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.

How will it keep gaining traction though? What do you mean by gain traction?

Do you mean more people will declare they are transgender?

I think you may be on to something there

Obviously, not in all cases such as plain old AGPs, but there is a pattern that's hard to ignore.

I think it's mute point.
The power and the influence in the world (that we are a part of) is shifting from the West to the East, the privileges we enjoy have to be paid for, and we're not in a position to pay for them anymore.

Unless, as a nation we develop enlighten self-interest, and pdq, we're going to end up as a dystopian mess and all of the rights we have given ourselves, including the right to indulge in such meaninglessness, will disappear.
'Trans' is just the visible head of the hydra, it's easy to see that it's a con job, but people still have cottoned on to the fact that whole ideology that 'trans' is a part of is also a con job.

So long as the post-modern mind-set continues to promote 'victimhood', it will continue to undermine the foundations of our society, which will collapse, and our modern country will be demolished.

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

I think that to a certain extent this particular issue will be resolved by people coming to terms with this.

However, I think this is all just part of a bigger issue - women need rights that men don't, and because of that they will always have to fight for them.

I agree on the whole that the word 'rights' should generally only be applied to those rules which can be applied equally to everyone. I think it's a way of framing the demand for trans rights that most people can understand

But what about the rights that we as women demand which don't apply equally to everyone - the right to separate safe spaces and separate sporting categories? Will it be difficult to defend those if we go down that route?

It's the equality/equity debate

"rights are those rules which can be applied equally to everyone."

The problem is that people don't all need the same rights.

For instance women depend on contraception in a way that men just don't.

It has always been self id. No one has ever trotted to their GP with a headache and been diagnosed as trans.

In the very rare occasions people who want to be diagnosed as trans dont get it, they can still be trans, they just dont get a GRC.

The idea that if we dont accept trans, we dont get to have feminism or womens rights in law is just bollocks. All of the sex descrimination legalisation was introduced before trans rights were forced on us.

Its a bit rich of the left to claim the right will remove womens rights, when Starmer is currently negotiating which rights we are going to lose to make men happy.

Look how long it took for the infected blood scandal to come out and (not) be dealt with. Trans healthcare scandals will be swept under the carpet and society will move on - if/when the politicians shift.

I was wondering what is stopping our politicians from shifting - but maybe it’s international pressure still?

But the kink-addled men who have seen themselves accepted and lauded will grip tight to their new privileges. I think it will take a massive back-lash to put them back under their rocks - and many other necessary privileges will be lost as a result. The social contract of men staying out of women's spaces has been broken. I think it may be difficult to fix without restrictive legislation .

Despite being on Terf Island, I’m not convinced we’re going to win back our rights. Groups are ignoring the FWS judgment and a government minister is supporting them in that act.

I don’t have much faith that anyone will ultimately be able to force compliance if enough people with power are intent in resisting the law. Unfortunately I think that there aren’t enough people who care enough to make it a political voting issue. There is too much instability and people will vote on other issues.

I said a long time ago, that this would only end when negligence claims become so costly that the bottom falls out of the medical transition market. Now I’m not even sure if that will happen because laws on medical malpractice are dependent upon doctors going away from standard practice and the standard practice in the US has been put in place by extremists. There’s also time limitations that mean those who realise ten years in (average time for a transitioner to realise it wasn’t ever real) are unlikely to be able to bring their cases.

I hope I’m wrong, I really do, but I’m not sure we’re going to beat this and I’m also concerned about what might be coming next that has been hidden as well as transactivism was when it was being built up under the radar.

Apologies for my pessimism. I used to be certain we would win on the grounds that we are right. Now I’m not so sure that right always prevails.

Agreed. This is just part of the TRA strategy of repeating any and all arguments, however ridiculous, loudly, confidently and aggressively. They fervently hope some of them, any of them, might just work with some of the people, some of the time.

Frequent mentions of 'most vulnerable', 'literally saving lives', 'right side of history', 'rights are not a pie' and the cynical forced-teaming of TQ with the struggle for LGB rights are particularly popular. None of these absurd claims holds up to even the gentlest of scrutiny.

Malta, for example, is terrible for women's rights. It has a total ban on abortion. Its performance on both women's inclusion in government and equal pay is truly woeful. Yet Malta is seen as THE global leader on trans rights. It offers full self-id and gender identity has replaced sex in virtually all contexts.

The Roman Catholic Church, is still very powerful in Malta. And this Church supports controlling, role-playing men in dresses making preposterous anti-science claims for their own benefit, far above actual women.

I wonder why?

Medical transition is driven by financial profiteering. As is almost all plastic surgery. So it will exist as long as it is profitable. There will always be vulnerable teenagers, perverted men and women who want to escape their despised female bodies.

Terf island has done very well to fight for protection for children and for women against what is essentially a profit driven, colonial enterprise, complete with missionaries (TRAs), soldiers (police) and legislators. The actual colonies ( NZ, Australia and Canada), being well versed in capitulation, fell easily for the tricks of it. Older nation states are a little bit more robust and seem to have better systems to protect their most vulnerable from the very worst types of profit seeking. Or maybe there is just a greater marketplace of ideas in the the UK, and somewhat in the US. Our hopes rest with Terf Island and the Kara Danskys, Jesse Singals et al of the US to fight for and hold the line.

Thinking about this again:

All humans are equal. All individuals are different.

Sometimes people can be categorised according to their similarities and differences. Often the similarities and differences are fairly superficial and/or culture-bound. In these cases, treating a group differently or separating them out from other groups is neither necessary nor desirable.

But the sex differences between males and females are fundamental and transcend cultures, extending even beyond humans into other species (unlike gender). Sometimes it is necessary and/or desirable to treat men and women differently.

