How is the trans issue ever going to be resolved?

[PassportPanicFuuuck]

It seems as insoluble as the Israel/Palestine question when the two "sides" want directly opposing things. I've heard the arguments that trans people "just want to pee" and that "no-one would go through medical/surgical gender reassignment purely to abuse women", plus the mantras that "trans people exist", "trans rights are human rights" and "trans women are women" and it's quite clear that the people who believe these things fervently aren't going to change their minds any time soon.

But to a certain extent, life isn't fair. Not everyone does have equal opportunities. If you're in a gay relationship (and there's nothing wrong with that) you can't have a biological child with your partner; if you're infertile (as I am) you can't have a child at all; if you're trans (and there's nothing wrong with that either) you can't enter the spaces of the opposite sex; if you're British you don't have an automatic right to go and live in the US; if you're short and unsporty you don't have a right to be on the Olympic basketball team - and so on. All sorts of opportunities are denied people at various different points, some as a result of decisions you make (like not studying for a medical degree means I can never be a doctor) and some not (see above re. infertility), and beyond universal human rights you don't have a right - one might say "entitlement" - to an awful lot of things, much as you might keenly want them.

Like it or not, once we end up in these categories we have to accept it. Absolutely no-one is eligible to do everything or to go everywhere. However if you have made a choice - even if you consider it to be more a recognition of something innate rather than a conscious decision - it doesn't mean that you have made this choice on behalf of everyone else. If you have chosen to transition (again, you may not consider it to be a "choice") you can't dictate that everyone else ignore biology and logic and linguistic authenticity and you can't dictate that everyone else will want to celebrate your decision. No, we don't have to accept the "lady bulge", we don't have to accept child abuse under the guise of gender-affirming care and we don't have to accept men in female sports / changing rooms / organisations.

Not sure how coherently worded all the above is, but perhaps it will provoke some interesting debate.

I am so sorry.

Thank you so much for sharing your terrible story @CautiousLurker2 . The ability of toxic transactivists to target and weaponise children in support of their niche sex change beliefs is unforgivable.

I am in awe that you did keep your ground. I have friends in a similar situation who held their ground but once she turned 18 declared that they couldn't stop her and I notice that their language discussing their daughter has changed over the past year or two. I do have another friend who has held her ground against the pressure from her ex-husband and his wealthy family though and I am in awe of her as well.

This is the issue for me. I had hoped that once awareness of the nature and vulnerability of the children being referred to the Tavistock - the horrified reaction of the clinical staff there who whistleblew - that even the #BeKinder would wake up from their trance. Am flabbergasted that the issue hasn’t been resolved and heartbroken that the Streeting Trials will be going ahead.

The heartbreak and stress and weight born by yourself @CautiousLurker2 and other parents in your position is horrendous

Your DD is so lucky to have you as their parent.

And the self serving sanctimonious and frankly abusive behaviour of health and educational ‘professionals’ is a scandal that’s not going away soon. Some highly problematic individuals are drawn to work with vulnerable children precisely because of the power imbalance and constant opportunities to dominate and coerce them and their families.

The whole gender ideology bullshit has provided such people with even more fertile ground in which to do so.

The problem being that a huge percentage are not aware of any of this.

The media has largely shielded them from it and many would prefer not to engage, if they're being honest.

she has never really had decent, neutral ASD/ADHD mentoring and counselling

Plus this ^

It’s incredible how there is such need on the one hand, and yet so few counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists who really understand and know the impacts and implications of ASD/DHD on the other. Including how AuDHD creates the conditions for extreme suggestibility and susceptibility. Despite the absolute plethora of ‘guidance’ that exists!

What a nightmare @CautiousLurker2, and what awesome parenting.

My family have gone through similar. Our experience is a pale shadow of yours, but echoes your experience in almost every respect. I quietly chose not to access certain forms of ‘support’ for my dc, because I worried about potential affirmation.

(((hugs)))

Am so sorry that you’ve experienced this too. I think it is the fact that you reach a point that you just cannot trust the supposed professionals and whatever you do, if it all goes wrong, it is your ‘fault’ as a parent. In the end I had to go with my conscience. If she really was at risk of dying, then I had to know I had done everything morally right to support her. To this day, if she were to go through transition as an adult in ten years, as heartbroken as I would be, I would still be there for her and love her, but I do feel she has finally worked out that - given she faints when having a covid jab or giving blood samples - that surgical routes are really not for her.

