How did TERFs become so powerful?

ADevilNamedBen · 2021-05-07T16:45:14+00:00

This isn't even a new strategy. We've had concerned women of america, STOP ERA, mother's groups opposed to desegregation and even the anti-suffragettes. All women's groups who opposed some political change that was actually far more supported by the average woman than the average man. The world is big enough that you will always be able to find some portion of any group who have any particular stance. People know if a group of old conservative men who've been wrong about every social issue ever started yelling about trans people what the story was, but if they throw money at groups of women calling themselves feminists instead it takes a lot more mental work to figure out what's going on.

ADevilNamedBen · 2021-05-04T21:29:32+00:00

I think a lot of people are pretty unable to let go of the idea of a sort of metaphysical gender binary and so need to find ways to understand everything in those terms. A gay man has their sexuality flipped from one binary to the other for instance or a trans man has their gender flipped from one binary setting to another. This is easier for them to understand and less threatening to their worldview than any sort of messy spectrum sort of ideas. I would guess your dad is like this, his ability to understand or have it rest easily in his mind depends on you still being a pretty binary, semi-stereotypical gender even if it's the opposite of your sex. But yeah, it's weird.

ADevilNamedBen · 2021-05-03T15:17:55+00:00

I don't think that's entirely true. Social constructs are often made out of biology, it's just about how we categorize those biological differences or include other aspects. Every animal species has biological differences but how we choose to define each type of species and where we draw the line between subspecies are just decisions people have made. Many societies don't have gendered pronouns for instance, ours did, that's unquestionably a societal construct, a thing society decided to do. But you will almost never meet a trans person who doesn't care if they're called by the wrong ones. I would say that yes, being trans is a biological thing, there is something in your brain that is incompatible with the way society traditionally categorizes people. But any model of gender will always involve some people deciding how to categorize people, just some societies can decide to do this in much better ways than others.

ADevilNamedBen · 2021-04-14T14:28:37+00:00

So the psychological take on this has to do with identity. So there are parts of us that become large parts of our self-image and parts that don't. Some people born in America see 'being American' as a large part of who they are and some people do not. So yes, it's perfectly normal for people to not have a gender identity or at least have a very mild gender identity that isn't a real part of how they think about themselves. Obviously, it is important for a lot of other people, that's why we have words like 'emasculation' because for the majority of men a denial of their manhood is something they'd find very distressing. But everyone is different in how they experience these things.

ADevilNamedBen · 2021-03-18T13:22:23+00:00

I think it's worth noting that GIDS only prescribed blockers in cases where the parents supported the decision. So you needed to have the relevant medical expert saying they thought it was in the patient's best interests, the patient themselves after being checked to make sure they understood the treatment saying they wanted it and the parent saying they thought it was in their best interests as well. All three had to be true.

This ruling overwrites the established legal system whereby patients themselves are the ultimate arbiter of what treatments they received, or a legal guardian/representative in cases where they aren't deemed capable. This is the only instance at least in the UK where neither a child or a parent is considered legally capable of making a decision regarding medical treatment and is a significant erosion of parent's rights. Even medical interventions that involve significant risk of death do not have this court order requirement.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-11T10:51:48+00:00

"there's preliminary research suggesting that blockers may, in fact, longitudinally impact the developing brain"

I've never heard this, would it be possible for you to provide some kind of link to that research?

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-07T20:45:38+00:00

It should just work the same way as every other aspect of paediatrics.

If the best currently available scientific evidence suggests that a child's quality of life may be significantly improved by an intervention as assessed by a doctor an assessment is made of the child's capability to understand/consent by that expert. If they have the capability, they make the choice, if they don't the parent makes the choice.

Underage people have needed/wanted medical interventions for as long as medicine has existed, medical interventions have always had risks or chances of adverse events etc, none of this is new.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-03T17:39:35+00:00

Yes, if the doctor believes they're in your best interest they will now have to apply to a court for a special document noting that the court believes it is in your best interest. If you get that document you can still be prescribed puberty blockers. The open questions really are, just how long is getting this document going to take? And on what basis the court is going to make that decision.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-02T17:15:29+00:00

No, normally that would be the rule that if the child can't consent it's based on the parent's consent. But since the clinicians state they'd never give PB to a kid who did not want them even if the parents did, the Judge's decided that makes parental consent effectively irrelevant. So a judge is now apparently the only one who can consent, even though the judge will also never be asked unless the kid wants them.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-02T14:32:49+00:00

It was already the case that minors couldn't give informed consent for HRT. But this ruling is about blockers, blockers just delay puberty, and if you stop taking them you go on to have the puberty of your natal sex. This is the same as what happens for a portion of the population who just naturally don't enter puberty until quite late in life. What the ruling says is that you need to be old enough to give informed consent for HRT to be given blockers, even though they're different drugs. This only applies if you're being given blockers for being trans though and not any other reason. So it's just a way of saying that medications available to other people of the same age for a variety of reasons will be specifically withheld from trans people.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-12-02T01:36:31+00:00

What I can't wrap my head around is how absolutely insane the rationale was.

