Continuation of Polypostwonder thread

[Imdunfer]

Follow on from this thread

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5532352-the-liminality-of-sex-perception-sex-based-spaces-and-bodily-autonomy?page=39

For argument sake, I understand Blaire White to be a woman. This is independent of the knowledge she chose to only undergo cosmetic facial surgeries and breast augmentation, while retaining everything else.
I think I remember reading that she politically aligns 'right' and is politically vocal about being a male, living as a trans woman. I'm not 100% sure, though. It's not a way that I could understand living, but it is financially lucrative in her case.

There is a person who declares themselves to be male.

That person chooses to live presenting as a female.

In spite of their self declaration as a male, complete with male genitals, you understand that they are a woman.

And you ascribe their understanding of themselves being male, at least partly, to financial motives.

This is either monumentally arrogant or monumentally stupid thinking, or possibly both. Or perhaps you just like playing with a largely female forum and seeing how many feathers you can ruffle.

One thing is for sure, and that is that I don't think anything you write on this subject from now on is going to be of any value to read.

Report and delete me all you like, I'll keep saying it.

Gaslighting and DARVO-ing women about this is abusive, men who gaslight and use DARVO against women are abusive men.

@CohensDiamondTeeth I kind of like GubbinsGender. I think I might be GubbinsGender. It would explain a lot...

I want female single sex provision for my rape counselling sessions. I am legally entitled to that. Under law, that single sex provision doesn’t include men. It therefore doesn’t include you @polypostwonder

that isnt à reward. It’s a necessity for me. And the law agrees.

would you attend a group such as I describe?

“my experience, which provides me some perspective in contrast to many of your beliefs”

I think that this again (for the n+1th time since February) is the key to how queer theory and postmodernism works.

It anyone can confidently claim that their life and life experience is described how they say it is, when that description is based only on that individual’s subjective belief and not material reality, they can use statements such as this to remain within that description and reject material reality.

I see this as self abuse being perpetuated on those who actually hold that belief by the theories giving the person what they then believe is a legitimate way to describe their subjective belief and the reality they have constructed around that belief. By providing the structure for this subjective belief to be supported, when it doesn’t reflect material reality, it creates this false reality.

It is also abusive then to the rest of society. Because those adherents to that subjective reality, the one they treat as material reality, then cannot accept any responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

The abuse may not be intended, but it is there. When a male person gaslights female people by declaring there is no knock on effect to his acquiring female language, when the material reality is very clear that there is, this is abusive to all female people. And it is just one instance of that dynamic.

Yup.

It really does begin to feel abusive, doesn't it? Low-key, of course - but just another way to harass us and remind us we can never really be safe anywhere.

That's good, because transwomen are men.

Agree. You don't believe your Y chromosome makes you a man.

I do.

And that the presence of X only chromosomes is the single defining characteristic of women that you said up thread didn't exist.

You define being a woman as a feeling.

You've never felt what being a woman is because you cannot transport yourself into a woman's body to find out.

You mistake being on the receiving end of other people's behaviour when they think you are a woman as you feeling like a woman. It isn't.

So we have no common ground.

And although I have a lot of sympathy for your own situation, I despise the fact that you can see, but don't care, that your support for people who think they are women to have access to female only spaces (of all kinds) supports men who think they are women but are very obviously men to deny women their legal rights.

You are a very intelligent person, clearly. I think it is a great shame that you choose to use that intelligence against the very sex that you believe yourself to be.

I agree with everything you say, but to be fair to PPW I don't believe he is defining his womanhood solely as a feeling, but rather through his experiences.

I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt here. I do believe that, throughout his life since a teenager, other people have treated him as female; whether that's because he passes and they don't know, whether that's because they genuinely believe you can transition, whether that's because they're being kind, or whether that's because they just don't care or it's easier to put a feminine looking man in the "woman" box in their heads is another question.

At least, this is what I understand when he says "the world allocates woman to me" (paraphrasing).

I can sympathise and understand the difficulty with the opposite suddenly happening. As with all things, it's difficult when your lived experience suddenly changes overnight. I don't think he is coming at this from a malicious standpoint, and I find his posts interesting to read to get a perspective from the other side of the fence even if I totally disagree with them.

I think you missed this sentence in the reply you quoted:

"You mistake being on the receiving end of other people's behaviour when they think you are a woman as you feeling like a woman. It isn't."

I find his posts interesting to read to get a perspective from the other side of the fence even if I totally disagree with them.

