TW who supports the SC ruling - AMA

[VanishingVision]

Hello! I was thinking of doing this post for a little while now as the previous posts doing this by the rather wonderful trans men here were really interesting but I didnt want to take up too much space here or take any attention away from much more important things here than what I have to say.

But I figured to just go for it before I have a big old break from the Internet for a while.

So like the title says, I'm a transwoman who accepts the SC ruling: ask me anything if you'd like to and I'll do my best to answer.

Please don't worry about language use on my part, I am rather hard to offend! 😀You can just speak clearly.

Well I'm terribly sorry that the young person is going through all that. I sincerely hope they aren't persistently experiencing gender dysphoria and that they don't ultimately have to go through the troubles of a medical transition. Life will be much simpler for them if they don't.

As @MumOfYoungTransAdult wisely says, the issue is that in some cases such identities do not persist, and in some cases they do. I certainly did feel gender dysphoria from a very young age, and that has been totally persistent and unchanged into adulthood. But I fully and wholeheartedly believe those who say they felt similarly in childhood, but it did not persist. I actually didn't know Stella fell into that category, that is very interesting.

I ultimately didn't transition until adulthood. The positive is that at least now I have the benefit of knowing that it is persistent in my case, whereas I suppose if I had transitioned young I might have doubted. I did try to mention feeling that I might be trans as a child, but it really wasn't "a thing" when I was young, and I lacked the language to describe it. If I was young nowadays, I surely would have transitioned young. I really hope it works out for the teenager you describe! I think puberty will cause huge problems for them, regardless of how persistent it is.

Retconning.

Nobody is born trans, its cultural based. Everyone who discovers that they are trans do so when they hear about it. Or discovers their child is trans when they are told the indicators.

The reason children don't have the language for transition is that transition is primarily about secondary sex characteristics, and 5 years olds don't have those to change.

Children see the difference between how boys and girls are treated and play, or get involved in imaginative play and can believe they are a character, but that's not anywhere close to the transition meant by an adult man.

And that's what i find so unforgivable. The adult men who transition, retcon their childhood and promote that to children because they want to pretend its not sexually motivated.

The reason we didnt have children with GD 20 or 30 years ago is because adults didnt need children to be trans.

“Recognise transexuals within their sex” excellent phrase which the SC ruling has pretty much said

I don't want to make this thread about me, so I'll give one reply on this point and stop. To be clear, I'm not in favour of childhood transition. I totally understand your perspective @illinivich, and I doubt there is anything I can say that would convince you otherwise, but I truly believe that it's not the case that I am retconning. I don't doubt that some people do retcon, I'm just saying that I truly believe I am not doing. The truth is important to me, I'm trying to describe it accurately.

Before I came out my mother was staunchly GC. She might well have written the exact post you just wrote. That's how I'm aware of mumsnet, and why I'm supportive of much of what is discussed here. I remember her talking about the Forstater case, I remember her delight at JKRs first tweets. She was fully of the opinion that TWs were mostly or all just AGP men.

When I came out to her, as you might expect, her initial reaction was extremely negative. However, when I raised the conversation we had had back when I was 8 or so, her reaction changed. That was before I learned that trans people exist (that was aged 10 via TV, I remember clearly). Because the fact is she remembered that conversation from when I was 8, she remembered how odd it was, how awkward I was, how inexplicable what I was saying was. I was ultimately talking about wanting to be castrated. When I explained it was because of the gender dysphoria I've felt my whole life, she just knew that it was all true. At the time she said she'd felt very confused and ultimately dismissed the conversation as 'kids are weird', and given I didn't bring it up again, that was fine. But after revealing the GD it all clicked into place. That's what convinced her that GD in males really can be persistent from childhood, and she ultimately now agrees transition is a sensible option in my case.

Of course, perhaps she is just wanting to support me, wanting to retcon too or something? But we both remember that conversation, she even mentioned bits I'd forgotten. If nothing else, it's a sign there has been something mentally wrong with me since childhood.

Vanishing (LOL) has not appeared for a bit so fill y ya boots@TroubledWatersTW

this is supposed to be about transexuals who know they are biological men.

My sons an archeologist. Retrospectively, we realise he was destined to be because of the time he loved exporing in a museum dig as a child.

The times he was obsessed about being a fireman, or a deepsea diver, have, of course been conveniently forgotten.

@illinivich

"Nobody is born trans, its cultural based. Everyone who discovers that they are trans do so when they hear about it."

I don't know about being born trans, but in my case, I knew it at 6, and I knew nothing about trans people.

That said, if I had to decide whether to make child!me transition or not, it would be an absolute no. Children need to be protected against making decisions with huge consequences they don't understand.

