"Trans people have always been here!"

[GoldenBracelet]

God I'm tired of reading "Trans people have always been here!", like it's some kind of unarguable gotcha 🙄

Yes, there have always been men who think they are women.
No, they have never been women.

See also women who think they're men.

My personal issue with this is that it tries to make history conform to modern day descriptions and values.

Yes there have always been transvestites, yes there probably has been men that have AGP. Yes there have been drag acts for a long time and male actors that played female parts.

But non of them should be shoe horned in to the modern day description of transgender.

They probably have but I don't see the relevance to the discussion going on today. Literally nobody I know denies that being gender dysphoric (narrow category), or 'being trans' (broad category) exists as a human condition or way of living.

Whether trans people have existed since time immemorial, or if they all popped into being in the past decade, the question still remains: is it best to organise society's segregated spaces according to sex, or gender identity?

Well there's that too. But "We have always been here!" seems to be the newest rallying cry. Retrofitting history has been going on for a while.

And women who wouldn’t submit to the constraints their society tried to impose on them.
Though even then they’re often being viewed through the distorting lens of today’s assumptions.

Yes. Obviously. I know that. Here I am on this board.

I'm just discussing an expression I am seeing from trans identified men as the new gotcha #nodebate.

You know it's not a good argument. I know it's not a good argument. We both know there are no good arguments for delusion. I'm just discussing what they're saying.

I wasn't having a go at you, I was agreeing with you

😳

In my defence, I am getting over a virus and am a bit tetchy. Hence this thread 😆

No problem, I probably came over tetchy - I'm in a bad mood because I've had to miss out on my works Xmas party I've been looking forward to for ages!

Yep, transexual people have always been about, people with a condition so severe that only extreme body modification brings relief.
Pretty sure there have always been transvestites too.
Somehow, the two got lumped together.

Oh yes, it can't be that a woman was a warrior or a scientist, she must have thought she was a man! 🙄

Indeed. And obvs they're claiming all men who ever wore a dress and a wig.

Even the ones they claim have “led the way” like Marsha P Johnson was just a self-proclaimed drag queen. They’re desperate men looking for a justification to exist.

I think TRAs really believe that GC people deny that trans people exist. It's like a straw man:

GC people deny trans people's existence don't they! But guys honestly we've been around forever.

Who cares? You still have to present an argument for gender identity trumping biological sex.

Yes, transvestites have been co-opted. Wasn't there a MN thread recently about Where have all the transvestites gone?

There have been people with gender dysphoria, and I feel for them.

This does not affect my opinion that sometimes sex matters.

Around 10 years ago or so, the effort began to totally decouple gender dysphoria as any kind of criteria for being trans, and the focus turned to gender identity as an inner feeling, rather than physical appearance or recognition of women as female people, as the defining factor into what made someone - literally - a woman.

Lots of things have always been here, LBG people, left handed people, people who are bipolar, people who are depressed…
only trans people want to take away another groups rights and freedoms.

Yes, it is usually a non-gotcha whuch follows the claim that people are denying/debating trans people's existence. Ummm nope. We know you exist. That doesn't mean we believe you can change sex.

We GC feminists have never denied that trans identified males exist. However we do deny that they are women.

There might have been, dunno. The distinction between TV and TS is crucial but now overlooked

Really? Where is the evidence for this? I know there were always sex fetishists, including those men who got off on wearing/ stealing women’s underwear. This was strongly disapproved of in the past. But I never heard of men having themselves castrated etc except in rare cases of very severe mental illness.

There have always been men who wanted to be women, and women who wanted to be men. But I doubt there were many men who thought they really were women, and women who thought they really were men, until society decided that was an acceptable belief to hold.

I was in on the scene in the 80s and afterwards. There were the TS people with real dysphoria as they would call it now and the TVs, far more numerous and generally hetero men wanting to dress as women.

Its annoying because it's purpose seems to be to pretend that the protests against the threat to women's rights are just a bunch of spiteful women deciding to sudenly make a fuss about something that's always been the case and never hurt anyone.
There has always been trans people really means "men with trans identities have always used women's toilets, changed in our changing rooms, shared our prison cells and refuges, competed against us in sports, and until some awful women decided to target them, no one was any the wiser, because they were indistinguishable from 'other women' and no one was harmed."
It uses a possible truth, to obscure the lie that we have always lived in a world where any man who feels like it can declare himself a woman, enter any woman's space he chooses and women can get sacked/arrested for hate crime if they protest or refuse to call him she.
There may always have been trans people, but TIM have not always had permission ride rough shod over women's rights. This is a fairly recent thing, and this is the thing that matters, not how far back we can trace the existence of people who may have had a trans identity.

They sure do like their slogans:

Trans rights are human rights!
Trans women are women!
Trans people exist!