It may be the lord’s work that you’re doing. But I think you’re observations are self selected for a group of people who identify with the non-traditional lifestyles. I don’t doubt you observe what you say you do with regards to the subset of kids in that group. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging them as abnormal or anything of the kind. I just find it odd that you choose to describe kids that fall into more traditional roles as “closeted, repressed, and conservative by choice”. Perhaps that’s not what you meant? In any case, I’m not seeing a future 20 years down the road that looks much different than now. More accepting, I hope. But I don’t see this dramatic shift you’re predicting. At least, I don’t see a reason why that should be the case.
Call me an old fogey, but I think it is more likely future society will reembrace sex-based constructs of “woman” and “man”. I can’t see gender ideology sustaining itself for very long because it is not scientific and it’s polarizing (as this thread attests).
It is not clear what a non-binary identity achieves that couldn’t be achieved just by identifying as one’s birth sex. Other than they/them pronouns and a claim to queerness, i just don’t get it. I could easily envision today’s teenagers and young 20-something NB’s outgrowing this identity once the work that goes into maintaining it starts outweighing the psychological returns. Kind of like what happened to this person.
Absolutely. You’d have to think that such acceptance might be a better path to to a good outcome, rather than an assumption that transitioning is the way to go (certainly given the irreversible nature of the treatments and the ages at which such treatments are being proposed)
There is a case in the UK courts right at this moment being brought against an NHS trust. It is all about whether young children can meaningfully consent to puberty blockers. There have been other accusations levelled at the same trust in the past.
Interacting with several actual in-the-flesh transwomen both socially and professionally is … the very opposite of rose-coloured glasses, actually. It’s real-life experience. Whereas though you mentioned your trans colleague, when you relate what you think transwomen think, it’s always someone off the internet. Someone has glasses, and they’re all smoked and cracked, it seems.
That would be - the children in my kid’s schools, their parents, uni kids (from diverse backgrounds), my clubbing friends, my work colleagues and the social workers I encounter while doing community work -again from diverse backgrounds. That’s a cross-section of society, not one self-selecting group. None of those are dedicated LGBT groups.
I didn’t describe the kids with “traditional roles” as that (I’d be describing my own daughter as that, in that case), I described the closeted, repressed and conservative ones as that. That’s your own gloss on what I actually wrote.
MAybe you’re interacting with a different set of youth than I am - where are you encountering them?
It’s entirely plausible that the transwomen you know who have undergone SRS are quite happy with the results. It is equally plausible that the transwomen @monstro has heard from, reported negative results. No glasses required. I’m not sure why you’d dismiss the experience of the latter as something they, “should have been used to.” Is it not possible that some people were dissatisfied with the results?
Entirely possible. I’ve certainly read of people dissatisfied with their SRS. I don’t doubt the veracity of monstro’s sources
I disagree. You have to be wearing a particular set of them to only ever come across negative stories, which seem to be the only sort she relates.
It’s entirely possible. I do question the wisdom of someone who has SRS without finding out all the implications, but they’re not me. I’m just saying, penises don’t self-lubricate, so their disappointment, as related, isn’t based on loss of anything, just disappointment. “Used to it” is a perfectly valid way of phrasing that.
Read the article that @YWTF jus linkedt to.
There are articles like that all over the internet. People spilling their guts about how deluded they and the people around them were and still are on this gender identity stuff…and not being able to talk about it in real life because woke folk don’t want to hear any expression of self-doubt or concern about stuff that’s on their agenda. They just want slogans and sound bites.
Just because you know people who are living their best lives doesn’t mean everyone else is. Everyone has a limited frame of reference–including you.
There are people who swear by Christianity and the Catholic Church. On their mama’s name, they will swear that their belief system has saved them from hell. But we both know there are abuses being committed in the name of Christianity. We both know there are millions of people who have abused by the church. It is possible to respect people’s religious views and appreciate the truths and goodness they contain but also question how their religion is being implemented. We can appreciate that some people really do benefit from a particular religious belief, while also acknowledging its laden with assumptions that–if taken literally–would be harmful to society. If we can dissect religion critically, we should be able to do the same thing with gender ideology. I’m glad we’ve been able to do that in this thread. I hope we will always be able to do it.
You can continue to portray me as some Debbie Downer looking to kick transwomen in the teeth if that makes you feel superior to me. Or you could try to be a bit more charitable and view me as someone who just hasn’t been sold yet on gender ideology. I am not convinced it improves society as a whole. I am not convinced it doesn’t have dangerous excesses. And I can point to tons of evidence to support my skepticism. Until this evidence stops being generated, I will never not be skeptical.
I don’t think this means I’m wearing the opposite of “rose-colured glasses”. It just means I’m a skeptic who doesn’t truck in faith.
Ah. Okay. Got it. I really had no idea where you were coming from with respect to exposure to such a diverse cross-section of society.
Thanks for clearing that up as well. So you exclude from your predictions of what the future will look like with respect to sexual identity/expression an entire set of young people who express traditional roles. Why? Don’t you think they too will have an impact on possible outcomes?
