"We have always been here"

[DiamondThrone]

Been noticing this a lot. It seems to be the new #TWAW #nodebate #bekind, after those didn't work.

I mean - lots of things have "always been here". Like women, for instance 😄

Just interested in new terms that arise, and how they are used to try and shut down comment.

D)

I agree with all my fellow biologists here (not as famous as any of the others).

@FeistyCat, that is a stunning collection of biologists! I think I might print those up and paper a wall with them.

E)

You’re famous here!!

Aaaaw, thank you :)

You claim we are 'mean' because we correct your ignorance and misinformation. Everything you have said is wrong. That 'study' about brain differences in trans has been DEBUNKED.

It ha been factchecked by ourselves AND by actual Biologists and the 'study' has been debunked as pseudoscience. It is NOT a 'fact' that there is any biological basis, and if there was any biological basis, trans people would use it as evidence.

You've come on here with ignorance, junk science and misinformation, you have been corrected by those who have the facts, knowledge and research. Take it with good grace and admit you really don't know anything about this issue, and endeavour to do better in future. It's not good to embarrass yourself on here when it's a topic you clearly don't know anything about.

Those with Swyer syndrome have XY chromosomes.

I was ridiculed for saying this earlier, but nature truly is mysterious and surprising.

While that might be true it doesn't mean you can make stuff up.

What are you referring to?

The TRAs trying to erase Stormé DeLarverie and rewrite the history of the Stonewall riots.

Sex is binary. We all have a sex.

Within cultures there are general expectations around presentation within that binary.

Some people conform to those, some don't. They are VERY culturally-specific. At the moment the fashions and mores of the 'cultural west' are dominant, but millions of people worldwide live in cultures that do not conform to them. Simple example - tell a European that your friend Dean is a farmer, they'll assume Dean is a man. Tell an African your friend Dean is a farmer, they'll assume Dean is a woman.

Strip out globalism and colonialism, add a time scale of millennia, add ever improving scientific methods for determining skeletal sex, and you'll see why archaeologists have been scrambling in recent decades to undo the culturally-specific assumptions their predecessors brought to interpreting the past. That isn't about 'gender', it's about a failure to understand diversity

Read some 20th century fiction (not SF or fantasy, anything else) and observe how gender does not feature. Because it has never existed, and until very recently nobody pretended it did.

It's oul' codology.

SmugglersHaunt · Yesterday 14:37
They haven’t though - or if they have it’s been in tiny numbers. It’s the same as them trying at appropriate the Stonewall riots etc. - it’s a load of bollocks

Bobbymoore123 · Today 09:27
What are you referring to?

SmugglersHaunt and CassOle are referring to the re-writing of history by TRAs
in an effort to 'prove' 'we have always been here' e.g. by 'transing' gender-non-conforming people, or gay people, from the past. There have been many examples from museums, art galleries etc, where someone from the past who didn't fit in with current gender stereotypes has been either non-binaried or transed.

Significant moments in lesbian and gay history have been hijacked - the Stonewall Bar riots in New York in 1969 took place years before the term 'transgender' even existed, and involved gay men and lesbians. Some of the gay men were drag artistes and referred to themselves as 'sissies' - but they were clear that they were men, at the Stonewall to mix with other men.

Legend has it that it was a lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, who started the reaction to the police raid - maybe yes, may no, but it was definitely a lesbian or a gay man; it sure as heck wasn't a trans person as transgenderism hadn't been invented in 1969.

The trans movement rewrote this, and declared that the riots were led by trans people; the Stonewall Bar itself was co-opted as a sort of LBGTQ+++ shrine was festooned with 'Progress' flags. It has since been restored to the historically accurate site of a key moment in the campaign for lesbian and gay rights.

Here in Ireland, the organisers of Dublin Pride 2023 altered a photograph of a 1983 protest by gay men and lesbians in response to a homophobic murder in Dublin - probably the first lesbian and gay demonstration in Ireland.

They cropped out sign that said 'LESBIANS ARE ON THE MARCH' and photoshopped in a placard saying 'TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS'.

Clearly, nothing is sacred, not even the death of a young gay man, nor the fact that his murderers walked free, nor the great and lasting distress of his family.

The shamelessness of altering the photographic record of an historical march in memory of a murdered gay man to attempt to prove that 'we have always been here' was so despicable that even the very pro-trans media picked up on it, and the Pride organisers issued some kind of non-apology which amounted to 'it was so badly photo-shopped that it was obviously not a trans rights placard in 1983'🙄

The 'we have always been here' strategy involves the falsification of history as well as the rewriting of biology.

I think trans has existed for a long time, but that doesnt prove that its innate.

The definition of what makes someone trans is only what can be achieve. So its clothes and behaviour and perhaps surgery and a certificate. It isn’t whether someone is of the sex to become pregnant or impregnate because that is unachievable. Therefore trans cannot be anything to do with sex, and DSD. DSD is used because the TRA is confused, or wants to confuse the argument.

