Some clarity in how the trans movement became so embedded, so preeminent

[MarcTheGenderSkeptic]

Despite being called a conspiracist here by a TRA, actually I work very hard to continually interrogate my thought processes, and not fall into easy generalisations etc.
So, I was reading Róisín Michaux and her fascinating conversation with someone high up in HIV funding, and the push in the last 20 years is to get everyone in the tent on retrovirals, meaning reaching out to not just gays and addicts, but sex workers (incl trans) and critically, the "third genders" who have migrated to the West in large numbers to end up as sex workers. And the decision was made to go for maximum anti stigmatization, which means zero messaging on personal behaviour, and critically deciding to accept these men as women. Don't blame them, get more onside.
Guess who has to move aside, and accept the messaging on health grounds that biological men can be women? Made even worse by the increase in HIV in European women who are the partners of men who use the services of these "third genders".
Then yesterday I read the amazing post from Hellofabore about how for 30 years plus, the sports authorities including IOC and FIFA decided to make total inclusion the policy, phasing out gender testing, primarily to allow the male DSDs from Africa mainly to be included, as they were IDd as female at birth, and the cruelty to deny they're still female is wrong.
Again, the overwhelming need is to not stigmatize these individuals. Of course a huge group (we know who) are stigmatized for objecting to losing sports opportunities.
And then back to Róisín Michaux again, her illuminating the revolution in psychiatric medicine, where men back in the day were diagnosed with transvestic disorder, a pure paraphylia, again to stop judging and be more inclusive, underwent massive de-stigmatisation and de-pathologisation, from paraphylia, to dysphoria, now to common all garden "sexual health category".
Three enormous areas where the drive to include men, to destigmatise their plight, to bring them in from the cold, couldn't happen in a vacuum. Society organised along sex-based lines couldn't be simply recategorised, no, a large population group (51% XX) was expected to move over, make their definition porous, extend the collective hand of kindness and inclusion, to this hardcore of men who were deemed most at risk, and needing most help.
At the same time, this blurring of definitions and imposed inclusivity spread from sport and medicine to law and education, the most motivated men worked hard to get the Gender Recognition Act on the statute book, and via Stonewall culture, "social training" and the "trans child" escalated as concepts and then real world consequences as noone in polite society other than a very brave few said anything.
So now we have developing nations male DSDs and "third genders", socially incorporated transvestites/transsexuals, and queer culture first world transgenders in the mix, a political culture in the West frozen into aquiescence and policy drift, and the only light of realism and sanity, an army of women fighting back, with amazing results re SC ruling, banishing self ID into the long grass, and medical and sports bodies tacking back to sanity.
But reading the almost scary analogousness of how health brought in trans and third genders at the expense of women, sport brought in male DSDs at the expense of women, psychiatry brought in transvestites from the cold at the expense of women, you can then see how the most motivated men got the Gender Recognition Act on the statute book to turbo charge the social trans/trans child revolution.
For me, I can now see the past as it travels into the future.

Of course people know what trans and natal is, now you're embarrassing yourself in misunderstanding my simple point.
People often misunderstand TW as a male IDing as a female.
Incl the barristers
I can tell you one thing, other than your gender studies depts, next to noone is differentiating female and woman terms the way you have on this thread, let alone saying female = biological only, and woman = social construct.
Yet you breezily announce these are not only true, but commonly understood and accepted.
There's only one person here embarrassing themselves, and it's not me.

I read it.

I also read :

”Overall, the zeal for neuroimaging studies has yet to be matched by findings, with few clear and consistent patterns regarding androgen effects on brain structure and activation.”

And then I read the large section outlining plans for future studies to support the theory.

It is almost like it is a theory and there are some indications that the theory could be relevant in some ways but as yet there are merely plans to do further studies to be able to draw the conclusions that you, personally, wish to make as accepted science.

Spatial abilities were positively related to amniotic testosterone in girls for one measure, but not two others, perhaps due to small sample 18]. Spatial performance was also higher in females with a male co-twin than a female co-twin, thought to reflect transfer of testosterone during gestation

So first study inconclusive and second study just a hypothesis.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39844442/

"but this result was not significant after multiple testing corrections (p > 0.050). The findings indicate that the TTT hypothesis may not apply, or its effects on digit ratios and testosterone levels in females of OS twin pairs are weak and not statistically significant. Further studies involving larger samples are however, recommended."

Again, it's not clear what you are trying to argue. Do you want to classify people according to brain scans? Why?

At the point when a man has had several children, I think we can hypothesise that the biggest influence on his sexual development has been his chromosomes and the testosterone produced in his own testicles.

