Thank you. I had some unplanned travel to one of the countries I don’t bring personal electronics. I didn’t find any of what your wrote to be difficult to read. But I’m also mentally as arms-length from this as any person with a trans history can be, I think. I started this thread in good faith, and will continue. I'm sorry that this is so long.
Those were my words from the other thread but there was an important part on the end of it (paraphrased): it is, however, almost always possible to tell someone's sex, most obviously from their gait.
I agreed with the entire statement, I left the end off as I thought it was addressed more generally by other points. I'm sorry.
On the treating people according to perception of sex point, this one is easy. People interact based on the sex they perceive someone to be all the time, without genital inspections or SRY gene tests. Without that perception being accurate there would be very few children born (heterosexual dating would take a lot longer and be very awkward if these two things needed qualifying first), there would be no sexism (without the same qualification) and so on.
I believe we would both agree that this is no coincidence and is a result of ‘perception’ being aligned to biological sex 99+% of the time. It feeds the framework of gendered power over women and influences which characteristics are culturally desired of women for reproductive purposes.
(Teacher example)
I agree that gait is one of the major unalterable sex characteristics. It probably isn’t 100% exclusively different, but it is at least as characteristic for sex as height, musculature, weight distribution or voice (emotion, frequency, etc.) across the population.
I agree with your comparison to the Uncanny Valley. I also see your concerns about having schools attempt to culturally influence your children's boundaries in a direction that is opposite of your beliefs.
Some trans people never enter the Uncanny Valley, let alone cross it.
On the whole though, I don’t believe ‘clockiness’ is culturally significant. Socially, yes. In most situations, evaluation of additional sex characteristics can remove/confirm discordance and settle an initial observation. A frequent example from mumsnet users is ‘speaking’ in response having their sex questioned in a toilet line, for example.
Honestly, there are probably more non-trans people placed in the Uncanny Valley on first meeting than trans people. I guess everyone else also attempts to resolve discordance by balancing interaction based on prior experience, knowledge of cultural ‘boundaries’ and observed sex characteristics.
Most people may feel discomforted or confused, but then quickly move on, deciding it doesn’t matter to them or the situation. Others, if it is important to them, take the opportunity to evaluate additional characteristics, contextualise the situation and continue until things resolve in something that makes sense to them.
Growing up, my parents had a ‘friend of the family’ who had known me from birth. The first time he spent time with us after I’d started transitioning, he wouldn’t shut up about the ‘suspension of disbelief.’
He couldn’t process how everyone around me had uniformly changed their perception and treatment of me based on his prior experience. It didn’t make sense to him because he couldn’t point to anything that I’d physically changed since the last time he’d seen me. Up until that point presumably, everything was ‘normal’ for him. He genuinely seemed broken at the time.
Anyway, it seems an alternative to the Uncanny Valley; when perception changes absent any alteration in characteristics.
I don’t know enough about the teacher to comment on their suitability in the contexts you raise. If there is a safeguarding issue, I hope people would be empowered to report. There should ideally be two adults present at all times when adults are with children.
People with a trans past don’t inherently possess nefarious motivations. I’ve seen FWR posters do this regularly, Over the years I’ve roomed with well over 100 women I’d never met until we were in a hotel room together. The longest was 5 months (we became flatmates afterward… if you can live together in one room for that long, a flat is a palace!). The most recent was 8 days. No motivations. Women are women.
Conclusion
I don't mind or care if you want to go "stealth". Go for it. I would hope for your children's sake (you've mentioned them on another thread) that you'll tell them about your past at some point. But that's none of my business. You wouldn't be the first parent to hide a big secret from their children. But what I do care about is anyone stealthing their way over someone else's boundaries and enforcing their beliefs on them. Everyone knows their own sex, regardless of whether others perceive it correctly or not. It's perfectly possible to subtly self-exclude without "outing" yourself. Obviously not the same thing but I once spent a whole night drinking what I said were gin and tonics - there was no gin in them but I was in the early stages of pregnancy with my first child and didn't want to tell anyone. I managed to avoid getting into rounds of drinks and nobody noticed.
