No, YANBU. This is one of the most important threats faced by women and girls today, and far too many people are still completely oblivious to it.
I'm an old, leftie, lesbian feminist and have always been invested in equal rights for everyone. So when I saw news stories about places in the USA fighting to ban transwomen from using women's toilets I thought that the wish to exclude them was hateful, right wing bigotry, and that it was high time transsexuals were allowed to go to the toilet in peace without being shamed by religious loonies.
It wasn't until March of this year that I first had an inkling that something weird was going on. That was when I saw an article about a female trades unionist being attacked on a picket line on International Women's day, and followed a link to a video of the incident that showed enraged young people screaming with pure hatred into a woman's face "TERF! TERF! TERF! Fuck you TERF! Get her out of here, she's a TERF!" They were a mob, they were glorying in their ability to intimidate, and they were egging each other on in a manner that risked turning physically violent. womansplaceuk.org/footage-of-picket-line-attack/
I'd never heard the word TERF before so I googled it, and found a website called terfisaslur.com which left me reeling. Somehow, while I wasn't paying attention, the quiet transsexuals I knew from decades ago, people just wanting to go through life without being tormented, had been edged out and replaced by a bunch of aggressive yobbos, making ludicrous demands, denying basic biology, and conducting witch hunts against any women brave enough to challenge them. Interestingly, when men challenge transgenderism the response they get is much more muted, and the rape, mutilation or death threats which women are inundated with do not seem to get sent to gender critical males.
I felt betrayed to discover that Stonewall, a charity I had supported for decades, had thrown lesbians under the bus in favour of people who "may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, two-spirit, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman,trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois."
As a lesbian I was particularly stunned by the concept of the cotton ceiling, which states that being a friend to transsexuals is no longer enough. Now that transwomen ARE women so there is no longer any excuse for saying that as a lesbian you don't want to have sex with somebody on the grounds that they have penis. If the person with the penis identifies as a woman then they ARE a women, and that is a WOMAN'S penis, so as a lesbian you need to train yourself to welcome it, and learn how to pleasure it sexually. Otherwise you are a TERF and a vagina fetishist, not a REAL lesbian. If you think this is an exaggeration or a joke then, like me up until a few months ago, you have not been paying attention.
As a mother and grandmother, and a lesbian with a fondness for butches I was scared and heartsick to read of the exponential increase in masculine young girls demanding mastectomies and irreversible hormone treatments. Meanwhile the pharmaceutical companies rub their hands in glee at the prospect of all the cash they'll make from each person who will need to pay for hormones for the rest of their lives, and organisations pushing for the transitioning of children are rolling in funds. The NHS will be bankrupted by all the malpractice claims once the children currently being neutered are old enough to understand what has been done to them.
I'm not particularly sporty, but it struck me as incredibly unfair when
I realised that boys who identify as girls were being already being allowed to compete as girls in all girls sporting events, despite all the advantages their unmodified male bodies gave them.
All these changes had managed to slip by under my radar for years, and when I speak to friends and family about it I find that most of them are still completely oblivious.
Women's hard won rights to sex segregated spaces are under threat, and nobody is allowed to talk about it because the new gender creed insists that MtF transgender people are women, (in exactly the same way that black women are women, infertile women are women, and disabled women are women), because changing your gender also changes your sex, and therefore it is bigoted cruelty to want to exclude penis bearing women from the sex segregated spaces currently set aside solely for women and girls.
Anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, even if they are only a woman on some days of the week, and a man on other days, like Philip/Pippa Bunce who has advised the government on this issue while feminists were excluded from the consultation. www.fnlondon.com/articles/mistranslated-i-split-my-time-as-pippa-and-philip-20171002 or Alex Drummond who advises Stonewall on trans equality and likes to widen the bandwidth of how to be a woman by wearing skirts, and queers gender by nurturing a full beard.
Transgenderists have targeted positions of influence and have been busy lobbying by stealth, behind closed doors to undermine laws that currently protect women and girls.
Any attempts to discuss what has been going on unleashes a torrent of hatred and misinformation. Academics and politicians are afraid to speak out publicly, for fear of loosing their positions.
Even Mumsnet, the company who dared to stand against the men's rights movement, and one of the last places where uppity women can discuss difficult subjects without being censored, have recently been intimidated into enforcing different rules for the "spirit of discussion" on the feminist board compared to the rest of the viper's nest.
I am shocked that it took me so long to notice what has been going on behind the scenes, and I want the issues debated openly.