other, far better frameworks of understanding which do NOT require medicalising or sterilising your children if they don't fit regressive pink/blue stereotypes enough for your tiny, conservative minds. Like questioning those frameworks in the first place. Which is what feminism has been doing for decades now. People have be fighting and failing to "fit" bullshit sex stereotypes for ever. It's not because they're something called "trans". It's because the sex stereotypes that transactivists and other deeply conservative thinkers so adore and base their ideologies on do not fit the breadth of human experience.

Who is “we”? Women had to fight for our spaces, if trans people want more spaces like you suggest, why don’t they and their allies fight for them?

And we know the reason why that doesn’t happen - because those spaces don’t affirm the pretence.

“Many”? Says who?

MissDoubleU · Today 15:52

First, the issues are not exclusive of each other as many people with DSD are trans, or seen as trans when they - for example - start puberty and suddenly present as the gender they were not assigned at birth.

No-one is assigned a gender at birth. A midwife, doctor or other HCP cannot assign a personality or love/dislike of gender stereotypes to a newborn.
Neither can they assign a sex - they observe and record the baby's sex, which they probably already know because of routine testing during the mother's pregnancy.

If the baby has a DSD which results in ambiguous genitalia at birth, further tests will be done to determine which DSD it is and the parent(s) will be informed and advised. Well before puberty.

Women with naturally elevated testosterone levels suffer so much from this debate. Usually the first ones screamed out of “women only safe spaces” too, sadly. Or subject to traumatic “tests” / made to show their genitalia to prove they are real women.
Sure, Jan. (And why are you so obsessed with genitals??)

So to your mind, being challenged in a women's toilet is apparently such a terrible thing that the risk of being sexually assaulted by a male person pales into insignificance in comparison to the risk of someone asking "Should you be here?"

Edited for typo

The two developmental pathways are that Wolffian duct atrophies and the Mulleran duct develops, or vice-versa.

Even in the extremely rare cases of XX/XY chimerism, where either

• a male blastocyst and female blastocyst fuse in utero and become one child or
• a single ovum with two copies of maternal haploid DNA is fertilised by two sperm, one X and one Y, one duct develops and the other doesn't. This can lead to interesting outcomes, such as a boy with an ovary and a testicle in his scrotum and a uterine horn connected to the ovary via a fallopian tube. Still a boy, because the other testicle and vas deferens are completely normal and his external genitalia are male. That the ovary was in his scrotum proves that he is male: the Wolffian duct developed and the female reproductive tissue fitted into that where the equivalent male organs would have been.

The doctors removed the ovary and uterine horn and fallopian tube because:

• high levels of oestrogen don't belong in a body with a developed Wolffian duct,
• you really don't want any chance of menarche in a child who has a bit of a uterus and no vagina to let the blood out, and
• although I suspect that high testosterone levels from the testicle would leave the ovary infertile, it's probably not a good idea to leave a testicle and an ovary in the same scrotum together because of the well-known consequences of eggs and sperm meeting.

There's no indication that he will have any difficulty fathering children. As I said, a boy.

So to your mind, being challenged in a women's toilet is apparently such a terrible thing that the risk of being sexually assaulted by a male person pales into insignificance in comparison to the risk of someone asking "Should you be here?"

And that is how we know that these posters are male.

With all due respect, agreeing that people are free to choose whether or not to add their pronouns to their email signature, in absolutely no way at all means you agree with anything other than just that.

Rapists are rapists, regardless of what pronouns they want to use. There is a real problem with extreme views like this, because they negate proper discussion.

What is extreme here? Using correct words?

@MissDoubleU a pp kindly tagged me in. If you want the safest toilets for your children, it is the traditional single sex ones with door gaps floor to door and preferable above the door too. It doesn’t matter how they identify- all are safer and healthier with this design. If you prioritise complete privacy over health and safety then go for unisex completely enclosed ones. Many parents are hearing stories of what goes on in unisex school toilets. When Ofsted did an emergency report on sexual assaults and rape in schools, after EveryonesInvited website publicity, they lamented no one had an overview of information on what’s going on. They had to refer back to a report in 2015/2016 where the BBC had done a FOI for every police force. The BBC said there was at least one rape per school day in each school. The example was a store cupboard. Everyone’s Invited has locations being disabled toilets. It is obvious if you make something private it becomes more attractive for unwitnessed crimes. Especially if it’s open to both sexes.

There’s a real problem for children with medical conditions that can collapse without warning and could be left until it’s too late in a private toilet cubicle (epilepsy, hypos, heart conditions, brain injuries inc strokes). The new threat is vapes that are spiked and seizures inside the cubicle.

Then there’s hygiene problems. Lack of ventilation and gaps to swill the floor down lead to a greater chance of catching something.

