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If you allow people to self identify and determine their own gender (which anybody can do when you think about it) without mocking them or seeing them as abnormal, and without insisting that biological sex is the be all and end all of one's identity, then the need to 'transition' so to speak is diminished. The reason some trans people feel compelled to have surgery is because there's a societal belief that that's the only way you can be a true 'man' or 'woman'. There would still always be people who want sex reassignment surgery either for the same reasons or perhaps even because they just want different genitalia, but I definitely think it would help. It needs to be a cultural shift in attitudes. We don't need labels and we don't need complex issues to be categorised to make sense of them. This societal obsession with the gender binary is actually quite damaging but also really pointless. Why do we actually need separate toilets? Why do we need to create toys or indeed certain items of clothing specifically for boys/girls/men/women? Most of these things are totally unnecessary and yet people lap them up because it's the only way they know how, they are the product of their environment and have been socialised to believe this is the only way and that it's almost natural. It isn't. Humans created this |
Agree with most of that. Toilets and...I guess 'womens safe spaces' though, I honestly don't know where I stand on it. While rape remains a huge issue, I do think its right to separate sex's when they are likely to be at their most vulnerable...if that makes sense? I get that a woman could technically be raped with something other than a penis, and that there are rare cases of women raping men..but it kinda doesn't sit right with me to just say everyone has to get on with it, who cares that the risk of rape will increase? :S
I would much rather go for, for example, mainly mixed sex changing rooms. With an option for male/female. Kinda like how we have a bunch of 'normal' loos then on disabled one at the moment? This way we are not forcing anyone to do anything they dont want to...and either trans women or women, or trans men or men can use said seperate room. The suggestion that seemed most prevailant in discussions with actual transwomen, interestingly enough, was leave everything as it is for stuff like that but add a further option so that trans people get their own safe space also. View was mainly, they don't want to risk making people feel uncomfortable, but they do not wish to feel uncomfortable themselves. |
It doesn't increase though, that's a myth
If a man wants to rape a woman, he will do so. If he wants to rape a woman in a woman's toilet, a sign above the door saying he's not allowed in isn't going to stop him. If anything having unisex toilets means that there's always more likely to be more people around, and if we're going purely by stereotypes here - more men around to stop it from happening or intervene. Dare I say you're more likely to be raped in your own house by a friend or relative than you are in a public toilet tbh |
Third options are perfectly reasonable compromises too, and quite frankly I'd prefer it if we ditched big open changing rooms for men and women at swimming pools and stuck with individual cubicles for everyone like some have, and do the same thing in toilets
The only reason unisex only toilets are preferable is because it's cheaper and it goes some way to diminishing the power of the gender binary and breaking down all these pointless labels |
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IDK..my own body issues may be clouding this for me, or even maybe how I have grown up (again, whats ingrained into me as the norm) but the idea of changing clothes in the same room as a bunch of random men is just..horrible to me :S Its not anything sexual, as I would have no issue getting changed in a room full of lesbians..IDK how to explain it tbh. Loos I could get away with as they are separate cubicles anyways. Dunno if I could be done with the smell of the urinals though :fist: |
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But toilets are a different ballgame, they exist for pissing, ****ting and maybe wanking if that's what floats your boat...nothing more, nothing less. It's all private and I want to be in and out ASAP so who's in the cubicles next to me makes no difference to me Re: urinals, ditch the vile things anyway with the awful ~social rules~ that come along with them |
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I actually think part of the problem here though is that the thing you're trying to understand, can't really be fully understood, we simply don't know enough about how the brain works. And the whole thing comes down to someone's connection (or disconnection) between 3 things, their brain, their physical body, and the social constructs around them. But these things often get mixed up and that's why it gets so complicated. And that's essentially why we have labels, so we can make sense of things and simplify things, and 'man' and 'woman' are easy labels because we can see there are clear difference between men and women... but how a person feels and how their brain works isn't something we can see, so we can't really know 'why' when it comes to transsexuality, it just is. And I think this, plus the fact that it's such a small proportion of the population that go through something like this, It makes it even more difficult to be able to personally relate to it or see it as 'normal'... and that's where it becomes easy to fall into the 'mental illness' way of thinking. But personally I reject that. It goes against what we consider an 'illness' to be. From a trans persons point of view, they are 'cured' at the point of transitioning, and why should we dismiss that just because we don't understand what's behind it? Quote:
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....I don't have time to make anything other than a quick post but it's interesting though because it can't all be a 'society construct' if 'male' and 'female' have been 'defined' pre-society and back in the beginning of man days...the hunter gatherer and the carer/the dominant and the submissive and etc...and then the evolvement of wearing clothing/fashion and 'expected' of male female clothing and behavioural 'society norms'/the provider the nurturer etc.... but that's all just an evolvement in society forming...?...and I do think that society is responsible for much unhappiness and the struggles etc but not the cause though....if someone as isolated from society from birth in an experiment, I will think that they would always be who they are...that I think is evident..(for me anyway..)...in those 'non-societies' and tribes, which have always so far as we know, had 'twin spirit' or 'two spirit' people in terms of sexuality, which hasn't always been understood or identified but has always been there ....societies pressure, societies judge, societies cause unhappiness and people not feeling free to be who they are but societies don't cause..?...
