Do you exist IRL?

[EdgeOfThirtySeven]

It's just that I see so many TRAs stating that "nobody IRL cares about this stuff", so maybe we just all exist on Twitter/X and Mumsnet? Sort of disembodied AI? Not actual women in actual buildings, doing actual jobs and leading actual lives?

When Katy Colin Montgomery briefly returned to Twitter/X for his drunken pre- and post-Christmas rants, they centered on the idea that:

Man it's so weird looking at twitter and seeing GCs still going on and on about their nonsense ideology. Literally no one irl thinks about trans people at all. No one cares. If they got a hobby they'd be cured of their relentless insanity in an instant

...

Obviously I've not posted for ages because of, you know, the nazis and the bots and how authoritarian Elon has even censored the word cîs. But there's one thing I wanted to say: Gender Critical isn't real. No one irl gives a fuck AT ALL

I'm pretty sure that I exist IRL. My dog certainly relies on that. Oh, and my loving family, and friends 😆

I am real but I am too scared to talk about my gc views in real life... that's pretty sad and telling right?

Errrr....

Schudson & Morgenroth (2022) – Nonbinary gender identities
Current Opinion in Psychology
www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S2352250X22002202
doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101324

Well, the first link does not work.
The second link goes to :

How food overconsumption has hijacked our notions about eating as a pleasurable activity
Ridder and Gillebaart.

Maybe if you find the right link Finch you could do the same as I asked about the last one:

"why any person's philosophical belief about themselves should be treated as if it has a materially real biological foundation that means it should supersede sex class when sex class matters?"

Looking forward to your analysis from a relevant perspective.

There’s also a very big difference between caring IRL and being brave enough to confront a man in a dress in our spaces IRL.

I care plenty but if trapped in a space with a man violating my boundaries I’m more likely to keep my head down and get out of that space as quickly as possible. To a man delusional enough to think that wearing a dress makes him a woman, he’s probably also delusional enough to think that counts as welcoming into the space with open arms.

Whyte, Brooks & Torgler (2018) – Man, woman, “other”
Archives of Sexual Behavior

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1261-2
doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1261-2

Pages not found. In my mind, this is not going well for someone so very condescending about being so well informed.

Can I suggest not doing an AI dump next time and actually posting carefully considered links with discussion points?

It's clearly an attempt to derail both of these threads and waste time.

The GI adherents do not seem to realise that every time they do this they reinforce the view that they are not here to engage in good faith.

Clark et al. (2018) – Identities beyond the binary
Journal of Adolescent Health
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X22002202
doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.03.027

Second link also doesn't work.

But the first one did. Again, why is this relevant to the question of "why any person's philosophical belief about themselves should be treated as if it has a materially real biological foundation that means it should supersede sex class when sex class matters?"

Highlights

Beliefs that affirm the existence of gender/sex diversity are associated with positive attitudes about non-binary people.

Multidimensional measures of gender/sex are inclusive, effective tools for research with non-binary participants.

Non-binary people achieve psychological resilience by challenging the gender/sex binary and building community together.

Scholarship increasingly identifies sources of happiness and pleasure in non-binary people's lives, such as gender euphoria.

I don't thinks many of us would disagree with these. In fact, that little gem about gender euphoria is very well known and discussed. Euphoria boner pics and discussion are easily available on social media.

And again... it is an article discussing 'identities'. Having an 'identity' is a well established human aspect. This doesn't seem to be saying anything about it being a biological reality, just another article saying it is an identity and people are all too happy to have people act like that identity is materially real.

I think it was some sort of exercise to prove that we don’t want to be “enlightened”.
What they don’t realise is that anything they post will never prove that humans can change sex and as most of us here are advocating for single sex provision, we consider their links as irrelevant. And that most of them have been taken apart previously anyway.

Please be careful clicking on any links shared by Quick. They made this odd post on another thread:

"What on earth are you up to?

What indeed? But thank you for clicking on the links."

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5470596-talking-to-non-gc-people?reply=149647026&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share&utm_source=copylink

I thought I'd look at one of Maddy's links when I reached them in the thread, to show good faith, clicked on it, and found the article:

How food overconsumption has hijacked our notions about eating as a pleasurable activity

Fascinating - but not what I'd expected.

McNeil et al. (2021) – Experiences of non-binary people in healthcare
BMJ Open
bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/7/e046872
doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-046872

First link doesn't work.
Second link is: ‘A silent epidemic of grief’: a survey of bereavement care provision in the UK and Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic

Hyde et al. (2019) – Gender nonconformity and identity diversity
American Psychologist
psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-17415-001
doi.org/10.1037/amp0000307

First link is: From silence to diagnosis: The entry of the mentally problematic employee into medical practice.

Thorne et al. (2018) – Gender diversity in childhood and adolescence
Journal of Adolescent Research
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0743558418761994

Link doesn't work

Barr et al. (2016) – Gender as a continuum
Sex Roles
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-015-0569-1
doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0569-1

Links don't work

Westbrook & Saperstein (2015) – New categories are not enough
Gender & Society
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243215584758

This one worked, but again, doesn't answer the question:
"why any person's philosophical belief about themselves should be treated as if it has a materially real biological foundation that means it should supersede sex class when sex class matters?"

And in cases where people are contributing to a survey, yes.... fucking oath sex matters much of the time as we have seen from the mess of the last census.

Morgenroth & Ryan (2020) – The effects of gender identification beyond the binary
European Journal of Social Psychology
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2673

Really???? This one links to: Make America gracious again: Collective nostalgia can increase and decrease support for right-wing populist rhetoric

Lindqvist et al. (2021) – Gender beyond the binary: Measurement and classification
Psychology & Sexuality
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19419899.2020.1729847

This one goes to: Sexual violence and suicide risk in the transgender population: the mediating role of proximal stressors

Joel et al. (2015) – Sex beyond the genitalia
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509654112

Ahh.... this one is telling us that there is no 'gendered' brain if I remember correctly. This was also then referenced in a later flawed review of MRIs where those new researchers didn't allow for same sex attraction in their male respondents and made conclusions not supported by the evidence.