She is now older and more mature [that 21st birthday they said she’d never see is just weeks away, even if she is still 20 going on 16…] and finally seems to understand on some existential level that she cannot wake up tomorrow and be a 6ft man (still a fantasy, I think, sadly but given the rise in misogyny we are seeing everywhere - this thread included - really doesn’t make that surprising). And this last point is really at the core of the issue - she needed time to grow up (extra time given she is AuDHD and their social, emotional, psychological maturity significantly lags behind NTs) and gain some life experience.

In an ideal world none of these treatments would be available to anyone under 25, and that age limit would be upwardly adjustable where NDs are evidenced. And yes, to lurking BeKinders, that may seem ableist, but … really?

Likewise. The stuff I saw 15 years ago were horrendous.

Transition isn't a magic bullet that reduces suicidal intention that's for sure.

I am fairly sure that years ago [at the start of this journey] I read research/stats that evidenced that the sweet spot for suicide attempts was 2 years post transition for all the reasons you both mention. I discussed it with an ex Tavi psychologist who concurred that this was what he had observed professionally.

Stupidly didn’t save/archive it so can’t link it here.

Having worked with children all my professional life I still find it hard to believe that so many professionals and society as a whole has stood back and watched all this happening to children. So little courage and integrity from so many professionals.

Miranda Yardley was saying all of this in articles as loudly as he could years ago, having walked that path himself. But his experience was the wrong kind of experience and he was the wrong kind of trans, despite being exactly the sort of person the GRA was written for.

It's the same story all along: I think all of us have seen each separate disaster - the assaults, the whistleblowers, the court cases - and thought this, now, this is when things have to start to change. But no, because our expectations are the historical ones now of days when there was sense and responsibility in government and things would not go beyond a certain point. Now nothing is ever enough, nothing is ever bad enough to stop or divert this agenda, nothing at all. All normal standards, policies, reason and sanity, accountability, the rule of law, decades of equality law and international law, policing, honesty, ethics, relationship with most of the electorate - all of it is hurled aside on this insane mission. The cost of this is enormous, in many directions, the consequences of all this are enormous and widespread, not least the absolute loss of integrity and trust in politics, law, police and government, and the government intentional destruction of equality. But without the honesty to actually admit to and own it.

And most of us are left wondering wtaf is happening behind the scenes that politicians are so frantically committed to forcing dicks on women and into women's spaces, removing women and gay rights, and sterilising and wrecking the lives of vulnerable children at this astronomical price? Because there has to be some reason. There has to be some method in this absolute madness. This has to have some kind of backhander reward.

And most of us are left wondering wtaf is happening behind the scenes that politicians are so frantically committed to forcing dicks on women and into women's spaces, removing women and gay rights, and sterilising and wrecking the lives of vulnerable children at this astronomical price? Because there has to be some reason. There has to be some method in this absolute madness. This has to have some kind of backhander reward.

Absolutely

I suspect there is significant lobbying going on in the background and rewards for those who hold the line and get stuff pushed through.

Jennifer Bilek's investigations are illuminating as to the type of people who are funding this stuff.

"..nothing is ever bad enough to stop or divert this agenda, nothing at all. All normal standards, policies, reason and sanity, accountability, the rule of law, decades of equality law and international law, policing, honesty, ethics, relationship with most of the electorate - all of it is hurled aside on this insane mission..."

That's what's so scary. People who would once have been seen of as sane, rational, ethical people are now all signed up to promoting the sex crimes of voyeurism and indecent exposure while cheering on children below the age of consent signing up to a lifetime of physical and intellectual harm.

Ableist only to people with no real experience of supporting ND individuals. I would consider it to be more along the lines of a reasonable adaptation, allowing the individual to engage at a level closer to that of their NT peers.

And most of us are left wondering wtaf is happening behind the scenes that politicians are so frantically committed to forcing dicks on women and into women's spaces, removing women and gay rights, and sterilising and wrecking the lives of vulnerable children at this astronomical price? Because there has to be some reason. There has to be some method in this absolute madness. This has to have some kind of backhander reward.

Why does there have to be? Why assume it's about money and not just pure power?

We see this is clearly linked to politics. That's power.

And the historical precedence is the witch trials. Or even examples in authoritarian states of snitching on neighbours and trying to prove your loyalty to superiors.

