A little piece of insight

[Tandora]

Into a topic so woefully misunderstood.

What matters is that the man front of you gets the mental health support they so clearly need, and stays the f- out of women's spaces in the meantime

If this is true, then good.

The alternative would be akin to telling someone that the voices in their head were real and they should listen to the voices, rather than take medication for a mental illness.

Don't encourage people to ascribe to non-reality. It's harmful.

Where's the insight?

It’s the language of a lot of transactivists.
its the language of the lie of the concept of ‘legal sex’.
its not ‘our’ narrow logic loop.

I find it quite astounding and disrespectful when posters like this come on here and deliver their posts, almost in the form of a patronising lecture.
As in 'you need to hear them, to listen and to understand that their experience is real '
Why? Why does the understanding have to come one way as per usual?
Where has 'being kind' got women?? Many on MN have become a little weary with the instructions to be nice.

As for respecting their 'experience' and allowing them to participate in society etc etc : do you mean men in women's spaces? Sport? Refuges, prisons, crochet groups? WI?
Nobody is stopping transpeople participating at all. It's just not fair to lie.
And what is " externally appear how they internally feel" ?
How on earth can a boy feel like a girl or a girl feel like a boy?

I do wish posters would stop comparing trans to being gay and that the attitudes to transpeople are the same as to gay people years ago. - being gay has no impact on women's rights. You are being unfair to parrot this, and unfair to gay people, many of whom do support women's rights.

As an aside, I know this has been asked before but where are all the middle-aged women identifying as men? Any comment on detransitioners?

Tandora- I'd recommend reading Helen Joyce's work or watch her interviews.
In case you ever wanted to see things without a trans 'lens'
Or Buck Angel or Marcus Dib
Maybe step away from Reddit??

Women said no, Tan. Even when it makes men all sad, women retain the right to gather without them and to know they're not women.

Get over it. Stop being creepy.

Edited to fix embarrassing typo.

Tandora
The person in front of you is not a lie. They are real; their experience is real.

Just for the record, I did not at any point suggest that any person "was" a lie, and I do not suggest this.

Delusional, yes. It is a delusion to believe that you are of a different sex, sexual orientation, race, or colour than the one you actually are.

It is often painful to have to face the truth about things. Having to face the fact that you are colour-blind or tone-deaf or under five foot tall or a woman with size ten feet is quite likely to be painful. But it absolutely does not help to be lyingly told you can tell red from green or have perfect pitch or are five foot eight or have size six feet. Someone lying about any of these things does not make them so, and you can wish until you are blue in the face and they will still not be true.

Tandora
All you need to do is to hear them, to listen, and to understand that their experience is real .

I do not dispute that their experience is their subjective reality; unfortunately, since magic does not exist, I am unable to change anybody's sex for him or her, nor alter how he or she feels about the sex that he or she is, so it remains entirely subjective, and that male person remains objectively male, that female person remains objectively female. I am happy for them to continue in their delusion, holding by the maxim "do what though wilt shall be the whole of the law, so long as thou harmest none." Unfortunately there are rather too many delusional men whose beliefs do harm others. I do not regard their feelings as being more important than any other person's feelings.

I understand that there are medical professionals in the field of mental health who may be able to help people come to terms with their delusions and live with them, or even to recognise them as being delusions, but I am not one of those. And I definitely do not think that chemical or surgical intervention to alter the bodies of those with mental problems is a good idea.

Is anyone clearer yet on what we are to do with this 'insight' that we have now all read?

Now that we have all read this person's emotional explanation as to how they perceive themselves, their 'insight', what are we expected to do with the knowledge of this person's situation?

-Are we supposed to believe that any male can be a female person?

-Are we supposed to feel enough emotional response to say 'any male person feeling like that most definitely should use female single sex provisions'?

-Are we supposed to think, well the only option for a child with such distress is to support their belief that they are something that they materially are not and to start them on a medical treatment plan that provides hormones and maybe surgery (even as a child) to provide them with the extreme body modifications that might help them to feel better about themselves?

What are we supposed to be doing with this information?

'All you need to do is to hear them, to listen, and to understand that their experience is real . It may not be your experience.'

