A space for respectful dialogue about sex, gender and diversity

[Tandora]

This is a thread for posters who want to talk and share a diverse range of opinions about sex, gender, being gender non-conforming and/or trans, and public policy. It is to learn from each other; to engage in a productive exchange, and to hear different sides of the story.

It is not a space for bullying and insults. Please do not join if your intention is to control the conversation and undermine those who disagree with you.

The only people who feel the need to be validated as women are men.

There are 2 initial categories of humans - male / female. These categories form the start of a branch diagram.
Then under each of those categories are myriad sub categories, one of which is male/female who identify as the opposite sex (what you’d call ‘trans’). Transwomen fall under the category of male, transmen under the category of female. This label was purposefully very sneaky as it made people start to believe that a transwoman was an actual woman who believed herself to be a man ie a woman who was trans.
In order to be a ‘transwoman’, one has to be male, there is no crossover, one doesn't magically jump from the side of the branch diagram to the other.

Experience with my own autistic DD (and at least three other autie female friends of hers and my DS who all trans IDd for between3-6 years) has proven to me that they are very confused and overwhelmed with what transitioning from child to adult means - no bullying, loving families, privileged middle class homes, private school.

All of them are lesbian/bi, all of them struggled with puberty. They experience, as part of their autism, elements of OCD which makes periods and their [often quite sudden] body changes quite harrowing. They all bound their breasts from 12 to deny that change. My DD hated the hormonal disregulation [as it compounded struggles with emotional dysregulation], and she resented the fact that she stopped growing at 5 ft 4 but her brother continued to 6ft 3. She has to produce ID everywhere at 19/20, her giant brother has been able to buy a pint anywhere since 16, so she feels othered/infantilised/patronised. My DD in particular was so angry at 12/13 that boys didn’t have to go through what she did, that they didn’t have to bleed/suffer period pain and monthly migraines like she did. She/They found girls (who they now found attractive and had crushes on) very difficult to fit in with because they were somewhat gender non-conforming. The autistic mind is very black and white, very “if not A then B” in its logic processing. And gender ideology told them that they could chose to be B if they didn’t want to be A.

Each didn’t want to experience female puberty and were being told by the media/teachers that they could identify out of it. So they ‘chose’ to be boys. My DD’s puberty started against the backdrop of the Weinstein prosecution and Trump’s ‘grab ‘em by the pussy tapes’, she felt scared, vulnerable, disgusted by the idea of sex with men. It was compounded by covid/lockdown which meant 2 years of interacting via zoom for months meant she missed important developmental windows, especially in terms of social development which was doubly/triply impactful for an autistic teen vis a vis a NT one (and we know they all struggled too).

Even though each of the autie girls/now women that I now personally is remarkable in terms of being gifted in at least one area (academic and art for my DD) they are emotionally very immature so there is a dissonance between their intellectual and emotional maturity. At 20 my daughter has to take a pill that effectively stops her periods because on many levels she is not emotionally/socially much older than 15/16. I don’t think she ever felt ‘special’ as a result of being ‘trans’ - in fact over time she realised it added further layers to her sense of otherness, it accentuated her awkwardness and heightened her sense of appearing weird, which may be the main driver for dropping it and desisting gradually over the last couple of years.. She is still ‘gender non conforming’ in the way she presents but much of that is fear of being sexualised, the vulnerability that girls like her associate with being female, so her non conformity is very much camouflage, though she doesn’t understand it in those terms.

Of course I’m not an expert, I am basing this on less than half a dozen autie teens I know, but the therapists and psychologists I’ve spoken to all suggest my DD’s experience is typical. It’s one of the reasons that assessment of girls needs to happen sooner and support needs to be put in place once they have a diagnosis. It’s why there needs to be more clinical research into how autistic girls present, struggle and the impact of puberty.

