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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Most people agree with us.

151 replies

ArabellaScott · 19/05/2025 10:38

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supreme-court-trans-public-opinion-b2753173.html

'[A] YouGov poll of 2,106 adults in Great Britain found that 63 per cent believe the Supreme Court made the correct decision in its April ruling.
The survey also revealed that 52 per cent of respondents now feel the law regarding women’s rights and their application to transgender people is clearer following the decision.
While 13 per cent said the ruling would have a positive impact on them and 6 per cent said it would be negative, more than three quarters of people (77 per cent) said the ruling would make no real difference to them.
The poll also addressed the issue of transgender women's participation in sports. Nearly three-quarters (74 per cent) of those surveyed agreed with the decisions made by some sporting bodies to ban transgender women from women’s competitions following the ruling.'

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/national/25172574.survey-suggests-people-think-supreme-court-gender-ruling-right/

Survey suggests most people think Supreme Court gender ruling was right

More than 2,100 adults were surveyed on their responses to the decision

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supreme-court-trans-public-opinion-b2753173.html

OP posts:
ItsNotUnusualToBe · 20/05/2025 16:43

but I don't think there are any organisations for AGP males, which I'm guessing is because there are so few of them.
*
That's weird logic🤪*

theilltemperedqueenofspacetime · 20/05/2025 16:43

@MarieDeGournay

Really good description! It's been like living through a dystopian novel.

Seethlaw · 20/05/2025 16:46

If I may, @GwenEdinburgh

"This might sound like I'm being defensive, but I think the AGP phenomena has been overdone."

On the contrary. I'm reading Dr Az Hakeem's books, "Trans" and "Detrans", and he's very clear that AGP men compose a big part of the number of trans-identifying males he's seen over his decades of career.

" I would also imagine they'd be easy to stop, given that I don't think they'd be undergoing HRT"

According to Dr Hakeem, some of them go as far as surgery - only to discover that they've lost their libido, and any interest in their neo-vagina along with it.

WithSilverBells · 20/05/2025 16:48

I've copied this from the Sex Matters website: 'Dr Az Hakeem is a consultant psychiatrist, medical psychotherapist and group analyst. He trained in medicine at University College London, in psychiatry at the Royal Free and in forensic psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic, where he later worked as a consultant until leaving the NHS.
He was one of the earliest and most outspoken gender-critical psychiatrists and the only consultant psychiatrist specialising in psychotherapy for adults with gender-identity conditions. He set up and ran a specialist UK psychotherapy service for adults with gender dysphoria for 12 years using both one-to-one and group analytic therapy with a less than 2% rate of patients deciding to pursue physical treatments. He stopped seeing gender patients in 2022 due to the political climate and now works exclusively in private practice based in Harley Street.
He is the author of Trans: exploring gender identity and gender dysphoria and more recently Detrans: when transition is not the solution; a member of CAN-SG, professional patron of LGB Alliance, and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at UCL Medical School.'

In his book Detrans he says (p 30 Kindle) "The numbers of non-transsexual trans have always greatly outnumbered those who would in the past been referred to as a 'transsexual'. The majority are males with a fetish involving some appropriation of aspects afforded to the opposite sex."

WithSilverBells · 20/05/2025 16:49

Seethlaw · 20/05/2025 16:46

If I may, @GwenEdinburgh

"This might sound like I'm being defensive, but I think the AGP phenomena has been overdone."

On the contrary. I'm reading Dr Az Hakeem's books, "Trans" and "Detrans", and he's very clear that AGP men compose a big part of the number of trans-identifying males he's seen over his decades of career.

" I would also imagine they'd be easy to stop, given that I don't think they'd be undergoing HRT"

According to Dr Hakeem, some of them go as far as surgery - only to discover that they've lost their libido, and any interest in their neo-vagina along with it.

I am glad you are reading Detrans, Seethlaw and finding it informative!

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 16:51

Marie, I'm very sorry for what you and other women experienced, it sounds awful, and I think this period after the SC ruling will hopefully allow for the trans community in the UK to have some serious conversations about what it did wrong in relation to women and their sex-based rights.

I also didn't mean the 'terrifying record of success' ironically, and I apologise if my post came across as such.

CapitalAtRisk · 20/05/2025 16:53

will hopefully allow for the trans community in the UK to have some serious conversations about what it did wrong in relation to women and their sex-based rights

Ha ha ha. Best laugh I've had this week.

Seethlaw · 20/05/2025 16:55

WithSilverBells · 20/05/2025 16:49

I am glad you are reading Detrans, Seethlaw and finding it informative!