Again, Tandora, to use your own analogy, when people actually hear voices (rather than their own inner monologue), they turn their head as though listening and might respond. They do experience it. Fully. But although it might feel real to the person, it does not reflect reality.

We cannot and should not reorganise society to people's feelings that do not match reality.

Here’s a bit of insight.

When I was a small child I hated being a girl. I hated having my hair long how my DM wanted it, and had it cut short as soon as I was allowed.
Hated having pierced ears (my GM’s culture has girl’s ears pierced at toddler age so my family followed suit)
Cried every time I was made to wear a dress
Cried for days when my DM took me to littlewoods for a bra fitting aged 12 and used to remove the bra as soon as I was out of the house and hide it in my bag
Played football every spare minute, hated “girl toys” and anything remotely pink or “girly”
Used to pretend to be a boy whenever I went on holiday and met new kids to play with/teens to hang out with. This included putting socks down my pants. I even tried to pee standing up a couple of times, which caused a bit of a mess.

I am so grateful trans ideology wasn’t a thing back then (yes I know there were “old school” transsexuals, and transvestites wearing their wife’s clothes in secret, but no social media and nobody going round schools telling kids they might be born in the wrong body)

If anyone had given me the idea that I could actually be a boy, and offered me breast binders, or worse, the chance to have my healthy breasts removed, and pills that could “turn me into a boy”, I’d have been all over it.

It started to wear off in my later teens, and when I reached 18, and met my first BF who admired my female body, I found that I no longer wanted to reject my female self. I’m still not typically “feminine”. I don’t wear make up, my hair is short, you won’t catch me dead in a dress or heels. I’m still a woman, and can never be anything else.

And yeah, whatever people want to think about themselves, men still need to stay out of women’s spaces.

As a child I wanted a prehensile tail like a monkey's and was convinced that I was going to grow one. Obviously as I grew older I realised that it was not going to happen, humans don't have tails so I dealt with it.
(I still would like a tail though).

Are we supposed to feel enough emotional response to say 'any male person feeling like that most definitely should use female single sex provisions'?

It's this one. Just emotional blackmail.

The distress from gender dysphoria comes from a misalignment between the body and what mind thinks it should be. Hormones and surgery brings the body closer to what the mind expects and that reduces and sometimes cures the dysphoria

I still say no to men in women’s single sex spaces. Regardless of surgery. Or not.

I would say that is just masking the dysphoria.
Curing it would be making it go away so that the person is happy to be their biological sex.

I understand the topic perfectly well.

Still a big fat no from me when it comes to men, no matter how they feel, being in women only spaces.

The lack of transparency about the desired outcome of the thread is notable.

It is just a plopped down thread that has no real purpose as far as I can see.

No. 6 year olds do not have the capacity to identify and analyse the root cause of their distress, much less recommend a lifelong course of action.

It’s interesting you seem to be claiming the concept of a person with genuine gender dysphoria though. So we can ignore all this men that freely admit they reached their current state of mind by watching too much of a particular type of porn and were not a distressed 6 year old?

"Dint make the mistake of assuming your own personal experience is universal. It isn't"...kinda undermines the emotional point you started the thread with

I don’t care when the man first thought it.

then again, I was told that it was fhe inclination of my rapist that mattered so there’s always that angle to consider.

It would be great if that was an option so people don’t have to go through the difficult transition process, but afaik there’s no proven treatment to do that

the 'and' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

respecting that their experience is real, legitimate, valid
No problem with that. I have every sympathy with mental suffering.

and

allowing them to participate in society in a manner which is compatible with their dignity , privacy and wellbeing.
Not if that means giving men access to female-only spaces.
Very happy to accept men in "women's" clothes, call them their chosen name, etc., but not happy to pretend they are actually women.

surely the misalignment comes from stereotypes, either from family, friends or the wider community/ media.
if there were no differences in clothes, toys or activities for boys and girls how could one claim to be the other?

That is why I was confused when the OP seemed to suggest there was such a treatment.
I now see they were just mangling words and using misleading language.

Is anyone clearer yet on what we are to do with this 'insight' that we have now all read?

No, not after this thread, or any of the others started by the OP.

We need to simplify the conversation significantly.

Yes.
It's very simple, really.

Women don't want men in their spaces.

Human beings cannot change sex.

Women are not support beings for men.

Transwomen are men.