Livestream debate with Mia Hughes and Morgane Oger

[unwashedanddazed]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WewreIEBhe4

Only heard a few minutes so far. My he has a deep voice!

Oh I don’t believe for a minute he actually thinks Maya looks like a man at all. There’s no rational thought evident at all. He’s just enjoying the attention.

I agree hows mentioned maya for the responses.

But it is confusing how, on one hand, trans say woman, girl, female has nothing to do with sex, and then, on the other, talk about how their experiences map onto biology of women. Men will say transition gives them a second pubery- therefore they are girls, or because they dont menstruate are post menopausal women.

Here is some more of transcript.

Question: I think in your opening statements you went straight for I think within within the first two minutes maybe you mentioned the Cass review and a bunch of medical literature and studies, and I think that's very important. Because that's what's at the crux of this …ultimately the claim that I've heard about trans becoming trans and gender ideology identity is that there is a mental health crisis and people need gender affirming care to resolve that. And so given that trans identifying people and people who have gone through this program still exhibit three or four times more anxiety and depression than cisgender people, and they are they have a chance of one in three, I believe, of or or it's one in three, have attempted suicide is the statistic, so given that mental health and mental illness still persists, how can we determine this to be the correct course of action in treating the underlying problem.

Mia Hughes: Yeah, we do have a a serious lack of followup research with individuals who've gone through this medical pathway. So it's a it's a remarkable field of medicine and that they perform interventions that have lifelong effects and then they don't bother to follow up at all.

So the limited research that we have short term can show some mental health benefits. There's a honeymoon period typically and then longer term will show higher rates of suicide and mental health issues. So there's not any clear evidence that it improves mental health. The research in the field is weak anyway. So whatever you want to, whatever, when you turn to the research, you don't typically get answers because it's methodologically poor.

But I think what you need to … transgender people, this community is so lump. … It's all lumped together, but it's a very diverse group and it depends what the person's reason for seeking medical transition and the outcome is going to be very different. I personally have not seen any evidence to suggest that this is safe, beneficial in the long term or in any way an appropriate way to treat individuals with a psychological issue. If that answers to your question.

Morgane Oger: Well, I've actually gone through transition, so I have some actual firsthand experience and knowledge and I've spoken to a great many trans people both as an advocate and also in crisis situations and in very challenging legal situations. Here are my observations. On the personal note, I have really noticed that when you're thinking about transitioning, you are thinking about how you can't live like you're living anymore and you… and one day you decide I can't do this anymore and it's really interesting. So, but I transitioned as an adult, okay? I was in my 40s. Many reasons for that. We can have a huge conversation about it. Mostly it was because I never saw room for myself before.

Um I couldn't live like that anymore. That was like the an… the mindset. But at the same time, I was so afraid of what was going to happen because I could see what the world around me was like somewhat hostile. That thing was, you know, somewhere between quite hostile and immensely hostile. If you don't want, if you want to know where the hostility is, go on Twitter and read the comments to me about this event.

Okay. And then read the comments to me about me saying something about that Charlie Kirk guy, right? And just have a look at this at the hostility. Uh cis women also deal with a lot of hostility. Fascinating the hostility towards trans people. Trans women maybe sometimes a surprise that it's going to be that actually seeing hostility towards women. So that's …

Moderator: Can I ask you to bring us back to the question about comorbidities?

Morgane Oger: I am actually.

Moderator: Okay, good.

Morgane Oger: Because people transition because they can't live the way they're living and then they're afraid of how they're going to be treated. And often they're treated worse than they thought they would be treated and they might feel that they if they made it a medical transition, they might feel that they've committed to something they can't roll back. And some people start to realize, my goodness, this is not, this aspect is making my life even harder because people are so awful to me.

Everybody who has experienced discrimination, I think, knows what I'm talking about that life can be just awful from discrimination or from the perceived expectation of discrimination. And some people start to react to the intensity of the negativity in a downward spiral. And I have seen this for some people do this. Um, however, I've also seen that statistically, uh, I very few, not very few, a minority, like less than one tenth of people I know have have expressed to me that their lives were worse except for the social aspects of their lives, the way they are treated, the way they are looked at and things like this.

