Piers Morgan - Transphobe

[Balderdasha]

Thank you for this thread. I am in the process of trying to educate myself more on these topics for several reasons.

1) My mum keeps spouting horrible TERF bollocks which I know she's getting from my sister (who I'm not speaking to). I haven't had the energy to counteract it much recently, but I feel I need to at least start.

2) My son has said various things recently that have made me wonder if I am responding to him appropriately or not. He likes to choose girls socks (I let him, obviously) and is very keen on rainbows and unicorns. He at times has said 'I wish I was a girl' or 'I want to be a girl'. I ask him why and we have a nice chat. At other times he will very vehemently say 'I'm a boy like daddy' or 'I'm your son' or 'I'm a brother not a sister'. I think he is just exploring the concepts, but I don't want to dismiss his feelings.

3) I don't have much direct experience with trans people. My best friend at middle school was known as 'Robert' and identified as a boy for the first year that I knew him / her, but later reverted to a female identity (albeit very tomboyish) and has followed a relatively cis tranjectory of straight marriage and baby. An acquaintance at university was female for the first year, left for the second year and returned as male in the third year, but he was not a close friend. A close female friend from secondary school always presented as tomboyish, was regularly harrassed in toilets because people thought she was a boy, and is now happily married to a wife who is a lecturer / researcher in gender identity / parenthood / sexuality. I feel like any attempt to understand 'trans' identity or 'trans' politics will depend very much on individual stories. I doubt that two trans people would necessarily have any more in common than two randomly selected cis people. I know that it is my responsibility to seek out appropriate information sources to send to my mum, but I don't really know where to start. It seems so much easier for her to access the transphobic stories in the mainstream media than to find any effective rebuttal.

I'm not really asking any specific question. I'm just trying to sort out my thoughts.

[Diable Rouge]

JK Rowling today - you'd think a fantasy writer would realise she has a sizeable trans following:

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033

[delicatemoth]

DR is referring to Rowling's response to a judgement handed down in a court case. Here is the background, and a link to the judgement, from the hugely recommended Elainovision -

https://twitter.com/scattermoon/status/1207678834956521474

[Lang Spoon]

Rowling is a horrible smug Brownite. A poison during the Indyref. I'm guessing Common Sense barely informed transphobia will become the default of the Sensible commentariat, from Fucking Caitlin Moran to Fuckface Chris Deerin.

I wonder how Wings Over Scotland cunt (his ban from twitter a glorious day for both the sane wing of Scots Nationalism and transphobe haters) will react to his 2014 nemesis now being on his side.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Why are so many people losing their mind over this nonsense? I spend a lot of my time trying to put myself into other people's position to try and see where they're coming from, and I just draw a total blank here. It's astonishing to see JK rowling coming out with this horseshit. It jars extremely badly with the core message of her books. should we go back and add asterisks and footnotes to her messages of the importance of tolerance and inclusion?

Is it a case that huge numbers of people are looking around them and seeing that taking a complex issue, adopting an unsustainably simplified position on it, and defending your position with an intensity and vigour that is inversely proportional to its validity is sooo this decade, and a lot of people have decided to alight on this?

[Lang Spoon]

A lot of older self defined liberals (like say Rowling) are going to look fucking bigoted and weird to ver kids who in general don't seem to be infected with the same anti trans bollocks at all. If it stops her shitey snidely classist books being read, all the better.

[Satchmo Distel]

The alliance between TERFs and the Religious Right is very disturbing. You'd hope a genuine feminist would hear alarm bells ringing when the language and strategy of fellow feminists starts to echo neo-Nazis and evangelicals.

Yes, sex is real but there are more than two and you have a human right to change yours if you literally cannot bear to live with the genitals you currently possess, as is the case with some trans persons.

Another common TERF argument is what happens if a trans person is rushed to hospital? It's profoundly ignorant of science because nobody knows for sure that their sex chromosomes "match" their birth genitals. The unwillingness of TERFs to do even the most basic Google search on this is highly revealing.

Forstater made her legal challenge in bad faith because (as the judgement highlights) a philosophical position is one that is not making claims that science has proven that your position is true based on evidence whereas Forstater is clearly harassing trans women on the false grounds that science proves they are not really women.

[Balderdasha]

I really don't understand all the anti-trans fear that's been whipped up. I'm constantly having to push back against the stuff my mum comes out with. She seems to come at it from a "won't somebody think of the children" angle. My son loves any clothing that has rainbows on it, so I obviously let him wear rainbow wellies and rainbow socks and a rainbow hat and whatever else I can find that he likes. My mum is concerned that people might 'misinterpret' him. He's a 4-year-old boy who likes colours, what is there to misinterpret FFS?

My mum also seems to think that other parents who had a son who likes rainbows and occasionally wistfully says he wants to be a girl (usually when he wants to go to the rainbow session that his big sister is going to) would have already whisked him off to a gender identity clinic and put him on hormone blockers. I don't know how to convey the fact that nobody is pushing transgenderism onto their kids. People tend to only take a child to a clinic as an absolute last resort when they've been consistently presenting as an alternate gender to the one they were assigned at birth for years.