I understand. I don’t feel overly wonderful about it either. Keeping the experience from them was pragmatically necessary at one time. Given the cultural treatment of trans people around the world, there remains no good reason to be ‘out.’ My children have trans friends and are quite supportive of LGBT people and issues. Whenever I think about the topic now, I am still stuck processing a discussion I had with my grandmother (my mother’s adoptive mother) before she passed. While transition had a significant impact on the direction of my life, it feels like an illness I once had and overcame.
It's not othering to recognise that not everyone shares your belief and to accommodate this accordingly.
Of course not. Part of thinking on this has been trying to pull apart why the trans topic is so different now, vs when my life was actively defined by it. And also trying to understand how the gender critical movement found support so effectively in the UK.
There were always ‘sex realists,’ even back then. Though, they were also generally quite publicly also homophobes motivated by their love of god and god’s plan for everyone’s bodies. We were just one small part of the big gay and lesbian agenda to corrupt children and remove heterosexual rights from people.
I think ‘gender critical’ groups and ‘be kind’ groups have both found their raison d’être inside and around the Uncanny Valley.
Trans people were advised to do our best to disappear. There were some who found themselves unable to do this. The provider-defined transition process itself was designed to force the issue early-on. Those of us who had few issues prior to the process had an ‘easier’ life after the process.
I believe there are those who genuinely hold a belief that biological sex dictates everything, everywhere. It is clear when they ground their beliefs equally with trans men and trans women. Ideologically, the subject for them has absolutely nothing to do with perception, motivations or morals.
There are ’sex moralists’ who spend most of their energy moralising against the presence and existence of trans women (specifically).
Others, typically straight men, don’t care a fig about trans people but are very focused on keeping the Valley empty and its edges, well defined and fortified for different, but related reasons.
The majority of people still don’t care enough about the subject. They may acknowledge ‘something’ and move on with life. I think this may be part of the ’making enough effort’ thinking that some have referenced feeling before being radicalised into the gender critical movement.
Equally, a lot of the ‘trans rights activisims’ don’t originate from trans people at all. To me, it looks like a political and ethical response to ‘protect’ the trans people inevitably stuck in or on the ‘wrong’ side of the Uncanny Valley.
The question keeps being asked about how to tell a trans person from a non-trans person. The easiest way based on the above is to ask yourself if the person you observing is in or approaching the Uncanny Valley.
Trans people used to be extremely rare. Now they’re not. Transition is still transition. There’s certainly a wider variety of people transitioning. There’s also a broader definition of what transition is. And what ‘trans’ is, for that matter.
The use of spaces was just life. Trans people were usually too timid to enter spaces and would be dragged into toilets or spaces by friends and family. For me personally, after being dragged into toilets a few times, I started permanently using spaces because I was tired of weighing ‘just pissing’ vs dealing with other people’s reactions (when entering the men’s) and the energy needed to argue against their perceptions and efforts to move me into the women’s.
As far as I can tell, ‘sex-based’ in reference to spaces and rights was never spoken until the culture war.
Laws, like healthcare, provide dual functions on either end of a timeline. One one side, they provide guidance. On the other, they provide remediation.
Laws don’t filter how people experience the space and time in between. The individual, the social and the cultural smush together there.
The UK legal system seems especially convoluted, compared to the rest of the world, because it is also attempting to shape and regulate the space and time bit in the middle (see GRCs, amongst other examples).
I believe the UK has to change its laws regarding trans people sooner than later. It only remains a question of in which direction.
In the big picture, policing sex-based spaces is quite provincial compared to the cultures in many countries where trans people are imprisoned or worse.
I travel to and work in some of those countries. I don’t believe it is coincidence that their goals to ‘prevent’ LGBT people also extend to controlling girls and women.
Things might be different if my work and volunteering wasn’t constantly working with multiple cultures. I’m stuck where I am until I don’t care about my life, or the lives of my family.