Are you scared?

I think there are lots of decent people out there who want to do the right thing who can easily be influenced in the age of social media so those that scream the loudest win. We all need to learn be more media literate, have better critical thinking and negotiation skills. It is too easy for any crackpot to get their ideas accepted as fact. We need to be prepared to pay for decent journalism. Without these we end up with a very bleak future.
I think the rise of narcissism needs urgently to be addressed though I don't know how.
Men's suicide levels show they aren't all having a fabby time either - and it is a shame the MRA movement hasn't managed to articulate those in a meaningful and convincing way. The message gets hijacked by the dickheads.
For change to happen, there needs to be a sense of urgency, so this "fear" could be helpful - but not if it stops us from listening and finding a workable new reality.

Yes, scared. But that fear spurs me on. The ferocity of a small group of privileged people and their flying monkeys is astounding. Not fear of them per se tho, it's more to do with how quickly the powers that be are bowing down to them. I'm shocked.

I don't believe they will win. When Self-ID aims, the outcome of them getting their way becomes apparent to wider society and impacts on the day to day life of women and girls, then whatever Self-IDs stand for or hope to gain will be quashed.

Depressingly I don't think women will be the catalyst for change. It will be heterosexual men.

Those men that think wtf..next to my wife/daughter/sister in changing rooms.. ? Hang on, my little girl has to share room/dorm with Self-IDs on school/guides etc residential trips?

That's without mentioning female hospital wards, refuges, medical examinations etc so very many areas that will be impacted. It'll be not my wife/daughter/sister/mum etc, eff that.

There's absolutely no way Posh Privilege will garner sympathy and empathy from wider society. They'll just be seen as cheeky fuckers trying it on.

& that will be that. I'm pretty sure they know it too hence wanting to bulldoze their way over us, quickly.

Nope. Fucking Mad as hell though

What actually really terrifies me is my youngest... she's desperately muddled up with pronouns anyway (and you try fucking googling information on pronoun confusion trying to find out why a 4 year old can't figure out the correct use of he/she these days and not finding morons with blue hair who've decided they'll be identified as Captain Underpants McAwesome the 3rd these days!) and has gone through a couple of phases of saying she wants to grow up to be a boy - just because she tends to play with the boys in her class (cos the girls are a really tight clique who don't like her)... and I'm bloody terrified these normal and perfectly understandable things that she does that are just 4 year old kid (she wanted to be a robot the other week too, and spent a good fortnight only answering to Catboy in case anyone reports me for ruthlessly denying an obviously transgender child or anything - the boy thing was about as short-lived) are going to be latched on by very dubious organisations and she'll be pushed down a very dark and sinister road.

She just doesn't quite understand linguistically to use he/she (she's got other speech issues and I think there's a large element of "sh" being hard to say for her)... actually she'd probably go down a storm at an NUS conference really!

The whole thing is a bit Twilight Zone in that who would have believed 10 years ago that rational people would be declaring beardy men who aren't even vaguely attempting to look less male to be female? It's as if once you pass a certain point in terms of suspension of disbelief all bets are off.

I'm not scared. Angry may be. Mostly annoyed. It's so relentless being a woman it's one thing after another from everyday sexism to male violence to women's only shortlist aren't just for biological women. When does it stop?

I would say I'm extremely worried. It's so hard because it's currently like living in some mad alternate reality. I just keep thinking "surely this can't continue?"

I'm not scared. I think too much power is being given to these people though. I am a bit annoyed by mumsnet at the moment for allowing themselves to be controlled by non members via twitter. Julie Bindel didn't turn around and go home when those protesters tried to block the stairway.

I don’t feel scared. Maybe I’m too much of an optimist.

I look at progress in a two steps forward one step back kind of way. This is definitely a two steps back moment ( I’m mostly thinking Trump) and feels really uncomfortable.

Pornification really worries me. I have a girl and a boy, I think they will both be damaged unless things can somehow improve.

I believe this has been going on since the 1990's, and a deliberate concerted effort has been made by the Men's Rights movement to take over womens spaces and services, and teach young women their place under the guise of 'equality'.
Men's activists have taken over Women's studies in Universities and co-opted them into 'gender studies'.
Men are re framing what 'feminism' and 'equality' mean in theory and practice.
We are facing a supremacy movement.

