Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Clippings from news sources involving fashion freedom and other gender equality issues.
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pelmut
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by pelmut »

Daryl wrote:
pelmut wrote:
I will also point out that puberty blockers as a means to make room for people to decide is making room for people to decide whether or not to undergo surgery.
No, they delay puberty long enough for the child to make an adult decision about what gender it is (and, incidentally, to comply with the law which assumes that all children become responsible adults overnight at exactly the same number of days after they were born).  They stop the child potentially going through an inappropriate puberty until the decision can be taken about which puberty is most appropriate.  When that decision has been made, puberty can proceed under the body's own hormones or under medically controlled and administered hormones; the final decision being taken by the well-informed adult patient themself.  Some, but by no means all, can then go on to have genital surgery if they feel they cannot be accepted by society without it.
You just confirmed my statement 100%. It was a lot more words but just the same result: puberty blockers are a means to make room (time) for people to decide whether or not to undergo surgery (medical procedures) to change sex (or "gender" if you prefer).
If puberty blockers are refused [...] they will then [later] be in a position to consider whether or not to have genital surgery
I have completed the quote for you, so there can be no misunderstanding.  Deciding whether or not to have genital surgery is not the reason why puberty blockers are given.  They are given to delay the decision about the most appropriate type of puberty; surgery comes later (if at all) and the decision about that is not deliberately delayed by puberty blockers (although it can be delayed as an unwelcome side effect of not taking them).

pelmut wrote: Unfortunately there are a few people each year who are not actually transgender but are persuaded to go down this [illicit drugs] route; they are the 'regretters' who are paraded by the hate brigade as evidence for refusing to treat the needs of genuinely transgender children.
Yes, let's not "parade" the victims of your ideology.
Please read that again and tell me if you still think that I was recommending the use of illicit drugs as part of an ideology.
pelmut wrote:
That surgery is for changing sex. Sex, not "gender" (except as a synonym for "sex").
The surgery does not change their sex, it alters the appearance of their external sexual characteristics (genitals and breasts) so that they can be accepted by society as the person their gender tells them they are. 
The surgery changes what sex they appear to be, their sexual morphology, to allow others (society) to perceive them as the other sex. This is what "sex change" means.
We appear to be agreed on this: "sex change" actually means "sexual morphology change", but I wonder how many people realise the subtle difference?
By the definition that the trans movement (which you endorse) uses, I am "trans" on "gender presentation" grounds at least,...

That's a tricky one because your reason for a particular presentation may not be the same as mine (or anybody elses).  Do you wear a skirt because you feel it aligns with your gender, or do you wear it for one of the hundred-or-more other reasons that men in skirts do?
...as I am quite often reminded by members of "society".
That sounds as though you don't believe you are the gender they assume you are.  If that is the case, they are making the mistake of assuming that a particular presentation [wearing a skirt] signifies a particular gender -- something I think we can all agree isn't true.
(As explained elsewhere, transgender isn't a movement, it is just a natural human characteristic which has become more noticeable recently because of the prurient interest of the media.)

To speak of it [gender] as being misaligned with a physical characteristic (like sex) is as incoherent as saying that a person's soul is misaligned with their body.
I did not say it was misaligned, I said that it was not aligned the way society expected it to be.  The transgender alignment is a perfectly valid one, but not the one Western society has historically endorsed.
There is no reason to reify the belief called "gender".
It has been a very useful concept which explains a lot of things that would otherwise be very puzzling.  Until recently, gender has been in a very similar position to the position light was in a couple of hundred years ago; people could see it existed, but didn't understand it.  There were lots of theories about it: was it a fluid?  Was it something shot out from the eyeballs that we sensed making contact with things?  Was it real at all, because nobody had succeded in weighing it?