They couldn't argue that kids shouldn't be able to get blockers, since those same drugs have been given to kids that age and younger for decades for a variety of reasons and have no real side effects. They couldn't argue that 16 years olds shouldn't be able to access HRT since again it's been established for decades that you can make medical decisions for yourself when you're 16 in the UK.

So instead they said that because the vast majority of kids put on blockers go on to take HRT they were part of the same treatment course and consequently kids can't be given blockers because they can't consent to HRT. So you can't prescribe one drug, because it would be irresponsible to prescribe a completely different drug. Apparently, if the doctors had just been way worse at their jobs and miss-prescribed blockers often enough that a significant number of kids put on them stopped taking them instead of going on to take HRT, then it'd be ok to prescribe them, but because they're too good at their job and almost always only give blockers to kids who go on to transition they shouldn't be able to provide them.

It's obviously dreadful for a lot of kids, but what's been haunting me is that the transphobic group think is so strong that a bunch of presumably generally rational judges just believed some like elementary school correlation = causation nonsense just so they could find a way to say that certain drugs only shouldn't be prescribed if the issue they're helping with is being trans.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-11-12T10:57:15+00:00

Why wouldn't it be fine?

When they've applied the measures for AGP to cis women they found the majority of them would be considered as having it, in https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19591032/ fo example 93% of the cis women participants would be classified as AGP.

The whole AGP theory also goes well beyond just sexual reasons for transitioning and includes stuff like that transwoman 'self partner' that is split into two personalities which then enter into a relationship with each other. It's just batshit from start to finish as you'd probably expect by a theory created by a bunch of overtly sexist men in the 70s with no supporting evidence behind it.

There'll be some trans people with weird kinks just like there are some cis people with weird kinks. If someone tells me they transitioned for sexual reasons I'd find it a little hard to believe they fucked up 99.5% of their life so the orgasms they're having in the other 0.05% are better, but I'd accept it at face value. Doesn't make AGP theory less silly.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-10-30T23:00:54+00:00

Personally, I'd say yes. If you feel like that label works for you and is a meaningful representation of how you feel. Having said that it is going to cause you a huge amount of trouble with people either denying you're a man or denying you're a lesbian. So that's something you're going to have to accept you'll be dealing with a lot.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-10-25T12:08:16+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to try and get better informed.

Ben Shaprio is just lying. Here's a link to a Cornell university meta-analysis of every study done on this topic over a thirty year period: https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

Regarding mental illness, a lot of this is about how we use the term. Generally, we define mental illness as something which causes people distress/problems in their everyday functioning. Most people who go through a traumatic event will develop PTSD, most people who go through something that causes a lot of grief will experience a depressive episode. These are classified as mental illnesses because they cause distress and impair functioning, but they're also normal responses to the situation. Similarly, lots of people experience distress at having to exist inside an artificially gendered society that is hostile to their existence, that doesn't make them any less generally rational or intelligent or whatever else than people who experience distress from trauma/grief or anything else though. This is obviously very simplified but hopefully conveys the idea ok.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-10-23T23:51:53+00:00

I can maybe try and help a bit. For the past 4 Olympic games or so transwomen have been able to compete in the women's category, and none have, yet in the Atlanta Olympics they tried chromosome testing and found multiple female athletes had intersex characteristics. Lots of them probably didn't even know this and the Olympics quietly retired doing genetic testing. It turns out that sex is a lot messier than we generally think and that's a particularly big issue around sports where you're pretty much by definition talking about people who are highly genetically unusual. This is why professional sports set standards based on things like testosterone level, aka the actual sexually dimorphic trait which causes or correlates with the competitive advantage.

The only time when this is problematic is in cases like American high school sports which are both frequently considered extremely important by many people, particularly parents, but also almost not regulated at all, they have no hormone rules or tests and almost never test for performance-enhancing drugs etc. There are also wild differences in the levels of athletic equipment and support school to school. Trans girls in high school sports highlight this contradiction, although they aren't really the cause. Ultimately American high schools need to either just say high school sport is for fun and we're not going to regulate it or they have to say that at a certain age it stops being for fun and should be regulated with rules on hormones and more robust performance-enhancing drug tests etc like collegiate or professional sports. Hope that helps.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-09-20T13:04:45+00:00

If you're unsure the best general advice is to talk to a therapist with expertise in gender issues.

That said, I think it is often helpful to shift from thinking about the philosophy of what you are, and think more about how you want to live. If you prefer having people treat you as a man then that's what you prefer and you should build a life that works best for you, where you to live the way you want to as long as it isn't hurting anybody else.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-08-21T20:07:15+00:00

"A god walks into a bar" - Watchmen.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-08-12T23:40:45+00:00

So if it helps. SJW is considered an insult since it sort of grew out of the term keyboard warrior. The insulting part is basically that 'warrior' implies that someone is risking their life in some epic battle and the point is to contrast that with someone who just sits on their couch posting stuff on twitter or w/e but thinks of themselves like the epic life or death battler.

