A little piece of insight

[Tandora]

Into a topic so woefully misunderstood.

But nothing you have said gives any reason or explanation for men who identify as women being ‘unable’ to use the mens or a unisex space. They just don’t want to.

Women who identify as men are regularly quite happy to use a unisex space or the women’s. Why?

Explain the asymmetry.

Thing is, @Tandora, I do understand what it is to be trans. You, on the other hand, don't. (I've read your posts; I assume you're not dissembling.)

There's probably several reasons for this. (Some metaphysical errors, some sociological, some psychological ... and so on. Likely something personal as well.)

Since I understand what it is to be trans, I understand too that trans women are men, and why they should keep out of women's spaces and so on ... Oh, and I understand why some of them don't want to.

Tough, but there you go.

I'm also fairly clear that you, @Tandora, for various reasons, don't want to understand what it is to be trans. Very little any of us can do about that, unless it's to quote Oliver Cromwell about "bowels of Christ" or similar.

14 pages and as ever no answer to any questions posed. Even if we ignore the obvious stuff about biology, logic and language - there are 2 sexes, 'girls' can't have a penis - still nothing on the question of why these males have to have female rights. We live in a (kind of) democracy. Go off and fight your little socks off for 3rd spaces. 3rd, very special places where the vulnerable males can be away from the terrible terfs. I'm sure many women will support that fight. If only to get a break from the demanding whining of these special men.

Yes they can. They just don't want to.

And trans women simply cannot understand what it's like to be a woman. Neither can I know what it's like to be a different woman from the one I am (say, Taylor Swift, or Jane Goodall, or an Afghani woman trapped and silenced in her house), beyond our shared body types and some shared experiences that arise from the way society, and men, treat our bodies.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again. There is nothing at all that women share with trans-identifying males, that we don't also share with other men.

Women who identify as men are regularly quite happy to use a unisex space or the women’s. Why?
Explain the asymmetry.
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Easy, it’s because they don’t have male entitlement.

Why? What is stopping these men using male facilities? Or unisex facilities? They have two options.

OP, I don't really understand your analogies. If a child had stomach pain, I would want them to have treatment to take the pain away so that they could be the pain-free child they were before. If a child had schizophrenia-induced voices telling them things that weren't true, I would want (probably a lost-cause want, but I'd still want it) for there to be a cure in which the voices didn't exist any longer to dominate their life so they could be back to being the child they were before.

I think (but can't say for sure) that if a child of mine said they were trans, that I'd hope to help them find a way through the pain and confusion that would allow them to accept, love and respect the body they were born into and the sex they were born with, and if they had same sex attraction to fully accept that as part of who they naturally are. I do find it hard to accept that someone can only be their 'true self' by mimicking a gendered version of something they cannot and will never be, no matter how much surgery they have or hormones they swallow. To me that seems like the opposite of self-acceptance. And like the schizoid voices which seem real but aren't, I'd challenge the inner voice that claims the child can be the opposite sex when that is not physically possible.

But I have several friends who are parents of trans children and none of them think as I do. One mother (not a friend - we never actually met - but the mother of a trans friend of DS) reacted exactly as I thought I would She was very supportive of masculine clothes and haircut, gently discussed how women could be anything they wanted to be, no need to be feminine or people pleasing, no need to have children - fine to adopt any behaviour that is traditionally ascribed to male gender but said that it is impossible to biologically change sex and was honest about how upsetting it was to be bullied into pretending the daughter she had loved and raised for almost two decades had never existed. The relationship between the mother and her transman daughter is now extremely strained.

I tend to believe that no one should take advice from someone who hasn't been in their situation, so I don't really have a clue how I'd actually react if DSs told me they believed they were actually women. But I felt for that mother, and I do privately worry that my friends who have been incredibly loving and supportive of their daughters transitioning might have problems later if they change their minds.

Exactly what women want.

Which is why men need to stay out of their private spaces.

I guess this thread is just another one to shame women who disagree that any male person can be female. I cannot see any other reason unless the writer is Tandora and the idea was to raise a public profile.

What is hilarious, is that one other threads we have a person telling us through similar belittling, mocking and sometimes crossing over to abusive tactics that male people are indeed women due to their stereotyped behaviours.

Who are we to believe? The person with an educational qualification in the topic or the person who seems more likely to be living the experience that the other person describes. Both ‘educating’ us with polar opposite opinions.

Both keen to extend any opportunity to shame and belittle and deride the women who reject that any male person can be a woman.

