Trying to understand everyday views on sex and gender discussions

[Schallern]

Hi,

I hope this is the right place for this post.

I am a bisexual female and have been friends for years with a very liberal, LGBT crowd. Past “trans women are women”, I never questioned anything.

I’m in my mid to late 20s now and I’ve recently expanded my social circle. As a result of this and moving away from purely LGBT spaces, I’ve had a lot more exposure to a wider range of political and social opinions.

A big one of these is the realisation that my previously, narrower social circle was very much an echo chamber. We just accepted everyone. That is lovely in some senses, but I also understand the world isn’t that simple.

Thing is, I’m struggling to even work out my feelings.

I’ve been taught that anything less than fully accepting trans people as the gender they want to present as is transphobic.

I suppose in my mind the two sides are a) complete acceptance and b) complete denial and erasure of trans-people and outright transphobia.

I’m interested in what exists in the middle. What do normal, everyday, people believe? What is the most “common” view on trans issues? Outside of my own echo chamber, where does the line lie?

I understand this forum leans very heavily in one direction. However, that’s why I’m asking here. Do you discuss trans issues with your friends and own social circles? Does it even come up? What kind of conversations do you have?

I suppose I’m trying to get a gist for what “acceptable” opinions are outside of my own social scene. Like I said, it’s just “trans women are women.” Anything less is considered erasure and denial and would have an individual cast out!

Happy to answer any questions. I’m trying to think more critically and actually work out what my own opinions are. And please note that whilst I have obviously described myself as coming from a very liberal background, I’m very open to hearing views as I no longer know what mine are. It’s amazing how quickly things change once you’re in the “real world.”

It is also rather important to remind posters that just because you consent to a male person using a designated female single sex provision doesn’t mean your consent in anyway overrides other’s lack of consent. And consent is one of the important bases to consider for strong safeguarding.

Even if a provision is one that is publically accessed, in principle consent is important.

They want to reduce the discussion to ‘toilets’ because some people can make the. moralistic judgements because they personally ‘don’t care’ and some people can being the discussion back to something they can label as ‘obsessive’ and either directly accuse or imply that some women are obsessed with ‘genitals’ or ‘checking for genitals’.

It generally shows the person who makes those accusations to have very weak arguments that are based solely on emotional reasoning and cannot even be defended logically.

My opinion as a disabled person is that I don’t want any non disabled people using the disabled toilet.

and I once went to a very woke theatre that had labelled the loos “urinals and cubicles” and “cubicles” and had had to station a member of staff outside them to answer the inevitable questions.

i did actually wonder if it would reduce the queues in the ladies (it didn’t)

when I was ten my local football club did a term of sports with us and the girls weren’t allowed to do football we had to do netball.

so given half a chance I’d have identified as a boy then and how much more pressure is there today? It’s actually worse now than when I grew up.

so I understand why people do it, but it’s a cop out.

Far out! So many typos! Sorry.

Think of it like any other belief system.

Do you oppress your Christian or Muslim or atheist friends and colleagues? Presumably not.

Does that mean that you accept their metaphysical beliefs about themselves and the world? Also not. Everything is fine.

If a new colleague or a friend demanded that you profess adherence to their beliefs, on pain of ostracism or punishment (or if your employer suddenly expected you to), that would be unreasonable or even cultish behaviour. That’s what the trans orthodoxy we had in the last 10 years has pushed for, pretty successfully sadly.

Normal age old human behaviour. Enforcing profession of faith, shunning, fads. We recognise it for the silliness it is in history. We should be a bit braver to politely decline to be part of it in the present.

Regarding language, when did it become acceptable for another person to demand compliance through language to their subjective beliefs about themselves that do not have a base in material reality? When did 'kindness' become single directional and used as a tool to try to coerce compliance in acting as if an individual believes in another person's subjective reality that is not also based in material reality?

As with many of these entreaties that treating a male person as if they were female, the pleas for 'kindness and respect' only go one direction and that is centring a male person over the needs of female people.

It is not a neutral act to use a person's demanded pronouns when those pronouns do not reflect the material reality of that person's sex category. Whether that is a seemingly passive demand where a male person is accepting female language while also then accessing female single sex provisions or a coercive demand (including stopping communication).

i seem to work on a tit for tat basis

I will use a preferred pronoun ( provided I don’t get myself too confused ) in the first instance

if the person behaves respectfully- so a man using the gents or a gender neutral loo - that would be fine. If they behaved disrespectful then they would become a he

having spent many years being missexed due to working via email with colleagues round the world i think generic “they them” or “he him” pronouns work in women’s favour so I can’t get bothered

but can understand that others find that disrespectful in itself. To me that seems a little strange - hanging onto a mechanism that is used to help practise sexism . Because if they don’t realise you are female you get listened to much more respectfully and making work progress is easier. Sad but true

@Schallern I would like to know what this means to you?