A concept like 'soul' has also been useful in the past, but greater knowledge has made it less and less believeable; in contrast, the reality of gender has become more and more believeable to the point where scans of brain activity (not structure) are showing differences which are independent of the sex of the volunteer and align with what they say is their gender.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

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Daryl wrote: "generally agreed amongst actual transgender people" is the authority you are citing, then.
As I have mentioned before, we are a diverse bunch of people and 'general' agreement on something is about as good as it gets.  Whilst no one transgender person is an expert on every aspect of the subject and some feel they don't understand it at all, the general agreement of a large number of the people who actually are transgender is more likely to be correct than an opinion about transgender held by someone who isn't transgender and hasn't grasped the basics of the subject. In the latter category I include most journalists and a large part of the general public they influence.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

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pelmut wrote:We appear to be agreed on this: "sex change" actually means "sexual morphology change", but I wonder how many people realise the subtle difference?
Roughly 100% of the folks who understand genetics and reproduction understand that. That is biology 101.
I did not say it was misaligned, I said that it was not aligned the way society expected it to be.  The transgender alignment is a perfectly valid one, but not the one Western society has historically endorsed.
And here we are, again, being concerned more with sociology more than hard provable science. What it means to be male today, sociologically, is vastly different than what it was 50, or even 20, years ago -- and the two cannot be easily directly compared. Throw in the complete marginalization of men in modern society and I can see why there is a massive uptick in the "diagnosis" of trans-* -- simply because men don't want to be classified as what it means to be a man now. Guys can game a system just as well as the gals can. It's just that historically it's been considered somewhat dishonorable to do so.
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Daryl
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Daryl »

pelmut wrote:the general agreement of a large number of the people who actually are transgender is more likely to be correct than an opinion about transgender held by someone who isn't transgender and hasn't grasped the basics of the subject. In the latter category I include most journalists and a large part of the general public they influence.
Let's replace "transgender" with "reincarnations" and see if that reasoning holds water. Are people who "actually are" reincarnations likely to be more correct about reincarnations than the great unwashed who don't even believe in reincarnation? No, because there is no convincing evidence of reincarnation itself.

If "gender" isn't real, but rather a belief, people who perceive themselves as possessing a gender are no more authoritative on the subject than anyone else. Now, we can respect their experiences as their experiences, but we are not compelled to respect any assertions they make about the reality of the idea of gender itself just because that is the language they use to describe their experiencces. People who say "it felt like my soul jumped out of my body for a second" are reporting their experiences in the language they have for it, but that doesn't establish the existence of souls in any way.
pelmut wrote: Daryl:
Yes, let's not "parade" the victims of your ideology.

Please read that again and tell me if you still think that I was recommending the use of illicit drugs as part of an ideology.
I never said you were recommending illicit drugs, nor was that implicit in what I said. You are shadow-boxing with someone else. The victims of your ideology are what you called the "regretters".
pelmut wrote: Daryl:
By the definition that the trans movement (which you endorse) uses, I am "trans" on "gender presentation" grounds at least,...

That's a tricky one because your reason for a particular presentation may not be the same as mine (or anybody elses). Do you wear a skirt because you feel it aligns with your gender, or do you wear it for one of the hundred-or-more other reasons that men in skirts do?
I could hardly think anything aligns with my gender or not since I don't have a gender for any alignment to be in reference to.
pelmut wrote: Daryl:
...as I am quite often reminded by members of "society".

That sounds as though you don't believe you are the gender they assume you are.
No, I don't have a gender. Some other members of society are simply applying their sexed expectations to me, for example the expectation that "men don't wear skirts". The conceptual baggage of "gender" is unnecessary for understanding this.
pelmut wrote:If that is the case, they are making the mistake of assuming that a particular presentation [wearing a skirt] signifies a particular gender -- something I think we can all agree isn't true.
Neither the truth or the untruth of statements about unreal things (like gender) can be determined.

The members of society I referred to are simply applying sex-based biases that say that men don't wear skirts. Sometimes they might also think "only men who are trans-something wear skirts" but in neither case are they referring to the concept of "gender" that you operate from, nor do they need to. They can be biased without it.
pelmut wrote:(As explained elsewhere, transgender isn't a movement, it is just a natural human characteristic which has become more noticeable recently because of the prurient interest of the media.)
No, it's not a natural human characteristic; it's just a belief, and an unnecessary one. Some natural human characteristics have come to be thought of through gendered lenses --biases-- but this doesn't make gender as such a human characteristic.

Transgender is certainly a movement. That movement is characterised by its member's shared belief in the idea of "gender" and by its organised social and political activities. You can't really use the community of transgender people as a source of authority on one hand and deny its very existence on the other.
pelmut wrote: Daryl:
To speak of it [gender] as being misaligned with a physical characteristic (like sex) is as incoherent as saying that a person's soul is misaligned with their body.