I've found his personal experiences interesting too, but I actually think he's a very unusual person and not at all representative of the people who women are up against in their battle to recover and retain their rights.

So while he's interesting, I'm not sure we're actually learning much about the other side of the fence.

I think that the posts show women how these subjective realities are built. How a portion of society has provide the structure for these realities to be given any semblance that some people then believe should be validated.

It is a great example of how philosophical theories work and just how much they lack integrity when they are evaluated against material reality.

Why? Genuinely, what is it that you think is very unusual about him? I'm not trying to be an arse with the underlining FWIW, I'm just using your highlighting of the word.

What is it about him that you don't think is representative of other trans identified male TRAs?

Remembering that we only have his word that he passes and that everyone in his life actually believes he is a woman - and we also have seen that he's more than happy to outright lie about or misrepresent so many things.

I don't think he's at all unusual in TRA circles, or much different than the usual male TRA posters that we get here so frequently.

I think he's demonstrating a lot of TRA tactics, arguments, beliefs and perspective. Playing the usual word games, taking no responsibility or ownership of themselves or their actions and how that might effect others, general misogyny, disregard for reality, science, truth etc etc etc.

Edited to make it clear I was talking about gender ideology trans activists, not just trans identified men, because I know there are trans identified men who are completely lovely, reasonable people who don't gaslight women, acknowledge they can't change sex, don't appropriate our words, and aren't trying to demolish female rights either on purpose or as collateral damage to their own selfish desires.

This.

he lies. Objectively, he lies. So therefore I don’t believe him when he says he passes.

and, objectively, it doesn’t matter if he passes or not. The law doesn’t say “no men except those who think they pass”.

He's physically much shorter than the average trans male and light frames as well. He was prevented from going through puberty and never produced even normal childhood levels of testosterone due to a medical condition. He had surgery very young. He's been on female hormones for at least 4 decades. I believe him when he says he is never recognised as male.

He transitioned at a time when that was very unusual and had little of the current hype and"trans culture" to support and reinforce his dysmorphia. It was not externally promoted and reinforced for him to behave as a woman in the way today's trans people are.

I don't think he is anything much like the majority of the female identified trans people who we are battling to keep out of female spaces.

I think that you are being extremely gullible to accept this self confessed liar's account of their life & circumstances. This is just a guy who indulges in a lot of wishful thinking. His story changes too. We don't hear about the alleged kids any more it's all just "Me, me, me...". I don't believe any of it other than the fact that he is a man.

Where has he said he has a medical condition that prevented even his body producing normal male quantities of testosterone as a child?

What prevented him going through any stage (even tanner stage 2) of male development where male testosterone levels are different to female levels?

What prevented him from going through puberty? He also would have been producing male levels of testosterone throughout puberty. Even if some of that was not used in puberty, some of it would have been despite the assurances to the contrary. Because we also know from studies and papers that these hormones are not 100% effective in their roles in the body, meaning that even if estrogen was impacting testosterone, there is absolutely no guarantee that testosterone was prevented from making changes to the body with 100% results.

Also Even puberty blocked males that are appearing in media are able to be correctly identified as being in the male sex category even though many people believe that they are indistinguishable to female people.

Once a person has not been truthful about something significant and something that is able to be judged as being materially untrue, why would anyone believe anything else that the person says that cannot be verified?

I do think this is one of those "OK I happen to be lying, but [I believe] this scenario could happen somewhere, and therefore my lie is just as valid as the truth when it comes to the ethics and logistics of this."

Speaking generally now, the problems with this approach are:

1. Unless the person is real or honestly describing a real person they know, It's just a belief that this set of very unlikely circumstances could in reality ever all hit the same person.
2. Once lying is ethicalised as a valid approach, it's not just the lie that comes in at the start, it's that there's no reason not to fine tune the lie as it goes. The lie evolves and mutates in response to the opposing arguments. So even the position the liar came into the argument telling their lie to defend may not be the one they are arguing for by the end.

So going back to PPW, there probably is some truth here. It could even be mostly true. But the "well actually...." extra details that keep being mentioned for the first time just when they have the most effect on an opposing argument are too convenient for this to be 100% true.

Certainly even if true, we are talking circumstances that apply to less than 1% of the less than 1% of people who identify as trans, yet the unique or very close unique circumstances of this nichest of the niche cases are being presented as having not just equal but more authority about what is relevant to being a "woman" than the circumstances shared by about 50% of humans.

There's a lot of tossed salad and scrambled eggs thrown around to hide it, but once you see that is what's really being said you can't unsee it.