And when I speak with mental health specialists about the phenomenon, the phenomenon that we kind of land on, isn't that the core morbidities were necessarily the same. So we're when we're talking about why, why mental health degrades for trans people, it comes from societal injury basically.

And then the question is and has been a really interesting question for a long long time which is, do we treat, do we deny treatment that will make lives better to a degree? Do we deny those people treatment if they have comorbidity? Do we say, you can't because you're limping, and you can't because you're on the spectrum, and you can't because you're, uh because of you know, whatever things, and and and the mental health providers they struggle with this. Because there's a vast difference between being on the spectrum and having psychotic episodes.

Moderator: Yeah. I'm going to cut you off just because I see the line is long.

Oger's answer above is so me me me me me!

It shows very little curiosity or concern about children's experiences at all. And yet claims to be the voice of authority.

It doesn't at all address the lack of evidence. It is remarkable to see the differences in this debate.

You aren't listening. As @nauticant said. 'Then how come in the case of Kimberly Nixon, Vancouver Rape Relief won at both the British Columbia Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada in being allowed to exclude him from working at the service as a counsellor?
Even in Canada, some forms of discrimination against trans people are permitted by the law.'

Do you think women shouldn't have the right to discuss their sex-based trauma away from men? Sex, not gender.

Absolutely how is unfailing in that regard

[Warning - I might be showing my prejudices against a style of music and the people who play it in this post]

Is it me or is there something about many middle-aged, likely-paraphilic men who claim to be women? Do they often look exactly like the sort of weird-looking man who, back in the 1980s, had one hope in life as far as women go other than to grow his hair, put on a leather jacket, and get on stage as part of a metal band?

Thanks!

Are you Gadigal?
Genuine question.

I wanted him to shut his cake hole more. On and on he went. Did enjoy watching Mia’s face though.

More of the transcript :

Question: Simon Kiss, professor of political science here at Laurier and I have two questions. One to Morgane, although you touched on a little bit but maybe if you wanted to expand on it be okay. In the spirit of curiosity maybe you could share with us like what it is like to be a pre-transition … pre-transition male and what the feelings are like and what drives a person to transition in that way. I'm not sure all of us know and I'm a bit mystified. So it would be productive if you could share with us.

And then my second question is to both of you and it's a question about the charter of rights and freedoms. So there is a big debate about whether the charter, uh, is actually the best way to protect or a judicially enforcable bill of rights is actually the best way to protect individual rights liberties in Canada. And the case is not entirely clear.

I actually was reasonably happy to see glimmers of compromise or uh a common ground there in your conversation. And I wonder if in your observation of how this policy is being played out and it's going to be litigated in the charter and it's going to be inflected by rights talk and I wonder if we might be better off if this policy was being brokered by elected politicians who are in the business of talking to people and finding compromise and making tradeoffs rather than judges.

Mia Hughes: I don't think the courts are the best place for this and I don't think we need I fear that we're heading for individual cases just being fought battled here and there. However, politicians are the ones who got us in this mess in the first place. So the very idea that they would get us out of it I'm going to push back on that.

The Canadian tradition on things like abortion, gay marriage has been to just kick it to the courts. And I think a critic would say that legislators have been more than happy to let the courts take charge because they're, they don't have the courage to do it. Um, and which I'm saying that I'm not saying I prefer one outcome or the other, but let's assume a world where politicians have the courage to grapple. I think that's the sphere of the question.

Would that be a better world? Yeah, I think it would. I think it, it's hard to once it's once this concept is written into law, it's very hard to to change it. But I think if politicians can face up to the fact that they supported something they didn't understand, they wrote something into law that was incoherent and completely conflicting with the rights of half of the population. I think, yeah, if they had
the courage to face that and put it right I don't think it's an impossible situation I think it could be put right but everyone has to start from reality not with the incoherency.