Sorry, that was an overly long answer. Not had much sleep recently, poss due to my own adjusting to my DD being at uni just now! 🤣

And yes - this is what autistic girls need…

'Added to which (because I'm old and believe in being resilient) would you not accept that women are fairly poor at assessing risk, usually massively overestimating, and therefore our perceptions alone are a poor basis for determining societal rules??'

Men commit 99% of all sex abuse and 80% of violent crime. These stats are reported in the ONS data and readily available, should you wish to check. Many if not most women, by middle age, have experienced abuse, assault, rape, harassment, at the hands of men.

I actually think women are astonishingly resilient. Individual risk assessment may vary, and maybe affected by trauma, yes. But that may affect perception in various ways, including underestimating risk as well as overestimating. And its a subjective assessment of whether a woman is under or over estimating risk.

There is the argument that as the smaller, weaker, more vulnerable sex, who carry the reproductive burden, facing the larger, stronger sex who commit 100% of all rapes, women have likely evolved to be extremely good at risk perception and assessment, for logical reasons. Female socialisation, however, can teach us to disregard instinctive responses.

100%.

And let's not forget that any man who wishes to enter a woman only space, is by their very nature, a risk.

You seem to be the only contributor to your own thread!

Yes. But even social conditioning tends to fail against the most powerful female instinct to safeguard one’s children.

Statistical fact and a lifetime of lived experience has taught me - as it did my mother and her mother before her - that my daughters are safer in an all female space and to be wary of males seeking to access women exercising biological functions in toilets or in changing rooms.

I am not troll hunting or claiming posters are not posting in good faith, but has anyone else noticed that those posters most belligerent in defending men’s waves seem to appear in groups. For example yesterday, there were many scolders and shouters,who all seem to have disappeared at the same time. I know one “poster” on another thread said they were in a group chat with friends abd then lots of new posters came on posting awful things. They have never been back.

That's interesting, because I was basing my post on the girls I knew. I suspect that means that we're both right and the thing we have in common is that girls with autism get a raw deal. There again, so do boys with autism. It seems to me that the more we talk about diversity, the more we're all expected to conform.

This has been my observation of several girls and one boy transitioning through puberty too.

My discussion with the mothers of girls tend to be also about how the girls also get sexualised comments while wearing their school uniform to and from school. The comments start early and while decades ago we rolled our eyes, now there is a constant stream of hyper sexualised media and social media and a 24 hr news feed. It is really tough to filter it all out.

I'm sure it's a joint effort.

I accept that some people just like the attention, but nonetheless, I think there is a joint push to find any dissent to the general view on here, and then attempt to capitalise on it.

Mumsnet has always been a target.

Absolutely - it’s why we really do need a ‘respectful space to discuss sex, gender and diversity’. There is so much we don’t understand about autism - and the broadening of the diagnostic umbrella to lump Asperger's with other complex presentation of ASD, doesn’t help. Nor does the failure to understand the sex differences between how ASD impacts girls v boys on a clinical level, but also on a social level - re things like sex-roles (what I understand as ‘gender’).

We’ve not been able to have that conversation for nearly a decade for fear of offending, but the SC ruling and Cass report may be facilitating a change. I’m hoping the replacement regional services for the Tavi are open to working with clinicians to research this so that the next generation of ASD teens can expect better support and their parents can ask questions without being silenced or censured.

First of all, we advocate for equal pay for equivalent achievement. Being the (for example) fastest woman in the world is an equivalent achievement to being the fastest man. The fact that the fastest man is much faster than the average woman is as relevant as the fastest formula one car being faster than any rally car. A rally car is a different machine, originally adapted from an ordinary saleroom car, rather than specially designed for racing a circuit. It can carry a passenger. It has a smaller engine and is less aerodynamic. It's less efficient at going around a circuit. Lewis Hamilton driving one of those is not a less capable driver, he is simply in a car which is less well adapted for racing. Women in equestrian events, in which the athletic prowess is that of the horse, compete equally with men. In sport, we judge the skill, resourcefulness and mental fortitude of the athlete as well as the raw physical achievement. This is why we are also interested in disability sport and sub-elite sport.

