MarkW

The only reason I don't understand why boys would want to play with dolls is that I don't understand why girls would want to play with them either when they could be outside blowing shit up with pipe bombs made from weedkiller. Ahh... those were the days...

Is now the time to mention that I'm not that keen on chocolate, and that if I never ate it again it wouldn't bother me?

Just looking at that makes me feel sick.

WHAT ABOUT MY F*CKING GINGER CAKE! Yup - 5 years on this forum and I've only just realised I can change font colours and size.

I'm going to guess your reasons for wanting to leave, as these are views I hold. I love europe, the countries, people, and I think we should have a good and fair trade agreement with them... BUT... I hate the EU commission. A cohort of over bureaucratic, undemocratic, unaccountable, tax haven promoting (Looking at you Juncker) politicians? The BBC have been appalling with that piece, as you don't have to go far to find out that the petition has *thousands* of signatures originating from Russia... Where's the news story about that? I look at the situation with Trump and the collusion, and here it seems immaterial that other nations are messing around. It's scary stuff. On the one hand, I respect your views. On the other, I have noticed a chronic shortage of Ginger Cake in all my local supermarkets, and if this turns out to have anything to do with Brexit I'll be coming to get you.

Aye - if you need ten holes drilling in a straight line, I'm yer man.

I've made another one. I'm not really sure that blue sparkle is my thing, but the shell was half price due to a tiny and almost imperceptible flaw in the finish. All I need now is a call from a Gloria Gaynor tribute act looking for a drummer.

I've never been attracted to girly girls: my wife is definitely more Ellen Ripley than Audrey Hepburn! About 25 years ago I met my first 'trans' person at my local martial arts club. He was a big butch bloke - an ex-policeman who'd transitioned after an accident at work forced him to retire (if I recall correctly, someone threw a fridge out of a tower block during a riot and it shattered his shoulder). There was no disguising the fact that he was a man, but he made an effort to look feminine: he had a decent wig of the sort a woman might actually wear as opposed to the shocking joke-shop syrup sported by the guy at my son's school, and he wore the same sort of clothes as any other woman who came to the club rather than turning up looking like a prostitute. We had a few logistical issues to sort out as there were only two changing rooms (he didn't want to be with the men and the women weren't comfortable about having him in with them) but we worked it all out and everyone was happy.

I dunno - he's been dressing this way for a couple of years at least, and his son has behavioural issues that I think would make him fairly immune to what his classmates thought. I was talking to my neighbour about this as we were walking back from school yesterday, and his view is that it's a boy wanting to be like his father, and a father who is happy to indulge him - for whatever reason. I guess that makes sense. If nothing else, the way the teachers have dealt with it was yet another reminder of how far things have progressed since my day: When I was at primary school I had absolutely no interest in football (I still don't) which, according to the headmaster, marked me out as a homosexual.

I still think you've got the wrong idea: I didn't say that in order to look feminine you shouldn't have any body hair, nor did I suggest that society sees this as the norm. The fact is that a very hairy man who puts on fishnet stockings does not look like a woman with a liberated attitude to personal grooming: he looks like a man in fishnet stockings. That's part of what I suspect the issue is - that people see him less as someone in genuine transition than as some sort of fetishist.

Are there many women with hairy chests in your part of the world?

You're looking at it the wrong way: it isn't that you have to shave and wear certain clothes to be feminine, it's that if you have legs like a gorilla and wear clothes only seen on a sex shop mannequin, 'feminine' is not the word that would leap most readily to mind.

I think this is a good part of what concerns people in this particular case: there is no attempt whatsoever on his part to look like a real woman, just like a grotesque caricature of one. If he made a genuine effort to look feminine, say by shaving his legs or wearing normal women's clothes, they would be more likely to perceive him as someone in genuine transition. As it is, he turns up in what is essentially fetish wear (fishnet stockings, a miniskirt that if it were any shorter would be a belt, PVC boob-tube and what Germaine Greer would call "f*ck-me shoes") having made about as much effort to disguise his essential masculinity as Les Dawson did in those Cissy and Ada sketches. Rightly or wrongly people then make the assumption that he is a pervert or at least a fetishist, rather than a genuine member of the trans community. He has been dressing this way for at least two years to my knowledge, and I haven't heard any parent in the playground making derogatory comments or sniggering (although of course this doesn't mean they weren't) and I don't think most people give two hoots how he chooses to live his life. What has caused the current concern is that the nine year old son of a man who dresses as a vulgar and overtly sexualised woman now appears to be dressing as a girl too, and questions are being asked about the extent to which this is free will or coercion. As I said at the outset, describing the father's behaviour to my kids was easy and they could understand it, but they can't understand someone who at nine still has so little experience of being a boy knowing that they want to be a girl.

Don't bank on it: I used to teach genetics and statistics to biomedical students and wouldn't have trusted half of them to make a cup of coffee. I also used to teach on the human anatomy course, and before a lesson in which they'd be drawing and annotating the internal organs I removed the pancreas from the model torso and replaced it with a pool ball I'd found in a box under the bench. Half of them drew it and labelled it. I haven't got the patience to deal with that level of stupidity on a daily basis.