Morgane Oger: speaking of reality versus perception I think it's important to talk about the reality about how human rights law gets put in. Having quite a bit of specific knowledge about how bills, how gender identity or expression was protected, it took 20 years. The first time it was considered, I believe, was in 1905 and then again in 19 a little bit later on like in 19 uh 10 and then again in 19, in 2015 sorry 2010 and 2015. Three elections, you know, three parties promised on this to try to get elected. One party won an election on this
amongst others. Gender identity or expression was before parliament for well over a decade in the books being debated.

This is not exactly, it's not exactly truthful to pretend that Canadians woke up one day and then there were trans people around here and the protection from discrimination. It's a little in this dis disingenuous.

It might have been a surprise to you. You might not have been here when this was happening. I don't know. But trans people have been fighting for equality in British Columbia and in Canada since the 1970s. Slowly turning the crank.

And we very very very slowly after reams and reams and reams of paper were wetted with ink. finally got uh our our you know equal, equal protection from explicitly protect prohibited discrimination which is a tiny tiny protection. It's protection in the workplace, protection in services, protection in statistics and consideration in hate crimes law. Okay.

So, so your answer is that in fact legislators have had their say. They had an enormous amount of say and like a mature democracy does, the legislators negotiated a law over a decade to a point that's super simple. The same rights as religion, the same rights has all kinds of other explicitly prohibited grounds of discrimination.

I'm not done. We put it to the courts just like we put all the other rights.

Moderator: And this is strictly not to put my finger on the scale. I just got other people and you have a second question to answer.

Morgane Oger: I do. What's it like?

Moderator: And then Mia has the right of herself this whole thing. And I I it's weird to sum up your whole life story in like 60 seconds. But I'm going to ask you to do that.

Morgane Oger: Like uh for for 30 years I I thought that maybe I could somehow managed to not be stuck as a guy, stuck the way I
was living, but I couldn't imagine how it was possible. All of the examples before me were examples that were very very clear cautionary tales about what happens to you if you try this. And then in the end over time, especially through my 30s, the the this conflict in my heart kept getting worse and worse and worse. And then I had children and I thought, okay, that'll sort me out. to just have children and and be the good caregiving daddy to my kids and everything was fine. And then one day I snapped.

I think basically is what I would say. I snapped. And I snapped when my daughter was telling me about how people were being mean to her about something or other in elementary school. And I caught myself telling her, you know, as long as you're true to who you are, you're going to be fine. And then I like the thing that the thought that overwhelmed me was not like I'm being right that I am not being true to myself like that's who I am.

And then that's created that was like the, the, cut for me. Uh was it a, a, break? Was it a mental health crisis? I wouldn't say so at all. The vast majority of trans people aren't in a mental health crisis. The vast majority of people just figure out who they are. Figure out I'm not like this guy over there. I'm like more like this guy over here. (Points to Mia Hughes)

Moderator: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Uh, and I appreciate that was concise and also very evocative. I appreciate that. Uh, Mia, right of rebuttal, not to the second part, but the first part.

Mia Hughes: Yeah, just a quick. So, when I'm talking, I understand that the that that the trans identified community had been fighting for their rights for for decades leading up to the gender identity movement. But that the concept of gender identity is very new. And like Denovo said in her memoir, no one knew what they were supporting. Nobody looked at nobody looked closely.

And we even know that from uh another person present in the early days, Robert Wintermute, who professor of human rights law at King's College, London. He was a signatory of the Yogyakarta principles in 2006, which is the blueprint for modern transactivism. It's enshrine gender identity or it was how nations could enshrine gender identity into law. And he was in Yogyakarta in Indonesia in that meeting and he said I think in 2021 he said nobody was thinking about women.

There were trans activists in the room and they said this is what we need. We need protection on gender identity and everybody in the room said okay this is what you need. We'll give it to you. They didn't think about women. They didn't think about the LGB. They just did what the activists asked.

And I think it was partly because it came right on the back of gay rights and it looked a lot like gay rights and it just looked like another vulnerable oppressed minority seeking equality. So yes, it's true that there was a movement before, but the gender identity movement came along very very fast, got put into law without anyone understanding it.