I agree with this analysis. I think it has been a long game.

I read The Handmaid's Tale thirty years ago when it first came out. The world today is looking awfully like Gilead.

Good tip to write to Penny Mordaunt, LongWeek. I have already written to my MP.

Bugger I burnt my food again - so much wisdom on these threads - appreciate it and you all - munching burnt bits as a penance.

Thanks KittyKlaws - that meant a lot to me.

I can't believe the number of words I left out in my above post - sorry
*affects you mentally

*(which is what women here are concerned with and are discussing now)

Life is terrible for a lot of women (not just women, children and men too) in a lot of the world, I'm not going to deny that. I'm not scared for women in this country really. I can't worry about what is happening on the other side of the world too much because there is nothing I can do about it and I have enough real life problems of my own to keep my mind busy. - for example being bullied at work - by a woman.

Well I'm sorry you are being bullied at work. I hope you get it sorted out, no one should have to put up with that in their work space it is very demoralising and affects mentally. So I am truly sorry you are being bullied. The fact it is a women is largely irrelevant however.

I was not suggesting you take up the cause of women in Iran etc if you don't have the time. I was merely point out how easily a country and its attitude towards women can be changed into something authoritarian and oppressive. I was not making a call to arms, I was drawing a parallel. I know it seems like it could never happen here but honestly politically speaking that is sleep walking. It is always possible for cultures and societies to change incrementally if you ignore the changes by increment (which is what women here are concerned and discussing now). You might think it wouldn't and couldn't happen here but I think that attitude is complacent. That's all.

I genuinely hope you get your work troubles sorted out and someone is helping you with them. It must be really unpleasant working there right now.

Once you deny objective reality, many things come up out of the abyss.

The TRA movement has succeeded because ‘if I feel it is discrimination’(substitute the ‘ism’ of your choice), then it is discrimination’. This denies any concept of an objective standard of reality, so ‘if I feel like a woman then I am one’ no longer looks quite so absurd.

It is not surprising that TRAs are making most inroads in the hotness of political correctness (the Labour Party, the media, academia etc).

A penis is male, end of.

On the other hand, what happens when natal males can bear children, do have real periods etc (I am sure it will come before my children are old). Do the chromosomes they are born with define them, even if the phenotype ceases to be expressed?

@LongWeek I think they are waiting to see how it will be handled/work in Scotland. They were gonna go first but then got the backlash and put it on the backburner, I think, knowing Scotland would be going ahead with it.

I'm in Scotland, we have been fighting against this as well as we can. We know self ID is coming in but we are trying to secure research, consultation and exemptions with regards to the GRA and the EA, in order to protect female only spaces. I'm currently working on some demands with some other women, I'm in the phase of dealing with the schools guidance atm, it is horrendous.

I've got 3 daughters and a granddaughter and I'm bloody terrified. I'm also incandescent with rage over the fact that those in power are allowing this to happen.

Do they not care about their wives, their daughters, their sisters, their mothers?

What will it take for them, and especially men, to stand up and say 'enough!'

I don't think you're wrong. It all does feel apocalyptic, doesn't it? Perhaps this is what the shift from Western to Chinese domination looks like? We're between eras?

Yes I share that view that unless someone grabs the middle - history tells us a war will ensue sometime in the not too distant future. Because someone will grab power who is enabled not confronted - exactly as happened with Brexit /Trump - using social media as their propaganda machine. And instead of stopping it dead in its tracks - it rolls on until full scale hostilities are inevitable. We can see that same phenomenon playing out here with MN. We've never had social media before and maybe that is where the war is taking place - for the hearts and minds of the young. Maybe we are in a war and haven't realised it as there was no formal declaration - it's like a phoney war.

But maybe this is it!! Because Hitler used the propaganda techniques refined by the USA during WW1 to get to power (Bernays referred to this work as "psychological warfare"). These same tactics are being used on us all the time now using social media as the loudspeaker of the forked tongue. Ref Century of the Self documentary: It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs in the public relations industry. PR is a 20th-century phenomenon, and Bernays—widely eulogized as the "father of public relations" at the time of his death in 1995—played a major role in defining the industry's philosophy and methods.

