What is "trans" and why does it justify undoing sex in law, society, culture and history?

[FlirtsWithRhinos]

In the Trolls thread @Tandora and I discovered that in a recent thread she had thought she was very clear about what "trans" is while I thought she was simply describing symptoms that could have many causes and did not justify why these symptoms should be treated as actual material facts by others.

• Trolls thread with our interaction on this page: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5420701-a-little-piece-of-insight?page=15&reply=147554941

• my question on the earlier thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5420701-a-little-piece-of-insight?page=15&reply=147554941

Clearly I missed something in that earlier thread but I can't go back because it has reached its post limit, so rather than derail the trolls thread, I am restating my question here.

Looking forward to @Tandora engaging with my questions to help me understand what I missed about her position in the original thread.

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Tandora · 02/10/2025 21:28
Right- this is your question. which is why im trying to explain what being trans is. It's entirely relevant, the reason people can't comprehend the issue is that they simply can't comprehend what it is to be trans.
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FlirtsWithRhinos · 02/10/2025 23:13
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.
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.

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@Tandora I don't have much free time this afternoon. Please don't take slow replies as bad faith and be assured I will be coming back to this thread when I have to engage properly as I really appreciate you wanting to explain this to me.

This thread is in danger of turning out like all the others. If Tandora is in good faith then s/he will find it hard to respond to all of us in a meaningful way. If she isn't then s/he will find it easy to cherry-pick who s/he responds to.

I'm going to back out and leave the thread to @FlirtsWithRhinos and @Tandora

You must know full well why a large proportion of time is taken up with fending off the intrusion of male people into female only facilities, services and sports; resulting in the erosion of female dignity and established protections. You claim to be a woman whose professional role is being caring, considerate and in tune with women as they give birth? Yet you seem to have no fellow feeling with other female people.

If it is true you really don't understand, then maybe you need to actively listen and empathise more?

And presumably his psychological condition was treated, rather than we upend peoples lives to accommodate him

It is literally just that - to have a pervasive , profound, unrelenting recognition of self as being the opposite sex.

What you are describing is a delusion.

A delusion is a firm, fixed, false belief, maintained despite clear evidence to the contrary, and not explained by the person's culture. These are symptoms of a mental, neurological, or medical disorder, with examples including believing that one is being plotted against (persecutory) or has extraordinary powers (grandiose) or that one is a member of the opposite sex (trans).

He had visual agnosia, so basically mistook lots of things for other things. But yes, the world didn't have to bend around him.

I would like to add another question please:
Considering the sex differences between males and females, why can't trans people fight for third (fourth/fifth...however many they feel they need) spaces? Rather than trans-identified males wanting access to female spaces.
Surely then everyone would be happy?

You have clearly missed the threads in the past that discussed transmen and their specific issues.

You have clearly missed the threads on which at least one very articulate and interesting transman posted at length. Those threads were by and large productive and not confrontational.

You are clearly wrong when you say posters on here "don't seem to even consider that". Maybe consider that you just haven't seen it?

There has been a wealth of discussion. about young women identifying as men over the years on this forum. Perhaps you could go back over it and read them? Lots of contributions too from female detransitioners.

And yes, men/male people are the most problematical group when it comes to the whole trans business. The contemporary surge in trans identifying women has really on come about in the last decade or two; whereas men have been cross dressing and displaying their erotic fetishes for a lot, lot longer; and homosexuality has always been more taboo ( indeed illegal) than lesbianism - resulting in some men seeking to escape into 'womanhood'.

When the general public thinks of a transsexual they think of a man.

Female people don't threaten female sports; female people don't engage in sexual paraphilias to anywhere near the extent that male people do, and female people tend not to feel quite so entitled or pushy.

The invention of the 'trans child' has largely come about to justify older and middle aged men taking cross sex hormones and have surgeries in order to be able to 'pass' better. Because everyone can see that they are male.

Is there some kind of objective test to establish whether someone is trans or not trans? Is it acceptable to say to somebody "I'm not allowing you to use this service, because while you seem perfectly nice, you don't meet the criteria for being trans"?

If a man believed their gender to be female, but didn't experience any distress if treated as male, would they not be trans?

Where does your definition leave people who don't identify as male or female?

I think the trans umbrella is now broader than you would suggest, and your definition excludes people who might argue that they still need protection from unlawful discrimination.

We absolutely must find ways in society to accommodate this small minority group of people, as we accommodate others with neurodevelopmental and other minority differences.

So making reasonable adjustment, but no more? In general people have to fit into the world around them. Autistic people have to put up with sensory overload. People with disabilities have to live in a world that is designed around the able bodied, even when additional provision is available. Religious people have to live in a world that doesn't always accommodate their traditions and beliefs.

It isn't possible to treat somebody who is male as anything other than male in a situation where sex is relevant. You can argue about when it is and isn't relevant, and argue for additional accommodation e.g. unisex toilets, but if a single sex service can be mixed sex, the logical conclusion is that there is no need for it it to be single sex, not that it can include some people of the opposite sex.

