UndercoverElephant wrote: ↑14 Jun 2024, 10:15
Unfortunately I am very much reliant on the ‘woke nonsense’ brigade for protecting my own freedoms,
Really? Are you man who believes they are a woman? We don't need woke attacks on reality in order protect any freedoms which are worth having.
Well, as I said, I find this view incomprehensibly cruel and personally terrifying. Trans people (and there are trans men as well as trans women) are being attacked as reality-deniers and a physcial threat in the same way that gay men used to be accused of being a threat. The consequences of this are what we see in various countries where gay people are declared to not-exist (because homosexuality doesn’t exist) in the same way that trans people are not being declared to not-exist (because transness does not exist).
Trans people have always existed, just as homosexual people have always existed. Trans people are not a threat by virtue of being trans. Just because trans people want to live in society in a way that doesn’t correspond to their chromosomes doesn’t make them a threat. Being trans is not a sexual perversion.
For sure, there has never been a real consensus on the causes of transgenderedness. Back in the nineties most medics seemed to believe it was caused by a hormonal imbalance in the womb during pregnancy leading to brain structure developing in opposition to other sexual characteristics. Since there has been no way to ‘correct’ the brain side of the equation and convince trans people they’re not trans, the compassionate solution was to allow them to change the rest of their bodies to match, as best as they could. This has been successful for the vast majority of trans people. Regret levels are ridiculously low. After the 90s, gender specialists began to try to de-medicalise being trans, considering it a variation in human diversity rather than a medical issue to be fixed. This is what has ultimately led to self-id and men just declaring themselves women and vice versa with no medical assessment. I can understand why trans groups wanted to go this route, but I always thought it was a mistake because it makes it all about selfish personal choice and not a serious mental health condition that only has one realistic form of treatment.
Three decades ago, trans people were accommodated and viewed with compassion because even if they were living contrary to their chromosomal biology, it was accepted that this was necessary to avoid really serious negative mental health outcomes. Because trans women (to address them in particular) thought of themselves as women, looked like women (if they transitioned early enough) and lost all their masculine physical strength, they were never considered any sort of threat in women’s spaces. In contrast, trans women gained enormous protections from being able to use women’s spaces, because they were vulnerable to male violence in just the same way as other women - sometimes moreso because of the anger their ‘deception’ generated in some people.
I would personally want to revert to this earlier understanding of gender dysphoria where society takes a compassionate approach to allowing trans men and trans women to be accepted as they believe themselves to be, regardless of biological reality. It worked just fine for several decades.
I think the real problem for trans people has been the conflation of ‘transvestites’ and ‘transsexuals’. Back in the 90s and before, you had two completely separate groups of biological men who presented as women. One did it for the sexual thrill and were happy to go back to being male at work the next day, the others did it because they believed they were women and never wanted to go back. These have all been conflated now as ‘trans women’ apparently demanding the right to be treated however they want on any given day.
My view is that trans people, once diagnosed as such by medical professionals, should be allowed to transition and live their lives as men or women as they believe themselves to be. The main tension is the period of transition itself, when a trans woman continues to look like man, and a trans man continues to look like a woman. This is a horrifying period for any trans person, and only made worse by the constant threat of outing and violence against them, and political judgements that try to invalidate their experience and humiliate them at every turn. Admittedly, it is utterly creepy for a trans woman who looks completely male to demand access to a women’s refuge. Conversely, it is cruel and ridiculous to deny access to such spaces to a trans woman rape victim who transitioned 20 years ago in their teens and who has never had any sense of themselves as male.
No trans person or their allies are denying a biological reality. They are simply recognising that mental health is no respecter of biological reality, and sometimes an effective treatment involves a shared societal agreement to ignore biology. That used to be the happy consensus for several decades and I wish we could go back there. It’s true that the present situation has been caused largely by woke overreach trying to force everyone to deny the reality of their own eyes, but the pushback has been utterly horrific for trans people and has become a cause celebre for right-wingers everywhere who just love to find a weak enemy to unite against.
So yeah, when Farage jumps on the anti-trans bandwagon, I crap myself and run for the hills. It’s an absolute nightmare.
