Do you support transitioning at all?

[UnlockedXCX]

I somewhat do, I will admit. I think it's okay if an adult wants to take hormones, dress as they'd like to, be treated as M or F, or even change their name. I'll respect it all. However I don't agree with them being allowed into single sex spaces or conversations (a gay trans person is functionally a straight person, despite what they say, and a gay FtM shouldn't try to date gay guys for example).

I question if this is a common view or is it niche in these more gender critical spaces.

I’ve said on other threads that I believe we need to separate sex and gender. The best way is to add definitions to the EA2010 and add or change the gender reassignment pc. For example gender and gender reassignment,

Sex is M or F as observed and recorded at birth. Everyone has a sex.

Gender is a belief and not everyone has a gender.

Clearly separating the two makes the law clear and helps employers, service providers etc. protect sex based rights.

The Scottish Government has accepted that 25 is the age humans become fully adult. Their sentencing guidelines are based on this and is why a 21 year old rapist was not given a prison sentence.

I believe an adult who is 25 or older, should be able to consent to medical treatment and/or surgery. However, safeguards need to be put in place to ensure that they have received appropriate counselling first.

I also believe the 25 age limit should also apply to women wanting hysterectomies or other surgeries due to endometriosis and similar medical conditions. At the moment many are refused surgery for years if not a decade + when, if they said they were trans, they would be operated on. This is a double standard.

There have always been people with gender dysphoria/incongruence and that is not going to change. Baroness Cass’s report is clear that whilst many children desist as they age there are some who persist into adulthood.

I know many on here advocate a blanket no, but I think there is a point when you have to let adults choose, By separating sex and gender you protect sex based rights whilst treating people with gender dysphoria/incongruence with dignity and respect.

Obviously you also have the people who have Malaga Airport and I think a lot more research is needed to understand the clinical basis for any interventions.

No, it's retrograde nonsense posing as piety.

If an adult wants to dress in a certain way and have surgery that is their business.

I think they should have to pay for the surgery though - a no to that on the nhs !

I do not agree that any of the above makes this person the opposite sex and they should be treated as their birth sex in terms of hospitals, toilets prisons etc.

In the the pub ? Fine.

Dave wants me to call him Sheila that’s fine. I would even use she to be polite if requested.

I support people to live their lives, dressing as they wish and challenging as many gender stereotypes as suits them.

I support those people being protected from violence, aggression or insult for their clothing/make up choices in the same way I support women's choices to wear whatever they want to wear.

I don't support botox, cosmetic surgery or other medications that harm a healthy human body - I want people to learn to love the bodies they have and would like people to be supported mentally to do this.

I will never support individuals who coerce and bully others into changing their speech or pretending that something is other than it is.

I will never support individuals harming children into damaging their bodies failing to support mental health problems by lying to them.

Yes, in general this does help individuals with gender disphoria.

No.

Its very damaging to all involved - the person "transitioning", their family, their friends, any other people they encounter.

Its abusive and shouldnt be enabled.

I don't because there's no such thing, you can't become the opposite sex. By all means wear what you like, call yourself what you like, conform or don't conform to gender stereotypes as takes your fancy. But actually going along with the pretence that you're the opposite sex isn't happening. In the same way I wouldn't go along with and agree with an anorexic saying they were fat.

Maybe you should re-phrase your question as "are people supportive of a person's right to experiment with their presenttaion and self expression" to which the answer would obviously be " of course - within the bounds of public decency and legality".

Nobody can change sex though......and so the concept of 'transitioning' only really exists inside the head of the person who imagines it. We all imagine things about ourselves all of the time. It is part of human nature.

But it is an imaginal process only - that may be accompanied presentation changes......but that is it.

Adults should have a right to make their own choices about their bodies. I’d add a caveat that they should be proven to be mentally sound and not making an irreversible decision when they’re not in a position to fully understand what they’re choosing and the consequences. I’d apply this to any and all cosmetic surgery and permanent procedures.

Beyond that no one is obliged to treat them as their chosen presentation.

Everyone has rights to not be discriminated against, but in recent years it’s become clear that trans people, particularly those born male, seem to get away with really poor behaviour, and that’s not ok.

No child should have any education about transitioning, or at least no education that doubles as grooming them into a fantasy ideology. More care should also be taken to hugely limit children’s access to the full scope of the internet, particularly those identified as vulnerable to grooming.

Malaga Airport? Is that some kind of code?

@tobee Malaga Airport code is AGP. Those of us who have been around a long time use it as posts with AGP or the full word often get deleted.

Is there any evidence for this?

I haven’t really searched loads for this, but what I have found is that there’s a real “because I said so” take on providing evidence, which isn’t good enough. I’m also not sure drs making megabucks from gender healthcare should have any say in the matter unless there is peer reviewed evidence.

For adults 25 or over, as a last resort to combat gender dysphoria after at least 2 years of therapy. And not the bs affirming kind but real therapy looking at potential causes for the dysphoria and addressing them. No one is born in the wrong body, it is a form of mental illness. There are plenty of trans people like buck angel who are in agreement with this statement. But for a rare few people, transitioning is the best option to help alleviate what they are going through.

There should be no stigma in mental illness. It's not shameful, it's human. But there should be shame in acting like it's normal and healthy and promoting body mutualtion as the fix instead of helping people recover.

Wear what you want. Have whatever name you want. Be an Alice in a dress and mascara.

But I’ll never pretend a man with a penis is a woman. It’s impossible. I’ll be kind as far as pandering, but no people who were born with penises are woman, even if they’ve had cosmetic surgery to make a poor impersonation of a vagina.

