The trans debate

[leebmx]

You’re factually incorrect - Caster’s biological sex is male.

But, but she's competing in women's events and nobody bothered her before. QED she is a woman. Unsure if she would be annoyed at you calling her a man.

Scared as I am to chip in here, but I don't believe the IAA are the official judge of who is a man and who is a woman.

[CEB]

Quite.

Here’s a description of the science of Caster’s condition



And here’s a thread about how Caster *and* the women competing against her have been let down by clumsy policy

[Proposition Joe]

Blog published on the work intranet today for Pride month giving advice on using pronouns including 'ze' and 'zir'. Genuinely can't keep up.

[Max Fowler]

Blog published on the work intranet today for Pride month giving advice on using pronouns including 'ze' and 'zir'. Genuinely can't keep up.

Get over zirself, grandad.

PS my pronouns are 6/8.

[Dunners]

Here's a video from ITV news this morning on the Thames Water fallout. From 2.40 the report focuses on the impact of increasing bills on an everyday mother. A straightforward piece that you'd want to communicate to a wide audience with minimal cause for distraction.

The everyday mother is trans.

www.itv.com/news/2023-06-28/thames-wate ... 1687959135

[CEB]

Not being able to keep up is the whole point;
Objections can be framed as intolerance
Curiosity can be shut down as “you don’t have to understand, just respect people”

Meanwhile, the net effect - whether by design or not - is erosion of any ability to recognise which of the two sexes any given company or organisation is sh*tting on the most.

An interesting couple of questions to ask oneself are these:

“Do I actually believe that a person I know to be male who adopts neo pronouns at work and expects compliance with them, experiences less male privilege in the workplace than any other male?”

and

“Would such a male person’s asserted gender identity of something *other* than a man make it easier or harder for women to raise issues related to his sex, eg pay, the gender balance at board level, making disclosures of sexual misconduct etc?”

A third question might be this:
“Since trans activists routinely claim ‘the problem is cis men, not trans women!’ whenever the question of the impact of male people identifying out of their sex is raised, should there be any criteria whatsoever for a “cis man” to have to hit before being recognised for any and all safeguarding purposes as ‘no longer a cis man’?”

The reason I’m such a massive TERF is by looking for good answers to obvious questions, and is why I went from criticising people doubting Frank Maloney’s mental health, to trying to work out exactly why my views are apparently incompatible with being left wing…

[CEB]

Here's a video from ITV news this morning on the Thames Water fallout. From 2.40 the report focuses on the impact of increasing bills on an everyday mother. A straightforward piece that you'd want to communicate to a wide audience with minimal cause for distraction.

The everyday mother is trans.

www.itv.com/news/2023-06-28/thames-wate ... 1687959135

Yep. And a male person casually asserting “a mum like me”, quite understandably results in some women saying “hang on, I’m cool with the idea that you identify as a woman, but being a mother means something important, that you can’t identify into”

And then it gets dismissed as a culture war distraction from the REAL issues.


PJ made a joke ages ago that I didn’t bite on, about “erasing women”, but the actual claim made by the (left wing) feminist argument against trans activism is that it’s the political and legal distinction between people who are female and people who are not, that is subject to attempts to erase it.

[Proposition Joe]

Bit long winded. With this though, I just can't help but feeling that - and aware this sounds fairly intolerant, so big ol' hypocrite etc - if you keep having to make up new ways of having your identity addressed, maybe it's not entirely a society problem but also a bit of a you problem.

Hear what you say about not keeping up being the point but don't people just find that exhausting? From both perspectives.

[CEB]

Me when there’s a new post

[CEB]

Bit long winded. With this though, I just can't help but feeling that - and aware this sounds fairly intolerant, so big ol' hypocrite etc - if you keep having to make up new ways of having your identity addressed, maybe it's not entirely a society problem but also a bit of a you problem.

Hear what you say about not keeping up being the point but don't people just find that exhausting? From both perspectives.

From my experience on my recent degree, it’s like asking if Scientology is exhausting - I personally think the cult analogy goes deeper than that, but for this point, I’ll keep it light - the ever expanding potential pronouns, potential identities etc emerge from trans influencers, and there’s a social hierarchy where “cis” is the dullest thing to be, and so any low cost way of climbing up the social hierarchy is attractive.

Conversely, there’s a high social cost to questioning any of it - with trans activism/queer communities, once you’re out, you’re OUT.

So you effectively have a cohort of young people who are usually interesting, intelligent, but often very socially awkward who find a community that welcomes them, but also punishes intellectual curiosity and sees most questions as “bad faith” - in that context, niche identities can be how young people struggle to express themselves within a framework that’s every bit as restrictive of free thinking as any religion

[Max Fowler]

So you effectively have a cohort of young people who are usually interesting, intelligent, but often very socially awkward who find a community that welcomes them,

Thank God for Message Boards back in the day.

[Proposition Joe]

Interesting?

[CEB]

Welcomes?

[CEB]

I think that even though I’ve stressed this several times, “these trans activists are regressive and backwards” sounds like a gotcha or a protest rather than a fair summation of what they advocate.

