A little piece of insight

[Tandora]

Into a topic so woefully misunderstood.

@Tandora any chance of an answer?

I am a left wing progressive person who used to believe in TWAW and be kind.

Part of the reason I am now dedicated to destroying TQ+ ideology entirely is because if people like you. People who try to justify TWAW / be kind do a combination of two things -

(1) Ignore at least 50% of the questions they are asked, which implies that they don't have answers.

(2) Answer so badly that it is 100% clear that they don't have answers.

You do realize that you are increasing the opposition to TQ+ ideology with every word you type (other than those words which have no effect because they are only read by people who are 100% certain they TQ+ is dangerous and evil and incoherent and couldn't become any more convinced)

To quote the song that my mate Claude AI and I wrote this morning:

Chorus:
You can’t just change the dictionary
‘Cause you think biology’s scary
When the law says “sex” it means what it meant
Not whatever’s convenient!
The judge said “Sorry, not today,
Words mean things, come what may!”

Bridge:
It’s like Humpty Dumpty on the wall
“Words mean what I say, that’s all!”
But the courts said “Nice try, but no,
That’s not how legislation goes”

Final Chorus:
You can’t just change the dictionary
Or rewrite legal history
When Parliament speaks, it says what it meant
You can’t just reinvent it!
For Women Scotland won the day
Words still mean things - hooray!

You are also reducing men to “penis havers”. Do we need to discuss why that’s not appropriate or correct? Dr Upton is not a penis-haver, he’s a man.

This is actually an obscene claim given the dispute - it actually made me laugh out loud.

It is you who is reducing 'being a man' to biological differences such as having a penis.

I reject this reductive perspective entirely.

To me Dr Upton is not "a man", she is a trans woman. I acknowledge Dr. Upton's experience of who she is; I believe her experience is real and valid and also grounded in biology. I also acknowledge her body is biologically different in some ways to mine because she is a trans woman and I am a cis woman. Your claim is that it's not possible to describe these bodily differences with language if we open up the words "biological woman" to apply to Dr Upton - I showed how it is very easy to describe these differences with language. For example, one of those difference is that Dr Upton was born with a penis, I was not.

Again - the dispute is about the need to be specific and precise in our language when we describe how bodies are different, it's not a dispute about whether those differences actually exist.

What part of Dr Upton’s biology makes them a “biological woman”?

Why does the sadness of a trans woman trump my trauma?

As a scientist, you should know that we need accurate words to describe things that share the same characteristics. So, what word are we going to use for actual adult human females of the XX kind? Because if you include men in the category, then the category becomes meaningless.

It's like saying my dog is a chair because it also has four legs, and my cat is also a dog because it has four legs, two eyes and a tail.

You can reject whatever you like and hold whatever beliefs you like, along with Upton. It’s a fringe belief that most people don’t share. You can tell me Paris is the capital of Spain, you can jump up and down about it as much as you want. You can believe everyone else is just wrong. But that’s not the case.

All valid points. I think the key thing for me here is that there‘s no perfect solution to this. And so if the choice is denying one or other group‘s professed needs in an absolutist No!, I’d rather try to thrash out some messy mitigation.

If the space isn’t available for this, I do think it’s preferable, if regrettable, for transpeople, as the minority, to find work-arounds themselves rather than seeking to change society wholesale at the expense of a majority of women (surveys suggest).

Pregnant women, women with children, the disabled, the blind… they’re all limited in various ways and have to accept that. A woman who wants to carry her own child may have to give up professional sport. I’m currently on crutches and able to walk only about 50m, so have to plan every journey I make with military precision, and find that many places are simply out of reach to me.

It’s not easy - it’s arguably not right! - but it’s another of those ‚realities’ Tandora stresses are so important. We ALL have to navigate our own realities, while impinging on others‘ as little as possible - whether in third or fourth spaces, or with a reluctant utilitarian acceptance of day-to-day challenges in an imperfect world that’s built for the majority. We can campaign for change - but this shouldn‘t be by denying others‘ needs and removing their precious gains.

Ok, so say we accept there's nothing inherently wrong or dangerous about being trans. We accept that affirming behaviour will alleviate the trans person's distress.

Despite this, most women will still recognise a trans woman as biologically male, even if they agree to use their chosen name, pronouns etc. Women who have suffered trauma at the hands of men, or women whose religion forbids them from sharing spaces with men, will experience distress at their presence in a single sex space.