We prize excellence of course but we compare like with like. So I challenge the disability or 13-year-old comparisons here because women's bodies are not damaged or immature by virtue of being female bodies. We are not Formula 2 or 3 cars, or Formula 1 cars with faults. We are a different type of body and the reason it is less effective at sport is because of the adaptations which allow us to gestate and bear children - the size and shape of our pelvis, for example. We are supposed to be like this, it's not the result of an accident or a medical condition.

Also we aren't men-in-waiting. A 13-year-old boy will experience male puberty, become a man and therefore be able to compete at a much higher level than he can currently. His time will come. Women and girls will never turn into men.

The majority of the sports we play now were designed to show off and hone the skills men are particularly proficient in - based on strength and speed. If sport was all events based on balance and flexibility, perhaps you would be questioning whether it was right for men to have their own categories just because they couldn't compete with women.

You describe it as a “privilege” to have categories which exclude people who might beat us - is that your way of describing fair sport? Fairness is essential to the appeal of sport. As I said above, we compare like with like. Nobody would pay to watch my female cat race and beat Usain Bolt. Except once, maybe, for the novelty appeal. We want to see a battle.

But we do not exclude “people” who might beat us - we exclude men, for the same reason that my cat would be excluded from the men's 100m - there is a clear category division. Clearer than age: children mature at different rates, performance declines at different rates. Clearer than disability, which is a spectrum. Female or male is a clear and immutable distinction. As is cat or human.

Having women's sports, or women's toilets etc is not prioritising women's rights. Men have single sex spaces as well. It's giving us an equal shot.

Regarding handicaps - the male athletic performance advantage is so big because it is an accumulation of many different advantages - strength, greater lean mass, different arrangement of ligaments in the shoulder, more efficient transmission of oxygen to muscles, to name but a few. So how do you calculate how big a head start or disadvantage to give? You can't match men and women for size and strength because a man is stronger than a woman of the same height and weight. You can't match their pelvises. The physiological differences make it too complicated to match the person. So you would have to handicap men using average performance markers from both men and women. Gleaned from ooh, I don't know, women's and men's competitions, perhaps? And if a woman wins the 200m over men who are actually racing 220m, or starting 3 seconds after her, what does that prove? That she is the fastest person in the race? Obviously not. She can only ever be the fastest woman. So what is the point?
Handicapping is an option for some sports but it would be just for the sake of pitting men against women.

I take on board that you are trying to engender discussion but people have already thought about all these things and that is why we have women's categories. The physiological sport advantage men have over women will not change. Therefore women will always need our own categories.

.. that the fastest man is much faster than the fastest* woman

Which, as I understand it, is because we are so dangerous and sneaky and nasty and unkind that we haven't demonstrated or smashed windows or threatened people. We have discussed and argued points and, which proves how horrible we are, we have the law on our side.

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling I was crossly amused that so many commentators and interviewers made a point of asking 'but what about the men who have lost' without adding 'what they shouldn't have been given in the first place'.' I can't think of another case where the victors were asked to consider the people who'd taken their rights away and carry on accepting less, so it strikes me that a lot of transmen don't understand women at all. They're seeing Barbie Dolls. We're seeing the people who will be kind until the moment when they say 'no more.' Maybe no one's ever said no to them before? If so, it's high time they heard the word.

Which, as I understand it, is because we are so dangerous and sneaky and nasty and unkind that we haven't demonstrated or smashed windows or threatened people. We have discussed and argued points and, which proves how horrible we are, we have the law on our side.

indeed. You kind of have to understand it, though, because as soon as you actually start talking about it, gender ideology looks mad, is inconsistent, illogical, and requires nothing but compliance.

This thread has been a case in point. The minute you start talking about the issues and addressing the points, it all falls apart.

Tandora had to have a whole load of made up rules to try and funnel the information in the direction they wanted it. Ignoring all the debate they said they wanted, and characterising disagreement as wrong, respectful or bullying.