I’ve been taught that anything less than fully accepting trans people as the gender they want to present as is transphobic.

I had a trans woman aquantance and maybe this is just a small thing but when this person's birthday came around I bought makeup and I felt very pleased that I'd bought a gift that showed how accepting I was. I knew this person would be pleased with the effort too and the meaning it had.

Some time after that I can remember hearing the phrase 'Trans women are women' for the first time. This was the point I started to think more carefully as I realised that if I really had believed trans women were women I'd have just bought that person booze or chocolates, like I do all my female friends. I realised I'd been fawning because I didn't believe this person was a woman. Furthermore I hadn't known until this point, hearing on the radio while sat at the lights in my car that we were supposed to view trans woman as actual women rather than just making a polite pretence.
So I had to confront that I wasn't the amazing accepting person that I thought I was, which was a bit of a bummer at first but I'm happy now to be considered 'Transphobic' if I literally can not convince myself to disbelieve the evidence of my senses.

Yep.

Well trans women aren't women. By definition. I don't think many people genuinely believe they are if they really think about it, regardless of what they may say.

My own experience is that I realised a long time that the problems imposed by self-ID are so huge that it should never be allowed to be legally enforced. As soon as a man can legally switch to “female” you may as well open the doors of any female space where women are undressed to any male predator. They are finding this out in various countries where self-ID is already in place.

More recently, I’ve also come to see that most of the prominent men campaigning for so-called “trans rights” which generally includes self-ID are almost certainly not those previously known as transsexuals. They are those previously called transvestites, known for wearing women’s clothes, and more, for sexual kicks. The two groups, once separate, have been merged under the shortened “trans”.

I also came to believe that women and girls transitioning were likely caught up in something like a fad. Historically, that group didn’t really exist at all, outside of very rarely women who pretended to be men in order to access careers women were not allowed to do.

Gradually I also concluded that transitioning children is a terrifying experiment, where nobody has bothered to follow up the patients to properly check whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I suspect, in the vast majority of cases (perhaps all) they don’t.

As far as discussing this goes, I used to discuss it only with family. Unfortunately this backfired when my daughter got heavily involved in LGBTQ+ groups, who told her I was unspeakable and eventually convinced her she had to cut me out of her life because I was so awful.

Following that, I started talking to a lot more people, including work colleagues, as I wanted to know how many people agreed with her. So far, everyone I have talked to agrees with me on most of the above.

I think transactivism unfortunately has an incredibly destructive side, where breaking up young people from their parents is an actual aim. My daughter is not better off without me in her life. I have loved her unreservedly from birth. I certainly would not hurt any of her friends.

I hope the situation will eventually be resolved. We cannot move to a middle ground. We had it before, when transsexuals were often accepted as kind of honorary women. Everyone knew they were not women, but it was understood they had a medical condition that meant they needed acceptance. Now we are being pushed for unreasonable policies, such as legal self-ID and the ban on conversion therapy, which will be weaponised against therapists who believe it’s essential to question why their patients feel they are the wrong sex.

I hope my daughter comes back to me. Transactivism has caused an agonizing and unnecessary rift in my family. I see it as wholly destructive in its present form.

@PriOn1
I am so sorry. This is terrifying.

I was recently in a small venue with a similar loo setup. I was faced with the decision about whether to follow two drunken men (men, not trans identifying men) into the toilet that I knew to have 3 cubicles, so being alone in a closed room with two drunk men vs taking my chances in the toilet with the urinals plus cubicles.......

It's a bit of a digression but demonstrates another difficulty that lack of consideration for safeguarding causes.

Yes. And that statement is a clear and obvious oxymoron.

Forcing people to chant an obvious untruth is making them perform an absurdity.

Its a power game.

This. It is all about power.

It will be weaponised against parents too.

Has OP not been back? Bit rude.

I was born in the 70s to a feminist mother. I was taught that gender was an abhorrent social construct and encouraged to just be myself. I have done my best to teach my daughter the same.

I don’t care how people style themselves. I want to live in a world where people don’t look twice at someone who is gender non-conforming.

I do believe that the best way to protect marginalized populations, including trans identifying people, is accurate data collection. That means not obfuscating sex just because someone doesn’t like the reality of their birth.

