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’m almost 76 and my husband is 83, and like all our friends and acquaintances we have never had a problem with homosexuality. We have gay friends and we supported gay marriage. How much older a generation do you mean? Much younger people than us who are evangelical Christians may have a problem with it but that’s a different issue and they’re likely to be as TERFy as we are.

Ageist much?

You are wrong. The 12 to 17 year olds that I know are heartily sick of the trans and non-binary message. It's seen as attention seeking and something that the older generation (i.e. 20-somethings!) do. And is therefore deeply uncool.

However, I am concerned that the forced teaming of the T with LGB has had a negative effect on young teenagers of today.

LOL, you wish.

@TheAmusedQuail Completely agree, all the stuff about 'being on the right side of history' and a reckoning coming is jokes. Reminds me of the huge numbers of families that were going to sue the Tavistock, oh wait - they didn't. Things will change, just like they did with Section 28. And the LGBT community stands with their trans members despite the comical attempts by the LGB Alliance to present it otherwise.

People in real life just don't care that much, and you all need to find a hobby and get off the echo chamber of Mumsnet where anyone who expresses a dissenting view is met with 'But what is a woman?' 10 times.

I am not far off your age either. The older generation I'm referring to is MY grandparents who are no longer (obviously, given my age) around. Their attitudes died with them.

I've seen in with other issues too. The older generation dies off and their attitudes die with them.

This is my prediction. No fuss, no protests, just a gradual change. All of the trashing and protesting by our generation and maybe the one below us, will have made very little difference. Change will come.

"Hobby"
"Echo chamber"
"Section 28" (haven't heard that one for a bit)
"People just don't care"

Bingo! Thank you for playing!

But what is a woman? Can’t you answer a simple question?

Ad nauseum.

"No fuss, no protests, just a gradual change. All of the trashing and protesting by our generation and maybe the one below us, will have made very little difference. Change will come."

But what change?

If a male person is not considered female for the purposes of sport or prison or access to female rape crisis centres now, how the fuck do you see this changing back again in the future? There will still be no evidence that any male person who says that they are female is female.

Now, if you are saying that people will accept that some people will have an identity that they adopt but that it is just an identity and not a reflection on material reality. That when they say they are a 'woman', they are just saying that is their identity and not one aspect of their life then changes except that some people will act like they are really women when they talk to them... so what. That happens now already.

But no. Your prediction requires evidence to support the supersession of gender identity over sex classes and that simply will not happen.

Nullum responsum

If one of you answered, we wouldn’t need to keep asking. Are you going to answer?

When people say things like this, they're being very selective in the examples used.

But there are, of course, other examples of where society pushed too far and had to self correct. Thankfully this is very much possible.

Here's an example for you. In the 1980s, the German Green Party were enthusiastic proponents of PIE. To the extent of experimenting with placing children in the homes of pedophiles. Horrifying I know. I couldn't believe this when I first read it. Warning, these pieces are tough reads.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

But no, people didn't just roll with this. They saw it was wrong and pushed back.

"Things will change, just like they did with Section 28. And the LGBT community stands with their trans members despite the comical attempts by the LGB Alliance to present it otherwise."

This situation is not comparable to the situation with people who are attracted to the same or both sexes.

"People in real life just don't care that much"

On the contrary. I have quite a few friends who are parents of children who have stated they are transgender. People in real life DO care 'that' much when it directly impacts them and the people they love.

This is grim.

But by the same token, let's also remember that in France in the 1970s a group of intellectuals convinced the French government that children were sexual beings and that the age of consent should be lowered?

It has just been raised again I believe after so long and after the scandals involved people considered untouchable by scandal have died or become not protected anymore and their victims are being heard?

And let's remember who was one of those celebrated intellectuals? Foucault. One of the people that have been declared a 'father' of 'gender identity theory'.

There is a significant issue in basing changes on such theories that don't have any foundation in material reality. Theories change and will fall from favour leaving behind many harmed people. Whereas basing laws on proven and established science, such as sex cannot change and there is no biological marker for gender identity, therefore gender identity should not be prioritised over sex class when sex class matters, will abide.

I am also find the premise that somehow female people will welcome a group of male people into their single sex spaces in the future and that it is just the dinosaur TERFS that is the issue now somewhat disassociated from the truth.

Considering how many school kids of both sexes protested not that long ago that they did not want gender neutral toilets, I am not sure what this claim is backed by?

Have girls been taught that they should have low boundaries? Yes, indeed they have. Will this continue through to them teaching their own children to have similar lowered, or non existent, boundaries after hearing about other's direct experiences or their own experiences? I doubt it. Many of us have discovered just how low our boundaries where when we had children and that does cause a review. It is remarkable how some people genuinely think that girls, as well as women, will welcome male people into single sex provisions in this pornified era and with such high incidence of not reported male on female sex offences.

But I guess that some people really do think that children and adults having non existent boundaries is a positive thing. Or that they think that single sex provisions will be a thing of the past, when I think that 'experiment' has been shown to not provide safety to female people.

I have no idea why some people continue to believe that women will just gradually change their needs as if they are opinions. They obviously do though, but I would love to see an articulate and detailed answer as to why rather than this constant misappropriation of the rights of LGB people as a comparator. Which is not comparable at all but consistently is used to uphold flawed logic.