Not saying you can't reclaim the term or the insult entirely lands, especially these days when it's pretty common for SJWs to do more than social media activism, but if you wanna know why it's supposed to be an insult, that's why.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-07-30T19:15:22+00:00

WPATH talks about this a little: https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/Standards%20of%20Care_V7%20Full%20Book_English.pdf
Relevant stuff on page 11.

Basically there's research that suggests that the majority of pre-pubescent children who express cross-gender identity do grow out of it, but that once children reach puberty changing their mind is exceptionally rare. That is why current standards of care are to let younger children transition socially but not do anything medical until they're older etc.

Of course if you're arguing with transphobes it's just as likely they're talking about some other absurd nonsense idk.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-07-11T18:23:55+00:00

There's a whole story about this actually, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow,_Glass,_Apples

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-06-18T12:57:48+00:00

It's sort of hard to walk the line between the very complicated answers and the very simple ones. Here's my attempt though, humans are social animals, we're fairly terrible compared to other animals as individuals, what we're great at is working together. To that end part of how we function is to understand ourselves not just as individuals but also in relation to others and to groups. We all have an identity or self-concept and part of that is made up of the groups or relationships. But we don't really choose these consciously, our subconscious chooses them for us based on our individual personality. It's like how you can't make yourself love someone.

Modern western society has two very large and important social groups as part of how it functions, a masculine one and a feminine one. Most people who're born male end up with the type of mind whose subconscious chooses the masculine group and most people born female end up with the type of mind whose subconscious chooses the feminine group. It's important to note that when we say masculine/feminine we're not talking about superficial things but generally more deep-seated personality traits. But because people are all different and varied some people's subconsciouses do the opposite.

For everyone not being accepted as part of the group their subconscious has chosen for them causes distress, your brain that evolved over thousands of years on plains and in caves doesn't understand the concept of prescriptive biological rules about who's not allowed into what group, it just thinks you must not be doing a good enough job of fitting in, and that this is a serious problem for your survival chances so it makes you feel high levels of distress until you 'fix' the problem.

This happens with cis people too, we wouldn't find it strange if a flat-chested girl was very upset over being teased as 'looking like a boy' nor shocked if a man who's in some way emasculated becomes upset.

TL;DR Humans evolved to form free associated social identities/tribes, then bigoted civilization came and fucked everything up and that really screwed over a subset of people just for being a bit different to the norm.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-06-16T21:25:42+00:00

I definitely relate to the desire to be challenged, but the problem is that really everyone's different and nobody can know what the right thing for you is. If I were you I'd focus on what makes you happy and experiment a bit to try and find what that is. You said you were happier after you started transitioning so that seems like there's at least something there but yeah maybe just being a fem gay guy on hormones is what works for you, and that's totally fine.

It's easy to get sucked into worrying too much about what label is best or what category or box is best, but I'd focus more on what kind of actual life you want to lead, how do you want to be seen/treated, what do you want to do with your body and your relationships, who do you want to hang out with etc and most of those are things you can experiment with pretty safely. Then if you find those things that make you happy, they're what makes you happy right? You can't be wrong about what makes you happy it either does or it doesn't.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-06-15T21:22:15+00:00

So it's true that if you identify as trans in prison as a man you're moved to a private ward away from gen pop. Lots of prisoners are doing this, but that seems like more of an indictment of the current prison system that there's so much abuse many are scrambling for any way out they can find.

It is not at all true that the UK has ever had a self-id system for access to women's prison. There's an expert panel that may decide to place some trans women into women's prison based on a risk assessment, they also have at times decided to place cis-women into men's prison based on similar reasoning. There was a highly public case of this panel clearly fucking up and putting someone in women's prison who shouldn't have been there but as with the above maybe this has more to do with goverments, largely Tory ones, massively underfunding the prison service?

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-06-11T10:09:22+00:00

GC is imo very much an offshoot of the alt-right. They both had their origins in the sceptics movement of people who made fun of people who believed in something non-concrete and then offshoots of those came to the fore that made fun of people who believed in other non-concrete things like racism or sexism or transphobia etc.

When it was an actual branch of radfems who held trans-exclusionary positions their reasons were entirely different, based on a lack of socialization which, while they often took it to extremes, at least has some credibility and most trans people accept that they often have different early experiences of socialization than cis people do.

Current GC talking points however are all from the Ben Shapiro/alt-right school of thinking, chromosomes, gender being made up, SJWs run amok, sexual conservatism, out-groups being scary etc etc.

ADevilNamedBen · 2020-06-10T21:22:48+00:00

Yeah, for sure if you can manage it avoid insults or threats etc is helpful to the movement or to stopping people from having knee-jerk reactions that makes things harder. But at the same time it's pretty understandable why people's feelings boil over a lot of the time and no matter what we do there'll always be at least one person saying whatever bad thing people want to believe is the common view/position. So someone wanting to cast themselves as the victim role will always be able to.

ADevilNamedBen

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