Very informative, yes!

As I said elsewhere, I'd be perfectly willing to try any treatment that might stop my brand of dysphoria. So I'm intensely curious to see the various reasons why people detransition - see if anything resonates with me, which would give me an avenue to explore.

Annoyedone · 20/05/2025 16:58

CapitalAtRisk · 20/05/2025 16:53

will hopefully allow for the trans community in the UK to have some serious conversations about what it did wrong in relation to women and their sex-based rights

Ha ha ha. Best laugh I've had this week.

Yup. I did guffaw at that. I mean, they trampled over women’s rights, got people sacked, threatened women with rape and murder, refused to let women hold meetings, attacked women, allowed rapists into women’s prisons and refuges, were responsible for the rape of one woman who was then gaslit for a year, enabled the assault if a 10 year old girl in a women’s toilet and much more but we should forget that as they’re gonna have a little talk about what they did wrong so we should forgive them and let men into women’s spaces cos they’re really sorry now honest guv

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 17:01

I don't know if there will be serious conversations - one comes to mind from watching Novara Media and the interview between Michael Walker and the head of the trans org TransLucent, in which Walker asked what the trans community could learn from this catastrophic period for the trans community, and what might trans people have done differently.

It's something to reflect on. Being on Mumsnet today has been thought-provoking for me, though. I will think a lot about some of the things I've read today and the good faith I encountered. I've spent too little time engaging with gender-critical feminists, and I think I was the poorer for it.

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 17:04

Thanks, WithSilverBells, I'll have to read it. I don't know much about AGP beyond Debbie Hayton's account.

WithSilverBells · 20/05/2025 17:04

What needs to happen is for transsexuals to form a community separate to the current 'trans community' and have a long, hard think about what has been, and still is being, done against women in their name.
You need to decide what, if anything, you still need to advocate for and do this fairly through the democratic process and without trying to take rights away from any other group. I'm afraid you are also going to have to find a way to keep out the fetishists and I am honestly not sure how that can be done. But you will forgive me if I see that as a problem for men to solve.

DameMaud · 20/05/2025 17:13

MarieDeGournay · 20/05/2025 16:41

GwenEdinburgh when it comes to lawsuits, the gender-critical movement has a pretty terrifying record of success.

We have indeed. I think it helps that we try to operate within the law as it actually is, rather than the law as some groups eg Stonewall would like it to be.

The rise of the trans rights movement has been a very bleak and dispiriting time. Over a short space of time women found our spaces, our organisations, our identity, even the words that refer to us - things that we had fought for for centuries and believed we had secured for good - appropriated.

We also saw familiar things that we interacted with on a daily basis - the media, the medical profession, schools, youth organisations, political parties - adopt language and policies there were inimical to us.

Most distressingly from my point of view, as I am a very rational person, we saw science itself abandon fact for easily-disprovable opinions, like sex being a spectrum. And that version of 'science' was even taught in schools, so several cohorts of schoolchildren have been misinformed by the people who are supposed to educate them.

For some of us, possibly many of us, it seemed like the world had been turned upside down. A tiny percentage of the population had somehow gained so much power and influence that the rights of 50% of the population were sidelined, and we were dismissed as bigots, transphobes or dinosaurs when we objected. Those of us who objected too loudly were threatened with death or rape, and some of us were subjected to literal violence, as in literal violence.

There weren't many lights at the end of this dark tunnel of misogyny: this board was one, and the judicial system in the UK (or England and Wales, more accurately) was another.

The 'terrifying record of success' you refer to (possibly ironically) was a case-by-case acceptance by the courts that women exist as a social group defined by our biology, and that we have rights based on that identity, and that we have been deprived of those rights, in ways that, when exposed in court, often seem outlandishly groundless and unfair.

It was such a relief that at least one branch of the state saw what had happened to women's rights, and made rulings that have gone some of the way to tilting the world back to the horizontal.

The level of aggression and misogyny apparent in the backlash to the UKSC ruling on the definition of 'woman' shows that there are many more hurdles to face before we reach a balanced state - 'to women, our rights and no less; to transwomen, their rights and no more'.

The continuation of a society less balanced than that is terrifying to me.

Oh, how I'd love to see this exquisite summary as a letter in a mainstream paper @MarieDeGournay

I actually had a powerful emotional response to this, as it voices so perfectly my experience and feelings.

Thank you

theilltemperedqueenofspacetime · 20/05/2025 17:17

We wouldn't need to speculate about people's motivation for transitioning if we could only (a) trust clinicians to be ultra-cautious and 'first, do no harm' (the Cass Report being a step in the right direction), and (b) treat trans people as being of their birth sex when it comes to sex-based rights (SC ruling).