@Seethlaw I studied psychology before i switched to law.

as i had small children at the time i was quite fascinated about child development.

the other thing that interested me was child learning and memory.

I read an awful lot around the subject that was not required in my degree.

My take is that we can believe we thought this or that from an early age, and i have asked my children along the way about this, and also thought about my own childhood memories.

We actually do not have complete memories of our childhood our brains are not a tape recorder. Childhood brains do not have fully formed memory wiring.We rework our memories to fit in with our adult narrative, it is like a colouring book.

So you are looking through the lens of your adult self upon your own childhood.

I do not buy and studies back me up that you can know you are a transexual, homosexual, or heterosexual at the age of six

i would go as far as to say that children are completely uninterested in sex, and sexuality until they are heading for pubert

To say otherwise becomes suspect if you think about it, because it suggests that children are sexual beings and that leads us to the idea that sexual interest in children should be normalised

i am not suggesting people with gender dysphoria are perverts at all but hope you can see what i am saying

I'm sorry but we did have GD 20 or 30 years ago. My trans male son had it from a very early age and there was absolutely nothing on TV or in schools about it and I certainly didn't know or really understand anything about it so there were no outside influences. You may not know anyone who had it back then and even earlier - that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

But parents can also look back on their children so it's not just the trans person looking back at themselves through adult eyes. Do you really believe people go through transitioning just for the fun of it? Because I don't, it's a hard thing to go through.

However I do not believe any child should start on any transition path until they are fully adult.

@Bannedontherun

I see what you mean, but I have to point out that "transexual" is not about a sexuality, unlike, say, "homosexual". In my case, it definitely had nothing to do with sexuality at all; it was purely to do with how I wished to be perceived, which sex I felt I belonged to.

An adult person has much better memory recall of their own children than a child of said adult.

simple fact.

Do i think a person transitioning is just for fun, no, but i do not think that denying your sexed body is the answer to incongruence between mind and body, we need to address the mind in such situations, since we can change our mind.

We can never realistically change our body, because our body is , our body.

Any person serious about transitioning would or I should say should have intensive therapy to try and work through it. Only after that if it's not solved and the person is in genuine distress should they start on the transition path. Therapy unfortunately doesn't work for everyone but I truly don't believe it's a path anyone would go down if they didn't feel they had to. They have so much they could possibly lose, friends, family, work, social ridicule etc. It's not for the faint-hearted.

Nice black and white analysis but it is realy not a simple as that is it. There is a long list of people who regret the decision, did not receive therapy, or were so influenced by the internet, at a very early age, that we are yet to learn about, but i frankly cannot be arsed to engage further with you as a TRA it is a pointless activity.

I'm not a TRA at all, that's ridiculous! Just speaking as a parent of a 39 year old trans man. Other than that I have no involvement with any trans activities whatsoever and he just leads a quiet life and doesn't make a thing of it at all, he's not involved in any activism or groups either. Sounds like you don't want to hear another point of view from a personal perspective - fine I won't engage with you either, very childish though.

I can't see where I've said anything that makes me a trans rights activist at all.

well i am sorry for what you must have had to deal with and obviously i do not know any of your details.

you do sound like an activist it is always helpful to state why first. You appear to believe your child is a man, when in all likelihood she is a lesbian, but not a man for sure

Unless you can tell me otherwise of course.

I did state in my first post that I was a parent to a trans man. I didn't say I believed my son was a man either. I will call him he/him and his new name because I love him and I wouldn't want him not to have that unconditional love no matter what that we have for our children. He was a lesbian as a female but has always seemed male so it wasn't a massive shock when he transitioned but it's still very difficult and it's not a path I would have wanted him to take because it makes life harder in lots of ways and it worries me a lot that he could be attacked or worse. But the main thing is he is much happier, so that's what matters and has a female partner.

Also I'm bisexual so there was never any issues with when he was female about being lesbian. So not that old chestnut of transing the gay away. Girlfriends were always welcomed here.

I'd like to add to my experiences as a young person as @seethlaw and @TroubledWatersTW have shared theirs because I do find these parts very interesting since they've shared some parts of their discovery. And yes @Bannedontherun I lived up to my name and 'vanished' today 🤣. I'm sorry, this will be a long post as I do suffer from word vomit!

So I don't believe that I knew I was trans or that I wanted to be a girl when I was young. I don't have any recollection of gender or sex based confusion until a little while before puberty when adults started telling me about puberty, which distressed me greatly but I have no idea if that's related to GD or trans or whatever. I do remember being uncomfortable as far back as I can remember, but I had a really chaotic childhood I was around alot of alcoholics and drug addicts and violence so that's likely why my young years were uncomfortable.