I have to say that the teachers at my son's school are fantastic - really passionate about what they're doing, and with the patience of saints: I go in once a year to teach them about insects, and some of them are such malignant little bast*rds it's all I can do not to unleash my inner Gunnery Seargent Hartman: "GET THE F*CK OUT OF MY CLASS, YOU SLIMY WALRUS-LOOKING PIECE OF SHIT! YOU DISGUST ME!" As [mention]Mississippi Bullfrog[/mention] said, what shocks me is how little some parents invest in their kids: they teach them nothing, take them nowhere and do nothing with them. No wonder half of them are such morons.

I'm fine with adults deciding they'd rather be a woman than a man, or vice versa, but how do you know at nine years of age that you'd rather be a girl than a boy? You don't even know what it is to be male at nine, let alone that being female would suit you better. I can't help thinking this is his father's (err... mother's) idea. And where's Painkiller when you need his expertise?

This is my problem: no matter how trendy and middle class I try to be about it I can't help thinking that this is the nub of the matter. His son certainly has some significant behavioural issues, but I think everyone had put that down to his unusual home situation. I also can't quite shake the feeling that this current trend for being 'trans' or 'non-binary' is at least partly due to the fact that being gay/lesbian/bisexual is now all a bit passé.

One of the boys in my kids school has a father who is now his mother. I'm not sure how far he's gone with it - if he is transsexual or just transgender - but he is one of those blokes who thinks that in order to look like a woman you have to dress like cross between a clown and a hooker. He is about 6'4" and drives a road-planer, and when he's not in fishnets and a miniskirt he's in his work gear - steel toe-caps and hi-viz jacket - with his hair in bunches and day-glo bobbles. Imagine if Giant Haystacks popped into Anne Summers and Claire's Accessories, and you'd have the picture. This bothers me not one jot: he seems like a nice enough bloke, and how he identifies and expresses himself is his own affair. When my two slightly perplexed boys asked me how a man can turn into a woman we had a sensible discussion about the difference between gender and sexuality, and that some people grow up to feel more comfortable identifying as something other than their biologiclal gender. So far so good. However, on Friday his nine year old son was taken from classroom to classroom by a teacher, dressed in a girl's school uniform and with clips in his hair, to be introduced to everyone by his new girls name. My ten year old came home and said "How can a nine year old think they are a girl before they've even properly understood what being a boy is? In art class I like knitting, but I know that doesn't make me a girl." I'm trying not to be judgemental, or to say anything un-PC, but I can't help thinking that far from indulging this sort of thing the school would have been better off referring it to Social Services. As my kids are both boys they couldn't care less if he/she gets changed for PE with them or not, but the parents of girls who don't want him/her in with them are already up in arms.

No willpower required with the stuff I made - meths would have tasted better!

I would offer to resurrect The Nun F*ckers, but out of the four original members one is dead, one is in rehab/psychiatric care after severe heroin addiction left him sleeping on the streets, and the other I haven't seen or heard from in nearly 30 years.

My first band as a teenager was The Nun F*ckers. Two of our most popular numbers were 'Anal Intruder' and the surprise hit 'Play My Guitar With a Plastic Lobster' which involved the lead guitarist windmilling power chords with the claw of a plastic lobster liberated from the local fishmongers whilst the singer shoved the microphone in his mouth and screamed. There is definitely such a thing as bad music. @Saddlebags would probably have loved this band We were God-awful! A couple of us were at least properly trained musicians who knew we were shite and that it was just a laugh, but the guitarist was utterly deluded and seriously thought we were going to be the next Sex Pistols. He even gave pompous interviews to local music journalists who couldn't work out if he was being serious or not. We played some memorable gigs though, including one in a condemned back-street 'pub' that had been closed down by the council where 500 hardcore headbangers turned up and tore the place to pieces shortly before the police piled in, one where someone got stabbed, and one where someone lobbed a dead and semi-decomposed cat at us whilst we were playing. Ahh - happy days!

My first band as a teenager was The Nun F*ckers. Two of our most popular numbers were 'Anal Intruder' and the surprise hit 'Play My Guitar With a Plastic Lobster' which involved the lead guitarist windmilling power chords with the claw of a plastic lobster liberated from the local fishmongers whilst the singer shoved the microphone in his mouth and screamed. There is definitely such a thing as bad music.

I reluctantly joined Facebook about 10 years ago after succumbing to pressure from the guys I used to dive with who said it would make organising dive trips easier. Then, at about the same time as I packed in diving I joined a band, who also used it for organising rehearsals and gigs. I have to admit that I never got the whole Facebook thing - before, during or since using it. I can't see the attraction of having virtual relationships with people you clearly don't care enough about to have bothered cultivating a real relationship with. I guess there is a moment of slight curiosity as you accept the 'friend' request from someone you last saw 30 years ago as you wonder what they are doing now, but it all becomes a bit predictable: none of the morons have managed to grow a brain in the intervening years, a distressing number of them are homophobic and racist, and none of the lads who saw no point in education and left school with no qualifications because they were going to play for England actually plays for England - or for anyone else. And as for the endless pouting selfies in mock super-model poses... Jesus! "Never before has a generation so diligently recorded themselves accomplishing so little" as the quote goes. When I left the band at the end of 2017 the first thing I did was delete my account. Much happiness!

That would be the greatest thread. Seriously. No thread has ever been greater, believe me. And it would be full of beautiful words. I have the best words. Everyone says so. All other threads are Losers and Haters. The Donald loves you.