Mary Harrington writes about this too...but within the framework of her own particular take on things. The digital age has led to increasing alientaion and disociation and people perceiving or relating to the world through their own self created personas; and of course, everything is then always commodified.
The natural end stage of certain forms of feminism lead to bodily dissociation too.. a rejection of the female body, seeing it as a confining and oppressive burden.

The only thing which really changes is the technology available. Human nature and people don't really change. Each generation thinks they are the first, but end up repeating the exact same patterns as the last. Cycles are predictable and patterns always repeat.

The problem for that theory is that sex is a fixed biological category. Gender is just personality, and personality " fluidity" was always the goal of the women's liberation movement and also the gay liberation movement. What we have now is actually very retrograde, not progressive. The idea that certain 'gender expressions' are either male or female is nonsense.

The whole self identification thing only applies if you believe in the concept of a 'gender identity' to begin with. Nobody had heard of it in 2010 - and by 2040 it will be viewed as a trend in the field of 'psychological wellbeing' that has passed.

Before and after that - people, whether male or female, have always been themselves without adopting unnecessary identity labels with which to signal their imagined progressive/unique credentials. And some people have always cross dressed.....but it is only recently that they believed they had actually changed sex too.

Agreed, there's nothing new under the sun, people wo think attitudes will change 'just like it did before', don't realise attitudes can change back as well as forward.

If something ends up offending people, they will reject it, and men saying there can be women if they want is something that offends most people. It offends they're sense of truth, and it's not because of 'phobia' but because it's stupid, people will only go along with stupid for so long.

Gender fluidity will just become pedestrian and everyday and the debate will die a natural death.

If gender fluidity was pedestrian then everyone would know the difference between sex and gender. No-one would be daft enough to try to change their own physical sex, or worse encourage anyone else to try it, because even if it were possible to change your physical sex (it's not, you don't get a body that works anything like it would work if it was the other sex, but never mind that for now) just imagine making permanent physical changes to your body to match something that everyone agrees is fluid. How stupid would that be?

And gender-fluid people would either confortably keep to the spaces and services available only to their own sex regardless of gender, and would be welcomed there by everyone of their own sex; or else they'd use the spaces and services that are available to both sexes regardless of gender. Because that's the pedestrian way to live with gender fluidity.

We have to keep plodding away til that happens and the debate will die its natural death.

Marx, of course, believed that the only real change would come when the means of production ( technology) was communally owned - until then history was just a series of oppressions as each new mode of production was seized by a small group and utilised to oppress the others.

I'm not a Marxist, but he did have some valid observations on human nature and society. The idea that history runs in a straight line towards some imagined utopia is simply a very naive take on matters.

Human society and human capabilities can degenerate as well as progress and evolve. We only have to look at past civilisataions to see how they peaked and then grew corrupted. Often with a loss of skill and knowledge too.

I see the whole trans thing as a degeneration; the apotheosis of late stage capitalism and the cult of the individual welded together.

To go back to Jennifer Bilek and a comment from @Seethlaw

“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.”

It’s an interesting theory and also quite possible. But if this is their genuine aim, it feels to me that they are missing the mark. Although there are still quite a lot of people and especially youngsters who are in favour of so-called “trans rights” I think the idea of an internal man or woman essence that overrides sex hasn’t really gained as much ground. That may be partly because even the super-rich men that JB has highlighted don’t look remotely female.

Of course, given these men are transvestites, rather than purely interested in the potential for money making and selling transhumanism might offer, I would be suspicious that, whatever they claim, their (perhaps subconscious) focus has always been on gaining access to women’s spaces for their own gratification. Those who aren’t transvestites might have a more purist aim, but transvestism seems like quite an addictive attribute.

American billionnaires have a lot to answer for...and the freewheeling American culture of the individual, lone cowboy has a lot to answer for. Think Martine Rothblatt; Jennifer Pritzker - both men who identify as women and who have billions to spare to spread their creed.

Key billionaires interested in transhumanism include:

• Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink): Perhaps the most prominent proponent, Musk founded Neuralink in 2016 to develop implantable brain chips intended to achieve human-AI symbiosis, theoretically preventing humans from being "left behind" by advanced AI. His broader goals involve merging human consciousness with machines and ensuring the long-term survival of humanity through colonization of other planets.
• Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir): A major proponent of life-extension research, Thiel has expressed that "the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead". He has invested in various research initiatives aimed at stopping or reversing the aging process.
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon): In 2022, Bezos invested in Altos Labs, a biotechnology company focused on cellular rejuvenation programming to reverse disease and aging.
• Larry Page (Google co-founder): Launched Calico Life Sciences (Calico Labs) in 2013, a research firm dedicated to extending the human lifespan.
• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): Alongside his wife Priscilla Chan, he is a founder of the Breakthrough Prize, which awards $3 million to scientists discovering new ways to extend human life.
• Sergey Brin (Google co-founder): Similar to Page, Brin is a supporter of longevity research and co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize.
• Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook): The first president of Facebook has invested in technologies to extend life, driven by personal experiences with life-threatening food allergies.

Common Themes in Billionaire Transhumanism:

• Life Extension/Immortality: Investing in biotech to combat aging.
• Merging with AI: Using brain-computer interfaces to enhance cognitive capabilities.
• Space Colonization: Using technologies like SpaceX to ensure human survival off-earth.
• Longtermism: A focus on maximizing the potential of future humanity, sometimes at the cost of addressing current, immediate problems.