Trans sibling in law

[Primrose86]

DH's sibling has just come out as a man. She is 26 and autistic, lives at home with mum, spends life on the Internet, got kicked out of school at 16 etc etc She has plans to go overseas and transition in germany where apparently you can get surgeries on the public health system while living with her grandpa. Her mum is fully supportive of this.

How should I react to all this. Should I start referring to him as my brother in law? What usually happens after people come out. I assume they progress to hormones and surgery but honestly based on what I read, Germany is quite resistant to health tourists who never paid in even if they are citizens. Are people really happy identifying as another gender when they wouldn't look like the other gender?

It seems the TRAs never want to talk about detransitioners.

Transgenderism is conversion therapy. They do it in Iran. If you are a same sex attracted man - which is illegal in Iran - then change to being a woman. Then you can legally be in a 'heterosexual' relationship with a man. It's a solution to a deeply homophobic 'problem'. In the West there is still the driver of internalised homophobia. Someone doesn't want to be gay so they identify as the opposite sex and can be in an opposite sex relationship. Detransitioner Ritchie Herron went through with surgery before he admitted he wasn't a woman , just a man who didn't want to recognise he was gay. Lesbians identifying as men so they aren't lesbians is a classic path to having a trans identity.

She absolutely didn’t say this

you lie about this, what else do you lie about

The actual consensus is that there is very little high quality research in this area, and conclusions can't be drawn.

Record keeping and clinical practice have been of a poor quality, particularly with regard to the lack of interrogation of the recent and sudden increase in young trans identifying females.

Why is therapy that isn't 100% affirmation seen as conversion?

I've worked in various MH settings, with people who believe all manner of things that aren't true. (Commonly known as delusions)

These included
That they were the biblical King David.
They were pregnant with God's baby.
They were a woman sometimes and should be allowed to steal clothes from the women in the unit and sit in the women's lounge on those days.
That they were fat and needed to not eat.

In all of these cases we worked as a team with each other and the patient to help them accept that they were provabley none of those things. Admittedly proving that he wasn't King David wasn't that easy, in the same way we can't prove or disprove the existence of God.

But this was never seen as conversion therapy. So why is therapy exploring why a transperson believes something that is demonstrably not true (that they have changed sex) seen to be so?

Definitely this

I think the approach encouraged now would be to understand the dysphoria as part of broader mental health - considering past abuse for instance.

This was not done at the Tavistock.

The suggestion that one approach fits all - ‘affirmation only’ - suggests deliberate disengagement from usual healthcare protocols.

This. This would be the last time I would converse with her and would hope she gets some sort of help

I'd like to point out that she does not have a brother in law. In law, her husband's sister is, in fact, a woman - and unless she has a GRC, there isn't even a legal fiction.

Pronouns arose in language as a convenient shortcut, saving us the need to use someone's name every time we refer to them. Any policing of language, to try to avoid one's natural use of third person singular pronouns, is a cognitive load on the speaker. Some people can comfortably use "gender based" pronouns, and some can't. Of the latter group, some can comfortably avoid third person pronouns, and some can't. I happen to belong to this third group; my natural use of third person pronouns has always been sex based, or more accurately, based on my perception of the person's sex. "Preferred" pronouns, and attempting to avoid them altogether, both cause me cognitive difficulties. And I do not understand how the idea has spread of "my pronouns" when someone else is speaking. Pronouns, if they belong to anyone, belong to the person using them to express themselves.

But they can change gender. Hence the name transgender

Respect their identity and wishes. Use their preferred name and pronouns

What is 'gender'? How does one change it?

And what has that got to do with sex specific spaces or language constructs?

Gender appears to be how a person wants to be seen and thought of and treated.

Where this involves forced speech, gaslighting, bullying, boundary-battering, safeguarding issues etc - no.