They cropped out sign that said 'LESBIANS ARE ON THE MARCH' and photoshopped in a placard saying 'TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS'.

That just broke my fucking heart.

I've given you evidence - have you not read it?

TRAs frequently claim that the Stonewall riots were started by Marsha P. Johnson. Not only was he a self-described drag queen (not ‘trans’), he wasn’t even there till at least the next day.

O I haven't seen an update statement from the BMA - can you post a link to it please?

I didn't say there was an "updated statement". And what is with you writing 'O' for Oh?

Going back to the DSD topic and "sex is a spectrum"...

I think, as I often do, the Genderists do have the core of something here but in their need to delegitimise a person's physical sex being a factor of any significance they fail to properly connect the dots and end up drawing a teapot when the actual picture was a helicopter.

Scientifically speaking, human sex is binary. We have DSDs where the blueprint misfired, almost always clearly a misfiring within one sex path or the other, perhaps within the 117 billion or so humans that have ever lived a handful that could be genuinely considered classifiable as neither, but we do not have permanent, structurally separate sex classes beyond the two.

But socially speaking, there is no reason we have to just recognise two types of human sex. Langauge, society and concepts are all human inventions. We did, and without implying any value judgement here, make them up. So we could imagine a society that decided certain DSDs made people a different type of human rather than a subset of their biological sex, just as we could decide that, oh I don't know, humans with red hair had a special name and social grouping, or in the past some societies considered certain mental illnesses to be divine and the people who had them had a specific social status.

So to that degree, I think the "sex is binary" and "sex is a spectrum" people are kind of talking past each other. One is speaking of the pure scientific fact, while the other is speaking of how we treat that scientific fact socially even if they don't realise that is what they are doing.

However society cannot create social structures that change scientific facts, at least not for very long, because if the social structure contradicts reality, reality will poke through and have to be dealt with. So stable social structures have to work within possibilties that are available from reality.

Which is why I think the "But DSDs" people are missing the point even though I also accept that social structures do not have to map 1 to 1 with scientific reality (crudely, that there is space for us to make things up) as long as they do not contradict reality.

Regardless of whether "But DSDs" is a valid argument to add recognition and provisions for new social sexes based around DSDs(1), or height, or hair colour or even trans identities if you want, still roughly 50% of humanity are simply female and deal with with physical and social consequences of that every day, and the existence of DSDs is not a reason to remove that social recognition of the female sex, nor that female people should not be recognised in law and language based on their sex, nor not be entitled to female-only supports where needed, nor be prevented from speaking about, researching and activism around female-specific challenges and experiences and naming them as such.

(1) Important to note this suggestion is offensive and hurtful to many people with DSDs. I bring it up here only to follow the logic behind the "But DSDs" thinking not as something I am proposing would be a good thing

@suggestionsplease1

Presumably, regardless of whether society decides to see people with (certain) DSDs as their true biological sex or creates additional labels, you would not disgaree that the vast majority of humans are simply the sex they appear to be at birth.

Why then is it so important to you that women (in the original sense of female people) should not be allowed their own sex-specific rights, spaces and protections, not even allowed the language to speak of how being female impacts their lives for good or bad? Why is it that you will only accept trans women being respected and protected if it also takes rights, protections and language away from women?

@FlirtsWithRhinos:

Why is it that you will only accept trans women being respected and protected if it also takes rights, protections and language away from women?

I would hazard a guess that it’s because @springbirdss doesn’t think that including transwomen in the category women does take any rights away from women.

Presumably she has never had any problem (or experience?) sharing intimate spaces with TW, and doesn’t have the kindness capacity to imagine that other women may have problems sharing intimate spaces with TW. The “well I’ve never been beaten by my husband, so I find it hard to believe that anyone else might be beaten by their husband,” argument.

Or perhaps she is unaware of the mounting statistics that show that TW, whether they medicalise or not, retain male patterns of criminality, including male patterns of VAWG (and in fact, of those in prison, a larger percentage of TW are there for rape or sexual assault than are non-trans-men). And so she assumes, as many do, that when we say we don’t want them in our spaces, and we don’t want their crimes counted as “women’s” crimes, it’s because we are prejudiced against their transness, rather than because they are men, who provide the same threat to women as any man. (We also just want our own spaces, but let’s not even get into that.)

Or because she believes in fairies. Maybe it’s that one.

I think female to male identifying trans people are insisting on access to those spaces as much as anyone.
Though any violence and aggression at all is too much, you realise that the percentage of male to female identifying trans people showing this aggression and violence is minuscule?

How many women threatened or hurt by violent TW is your cut off? How many would be too many? Is 1 ok? 50?

How do we know? There seems to be plenty of representation of it on SM.