Morgane Oger: I would like to clarify.

Moderator: No, no, sorry.

Morgane Oger: clarify something to clarify.

Moderator: Roll it into the next.

Morgane Oger: I remember being in …

Moderator: Morgan. No, no, no. Morgan, I'm going to have to move on to the next question because look at them. They're all standing up. You're sitting down. Next question….

So you are cool with raped women having no space from males to deal with your trauma and you are cool with intimidation and abuse of organisations that recognise the distress of being forced to share trauma support with males and have tried to protect themselves women?

If so, it says just how much contempt you hold vulnerable women in and I have nothing further to add to my absolute disgust.

What are these other characteristics that aren't reproductive characteristics?

Morgane Oger has a daughter???

I know! I thought that too....

I wonder if she ever gets to have her voice heard? Or is just talked over.

I feel that may be a rhetorical question :/

Christ, the poor lass.

More....

Question: so in the phrase transwomen are women, what does the word ‘women’ mean? Does what women mean? What does the word women mean in that in that phrase?

Morgane Oger: So, are we talking about a legal text here or an identity question?

Question: I guess what does it mean to you?

Morgane Oger: So, to me, well, when I when I'm asked what is a woman, boy, that's not a trap question, is it? So, to me, what a woman is is a person who says and knows she's a woman. What does it mean under the law? Does it mean no?

Moderator: No. No. But it doesn't. …

Morgane Oger: It's really interesting.

Moderator: a lot about the law. But yeah, but under Yeah,

Morgane Oger: but the law is a protection of people, right? So really interesting thing is you see we we we we talked about gender identity movement, right? But it could have just been a belief system. Transness is protected under the belief system under the protection of religion, which is a really interesting one. So for me, what a trans person is a as a person.

So a woman is a person who functions in society as a woman.

There are um numerous aspects of women who do not function in society in under the comprehensive list of what females function in society under, ( he says as an aside to Mia: now you're you have to wait on that one.)

Uh is sex uh a defining or fun or foundational aspect of being a woman? I would say it's foundational. I would say it's not defining. There's lots of people who will say no sex is what's the difference between defining and foundational? I would say that the assumption of a woman is a list of things.

You know, a woman uh is a fertile person in her fertile age. A woman uh is a person who is physically statistically smaller than a
man. A woman is a person of a certain life expectancy, of a certain physical appearance and things like this. A woman is also a person of a certain meta role.

You could say women you you can generally scan the room and get a 70% hit on who the women are in the room. And this is how you define it. To me, that's how that's how I see it.

But at the same time, it doesn't matter how uh you in the blue shirt who ask a question sees me. It doesn't and it doesn't matter how I see you. Really, it's it only matters if we're going to interact, right?

If we interact, it matters that I'm a woman and I see myself as a woman and that he sees himself he. I presume this person sees themselves. I'll presume it's a he. So, it's a question of it's a question of courtesy and functioning as well as it is a question of what society considers purpose.

Moderator: Mia

Mia Hughes: Well, come on.

Morgane Oger: Go on. I had to answer your answer.

Moderator: It was a question. What is it?

Mia Hughes: Well, I don't think it was directed at me. Of course, it's an adult human female. There's no other definition.

Morgane Oger: But but what is that? I'm an adult human female in Canada legally. Adult human female. Okay.

Mia Hughes: No, no, no.

Morgane Oger: Oh, okay. So now, so go deeper.

Mia Hughes: Okay. Well, first of all, the the crucial part is female. Um, a female is a person of the sex that Let me see if I can get female. Let me see if I can get Heather Hing's excellent definition. So, a female is a person of the sex that
does that can or will or would or could produce large gametes.

Morgane Oger: And that's relevant how in our society?

Mia Hughes: I'm just saying you're asking me to define adult, human, female. It's very clear. An adult is somebody who has reached full sexual maturity. Human don't need to define. And then female has a very clear definition.