This study states as its conclusion:

The lack of internal consistency in human brain and gender characteristics undermines the dimorphic view of human brain and behavior and calls for a shift in our conceptualization of the relations between sex and the brain. Specifically, we should shift from thinking of brains as falling into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, to appreciating the variability of the human brain mosaic. Scientifically, this paradigm shift entails replacing the currently dominant practice of looking for and listing sex/gender differences with analysis methods that take into account the huge variability in the human brain (rather than treat it as noise), as well as individual differences in the specific composition of the brain mosaic. At the social level, adopting a view that acknowledges human variability and diversity has important implications for social debates on long-standing issues such as the desirability of single-sex education and the meaning of sex/gender as a social category.

But, what is the relevance of this study supposed to be Finch?

Jumping to Fausto:

Fausto-Sterling (2012) – The dynamic development of sex and gender
Biology of Sex Differences
bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-6410-3-9

Like to tell Finch why mouse liver gene expression, (not by Fausto-Sterling by the way) is linked up here.

I am not going to continue to go through your journal dump. Because you have not bothered to even fucking checking what you have posted.

I tell you what I will ponder though. Why the fuck you thought you would be in a good position to shame people on this thread with your clearly inept work? Link dumps rarely work as 'gotchas' because people don't bother to check the relevance of them.

I think also you perhaps have shown though, that you have a prejudiced and inaccurate view on what people who believe that sex should be prioritised above gender identity when sex matters.

Ha, Cassole - and there we have it. I mean, what are the odds that 1) the only link I click on in Maddy's list appears to have been carelessly pasted & 2) the only post I make in the thread sits right next to another giving a strong argument for being wary of links pasted. It doesn't really say much about the overall reliability of the TRA approach here...

I now think that perhaps if that was not an AI dump, it was taken from the references of a published study.

Again, irrelevant or leading nowhere links that do not engage with the fundamental premise of what the group of people disparagingly categorised as believing 'GC ideology' are campaigning for.

From someone who posted them as some kind of 'gotcha.'

Ah. Helle, how could I ever compete with your extraordinary thoroughness!

PS After checking my posts, apologies to Finch and Maddy for confusing you.

I am distracting myself from work...

But I must admit that I was curious after the Fausto link went to a mouse liver study, I thought, WTAF so started checking. It was not very long because most of the links were dead or went elsewhere. And the rest were not engaging with what the poster is denouncing over two threads at the moment.

It's sad and telling that we can't have this conversation openly as a society, even though it seriously affects half of the population.

It's not sad and telling about you as a person because it can be difficult to speak out about these things. People have lost their jobs, been physically threatened etc etc for showing support for women's and girl's rights. Silence is interpreted as acceptance. It's not.

Well done, Hellebore. Personally I charge by the hour for checking careless reference lists, but your service is appreciated!

I exist.

I've noticed that my friends don't like to have to think about it, because that would require them to form an opinion and that opinion might be at least partially contrary to being the nice thinking person they want to be, they would have to mentally adjust to having friends with opposite opinions.

In two discussions recently, I got a response "but you were thinking about it!"

I think, also, that IRL people might express the lightest of "But I think girls should have their own divisions in sport" and then discover that that renders them a bigoted transphobe worse than JKR. And they have started to think about that... Quietly, but it's happening.

So it's not just us mythical GC biddies 😉 who are now questioning the dogmatism.

I think they do realise it perfectly well.

Yes, people are interested irl. I was talking to my DParents about the WI change of rules and they were horrified that anyone can obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate without physically changing anything!
They hadn’t realised the reality of self-id and now will be challenging family members who tell them “trans women” are women!

I think posts such as Finch's is trying to overwhelm people with what they consider 'science'. It could be considered a 'flood the zone' attempt. It is not really a Gish gallop but the attempt was either to overwhelm people with so much evidence that surely people reading will think that Finch had a really good evidence base and must be right.

Or it was just meant to appear that way and to give posters who fully support gender identity theory some moral superiority if people didn't engage with the evidence presented.

The links that did work as expected though were not new to people on this board.

Not only that, but most of the links that worked were actually ideological and discussing identity from a philosophical perspective or a psychological perspective. It was almost like 'these identities exist'! was the argument.

Well, no shit Sherlock. We all know that some people claim to have these identities. The question that is relevant is why should that identity be prioritised above the materially real sex class aspects of humans when sex matters.

The links were a complete failure to engage with what that poster believes that 'GC' people are campaigning for.

I exist IRL, as do 20 or so of my university friends that I met up with over Christmas. We had a great conversation about all this. Not a single genderist amongst us. One or two still having to be careful what they say around BeKind uni age DC, but even most of our kids think it’s a load of codswallop too.

But if any of the TRAs want to let HMRC know I don’t exist I’d be v grateful. Am sick of them hounding me to do my tax return by the deadline when I’m trying my hardest to procrastinate it till the last minute. They certainly believe I exist.

But if any of the TRAs want to let HMRC know I don’t exist I’d be v grateful. Am sick of them hounding me to do my tax return by the deadline when I’m trying my hardest to procrastinate it till the last minute. They certainly believe I exist.

I hadn’t thought of that. If I could convince my local council I didn’t exist I could stop paying mt council tax. And better yet, if the bank thought I didn’t exist I could start using my mortgage money for fun stuff.

Yep, no end of possibilities here. It'd be brilliant.

Sadly, I think these bodies might be harder to convince than TRAs muppets with vested interests.