Yes it's like the other analogy with self harm which was/is quite prevalent and sometimes called a social contagion. We wouldn't advocate handing someone intent a self harm a razor.

People say it's not the same. But is it?

There's also the suggestion pushed that there's always been loads of trans people through history, and we just weren't aware. To counter the social contagion and other less tasteful reasons why people want to transition argument (fetishism and male rights movement). But that's just a re writing of history to blur things. Similar to highlighting inter sex and toilets for headlines.

Cheers! Presumably not so likely to be deleted nowadays!

Completely, me. One of my old mates is a woman now and much happier. She was a gay bloke beforehand.

I don’t support men’s rights activists who
hijacked the trans movement the way paedophiles piggybacked on gay rights in the 70s and 80s. Or liars.

How can we tell the difference?

Such an interesting question because there are multiple answers depending on context aren't there. I think young people should be free to experiment and not have too many fixed ideas - but this current incarnation of gender identity is too constrictive and not light hearted enough. It also seems really sexist and many attitudes seem more at home in the 1970s weirdly. So for a child and even someone under 25 I would say absolutely not. Do I support "transitioning" in general for adults? Well in principle I am not bothered and think "whatever floats your boat". But then if you define it as transitioning = hormones plus surgery then it gets more difficult. It is easy to #bekind and liberal when it is a hypothetical question that won't impact on my friends or family isn't it? But I see it as extreme cosmetic surgery which comes with long term health risks and a narrowed dating pool. And then there is the general assumption that the surgery is binary and will mimic the opposite sex. But increasingly that is not the case - the "non binary surgeries" offered in London private clinics are too much. Those cross the line to mutilation for me because they are too science fiction and not enough real life. I couldn't ever support anything like a Phallus-Preserving Vaginoplasty or the Genital nullification, Nullo, or Eunuch stuff. No way. But any surgery is potentially high risk when it comes to looking for a happy life is it? I have lived long enough to know that when I said to myself "I'll be happy when X happens" - that was usually about some trivial thing that didn't work out so well, so no idea how I would feel if I regretted surgical alterations. And that also assumes nothing iatrogenic because the failure rates listed out by Ritchie Herron recently were hideously high. So no - for a close friend or family member I couldn't be 100% affirming (and maybe actually much less than 50% affirming) because I care for them. And that is in the same way I would probably object to a radical facial piercing or any cosmetic surgery TBH because apparently I'm old fashioned and think people are lovely the way they are! Sorry for the stream of conciousness

I don't think it should be on the NHS. Cosmetic surgery on the NHS should limit itself to people who don't like their bodies because they are outside the norm (burns, birthmarks, post surgical) rather than the subjective "dislike" and people making themselves look weirder.

I would be uncomfortable stopping men getting their Adams apples shaved and boobs put in whilst saying it's okay for woman to put in massive boobs or lips. The rules for all elective surgery should be the same and none treated as if it's a borderline holy process to be celebrated.

I think a peaceful middle ground is people identifying as transmen or transwomen, which they are, rather than men or women, that they are not. Without the dishonesty and boundary pushing it doesn't matter so much.

In principle, no.

In practice... well, with my few long term MtF friends, I don't see them as women, I see them as transwomen. And I worry about what they've done to their physical health for the sake of their mental health. But because I love them as people, I'm not going to be an arse about it.

I have two absolute lines in the sand:

Women's single sex spaces: hard no.
Transitioning children: hard no.

Other than that, if it's just a matter of what presentation makes you comfortable, and you're not a misogynist git, we're cool.

Changing your name and wearing a dress isn’t transitioning. It’s cosplaying which is harmless.

Taking hormones without medical oversight is dangerous and shouldn’t be supported. For obvious reasons it’s not studied and tested what happens never mind what happens if you stop taking them. Plus if people are buying these over the internet then there’s a possibility that they are causing themselves damage. Can someone who is say 18 really say that they are ok with taking medication that will affect their fertility never mind what will happen to the baby’s health if they conceived ? Hormones is very Russian roulette. I also do not support this angle because there were shortages of hormones for women who need it for HRT. That’s not ok in the slightest.

Being treated like a M or F.. A transwoman has privilege due to being born male. They won’t face the same challenges as women. While I agree that the challenges they face are from men, men face threats from other men too so transwomen muscling into womens spaces is not the answer.

No because there is no such thing. It's impossible. People can wear what they want though and carry on however they want so long as it isn't harming others but they can't tell me what to call them or let themselve into places for the opposite sex.

I feel it’s incredibly complex in some ways. Even if it does genuinely make some people feel better and they feel that physically damaging the body is more than made up for by the improvement in mental health, it’s still a treatment that creates a huge societal problem.

The reality is that sex doesn’t change and it pushes people who are already mentally unwell into a situation where they no longer easily fit into either of the societal categories we use most commonly to segregate people. It seems to have been done with decreasing consideration of that fact over time.

It’s also increasingly obvious that many men who transition (don’t hear so much from the women) transfer from wishing badly to be something they’re not, to a deep paranoia where they are constantly aware that people can see that they are not what they are pretending to be and that someone might say something that proves that. That creates enormous tension and makes them very volatile.

My feeling is that this is a mass medical and social experiment that is creating a huge schism in society. No medical treatment should require others to play along with something that patently isn’t true. There surely must be some kind of mental health help that is better than the current model which is so damaging to physical health. I suspect most “perceived improvement” is actually created by the feeling there’s a journey. When that wears off, what is left? A broken body and a mind that hasn’t been fixed because self-hate isn’t cured by changing the body.