@GwenEdinburgh how would you feel about a gestalt switch to a world in which 'male transsexuals' are out and proud and everybody knows they are socially one sex but legally and biologically the other? Exposed, I guess. But I'm going to argue that this could in the long run increase acceptance and take away some of the pressure to pass and/or have particular treatments.

I have trans friends who don't pass, yet are weirdly wedded to the idea that birth sex is irrelevant private personal information, which worries me. Knowing birth sex is so important - for safeguarding, medical safety, and data integrity, amongst other things.

GetDressedYouMerryGentlemen · 20/05/2025 17:30

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 15:11

Yes, WithSilverBells, you're right. The SC ruling does establish that binary, at least in relation to the Equality Act, though not with other legislations such as Gender Recognition Certificates (which capture a change from male to female) or even basic ID like passports (mine says 'F'). And with all that additional admin not covered by the Equality Act and the SC ruling, I think it's important to realise that trans people slip between that binary.

I don't want to come across as being argumentative or disrespectful for the sake of it, by the way. I'm not a troll, just a trans woman feeling quite exhausted by everything. And I don't speak for other trans women, unfortunately. I just came here wondering if dialogue and compromise was possible. Maybe it isn't, although if it makes you feel better, I think the SC ruling is leading to lots of adjustments and compromises now on the trans side, in order to be legally compliant. I think generally, women-only spaces will only be for women in more and more ways, once the infrastructure is constructed to enable trans people to use gender-neutral facilities.

My elderly mother was (physically) abused in the bathroom of her childhood home by a man when she was a teenager. Some 60 years later she popped to the loo on a day out and found a man (i.e. a trans woman) waiting for a cubicle in front of her. It completely freaked her out she was re-traumatised and left the toilet immediately. She was too embarrassed to tell me and too scared to return to the toilet later so she held her urine for the duration and ended up with a raging bladder infection. She ended up quite unwell and my kids had a total shit half term because granny couldn't leave the house for the week when she was supposed to be looking after them.

Why is women's fear worth less than trans women's fear? Why should women budge up and give up their spaces? Why should my Muslim colleagues have no guaranteed man free space to adjust their hijab? Why should my nieces cope with their first periods with a boy in the nest cubicle. Why she the wants of one group ride roughshod over the needs of another? Part of the reason women fear men is because they are (as a class) bigger and stronger than women. As trans women have physiologically male bodies they don't have the same disadvantages of women so they may have 'fear' but it's not the same fear as that of women. We say no, the law says no so stay out.

Stepfordian · 20/05/2025 17:35

I’d bet a penny to a pound a large section of the population thinks that transgender is the Hayley Cropper type homosexual transsexual who has had full surgery.

BellissimoGecko · 20/05/2025 17:37

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 15:02

I wouldn't describe trans women as men, WithSilverBells, I don't think they are (anymore). If they were, they wouldn't be covered by the protected characteristic of 'gender reassignment' to signify their move away from manhood. I don't see it as binary as you, I guess.

But ‘gender reassignment’ covers people who are ‘proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex’, which means they may have done nothing at all to change their sex. So they are still their birth sex.

people can’t change sex anyway, and the SC ruling makes this clear.

sex is binary.

Annoyedone · 20/05/2025 17:38

ANd for some reason…. Haley was played by a woman,which helped to push the narrative that TW totally passed. Maybe they should have been brave and had a man play Hayley, for the true effect.

GwenEdinburgh · 20/05/2025 17:41

theilltemperedqueenofspacetime, I think what you've just said is a really radical idea that I've toyed with in the past and is there under the surface. The SC ruling brought it back to me with its uncompromising re-sexing. I absolutely can't speak for other trans women, but personally, the idea of being a 'male transsexual' does have appeal to me, a recognition of my past and much of my biological reality, as well as my transition.

"out and proud and everybody knows they are socially one sex but legally and biologically the other? ... But I'm going to argue that this could in the long run increase acceptance and take away some of the pressure to pass and/or have particular treatments."

I think I agree. 'Socially one sex but legally and biologically the other' is something that resonates with me, for the reasons you mention, concerning the pressure to pass. Perhaps that's why I came here today, because the SC ruling and the EHRC statutory guidance that's on the way feels in some ways like a liberation. But also, I'm struggling to find a place to make sense of it, the ruling is meant to be terrible, but there is guilt on my side because for some reason I welcome having the pressure taken off my shoulders at last.

