monkers
Legendary Member
An excellent explainer and I thank you for it. It does help many of us to understand where different points of view come from.
I think where the dissonance comes in is that as well as the people you describe, there is also a cadre of the male sex who enjoy dressing up in women's clothes as a fetish and using this to gain access to women's spaces by claiming that they are women - whether that's lesbian groups or whatever. We then have the secondary issues around ensuring that things like sport remain fair.
I think it's the secondary group that most people are concerned with. That and ensuring that people in the primary group of "truly trans" really are trans and not just young autistic adults seeking to fit in, or young adults confused about their identity. Hence the concerns around ensuring safeguarding and that medications or surgical interventions are not offered to people too soon.
Thank you for those words.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to quote myself from my first post to this thread ~ #918.
A problem word is 'transgender'. It's problematic for a number of reasons.
1 It's spelt with the 'trans' part as a prefix rather than an adjective like other trans terms.
2 If a person undergoes transition, their gender is confirmed not changed as the term implies.
3 It's an umbrella term that includes not just trans people, but transvestites, crossdressers, etc.
4 It's used in different ways in different parts of the world.
5 It lends itself to the form 'transgendered' which is in turn problematic for a number of reasons, but essentially it suggest that to be trans is to experience an enforced change by something external to the person.
Transvestites / crossdressers / Tgirls - [placeholder - they can insert their word of choice here] are not trans in everyday identity but trans in occasional presentation. They identify as male, and as men. They definitely do not sincerely identify as female or women, though they might playfully say so when dressed; unless they are actually trans and on the beginning of a 'journey' (ie not yet 'out'). Plenty of gay men refer to each as 'she' and as 'madam' and 'bitches' - 'oh listen to her (another gay guy) ' they might say.
When I say 'trans folk' I'm not including all those under the transgender umbrella, just those whose whole time identities have changed or in the process of changing.
Personally I think the word 'fetish' is also a bit problematic being as it a word loaded with moral judgement. Maybe it is just more of an aesthetic?
I don't know. Year ago I went to a house party given somebody I knew. When the door was opened I found my then friend was hosting as an adult baby - they'd never said, and I had no idea this was her thing. She later rode her partner around the garden who had spent thousands on a bespoke costume to make him look like a horse. I admit my surprise, and I don't 'get it' from a personal perspective, but different strokes for different folks eh? I doubt that if it wasn't for the internet that they would ever have found each other.
The media like to simply use the word 'transgender' because they know that their readers will associate that with their typical guff about trans women presenting them as harmful or dangerous fetishists. Fetishism is persistent across all groups - there a plenty of couple with furry handcuffs and the like, and plenty who attend burlesque shows without being gay or transgender in any way. Hence my take, 'an aesthetic'.
Maybe we can be free to critique art without critiquing those with a different sense of aesthetic to ourselves. One problem is that so many of us were brought up in a culture with lingering Victorian morals and standards - there are Tories who want to take us back there. Today a chap wearing a top hat, tails, and sporting a monocle riding a penny farthing looks rather eccentric. So it seems we've left behind a lot of Victorian aesthetic very happily, but not the moral judgements that deny folk the right to be themselves.
I really don't know too much about sport, but I do think that there are reasonable steps that can be taken that negate the need for blanket bans from everything to track events to board games like chess. Blanket bans are unlawful for good reason. I don't play golf, but their system of handicapping players according to their record in the preceding games (have I got that right?) seems like it's worth considering where appropriate for other sports too.