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.

Good luck - ask for Solifenacin :)

Spending all day winding yourself up about a minority

Actually I think the concern is more about the majority (women) losing rights that have only recently been won if sex ceases to be defined in legislation and policy.

Did you not notice that this is the feminism and women's rights section of the website?

Back to your and your daughter’s hormone issues:

I, 50s, almost certainly have undiagnosed ADHD, had debilitating migraines as a child, and had unbelievable mood swings and panic attacks when on the pill when I was in uni (can’t remember what type it was, unfortunately - was too long ago - long enough that I don’t think it was the mini because I don’t think that was available). A few years after my son was born I started having similar horrific mood swings. I thought it was lack of sleep, or that I was just losing my mind. My husband was the one who noticed that it cycled with my cycle. Went to the GP, was diagnosed with PMDD and given the option of the pill (no thank you!) or low dose Prozac. I took the Prozac. I finally came off it when I was through the menopause.

From the small amount of research I did at the time, I think that for some women it may be hormone fluctuation rather than just the presence of particular hormones that cause the extreme mood (and other) issues. Looking back, I actually think that post-birth I was actually starting to go through meno, and my anxiety and depression and rage were my body being ultra sensitive to the fact that my hormones were on a rollercoaster.

All of which is just to add some anecdata to your ND-hormone link theory. And to warn you about menopause, I guess!

When I went to bed last night this place was a warm and supportive space where women with a raft of different experiences had shared their issues and given varied contextual backgrounds to why, had they been growing up now, being trans or NB would have seemed attractive. We shared reasons why we were/are ‘dysphoric’ as we now understand that term/diagnosis, why having male-appendaged people in our intimate spaces causes emotional and psychological distress.

We discussed the factors that lead young girls to transition/trans identify. There was no ‘anti-trans hate’. There were no longer aggressively toned, abusive and accusatory posts. Just a discussion about the ways we need to change and learn if we are to understand WHY girls - autistic - feel this way and how better to support them.

The thread I opened this morning is light years away - and totally evidences and demonstrates why, No, we will never likely resolve the trans issue because there are still women [?] out there who want to prioritise the needs and wants of MEN who trans identify over the needs of women - including the needs of WOMEN who identify as men (trans men). It’s all about the men, isn’t it?

There is no trans hate, as far as I can see, amongst 99% of the women posting - just a deep, viscerally experienced need to ensure that women can have single sexed spaces where they need them, spaces that exclude biological males. We would like separate protected spaces for those people so that if they are indeed vulnerable and fear assault they can feel safer [though Ironically that is NOT what they, themselves, are asking for. Funny, that].

I am so sad that the scolders come on to rebuke, and to prove that we may never be able to meter out solutions because, ultimately, they couldn’t give a shit about the rights of women - autistic ones, menopausal ones, muslim/jewish ones, the black ones, the poor ones, the abused ones, the childless ones, nor the trans identifying ones. It’s all about the men.

Is one of the things you’re doing working on men to stop being violent? If not, why not? You seem very convinced that all men are violent mean bullies who make women and gnc men unsafe so I’ll assume that’s your top priority. Good luck.

Thank you.

Saying males are men and boys and females are women and girls is not ridiculous aggression. That's part of the point.

There are however a lot of deeply misunderstood issues around bodily functions and mental health that affect certain groups more than others.

But it never ever makes them the other sex or born in the wrong body. Misfiring or working in a different way yes, but not the other sex. You can never be the other sex and we need to recognise this because it harms transpeople to suggest different. We can adjust society to accommodate these differences, but we can't change the impossible or get society to uphold lies they just, rightly, don't believe.

If you look at the exchange between myself and cautiouslurker, there's a couple right there in terms of misunderstanding.

Are we to be surprised that girls with autism struggling with significant hormonal imbalances which cause they significant pain, mental health issues and other problems relating to fertility start to hate their bodies? We know that pressures about body image can lead to eating disorders so why are we so ignorant to think that issues with the reproductive system wouldn't cause issues? If you have never had significant issues in this area perhaps you are naive about it. But given I've actually had these experiences and my feelings were almost identical in description to what Cautiouslurker describes in her daughter but I'm now in my 40s and have absolutely no desire to be male anymore we need to be fully aware of this and safeguard against girls and young women like me being swept away by the rhetoric of others. What I needed was better scientific and medical knowledge and support out there. Instead my issues have, over the years, been made worse by ignorance and misogyny in ways that have deeply impacted my mental health and ability to function.