But I want to go back to your your definition because I always find this fascinating. A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. It's just this. It's just this circle.

Morgane Oger: Absolutely. like a Christian or European identifies as …

Mia Hughes: Pretend that I'm from I don't know another planet and I've never heard the word woman before.
Tell me what is a woman without using the word woman in the definition.

Morgane Oger: A woman is a person like me.

Moderator: Okay, but let's say the space alien. You know what? I'm going to leave this alone.

Morgane Oger: No, I think I think it's really interesting that the the foundational definition of being a woman is something that no one in this room is able to produce a proof of. It's a little interesting…

Mia Hughes: adult human female. It's the simplest. It's the simplest definition.

Morgane: a stream of incoherent babbling nonsense

Mia: three words - adult human female

A woman is a person of a certain life expectancy

If a man 'transitions' to a woman, does he gain the statistical advantage that women in almost all countries have of living longer?
If not, why not?

You are a heroine for fetching the transcript and posting it, Helleofabore.
What a contrast - Mia Hughes' presentation is rational, analytic and insightful. Informed by history, clear and comprehensive. Oger's is just me me me, basically.

That’s hilarious. Are you always this funny?

Always so ridiculous to hear these inseminators refer to themselves as female.

More and fuck, this is fucked up. Mia swerves from the sports question. Oger speaks with no evidence supporting his answer at all. And then on detransition, the %s that Oger presents are incorrect and have been incorrect for a long time. It has been shown to be much higher in studies since before the massive increase in numbers. No country has tracked the numbers since the massive increase in numbers, there is only anecdotal evidence at the moment. The one study that was proposed in the UK was not approved do to accusations of it being transphobic.

Question: I just want very direct answers about two topics. Uh, one is sports. Um, and the other one is detransitioners. Um, how do they fit into your kind of mental framework there?

Moderator: Uh, Mia, why don't you take this one first?

Mia Hughes: Uh, sure. Are you anyone familiar with my work knows that I almost never talk about sports. It's just not my issue. To me, it's just so completely absurd that anyone could ever think that males could fairly compete against females in a sporting in most sporting um categories. So, it's ludicrous. Um it's a sign of how completely mad our society has gone that we ever even tolerated it for a moment.

Detransition? Oh, goodness me. I could go on for a long time. I spend my days with detransitioners. I talk to detransitioners
all the time.

Moderator: Sorry to interrupt. Could we just get a definition? Because sometimes you hear detransition and sometimes you hear the word desistence.

Mia Hughes: A detransitioner is somebody who identified as transgender and then went through the gender medicine pathway,
medically altered their body in some way with hormones and surgeries and then at the end of it realized that it was a mistake. They're not transgender and they stop medicalization.

Then a desister is somebody who identified as transgender but did not medicalize. and then dr then then stopped identifying as transgender. And a lovely dransitioner that I recently interviewed gave me a great distinction between detransitioners as well. There's
um she she has ideological detransition and medical detransition and they're not the same thing. So some people can medically dransition but not ideologically. They still actually believe themselves to be transgender and they can't let go of that belief and they'll often end up landing at non-binary because they can't quite come back to realizing that it was all a lie.

And then the medical detransition or the ideological detransition they just they some will they realize that it was all a lie but they've gone medically too far. Many of the detransitioners I talk to will say there is no such thing as detransition. If a if a young man's had
his penis chopped off, he's not detransitioning. There's no going back from that. So, he's ideologically deransitioned, but medically there's nothing to be done. And I think we saw an explosion of young people identifying as transgender starting around 2014 2015. And I think on a long enough timeline we the the the graphs of detransition will mirror that because all of these young people they were just lost and confused and they were sold medical body modification as the remedy for their difficulties. And so I think we're looking at a wave of them coming there. Well, the first wave is here. The second wave is here.

Moderator: Morgan, uh sports. I’m curious actually if you lump sports because you did say there were a few categories where biological sex was sort of predominant. Uh and then the other topic was detransition and again uh trying to be concise just because we still have about half a dozen people.

