Why do you care so much about gender issues?

[GCScot]

Longtime lurker, first time poster.

I'm fully GC, mainly due to this board. So first of all, thank you for all the excellent thoughtful discussion!

DH and most of my family are also GC. But they don't care about it anywhere near as much as me. This got me wondering - why do some of us care so much about gender ideology?

My reasons are:

1. I'm a lifelong feminist. Gender ideology causes so many issues for women. But the attempted redefinition of the very word woman feels like an actual existential threat

1. I'm a lifelong lefty. Finding myself on 'the other side' to left-wing political parties, friends, and institutions I have trusted all my life (The Guardian, BBC, NHS, universities) has completely thrown me. Am I wrong? If I'm not wrong, how have they gone so spectacularly wrong?

1. I have a science background. The (wilful?) ignorance of the basic science of biological sex and the prioritisation of feelings over facts enrages me

1. I have personally had a double mastectomy and hormone therapy for breast cancer. These were extreme medical treatments to save my life and have long-term health repercussions - I am at high risk of heart disease and osteoporosis. The fact that physically healthy children and vulnerable young people are being encouraged to undergo these treatments makes me sad and angry

1. The 'No debate' aspect of this issue is totally against my values. I work for a fully captured institution (Scottish university) and being unable to freely speak about this issue means that it is frequently running through my mind

Do any of the above resonate with others? Do you have any additional reasons why you care so much about this issue?

My TL:DR A small number of very sick puppies prodded and probed around our boundaries until they found a way in through our children. It will take a long time to repair the damage that they have done but, however long it takes, these people will spend one hundred times as long in their own special hell. Yes, I really hate what they have done to far too many children.

I think it’s because language doesn’t exist in a vacuum, especially when it’s spoken and part of a conversation.

So, for example if someone said to me: ‘Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I’d likely reply ‘yes they are’. I know she is female, but the person I am answering doesn’t, and the sex of my child wasn’t foregrounded in the question. If they’d asked ‘did you say your daughter is at university’ I’d have replied ‘yes she is’.

Not sure if that answers your question, but I would - and do - use ‘they’ when I know the sex of the person I refer to, but sometimes it’s not the focus of the sentence I am responding to, or the subject of the question, so unless I reframe the question asked above: Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I’d likely reply ‘yes they are’. ‘Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I might reply ‘Oh, my daughter? Yes, she is,’ because I’ve now clarified the ‘who’ - or the subject - of the conversation.

You are trying to find a difference that doesn't exist. Three of my grandparents didn't have English as a first language. While I would say "I saw a figure walking along the beach and they stopped by the fairground", they would all say "I saw a figure walking along the beach and it stopped by the fairground". It is a use of English thing.

Sorry that last para should have read: Not sure if that answers your question, but I would - and do - use ‘they’ when I know the sex of the person I refer to, but sometimes it’s not the focus of the sentence I am responding to, or the subject of the question, so unless I reframe the question asked above: Oh, did you say your eldest child is at uni now?’ I might instead reply ‘Oh, my daughter? Yes, she is,’ because I’ve now clarified the ‘who’ - or the subject - of the conversation.

It’s a bit late and my cutting/pasting and editing abilities failed me 🤦🏽‍♀️

The Free Speech Union support people who have been cancelled for having gender critical views (ie for continuing to believe in reality). But they rely on crowdfunding for individual cases.

In the United States, most of the pushback has come from Christian charities, who apparently have a much better grip on scientific reality than the institutions of government and education.

For most of the reasons already stated but also because it’s a deceit that I refuse to enter into and what infuriates me is that every last person knows it’s a deceit and yet so many go along with it.

So, to summarise:

• It's made-up nonsense;

• with real-world implications, especially for women and children;

• which we are being forced to agree with

Yes, I guess the real question is not why we care so much, but why others don't.

Thank you for all your contributions. I feel less crazy and alone now

On my most forgiving days I can convince myself it’s just a delusional falsehood. But mostly I see it as the abuse of vulnerable children and young people on a massive scale.

I find it so maddening that so many brilliant and intelligent women are just pandering to these men.

Thank you very much, it does answer my question. English is my second language, but I am very proficient (putting false modesty aside, most people including native English speakers readily believe I was raised in a bilingual household). I don't think I have ever come across someone who has replied "yes, they are" rather than "yes, she is" in the particular example that you give, but it's most interesting to know it could happen bona fide.
This being said, I still can't get used to the English way of referring to a baby as "it", maybe it's the same underlying semantic construct.