Then you have the satanic ritual abuse sagas...

Look closely and you find parallels which don't include money.

In an ideal world none of these treatments would be available to anyone under 25, and that age limit would be upwardly adjustable where NDs are evidenced.

I am autistic, late-diagnosed. Consider how my lifelong experiences of living with undiagnosed autism and a female body in a patriarchy might inform my next statement.

And yes, to lurking BeKinders, that may seem ableist, but … really?

No, it's not.

• 90% of autistic women have been sexually assaulted. The baseline female SA rate is 33%. Who wouldn't want to escape being (re)victimised by becoming a man?
• Female puberty is traumatic enough without being several years behind your peers in terms of emotional development. Who wouldn't want to escape that by becoming a man?
• The communication difficulties that are literally one of the diagnostic criteria for autism mean that the autistic girl has a smaller social toolbox for detecting and safely evading coercive and abusive men.
• Period pains hurt and the meds your doctor gives you don't even touch them. Bras are uncomfortable but so is going braless. Transition offers the escape of a double mastectomy and hysterectomy.
• The "trans community" offers an illusion of acceptance to kids who have never fitted in.
• Gender dysphoria is a seductive "magic bullet" explanation for why the autistic girl feels bad all the time. She struggles with naming her emotions so cannot think of an alternative explanation.
• Autistic girls don't recognise danger signals from abusers because 100% of social interactions cause anxiety and the danger signals just look like more of the same.
• Autistic girls, being emotionally behind their peers, are naive in the same way that a child three or so years younger would be, so they trust people who they really shouldn't.
• Becoming "trans" can provide a special interest for the autistic child, one that earns peer approval instead of the mockery associated with, for example, trains.

It is ableist to deny that autistic women and girls are vulnerable and need extra protection compared to their NT peers, in the same way that it's ableist to deny that wheelchair users need ramps.

If you feel able to, please consider sending what you said in your post to your MP and ccing Wes Streeting. It is powerful first-hand testimony of the impact that this fraudulent ideology has on vulnerable children and their families.

Thank you for protecting your autistic daughter.

Don't underestimate the ick factor. People really, really don't want to think about the genital surgeries, which in itself makes it hard to get them to listen to the fact that most "transitioned" people don't in fact "do that to themselves".

It's been hugely helpful to Gender Identitarianism because on the whole, Joe Public feels pity for anyone who'd take such steps, but the attendant repugnance for any discussion of those steps means that the general assumption is still stuck in 2016, before the ECtHR decided that surgical sterilisation was an unacceptably high threshold for gender recognition. (A.P., Garçon, and Nicot v. France, 2017)

Thank you for articulating what I have tried to communicate to others (including supposed professionals) for years. I am sure my DD was not a victim of assault, but being lesbian/queer I think she was likely subject to some sexualised bullying at school. Otherwise, pretty much every thing you say I have observed in her (and experienced myself).

One of the biggest issues I have with the affirmative model is that it coincided with the growing awareness of women/girls with autism and the way it presents differently in them vis a vis their male counterparts parts - and as a result in stead of there being more research and training into understanding and supporting them and and exploring why girls with ASD/ADHD have dysphoric symptoms, this was shelved in favour of: ‘yeah, she’s trans’.

For instance - now late diagnosed as AuDHD myself - I suffered from an eating disorder from my teens into university. I assumed this was due to family/situational trauma at the time. One of the ex Tavi clinicians I spoke to was doing a post doc on the observation that many GD teens seem to have mothers/grandmothers who had EDs when they were the same age (my mother was also anorexic - and likely AudDHD with BPD - and died from it in her mid fifties). Ie, body dysphoric-linked MH issues seem to run in families and he was exploring whether the prevalence should be linked to ND rather than toxic/unhealthy mother-daughter relationships, as previously thought.

I am very much of the opinion that ND teens need significant support with puberty/adolescence as this is when body dysphorias kick in (the body is maturing far too early/suddenly vis a vis the emotional and psychologically delayed ‘mind’), when many aspects of ASD become exacerbated (social skills lag, feeling isolated etc), when girls become especially vulnerable to needing to fit in and belong. Gender ideology allowed a cynical and powerful lobby to highjack a cohort of vulnerable young women and exploit them, when in my generation no one would have dreamed of affirming my belief I was too fat!

