Am I naive in thinking that in a couple of years, if not sooner, this will all be behind us? A few court cases, people clear about the law, women's rights protected again??

[loveyouradvice]

And yes the noisy TRA far fewer in number and sidelined as the sad fringe that are left as others move on.....

Or do others think it will pan out differently??

The venom in your words when any other trans-identified person ventures to give an opinion which differs from yours is very revealing and what it reveals does you absolutely no credit. Have you no self-awareness at all?

It is concerning, isn't it?

In the past, and especially over the past month, I have felt like we are a test site. It is like some people are working out just the right formula of enough pleading and emoting to convince us. And if we can be convinced, then perhaps that formula will work elsewhere.

The manipulation is off the charts.

But it has felt like when some posters encounter someone who they cannot accuse of being hateful, they will try all the tactics to see which one sticks.

So, when a male poster tries to tell us that their community is all about love, tolerance and acceptance or whatever, it really, really does show it to be rather a false claim.

And all because women reject male people demanding that they be allowed to access single sex provisions and that everyone complies with their philosophical belief.

It isn’t conversion therapy for you to accept the body you have. No amount of surgery or medication is ever going to make you a woman, you are trying to achieve something that can never happen. That does not make for good MH.

I genuinely feel for you that you feel like this, but it’s a MH issue and shouldn’t be affirmed with a fake transition, putting you on a pathway to lifelong medicalisation. We don’t affirm anorexia, and we shouldn’t affirm this.

Yes, it's well documented. Even the Tavistock said they were transing away the gay.

We know it from here. It's the difference between AGP and HSTS.

If homosexuality was completely acceptable, no one would want to transition into what they believe to be a straight person

The Tavistock were basically Iran in micro form.

In the past, and especially over the past month, I have felt like we are a test site. It is like some people are working out just the right formula of enough pleading and emoting to convince us. And if we can be convinced, then perhaps that formula will work elsewhere.

yeah, it hasn't worked though.

I never seen so many people more aghast at the way transactivism plays out.

Any remaining doubt seems to have been completely exterminated.

Gosh, all that happened in the six weeks since the SC judgment was handed down or is this the first draft of your new novel?

I'd add 'or other external factors' - especially if talking more generally about clustering of various pehnomena. Disease clustering can indicate environmental contamination, for example.

But yes - if there's statistically significant clustering (not of relatives) then it's not innate.

The age of first memories is fascinating. I remember from my developmental psych modules that before age 2 is very unusual (and confident assertions from some reaearchers that either 'before 2' or 'before learning to speak' is impossible). But the spread is very wide, and later memory creation from photos or re-telling of family stories so easy that it can be very hard to pin down a true first.

I have one that is definitely before before my first birthday, and one that could be anywhere between 4 months and 18 months but likely towards the earlier end of that. Both so trivial they weren't photographed and are highly unlikely to have been spoken about. The earliest I can give an absolutely precise date for are at just over 2 years. I had one boyfriend who didn't remember a thing from before age 9 - but that was related to a head trauma. It must be odd to have so large a gap in your life.

But at least Butters had taken on board that women too often get paid less than men...

@murasaki

Re: therapy. I had therapy for years, yes, and if you can find a good therapist that works well with you, it can really help a lot! In my case, there was also my passion for psychology since I was very young, and then confronting and comparing my memories and understanding with my sister's over the last decade.

@TangenitalContrivences

"This is interesting as I'd be questioning who told you you had to be a certain way and a certain thing, who are you disappointing or letting down."

Yes, I see what you mean. Unfortunately, since I was just a toddler, I don't remember who might have told me things.

You start getting passed over for promotions. Eh it's fine, you have a job at least.
Of course you're the person picked for redundancy.
You apply for new position after new position.
You mysteriously never seem to get hired, despite being perfectly qualified and with plenty of experience. Weird - you were straight in the door for your last job a decade ago.
But that was before your life was detonated by hitting the glass ceiling.