If you're arguing for society to alleviate trans people's distress by treating them in all cases as the gender the believe themselves to be, what is your solution to those women's distress? Because it sounds very much like you're happy to handwave that away in a "reframe your trauma" type of way. Or does their distress simply not matter because you think they're wrong/narrow-minded/uneducated?

We’re getting a little illustration of this handwaving away of women as unimportant on the Kelly v Leonardo Tribunal thread today.

The thing is, people like Tandora won't accept that. They'd have had armies of us women campaigning right alongside them for things like third spaces and trans sports, but they didn't want it. They wanted to take things from women. Any of us who dared to suggest third spaces and separate accommodations were called evil bigots and threatened with violence!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5420656-kelly-v-leonardo-employment-tribunal-thread-2?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

I suspect @Tandora is getting pleasure from ignoring your posts, Taz. You have lots of support from the rest of us 💜

There's nothing reductive about knowing men have penises, but whatever. Tell us then. If it's only about language, what language should we use when requesting a female doctor, or designating a single sex space?

@Tandora You never answered my earlier questions so I'm reposting them.

What is being trans, then? What about it makes it impossible for transwomen to use men's public toilets? I understand that might make their gender dysphoria worse but I don't understand how it makes it impossible to use the gents.
I do not understand why any transwoman thinks it's ok to use the ladies loo, changing rooms, etc. when that is likely to cause distress to some women. Why is the transwoman's discomfort more important than the women's?

Why is it fine for many women to experience discomfort or distress when transwomen use their spaces and services?

It is you who is reducing 'being a man' to biological differences such as having a penis.

And it’s you that’s trying to reduce ‘being a woman’ to a feeling in someone’s head.

Again - the dispute is about the need to be specific and precise in our language when we describe how bodies are different, it's not a dispute about whether those differences actually exist

The dispute appears to be about whether human bodies come in two sorts, men and women. I say they do. That’s specific and precise, and I say further that the proportion of people who cannot be easily, accurately, independently, repeatably, and consistently categorized into one or the other by reference to their physical characteristics is minuscule. Therefore it is a genuine categorization, and I say further that in some cases it is an important categorization.

The same cannot be said for “cis” vs “trans” categorization which is self-assigned, impossible to observe independently, has no agreeed definition, can change over time, and in many cases is difficult to determine even for the individual themselves. I claim that makes it useless and irrelevant and of no wider interest or importance other than to those who claim “trans” status.

Alas I have tasks to accomplish now so I can’t continue this thread till later.

Tandora is mistaken.

It's not that we "know not the darndest thing about which they speak." It's that we do know and think it's irrelevant.

Someone's gender identity is as insignificant to someone else as their favourite colour or religious belief. Their personal self perception is their business and has no bearing on material reality.

I don't give a stuff how Dr Upton sees himself. Couldn't give less of a shit. That's between him and his wife.

I do care that he stays the hell out of the staff changing room, a women-only gym, and goes nowhere near a woman wanting a female doctor.

@Tandora brought up Dr Upton's penis. Suggested as an alternative to the complicated question as to whether or not he's a 'biological woman'. Apparently the fragrant Dr would have been happy to concede he was born with a penis. Would have triggered zero dysphoria?

And why is it always the genitals they go for? One's sex is coded into every cell in the body; it's really not just about the penis.

Ok I’ll bite and be specific as we seem to have some slow learners on board

a man is a male who has (or has had) a penis
a woman is a female who has never had a penis.
is this straightforward and clear enough for you
Stop trying to make “male women” happen. It’ll just go the same way as “fetch”. Stop trying to bully women into allowing males into female spaces. Women are saying no. No means no. Didn’t they teach you that in nursery school? .

Not good faith.

We don't reduce ourselves to our uteruses. But we have a uteruses and that affects our life experience. We can't pretend it doesn't. That would be stupid when we undergo tests for why our uteruses are faulty, how we use them and whether we may need to have them removed for medical reasons. And how males seek us out on the basis of using our uteruses for their own ends.

Males never ever have these experiences. They can't. Cos they don't have uteruses.

We also have chromosomes that affect how tall we are, how strong our bones are, how we walk, how we talk and how this impacts on how others interact with us.

I can tell you now, that being a female who is 5'2" I automatically get men (and other women) treating me completely differently to a male who is 6'2" because of how I'm perceived as competition / a threat / someone to dominate easily.

That's my biology as a female. Dr Upton will never ever understand this. Transwomen are simply not my build no matter how they identify.