I still think it's very bizarre when referring to one's own husband, and over a whole paragraph where said husband is topic number one and the pronoun is used half a dozen times at least.

@JanesLittleGirl thank you also for your reply, although your situation is different. I would use the English "they" in your example as well because I don't identify the figure on the beach.

Sorry - I think you’re being pedantic and trying to derail this thread. Being very proficient in the English language myself (completing a PhD in English just now, bur also have.s BA and MA in it, and also lecture/tutor undergrad English and creative writing) I have encountered it many times in my personal and professional life - it really doesn’t matter whether in your individual experience you can’t recall anyone using ‘they’ or not. It simply means that you probably didn’t notice at the time - no-one runs a continual audit of every spoken English encounter.

Perhaps you could return to the topic of the actual thread, as started by @GCScot, or start your own thread on the vagaries of the English language?

In my experience, a lot of people aren't good at "system thinking" ie they can't do big picture thinking. They approach issues from the perspective of whether it will directly affect them at a personal every day level rather than whether it affects people across eg a sex, a race, an age. So 'I've never met a TW/wouldn't mind them using women's loos/I've got bigger problems anyway" is as far as the thinking goes.

they don't see the problems that legally redefining women to mean "adult human female + some men with women feelings" means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women. Public services for example use census data to plan for eg how much maternity provision an area is likely to need based on the number of women of child bearing age live there. If we don't know how many actual women there then we can't work that out and allocate resources. We can't provide single sex anything if the definition of women is "adult human female and some men"

it'd just impossible to work like that and that's before we get into the impact on women who eg have experienced sexual violence or for cultural reasons can't be on their own with men

most people's thinking starts and ends with their own direct experience

Its always been grammatically correct to use 'they' singular in English when the sex of the person was unknown. When the sex was known, the appropriate sex pronoun was used instead. For obvious reason, as it leaves no doubt that the reference is to one person rather than two or more, and why would we seek to deliberately introduce ambiguity?
The use of they singular as a default has gained popularity purely to service GI. The fact that grammar allows for it, is neither here nor there, as the rule of grammar merely provides an option for a specific circumstance (sex unknown) rather than being an alternative that offers equal clarity.
The push for acceptance that it's embedded in the English language as an equally valid, widely used alternative to the singular comes from the same place as 'there have always been trans people'. It's purpose is to frame any objections to GI and its trappings as a new thing born out of a sudden spite against trans people, and disguise the fact that we are being required to change our behaviour and language to accommodate the ideology.

I think 'they' is commonly used to refer to something indefinite, so when it is used to refer to a known person it has a distancing effect.

as @Theeyeballsinthesky comments, I think it is simply that people in general really do not think about the wider implications. They will hold the belief that ‘exceptions to the rule’ are benign - it’s only one person, one time, etc - when the legal ramifications mean that once you have allowed the precedent, you open the floodgates. Once you allow that exception, the social contract has been broken and people are required to constantly justify and explain the logic, when in the moment of that exception being made, there wasn’t any. Someone simply thought they were being kind, or were put on the spot and acquiesced because it made fewer waves.

Those of us who have worked in areas where safeguarding law has to be applied 100% of the time, where compliance with legal and financial regulations is compulsory 100% of the time, understand ‘exceptions’ really cannot be made because we are forced by employers or professional bodies to be aware of the bigger picture.

For me, this is why I am flabbergasted at the way companies and institutions have allowed themselves to believe the blatantly obvious misrepresentation of any law where sex is pivotal to its understanding. In Banking you don’t get to redefine what a financial term is because your clients demands it.

@CautiousLurker2 I very honestly didn't mean either to derail or to be pedantic and I was (still am) sincere in thanking you. I believe language is extremely important when talking about sex and gender and that's why I often muse about the differences in my two languages and how it can be a factor in how GI is more successful in English-speaking countries. But I'll stop.

means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women.

and renders such planning offensive and taboo.

In truth, the only time I've heard they for a known person was in the context of a contrived/performative compliance with the idea that we 'can't assume someone's pronouns'.
I've mainly come across it in the writing of my younger colleagues, who persist in emailing things like "John Smith from the IT team said they will be prioritising this next week" requiring me to check whether the whole IT team will be prioritising it, so it should be fixed in a day; or Just John, so it will take at least a week.