Well, my kids (boy and girl) are nearly 7 and 10 years older than your daughter. But I’ve met and been around their friends and so I use that as my frame of reference and as my predictor of what the future likely holds. It doesn’t look much different from where I’m standing. They are certainly much more laid back about many things. Less optimistic about others.
I’m willing to grant them sufficient benefit of the doubt that the disappointment doesn’t exclusively, or even largely, lie in lack of lubrication or how to fix that. It seems their dissatisfaction could quite possibly be more complex.
Sorry, that would require interacting with your sister’s posts in this thread and I’ve already made it clear I’m not doing that anymore.
Of course there are. It’s the internet. Why should I privilege cherry-picked articles over lived experience?
Mine is actual experience. That’s got more weight than stuff I read on the internet. And I’m not saying I’m not aware of negative stories. I am. They’re just not anywhere near numerous enough to counter both my own experience and all the positive stories on the internet that you don’t seem to encounter.
My friends are not articles of faith. They’re real people.
Not at all - the ones I know are, like my daughter, happily hanging out with the nb and LGBT kids. They’re actually the ones that give me the most hope. When I say “gender binary as we know it is just not a thing to them”, they’re the ones I’m talking about - not nb themselves, but not fazed by it in the slightest. My prediction isn’t that “everyone will be nb”, it’s that people won’t care if you are. At least, that’s my near-future prediction.
I meant location, when I said “where”. Because obviously your mileage will be location-dependent.
Possibly. I was dealing specifically with the lack of lubrication. Because that’s specifically what she emphasized.
Seemed apropos, since as we all know, all men just want a “wet hole” 
Yep. I don’t identify as a TERF but I’m gender-critical enough to say “choose one; you don’t get both”. Not only is it fair for feminist women to organize as people who’ve been regarded & treated as female since birth (and to exclude trans women from that on the grounds that that has not been their experience), it’s also appropriate to have some word that refers to the physical architecture and not the gender identity. And no, goddammit, noticing physiology is not a tool for delegitimizing someone’s gender identity. Quite the opposite. If your gender identity is valid regardless of whether you sought out a surgical transition or take hormones or “pass” or not, then your gender identity is valid regardless of your physical structure, therefore noticing it and putting a label on it (the physical structure as a categorical matter) has no impact on the legitimacy of how you identify.
ahem I have been kicked out of several Facebook gender-centric LGBTQIA groups for identifying as “male” and explaining that I do so on the basis of my physical architecture. People have replied saying that if having that architecture makes me male, I’m saying that the same architecture makes them male and that’s transphobic. People have replied saying “So called biological sex is a myth, because intersex people! Because when you zero in on sex you find variations, so there’s no binary division into ‘male’ and ‘female’, it’s all a myth, it’s all social, so quit saying this outdated TERFy sounding stuff about physical sex”.
They don’t say "you can’t call yourself ‘woman’ or ‘female’. but they say “You are not permitted to explain that what you mean by that is anchored in your physical structure”.
I said I perceived a generational difference. If that perception is really true, it’s worth considering the reason for it.
I responded to your quote on feminism, but I didn’t say anything about feminism myself. I said, rather, there are potentially many possible explanations.
You honestly see no point in trans people ever possibly finding out for certain whether some small fraction of their romantic rejection might stem from unconscious bias.
I don’t appreciate people jumping to conclusions on little data, or casting moral blame for unconscious tendencies – we all have snakes somewhere under the surface. But this particular issue is something that will be of rather keen, even desperate, interest for a lot people who don’t happen to be you.
Your lack of interest in the “point” of this is entirely irrelevant.
I don’t know why this matters. The usual places parents and kids can be found, I guess: various sports teams through the years, school activities and plays, friends coming over to the house, sailing, etc.
One thing that never even occurred to me is to have a conversation with them about anything related to sexuality or gender identity. Even if I had my suspicion that one or two might be gay, it was really none of my business and would have been completely inappropriate in my view to raise in conversation.
For fuck’s sake…
Here:
Why should I privilege cherry-picked articles over lived experience?
Because you aren’t living everyone’s experience. You are only privy to certain experiences. You aren’t going to hear about the disillusionment and regret happening in your bubble, because social pressure is an effective silencer and no one wants to be the lone voice of negativity among friends and family.
The internet has exposed all kinds of hidden realities. If it weren’t for the internet, there would have been no #metoo movement. My father refused to look at “cherry picked” internet stories about Bill Cosby that I sent him one time. My father is still convinced he’s an innocent man because he’s convinced those bitches are all lying whores. And what the fuck does “cherry picked” even mean in this context? Jamie Shupe is the first person to be legally documented as nonbinary in the US. If his story isn’t relevant to this conversation, no one’s story is. Including yours.
Mine is actual experience.