I've been exceptionally fortunate and I have had some people along the way who have been brilliant but no one has put it all together.

Hindsight suggests that my suspicion of PMDD is accurate - it's debilitating in its own right. Understanding this at a much earlier age with trying to get hormones balanced, would probably have saved me huge amounts of issues with anxiety and kept me in work at times when it got too much. It would have had a massive impact on my confidence. It would have made other issues relating to neurodiversity much easier to manage. And the knowledge would have saved me issues and a lot of distress at hitting perimenopause.

We are at a point now where it's only just getting recognised that some women have a terrible time with perimenopause but we don't seem to have cottoned onto the idea that some girls might be having dreadful times at an age where they lack the understanding, capacity and ability to advocate for themselves to have a similar recognition in society. That's for older women like me to make the point over without being demonised and accused of being transphobic or hateful or ignorant or any other bullshit.

There is a simple mantra here which serves the entire subject arc: it's not all about trans.

We deserve to have this recognition and to warn that affirmation only approaches which fail to acknowledge there's a lot going on at puberty and caution is advised. Some of the unscientific and unproven disinformation claptrap you've come up with it's utterly poisonous to ALL parties.

I'm sorry but the hyperbolic idea that not using incorrect pronouns causes deaths is socially driven cultish nonsense and it's about time we had a proper conversation over the difference between that and the real distresses that various groups are facing.

Oh yes. Perinatal and Post natal mental health issues are more prevalent in women with neurodiversity too.

For me, pregnancy and the post natal period seemed to straighten me out actually. Then my cycles started again (after nearly two years!) ...

Pregnancy was amazing. Clear head, mood stable, anxiety vanished. I walked around wondering if this was what other people felt like all the time, which is a bit sad, really.

Why do you see fit, to come onto the feminist section of MN and berate women for talking about their lived experiences and how the drive to make everything about trans has harmed them personally and also appears to be harming girls who appear to be following on experiencing similar issues to the ones they had 20 or 30 years ago?

Why the desperation to claim all these kids as trans rather that looks and consider there's multiple cohorts and groups getting caught up in a political and ideology movement - some of whom might well have issues that can't be defined as anything other than 'trans' and some of whom may be catastrophically harmed by the drive to shut down other possibilities.

We are talking about a group which is well recognised as having complex needs - even by those advocating hardest for transpeople.

People with complex needs need individualised support and care. The greater the sausage factory approach - eg affirmation only (the clue is in the word only here) the worse outcomes for all is going to be. It is an approach that shuts down exploration and avenues for parallel and additional issues caused by inappropriate responses and failure to widen understanding of issues.

We know that the cohort of kids is massively overrepresented by gay kids, kids with sexual abuse trauma, kids experiencing family breakdowns, neurodiverse kids - all these things are massive red flags to say this isn't a naturally occurring state but an much more complex set of issues that society is failing on. If it were naturally occurring we would see a broader spread of cohorts without these backgrounds.

We can not and should not ignore this. Doing so is the root of a medical scandal we can see unfolding before our eyes and then being repeated.

We should not sit back and just let that pass without saying "woah hold on there" given the implications.

This is not anti-trans. This is pro-kids.

My role involves working with lots of young people (up to the age of 25) who have trans identities and are very vulnerable. It’s their vulnerability that results in my working with them, rather than their trans identity.

Whilst I disagree with the views of ParentallyAnnoyed, I can see how parents of the young people I work with form such views. Many parents, when referring to ‘trans people’, hold in mind young people who have poor quality of life, poor mental health and high levels of isolation. Just like the sweepers in curling, who frantically brush the ice to coax the stone to move where they want it to go, these parents want to make changes to the environment and others’ behaviour with the intention of improving outcomes for their child. They think that anyone getting up and out of the house, working or going to school, and using public provision are 100 times better off than their child and have broad enough shoulders to bear the burden of accommodating ‘people like their child’. They think all ‘trans people’ share the vulnerabilities of their child and the bad stories don’t relate to real trans people because people like their child barely leave the house.

