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?

There’s plenty of reading on the subject available, if that would help?

I have absolutely no need for a gender studies reading list thanks, and you can’t back up your views with anything coherent, that’s the point. It’s just postmodern babble. You also don’t grasp what the difference is between a stereotype imposed on female people and a sexist man seeing that stereotype, liking it and thinking he should adopt it.

A definition doesn't have to cover your "complexity" it needs to cover the minimum requirements for something to belong to a group that sets it apart from other groups, for example, mammals:
1 produce milk to feed their young
2 have hair
3 give live birth
4 are warm blooded
5 breath air
If you have all of these characteristics you're a mammal and you can be a mammal in the shape of a bottle nosed dolphin or a Bactrian camel or a human, it doesn't matter which shape you take to belong to this group as long as you fit all of the above criteria.
If you're a mammal in the the species Homo sapiens who happens to produce eggs during the fertile period of your life, you're a woman and you can be that woman in any way you like (here's your complexity) or society allows you to be (which feminists tried hard to fight against), you do you. What can't be a woman is an adult human that produces sperm no matter how much he'd like to and how many of his society’s gender stereotypes he tries to emulate, or how much surgery he gets.

Thinking about this further: I think we're back to the old confusion between sex realism and sexism. There are not just two positions (sex matters, sex doesn't matter) but three:

Sexism (sex does and should govern everything): " Don't be silly, of course no woman could fly solo to the moon. They're not strong enough and too emotional, especially at the wrong time of the month."

Sex denialism (only gender matters): "Of course a woman - the right sort of woman - can fly to the moon. Being female is irrelevant." First day of voyage: "This rocket is a pig to fly." Five days into voyage: "Oh shit, I forgot to pack any tampons."

Sex realism (sex needs to be reckoned with in certain situations): "Yes a woman can fly solo to the moon if she plans properly." Packs tampons. And (since rocket was probably built by men for men) checks that all the controls and fittings can be operated by somebody of her size, weight and grip-strength and gets them adjusted if they can't.

Yet you still don’t seem able to explain why you think sex should be ignored.

Again, really can’t recommend Call tbe Midwife enough as a study of how women are structurally impacted by their sex.

As a related example, Parliament might be debating whether to decriminalise abortion, largely because of changes to abortion laws that were made necessary by Covid.

Regardless of your views on the rights and wrongs of decriminalisation, this was a change that happened because of external events, not a deliberate desire to discriminate against women, but no man will be sent to prison for having an abortion. Sex affects men and women in fundamentally different ways.

Quite.

Unfortunately identifying as not carrying out and enabling sexist views is not the same thing as actually not doing it. In rather the same way as identifying as binary biology not existing does not do much to disappear reality.

It shouldn’t be as important as many other factors, because IMO that makes it self limiting.

Just because some men minimise women to being a sum of their biological parts, doesn’t mean we have to do the same, and in essence agree with them that that’s what we are.

Are those who state that gender doesn’t matter sexist then, because they believe that only sex matters?

Just ask them what they want and how they'd like to be referred to. You might make a few errors with pronouns for a while but this makes no difference to your life..

You cannot possibly know that all trans women are sexist men, because you cannot know the motives of all people. What a broad assumption.

Gender isn’t an actual thing. It’s a social construct based on stereotypes of sex.

I'd love to see @SleeplessInWherever and the rest of her gender studies class explain their position to a woman locked up with a man in prison.

Would she agree, do you think, that this man's 'womanly feeling' is more important than his biologically male body and physiology?

I'd love to see how that conversation would go.

But sometimes biological sex is the important factor. When talking about menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. I want single sex toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards. I don't want to discuss the sexual abuse I've suffered at the hands of men in front of men.

My Muslim friends need single sex swimming session.

Is it important at book club? No. Are men welcome at the craft club I run? Of course!

I really don’t understand this.

Are you not reading the post?

It doesn’t matter whether you want sex to be limiting. If you are a woman and you live in a country where there is no access to contraception, you are limited.

Again, have you not come across the concept of indirect discrimination?

Similarly, women depend on maternity leave, but can also suffer discrimination because it is assumed that they might take maternity leave. Pretending sex doesn’t exist doesn't change this.

I agree that @SleeplessInWherever doesmt seem to be able to tell the difference between sexism and sex realism.

It’s my personal opinion, and has a lot of evidence to back it up. I didn’t even say they all were. I said that was something that is not the same as a stereotype imposed on a woman by society. Interesting that you knew exactly what I was referring to despite some other disingenuous posts you've made, though.

I should say, it’s not a thing independent of the concept of sex so I don’t have to respect the existence of sex stereotypes.

Because I believe that women can fly rockets, work in management positions, have 50/50 relationships and household dynamics (for example) and that all of that has absolutely nothing to do with their basic biology?

I've already got the Mr Men and Little Miss series of books in the house so I'm ahead of the game on that reading list.

Why is that definition of “woman” constraining?

It doesn’t constrain me, or any other biological woman. Doesn’t stop me wearing anything or doing anything.

🤣 quite. There is no doubt some legit research paper on gender in the Mr Man universe.

There are situations where it matters and others it doesn’t.

Those who reject trans people in all walks of life, aren’t following this ethos though are they.

OP’s in law for example is FTM, our spaces aren’t even relevant to this specific discussion, if anything she’d be leaving them. So what odds does it make to anyone here whether someone calls her a man or a woman. There is absolutely no risk attached to this specific post, yet still - the same old conversation.

Do you think we think those things are to do with biology? A complete non sequitur.

It depends whether they are sexists or merely sex realists. Sexists assume that sex comes (and should come) umbilically attached to a load of stereotypical gendered baggage about masculinity and femininity.
Sex realists recognise merely that sex is a physical reality which needs to be acknowledged and accommodated in certain situations. Various gendered baggage gets attached to sex by society, and internalised by individuals, or rejected by individuals, but it is not a unified stable entity called "gender".