Who doubts that early brain chemistry chemistry results in forming personality and temperament and behaviour? Just as environmental factors, especially parental bonding does. And then there's the epigenes.
Society forms along stereotypical lines, that bear down on interactions at the personal level.
I can see why most here see gender as something to be broken down, and TRAs see it as something to be celebrated, surpassing natal sex as <the> marker of identity.
The way I see it is that of all human divisions, race, abledness (sorry if that's not a real word), wealth, health, sex is the absolute dividing line, the absolute binary. You could possibly add class as a very distant second (it's very hard to really pull yourself up into a totally different strata). But natal/biological sex is where it's at.
Only one group can get pregnant with the wholly unique cascade of vulnerabilities associated with that, violence on one side, death in childbirth, menstrual cycle/menopause.
And the other group, not. Everything in human history on a societal level revolves around this.
And it's from this centre that gender identity springs. Because it's from this that societal rules and roles form.
But gender identities especially if they buck the average, can't reverse the biological imperative for society that the inherent difference between women and men imposes.
And so no matter how compelling it might be that a gender ID contra to the average proves you're the opposite sex, it in fact does nothing of the sort.
Because any trans policy beyond let's say simple social acknowledgement falls apart the moment the inherent biological vulnerability of women is exposed...in toilets, sports, prisons.
And since that's the case, then the argument for permanent life changing medicalization of teens falls apart as well.

I know.

All the way through I was thinking the paper keeps distancing itself from making firm and concise conclusions because it is posing theories and proposing further research. But apparently, we are to be derided in not believing it proves the point that keeps being leveraged.

I don’t believe there is a way to control for or separate the children being measured from social conditioning that will have occurred in the time from birth either.

Have we got a list yet of what behavioural and psychological traits are considered ‘male’ and what are considered ‘female’?

Or is it just more amorphous blob stuff ?

Yep.

And male people declaring that they can use female reference language to describe themselves is all about power, control and misogyny.

Still waiting…

It doesn't matter. It's what the subject believes. Maybe Northernlightsss is simply listing cake making and sewing etc as typical tabloid headline female traits.
Because the ideology is purely in the mind of the individual.
Hence a male can wear a dress and feel both female (and should be allowed to ID as woman, with all that comes of that re women's spaces, sports etc) or male (and stay in his cis male natal class).
As I write that, a giant elephant enters the room.
Are all the new members of the expanded class of women all going to get health services directed at women. Y'know, all those pesky cervical smears, breast cancer exams etc? For osteoporosis, menopause etc?
Or again, for the sake of gender as temperament as re-categorisation of societal attitudes of women and men, is everything going to be complicated to levels unheard of in a sane society? Things like natal male TWs opting out of natal female health processes. Good luck with that, already beleaguered NHS.
I've been heard arguments from TRAs on here that gender should be purely private, that no formal declaration in the public sphere be made.
That utopia comes with gender ID traducing natal sex, and it staying free of the public sphere.
I guess according to TRA feminists, that'll be for the sixth wave (or is that fifth, I can't work out if pro trans is fourth wave policy).

I'm still waiting for Northern to confirm that Prof Phoenix, Nurse Sandie Peggie, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey et al are, and I quote from Northern, 'useful idiots'.

So on one side, we have idiots like Prof Phoenix, Nurse Sandie Peggie, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey, and on the other...... Northern....

Hmmmm. I think 'balance of probability' is the most sensible route to go down here...

I think we can see that there is a tendency to throw out shit accusations to distract from the paucity of evidence or even logic that supports the claims being made. After more than 12 months, we are no further ahead on the evidence front or even the logically coherent point front.

I’ve tended to think these ‘interventions’ by TRAs and IAGCATCs (I’m as GC as they come) are useful as a way of helping refine and reshape one’s own ideas (hell the AIS in sport thread has seen me change my mind about 10 times) and also for lurkers, but I’m now starting to have more sympathy with those posters who think engaging is pointless.

I sort of agree with you, but sticking with things, and allowing TRA reasoning to be teased out reveals some nuggets, yet those nuggets only go on to dig the hole even deeper. It's good the let the most wordy TRAs like Northernlightsss insist on hanging onto the spade herself.
What do I "learn" from her? That female is the natal sex class but women is the social construct class, open to those males who ID as women.
I know this isn't new, but I've never heard it phrased this way before, a sociological seperation of the two terms to make one (female) biological and the other (women) social construct.
Of course this allows males to opt in, because now the women definition is simply a case of semantics.
I'd love any white person tell black people that their dentity is a matter of semantics, or ditto disabled people, or ditto poor people.
With the sex category it's even more decisive than these groups.
So Northernlightsss is pure gender studies made flesh, and wishing to reorganize society according to queer theory.
The other thing I've picked up from her is the belief that what she sees as science that the gender stereotypes instigated by early brain chemistry somehow has any bearing on the sexed differences between men and women.
That what a scientist sees as a female stereotyped trait in males because of early brain changes should go on to mean society must reorganize because those traits trump the sex you're born as.
Modern gender studies, queer theory and stereotyped traits equals reorganisation of males and females.
Finally all this TWAW and circular non definitions of what is suggested here is made much more explicit.
And it's why I persevere on here (even on my own thread, lol).

