This isn't working - Trans Identified Men in the workplace

[Niminy]

Not sure if anyone else has flagged this, but the latest edition of This Isn't Working podcast has an absolutely brilliant interview with psychologist 'Dr P', which absolutely nails why cross-dressing men are so disturbed and disturbing. She goes right to the heart of the matter and is absolutely fearless in her (in my view totally convincing) analysis. Youtube linked but audio version also available on podcast platforms.

I’m still working out what I think about this episode. I love Dr P’s outspokenness and in a personal conversation I’d agree with most of what she said. Her personal views are of course informed by her professional experience and training as well as many other influences.

I was uncomfortable with all the hypotheticals that she shored up with her professional qualifications and experience, to give her views extra weight. Like conflating facts and opinions. I felt this wasn’t honest. I’m not sure how to express it any better than that, I should listen again and maybe it’ll be clearer to me.

I think identity politics is to Marxism as Mormonism is to Christianity.

People that are into id pol, like the BLM people, see it as a type of Marxism.

I'll give that a listen tomorrow, but I will say, I think Karl Marx would have thought that the idea that people could change sex was a load of old bollix.

I think the thing is, there are already lots of "dresses" for men.

There are kilts, sarongs, various kinds of robes and things. They might be less usual, but people can usually see these are men's clothing that men wear, made for men.

Men who wear dresses made for women are doing so because they are women's dresses. Even David Bowie or Kurt Cobain. It wasn't intended to make them men's clothes. It was intended to be a statement and noticeable and create a sexual frisson.

It was very good.

I personally don’t care if a man wears a dress- but I took her point being that this was a person who was very comfortable living outside of cultural norms.

It was refreshing for her to say transwomen are either or a combination of mentally unwell/pwrsonality disorder/pervertion. That is now what I have started saying to trolls who are coming back with “transwomen are women just different types of women to cis-women”. I am now saying society does not see transwomen as women but as mentally unwell men.

I found this refreshing because it aligns with the position I have arrived at over the last few years.

Interesting. I felt uncomfortable about her comments about TIMs behaviour & mental health issues being paraded in the workplace. But on reflection these are issues that we need to speak about. Especially if the workplace & the people in it are being used for validation? to fundraise? as an audience to impose beliefs on others?
When you add in children (ie education, nurseries, sport etc) then the issues are even more stark. Nobody's been allowed to talk about this but we need to.

Also interesting to hear Tanya speak about employers quietly making different decisions about employing the alphabetti / pronoun people. I understood that to mean that they're going back to focussing on what employable skills employees can offer rather than those who "bring their whole unemplyable self" to work

I think her point about pilots, air traffic controllers etc was very important and also worrying. We really don't know what mental effects taking these large doses of hormones have and, perhaps more importantly, research and enquiry is actively discouraged.

That everyone sees many TIMs as that is the elephant in the room, and it’s been clear since the 2017 British Social Attitudes survey where the people polled agreed with fluffy statements about “trans people” but also were negative towards them being a primary school teacher or police officer.

She's talking about the workplace.

If we want to remove the idea of separate men and womens clothes we have to change social norms and the workplace isnt where that happens. It took years of women wearing trousers in their private life before it became acceptable at work.

Also Derek from accounts wearing a short skirt and a padded bra isnt going to normalise men wearing dresses in society.

Women wearing trousers and flat shoes at work is motivated by practicality. Thats not 'Derek' motivation. He's wearing them because they are womens clothes and he wants everyone to see that. Its convenient to pretend thats not the case, or it might not be true, or another man may wear a hoodie from the womens section and we cant draw a line.

What happened to Canadian Fake Tits Bloke?

I agree.

I think, as a society, we have moved past the whole "gendered soul" and are reverting back to gender non conforming gay men and cross-dressing men as the two archetypes.

Stepping back, we are treating transwomen the way we have treated mentally unwell men. We try to be accepting, either through care or through fear, but as Dr P says, it's never enough.

Once they got the go-ahead to enter female spaces, that wasn't enough because the distress comes from inside. This change has now made it a lot easier for dominant perverts (Dr Beth Upton) to access women's spaces, knowing there is nothing that women can do about it in the moment.

It's the same with sexual assault: until a man tells them no, they just carry on- and I agree it's time for the men to start speaking up now.

💯

Quoting myself to add that I arrived at this position as a result of seeing the behaviour of so many trans identified people and their allies, and the resulting detriments to women and girls. Like many others, I decided to “educate myself”, and here I am.

There are myriad reasons why someone may not be hired - zero violent convictions isn’t the only criteria for employment. I’d say the essential criteria should include honesty, truthfulness, the willingness to accept other people’s viewpoints that are legally considered WORIADS and an ability to live within the Law. Oh, and I’d also include the ability to keep any fetishes or paraphilia out of the workplace.

Interesting to hear a professional psychologist make the Blackface comparison.

Did you actually watch/listen to the podcast @TransParentlyAnnoyed ? She explains her reasoning extensively there.

Where I disagreed with her was in her rigidity about gendered clothing.

I think Harry Styles looks great in his gender fluid outfits, and I'm all for "total clothing rights" as Izzard used to say before he lost his marbles and decided he could be a lesbian.

My male hairdresser buys his jumpers from the women's section on M& S because they are better colours. I don't have a problem with a guy in a blouse. I don't think anyone should, as long as it's suitable clothing for the occasion (like DrP's beachwear being inappropriate for a wedding example)

I do have an enormous problem with a man cosplaying as his version of a woman, along blackface lines. And I have a problem with being coerced by my employer or society to pretend a bloke is a woman.

Someone's said it before.. 5 year olds often want to be mermaids. We don't surgically apply a tail to them.

It's excellent.
It needs sharing widely.

where’s the slur? And it’s not appearance based. It’s about working with someone who is mentally less
than well, ie want to remove healthy body parts and the impact that pretending your eyes can’t see what they can see, ie pretending that a man is a woman or that a woman is a man, when clearly they’re not.

oh gosh, I really hope so

As a society, we accept, and probably wouldnt notice, men wearing basically unisex clothes from the womens department. But it isnt normal for men to wear low cut blouses. The workplace isnt where we push these boundaries. I think that's what she means by cultural norms.

I really appreciate you pointing out that workplaces are not the setting for pushing boundaries around cultural norms. I'd been stuck on that element of what Dr P was saying as broadly agree with @Heggettypeg's perspective.

But yeah, of course workplaces are more conservative! Look at the attention Hillary Clinton's "pant suits" got only a decade ago!

I wore a pair of shorts into my very casual workplace on one of the very hot days in the summer (mostly because the 2 very hot weather work wear dresses I own were in the wash). They were a couple of inches above knee and not revealing, but people looked and commented and I was very aware that what I was wearing was not quite appropriate for the setting. Male colleagues were wearing shorts, this was not commented on because it is a norm in our sector.

Asymetry of risk. (Women know what men are, survival and reproduction)

The trans truth effect section is worth watching from 14mins in there abouts.

I bet no one would have said anything if you were wearing a skirt or dress of the same length.