Bernays argued that the covert use of third parties was morally legitimate because those parties were morally autonomous actors.

"If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway", he said. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted research and found that the American public ate very light breakfast of coffee, maybe a roll and orange juice. He went to his physician and found that a heavy breakfast was sounder from the standpoint of health than a light breakfast because the body loses energy during the night and needs it during the day. He asked the physician if he would be willing, at no cost, to write to 5,000 physicians and ask them whether their judgment was the same as his—confirming his judgment. About 4,500 answered back, all concurring that a more significant breakfast was better for the health of the American people than a light breakfast. He arranged for this finding to be published in newspapers throughout the country with headlines like '4,500 physicians urge bigger breakfast' while other articles stated that bacon and eggs should be a central part of breakfast and, as a result of these actions, the sale of bacon went up

No, I’m not scared. I am FUCKING FURIOUS.

I have sons and daughters. They are teenagers and they are (by default) feminists. Some years ago I saw this and it struck me:

The patriarchy says, “boys will be boys”
Feminism says “you’re better than that”.

I have high expectations. I won’t have any toxic masculinity. Their dad is a misogynistic emotional abuser. I have spent years firefighting his shit.

No, i’m not scared.

Brilliant post OP, you sum things up so well. We still live in such a level of male supremacy that all of this is invisible to most men becuase they don't care to understand it because it doesn't adversely affect them (I am beginning to get really pissed off seeing the amount of men who say 'live and let live' in relation to the whole issue, when in fact what this means under male supremacy is let men get on with upholding that norm).

As for fear, yup I feel fear for all women and girls, my personal reaction to all this is much more one of anger though, but it powers me on which I think is the case for so many women. What has been really shocking to me is how the violence has been ignored. Everything from violent ideation to actual violence, VAW is glorified in trans activism and very much centered and pervasive. So many women and men ignore it, I would never have believed this would happen until it happened. It shows me how people can accept pretty much anything. That is scary to realise.

Why now? Social media.

Anyone with a grudge, a complaint can find a hundred/thousand/million more people like themself and together they can whip themselves into a righteous froth of indignation. About anything.

Likewise fetishists. 20 years ago, they’d sit home wanking over some well-worn mail order porn, now they can watch, live, and find other similar people like them.

It’s tribalism, facilitated by social media. All of it.

I'm not scared - yet. But I'm fucking furious that my woman's body is apparently both up for debate AND nullified because apparently it isn't important to my identity as a woman any more. I will not stand here (sit on the sofa here) and let my identity be rewritten as 'cis' (or TERF, or woman-with-breasts-rather-than-woman-with-penis).

The worst thing, which I can see is a concern to all of us, is that hardly anyone else seems to realise or care about the significance of what's happening. And because it's such a nuanced area, it is VERY hard to explain to the 'uninitiated' that I am NOT anti-gay, I'm not anti-queer, I'm not anti-transexual ffs. I'm not a bigot. It does terrify me that I was agreeing with that recent Normal Tebbit article. Now that's scary!

*Also, I haven't watched the Handmaid's Tale, so that probably keeps my imagination at a normal level.

There is nothing in The Handmaid's Tale that hasn't actually happened in the real world. Atwood made a point of this.

Perhaps avoiding that might keep your imagination at a normal level. How do you feel about the changes to women's rights in Iran as the result of a belief system. Are they too imaginative too?*

Life is terrible for a lot of women (not just women, children and men too) in a lot of the world, I'm not going to deny that. I'm not scared for women in this country really. I can't worry about what is happening on the other side of the world too much because there is nothing I can do about it and I have enough real life problems of my own to keep my mind busy. - for example being bullied at work - by a woman.

And don't be fobbed off if you get a standard response back from an MP. It's easy for them to do, but not good enough.

Ask to see them in a surgery. They're not gods, they're normal people, paid by you. Don't be scared. Push them to find out their view. Ask if they have daughters and if they'd be happy with gender neutral toilets for their daughters.

(Married to an MP)

LongWeek is right. Go and see your MP and explain your concerns. Use specific examples like guides policy or schools policy on mixed sex spaces or women's prisons or whatever.