You know, reading that made me think it could be the first time Butters truly gets an inkling of what women deal with at work.

The figures from the Tavistock and the Dutch Study are off the scale appalling.

I've attached two photos from Hannah Barnes book to highlight the point. (I could type and quote but I don't have time).

This is EXTREMELY important data and context. Apologies as I can't rotate one of the photos on my phone.

I have felt like we are a test site. It is like some people are working out just the right formula of enough pleading and emoting to convince us. And if we can be convinced, then perhaps that formula will work elsewhere.

TBF, this is an excellent place to get a robust test of an argument. Their problem is that pleading and emoting isn’t an argument

I reckon! And getting older.

Alternative views of Gender dysphoria are available

https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1808825717204922755

an extract:

" Gender Dysphoria itself is not real. It has no clinical or evidentiary basis. It is a false construct, created ex nihilo and first published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) 5th edition in October 2013. We psychologists should not be involved in any of it."

Bloody Hell, this thread. And the one about the Cass report being trashed....by that bloke who co-authors papers with his imaginary self. And the "ahah, what about male cleaners in the toilets!" thread. And Jolyon Maugham telling women how to feminist better. Proper last-gasp desperation.

I thought I'd seen everything, but I'm also genuinely shocked at the way a "wrong type of trans" poster has been sneered at by the true believers. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised though.

They have to. They have to police it so hard because there is no underlying sense to it. There can never be rational compromises where people go back to some basics and work forward from there because there are no basics, no common observations of reality to start from. There can only ever be arbitrary edicts that are to be obeyed not understood.

That's why police, NHS, politicians, whatever have fallen under such on the face of it batshit groups. They have no confidence in their own ability to make sensible, logical descisions in this area because there is no sense or logic. All they know is everything they know is wrong so they'd better just shut up and be told how it is by people who can see beyond the veil of the flesh that they are so stubbornly unable to pierce.

There can’t be any deviation from the one true faith, except that each of them have their own version of their one true faith, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t instantly acquiesce to everything immediately. It’s mind blowingly narcissistic and controlling. No wonder the de-transitioners get torn to shreds by these people, they’d turn on anyone in a heartbeat.

This is really quite saddening to read, and shows a repeating pattern.

You seem to be saying:

1. You don't talk to your own mother anymore because you refused to accept your sister and this drove them both away. This is heartbreaking.
2. That you believe your mother isn't capable of 'really' seeing her daughter as female. This may well be true.
3. That it is important for mothers to deny children when they express gender dysphoria and refuse to accept their transness if it persists. (Imagine saying the same about same-sex attraction 30 years ago under Section 28 - it's eerily familiar rhetoric).
4. That there is a trans woman in your life who you haven't yet alienated enough to drive away forever, and who appears to agree with you when the two of you are together.

Ok.

My experiences of my own friends and family are very different, but everyone's family is different I suppose. Maybe your mother really can't see your sister as female - she is clearly just trying her best to accept her child anyway, though, and I can respect that.

I know that you are going to labour the point you and other posters keep trying to make that I and other trans people are only being humoured by the people in our lives (I think there are actually some good points to be made about how many people struggle with latent transphobia and are desperately trying to wokewash their own behaviour, in much the same way that homophobes had to learn to treat the LGB people in their lives like human beings a decade or two ago after it stopped being socially acceptable to voice publicly. Hell, even trans people today aren't magically immune to transphobic attitudes!)

The thing is, you seem to not be considering that this same principle also applies to you - people in your life will humour your anti-trans views in person an extent because they don't want to turn every conversation into a battleground and want to keep their family and friendship groups together if possible.

Your complete refusal to accept your sister seems to have finally broken your family apart when they couldn't humour you and the harm your ideology was causing any longer.