I don’t agree that making single sex provision mixed sex to accommodate these young people reflects a reasonable adjustment. Furthermore, this is a distraction to the work that needs to be done to improve their quality of life. Recovery involves developing self acceptance and having a strong enough sense of self that can weather the storms that arise from people seeing them differently to the way they see themselves.

Yes agree with this too. [Sorry this seems as though I am making this thread about me, but AuDHD tends to lead to us AuDHDers trying to explain our empathy with concrete life experiences…)

My obstetric history was complicated by 5 miscarriages at 8-12 weeks between DD and DS. Eventually turned out I had PCOS (as @RedToothBrush mentions above, this is also very very common in ND women and still little understood). My hormones were a mess after DS arrived - I was told ‘you have what you wanted, so you can’t moan about it being hard’. But it was - for a raft of issues - horrendous. I was absolutely terrified of failing, of harm coming to my babies due to my incompetence.

As at least a 3rd generation ND mother, I didn’t have a positive/functional model of mothering. I had no idea what to expect from my partner. I now think I was borderline puerperal - my DH came home from work one day to find me sitting on the stairs with my bags packed, sobbing hysterically [full on autistic meltdown] because I was so scared that I would slip down the stairs when holding one of the babies and die and they’d be left alone, in harm, and DH wouldn’t find them until too late. He travelled/travels a lot and having to deal with crises alone is a constant daily stress. At the time I was batshit crazy through hormones, changes to routine, the sudden dramatic change in sleep patterns because my preferred sleep pattern in no way meshed with a new born and a toddler. I had convinced myself that the kids would be safer if I left and my MiL moved in - after all, she had got her children to adulthood, alive, healthy… she could be relied upon raise them, couldn’t she?

In hindsight I can understand so much of this through the lens of autism, but I had no-one at the time. My lovely NCT group were functional, NTs so I was too ashamed to share that I wasn’t coping. My HV said I should just get a cleaner as my house was too large for me to cope with (!!) on top of 2 babies. Had I had a diagnosis then, I could have reached out to the NAS and maybe had the medical profession understood more about women with autism, my HV and GP could have had training and offered better support. Ironically the friends I did make and felt close enough to talk about these issues with later in life - because they reported similar experiences - have all got ND children and are clearly ND themselves. Discovering that I was not a freak, that there were specific challenges due to my autism that other autistic women shared, has been liberating.

The more I read here, and on other threads, the more I feel we really do need to be activists for better women’s health care across the board and that includes understanding women who are navigating this with ND, histories of SA/DV, from different ethnicities and so forth.

TRA often tell me that I am ‘cis’, that I identify as a woman and my identity in congruent with my body. But I never have, and I think conversations like these help me understand why - I am a biological woman, there is no scientific avoidance of that fact, and it shapes my experience of living, of the world. But the WAY in which my womanhood does this is in its interaction with my sexed body, my cultural influences, my autism, the patriarchal society that still exists, the trauma I have experienced and witnessed as a result of the above. So, I do not go about my life proclaiming I AM WOMAN, because I am a much more complex nuanced being, as is every woman on this board. No, I AM ME. And, most days, that’s okay.

And fuck me that was another long one. Am wondering whether any of the women here might be interested in a ‘Women who wouldn’t wheesht it’ follow up? Maybe a collection of essays about living as women, about mothering from the autistic woman’s perspective?

We all have so much to say and I think it could be valuable to other women to read it…

This is from pages back, so others may have already made this point, but I want to say it while I’m here.

Because of the further effects of transactivism in vilifying those of us who object, it is likely that any successful suicide at this point after transition will not be attributed to the failure of transitioning as a treatment, but instead will be attributed to the “evil TERFs”.

Two members of my family have been torn from me because I disagree openly with transactivism. I spend quite a lot of time wishing I was dead as a result of this. I won’t commit suicide because I love my family members too much to inflict that on them, but transactivism is incredibly destructive to all those it touches as well as to society.

To @CautiousLurker2 ,@RedToothBrush and all others whose families have been torn apart, I’m so sorry you have been forced to carry this impossible burden. I hope that, at some point, peace will be restored in all our lives.

I don’t think this poster understands quite what point they are making here.