It’s also true that we understand that there was a very high incidence of ED’s in the last 40 odd years… and this seems to have given way to GD (though every GD/trans teen I know has some form of disordered eating). It’s why I think the analogy of ‘we don’t affirm anorexics’ is painfully appropriate when arguing with a TRA.

Sorry, I'm going to braindump a bit more on this.

People have sometimes talked about the "social role" of women. To get some examples of what that social role entails, I thought of some of the things DSis does that I suck at:

• The mediator in family quarrels.
• The defuser of brewing arguments, e.g. by spotting the early signs and changing the subject or asking one of the arguers to help her with a task in another room.
• The person who organises the whip-rounds and leaving presents, the Christmas social, etc at work.
• The person who remembers to write all the family Christmas cards on time.
• The organiser of the milk kitty.
• The sender of thank you chocolates to whichever relative hosted Christmas this year.
• The person who texts all the men in the family (and her autistic sister ) a week before anyone's birthday to remind them to send a card.

There's a lot of organising stuff in there that, if DSis isn't available to do, I get leant on to do instead (thanks DF 🙄) and I suck at it. If the autistic girl becomes a man, that expectation should go away, right?

There's also a lot of diplomacy stuff in there, which an autistic girl is going to really struggle with, to the point of catastrophically failing at it and then being blamed for failing to stop two other people from arguing (see also: First Rule of Misogyny). She may even be participating in the arguments because she doesn't know how to interact skilfully or she refuses to accept her gendered social role of being the one to back down in a row. If she becomes a man, she's no longer expected to be the diplomat. She's no longer expected to swallow her own hurt feelings to keep the peace.

@selffellatingouroborosofhate I definitely think the role and perception of women’s ‘gendered’ role is a factor - which is why [going back to the OP’s original proposition] I do wonder whether we will ever meter out an answer to the trans debate. My mother grew up in England/S Africa in the 60s, with a mother who married 4 times because women were not allowed to live independently and the stain of divorce made them social pariahs. Mum was the eldest daughter and the responsibility for her 4 siblings rested on her… and S African [white] women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant. She married an Iranian asylee in London eventually (not my father, she failed to trap him into marriage despite intentionally getting pregnant with me). Expectations of women, even thought the family were ostensibly liberal, very clear and i was raised to understand that i could not wear jeans/revealing clothing that would make me sexually attractive to men because I, myself, was responsible for their lustful urges and any behaviours arising therefrom. [I refer any reader still with me to a post dozens of pages back about how that impacted me in more ways than ‘words’].

I married a wonderful man who has tried to be an antidote to everything I grew up with, but despite that I still ended up a SAHM and this is what my daughter saw. Lock down, #metoo, the Weinstein trial and Trump’s ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ tapes coalesced with the onset of her menses. At 12, at that time undiagnosed, developing the sense that maybe she fancied girls or was bisexual, she was absolutely not ready. She absolutely raged at the indignity of periods, or the much higher level of pain and heavier periods [no idea why, but heavy painful periods and migraine seem to afflict many autistic girls]. She absolutely and expressly wanted to ‘opt out of womanhood’.

The phenomena of young autistic girls responding to puberty in this way, of the disordered eating, the rejection of their embodied selves, the abject fear of what being an adult woman in a world populated by men like the Tates/Trump and female SM celebrities like Bonnie Blue has been completely submerged beneath gender ideology and the affirmative model. It’s the lobotomisation scandal of our generation, only done with brainwashing, hormone therapy and scalpels on genitalia.

It’s the most salient feminist issue of our era in both the way it is damaging vulnerable young women and being used to justify the erosion of women’s rights more broadly across society.

the much higher level of pain and heavier periods [no idea why, but heavy painful periods and migraine seem to afflict many autistic girls].

Yes, yes they do. I threw up four times during Saturday's migraine, despite being on prescription prophylaxis.

Crap isn’t it? Blood tests for DD today (anaemia, probably exacerbated by heavy periods) and an appointment to explore contraception to stop periods and propranolol (migraine prophylaxis). It will be down to me/us to draw the dots between each of these things and show that they are all inter-related.

GPs still don’t seem to treat females holistically, especially when it comes to menstrual/gynae related health issues. Older women, black pregnant women, young autistic women… nope, just uterus havers to a certain sector of society and indistinguishable from men who think they are women.