@selffellatingouroborosofhate thank you for helping the cause!

think it should be an acceptable compromise to use they/ them or avoid pronouns altogether so the accused pushed the accused penis into me

If a man raped me, I'm not going to be dancing around his "identity", and there is no way anyone can expect that.

If a person has become pregnant naturally with their own ova released from their own ovaries being fertilised in their uterus, they are a female person.

Please link us up with such a case where a person had been miscategorised as being male despite having working ovaries and a working uterus while also having streak testes.

You seem to be very keen to utilise people with particular medical conditions in your attempt to destabilise the reality that humans can be categorised through testing into either male or female sex categories. Why?

Ah, the Scottish third sex: male, female and rapist. As introduced by Isla Bryson. Problem being that you have to wait for someone to be raped before you can announce the rapist is not a woman and doesn't belong in female spaces.

"Attacking her"? Is this attacking in the same way that "misgendering" is "genocide" or "literal violence"?

There isn't more than one sex binary that people can fit into. There is the one binary, which consists of female and male. For a few people, it takes a bit more investigation to determine which category within the sex binary they belong to. For everyone, when it comes to medical care, it's important to determine whether they are male or female, particularly perhaps if they have a DSD, many of which have profoundly disabling impacts.

Do you know that men's toilets usually have only one or two cubicles, plus a row of urinals? They already usually take up less space than women's toilets - unless they are not the traditional type. Men with IBS can ill afford the few cubicles to be taken up by men peeing.

Oops, tagged the wrong poster. That post was for @DivorcedMumOfAdults . Apologies.

Women aren't asking for individual cubicles. We just want safe spaces. If some men don't think their spaces are safe, they need to highlight why.
Rather than push into women's spaces they need to explain to other men that they have the right to dress however they choose. That they won't accept losing the right to what should be inclusive male facilities.
No man should feel unable to wear a dress or heels because he likes that clothing. I'd happily support men to have the freedom to wear anything.

Your previous quote was “I have a GC friend currently job hunting in Australia, and she said every single application asks for your pronouns, she’s really struggling with it”.

I live in Australia. Job applications - at least, not every one of them - don’t ask for pronouns.

Well, obviously, that will depend on the jobs applied for, won't it?

In some sectors, generally the ones that consider themselves "progressive", every application WILL ask for pronouns.

Same in the UK.

Are you claiming people are lying or something? Because quite clearly it's going to depend on the job sector they're applying to.

So I'm unclear why you appear to be so desperate to try to "prove" the person is lying here. Almost like you've got some weird agenda.

I did write “Job applications - at least, not every one of them - don’t ask for pronouns”, indicating that some may.

I answered with a comparative experience from Australia. Is that not allowed?

I think it should be an acceptable compromise to use they/ them or avoid pronouns altogether so the accused pushed the accused penis into me

Forcing a witness to use unnatural language in order to avoid using factual language, such as sex-based pronouns, is harmful to the the victim, the trial, and the very rule of law itself.

It harms the victim by allowing the defendant to exert coercive control over her in the court room, a place where he should have no power over her because we are all meant to be equal before the law. Him having power over her by controlling her language is a form of witness intimidation and the State should protect witnesses from intimidation, not sanction and facilitate it by having Bench Book rules that demand that witnesses use defendant's "preferred pronouns".

It harms the trial because the witness's sole focus isn't on giving an accurate account of the incident, but is on trying to censor her own factual neutral language. Referring to someone by sex-based pronouns is factual and it is a neutral act because it is factual.

It harms the trial because the jury are having to decode unnatural language like "the defendant inserted the defendant's penis into me" or unscramble inaccurate language like "her penis", which impairs their ability to understand and assess the factualness (not the same as truth) of the evidence they are hearing.

It harms the very rule of law itself because the first thing that the witnesses do in court is to swear by Almighty God or solomnly affirm to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". By coercing the witness to use the wrong-sexed pronouns contrary to her own perception of the defendant's sex is to instruct her to lie under oath, which is a criminal offence called perjury because telling the truth in court is fundamental to being able to have fair trials conducted according to due process.

It harms the very rule of law itself because if "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" doesn't actually mean that, then evidence can no longer be trusted to be the witness's honest recollection of events and the jury cannot "faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence" because the evidence is no longer trustworthy.

It harms the very rule of law itself because unnatural language impairs the ability of the jury to process the evidence and assess it.

It harms the very rule of law itself because a core legal principle is that we are all supposed to be equal before the law and allowing a defendant to coerce a witness's speech gives the defendant power over the witness.

There is no place for compromise on this. Witnesses must be able to tell the truth, a good-faith recounting of what they experienced to the best of their ability, otherwise the whole concept of a fair trial is compromised.

What startles me, terrifies me, is either that no one in the whole court system realised this when the Equal Treatment Bench Book edition that forced "preferred pronouns" was drafted, or they realised and didn't care.