I did not say it was misaligned, I said that it was not aligned the way society expected it to be. The transgender alignment is a perfectly valid one, but not the one Western society has historically endorsed.
Oh you're as big a quibbler as I am. Either way you want it, my point remains that speaking of the alignment of something that is not real --gender-- with anything else, is incoherent.
pelmut wrote: Daryl:
There is no reason to reify the belief called "gender".

It has been a very useful concept which explains a lot of things that would otherwise be very puzzling. Until recently, gender has been in a very similar position to the position light was in a couple of hundred years ago; people could see it existed, but didn't understand it. There were lots of theories about it: was it a fluid? Was it something shot out from the eyeballs that we sensed making contact with things? Was it real at all, because nobody had succeded in weighing it?

A concept like 'soul' has also been useful in the past, but greater knowledge has made it less and less believeable; in contrast, the reality of gender has become more and more believeable to the point where scans of brain activity (not structure) are showing differences which are independent of the sex of the volunteer and align with what they say is their gender.
I don't agree that "gender" is a useful concept. I think it muddies issues much more than it illuminates them. That is my opinion on the concept of "soul" as well. But further than this, I don't think metaphysical ideas like these belong in the realm of law or government policy. They violate the principle of the separation of religion and state. I don't believe they belong in medicine or science either.

It's worth noting that the article you referred to is quite careful to use the phrase "desired gender" not merely "gender". I don't know how thoroughly you read that article, but those brain patterns aligning with what GD people say is their "desired gender" are based on patterns that are typical for the sex associated with that gender. The article supports what I think most of us have known all along; that certain characteristics are in fact biological in nature, and that what is typical across the population, when sexually divided, can nevertheless vary within individuals. This in no way establishes that "gender" is an independent characteristic of humans, but rather proceeds from an enlightened understanding that our perceptions can be "gendered", a metaphorical, not reified, use of the term "gender".

The very existence of human characteristics that have correlations to sex in populations but which can vary in individuals independently of sex, proves that the idea of "gender" as a characteristic of a person is either hopelessly unrevealing or meaningless owing to it merely being an added term to each individually-varying characteristic. "The gender of my visual-spatial activation is male, but the gender of my sexual attraction is female" is less useful than simply "my visual-spatial activation is male-typical, but my sexual attraction is female-typical".
Daryl...
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Uncle Al »

Whoa :!: Hold your horses :!:

This line of thought is way off on a tangent from the original post.
Does the Cafe' need to open the back room so you two can duke-it-out :?:

So, you think(write) that Gender is a "Non-Item".

Check this out Jazz Jennings - Wikipedia
Jazz Jennings 2019-11-09.jpg
Jazz has known, from a Very Young Age, that she was - hands down - a girl.
There are a multitude of clips on YouTube about her, even one of her first
interviews with ABC News reporter, Barbara Walters. Jazz has completed her
journey to womanhood(SRS), and is living a wonderful life.

Now - for you two - PLEASE put away the daggers(not allowed in the Cafe'),
grab a fresh cup and agree to disagree with each other. BUT KEEP IT CIVIL :!:
(Dagnabbit - We've GOT to get the metal detector fixed... :oops: )

Thank you :!:

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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by pelmut »

Daryl wrote: The victims of your ideology are what you called the "regretters".
I'll just try to clear up this one point:

The 'regetters' are the gullible victims of drug dealers who have have persuaded them they are transgender when they are not.  They have not been victimised by anyone transgender (unless the dealer happened to be transgender too) and they have not gone through the usual channels which transgender people are obliged to do before any form of treatment can be considered.

I am transgender, I know I am transgender and it took me a long time and a lot of research to be sure of that.  There is no ideology involved and I have not used my knowledge to victimise anyone.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Fred in Skirts »

Uncle Al wrote:Whoa :!: Hold your horses :!:
So, you think(write) that Gender is a "Non-Item".

Check this out Jazz Jennings - Wikipedia
Jazz.jpg
Jazz has known, from a Very Young Age, that she was - hands down - a girl.
There are a multitude of clips on YouTube about her, even one of her first
interviews with ABC News reporter, Barbara Walters. Jazz has completed her
journey to womanhood(SRS), and is living a wonderful life.
Uncle Al
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This woman is one good looking piece of human flesh. There is no doubt she is all woman.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Ray »

Fred.

Exactly. Not a bloody disorder. A woman. Nice and simple.

