"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.

Sure, just like the way people of colour, women & gay people insisted society & the law must change to accommodate them as self determination being a universal human requirement demands.

There's no evidence of social contagion yet. What's probably confused for a contagion is the internet allowing for a better understanding & acceptance of the phenomenon that encouraged visibility just like it did for gay people, people with autism, people with mental illness etc.

Where is the self-determination in being a person of colour, a woman, or a gay person? These are observable facts, not something that a person self-determines. On the contrary, having a gender identity is an unprovable claim. At best, what can be observed is the taking of measures (medical treatments, cosmetic measures to try to pass as the opposite sex), but that in itself is not reason enough to grant special rights to anyone.

Moreover, people of colour, women and gay people need special legal accommodations because they have historically been discriminated against by virtue of an innate trait they cannot help having. Trans people are not discriminated against: they have all the same rights and protections as anyone else.

There's plenty of evidence of social contagion, especially among young, often neurodiverse women. The simple fact that you can find several trans-identifying young people among small friends or classmates groups is a blatant evidence of it. The study of different cohorts of trans people over the decades also shows a massive change in who identifies as trans, which points directly to social contagion among some particularly vulnerable and confused populations.

Psychological conditions/dispositions not being observable don't make them any less real particularly given their behaviours are observable & society has long made accommodations for these sorts of phenomena.

And the fact is trans people aren't discriminated against is patently false.

Which psychological conditions does society make legal accommodations for?

Which rights don't trans people have, that other people have?

If the rise in numbers is just down to increasing social acceptance and wider awareness of other people, where are all the middle aged women identifying as trans men “coming out” to match the huge jump in rates for girls identifying as trans?

If it is simply an innate phenomenon like left handedness, there is no reason that the rates of occurrence should be different amongst middle aged women vs teenage girls.

If on the other hand, there is social contagion involved, and teenagers with who are scared of puberty and becoming a woman, or with autism or ADHD ascribing all their problems and feeling different to being “not really a girl so I must be a boy” then we would expect to see EXACTLY the huge explosion in numbers of girls identifying as trans that we have seen.

Teenaged girls are extremely susceptible to social contagion, it is a well documented psychological phenomenon.

https://bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up

I found this analysis of "trans" as a cultural phenomenon to be a compelling read.

Not only have transgender people not always been here - the concept and the word are recent - but they also rewrite history shamelessly to falsify the record.

Take the Stonewall Riots in NYC in 1969, taken as the starting point for the modern lesbian and gay movement - transpeople claim that it was started by 'transwomen'. A previous poster referenced Marsha P Johnson, who was a gay man, not a transwoman. The men who frequented the Stonewall Bar were men. Gay men. They went there to meet other men.
There was a 'drag' subculture there, and some of the gay men were drag performers, and wore make-up, and referred to each other as 'she', but they were not claiming to be women.

One legend has it that it was actually a lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, who started the famous riots, which is about as far from a trans-identifying man as you can get! But whoever started the Stonewall Riots, one thing is sure: it was not a transwoman.

The trans movement co-opted the Stonewall Riots, and covered the actual bar with trans flags, which was deeply offensive to the lesbian and gay community for whom it was an important location.
[They have since been removed, I'm glad to say].

An even more shameless example was the photoshopping of a trans slogan onto the photo of the first lesbian and gay march in Ireland in 1983, which was in memory of a murdered gay man.

Apart from the obvious anachronism - 'transgender' didn't exist in 1983- the disrespect shown to the murdered man and his family and friends by hijacking this memorial event is disgusting.

I'm sure others can come up with examples of TRAs rewriting and falsifying history to put trans in where it never was, to try to back up the 'trans people have always been here' claim.

Adding the T to LGB has exacerbated this: anything or anybody lesbian, gay, or bisexual, even from centuries ago, is now anachronistically labelled 'LGBT.'

LGB✂T, ASAP, in the interests of historical accuracy, as well as everything else!

DB's partner recently did a craft fair and printed loads of tote bags saying "save trans kids"

It made me pause for a minute, because I agree with the sentiment, but probably not the execution that the slogan is trying to portray.

I'd love to save trans kids from an ideology that they were born in the wrong body, from puberty blockers and from irreversible surgery. I didn't say anything though incase I got shot.

Ah, ah but you're forgetting the two spirit indigenous people's across the pre-colonial America's.

This keeps getting shoved down my throat by DB and I am colonialist for erasing them from history. 🙄

and:

”I think TRAs really believe that GC people deny that trans people exist.”

Exactly, this is the argument that makes no sense to me. No one denies that people with dysphoria or who didn’t ‘fit’ the gender stereotypes, or who got a thrill from cross dressing, exist. Of course they exist. It’s such a silly thing to say.

We are denying the delusion that anyone can change sex, or that you can be born in the ‘wrong body’. Being a woman isn’t a feeling, it’s a biological reality.

Well, Christmas is coming @Jimmyneutronsforehead so why not buy them an Adult Human Female t-shirt each

Aha, I have some plain tote bags myself and the meals to print and stick vinyl on them and I had considered doing an adult human female with Pete the Plumber on them.