I've been reading back over the thread and noticed this insult which may have slipped by unnoticed:
a lot of people as demonstrated on this forum don't have the capacity to understand nuanced topics that aren't oversimplified particularly if they have a raging bias issue

So Northern is saying that a lot of posters here are intellectually incapable of understanding complex things - unlike clever Northern - and are biased. Ragingly biased even.

I don't know why Northern bothers with us, really, since we are so intellectually inferior and incapable of independent thought!
Unless its an opportunity to do some insulting?

Well, she quoted gender theory as fact, and signed off "you're welcome".
So that's my stupid self told.
She probably thinks we're "a basket of deplorables"
And need to read Gender Studies For Dummies.
Then again, anyone who thinks JKR, Helen Joyce, Victoria Smith, Jo Bartosch, Helen Lewis, Hannah Barnes, Maya Forstater, FW Scotland, everyone on Sex Matters and the LGBA, let alone the unwashed Darlington nurses, nurse Peggie, and in the best tradition of the BAFTAs "and too many others to mention", are all useful idiots, has an unbelievable chip on their shoulder.

That poster isn't here to persuade us. (S)he is here to:

1. Win points on their internal scoreboard based on esoteric rules about what counts as a fact and what doesn't that no one else buys in to.
2. Astroturf FWR with nonsense to try to confuse and obscure the very simple logic that female people continue to exist and our sex continues to have consequences for us, and all changing what the word "woman" means does is change what the word "women" means, it doesn't at all change the underlying reality for the adult human female people who were previously called women, nor change the way we positioned in society relative to the adult human male people who were previously called men. Only honest engagement and conversations that recognise sex will do that. Everything else is just Genderist Trans-Feminism, something that attempts to adopt the appearance and social role of Feminism while in fact being something totally different.

It is a repeated accusation that has been made regularly for over a year.

It is just as empty as the evidence that the poster links up as if they support their claims. I just laugh when I see it. Because I don’t actually remember one relevant point that supports males either being considered female in any way or why they should access female single sex provision being evidenced, despite attempts. It is effectively just a constant stream of emotional manipulation. The pattern of posting style is still one I recognise as the misogynistic style of making arguments by male people where I grew up.

We know some posters arrive on this board to play to an audience watching from a different platform where they will be getting plaudits for getting one over the vile bigots.

There is also some we have picked up who seem to have a humiliation fetish.

There are many motivations for posting here.

Reminds me very much of my TIM ex. Same pontification. Same claims “you’re just too stupid to understand”.

The similarities to male people who hate women so much may also be a mirrored and learned style by a female poster. Either unconsciously or deliberately. But once you grow up with someone who absolutely despises women, you don’t miss picking the pattern.

I'm more and more seeing this. I'm not sure if I'm a masochist, or it's my upbringing as someone who always wants to hear opposing views and argue in good faith, finds it hard to castigate people I disagree with, but as you can see from my posts I've done my best to engage Northenlightsss.
I'm not saying it's impossible to have a discussion, but the positions laid out by the TRA side just can't be reconciled if you apply any modicum of logic.
It ends up being an argument about religious demands.
FWIW however, I glean a bit about the other side in these exercises, and this helps me to be forewarned about the arguments used in subsequent discussions.
I know the GC women here are way past this stage, but I'm catching up!
As to whether there are ulterior motives for TRAs to keep at it here, maybe.
I've posted that the likes of Trans R/eddit don't allow GCs to keep posting, but MN is extremely liberal in being a beacon of free speech.
But <all> that energy extended, to go around in circles.
Thank God I get <something> out of it, lol.
Whether the rest of he GC community here do...?

It's always worth someone taking the time to counter the wave of salad, not for the salad chef but for other diners who might be dropping by and aren't familar with the menu yet.

In an ideal world we'd have a FAQ, or a thread per topic, so a poster bringing up a well trodden challenge or question could be referred to that. But since most of them are here to muddy conversations rather than engage it wouldn't change anything.

In fact, any time I wonder whether I'm being unfair to a person who is genuinely wanting a discussion and to understand why the other side is, well, on the other side, I remember how often arguments are made and countered on one thread, then the same poster starts them again on the next one as if the previous thread had never happened. That's all I need to be very sure this is not genuine engagement.

Well, that, and the sneering, false reframing of arguments, and insults. They do kind of also give the game away 😂

I bloody well hate salad.
Blame my mum who made me eat them with cold boiled eggs laden with Heinz salad cream as a kid in the 70s.
To discuss salad is almost as bad.

All respect to those who take up the cudgels to refute the tedious endless AI generated gibberish of posters like BaileyNorthernHowseThegoodnewsGretel...
I'm afraid I skip over those posts for the most part these days.
Perhaps that's laziness but I honestly can't be arsed with it any more.
It's all just the same shit, different thread.