...anyways, just an initial thought but I don't have time to give more thought to it atm.... |
"Re: urinals, ditch the vile things anyway with the awful ~social rules~ that come along with them "
No Jack we can not afford to go Fancy Times are hard Me , LT and TS all know this. Feel The Force |
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If you become a man but then have a baby like a woman, something recently spoken about as news, are you still a woman and not a man at all? If you want to be a woman but can't procreate as a woman or have a menopause when the time comes are you really living a woman's life? What about menstruations? By the same token if you want to be a man but can't procreate like a man are you really living the life of a man? Is the change really a satisfactory conclusion, does it make you the sex you desire to be or is it a band aid? |
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As a teen I hated having huge breasts. I did not think I should have huge breasts. The huge breasts caused me distress and upset in many many cases. At one stage I had a total disassociation from my body and refused to believe it even belonged to me, such was my hatred for it. Now, it would be easy to say due to these feelings...oh my breasts do not belong to my body, I should be in a body without these huge breasts. And if I had at one point had a boob reduction...my distress and such would effectively have been 'cured'. This does not mean that I was infact in the wrong body and this is the reason for the 'cure', Not sure I am explaining this right though :S Quote:
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Also again on this TERF issue..of course they 'exclude trans women' and I can honestly see why. Feminists have fought for years and years to have equal rights to men. They are there (or very nearly there). Can you imagine how it feels to then be expected to put the needs/wants of a man ABOVE your own rights? I am speaking purely from the 'trapped in a mans body' perspective of this, NOT those who have fully transitioned. To include people who simply say they identify as women is effectively saying **** the rights we fought for, men still rule all and have the final say...we were oppressed for thousands of years, but now a guy can simply claim he is the most oppressed of the oppressed and everyone must forget everything else and yield to this. Its not right. Womens rights could therefor be broken down systematically by a few blokes on a power trip who have an 'easy out' for want of better words. Yes these people are a minority, but a very dangerous minority and a very loud minority and I am not sure I agree with making this easier for them. Same as the lesbian issue I guess...those who think they have the right to bully lesbians into ****ing them by labeling them transphobic if they don't and saying they should be beaten up and such..are a minority but at the moment, they have a very real way to exert their power and basically say 'hail my almighty penis' :S
-------------------------------------- Also adding onto this post, though has no relevance to the above part of my post, adding simply so I don't spam the thread...I have read many things about trans people, but this seems to be the prevalent thought process on the 'living as a woman' issue I asked of earlier http://bilerico.lgbtqnation.com/2011...y_girlhood.php Its all very very sad to read, but this part Quote:
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We spoke last night about toilets and changing rooms. I now move onto a much more complex area that cannot simply be solved by 'unisex closed cubicles'. Refuges and such. Where women (or men in less cases, so for the post I shall refer to women as it is more prevalent) go to escape domestic violence. Where sex segregation IS needed as so many women in those places are there due to rape and such, or violence committed by men. If we accept this 'anyone is anything they identify as', the logical answer is that trans women are not excluded from said places as they are also women. I completely disagree. While they may be women in thought, they are not women. Male on female violence (inc rapes) and such is a huge issue, not one that can be ignored to go along with the fluffy media rhetoric of any issue to do with trans. Do we accept that afterall, a trans woman is NOT the same as a woman and as such should not be granted access to womens refuges and such? Or do we go along with 'anyone is what they identify as' and allow anyone access to female only safe spaces such as a refuge? Which in turn, would mean that for example, a woman fleeing domestic violence..is found in said refuge by abuser, who can then simply stick on a dress and say he identifies as a woman, and gain access to said woman to abuse yet again.These are the kind of questions that need to be asked these days sadly. I believe there is a NEED, not a want, for some places to be segregated entirely by sex. Yet again, this has been spoken about with actual transsexual women who agree entirely that men should not be able to under any circumstance be allowed into a womens refuge. again, it has been suggested that refuges specifically for trans women could be opened. To me, this comes down to who has more rights, whos rights trump the rights of others. Is it right to allow men to redefine womens rights in the way they are trying to? Or are feminists (not even feminists, just people who accept women are entitled to..their rights) wrong on this issue and everyone should pander to the view that anyone is a woman, regardless of their actual sex? Quote:
--------- And a further addition..that kinda has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but again I do not want to spam post. https://www.change.org/p/human-right...ces-drop-the-t basically, the trans movement as it is today, is homophobic in many ways, ignoring the cotton ceiling concept entirely. Many views on this, but the petition puts most of it across in one place..so was easier to post than a bunch of links on the top of my screen right now. |
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http://www.thehomoarchy.com/do-youth...-intervention/ My arguments for how deciding someone is trans from a young age is actually homophobic are put across well on here^ however I do not know how true the statistics they mention are, as I can't find any extensive statistics or anything on the subject. IF its true though that anywhere near 90% of children who would be recognized as 'trans' actually grow up to just be gay..there is a huge problem and declaring them trans but 'straight' is effectively...'curing' people of being gay? By throwing a different label at it. I am definitely prepared to accept that being trans in itself is not a mental illness or BDD. But I also feel it is much rarer than it appears to be and we need to find ways of finding out who exactly is trans, what actually causes it and such. For example..a word that was mentioned by Miranda Yardley was Autogynephilia, which is the most controversial word that can be used when discussing MtF trans people apparently. But it makes perfect sense, though has not been proven or disproven, but could go a hell of a long way to explaining quite WHY there are so many MtF transexuals as there are FtM. There is definitely something to this, as the huge majority of FtM transexuals identify as lesbians...Autogynephilia is not being trans, but a sexuality or sorts. Or (possibly easier to digest) a fetish. Seem to have gone off on a tangent there again with my new catalogue of thoughts that I didn't even know existed :S I ask though Jamie, personally, do you think it is correct for someone to simply say they identify as a woman or a man, and thus they are that and said individual then gets all of the rights and such of whichever sex they chose and everyone else just has to deal with it, or be branded a bigot? If so, fair enough, but also, do you see how this current direction we are going in of accepting this..is wide open to abuse by people with their own agenda(including, IMO many of the loudest transactivists) |
Going to be quick and straight to the point here I'm afraid Vicky:
Your entire argument from the very start of your first post describes the difference between "sex" and "gender". This is accurate. However what you then go on to do is attempt to entirely remove the entire concept of gender from the equation completely by pretending that - as it is not biologically hard wired - it therefore does not exist. This is fundamentally flawed thinking. Yes, the concept of gender is a social construct, but it a very REAL and still current social construct in the world we live in. You simply can't take it out of the equation. It's incorrect psychology; anything and everything you say after that is then flawed or incorrect because you are hinging your entire philosophy on the still-false premise that males and females are not still socially distinguishable. You argue that IF infants were taken and raised in a gender-neutral environment, these issues would cease to exist. That's a valid hypothesis and may well be right but... it's completely irrelevant to a real-world discussion of gender identity. Beyond that, I would actually agree that there are probably many individuals living as transgendered who do indeed more accurately have generalised identity disorders, often triggered by trauma. However that's a different discussion, really. The existence of those individuals doesn't make it valid to "throw the baby out with the bath water", so to speak, and deny the existence of literal biologically trans-sexed people. When you then put those people into the REAL world in which gender identities DO exist, rather than your hypothetical non-existent ideal world devoid of such roles, it's easy to see why there would be distress based around being in the "wrong body" and associated expectations. |
OK, it wasn't that quick.
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I wasn't trying to deny that gender roles/stereotypes and such play a huge part in everyones lives though, the 'gender neutral' stuff was me trying to write out my thoughts as I thought them..which may well have come across really wrong. And basically, I have come to the realization that society, as a whole has actually created 'trans' issues in most cases..which is sad and could be changed. Not immediately granted, but long term, and would be much more useful than writing a 'feminine' man off as a trans woman and then going onto attempting to redefine the word woman to fit this. I have flip flopped so much in views on this subject over the past week or so that I feel slightly like a hypothetical dying carp. And I have realised the reason for this feeling, for the lack of understanding surrounding these issues..is that we aren't allowed to have conversations about it without being written off as phobic, which is really wrong.