Quite.
It's a mystery why we should focus more on these things on a feminist forum...

I appreciate your setting out your thought process Tandora. You seem personally very emotionally invested in the discovery of a biological marker (genetics/brain scan etc) for "transness".

My question would be how do you think those who vehemently insist they are trans will react if they are shown NOT to have this theoretical innate trans ID? A lot of these males seem very aggressive, and a lot of the females extremely troubled. Would they ever accept a diagnosis that it was all in their heads after all?

Excellent post

Transpeople wouldn't be happy as there is no validation in a separate space. It needs to be the one they want, and to know they are subjecting others to have to put up with that that is the goal.

Yeah, it's not about the space, it's about access to the women in that space.

Otherwise they would have campaigned for and secured third spaces a long time ago.

But if a man was already and actually a woman ( the one he recognises in himself) then he wouldn't nee to transition would he? What is he transitioning from, and to?

The only fixed state in being female/male is the facts and consequences of the biological body. Personality, preference and other such characteristics are not fixed; they are fluid. How can you transition from fluidity to fluidity?

By the way lots of us do 'get it' because we've spent extensive time listening to people who have trans identities and to those who have detransitioned.

Being trans is a naturally occurring form of neurodevelopmental difference.

Is there solid evidence of this? As far as I'm aware, early research only considered homosexual male transsexuals, and the neurobiological differences discovered in this research turned out to be correlated with homosexuality, not transsexuality. This was figured out with later studies that included both homosexual and heterosexual males with a transwoman identity.

There is no evidence that being trans can be cured through psychological therapies

What about detransitioners? Most of them essentially think their way out of it.

There is no logical, nor evidence, base for the idea that banning trans people from using basic facilities, like toilets and changing rooms, in accordance with their gender will have any impact whatsoever on

Even if everything else you said was true, how can you reliably ascertain if a male who desires to access a female space is trans or not? Are we expected to just believe whatever they say?

e.g. a man parades nude around the women's changing room, genitalia on show to all. Does this suddenly become acceptable if he says "don't worry, I'm trans"?

The issue is that you are conflating two different types of transgender person and psychological profiles that cohabit together beneath the ever expanding ‘trans’ umbrella.

Firstly, middle aged, largely white male with AGP whose goal is to ‘transition into women’ usually without surgery or medical intervention and who are, therefore, a direct threat to women in women’s spaces.

And, secondly, trans men who are largely women an girls aged 12-late twenties at least 70% of who are ND (autistic mainly), a further %age of whom are CSA survivors and all, in this current cohort tended to trans ID during puberty [known as ROGD].

This latter group are a psychologically vulnerable group of women impacted by lock down, lac of support for their ASD and comorbid MH issues, and a not-unrelated ove-reliance on social media who have been let down by the clinical profession for allowing the ranting and ravings of the first group (lead by Stonewall and endorsed by Mermaids). They are not a threat to men and don’t impact women unless you are in the heart breaking situation of being their mother. As I am/was.

Sorry for typos… by keyboard is a bit buggered……

Why is my trauma worth so much less than the trans persons trauma?

We absolutely must find ways in society to accommodate this small minority group of people, as we accommodate others with neurodevelopmental and other minority differences.

Why must we?

There is no logical, nor evidence, base for the idea that banning trans people from using basic facilities, like toilets and changing rooms, in accordance with their gender will have any impact whatsoever on

So what, that's not what the measure it's about, it's about women not wanting men in their spaces. Not everything is about what we must do for the 'trans', women are allowed to think about themselves and themselves alone without having to accommodate every other 'group' first.

I commented to you on this before, comparing autism to trans ideology, that I find this extremely offensive as my autistic family members go out of their way to learn to fit into society and not negatively impact anyone, and got told by you to get over it.

So I will say again: autism is a proven medical condition, unlike trans ideology idea of self id, you do not diagnose yourself; there are proven brain pattern differences, unlike trans ideology; children are taught coping strategies, you would compare it to conversion therapy; and many people with autism can learn to cope not being their authentic self in society.

My child manages to know not to draw on the walls in other peoples house, that they should wear clothes outside of our home even though they have sensory issues about textiles and that they can't throw a massive tantrum when it gets too much but leaves the situation. All to fit in and not negatively impact others.

So stop comparing the extremely self centered approach of many trans people with people with autism, just to manipulate people in going along with your ideas that trans people have the right to their feelings and actions always being accommodated, even when it is at a cost to others.

So back to the question: if many women don't want to share their facilities, sports and services with transwomen, what alternatives can we as society think of to put in place for transwomen?

This would be a great premise for dystopian sci-fi. They find a marker which is reliably absent from 'cis' (sorry!) people. But not all trans people have it! 😱 Better yet, it leads to a cure. Take the red pill and magically become happy with your sex. It would be like the cochlear implants controversy all over again. Endless shenanigans. One of the things I hate about No Debate is the inhibition of this sort of creativity. They've only just started telling some tame and tentative jokes on R4.

Great question! And one that really highlights the misogynistic/patriarchal roots of genderism.