One of the courses I studied at university on my social anthropology course was about how humans love putting things into neat boxes and are easily spooked by anything that crosses boundaries. It's not just with gender. Various cultures tend to either worship or demonise animals that appear to cross categories, like the cassowary, a massive Australian bird with feathers that look a bit like black hair and blue skin that was a similar pigment to some of the war paint used by various aboriginal tribes. People are fascinated by it because it appears to cross the animal / human boundaries.

In reality, there are so many more than two sexes. There are intersex people. There are people who appear to be born as female but develop male genitals during puberty. There are people who have more than the standard XX or XY chromosome (XXY or XYY or XXX are all possibilities). There are people who may appear physically and / or genetically to be simple to classify as a certain gender, but who emotionally feel they identify more with the opposite gender. There are huge variations in presence and distribution of hormones such as testosterone or oestrogen, which are often associated with one or other gender. But this is a complex story and generally, humans don't like complexity. Humans like binary classifications so they can say 'you are like me' and 'you are not'.

And then there's sexuality, which is entirely separate to all of the questions above. Who you are is different to who you are attracted to, but people get confused and often conflate these issues.

I am optimistic that the generations younger than me appear to be maturing and more capable of handling complexity and less expecting of people to fit into binary boxes. But there's still a long way to go.

[Satchmo Distel]

Excellent post.

[Balderdasha]

The other major differences recently are global population size, communication systems, and changes in attitudes to secrecy / privacy.

So, if you're talking about intersex people, for example, the proportion of people who are born intersex is estimated to be 1.7%. Back when we were hunter gatherers, that meant that each tribe of about 150 people would maybe have one or two intersex people, who possibly only the local midwife or the children's parents knew about. Possibly less because not all intersex characteristics are visible. Now, with a global population of nearly 8 billion people, roughly half of them connected to the internet, roughly half of those are adults, that would suggest there are around 34 million adults with personal experience of being intersex and the capacity to tell their story to the whole world. So, people are suddenly hearing more of their stories and thinking that it's a 'new trend'. It's not. It's just that there's more of every type of minority in existence because there are more people and everyone now has more channels to tell their story on.

[Erskine Bridges]

I really don't understand all the anti-trans fear that's been whipped up. I'm constantly having to push back against the stuff my mum comes out with. She seems to come at it from a "won't somebody think of the children" angle. My son loves any clothing that has rainbows on it, so I obviously let him wear rainbow wellies and rainbow socks and a rainbow hat and whatever else I can find that he likes. My mum is concerned that people might 'misinterpret' him. He's a 4-year-old boy who likes colours, what is there to misinterpret FFS?

My mum also seems to think that other parents who had a son who likes rainbows and occasionally wistfully says he wants to be a girl (usually when he wants to go to the rainbow session that his big sister is going to) would have already whisked him off to a gender identity clinic and put him on hormone blockers. I don't know how to convey the fact that nobody is pushing transgenderism onto their kids. People tend to only take a child to a clinic as an absolute last resort when they've been consistently presenting as an alternate gender to the one they were assigned at birth for years.

One of the courses I studied at university on my social anthropology course was about how humans love putting things into neat boxes and are easily spooked by anything that crosses boundaries. It's not just with gender. Various cultures tend to either worship or demonise animals that appear to cross categories, like the cassowary, a massive Australian bird with feathers that look a bit like black hair and blue skin that was a similar pigment to some of the war paint used by various aboriginal tribes. People are fascinated by it because it appears to cross the animal / human boundaries.

In reality, there are so many more than two sexes. There are intersex people. There are people who appear to be born as female but develop male genitals during puberty. There are people who have more than the standard XX or XY chromosome (XXY or XYY or XXX are all possibilities). There are people who may appear physically and / or genetically to be simple to classify as a certain gender, but who emotionally feel they identify more with the opposite gender. There are huge variations in presence and distribution of hormones such as testosterone or oestrogen, which are often associated with one or other gender. But this is a complex story and generally, humans don't like complexity. Humans like binary classifications so they can say 'you are like me' and 'you are not'.

And then there's sexuality, which is entirely separate to all of the questions above. Who you are is different to who you are attracted to, but people get confused and often conflate these issues.

I am optimistic that the generations younger than me appear to be maturing and more capable of handling complexity and less expecting of people to fit into binary boxes. But there's still a long way to go.

Great post Balderdasha. I don't post on this subject because I don't understand it enough (yet) to take a position or make a worthwhile contribution but the subject comes up in conversation sometimes. I'll be quoting you when it does. And thanks to other posters for their views and experiences. This really is a great site.

[Balderdasha]

I would stress that I don't have any personal experience in this arena really. It's more of an academic interest for me.

[Balderdasha]

See also, trying to explain to people that transgenderism does not equal transvestitism and both are totally different to, for example, drag queens and / or pantomime dames.

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/BoyGeorge/status/1214195357447528454

[Satchmo Distel]

Leave your stray apostrophes there instead, O'Dowdy.

[MsD]

#BanGlinner is doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment, which of course has made Linehan double-down. I don't recommend looking.

[Satchmo Distel]

Agreed. Why waste time on such pricks, who choose to ignore the information supplied to them?