That's heartbreaking - and a very common dynamic amongst many families I have spoken to who have also been torn apart by gender critical ideology. There comes a point where it just can't be stepped over like a missing stair anymore - where you just can't in good conscience keep inviting dear Sister or Auntie or Granny over, due to the harm it causes to the kids. Heartbreaking, but you eventually have to make the difficult call.

It also seems like something that would be so easy to repair as well, let alone to have avoided to begin with.

I asked my own mother what it would feel like to have one child begging for acceptance and another refusing to accept her for who she is and she said it would tear her apart and destroy her utterly. She would be incandescent over feeling like she was being forced to choose, and would find herself wondering if that lack of acceptance would extend to other facets of a family member's life rather than just the parts it is currently socially permissible to hold negative philosophical views toward.

I can unfortunately imagine precisely what hearing this stuff constantly must be like for your Transfriend (friend? Maybe she's just a Transacquaintance?). Hopefully she has robust filters in place and a solid support network - I know I find it exhausting to engage in person with people who are doing the conversational equivalent of kicking me in the teeth periodically, even more so than online. That said, she might find it tolerable if she isn't particularly dysphoric or has managed to frame being misgendered during your meetings as a sort of necessary evil.

You've clearly found a community here who accepts your ideological rejection of your sister, and (before that?) you found a place in the Dr Who fandom, but you seem to have said before that there is a great deal of tension there - which makes sense!

Dr Who is one of the most relentlessly inclusive and trans-positive shows on TV and has been for years. It makes me wonder how much of an influence you have in the Who fandom - and whether it has diminished over the last decade or so due to your behaviour. I could see a situation where a prominent fandom figure liberally throwing GC talking points about in a space populated by many trans people would actually encourage the community to close ranks, and if it got especially bad and impossible to ignore, it could encourage the show writers to write more trans-accepting stories and thus make it starkly clear where they stand. It would be hard to remain prominent or relevant in that community afterward!

You don't come across as someone who actually likes the Who fandom or even the show very much to begin with, honestly. You may find it less frustrating to disengage rather than continuing to hate-watch.

That said, you seem to talk about it in the past tense quite a bit, so you may already view it as something in your past.

This is an attitude I've seen in geek circles a great deal in recent years - holdouts who come together to lament how the IP they grew up with 'went woke' when they suddenly started noticing it conflicting with their own ideological standpoints. You end up with these little island universes that refuse to accept anything beyond a particular cutoff date in canon. It's particularly odd when said IP has always, transparently, been 'woke' within the climate of the times within which it was written. Star Wars is particularly egregious for it - the amount of screaming rage that has accompanied the release of the most recent series of Andor has been a sight to behold, and similarly for The Boys once a subset of fans finally realised that Homelander isn't supposed to be viewed as heroic.

If you have disengaged from the Who fandom, Bravo on moving on! If you are looking for TV shows that display appropriately virulent anti-trans attitudes then there is no shortage of classics from before the Great Awokening.

Old Who itself, of course, has a particular low budget earnest shaky cardboard-and-tinfoil charm as well - and barely ever resorted to getting mean or punching downward. Even the shaky early attempts at depicting trans characters were pretty interesting if a little tonally odd. I can't recall a single instance of overt mean-spirited transphobia and I've watched most of it at some point. It simply has never had a single malicious bone in its body, so no wonder most of the modern fandom - bar the holdouts - have no issue with trans people.

I think that the way you launched a jeering pile-on against me yesterday is an indication that you perhaps aren't someone for whom kindness or tolerance comes easily, even if your self-image says otherwise. You've certainly done a lot of sneering at me, and it has felt like a rather desperate point-scoring exercise that went on and on for several pages. I used to get plenty of that kind of thing from girls and boys at school, as a trans kid trying to catch up on missed social cues, so it's almost nostalgic in a way.