You can't change 'gender', because humans have no agency in whether and how gendered-stereotypes are constructed. Apologies, but Butler's terms are inevitable here: she claims gendered discourses are iterated, reiterated and reenacted in a so-called chain of social signification and meaning. (Ugh! I'm sorry ....). There's no mystical essentialism involved at all here that I can see; despite her later protestations to the contrary. If gender is something we perform, then by definition it cannot be 'innate'. Gender ideologists can blame their very own demigod queer theorists for that one: they have a habit of catching themselves in the net of their own wordy pontifications and Butler is just about the worst culprit.

We have no more agency over socially-regulated gendered stereotypes than we do our sex. The only difference is that these stereotypes are constrained geographically and historically and shift with time and place (although we have no control over that change). Sex is immutable and does not change. The only choice here is whether and how to present ourselves in accordance with those gendered stereotypes, or not; or whether we happen to have no truck whatsoever with regressive, restrictive modes of regulating masculinity and femininity because we recognise that these cause nothing but harm.

It IS possible to be respectful of others without being props to validate their identity at every turn. I want and expect no such validation - I'm not that insecure or given to navel-gazing - and will treat everyone with the same respect and courtesy. This isn't tantamount to saying 'some animals are more equal than others'. A refusal to cede over one's own rights, or to contort our language to fit in with aggressive demands to show 'kindness' whilst those rights are stamped on, are not actions borne of a hate-filled, rampant transphobia. They are the actions of a weak mug, devoid of critical thinking, who whilst disappearing up their own backside in an ever-decreasing purity-spiral are incapable of questioning the harm they might be doing in turn.

As to potential harm, I'd suggest that those people read the Cass report, but their very doctrine of #NoDebate has deadened critical capacity to the point that any concession to safeguarding, of any variety, is instantly labelled 'transphobia'. And when a certain movement repeatedly terms the word 'safeguarding' a dogwhistle, then they are showing the world precisely who they are.

You can't change 'gender', because humans have no agency in whether and how gendered-stereotypes are constructed.

Nothing demonstrates this more than the discourse on sport.

There is no drive to instigate some kind of handicap system to enable women who identify as men to be included in men's sport.

To have a chance of competing at a high level, they must compete as women and forego treatment that might disqualify them, and as they are women they are expected to accept this.

That is plainly untrue. A healthy relationship does not rely on one person seeing another person as s/he would like to be seen, and it is trans thinking that requires everyone to act as if they do.

“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy” The World Health Organisation
You can change your gender by adopting the characteristics of the gender you identify with as demonstrated by transgender people all over the world.

This thread's a great demonstration of coercive control that underpins this whole ideology:
You will affirm, you will call this vulnerable young woman a man because I demand you do. If you don't you're a bad person, a transphobe, you'll be alienated from your family etc etc.

The positive thing is that people are now refusing to be bullied. Are insisting on speaking up and trying to protect the young and vulnerable who for too long were abandoned and left in the clutches of the trans extremists seeking to use them for their own purposes.

#nodebate did so much harm but at least now there can be discussions in families about how to support and protect vulnerable family members from a bleak future of medical experimentation and mental vulnerability.

If I’m the breadwinner in my family, have short hair, wear trousers and shirts and no makeup and like football and a pint, have I “adopted the characteristics” of masculinity? Am I “identifying” with it?

How do I “identify with a gender” if gender is socially constructed?

So being transgender is just performing stereotypes?

Regressive stereotyping at its worst .

So as a woman, if I wear trousers, have short hair, do manual work and watch the football - then I've 'changed gender' and am a man? Is that right?

And why does it require surgery?

Yes - and from the 70s until about 10 years ago, it was generally accepted that this was oppressive and a central driver of discrimination against women and gay people.

I'm not sure why society has apparently gone into reverse gear.

Perhaps greater tolerance of difference has conversely led to greater anxiety around gender non-conformity.

If gender is a performative construct, you’d be performing the male gender.

The thing that always strikes me about this specific part of the debate, is that you’re all seemingly intelligent people. You know what gender is; or certainly what other people believe it to be. So when people start with the “but what is gender, how do we know which someone is, is it not just stereotyping” - you know the answer, you’ve read the research and studied the articles.