Can we get back to clothing? I’m slightly miffed at all this posturing from non trans people.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Pdxfashionpioneer »

Ray: "Can we get back to clothing? I'm slightly miffed at all of this posturing by non trans people."

Hear! Hear!
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Fred in Skirts »

As I said in another post if you want to continue the back and forth take it to PM's and off the open forum. It is getting very tiresome for many here me included!!
"It is better to be hated for what you are than be loved for what you are not" Andre Gide: 1869 - 1951
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by skirtyscot »

Hmm ... Jazz Jennings ... what a strange life. How would you fancy it?
Never off television, followed by cameras non-stop for the benefit of the viewing public / the TV company / your overbearing mother's bank account. No privacy - check out the scenes when the post-operative complications start, and cringe. Home schooled, growing up under your mother's beady eye 24/7. Then having to defer university entrance (escape!) to "re-centre", i.e. recover your mental health. Maybe just as well, because university will be an awfully big shock.

And if you give a boy puberty blockers, there isn't enough penile tissue for the surgeon to work with. I really didn't need to know that, but sometimes you get more than you bargain for on the internet!

Graduated valedictorian .. I had to look that up ... but it scarcely makes sense for an online school. Can't help wondering if young cause célèbre Jazz's fame had anything to do with it.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Pdxfashionpioneer »

CRFriend said
Throw in the complete marginalization of men in modern society


You. Have. Got. to be. Kidding.

Less than 7% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are women, 0% of US Presidents were women and men are marginalized in our society? In whose reality?

To me, this kind of false victimhood is misogyny of the worst order.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by pelmut »

skirtyscot wrote:...And if you give a boy puberty blockers, there isn't enough penile tissue for the surgeon to work with. I really didn't need to know that, but sometimes you get more than you bargain for on the internet!
Caution -- medical details:

There have been recent cases where there was insufficient penile tissue because of circumcision or a smaller than usual penis.  A neovagina was constructed from gut tissue instead.  Not only was it more robust but it was self-lubricating because of the glandular lining.  There is a possibility that this may become more common in future, even when there is sufficient penile tissue, because of those advantages.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by Dust »

Pdxfashionpioneer wrote:CRFriend said
Throw in the complete marginalization of men in modern society


You. Have. Got. to be. Kidding.

Less than 7% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are women, 0% of US Presidents were women and men are marginalized in our society? In whose reality?

To me, this kind of false victimhood is misogyny of the worst order.
Men are the vast majority of suicides, homeless, workplace deaths, homicide victims, and more. Women earn the majority of college degrees at all levels, and young college educated women out earn their male peers, on average. Include medical in with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), and there are more women studying these fields than men.

We are on a forum devoted to dealing with the fact that men are restricted from wearing the clothes they want, and you are mocking the very notion that men may be marginalized in our society. Who is the one kidding here?

Look, women may not be as common at the most elite, tiny fraction of a percent of the rich and powerful, but the rest of society doesn't care if the a-hole at the top is male or female. And the wise among us don't even want those high stress, long hour, cutthroat jobs as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or President of the United States.

The vast majority of people, both men and women, are dealing with mostly the same problems. It is true that there are some issues are unique to, or disproportionately affect, certain groups, be that men, women, old, young, disabled, black, white, rural, urban, etc. But women's issues have been at the forefront of people's minds, getting addressed, and aggressively so, since before I was born, with no end in sight. Women and girls are praised for simply being female ("you go, girl!"), and retain unique privileges in society. Men, meanwhile, are demonized as monsters, rapists, and generally toxic.

I'm just trying to point out some of the issues you might not be aware of, because they rarely get attention. This is not a case of who's got it worse. Treating people with humanity and compassion is not a zero sum game, and men really do have problems. Let's stop dismissing the problems of one half of society simply because of their sex.

I wish I could say I'm surprised I have to explain this, here of all places, but I'm not. We've been brainwashed our whole lives to think that women are helpless victims and men are privileged. The fact is, that both men and women have their strengths and weaknesses, their advantages and disadvantages, their privileges and burdens. Those things are simply different for each group, and even each person. We can overcome the negatives only by working together as a community, instead of pitting groups against each other, and isolating people as individuals. We can be better than that.
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Re: Nice article that mentions Skirtcafe favorably

Post by john62 »

Here, here !

John
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