It is almost like it is all is based on shifting sands of philosophical theory, identity theory, and that is all.

It will never cease to amaze me just how self righteous people are capable of being when they assume other people have based their views on “narrow assumptions and experience”.

I’m an autistic woman who was very much “TWAW”, who went through a period of believing myself to be NB. I was a ‘tomboy’ as a child and teenager, struggled to get on with other girls, and remember wishing I’d been born a boy because it seemed like it would have been so much more natural for me. If I had been born later, and was a young teen now, I am certain I would have believed I was trans, and this belief would have been affirmed by people like you.

As a young adult, how I dressed (men’s clothes to hide my body) didn’t stop me from being sexually assaulted, twice. Later, my futile attempt to police the language of others didn’t stop me from reading as female and being treated as such - even when people were being dutifully “respectful” with their language. I wanted a breast reduction, or to have them gone…but it wasn’t gender dysphoria; it was desire to avoid the objectifying male gaze and an attempt to opt out of gender stereotypes which felt reductive, oppressive, and restrictive. I didn’t need to change my pronouns; I needed mental health support, trauma counselling, and a better understanding of feminism, to help me feel comfortable with my body and with who I am.

I am still wary of being in isolated environments with men I don’t know, and I’m grateful for single sex (not single gender) spaces, because I am painfully aware of what male bodies can do to female bodies. I’m not GC because of a narrow worldview or lack of experience. I am GC precisely because of personal experience that showed me that this kind of manipulative bullshit can be unhelpful at best, harmful at worst. Kids going through the same issues I was need support to feel comfortable with themselves, not blind affirmation that entrenches the distressing beliefs and makes them their ‘identity’. And women need single sex spaces.

I wonder if you could drop your assumptions, or open up that narrow worldview, for long enough to realise that I am not, by far, the only GC woman with beliefs based on experience like this.

No, this is what we know after doing the thing that trans activists keep demanding we do - we listened to trans people.

We’ve heard the men breathlessly announcing their ‘validation’ as they’ve suddenly become bad at parking, or prone to being teary. We’ve listened as they described their ‘periods’ and imagined PMT.

We’ve seen them prancing around in fishnets, stilettos and outfits that show their testicles. One guy rocked up at A&E in an utterly indecent Ann Summers outfit to visit his friend in hospital.

It’s strange how you are such an advocate, yet don’t listen to the voices of trans people yourself and seem to have little understanding of so many of them.

It's just lecture lecture lecture from Tan.
Lecture after bloody patronising lecture
And if you're not trans Tan; how the heck do you know what it's like to be trans??
I'd love to know
Actually dont bother

Well one thing this thread has done is brought new user names to these threads. With new experiences to be heard and considered. Just not the experience that the OP believed we should treat as a profound insight.

@Tandora you'd like children to love their wholeselves wouldn't you, who they are is enough?
They don't need to change to be fixed, just mental help support to find out why they reject who they are.
That way they can lead full and happy lives, without medicalisation, sterility, or inability to climax.
You can't want children damaged can you?

Tandora is also an arbiter of who is and is not a person with a transgender identity. Over and over again Tandora has told us who is and isn’t transgender based on their criteria.

It is very educational when you see who does and doesn’t qualify.

As uncomfortable as this is for the person experiencing it, what is being asked for is not compassion, but millitant acceptance. No group who have experienced a human rights violation (women, same-sex attracted persons and races) have asked for millitant compliance just for equity in the law. You cannot create a law that requires other people to deny reality.

Trans-gender is an identity formed on a social construct, not on biological reality. Even if there are "structures in the brain that confirms that the brain aligns with sex opposite to that of the body" it is the sex of the body that takes precident as that is where the risk comes from that other people interact with.

If a woman has hirustim (male pattern body hair) she is not a male- becuse she still retains strength within the normal range for her sex. If a male has breast cancer, he is not a female etc... So if a male acts in a way that is considered more socially aligned with the that of females, it does not make him female, but his body and strength and increased probablitily of violence towards females are the risks that need to be managed.

I don't care how sad the transwoman is, he still ain't welcome in women's single sex spaces.

We don't believe that transwomen are women, because that's laughable, isn't it - the one requirement to be transwoman is that you are male.

All the heartstrings-tugging won't change this fact.