But it really is core to why I give a sh*t: these people are regressive, restrictive f***s whose actual gender conformity would be blatant if they didn’t clumsily attach it to gay rights discourse, claiming it to be exactly the same.

From this link:

https://www.thecut.com/article/transgen ... dbook.html

It was the week before Thanksgiving in 2016 when my kindergartner said, “I think I’m a girl with a penis.” We were in the restroom at a wedding reception for a friend of mine. “Okay,” I said, a thousand thoughts flooding my brain. “Okay,” I said again in the calmest voice I could muster. “Thank you for telling me. I love you so much.” Then, as we washed our hands and went back to the party, “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

In hindsight, my firstborn, who had been assigned male at birth, had been trying to signal to me about her gender for a while and, without understanding the harm I was doing, I had been subtly dismissing her hints and gestures. I knew trans kids existed, but I hadn’t thought my kid was trans, which led me to discourage her from wearing a dress on Picture Day (“It’ll be confusing”) and repeatedly cut her hair (“It’s just easier this way”). To me at the time, these had been simple exercises of parental judgment. To my child, they had probably been rejections. By spelling it out in no uncertain terms on the night of the reception, she told me she needed me to start really seeing her. And I honestly wanted to. I wanted to understand every corner of this mysterious little person I helped bring into the world. But to see her for real meant I needed to trust her in a way I never really had before.


So this is a parent who
1: restricted her child’s choices around hair and clothing, on the basis that they’re not for boys
2: responded with love and care when the child, who had been shown that his personality wasn’t right for boys, was actually a girl
3: never considers whether the state of being “trans”, or expressing discomfort with his sex, might be due to being told that his interests were wrong for his sex
4: gets held up as an exemplar of what to do


As I said in response to OTF the other day - a traditional conservative parent forces boys toys and clothes on their kid, while a certain brand of progressive parent lets them keep the clothes and the toys, but reinforces that it means that they are trans.

[CEB]

Worth reading the rest of the link too - it gets worse from there if anything

[BoniO]

If ever I can’t get to sleep at night I find reading this thread highly effective - many thanks.

[Max Fowler]

Intelligent?

(Think that's the full set now).

[CEB]

If ever I can’t get to sleep at night I find reading this thread highly effective - many thanks.

Sorry, who are you?

[BoniO]

Good question - just call me bored they

[Max B Gold]

I think that even though I’ve stressed this several times, “these trans activists are regressive and backwards” sounds like a gotcha or a protest rather than a fair summation of what they advocate.

But it really is core to why I give a sh*t: these people are regressive, restrictive f***s whose actual gender conformity would be blatant if they didn’t clumsily attach it to gay rights discourse, claiming it to be exactly the same.

From this link:

https://www.thecut.com/article/transgen ... dbook.html

It was the week before Thanksgiving in 2016 when my kindergartner said, “I think I’m a girl with a penis.” We were in the restroom at a wedding reception for a friend of mine. “Okay,” I said, a thousand thoughts flooding my brain. “Okay,” I said again in the calmest voice I could muster. “Thank you for telling me. I love you so much.” Then, as we washed our hands and went back to the party, “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

In hindsight, my firstborn, who had been assigned male at birth, had been trying to signal to me about her gender for a while and, without understanding the harm I was doing, I had been subtly dismissing her hints and gestures. I knew trans kids existed, but I hadn’t thought my kid was trans, which led me to discourage her from wearing a dress on Picture Day (“It’ll be confusing”) and repeatedly cut her hair (“It’s just easier this way”). To me at the time, these had been simple exercises of parental judgment. To my child, they had probably been rejections. By spelling it out in no uncertain terms on the night of the reception, she told me she needed me to start really seeing her. And I honestly wanted to. I wanted to understand every corner of this mysterious little person I helped bring into the world. But to see her for real meant I needed to trust her in a way I never really had before.


So this is a parent who
1: restricted her child’s choices around hair and clothing, on the basis that they’re not for boys
2: responded with love and care when the child, who had been shown that his personality wasn’t right for boys, was actually a girl
3: never considers whether the state of being “trans”, or expressing discomfort with his sex, might be due to being told that his interests were wrong for his sex
4: gets held up as an exemplar of what to do


As I said in response to OTF the other day - a traditional conservative parent forces boys toys and clothes on their kid, while a certain brand of progressive parent lets them keep the clothes and the toys, but reinforces that it means that they are trans.

The last para is just a straw man argument. You need to try harder if you are going to continually poke your nose into other people's lives.

[CEB]

Here's a video from ITV news this morning on the Thames Water fallout. From 2.40 the report focuses on the impact of increasing bills on an everyday mother. A straightforward piece that you'd want to communicate to a wide audience with minimal cause for distraction.

The everyday mother is trans.

www.itv.com/news/2023-06-28/thames-wate ... 1687959135

That story has got a whole lot weirder since…

[Long slender neck]

I didnt know trans women could breastfeed.

[CEB]

They can’t. Men with a dressing up fetish can force a baby to suck their nipples though

[Proposition Joe]

Is that what it is? Just dry sucking? Assumed they had some kind of tube thing set up like a reverse catheter for breast milk/formula.

[Long slender neck]

They take drugs that can make them lactate, according to the article I read.