The only thing that stands out is something I never knew until I told my mother I was transitioning. I had long hair as a child, blonde and curly and people often thought I was a little girl. My mother actuslly was approached for me to be in a shampoo commercial! I had to have my hair cut off because there were children at my school who constantly had nits and I was catching them constantly so in the end my mum cut my hair off and I was really distressed and apparently I said 'noone will think I'm a girl now'. I never knew that I had said this but I also never said anything like it again my mother says, so I have no idea if thats related to some early sign of GD or its just a massively weird coincidence and I was just upset that my long hair I loved was being cut off. I don't have a strong opinion on this as I'm pretty certain I was unaware of sex or gender at all.

There was no 'trans debate' back then. From TV I knew there were some women who used to be men, from Ace Ventura and Jerry Springer as I remember seeing them as a young person when they were on in my home but I didn't know what these people were exactly or why they were that, it's likely I didn't even think it was a real thing but on some peripheral level I knew that it existed it some form and had no sense that I had anything in common with it. I also remember Hayley from Corrie 'used to a man' as my mum watched it, but I had no idea why.

Fast forward to being 17, I had been deeply uncomfortable in my body since I became aware of it and I had no way to describe it. I had been through a weird puberty, it was a bit delayed and quite weak. Puberty is undeniably uncomfortable for everyone, I was aware I was different to the other boys during high school because I didn't like girls (all my friends were girls though) and had little interest in sex unlike the other boys (though i have a couple of experiences with a boy my age), I wasn't running around full of testosterone, I was aware that boys thought i was 'girly' and picked on me for it even though i think I was probably just quiet and neutral and also that i was terrified of anybody seeing my body and was constantly in trouble at school for refusing to do PE. I had very little male 'functions' (sorry TMI) but I hated how my body worked and looked but I had no idea why. I also self harmed because I wanted to 'cut out' whatever was wrong with my body.

Back to being 17, I had dreadful insomnia and frequently stayed up watching whatever random stuff was on channel 4 at the time. There were was a male to female transsexual on something I watched and this was the first I saw something realistic because she actually talked about her body and why it is was wrong to her and it set off an alarm bell in my head for the first time and I immediately went to my grandparents to use their Internet to search for what a transsexual was and stayed up all night reading about transsexualism and gender identity disorder. Bare in mind this wasn't as politicised as now so everything I found was essentially clinical, no Dylan Mulvaney magickal stories of gender euphoria and sprinkling trans joy across America. Very medical.

So to sum up my novel, I don't know if I showed any real signs of GD as a very young child. Maybe, given what I've learned and been told. But also, maybe not. I was also vaguely aware that 'trans' existed but I didn't know it was real or what it was called. Without trying to make this post too much longer, I didn't transition right away. I ignored it for two years, tried going to the dr and was too scared to talk about it. I ignored it again for a couple years and then desired to try again but this is when I was r*ped by an older man that had assaulted me previously so that scared me 'back in the closet'. I then sought some help to bury it all, it didn't work and then a couple years later I finally transitioned and years later I'm here, boring you with my life story 😅

As its been suggested here, i don't believe i look at my experiences as a young person in a 'trans' coloured lens and retconning then, I don't really consider anything i experienced to genuinely be related to GD until perhaps 13. I will say there are things that add up but I don't put much stock in them as my memories cannot be that clear and I dissociated alot from my surroundings.

Anyway time for bed 🥱

This is going to be difficult to say without appearing to judge you, so I apologise if I get my words wrong. You appear to be saying that unconditional love requires you to call your child (yes, 39, I know) "son" and "he". Why is this?

For me, unconditional love for my son does not require me to lie by pretending that he is my daughter and calling him "she". Doing so would, in my opinion, be colluding with a damaging ideology which is leading him on a difficult and probably unnecessary path. Of course, I have to accept the consequences; my son currently appears to believe that I don't accept him and that I am a transphobic bigot. In fact, I do accept him as I perceive him, as my gentle son in a dress, on the autistic spectrum, and surrounded by people cheering on every step he takes towards rejecting his physical nature and damaging his body.

How is it that parents are expected to accept every action taken by their children, or they are perceived as rejecting them as people? My parents disagreed with some things I did, and would have struggled if I had taken a different religious path from them, for example. They would not have rejected me if I had become a Moonie, but they would not have affirmed that choice in any way. It is the cult that makes demands, and if they are not fulfilled rejects the parents.

”I truly don't believe it's a path anyone would go down if they didn't feel they had to”

I think we as a society need to accept that there are people who make the decision to have surgeries and hormones that don’t feel ‘they had to’. I think we have covered some of the groups in this thread already. Those with paraphilias for instance. The transmaxxers is another group. There is great danger in making such blanket statements which has also led to mantras such as ‘most vulnerable and marginalised’.

I think that the TRAs and even the most vocal TWAW allies also need to admit that those people exist.