Guardian: weaponised emotional blackmail from 14yo 'trans' athlete

[teawamutu]

The Guardian's rearguard action on reality continues. Apparently the problem is not the parents and authorities who conspired to lie to this boy, coddle his delusions, disadvantage all girls around him in the service of his own wishful thinking etc etc etc: it's definitely the people who pointed it out:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/17/trans-athlete-no-one-should-face-vicious-attacks

I am prepared to feel a little sorry for the kid, who couldn't have been exposed like this if the useful idiots around him had done their fucking jobs. But the Grauniad can fuck off with the tired 'beee kiiiind' shit as a solution. Been there, binned the t-shirt. We want our shit back.

Maybe due to a glitch in the development process as an embryo.....feasible... maybe one day scientists will be able to explain it on the basis of physiology?

What kind of 'glitch'?

How does this 'glitch' happen?

I'm actually one of those people. I have a female body, but my brain sees it as male (narrow hips, flat chest, penis, etc...) I know this disconnect perfectly well. I also know that this doesn't actually make me a man. I am a woman who feels like she should be a man, presents as a man, and wishes people to treat her as a man. But none of this actually makes me a man; that's a fundamental, unchangeable fact.

Actually "Born in the wrong body"?

No I don't. I don't believe there's one type of mind that thinks innately womanny thoughts and is right for a woman's body and another type that thinks innately manly thoughts and is right for a man's body, and sometimes the blueprints get muddled up.

I think our minds develop in our bodies, are intimately connected to our bodies and created by the experiences we have through our bodies. We are the conscious of our body, not a separate thing.

I think "being trans" is an outcome with a variety of causes not a thing in its own right. I think the opppsite sex is a very common metaphor/symbol for people's subconscious to seize on and project their own inner self and feelings onto to make sense of them, because the opposite sex is so everyday and yet so culturally overlaid and charged with additional meanings.

As such, I place transgenderism of the "I have the wrong mind for my body" variety and related ideas like two spirits in the same category as believing its possible to talk to or come back from the dead, communicate with or beco.e animals through a spiritual connnection, see into the future or interact with spirits who can control nature. They are things humans have always desparately wished for, but they are not true.

This is incidentally different from the "why shouldn't we decide men amd women are personality types not sex classes" version which doesn't require any feeling of wrongness of the body is more a deliberate/political choice, either cynically or naively, to reify sexism back into a first order organising social factor and dismantle the legitimacy of female political voices.

I agree you don't know much about this, especially if you're saying "born in the wrong body" because even Mermaids and Stonewall say that isn't possible.

The thing is, you're trying to argue with people who actually do know quite a lot about this. They've done all the reading, they keep up with both the research and the data, and they often have trans people in their lives (or are trans identifying themselves, like Seethlaw)

So we know there aren't children facing a life or death choice, but there are bad faith activists telling them that's what they face. We know the longer term outcomes for women and girls who identify as trans are not good. We know that, if left alone, over 80% will go one to be happy in their sex, and mostly be lesbian or gay. We know the consequences of letting boys and men (however they identify ) into women's sports, prisons, hospital wards, etc etc and we kept the recs.

The kindest thing we can do for gender questioning or confused children is not to lie to them that they can change sex. That 14 year old can never become a woman and it's storing up a lifetime of trouble to tell him he can.

Do you think people can be "trans height" if the growth hormones don't properly set the body height in the brain? Or is ones sense of sex sonehow different, uniquely able to suffer from a physical ibstallation of the "wrong blueprint" ?

Given the mind develops within and as part of the body, don't you think it's odd that this "wrong blueprint" for the body isn't a distortion of the right one for that body in the way a physical birth defect is, but a perfectly correct one that is just for a completely different body? Does that not seem to you just a little bit too neat? A bit more like a story than nature?

And if it is different, aren't you at all curious why the physical difference that brings such a fundamental social difference, and that has been so overlaid with projected meanings over the years, should happen to be the exact one that can apparently go the wrong way round?

Yes of course I think that's a bad idea. I am a feminist and agree that women should be protected at all costs because Lord knows we've been historically shit on and don't want it to continue.
I don't agree that trans women should be allowed in female toilets or female prisons or be able to enter athletic competition alongside females....but I also wish to acknowledge that these people do exist. I don't know what the solution is.

This is a great question, and I have never seen a good answer to it.

Why is one's sex the only human characteristic where one's inner feels count more towards determining what you are than observable, physical reality?

I don't deny trans people exist. There are certainly men out there who feel like they're women. But they are not women. They are a subset of men. I don't hate them, I have compassion for them, and I hope they can live their best lives, without infringing on the rights of others. But with the best will in the world, they are not women.

...you don't know how these things work or why they happen. Neither do I
Perhaps one day this will be explained scientifically.

I'm with you on the 'not knowing all about embryology' front
But there are people who do know all about embryology and genetics and human physiology - people who have studied those areas for decades, who have recognised qualifications, who have published in proper, verifiable, peer-reviewed publications.

It seems to me that the most sensible and workable way of seeing and understanding the world around us is to look at what is verifiable and verified in a way that is acceptable to most reasonable people, and go along with the best possible explanations. The alternative is constant 'what ifs' and getting information from less well informed sources. That's not very practical - the real world has to function on reality as currently understood.

