Is Jenni Murray right about transgender?

I appreciated your stream of consciousness Penstemmon. One of the points Jenni Murray made was about a M-F transgender person who was to be ordained as a priest. JM was concerned that this individual's main point of discussion about the ceremony was what she'd wear and how to do her makeup. JM referred to other female priests she knew waiting to be ordained, for whom these issues were irrelevant. She also talked of female priests having words like "pussy" hissed at them by some male clergy.

Whoputthecatout is right say it can't be impossible to protect transrights without trampling over women's hard won rights to safe spaces.

Elegran I am sure you are right about cis and trans being opposites. However, Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres according to De Bello Gallico.

How interesting Elegran, the origin of language is fascinating,I am going to look that up.

Penstemmon, creating language is fine, stealing other peoples language, not fine. I know several M to F, two that pass completely, they were effeminate, gay men and found life easier as women. No one has a problem with people like this. there is a bloke in a nearby town who wears a dress, is over 6 foot tall and is very aggressive, no idea how he identifies though. I have also met men who have a sexual fetish about women and women's clothes. I don't have a problem with the first group but autogynephiles do not belong in womens dressing rooms. None of the groups are women, they are all male but I would respect their right to choose their name and pronouns.

The group I am most concerned with are children, children who may grow up to be healthy and gay but end up transing, or being transed to the opposite sex. Some of the material being shown in our schools is concerning. I find it deeply sexist, based on zero evidence with the most appalling pseudo science behind it.

The other group that worries me as is young women, they are damaging their bodies with breast binders. There is also something deeply homophobic about some parts of the movement, there is no place for lesbians, they either trans or accept male bodied people as partners cos hey, their lesbians too. The bullying of lesbians is truly awful, online and in real life.

elegran Gosh yes that is interesting, thank you.
p.s. shall we just call ourselves "women" not even "born women"

Also, if all toilets become open to everyone, which they will as we would have lost the right to challenge anyone, then how will the ladies be safer? The ladies would then become an unsafe space. Transactivists don't want their own loos either, I feel that it's all about validation. Just my opinion though.

Im with her on this. Things are getting ridiculous as always.

Someone campaigning for an end to FGM was harassed as it was seen as transphobic, the vagina monologues had to cancel as they were seen as, you guessed it, transphobic. The only thing that makes a woman is her biology, and the shared way we are socialised, our personalities are our own and we can wear what we like, just like a man can.

Respect material reality but support any individuals choices, so long as they harm no one.

Has anyone heard of The Overton window? It was named after a journo and it represents ideas of discourse that the public will accept, so politicians need to pitch ideas within The Widow, outside the window is extreme. I feel someone has removed the window and put a patio door in, up is down, faith over science, it's crazy. I have never known a group campaign to become another group. Establish rights yep, which means some people have to budge up and share power, fine, all good but this, it's like the female sex is being colonised.

There are of course genuine cases BUT these are few and far between, now it seems all and sundry are jumping on the bandwagon. The world is full of twits that just like to stir the pot and now due to so many avenues having been opened up, flipping twitter, instagram blah blah blah these nutters have a voice and delight in spewing.

The internet connects people and forms movements, it also grooms and converts with distorted version of reality, it can be amazing, it can be hideous.

Double edged sword huh Lumpy

completely!

The internet connects people and forms movements, it also grooms and converts with distorted version of reality, it can be amazing, it can be hideous.

Absolutely. I am concerned about this in general as well, not just about this specific issue.

The internet is quite a bubble. In real life, I can tell that not many of the people I talk to, regularly use the internet at all. Certainly not for chat.
They have not heard of words that are almost everyday language on the internet.

This I find hard to believe.

Anyone any idea what the figures are for assaults on women in non-sex specific toilets? Sometimes we get carried away with an 'issue' that does not really exist.
Any assault is one too many but sadly women get assaulted in many places and I understood it was usually by heterosexual men & less often by trans/gay/lesbian people. Are we being dragged down a path to distract us from the bigger issue here?

Ankers From what you have stated on here, your still a relatively young woman. I'm amazed that you know a lot of people that don't use the internet. And by the way, the internet isn't a 'bubble'

Pen as a vehement opponent of gender identity becoming a protected characteristic, I have to say that safety in toilets is actually pretty low down my list of concerns . The issue is much deeper and greater than that as has been well aired on this thread . We should not be sleep walking into a world shaped by TAs and penised self identifying transwomen who want to deny the reality of our lived experiences as biological women, who want to define us as not being trans by calling us ' cis women', who want to invade all our safe ( and not just in the physical sense) women only spaces and our rights to have certain services offered to us by biological women, who want to deny us our achievements as women, in sport, the arts and sciences. I've just emailed my MP about the bill - I have to say it's a first for me to write to my MP and use the word 'penis' twice

If you are a born biological male hanging on to your penis – literally or figuratively – claiming to feel like a woman, then you certainly don't feel like me, a born biological woman, wife and mother or, if you must, cis-woman, and I would hazard a reasonably accurate guess that you don't feel like the other women who are close to me in my life.

I know a huge amount of old people petra. And in particular the very old. Not much internet use at all, even if they have one.

Even amongst my age group, yes they use it for internet shopping, at work, and occasionally in the evenings, but they are not on chat forums, and as far as I know dont use it for online media such as newspapers, only occasional Facebook use.

That is, Facebook use to see what the children of friends are up to in the main.

Completely agree Rigby, it's the redefinition that is the most dangerous.

I think internet bubbles, fake news and confirmation bias are very real and very dangerous, we all need to guard against them.

I appreciate that the very elderly may not use the internet as much as even our generation, but all my friends of my age /older/younger use the internet for emails to each other and family, shopping (groceries, clothes) online newspapers, interest groups, like dogs, of course, downloading books from Amazon onto their Kindles, pictures of grandchildren, Skype or FaceTime, some are on Facebook and Twitter and no doubt Instagram and WhatsApp (although that has as yet passed me by!)
However I would be interested to know more about what you said here though Ankers
They have not heard of words that are almost everyday language on the internet
.

Afraid I've come rather late to this thread and have read some but not all posts. Very interesting thread, imo with some very well informed points being put.

The article by Rachel Johnson made a lot of sense to me. I heard a discussion on R4 a while ago where one of the guests was a psychologist. In his opinion, many (if not all) transgender issues had a psychological rather than a physiological base.

I'm inclined to agree. For one thing, bodily mutilation is so extreme as to be unthinkable for most people. Secondly, it appears that many who have been through this process are still not happy.

And thirdly, many men who 'become' women (in whatever guise), still seem to prefer female sexual partners. So to all intents and purposes, they are true to their birth gender.

Maybe we should be free to accept whatever gender a person wishes to display at whatever stage in their lives. I'm thinking this is a spectrum which everyone is on, somewhere. Maybe the position on that spectrum can change depending on circumstance. There will always be extremes at either end, but a lot of people are somewhere in the middle, inclining to one end or the other most of the time.

Doesn't answer the ladies loos issue, though....