Certainly even if true, we are talking circumstances that apply to less than 1% of the less than 1% of people who identify as trans, yet the unique or very close unique circumstances of this nichest of the niche cases are being presented as having not just equal but more authority about what is relevant to being a "woman" than the circumstances shared by about 50% of humans.

This, for me. If there's any "dishonesty" that bothers me, it's a certain intellectual dishonesty. We can't know PPW's circumstances, but we do see their words, and these just don't hold up. There's intelligence, and emotional resilience, and such a gritty determination to engage as a minority voice, which I admire... but so much of that is being pressed into serving clever evasion of the issue at hand.

I know even this isn't quite that simple: the focus of PPW's posts is, of course, the exact issue at hand for them - this is hugely personal. And in a debate, you draw on the tools that best serve you. I think these serve them emotionally - a kind of drawing their own experiences in around them as a protective, unquestionable cloak. But the thing is, we have our own emotional worlds, too. Our relationships and suffering and trauma, that justify our arguments. Taztoy's so brave in sharing some of hers, and the list someone posted a few pages ago was devastatingly powerful and true. And yet we don't rely on these to the same degree - we acknowledge that this is a bigger issue than the self.

And given that, and also knowing there are other trans people who recognise the same (eg. that interview with Blair White someone posted recently - fascinating) - that there's this whole world outside PPW's posts that they won't really engage with, emotionally or intellectually - it becomes frustrating, and also, as I say a few posts ago, actually somewhat disturbing as the pages roll on.

It's what Helle says, about how theories can collapse when they rub up against real life. There's this kind of intransigent insularity that parallels the thinking of the ideology. I genuinely think that threads like this could help me to understand and empathise and reach out, and it feels ironic that they do, instead, almost invariably tend to leave me even more concerned: for the individual posting, for society, and for women*.

*by which I mean adult human females regardless of their respective self-identification - I mean, that anyone could suggest in earnest that it's acceptable for me to have to type all that in order simply to make my meaning clear in a debating a human rights issue will never cease to disturb me.

ETA If we take PPW's posts at face value, and I do try to - the whole board's built on the premise that people are posting as themselves - I do think their situation's really, really difficult, and I'd have taken the same perspective as many women still do on this only a short while ago. I honestly wish it hadn't come to this awful conflict, and there was scope for us to focus on the tiny minority of trans people in this position, who need society's care and attention - and who I can actually see as being deserving of the graceful concession of "woman" and "she" in quite a wide range of contexts. But this war wasn't of our making: in having conceded that much in the past, we now stand to lose everything, and PPW's emphatic denial of our very real and evidenced fear of this (even as their experiences are paramount in their own posts) really doesn't help to make the case that we can afford to renegotiate some kind of gentle compromise, even if some of us may, in some respects, actully want to.

Well, given that puberty blockers are now banned in the UK, these magical "passing" TIM will simply not exist anymore going forward a few years.
So sorry to use the verboten "exist" but in this case, it's actually true.

Any TIM currently under the age of 18 will not have access to puberty blockers (legally) and will therefore experience full male puberty and develop all of the physical characteristics of an adult man.

So there really won't be any more "no one can tell" or " society has assigned me as a woman" assertions.
Toddlers are able to distinguish between the sexes with remarkable accuracy. The rest of us, even more so.

So, the law is - no men in female spaces.
And it will be glaringly obvious who is a man and who is a woman, even with all the surgery and jiggery pokery in the world*
Because they will be fully developed MEN.

• We can already tell, but that's currently just a "belief." Obviously.

@Helleofabore

Where has he said he has a medical condition that prevented even his body producing normal male quantities of testosterone as a child?

A long way up thread. Hypogonadism.

Thank you.

that may have been a consequence of an eating issue he has told us about.

It doesn’t mean he had NO testosterone production and usage as testosterone. And again, genetics does play a part in development as can be seen by the images of the male people in the media who had their puberties blocked and yet are still able to be correctly identified as being male sex.

A long long time ago, hypo-gonadism and delayed puberty were mentioned by the person in question. For which the normal treatment in a male person (testicles, penis etc, no womb or ovaries) would presumably be exogenous male hormones if required.

Assuming this part is true, it has then been slyly conflated with taking female hormones as a medical necessity because of hypo-gonadiam, and magically becoming female as a result (and er hem, “going through female puberty” ha bloody ha).

A lot of obfuscation and sleight of hand and wide-eyed “I couldn’t help it, it all just happened to me, and I can’t help it if everyone thinks I’m female” etc.

edited to add: sorry slow typing hence cross posting