Accepting trans people living their lives as trans in a private capacity doesn’t affect me and I don’t mind it at all. But…

trans women in women’s sport affects me,
trans boys in girls toilets and dorms at school affects my DDs,
trans women in my changing room at work affects me - especially if they get me sacked for not undressing with them,
trans,women in women’s prisons could affect me,
trans women winning prizes and getting jobs meant to women affects me,
trans women committing crimes that are recorded and female crimes affects me.

Edited to add gay people men being gay don’t affect me in the slightest. There no relevance and no comparison there.

No one is lying about reality or affirming delusions - this is your misunderstanding and projection. Actually, what we are doing is acknowledging the reality of trans experience. Because trans experience is real.

It’s interesting that you appear to have a blind spot for people who’ve said “I thought I was trans but it was actually mental illness and/or trauma”. How do they fit into your attempts to define what it means to be trans? If they were trans once but they’re not now, would that undermine the ‘reality’ of the experience? If they were never really trans, does that undermine an approach of automatic affirmation?

I experienced “gender dysphoria” (wishing I had been born a boy from around the age of 5, identifying as NB for a while as an adult). I didn’t fit in with the other girls when I was young; I didn’t like the things they liked, didn’t want to wear dresses, preferred cars to Barbies. As a teen I didn’t see the point of make up, I wanted my hair short, and I preferred boy’s clothes and trainers. I had ‘male’ coded interests and hobbies, got on better with boys, and understood the boy’s social rules better. When I began to receive inappropriate attention from adult men, wearing loose men’s clothes helped hide my female body. Eventually I wanted to have my breasts removed - they marked me as female no matter what I wore or how short my hair was, and I hated them.

Was my desperate wish that I’d been born male instead of female “the reality of trans experience”? Would you have affirmed me? Told me I was brave and real and “valid” and used male pronouns and fought those nasty transphobes who suggested it might be an idea to seek some counselling (when god dammit it costs nothing to be KIND)?

The whole thing was actually just personal preference clashing with gendered societal expectations, combined with a trauma driven attempt to avoid the male gaze and opt out of gender stereotypes I didn’t want/didn’t understand how to exist within. The later preoccupation with hiding/removing my breasts was due to sexual assaults, not some innate ‘maleness’, and trauma counselling sorted that issue out. I’m much happier having had a lot of therapy and being totally comfortable being myself, in the body I was born with, than I ever could have been if I’d been encouraged to lean into these unhealthy coping mechanisms.

But sure, it’s ALWAYS real and valid, and affirming that people have been born in the wrong body is definitely, 100% of the time, the right thing to do! I’m literally the only person with an experience like this, so there is absolutely no possibility of anybody being harmed by your approach!

I expect you’ll ignore this and immediately jump back into suggesting anyone who disagrees with you is an uneducated bigot who needs to step outside of their own narrow assumptions and contemplate that different people have different experiences. No doubt you’ll wrap the empty statements up in some passive aggressive word salad with a garnish of moral superiority…how’s that approach been working out for you? Changed anyone’s mind yet?

Since neither you nor I are trans, and both of us have studied the issue of gender in great depth and come to different conclusions, looking at the findings of others is useful, hence my repeated request that you read and comment on the words of the professional psychiatrist I linked to several times upthread.

Why are you so determined to ignore this clinician with extensive experience who wishes to help people in distress?

Gender Dysphoria is a venal lie that is causing untold damage to innumerable people. Let us instead re conceptualise Gender Dysphoria for what it truly is: Body Anxiety Disorder (BAD) a novel, culture-bound expression of disordered emotional functioning.

Let clinicians be free to help distressed clients using all of our clinical skills and expertise. Do not tie our hands. Do not criminalise us.

When it comes to Gender Dysphoria, John F Kennedy’s words come to mind. “We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

We must now exercise thought and excise opinions. We must dismantle the teetering, cruel and destructive insanity of gender identity, gender dysphoria and gender affirming care.

We must drain Gender Dysphoria from our symptom pool.

x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1808825717204922755is -

You do know that cisgender is terribly transphobic don't you? It should be written, according to GI, as cis gender. A type of woman who is cis. Like tall woman, black woman or trans woman. Shame on you! Do better! 😊

Incidentally, who thinks that if every woman suddenly agreed to be a cis woman there'd be a proportion of tw who would complain. Either it would be othering and trigger their dysphoria 😥 or they'd also claim to be cis women. Then along would come a bunch of their allies, like the OP, to put women where they always belong, in the wrong.