I also think that 'people who identify' and 'trans' are entirely different, and I will never fully accept someone who simply thinks they are a woman in their head, as a woman. Where I would accept a trans woman who has transitioned as a woman...this view is thought to be totally unacceptable. I understand that to transition there are dangerous surgeries and such and I don't wish to make people feel they HAVE to go through stuff like this, but I just cannot get over the fact that with the whole 'identify' thing..literally anyone can say they are anything they wish to, either for genuine reasons, or for another agenda (such as blokes on a power trip having an easy 'out' and getting a kick out of eroding womens rights /feminist) |
You can get quite sweeping there though, as sadly it is "society" that has created almost EVERY human issue, but some aspects of society are so ingrained that it would most likely be futile to try to rewrite them. I'm also not personally convinced that a "gender neutral" world is something that we SHOULD strive for; I am completely in favour of gender equality but, to me anyway, gender uniformity sounds pretty... Grey?
I would be very skeptical of anyone who insists that they be considered "female" whilst still being entirely masculine... But like I said, you can separate the bull**** and the abnormal psychology from the legitimate individuals without having to tear everything down and start over. From my own personal viewpoint it's all quite academic, to be fair. I'm a huge believer in individuality and I don't like categories of any kind as a rule. I wouldn't say I feel particularly masculine, nor feminine. I'm male, 6'2, well built and as far as I can tell entirely straight (I've only ever been sexually attracted to females) and I'm entirely happy with my body; though I also don't feel like I'd be unhappy in a female body. I can handle myself, but I've never been aggressive. I'm not into sports of any kind as some would argue "most" males are. I like "girly TV" like Gossip Girl :joker:. I generally prefer female company... Though my two best friends are male. One is gay and pretty camp, the other is straight and probably even more camp. To be honest I sort of think of myself as an individual as being entirely unrelated to the body that I happen to move around the world in. What sexually / gender is that? Hmmmm. Just a TS I suppose :shrug:. |
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For me personally, it would be enough for someone to say they identify as male/female for me to accept them as that. I know there would be a lot of people in all sorts of circumstances who might say that but it not necessarily meaning they are trans and there may be other issues at play, but because I do think transsexuality exists, it would have to be enough for me because otherwise I'd be denying the genuine transsexuals, and I don't think those who are genuinely transsexual should be punished for the fact that some people out there are just weirdo's, because undoubtedly some people are, but that's true of any category of person. So I also think that it would be enough for me to be happy with them receiving the rights etc that comes along with it. If it was up to me and I was being really honest then I'd say yeah, I'd want everyone to just deal with that :laugh: but I wouldn't brand anyone a bigot simply for not agreeing. Like you said in an earlier post it's all fairly new in terms of society's views etc, and hearing cases and experiences of trans people, and just generally trying to get to grips with what it is/how it effects people/the abuses that can occur etc, all sides to it, so arguing against it has it's merit too. I'd only say someone was bigoted if they were against it just because they don't like trans people. And yes it could be open to abuse but I just don't consider that to be a reason against it because absolutely anything in life is open to abuse and I wouldn't want to legislate against and restrict transsexuals just because some people have different agenda's, I don't think that would be fair on them. And it's not something we do in many of the other areas where systems are abused. My biggest worry would be reversing the direction we are going in because the way views are currently shifting I see as being progressive, and sure there might be a lot of bad that comes along with that but overall and long term I think it's a good thing. |
See I did see it as being progressive until recently, but now,,I see it as a huge step backwards for womens rights, and downright dangerous to actual real life trans people as to force people into something they don't believe in, will incite hatred, hatred that may not ever be there if not for the 'trans-movement' as it stands today..
OK, Helen is one of the people I have spoken to over the past few days who has helped me shape my views. They have given me permission to copy/paste one of their posts about the matter, and suggested a blog post may be helpful in trying to explain my views about the trans-activists arguments being detrimental to actual transpeople. http://transavant.tumblr.com/post/14.../whats-my-deal The blog is well worth a read and actually quite upset me. It must be horrific to be rejected by society because of who you are, whilst equally abused by the very people who claim to represent you, simply for failing to 'fall into line' with the current TA views... Quote:
I am also speaking about this on a more private forum with a MtF transexual who prefers to be known as she as she sees herself as female despite being born male. But also completely distances herself from the views of the most prominent TAs who claim the need to totally redefine the world as we know it, rather than fighting for acceptance for themselves..and thinks that the current way the trans-movement is going is 'bizarre, scary and damaging to women and transwomen alike' |
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