If you behaved like that to your sister, I'm not surprised that your family no longer talks to you - and wouldn't be surprised if you have lost your voice in the Who fandom as well if you've engaged in this kind of behaviour there. Many people - especially in geek circles - don't enjoy those who engage in behaviours that look awfully like bullying, and generally only play along out of fear or a desire to engage in ingroup signalling performances. There are plenty of well known geek social fallacies where people tolerate bullies due to the residual siege mentality and wish to be inclusive - but there are times when it just becomes too much.

You'd probably have more success with both your family, and the wider Who fandom (Whodom?) if you eased off on the anti-trans stuff. That really seems to be at the core of everything you have described as a source of conflict in your life.

I suppose this board's community will never challenge you for expressing gender critical or otherwise trans-hostile views - indeed, you'd be treated like other posters who haven't toed the line if you didn't - and is more than willing to support you, so you have everything you need here!

I think there's a Reddit board that dedicates itself to a virulently 'anti-woke' trans-hostile interpretation of old-left political thought. Same kind of gig as Spiked and its hybrid 'conservative leftism' holdout ideology. Can't remember its name and don't really care to expose myself to it again unnecessarily but you might find it to your liking. There seems to be a lot of lamenting the existence of trans characters in modern media. Obviously as with anything that markets itself as 'anti-woke', buyer beware.

I'm wryly glad you found yesterday's juvenile multi-page pile-on an entertaining opportunity to hold court and grandstand. It's certainly given me a lot to think about and reminisce on. I thought it was quite illuminating - as did quite a few observers who were vainly hoping that following the SC ruling, things would ease off and the board might become a little less overtly hostile to trans people.

My general policy for social media laugh-react storms is that the harder and more sweatily a dogpile labours a point about how loudly they are guffawing and how jolly a time they are having with their collective mockery of a single person for an innocent mistake or even just a statement they dislike, the more desperate they are to find straws to clutch to undermine said person. There is a characteristic desperation that almost looks like relief. It's fascinating to observe, and almost like clockwork. It seems like a perfect fit for a strategic policy of portraying trans people as inherently laughable, ridiculous and worthy of scorn and derision, should that align with your goals.

I don't think it will win you many friends amongst people interested in treating trans people with dignity and respect, but perhaps that isn't a priority for you.

Sorry, this got pretty long. Your disclosure of your family situation really upset me and I suppose I'm just trying to understand what leads a person to that point, and how that would affect the way they engage with the world.

I really hope you find a way ahead that allows you to reconcile with your family! The world would be a better place if more people were able to find a way to reconcile with and accept their parents and siblings.

I'm rooting for you!

That nice.

Bore off.

Honestly after yesterday and neo nazi bullshit, I'm really really really not interested in your opinion and your fantasy.

Yesterday was funny. Today it's just boring.

The issue in this is that there is no debate - it would be more interesting intellectually if there were...

The reality is so stark / so binary / so immutable / so set in stone that there is no argument that can pull it apart - in a world where words and imaginary logic is so strong in so many places, the core black and white nature of the truths in this discussion is really unusual.

In fact - so clear and fundamental and basic is the underlying reality of born man - remain man / born woman - remain woman that it is the equivalent of debates on whether 1 + 1 = 2 or whether grass is green or whether a mile is longer than a yard etc.

One side of the discussion has no argument to put forward - all they have had in the past (which has been very powerful in its time) is a cloud of fluff and mis-direction, clever use of language, emotionally charged rhetoric and bullying to get buy-in for something clearly not possible.

As that cloud has now lifted, with a huge thanks to FWS and the Supreme Court Judgment, the shining clarity of reality is out in the daylight for all to see. All that is necessary now to refute arguments is to just keep on repeating the truth:

• born a man / woman
• you can't change sex
• single-sex spaces are reserved for those of that birth sex

and that is it - no argument will hold up against those truths, and everything can be brought back to a discussion based on those truths:

• should men be able to call themselves women?
• should we force people to use any pronouns they wish
• can people use spaces reserved for the opposite sex by pretending to be that sex
• can someone change sex
• does mutilating the body change sex
• does taking hormones change sex
• can someone be born in the wrong body
• What loos should people use
• etc. etc. etc.