Morgane Oger: So sports fascinating true fact uh genetic males are a disadvantage of sport up until what uh partway through their uh puberty and then puberty kicks in and then they um they they you know when we're talking about advantage of course in the power and strength sports the advantage shows up at around 12 to 14. So actually the question more interestingly is what is the purpose of sports?

Why are there women's sports and girls sports? And the reason there's girl sports was because uh global organizations like the UN and the precursor to the UN discovered that uh that girls were like just not getting exercise and they were not getting exercise because they because girls doing sports wasn't culturally supported at the time.

And so there was a push to to to to basically to encourage girls to do sports in order to get better outcomes later on in their lives. And that was the reason sports was brought into girls at at in that time a long long long time ago. Now, uh the purpose of sports of course is fitness and inclusion and and being active and teaching competition and fairness, right? And then over time you have an
interesting problem which is is there an inherent uh is there an inherent advantage in certain sports based on physiology, right? And what do we do about that?

So here we we go into a really interesting conversation about elite sports with versus average sports and another conversation about safety versus uh versus um uh inclusion. And uh there are some sports like for example let's talk about boxing and you know the fighting sports where they have weight classes. the weight classes are intended to be a reflection of reach and things like this. And they have those things to keep people of a similar capability in a similar cluster.

Um, and you have also other sports like rugby where it's always fascinating to look at rugby and uh soccer and to look at uh the the natural distributions of of sex and weight and strength and then to look at who the athletes are and to look at the athletes and they're nowhere near on the normal. They're all on the freak side.

Always elite our elite as athletes are on the exceptional end of bring us around to the question though the exceptional end of sports is one where you get your advantage from being exceptional and then the question I think it's a really interesting question is in is being trans and uh you know how do we manage fairness in a place where you can be extraordinarily exceptional if you're uh non non non-medically transitioned trans person in sports?

So, a non-medically transitioned athlete in women's sport could be on the freakishly high, freakishly tall, freakishly strong scale for a male body. And is that not fair? And is that just dangerous? And some arguments have been made. Absolutely. which is why we require the people in the sports to have a certain range of hormones, a certain range of certain physiological characteristics.

The way out of the problem with sports isn't to ban a demographic because that's unfair and it's just bad bad practice to ban people. What you do is you come up with the the the the population is you're in this class or you're in this class.

Moderator: like testosterone limit

Morgane Oger: testosterone limit or maybe I don't know strength limits. You know maybe, uh you know, this is the league for people who can do a certain thing and this is a league for people can't and this is the open.

Okay so fun fact, medical transition versus non-medical transition, transition one, two, um, transition because ‘it wasn't me’, versus transition because ‘society was so awful to me when I was trans’. ‘I decided I couldn't stand it versus permanent and not permanent.’

These are different factors. Medical detransition 1/3 of a percent to 1% rate is what today?

Internal international meta analyses show, which include Canadian centers, show 0.3 to 1% permanent reversal or regret after gender affirming surgery. Objective data from studies trumps people talking to me every time.

Moderator: So So you're saying it's very rare.

Morgane Oger: It's it's it's quite rare. We have other data, regrets data, because transition, medical transition, we ask ourselves what regrets going to look like. And I have experienced I've I've seen victims of medical regret from a medical transition and how it messes with them. It's pretty awful to go through something like transition, physical transition, getting getting your genitals reformatted. They're not destroyed, they're reformatted, but the reversal is extraordinarily difficult. So, but nothing is chopped off except that okay, the testes or the ovaries are chopped off, but you could reconstruct that stuff if you really wanted to. So, let's get, you know, but regardless …

Moderator: Reformatted is what you do to a disc.

Morgane Oger: I mean, well, no, it's, you know, uh you could, you know what, there are videos online about how you do bottom uh surgery and we're not watching those. Anyhow, it's so it's it's really really gory. I've almost done and you keep on talking about

Moderator: No, no. I'm I'm going to be evenhanded here and say you both have to stop. That was a good long answer. And no more double questions.

Oger by name, ogre by nature.