I think transactivism unfortunately has an incredibly destructive side, where breaking up young people from their parents is an actual aim

A knowledgable poster has often pointed out that this is one of the main methods for control used by cults, and this is a cult.

I’m trying to think more critically and actually work out what my own opinions are.

I would suggest firstly thinking about your perception of what gender means to you & how you see your own gender in order to flesh out your beliefs.

Gender refers to the spectrum of behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females that are mostly categorised as 'man' 'woman' & 'non binary'. Trans people are simply expressing a commonality with one of those categories. This is a personally subjective intuition based on value belief systems that only an individual can make.

It's important to note the difference between sex & gender. Trans people aren't saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex rather expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females.

Trans people aren't saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex rather expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females.

1. A significant proportion are "saying they are the opposite sex or neither sex" - including some of the most prominent and influential.

Loads of posters here can evidence this on request.

2. In any case, is "expressing a commonality with behaviours, expressions, and norms typically associated to males & females" so straightforwardly problem-free as you (appear to) imply above?

Andrea Long Chu's describes being female as: “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”* This is in a work called Females.

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer Prize.

Females was shortlisted for a well-recognised transgender writing award.

*This is the less distressing (by a long way) of the two (in my experience) most commonly cited definitions of femaleness by Chu. Google the other. I won't type it here.

“I suppose in my mind the two sides are a) complete acceptance and b) complete denial and erasure of trans-people and outright transphobia.”

Who has ever denied that Trans Identified people exist? Of course trans identified people exist, and, just as anorexics believe themselves to be overweight, trans identified people believe they are ‘in the wrong body’ and struggle with the resulting dysphoria. No one denies that.

What exactly is meant by ‘erasure’? The implication is destruction, and the TRAs who speak of ‘literal violence’ are deliberately implying that TERFs want to execute Trans identified people, and this whips up hysteria and conflict. But, look at the reality, no TERF has ever called for trans identified people to be attacked, but TRAs regularly carry placards and write tweets calling for violence towards TERFs.

I’m unashamedly a TERF, Gender Critical, whatever you want to call it. Men cannot be women, they can’t change sex, nor do they know what it ‘feels like’ to be a woman, because they are male, and always will be. Long hair, skirts, heels, make up, painted nails, breast implants, oestrogen injections, doesn’t make a man a woman. (And ditto women can’t become men, no matter what they surgically remove or how much testosterone they inject) Transwomen are biologically men, and transmen are biologically women.

But I wish no harm on those who feel dysphoric, and if ‘presenting’, wearing gender stereotypical clothes associated with the sex they wish they were makes them happy, that’s no problem to me, or anyone else. But men don’t belong in women’s spaces, or sports, and so on.

Does that answer your question @Schallern?

This is something I wonder about a lot. I read an article yesterday about real life quidditch and the ‘journalist’ wrote something anodyne about its decline in popularity being likely due to JKR’s ‘move to the right’. Do they actually believe that? Have they actually listened to/read what she has said? Or are they just lazily parroting their echo chamber? I do discuss gender issues with a few select people but would never randomly give my opinion. Which is that everyone can express themselves however they want but TWAW is regressive, sexist and homophobic (and that no one is born in the wrong body). Most GC people I find are very ‘left’/progressive, not right wing at all. I do have one friend who consistently brands anything less than enthusiastic cheerleading as vile bigotry. It’s kind of sad really as they were someone whose thinking I once admired.

How many more times do we have to point out that ‘commonalities in behaviours, expressions and norms’ is a meaningless categorisation for humans when it comes to sex category specific language and access to female single sex provisions.

Femals single sex provisions are not for people who perform femininity, have specific personality types or dress in a particular way.

I think, for me, it starts with trying to see the full extent of this conflict of rights, as this is so often denied.

You see this, as others have said, in your own post: "accepted everyone" actually excludes GC feminists, and whereas trans people are privileged with the existential threat of "complete denial and erasure", the possibility that women may perceive a parallel threat isn't even considered.

That imbalance is, to me, evidence of how serious things are for women - and also of how difficult it is to even define "moderate" - it's like asking a fish to describe water, as we're battling against exceptionally strong currents that just carry us along without realising. And (with apologies for the clumsily extended metaphor) in fighting against those currents, you can be forced to fight far harder than you personally would like - I mean, I'd prefer to return to using "preferred pronouns" more freely (never entirely freely - not now I know what I know...) than I currently feel able to do, knowing what's at stake.

OP, I hope you find the responses helpful.