My brother keeps having these moments where he almost peaks, almost. He's 10 years younger than me, so only a young adult, and I keep trying to cut him some slack because at 20 I was very impressionable too, but I sometimes think Pete the plumber might land really well.

From this analysis:

"People are conscious of the way they are classified, and they alter their behavior and self-conceptions in response to their classification."

Ooh boy, does that speak to me!

I've always had a "mental map" of my body as that of a male - but!

When I was 6, my mother enrolled us into a fundamentalist Christian church, where I was actively endoctrinated into understanding that, "I'm a girl, I will grow up to be a young woman, then a woman who will get married to a man and have babies." Well, okay then. I mixed that and my self-perception and came out with, "I'm a tomboy!" Worked well enough in that environment.

Years passed. I left the church. Later I cut contact with my mother - at which point I asked myself, "What am I, if I don't have to be what my mother wanted me to be?" Immediately, the answer came: "First things first: I'm a man!" - because my mental map hadn't changed.

But it's only because "transsexual" is described precisely as "a man in a female body" in our culture that I then took on that identity. If it were something else, some other concept, that were associated with my feeling, I would have adopted that other concept instead.

So yeah, that really speaks to me as a trans person.

What makes me angry about this is they are trying to erase some amazing women from history. There was the woman who pretended to be a man to be a dr Margaret Anne Bulkley who went by James Barry- her Wikipedia page claims she was hermapredite. I’ve seen it claimed Joan of arc was trans. These were women limited in what they could do in their time because they were women, they dressed as men to achieve great things as they couldn’t achieve these things female. But no woman can’t have impressive history, just like all the science breakthroughs stolen from us by men these woman had to have really been men to make such achievements. Boils my blood

Most people think that when you say "trans person" you mean what would have previously been called a transsexual - someone that wants to be the opposite sex and have others see them as such.

Whereas the definition now includes those with the belief that there are gender identities, that each of these either matches or doesn't match a sex, and that any mismatch (or no gender) makes you transgender.

What a gender identity is isn't clear - the characteristics that you believe everyone in one sex to have and none in the other; the desire to be one or the other sex or neither, various traits relating to cultural masculinity or femininity and nothing to do with the body, etc etc.

Either way you have these people, the people who don't have a gender identity, the old-school TSs and many others now under the name of "trans".

The situation currently with women’s rights is not actually comparative to those examples. ’people of colour, women & gay people’ wanted, and rightly, equal opportunities and equitable outcomes when compared to other races, men and heterosexual people.

Some of those people with transgender identities are demanding that they get additional privileges compared to other people. They want not just access to the opportunities and services for their own sex, but also for the opposite sex. They also have demanded that they are treated as something they are materially not as they are not the opposite sex, or no sex in the case of non-binary people.

This group of people already have access to same rights as everyone else in the UK. Unlike the groups you referred to in the past.

I am not convinced it's even true.

I don't think the differernt examples of people "living as" the other sex historically were ever actually believing they were the other sex, nor were other people in those societies. And the social rules for them, in every instance I have seen, were differernt.

But also - these categories do not seem to exist in every society. And are we really saying that Gruk the caveman was living as a woman back in the paleolithic? We don't know, of course, but it seems unlikely for a host of reasons.

I think this phrase is borrowing from the same claim about homosexuality, hoping people won't challenge it seriously. It's not even as clear cut with sexuality as some seem to believe, that variations appear in every human society. And it's less so with third gender categories.

Which psychological conditions does society make legal accommodations for?

Anti discrimination of Religious beliefs & freedom of religion.

Which rights don't trans people have, that other people have?

Legally? That varies between countries. For some western countries its access to basic amenities without fear of abuse & access to health care.

You know, I agree with you basically, but it's maybe worth remembering that id pol is an American creation, and its supporters very often do think that people should have additional rights/privileges on the basis of things like race. For example weighting university admissions according to race.

So maybe it seems similar to that for people who buy into that way of thinking.

I was referring to anti discrimination laws.

Are trans people still discriminated against in the UK? They are restricted from access to health care & public toilets.

Some transvestites have changed their tune. Eg Eddie Izzard was known as a man who enjoyed wearing stereotypically female clothing. He never claimed not to be a man. He said 'they're not women's clothes, they're mine, I bought them.' I was totally fine with that. Liked him as a comedian. No issue with anyone wearing whatever they like.
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However now this trend has given him permission to claim he is actually a woman. (At least some of the time!) This I am very much not okay with.

Anti discrimination of Religious beliefs & freedom of religion.

Calling religiosity a psychological condition is not something everyone would agree on, but never mind. What matters far more is that as you say, the extent of the legal accommodations religious people receive is anti-discrimination. They don't have extra rights. Well, trans people also benefit from anti-discrimination laws, but they want extra rights. Big difference.

Legally? That varies between countries.

Yes, legally, that's what "rights" are about: the law. And let's stick to the UK. What rights don't trans people have in the UK, that other people have?

I hear you.

How ever, those weightings are to allow for equitable outcomes to give equal opportunity. They ‘could’ be considered additional I guess, but the outcome is supposed to be equal.

I would say this doesn’t apply to a male person not only having access to their own single se provision but demanding access to the female single sex provision. Because they already have access to their own single sex provision established. That is equal and equitable as an outcome, if you see what I mean.