When exactly men and women should be treated differently is something that not everyone can agree on though (including feminists). I think it should be wherever people are naked, and when men's size and strength gives them a competitive advantage (most sports)

I agree. It’s more likely to quietly diminish because of the mounting costs of legal action than because of any care for women.

So many organisations are captured including, worrying, the BBC spreading its misogynistic agenda under the radar of supposed world class objectivity - I think we are still a long way off, if at all. I think we should be grateful we live in the UK and keep fighting but TRAs and their handmaids are not going to let this advantage go easily.

The BBC, the Civil Service, schools and teachers' unions, these are the big worries. It's so baked in.

Bookmarking

The case of Malta is interesting, in that the RC church is still very powerful AND gender ideology has been enshrined in law.

In Ireland, the promotion of GI followed on from, and was probably part of, the rejection of the unfettered power of the RC church on Irish society.
So two very historically Catholic countries, two different scenarios.

On the subject of the Catholic church itself: unlike many other Christian churches, the RC church has never wavered from rejecting transgenderism, 'gender affirming' surgery, etc. etc. cf the 2024 "Dignitas Infinita: on Human Dignity,"

I wonder what 'preposterous anti-science claims' you are referring to? On the subject of transgenderism, the Catholic church sticks firmly to scientific fact and the biological reality of human sex being binary and immutable. The anti-science claims come from the trans side.

The RC church has got a lot of things wrong, but in fairness, in the case of gender ideology, it's pretty GC.

@Helleofabore

How would a belief based on philosophical theory only and not established any physical science or even logic continue to be supported when society is being coerced into acting as if they believe in it? Not just exist side by side with it, but have to act as if they believe it.

Communism.

I do think this current social contagion is quite unusual in the way it seems to have made it so difficult for people to speak out against it.

Yes, looking back over the last nine years, it was this more than anything that got me involved in the debate. We saw a ridiculous and potentially harmful ideology suddenly become ubiquitous - and no one was allowed to question it. TRAs threatened, insulted and even physically attacked feminists. They regularly stopped feminist meetings from taking place. People lost jobs or got arrested for saying they didn't think males could be women. On the Internet, the number of places where you could dissent from the ideology shrank until it was just Mumsnet - and even here was heavily censored. That made it feel important and urgent to resist.

I still have faith.

Firstly, because I don't think it is possible for such nonsense to survive long term. Nonsense generally comes to an end eventually.

But secondly, because youth transitioning is key to the movement. Otherwise it becomes pretty obvious that it's just a bunch of fetishistic men.

And I think youth transitioning has been dealt some catastrophic blows, by the likes of the Cass report, by the closure of facilities in the US, by the retristiction of medical pathways across multiple countries.

It's not that it's over. The gender zealots will find a way to keep transitioning their children. But this will give the normies pause. I'm very critical of the pathways trial, but it strikes me that only committed ideologues will sign their kids up for this. Normal people who will have been a bit 'on the fence' about it all will keep their distance.

The movement needs the cooperation of relatively ordinary types. There will be a cooling effect now and ultimately fashions move on. Confused children will find other avenues to express that confusion. Social justice activists will find new causes.

And in time, we'll be back to just the core - the fetishistic men.

@TheKeatingFive

Firstly, because I don't think it is possible for such nonsense to survive long term. Nonsense generally comes to an end eventually.

But secondly, because youth transitioning is key to the movement. Otherwise it becomes pretty obvious that it's just a bunch of fetishistic men.

Fetishistic men drive the porn industry. It's not nonsense to them.

I think that the best we can hope for is to drive it out of everyday life. While maintaining vigilance that it does not invade again.

True. The Pope, and his Church in general, definitely doesn't believe men can become women or vice-versa. It doesn't even believe that women can become Catholic priests.

But the Pope does believe bread and wine can literally become the body and blood of Christ. Good old transubstantiation! X can become Y just because we really, really want it to, and we will be very sad if anyone tells us we're wrong.

I was in my twenties when I found out that some (a majority? certainly a significant proportion?) of devout Catholics believe the communion wine & wafers do become something else in reality. It's not just symbolic. Which I find very, very creepy. The cannibalism aspect alone is disturbing.

My view is that the misogyny in Catholicism, and its view of women as lesser creatures who must support/do whatever the men want/decide is key to Malta's apparent support of transgenderism. Men becoming women IS against Catholic teachings, but its wider philosophy, and hence Maltese society's view, is that men should generally get their own way.

Malta is a small enough country that TRAs can place allies in key positions in the long-ruling Labour Government and bully/blackmail others into submission. And the wider Catholic Church can't be bothered to course-correct. Malta has a population fewer than 600k, so about the size of Bristol or Glasgow. Tiny.

Well yes, because that was the starting point. I'd be happy to get back there.

I guess that's what the TRAs really mean when they say 'trans people have always existed' 🫠

I'm reading a book (a collection of articles) by Jennifer Bilek, titled "Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman". She basically argues that the whole transgender craze is merely a stepping stone towards the real goal: transhumanism. The point of transgenderism is to get people used to the "essence" of a person being entirely dissociated from their body: gender is entirely disconnected from the sexed reality of biology.

Most importantly, she claims that the movement was entirely created and backed by extremely powerful men (many of whom identify as transwomen), with literally billions of dollars at their fingertips, and massive investments in medical and tech industries.

That's why the trans movement appeared out of nowhere and was a top-down movement: because it was entirely fabricated, and these people went straight to where the real power is: politics, big businesses, human rights NGOs, and so many others who have the power to dictate what the masses are supposed to think. Bilek argues that it was them, for example, who so succesfully attached the T to LGB, precisely to manipulate people into defending the indefensible.

If she's right, then not only is trans not going to disappear, but worse things are on the way in terms of commodification of the human body, most especially the female one.