How would you deal with T in a friendship group?

[FourSevenTwo]

How would you deal with T people around you? In general and in my situation?

The main question:
A male in a friendship group decided to go full TW, starting hormones and so on, changing name to the women's form and coming out with pronouns.

Unfortunately, our language is heavily gendered*. For example, instead of Hi Alex, you would say Hi Alexi for a man and Hi Alexo for a woman. If you want to say anything in past tense, like Where were you yesterday, you have to use men's or women's form for were.
This means it is not really possible to ignore it in direct interaction.

I'm not willing to pretend through language that I see him as a woman. I don't and won't. But I don't insist on calling him him. There are some not great alternatives (it, plural - with it's own verb forms, switching to English), but they are all very noticeable.

I'd like to find a solution for our coexistence in this friendship group. I'm not asking about a language solution here, more about an approach.

I'm considering

1. reaching him with a message, saying I've heard the news, and I can't affirm, but, I'd like to keep things civil, so is there some alternative we can agree on?

2. ingoring the issue and limiting communication on grammatically neutral constructions (which will be limiting and obvious after a time)

3. some other option?

To answer possible questions.

• I'm GC woman - in the adult human female sense, in the gender identity terminology I'd claim agender. I absolutely understand people are unhappy with gendered roles, I just don't believe that trying to become/pretend to be/claiming to be the other one is the solution. And I'm sure one can't change sex.

• It seems that majority of our shared friends are willing to be kind, some believe it, some just don't care, men with no skin in the game.

• *I'm elsewhere in EU, not a self-ID country. I don't ask about legal aspects, just personal approach. Discussing in my country's forums would be hard, as we are a small population.

• The group is about games, meeting at someone's home, so no issue with single sex spaces, and generally gender doesn't play a role in the group's activities.

• Yes, I'd like to try to keep the group if possible. I see it as a political topic and I don't need to discuss politics all the time.

• Edit to add : I've name changed for this one. Sorry it is long. And yay, I've managed to force the formatting to behave!

This.

Instead you weaponised AGAINST us at every opportunity telling us we are wrong about our own experiences.

You are a gay man with a sexual attraction to straight men, but not gay men. April Ashley described a similar experience.

An attraction to straight men and not to gay men used to be ascribed to internalised homophobia. What's changed? (Out of date old lady wondering...)

"I was a toddler going "Why am I not a girl"."

Yes I never lived my life as a male or had male experiences.

I'm just catching up and I must say, this thread has been an absolutely wild read, my goodness. This level of delulu is simply not healthy.

It is a study of understanding that when someone makes a statement that relies only on subjective reality as a grounding, they can say completely contradictory things and still expect to be affirmed that they are factually accurate.

There are quite a few factually contradictory bangers in this thread.

Yet, apparently, there is nothing ideological about claiming to be female as a male person....

"I was a toddler going "Why am I not a girl"."

I think the key thing is that this is a uniquely male experience. The female equivalent would be a little girl wondering"why am I not a boy".

It's also a very sad experience because it points to a toddlerhood where gendered expectations had already been made clear.

Feminists don't want toddlers to feel gendered expectations. One of my kids looked like the opposite sex until puberty and never cared if they were "misgendered" because to them both sexes have equal value.

Yet extreme trans ideology won't stand with feminists here either. Instead of questioning a childhood restrained by sexist and homophobic attitudes, extreme trans ideology lays the fault with the child's body and their natural puberty.

This is really sad - upthread this PP stated they were a woman because they had the required primary and secondary sex characteristics… oh dear! Im really horrified if that’s been the medical advice given. They maybe have some cosmetically created/adjusted secondaries but to be clear zero primaries

Are doctors blatantly lying or do they let patients believe their delusions. I heard about a trans identifying girl who believed that she’d be able impregnate a female partner with her phalloplasty. Very sad

I agree Knotty. I said this upthread. Where the actual fuck did male people get the message that simply acquiring some of the sex characteristics of female people made them female people.

If it is was anyone in the medical profession, they should be exposed for this misinformation.

Besides which, the misinformation just kept on coming from male posters on this thread.

Female bodies on those bodies formed at birth around the production of large gametes, regardless of whether those large gametes have ever been produced or will ever be produced.

That is all that is needed to be known.

That any male person thinks they can acquire a female body through any process is misogynistic and it is also an impossibility.

Destabilising language as part of that acquisition is also misogynistic. It is also a fleeting temporary measure that is a clear falsehood. Because material reality will prevail despite any male person attempting to destabilise the language female people use to describe themselves.