Those of us who have worked in areas where safeguarding law has to be applied 100% of the time, where compliance with legal and financial regulations is compulsory 100% of the time, understand ‘exceptions’ really cannot be made because we are forced by employers or professional bodies to be aware of the bigger picture.

Against that, as proposed by the judge in the Sandie Peggie case, is the idea that every time a trans person enters a new setting there should be an assessment of whether they pass/are sufficiently committed, so they can know which facility to use. If a judge can honestly not see why this is a bad idea for everyone, having apparently thought about a case for months, perhaps it's not surprising that other people are rather muddled.

"John Smith from the IT team said they will be prioritising this next week"

I would understand that as 'Somebody will do it when they get round to it. We don't know who'.

"Emma from the Manchester office said they were in support of the proposal"
"The service user and their partner are separating. They intend to remain in the marital home"

"Emma from the Manchester office said they were in support of the proposal"

-> Reads to me as The Manchester Office as a group is in support. If it was just Emma it should say 'she'

"The service user and their partner are separating. They intend to remain in the marital home"

-> The use of 'they' in this context is downright confusing. Does it mean the user and partner are separating but both intend to stay, or the service user is staying alone, or that the partner is planning to stay there alone.

@Theeyeballsinthesky

In my experience, a lot of people aren't good at "system thinking" ie they can't do big picture thinking.

Indeed. I know that's one area where I'm particularly blind. I naturally focus on the individual, and I have to train myself to think on a global level.

So 'I've never met a TW/wouldn't mind them using women's loos/I've got bigger problems anyway" is as far as the thinking goes.

Also: "The TW I know wouldn't hurt a fly," ie. not necessarily focusing only on what directly concerns only oneself, but on what concerns the people around oneself.

There's also the slippery slope phenomenon. You start with something that seems harmless enough (eg. calling someone whatever pronoun they prefer), and you don't realise that the activists work from there to get you to accept bigger and bigger things, until you end up staring at a position that's obviously wrong to you, but you can't pinpoint where the limit should be drawn.

they don't see the problems that legally redefining women to mean "adult human female + some men with women feelings" means it is impossible to plan anything at system level for women.

I'd been sporadically visiting MN for years before the SC judgement, but I could never stay around for long, and nothing ever stuck with me, because "I know I'm personally full of good will so I've got no reason to assume other trans people are not as well", and "I know TW who are nice and deserving of kindness", and "it can't be so bad", and "don't we all have to make some compromises for society to work properly", and and and.

By a complete coincidence, I happened to visit again on the day of the SC judgment. And the floor dropped from under my feet when I realised that its point had been to determine what a woman is. I may not think globally, but I do know the importance of properly defining things if you want to discuss them, so the fact that it had come to that, that the very legal definition of woman had been under attack, really shook me. I'd never realised that TRAs would go that far, that they would actually claim that TW are women. I had always assumed that we would all always work under the mutual understanding that, "We all know TW are men; we just squibble over which special authorisations to enter women's spaces they should receive." Once I realised that yes, TWALiterallyW was the logical endpoint of a trajectory that starts with eg. "calling a TW 'she' just to be nice to her", well, I had to revise my entire mental system, and it all fell apart.

And I think most TRAs and most passive onlookers work with the same kind of cobbled-together, internally incoherent mental system as I did. The proof is in the way they are unable to properly define the terms they use, even the most basic ones, such as "What is a woman?", "What does trans mean?" and so on. They mean well, and for them, that's more important than being logical or coherent.

Exactly. Both of these are real examples of the sort of thing I recieve in work emails regularly.

Completely agree.

It is utterly wild. It's that feeling of 'surely not?' then an feeling of a punch to the gut when you realise where we actually are with this.

It scares the shit out of me.

Yes! Totally agree that systems thinkers are likely to be more alarmed about this issue as they may see it in big picture terms of truth suppression, oppression of women, authoritarianism.

I think it's highly significant that autistic people tend to be systems thinkers. When coupled with the strong sense of fairness/justice that many of them have, I think we can see why many of them feel so strongly about this issue. We know autistic people are vulnerable to believing transgender ideology and I suspect that many people on both sides of the debate have autistic traits. When autistic people feel strongly about an issue they can be passionate and persistent (eg Greta Thunberg, who sees the importance of climate change and can't understand why everyone isn't treating it as an emergency)