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?

Or for the purposes of identifying unlawful discrimination.

Ladybrains, Heggettypeg, the world needs to be reorganised around ladybrains and gentlemanbrains. Or possibly around those who wear dress and makeup, and so are at risk in a male toilet, and those who don't, and should use the men's. (That would be me, then.)

Says the person who tried to out authority everyone else by saying they had a degree in gender studies.

I'm an adult male human, and I can assure you that I don't think that means that I am reduced to the sum of my body parts. That's just the factual definition of a man. I am adult (even if I don't always behave like it); I am human (even if I don't always behave like it); and I am male (even if I sometimes behave as if, according to stereotypes of masculinity/femininity, I haven't a clue how I'm supposed to behave).

So what is the problem with a factual definition of woman and man? And how does our behaviour affect which we are?

You need to debate the things posters have actually written, not some other thing you claim they’ve said when they haven’t.

Exam technique basics.

Read the question properly and then question you've been asked not the one you've assume you've been asked.

‘If we are victims (which we’re not always), it’s not your uterus doing it, it’s society and the expectations within it.’

You’re so nearly there, but you just can’t grasp it can you? Who created ‘society’, who is (still) largely in charge of it? I’ll give you a clue, it isn’t women. Why did they think they could have so much control within that society? Because of the biological differences between men and women. If we didn’t choose to comply they used physical force to make us.

In some ways I suppose feminism has done its job if you feel that your place in the world is free of the restrictions placed on us ordinary women, that you are so superior to the rest of your sex, what with your gender studies degree and all, that the trifling, everyday sexism and unfairness that we ordinary women deal with is unknown to you, because obviously you are simply better at womaning than the rest of us. There’s another group of individuals that also hold the view that they are better women than we are, can you guess who it is?

‘What use talking about already won battles has on the here and now is always beyond me.’

I think there’s more than that that’s beyond you. If it wasn’t for those ‘already won battles’ you wouldn’t be on here, or anywhere else, having the freedom to talk about anything, because you’d be bare foot and pregnant for the umpteenth time and stuck in the bloody kitchen. If you are uninterested in how we got here, you will never fully appreciate the rights you now so blithely take for granted.

’Ifyou don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday then any leader can tell you anything.”
Howard Zinn, American historian (1924-2010

Substitute ‘leader’ for man.

Why didn’t you say that right from the start? Because if we’d known that we would have instantly capitulated to ‘the poster with 3 degrees, one from RG’ and hushed our mouths. 🤐

I’ve got four degrees and they’re all from Oxbridge. Na na na na to everyone else 😆

Only two RG and only one of those from Oxbridge. I feel chastened.

I don’t know why you’re all so fixated on the degree matter. I mentioned it literally because it at least evidenced that I had actually looked into what I was saying, and wasn’t just blindly posting. Like I said, different books.

Some of them likely the same, actually. I have been bored to death by Greer, I have read my Friedan, looked at the Beauty Myth, struggled to work out why Butler had to write in unnecessary convoluted ways. I’ve read it all, and formed this view.

I said it, because so many of you resort to “read a book.” I’ve read some of them, thank you. Enough of them.

In my exact personal life, the sexism is so covert I’m not seeing it. My world is not ran by men, and I am not beholden to them. By no means do I think that’s the case everywhere for everyone.

I am critical of the way gender ideologies oppress women, and I do believe that they’re naturally prejudiced to do so. But to say you don’t have a gender ID is IMO to say you’re not affected by that, at all, and you are. You cannot not be.

As someone said to me, unless you were never given a doll or pink clothes, never taught to cook, you do have a gender ID because you haven’t escaped the outcomes of them.

I don't have any degrees. So I guess I'm not qualified to post any more. Oh well.

And similarly, I really don't want to be seen as a dick!

It is being human that defines us most profoundly, and we all know what "the human condition" means to us. I'll leave it to women to express how having a female body tends, very strongly, to affect women's lives. Categories, including animal, vertebrate, mammal, human and whichever sex we are, necessarily constrain and enable what we can and cannot do. I had thought that societal expectations no longer ruled our behaviour based on "gender", but then along came a reversion or regression to the idea that a woman has to be feminine, and that a man has to be masculine, and the converse that a masculine woman is really a man and should make herself as like a man as she can, and a feminine man is really a woman and should make himself as like a woman as he can. But these attempts are futile, and no-one who knows these trans people is actually fooled.

I don’t either practising 😀😀

We’re not “fixated” on the degree matter. We’re making light fun of it. Very different! 😆

And why were you bored by Germaine? She’s a brilliantly funny, acerbic writer. As far from Butler as could possibly be.

As someone said to me, unless you were never given a doll or pink clothes, never taught to cook, you do have a gender ID because you haven’t escaped the outcomes of them.

How can you know what's inside my head?

You've just described the effects of gender in society. Not at all the same as having a gender ID.

As someone said to me, unless you were never given a doll or pink clothes, never taught to cook, you do have a gender ID because you haven’t escaped the outcomes of them.

You realise that this sort of bullshit is precisely what real feminists (such as Germaine Greer) have been fighting to liberate women FROM, right?

Or maybe you would realise that if you hadn't skipped the Germaine Greer parts of your "gender studies" degree.

As someone said to me, unless you were never given a doll or pink clothes, never taught to cook, you do have a gender ID because you haven’t escaped the outcomes of them.

Both my DC were given dolls and pink clothes. They can also cook. DC1 made dinner tonight. What's their gender ID please?

Edit to add about cooking

My dad can cook and my mum can't. (Literally, cannot. Could not, if her life depended on it.)

My mum's C-section scar says she's the one who gave birth to me though.

Are you sure it's a c-section scar? Maybe It's just identifying as a c-section scar
If your dad cooks he's probably actually your mum.

True facts. Based on my imaginary degree.

This Greer? Hilarious, yeah.

"If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that."

So is "man" reductive because it means "adult human male" and it's just a human with a specific set of parts and nothing else?

It's more reductive to categorise people into a gender because of how they feel and behave, what interests they have, what they want to do in life, what they like to wear, who they love and so on.

When you do that, it's no wonder some people begin to believe they are the "wrong" gender and/or sex, because we've given them a checklist of things to be the gender that "matches" their sex and they can't tick anything off.

You identify as having a degree. That's legitimate. Did you go to a RG imaginary university? Did you wear blue or pink when you graduated?

I think this has been standard Mumsnet parenting protocol since its inception over 20 years ago.

Although I think there were women arguing that feminism had gone too far back then too.

Yeah

you found it boring….