A male person categorising themselves as a female person will always be a category error. It requires a web of inaccurate language to mischaracterise themselves and the category they are forcing themselves into figuratively. However, this will not matter because the accurate description remains in material reality which cannot be controlled.

Its not sad.

Its criminal neglegance due to a failure to obtain informed consent. Its malpractice.

By the way. Coming back to this.

If a group of 'women' are to be excluded from sport open to all female people and they fit the age and skill level criteria, then they are not 'women'. And they are not 'female'.

It is contradictory to hold this view.

If someone claims that they are 'female' and have 'female bodies', then it is incoherent to then say that those people are excluded because they have male physical advantages.

Thanks again for showing the incoherence in these arguments.

It is like declaring that male people who stated they have female bodies are not to be housed in female prisons. It highlights that the categorisation is not materially real and is false.

Our visitors will never be argued out of their conviction that they are women, because it's an intrinsically unfalsifiable metaphysical proposition.

And maybe they always 100% pass and have never committed a sin, let alone a crime, and are therefore harmless. Maybe.

But it's not about them: it's about the laws and customs that have arisen to protect them.

Allowing anyone who wants to to conceal their sex, proselytise to minors, adopt unsafe medical practices, arrogate the (actually rather limited and specific, but necessary) sex-based rights of the opposite sex, and punish non-believers. Which is a threat to data integrity, safeguarding, medical safety, sex-based rights, and secularism. It's huge, and some of the worst affected are believers themselves.

I do obey pronoun edicts irl, for a quiet life, and tactically: it means I can raise the issues above without being shunned from the very outset.

Our visitors will never be argued out of their conviction that they are women,

And yet it is obvious that they know they are not women.

You're a transsexual man. You're not any type of woman. Your attempts to use language to obfuscate this are a good example of the harms you were attempting to query earlier.

I don't have internalised homophobia? Why would you think I do. Me being a straight woman attracted to men has nothing to do with gay people.

You being in denial about being a male attracted to males (i.e. gay) has everything to do with your internalised homophobia.

Well yes, which is, paradoxically, one of the reasons I don't tend to join in with pile-ons based on large gametes etc although I can be a bit obsessive about DSDs, because they're legally and scientifically interesting: it's feeding a mean-spirited part of myself. I experience schadenfreude, because they know that they are not women, and that I am.

Indeed. Actual women aren't twisting themselves into pretzels trying to convince women on a feminist sub-forum that they're also women, and always have been. We just are, by virtue of the material reality of our status as adult humans of the female sex class.

I responded saying I didn't need a pregnancy test because I never had a uterus.

The maleness of this statement is so utterly glaring, I'm speechless.

The inside? Your ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, most of your clitoris, cells, bones, blood, lobules, milk ducts? You have these? Or are you talking metaphysics?

Or are you talking metaphysics?

He's talking bollocks about the implications of no longer having bollocks.

Literally bollocks.

As in cutting off bollocks.

"Female primary sex characteristics are the vulva, vagina, uterus, uterine tubes, cervix, and the ability to give birth and menstruate when matured."

You are a man with a facsimile of female secondary sex characteristics, as a result of extreme bodily modification and/or exogenous cross sex hormones, sure, but remind me, which female primary sex characteristics do you have again?🤔

That's much the same as saying that old men are weaker than men.

It is also like saying 'boys are weaker then men'.

It was always an irrelevant point.

*poor facsimile

Trying to be what you are doesn't work. In order for a boy to try to be a boy, he has to have a mental picture of what being a boy looks like, and then try to fit that picture. But being a boy just means being, not trying to be what you think a boy is supposed to be. It's clear that you weren't an 'average' or 'typical' boy, but you were still a boy. Whoever (and in feminist terms this isn't any particular person or people, but 'the patriarchy') formed that mental picture of how you were supposed to be misled you.

You had no need to change anything about you, either physically or mentally, to be the boy you were. The process of growing up, with no medical treatments, leads the boy to being the man. For many of us, that process isn't easy. Working out how to be oneself with all the pressures on us to conform to various ideals can be tough. Some of those pressures are positive, some negative, but they are all active in maturing into a functional adult. Pressures to conform to the extent that some of us try to be what we cannot be are negative. It is not possible for a boy to become a woman; it must be horrible to be in that position of having tried very hard to be a woman and to find that not everyone can be made to go along with the pretence that means so much to you. But a logical impossibility doesn't become reality by dint of wishing. You can be accepted as a man who is 'transsexual', but that does not make you a woman.