I do have to start by pointing out that you and I have actually had a conversation about the impact of redefining womanhood to exclude trans men, so your assertion is not entirely true, but nevertheless it's a fair question.

Firstly, as you may have seen I have noted on other threads, Genderism even when practiced by female people identifying as male is mostly still defined/ debated/exeuted in practice in terms of womanhood: who is a woman and who is not one, who can go in women's spaces and who cannot. Even for trans identifying women and girls the conversation tends to be "but she's a woman anyway" as opposed to "she's not a man". And the cultural shibboleths of transitioning are all female coded - the adoption of women's clothing and women's spaces by trans women, the removal of female breasts by trans men.

The men themselves sort of fade into the background - a baseline not a battleground.

This is entirely in line with our culture.

Patriachy made men the "default human" and woman the "other". Woman was for a very long time (and in popular culture still is) an object not a subject - something to be studied, defined, gazed upon, won. A muse, a prize, a mystery, but not a person with her own inner life and her own motivations. Therefore, "a woman" can be a vessel for others' definitions in a way a man cannot. In our culture, men and indeed women are much more comfortable pontificating about what makes a Woman than they are about what makes a Man.

Secondly, exactly because of this history of patriarchy which has skewed cultural power so much towards men, male privileges are implicit. No one (at least not for a long time) wrote a law that says "men will be given more default credibility, male voices will carry more weight, if there's a man and a woman in the meeting we'll assume he is the senior", it just accrues to them anyway through the weight of the history and the images and stories of men and women we are exposed to, and the way our centres of power (legal, financial, cultural, professional) have implcitly assumed someone else is at home looking after the kids.

Women however are in the opposite position. The same mechanisms that accrue [relative] power and privilege to men take them away from women.

To counteract that, in the last couple of hundred years as society has generally accepted at least in theory (though as above not yet accepted in many people's subconscious) that women are equal human beings with equal mental abilities and value to men, we have gradually gained explicit rights, protections and opportunities to help us push back against that "default male" world and create a culture where we atre recognised and valued and where we also have automony and opportunities without facing additional hurdles or risks simply because of our sex.

But unlike male privileges these things are written down or explicitly defined. They are created through specific legal rights, through signs on doors about who is allowed in, through the creation of "women only" groups and networks.

This means that unlike male privileges that can only be taken away through the gradual rewriting of unconscious social assumptions and cues as women build on those explicit opportunities to change the cultural presence of women in subconscious narratives (and how is that going so far?), female rights, protections and opportunities can be given to men as easily as changing a word, or a law, or a sign or a charter.

And that is exactly what is happening.

So while the issues and neo-sexism around who has a right to rewrite whose existence and reality apply just as much to trans men as to trans women, the actual on the ground impacts of this redefinition are felt much more immediately and keenly by women than men because we can be forced to accept trans women as women through a small lobby group putting pressure on employers, councils, hositals and politicians to change a word, or a law, or a sign or a charter. Quite simply there are are far fewer scenarios where a man can be forced to accept a trans man into male privilege as a man (and as we all know, the most famous explict male privilege of primogeniture was excluded from the GRA) so men simply have less immediate skin in the game.

And thirdly, while the question is relevent to both sexes, as far as I know I am a woman, or at least that is what I have always understood. So if someone wants to change the legal, social and cultural definition of womanhood to include male people that affects me personally. This makes the flaws easier to see and easier to highlight, and frankly I think gives me the right to speak from my own lived experience of being female and the right to ask why if trans women are women are their needs and challenges so unaligned with mine, and if the supports of "women" going forward are to be based only on those needs that are also felt by trans women, where can I go for specifically female needs and supports?

It is literally just that - to have a pervasive , profound, unrelenting recognition of self as being the opposite sex.

Even if that's true, the problem is that this "pervasive, profound, unrelenting 'recognition'" doesn't actually change their behaviour in any meaningful way.

They still behave exactly like the sex they actually are.

Before I ever gave this much thought, I was open to the idea of men who were "women inside", and I still think that's a thing that could potentially be - you could have a subset of men who had some subset of "female" characteristics.

(And indeed they arguably exist - gay men. They have the very female characteristic of being attracted to men, if you're going to try to identify strongly-correlated-to-sex characteristics).

But trans-identified males clearly behave just like other men. And in as much as any had any "female" traits, those arose from being gay.

The trans-ness of trans-identified males is clearly irrelevant to anything that occurs outside their heads. They're just men, who behave like men. (And possibly worse).

That's what got me my first deletion comment from Comment is Free in the Guardian, starting me off on a "what the fuck is going on here" journey.

I replied to someone who'd said something about some comparison between transmen versus transwomen being unexpected, and I said "it's only weird if you forget what sex they actually are". Enough for a comment deletion, apparently!

But totally true, and I stand by it many years later - aside from all the logical/philosophical 1=0 problems Helen Joyce points out, it's just blindingly obvious on the face of it that "transwomen" are in no way like women regardless of whatever they think internally.

So there's no justification whatsoever for separating them from other men.

Brilliant post