Here’s the thing about gender. We all have one. And supposedly all of us have gender identity. So all of us have actual experience. Just because you know more transwomen than I do doesn’t make you an expert on women, womanhood, or feminism. You have male privilege. You see the world through a male lens. I see it from the standpoint of a woman. Not someone who identifies as a woman, but as a female whose femaleness is readily apparent. I am living the “sex is real” reality. We have different areas of expertise, but yours is not greater than mine. It is just different than mine.
My friends are not articles of faith. They’re real people.
Jamie Shupe is a real person too. And he’s been harmed by gender ideology. Sounds like your friends have benefited from it and that’s great. But your friends’ positive experience shouldn’t keep us from worrying about other people’s negative experiences. If we only talk about the positive stories, we never learn what to do and what not to do so that no one has negative stories to tell. It is only when people consider all the stories that we can say we aren’t ideologically blind and biased. That includes stories written in tones we don’t like, published in media we distrust, and shared by Dopers who have hurt our feelings.
Yes. After reading what all the whistle blowers have to say, it’s highly concerning. It’s not necessarily that the treatment is inappropriate, but that it was developed for one set of patients - kids who were always gender non-conforming and continue to identify as transgender after getting some way into puberty - and being applied to another, vastly larger population - teenagers, especially girls, who had ordinary childhoods and suddenly identify as transgender in adolescence. It’s not at all clear that these two populations are suffering the same condition or would benefit from the same treatment. But the atmosphere is such that therapists don’t feel able to explore the reasons why patients feel that way, but are pressured to always affirm the patient’s stated identity, and move quickly to medical interventions.
And then there’s the fact that charities and activists are pushing for early social transition for gender non-conforming kids. We know that if left alone, more than half of these kids grow up to be gay, and a smaller percentage are transgender. Early social transition may well cement them into the latter path, with all it’s attendant medical issues. But that is something GIDs has little control over.
At least the NHS has standards they follow, though. These cowboys don’t have any:
This is a different question than one that is focused on scrutinizing lesbian romantic preferences. If we’re going to suppose unconscious bias is behind their rejection of trans lovers, then we should suppose the same bias exist in most people, since lesbians are not that unique in choosing partners based on their natal sex. . I believe focusing on lesbians—-as if they are the solitary hold out on trans acceptance—is not just misguided. It fits a larger misogynistic pattern.
So I hope then you read the data that I just linked to and now understand why I have my opinion.
Serano claimed in that article they score with bi women and straight men, but I don’t take this claim at face value because it goes against available evidence. Both anecdotal and non-anecdotal.
From the article:
Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man , even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women.
Straight men and lesbians are both attracted to transmen at rates not substantially different from one another. Only lesbians get called hypocrites for this.
About bisexuals:
Bisexual/queer/nonbinary participants (these were all combined into one group) were most open to having a trans partner, but even among them,almost half (48%) did not select either ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman.’
And 33% of the trans-inclusive bisexual/queer participants said they would only date a trans person of one gender but not the other, even though one may expect this group to be attracted to multiple genders.
Digging even deeper into the choices of cis folks willing to date trans people, an interesting pattern of discrimination against trans women in particular emerged among those who would be expected to be attracted to women: 28% of trans-inclusive bisexual/queer/nonbinary folks and 38% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they wouldn’t date a trans woman — only a trans man .
If we’re going to investigate “unconscious trans bias”, I think we should look at bisexual/queer/non-binary folks. This is the one group I would expect to not be biased against transwomen, and yet they are biased.
I also saw similar behavior in the kids at my children’s HS. Kids were openly gay, openly sparkly, openly whatever, and no one seemed to care. Very different from my HS experience. But just hanging out is not really a gender-specific activity. Gender and sexual orientation doesn’t really matter all that much in most situations. But I’m not sure how these kids would feel about the cases we’ve been discussing here, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and dating. Would the kids who were indifferent about the gender of kids in the class room care once those same kids were in the locker room or competing against them in sports? What about when they are applying for gender-specific scholarships? I suspect that there would still be gender concerns in places and situation where gender was a defining characteristic regardless of their indifference in other situations.
So… I am attracted to gender expression, not to biological sex. Or, at least, I’m mostly a straight cis woman, but I’ve had crushes on other women, and every one of those women has been pretty masculine in gender expression. But some of them have had traditionally attractive female bodies. (And some haven’t.)
That being said… I think a lot of people really are attracted to bodies and pheremones more than to gender expression. My guess is that men are more likely to be attracted to bodies, and women to gender expression, but I’m sure that varies, too.
Er… I also hang out with a lot of trans and nb young adults. I’ve seen the proud photos post-top-surgery on Facebook, too. A very close friend went through a period exploring his gender identity, and considered transitioning, and ended up deciding he identified as a gender-non-conforming man (who wears dresses and puts his hair up in a cute bow and gets felt up by a female TSA employee based on his presentation.)
You know what, the trans folk have all met someone who was disillusioned. But a lot of them are happy with their choices.
Yeah. I’m also a woman whose femaleness is readily apparent. And I have a lot of happy trans and nb friends, too.