"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.

Don't forget:

No debate!
Be kind!

They weren’t all trans until Stonewall tried to stay relevant and changed the definition.

Now it doesn’t matter if you’re transsexual, have a raging fetish or a confused and vulnerable teenager, they’re all the same now 🙄

It's also such a stupid argument/position to take.

Lots of conditions or disorders have always been here, doesn't mean society has to indulge them!

Indeed. And they're all what, iirc, Helen Joyce calls "thought-terminating clichés".

I agree OP, it is the new rallying cry. One TRA said it first and now they're all repeating it because they think it sounds like such a catchy mantra.

The implication is that we meanie women only began to notice transpeople in 2017 or thereabouts. That a manufactured panic started around that time, driven by the far right. Or fundamentalist Christians. Or JKR. Or something.

No. We know men who present as women have been around for a long time in one guise or another. Sorry fellas. You're nothing new and you're nothing special. My gran remembered a few in her spaces, way back when. Some men have always tried to go where they're not wanted. Women stood up to them back then and we're standing up to them now.

For this statement to be true, they have to twist the experience of the historical homosexual male people too. The ones who were expected to be put into a different group because they were attracted to the same sex or both sex.

This was often because of a homophobic society in that country / region at that time. These people and their oppression have been politically leveraged to prove this statement.

Yes, the leveraging of historic women who resorted to deception that they were men, such as James Barry and there were two female soldiers in the Civil War iirc, is appalling.

The oppression of these women gets completely erased with this false claim.

These women wanted to do things that, for the era, they could not do without being male so they did what they had to do to have access to opportunities that were closed to them. Yet, activists have completely changed their history to suit the activists political aims of support a claim that there have always been people with transgender identities.

It is just more misogyny for these historic women.

I mean in biblical times everyone wore a dress.

Every culture has:

people who believe it's possible for some special people to speak to the dead or cross back from death.

people who believe it's possible for some special people to perform both reproductive roles or cross between one sex and the other.

people who believe it's possible for some special people to communicate with or transform into animals or other natural elements.

people who believe it's possible for some special people to predict the future.

people who believe it's possible for some special people to do magic.

How these beliefs are expressed is cultural. Sometimes they are the mainstream beliefs codified into religion and ritual roles. Sometimes they are the core mysteries of mystics, heretics and cults. Sometimes they are not generally believed but indulged in friends as a personal harmless eccentricty. Sometimes they are treated as proof madness. But the core beliefs arise again and again.

Does the fact they occur so often in different cultures mean all these things are actually real?

I would say the reason these themes occur in every culture is simply because every culture is aware of sex, death and the natural world, wishes it could be certain about the future and could harness a free source of power or comfort.

These are things that have been us throughout our history, both familiar as, well, family yet also divides we cannot cross, experiences we can imagine but never know. Of course they have become go to symbols and metaphors in our cultures and religions. And by the same token, they are potent symbols and projections for our own subconscious.

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.

I totally agree with this @5128gap

Yes, also this. In some cultures including our own, homosexuality was considered a difference / degeneration in sex. (Very like the TRA concept of sex being a spectrum actually.)

The interweaving of gender crossing and gay culture is not new. The Molly houses as one example.

The thing that I find odd is the insistence on dragging all seemingly related things (from all over the world), out of their original frames of reference, and shoehorning them in the One Frame Of Reference all things must be looked at within. Without even starting to go into the colonising and cultural appropropriating it's a bluddy funny version of post modernism in its erasing of context, and seems to me to indicate a lack of ability to think flexibly.
Or an opportunistic hoovering up of anything and everything to try and bolster an argument.
Which could it be? So very puzzling. (both!)

I see it over and over agin here, where women are discussing their rights in the frames of reference of their choosing and some one gallops along on an extra high equine and tries to insist on dragging everyone into their frame of reference because it is the only one that is Really True and Kind, and all the nasy wims need to be told how nasty they are for saying no thanks, we're using this one.

It just means all the other people in all the other ages have been dealing with the same batshitery we're dealing with. 🤪

"Mental delusion has always been here!"

Well, yes, but we don't have to change society in order to play along.

A man thinks he's a particular woman, ie Cleopatra? He's deluded.
A man thinks he's a woman? Stunning and brave. Shut up bigots! 🙄

Yes , I'm seeing it a lot too.

Unfortunately, after years of tra bile and guff, my only response is So Fucking What?

No human has ever changed sex, and it seems very unlikely that any human ever will.

In the 16th century some people claimed to be made of glass. They weren't believed and kept in fucking cabinets.

This, absolutely. We also denied that they had a right to women-only spaces.

In the 16th century some people claimed to be made of glass. They weren't believed and kept in fucking cabinets.

One of them did manage to rule France though 😆

I think the point is transgenderism isn't a modern 'invention' or 'contagion' as is alleged.

A related theme is that trans identifying males have always used female facilities without women and girls noticing. Because of course they pass so readily. Though somehow have also been noticed, hence all the discrimination and danger.

Totally. Bless them for thinking they pass.

But also:

"Male bodied people Trans women have always used female spaces and the women don't complain to us when we do!"

Well, yes. Women have learnt not to confront men, over the centuries. Fuckwits 🙄

Well, yes. What's different is their insistence that society, and the law, and women, must change to accommodate them. And their argument that "We have always been here!" is somehow supposed to strengthen their demand for everyone else to play into their delusion.

It's both. Yes there have always been transsexual and tranvestite people, but:

1. The grouping of them under the same "transgender" umbrella is a modern invention.
2. There are plenty of people, young women in particular, who delude themselves into thinking they are transgender because of a social contagion phenomenon.

I’d never heard of that so I went to look it up. Just goes to show that the delusions we see today are nothing new

You are claiming that there're people out there who'll believe anything.

Yes, every culture has these people, who'll believe anything.

Yes. and:

1. Trans people, especially females, seem to have higher rates of diagnosed autism than the general public.