I guess we've all woefully misunderstood the topic

We thought it was about women and girls

But Tandora you haven't explained what being trans is. All you've done is played the old TRA game of "Not that" when anyone else tries suggest an definition, any definition at all, that appears to fit the random claims you are making that feeling very wrong in the sex you actually are is somehow interchangeable with being the sex you are not, or that a characteristic of the mind somehow overrides the reality and consequences of differences of the body for both the trans person and for others.

You have made all sort of hand wringing emotional claims on behalf of trans people, and roundly insulted everyone who doesn't accept your argument of "they just are, alright" as closed minded and uneducated (which frankly would be hilarious to anyone who'd ever met me), and yet never once explained exactly why this thing makes the differences of sex and the social consequences of those differences, facts that are entirely and unproblematically accepted as real in all other circumstances, suddenly inconsequential and irrelevant in the face of a trans person's mental self image.

So I'll ask you again.

What is "being trans" Tandora?

Is it being one sex but with a deep and aching wish you were the other sex, maybe like a blind person has a deep and aching wish to see, or a lonely little girl has a deep and aching wish that she had been born as one of the popular kids instead?

Or is it actually being, in an innate mental way, in ways we don't yet understand, the other sex, implying that sex is not in fact a descriptor of the body but of the mind?

Because take away the emotional manipulation and neither definition actually justifies the demands being made of women in its name.

Neither definition changes the fact that people with female bodies do exist and do face social and physical consequences because of those bodies, and neither a man's deep feeling that he should have had a female body, nor a man's deep feeling that women don't need to have a female body, changes the embodied experiences and needs and self knowledge of the people who actually have a female body one iota.

Because these are things that are entirely to do with the experiences of women, and so no experience or feeling, no matter how genuine, of a man is relevant to them.

And regardless of which definition you go for, in fact regardless of any definition you go for that places more weight on a man's idea of himself as a woman than the embodied fact of female existence, outside his own mind he is simply not relevant to who women in the original female sense are and what women in the original female sense need at all.

No definition of woman that is stretched to include male people is more relevant to the needs and experiences and reality of female people than the simple old fashioned sex based definition and there is sinply no way round that.

When I was six I cried because my mum told me I couldn't marry my grandpa.

Its actually you and your friends who are misunderstanding @Tandora.

I'm glad you pasted this ill-thought-through image here though because I have seen it numerous times on Facebook and I don't engage with idiocy there.

Say that there is symptom X is exhibited in a child, and previous data shows that 95% of the time it is not serious, and will resolve without specialist treatment given time, but 5% of the time it is part of a bigger and more complex issue Y that requires help.

There is a vocal pressure group of adults who have issue Y that was not detected when they were young. They feel they were damaged by this, and yes maybe they were. But they are calling for EVERY child who has symptom X to be treated as if they definitely have issue Y, so as to be certain that no cases are missed.

Surely you can see that this should only be the right decision if the treatment/help is absolutely proven to be harmless and will have zero effect on the 95% who do not have issue Y.

In the case of gender-nonconforming behaviour, and even claiming to be something they are not (a dog/a dinosaur/a robot/a member of the opposite sex) among children, it has been shown quite the opposite. Assuming that such a child "is" trans does immense damage. Puberty blockers do damage. Cross sex hormones do damage. Social teansitioning without drugs does damage. Gender-nonconforming behaviour among children is not even a problem or symptom to be resolved - there is no problem with any child or adult making the free choice to be gender-nonconforming.

Most of the kids identifying as trans do not have the level of anguish described in this image. Most of them, if supported to accept their bodies as they are and live their life proud and happy to reject the sexist stereotypes that society tried to force on them, will reach adulthood safe and well without having needed to have the damage that is caused by long term use of hormone disrupting drugs. Yes there should be research to find out better how to identify as early as possible the few who might not, but not at the cost of the wellbeing of the many who would be damaged by and never needed that intervention. The propaganda machine that churns out the TRA narrative like this image makes that research much more difficult, it will take a long time before there's enough reliable background level of sanity that it's even possible.

Bwaaa haa haa 😂! Did OP actually fall for that very obvious rage bait? Like, you do know that when a child is hearing voices we don't tell them the voices are real? And, you do know that that image was obviously posted where is would generate a massive amount of comments pointing that very obvious fact out? Like, you do know that, right? Oh you poor, poor man.

Of course they can. And some of them do - and post about it on Twix to say it's not a problem. So there's that...

Its sacred caste time again. You wouldn't understand unless you're part of the sacred caste. If you were you'd understand. But you aren't are you?