The best possible understanding of human sex is that it is binary - you are either male or female, and even if you have a medical condition called a DSD, you'll have either a male one, or a female one - and immutable - your sex is encoded in every cell of your body, and even millennia after you die, some future Alice Roberts can look at your skeleton and say 'This was a female...'.
Even if they only have a fragment, they can test the DNA and say 'This was a female...'

It's an interesting intellectual exercise to speculate about 'Perhaps one day', but a 4 year boy who thinks he is a girl deserves the truth, not intellectual speculation.

Reality is going to catch up with that little 4-year-old. It already has.

He is going to learn that he can never be a girl, he can never grow up to be a woman, because that's impossible. He is going to be adrift in a world where outside of a certain bubble, he will always be recognised as male not female.
He may never accept that fact.
He may spend the rest of his life arguing against reality, medicating against reality, undergoing surgery and subsequent ongoing care against reality.

That's a big load to put on little 4-year-old shoulders.
Gender-confused children deserve love, support and above all, the truth.

Nobody should judge them for that - I do believe that people can absolutely have a female brain in a male body. But they still have a male body. And as such they shouldn't be allowed to compete against people with female bodies.

Do you believe that people who say they are made of glass are actually made of glass?

Would you bury a person with Cotard's Delusion, since they believe they are already dead?

If a family member developed Capgras syndrome, would you agree that you weren't yourself, but an imposter?

Would you take someone with delusional parasitosis to be wormed and de-loused, since they believe they're infested with parasites?

After all, in your world, belief = reality, and you're proud of it.

How is wanting to have your genitals cut off and reshaped because you feel they don't belong to you any different from wanting your leg amputated or your eyes poked out because you feel they don't belong to you? There's nothing uniquely special about genitals to put them in a category all their own and except them from the general rule.

I agree they shouldn't be allowed to compete

That's a different topic for a different conversation.

Trans identified people often suffer a great deal of bigotry and bullying. In a truly tolerant society, this wouldn't happen. However, the fact that they suffer mistreatment does not validate their claims to be the opposite sex. And it must be said that they and their allies sometimes bring it on their own heads by their violent verbal and occasionally physical attacks on women in general and gender-critical women specifically. They shouldn't have to tolerate being persecuted for their beliefs, and neither should we.

Totally agree

As a transman, I'm a LOT more afraid of saying the wrong thing around too many transwomen and TRAs, than of being myself around random people. I know who's yelled in my face for not toeing the party line to the millimetre (and that was long before I turned GC.).

So you believe we should say to boys who think they are really girls that yes they are girls, but a special type of girl that can't use the girls toilets or changing room or enter girls races? How is that kinder than saying sorry you are actually a boy, but it's OK to be a boy with long hair, it's OK to be a boy who likes pink and it's OK to be a boy that plays with dolls.

The boy in the article is 14 the age at which my long haired DS stopped being regularly mis-sexed, the age at which he grew 4 inches in a year and his physique became noticeably male rather than androgynous.

There is no such thing as a "female brain"
https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-samsung-rvo1&source=android-browser&q=is+there+a+female+brain#lfId=ChxjMe

“the vitriol I recently experienced was not a healthy debate”

Oh the irony. Welcome to what women have been experiencing at the hands of TRAs in recent years. A taste of how it really is to be a woman for you.

Am I afraid of emotional blackmail over distressed children being cynically leveraged by a sexist political movement to destroy female people's rights, voice and political legitimacy? Hell yes I am!

It's straight out of the populist authoritarian playbook. Make people act from emotion rather than rationality and you can lead them by the nose into whatever you want.

That's why I post long, carefully though through arguments not knee jerk slogans. Because I refuse to be part of this mindless stupidity.

I'm sorry about what happened to your female child when she started identifying as a boy. That was very wrong. However, the wrongness of the abuse is not somehow proof that her identity is as a boy must be "right", and the solution to her distress cannot be to undefine the reality of sex and replace the recognition of sex based needs, rights and political legitimacy with a sexist construction based on the idea some minds are simply wrong for their bodies, because that has impacts that go far beyond your daughter's personal sense of self.

Interesting. Rejects his father's name, takes his mother's and then beats his sister in competitions.....lots to think about there.

Even at 14 there’s a desire by the male sex to dominate the female sex?

I mean genuinely- so what?

It might explain why a boy feels that way.

It doesn't mean his body is actually female. It doesn't mean he experiences life in a female body and forms his personality and sense of self within all that comes with that body.

It doesn't justify treating him "as a girl", bexause unless you decide to take the sexist position that being a boy or a girl is a mental difference rather than a physical one, he is still a boy in the real world even if his brain says otherwise.

That's an excellent analogy, are you Scottish?

This is what I don't understand.

How is it better to pretend boys can become girls, but only up to a point. And at a crucial point of affirmation (accessing women's spaces) you pull it back. That strikes me as much more cruel. Better to be clear from the get go.

People have lost sight of the fact that sometimes you have to tell people what they don't want to hear to do the right/moral thing. And that's the right/moral thing by them as well as everyone else.

'Be kiiiiind' has so much to answer for. Sometimes the truth and firmness are much more important that being fluffy and 'nice' in a very superficial sense.