Your post has really shaken me, tbh. I think perhaps you've just got to the heart of my confusion, and suddenly it doesn't feel like confusion anymore.

Where that leaves me as a transgender woman is something for me to grapple with.

I think your trans friends are very lucky to have you as a friend.

CapitalAtRisk · 20/05/2025 17:43

GetDressedYouMerryGentlemen · 20/05/2025 17:30

My elderly mother was (physically) abused in the bathroom of her childhood home by a man when she was a teenager. Some 60 years later she popped to the loo on a day out and found a man (i.e. a trans woman) waiting for a cubicle in front of her. It completely freaked her out she was re-traumatised and left the toilet immediately. She was too embarrassed to tell me and too scared to return to the toilet later so she held her urine for the duration and ended up with a raging bladder infection. She ended up quite unwell and my kids had a total shit half term because granny couldn't leave the house for the week when she was supposed to be looking after them.

Why is women's fear worth less than trans women's fear? Why should women budge up and give up their spaces? Why should my Muslim colleagues have no guaranteed man free space to adjust their hijab? Why should my nieces cope with their first periods with a boy in the nest cubicle. Why she the wants of one group ride roughshod over the needs of another? Part of the reason women fear men is because they are (as a class) bigger and stronger than women. As trans women have physiologically male bodies they don't have the same disadvantages of women so they may have 'fear' but it's not the same fear as that of women. We say no, the law says no so stay out.

And yet so often we hear from trans-identifying men who think they're women, saying that "Nobody has ever complained about me being in the Ladies! And the NHS has virtually no complaints about us being on Women's wards!"

🙄

BigfootSmallButtons · 20/05/2025 17:46

I'm not surprised you're so tired "Gwen" when your entire identity is a lie. It must be disconcerting when reality tries to impede and the cognitive dissonance occurs.

Never mind, keep plopping around with your many paragraphs of faux concern. We all know what a woman is, and unfortunately for male chancers Mother Nature's a TERF 🌊 🦁

GetDressedYouMerryGentlemen · 20/05/2025 17:54

CapitalAtRisk · 20/05/2025 17:43

And yet so often we hear from trans-identifying men who think they're women, saying that "Nobody has ever complained about me being in the Ladies! And the NHS has virtually no complaints about us being on Women's wards!"

🙄

I've had it up to here ⬆️. Women shouldn't have to confront men in their spaces because the men shouldn't be there. The law agrees so those men who persist in breaching women's spaces do so knowing they are breaking the law. Hardly the actions of harmless innocent people who can be trusted to respect women.

JamieCannister · 20/05/2025 17:55

theilltemperedqueenofspacetime · 20/05/2025 16:20

No, I agree classic sex-segregated multiple occupancy provision with door gaps is the gold standard: mixed-sex provision is dangerous for women. And the ruling has made 'single-gender' provision almost certainly illegal. So I'm just talking about what we could additionally do to accommodate trans people. I don't have fixed ideas about it, but I do think it's worth going to a bit of trouble, rather than just say "use the gents".

Why though?

Other than disabled facilities, why should some men and some women have special facilities laid on for them?

Why should service providers, employers and government face an increase in risk of being sued by a victim of sexual assault in a mixed-sex toilet built for trans people but open to all? Why should they face the costs of extra spaces?

Why should (naive) women be placed at increased risk of sexual assault simply to validate the feelings of men, feeling based on the absolute opposite of reality?

Are there not other groups more deserving if we were to start providing extra spaces? (Those with serious trauma or certain MH conditions probably deserve and would benefit from special spaces away from other men and woemn more than trans would)

Why on earth does everything have to be about the T? No other group have ever before even asked for special toilets, let alone had serious cconsideration for them, and they don't want them.

ArabellaScott · 20/05/2025 17:56

Seethlaw · 20/05/2025 16:55

Very informative, yes!

As I said elsewhere, I'd be perfectly willing to try any treatment that might stop my brand of dysphoria. So I'm intensely curious to see the various reasons why people detransition - see if anything resonates with me, which would give me an avenue to explore.

I'm sorry to hear you still are suffering dysphoria. I sincerely hope you are able to find peace and ease.

OP posts:
MagpiePi · 20/05/2025 17:57

Also @GwenEdinburgh said

I just came here wondering if dialogue and compromise was possible.

Women have been making it very clear for a long time that we are not happy with the way transwomen have been behaving, and have suggested compromises such as third spaces. We have been shouted down, threatened, lost jobs, lost sporting opportunities, been raped and sexually assaulted in prisons, hospitals, toilets and changing rooms, but now the law has been clarified and you are having to abide by it you want a civilised chat and compromises?

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