All of those if asked in the context of the now clarified reality in the three points above - leads to obvious and clear answers

So, it is worth putting the time in to continue to refute the spurious arguments that keep appearing, but the battle and war is already won - there will be lots of minor battles to come - but all now have phenomenally solid ammunition in the clarity that has been established.

It is time to start re-framing the discussions to more pertinent needs:

• how do we deal with mental health issues (not just these, but the explosion we have seen in recent years)
• how do we care for our children rather than abuse them
• how do we establish better scientific procedures to avoid repeats of Mermaids / Tavistock / Stonewall
• how does the charity commission need to think around what is and isn't acceptable in a charity
• how do we as a society help those who have been so badly affected by the lies / the medicalisation / the mutilation that has taken place
• how do we rebuild women in society so that we have a strong and healthy balance between women and men - both seen as different but equal
• how do we help to heal those who have been collateral damage (often women)
• how do we bring to account those who have been instrumental and knowing in pursuing coercion / abuse / control in this field for so long - esp. those whose actions have ended up with abused children / abuse of the vulnerable

All of this will take a long time - but we have the bedrock and framework to do it now - it just needs hundreds / thousands of decent people (as per here) to stand up, be counted and keep pushing forwards...

Love it when self identified experts with zero experience of being a parent or understanding children rock up to lecture women on here. Once you get past the irritation at the tone deaf ignorant lecturing, it's actually funny to see the lack of insight and knowledge.

It never seemed to cross their minds that being bullied for behaviours deemed as feminine during the time their personality was forming and as they learned about themselves and where they fit into the world might actually be the reason they had reached the wrong conclusion about what sex they ought to have been.

That's what makes gender ideology horrific: it seeks to reconceptualize 'women' as a group consisting of most, but not all, adult human females, prepubescent and adolescent males 'too feminine to be boys' who go on to be trans identifying adults, and adult middle-aged heterosexual males with sexual fetishes (with a sprinkling of other males with more individualized motivations). That is the straight forward, non-euphemistic definition. So, of course it will tempting for those feminine males to identify into the 'normal' heterosexual category. It's presented as a matter-of-fact description of how society is configured. How is it not depraved that this is now the enlighten polite definition of womanhood?

If I were to be honest, one of the surprising aspects of this contagious mania is that by-and-large boys who fell into the above category didn't decide to hop onto the transgender bandwagon. In fact we know that they most grow up to identify as men, with a strong propensity (but by no means exclusive) to be homosexual. Presumably in part because the privileges of being male-identified (even if effeminate) are still considerable. This is corroborated by the fact that it's girls who are more likely, as much as > 2x, to identify as trans, sometimes even when they are not especially 'gender non-confirming' compared to their peers. But for both sexes it's mostly only those with co-morbid factors like autism and trauma that don't see through the ideology (at least for themselves) and become ensnared.

akkakk
I am in my 50s and the concept almost never occurred to those of my generation back in the 1970s that they were born into the wrong body.

There were quite a lot of people in the mid-to-late sixties who made a good job of being convinced they had been born into the wrong body (or sometimes had been in a crash that left them abandoned in early infancy, like days rather than years) and were in fact not really human at all, despite appearances; they spent time waiting for their Real People to come in their spaceships and collect them to take them where they belonged. We didn't argue with them about it, because we knew that the Others were unlikely ever to appear, so these children would get over it.

Previous generations had the whole "I am the son/daughter of someone Important who had to foster me out because The Enemy might otherwise destroy me", which I think was called Missing Heir Syndrome by some onlookers. And slightly later there was a whole series of books about being rescued from horrible home circumstances by a Horse-Not-Horse; Mercedes Lackey, I am looking at you. More recently, well, Harry Potter and need I say more?