As a pro gender critical advert, it couldn't have gone better.

Transactivists really do have fuck all in their arsenal. They're an irrational, misogynistic, violent, demand machine. The only way they have made any headway is through fear and the silencing of women.

It's still all they've got. Attacking Filia, and trying feverishly to censor women on their own board.

fortunately, they've run out of road, and it would appear that now almost everyone can see it.

Tedious crap. Rather than posting on an ostensibly feminist board the OP should just go away and read some feminist theory, learn about gender as a patriarchal social construct, rather than a personal, essentially private identity.

I have to say, I think Tandora's posts are pretty much top tier in terms of a comparison with other attempts to justify the unjustifiable (an end to women's and LGB rights and child safeguarding). Not a high bar.

Tandora said:
"A trans woman is a person who has some observable physical male characteristics but who recognizes self as female."

Person - human child or adult.
Which people have observably male characteristics? Men, boys, men pretending to be women, boys pretending to be girls, women who have taken testosterone, girls who have taken testosterone, and possibly even some normal women (potentially including, depending on how you define "male characteristics" some women, including some very attractive women, with, say, broader shoulders and more straight up and down body than your average woman).
Who recognizes self as female? Delusional men who identify as women, sane women who identify as men but understand the reality of human biology, women. girls.

So, a trans woman is a delusional man who claims a TW identity, plus sane women on testosterone who claim a TM identity, plus women with some masculine characteristics, plus the juvenile equivalent of the three previous groups, plus confused / ill-informed men and boys who have male and female mixed up in their heads so think they're female even though they know they are of the sex that normal men are.

I always though Tandora was prolific at least.

Apparently Tandora admitted to using AI to write posts (I missed this, please can someone tell me which thread this was in?), so this could account for the volume and seemingly articulate (but meaning nothing) word salads that Tandora specialises in.

I was one of the posters quoted in the OP, and TBF, I did post reasonably early on to say I wouldn’t be able to contribute much (if at all) to this thread as I’ve been otherwise busy. I’ve dipped in and out to read though. In all honesty, I see little point posting now. It would only result in a pile-on. It could be similar for other posters.

I have a different view on that - I didn't know he'd originally consulted on the NASWUT guidance for schools which suggested allowing children to use the facilities of their gender identity.

But he has clearly changed his mind since - and people are allowed to change their minds - it's a good thing.

I also don't think its true to say he hasn't fought to change it back given he literally provided a statements to several parliamentary committees arguing that third, gender neutral spaces should be provided alongside single sex spaces.

Most of his writings since in the last 7 years or so are against trans women being allowed in single sex spaces, recognising the importance therapy, arguing against denying biology etc.

On that basis, knowing that years ago he thought trans women should be allowed in female spaces doesn't really change my mind about him.

In fact, the very public change of heart is even more impressive given it seems many GC people still won't accept him as an ally and he has been thoroughly lambasted by a lot of LGBT groups.

I know you probably won't agree with me - but that's fine, because no-one has to agree on everything 100% of the time 🤷‍♀️

"It would only result in a pile-on."

Do you mean to say a lot of posters would reply to your post, possibly to ask questions to clarify your position?

I was interested in the OP’s suggestion - I think it was the OP - that there might be some spaces / events open to people of the same gender / organised by gender rather than same sex.

I am very clear that I prefer single sex environments for females exercising biological functions (women don’t just use loos ‘to pee’) or where they are physically vulnerable or undressed - changing and fitting rooms for example, but I could envisage sharing some experiences/ events with transwomen that I wouldn’t with other men.

For example, if there was to be a hairdressing masterclass in long hair or something of that nature. I would also have no issue with some ( not all groups) I might join being gender organised. If group is menopause related, for example, I’d prefer single sex ( inclusive of transmen) but a charitable or other grouping, I’d not be fussed at the inclusion of a trans person of any gender. I’m very happy to be inclusive and friendly provided that I’m not prejudicing my safety, privacy or dignity by doing so.