“trans people have been using those spaces forever.”

To all of the people who make this argument, you are forgetting that those male people using female single sex provisions did so and do so without female people’s consent.

What should we call people who ignore female people’s consent? I think abusive is just the start of the list.

Perhaps this point contradicts the assertion that this group of male people have any respect for female people.

“Pretending trans people are the problem is playing into the hands of the far right, who would love to gatekeep femininity.”

This is another emotionally manipulative tactic. It relies on people caring about appearing to align with far right politics. Yet, this forced teaming is really just bollocks. It is dishonest.

“Transphobia is a tool.of the patriarchy, designed to keep women from addressing the real issue: that violent men attack us wherever we go and usually get away with it.”

This is another dishonest tactic. It is based purely on falsehood. It is also misogynistic. Because the evidence shows that the group of male people with transgender identities still retain male crime patterns. So by trying to use this falsehood to distract female people from campaigning for retention of single sex provisions is preventing female people campaigning for their needs to be prioritised above a group of male people.

Yes. I agree that violent male people, men, attack female people and get away with it. Male people with transgender identities are still ‘men’ and they are attacking and intimidating female people and getting away with it. And people using these dishonest tactics are helping them do it.

I’d be in for this.

Brilliant post

Thank you for sharing @PriOn1 I think you are right - and the effect is to silence us, isn’t it? Because if we fear being blamed, we won’t speak up. And if the result of speaking up, the backlash, is to isolate us, to disconnect us from families and support networks so that suicide seems tantalising, the bastards are winning, aren’t they?

Am so sorry you have been in a dark place over this and are hurting. Really hope it helps to rub shoulders with us here. <<big hugs>>

Cautious, you are absolutely NOT making it all about you.

You are speaking about taboos and ignorance that is RECOGNISED by the medical profession but is being trampled over by the Affirmation Only and anti-woman crowd who don't want you to speak whilst simultaneously crowing on about the importance of lived experiences.

It's always stuck me from day1 which voices have been silenced and why. The voices that are taboo are: women married to older transitioner (many of whom often describe abusive relationships), siblings of transitioners, parents of transitioners, neurodiverse women, people who have had issues with body image in other ways and how it manifests and women who are victims of abuse and trauma.

It's absolutely fascinating to look at this and then think about the group politically driving this - middle aged male transitioners, who undoubtedly have influence and how coercive control and emotional blackmail runs through the movement like a stick of rock.

When will the issue be resolved? When we fully recognise all of the above and stop being held hostage by abusive tactics and women's voices are fully acknowledged as part of the conversation as legitimate and equal.

Right now there are ongoing deliberate attempts to shut down vulnerable women's groups.

There is no disguising this at this point. We should be pondering the why bit as a result.

Also. I too am AuDHD. Late diagnosed, after DD and DS were diagnosed.

I think I’ll have a chat with my Prof at Uni and see if I can get some support/funding for it as a post doc project? She does work with DV survivors, and her project publishes stories and essays by the women she works with.

Am thinking it could be great therapy, create community IRL, and produce something tangible that we could share and maybe use any proceeds [lol] for charitable purposes to support more research into girls and mothers with autism?

Give it five minutes before it's invaded by males.

That's the problem for me. It's like a magnet for shitty little incels.

LOL, I am thinking that if I get to curate membership as a post doc thesis project, or something, I might be able to navigate that? I’ve just messaged my Prof to see how it would work… I think from an ethics committee point of view, as I would define the project as specifically about the impact of autism on biological women, and that this would actively include trans identifying/desisted ones, I should be able to push it through. Especially given the publicity the campaign for ‘Free Speech in Academia’ is getting atm?

Oh my goodness this is not just about you! This is about so many of us! Thank you for your posts. Thank you, genuinely. The sort of things you have been posting may be cathartic for you, but they are one of the core strengths of Mumsnet: women supporting women. This is the second post I have read from you where I have thought to myself, “Yes, that’s it, that’s what it was like for me.” Followed by, “I wish I had known this then.” You were not the only one struggling. You were not the only ND mum. You just did not know that. Which is a very lonely place to be in.

Coming to the realisation that “I am me. And that’s OK” is wonderful.

I wish the young people drawn to transgenderism would understand that.