Feminist Current: I supported Trans ideology until I couldn't any more

I love how Twitter seems to think that banning gender critical accounts and posts will somehow make it go away.

I thought the article was excellent, and good on Alice for writing it and publishing it. There will be more like Alice, many many more, and once they reach peak trans i would welcome them all.

Fucks sake.

Nine days on, Alicia Hendley, who wrote that excellent article, has been suspended by Twitter. Same old, same old...

It struck me that, although the initial chink was the pervert who used the Trans label to indulge his fetishisms, it was when the narrative of theory didn’t square with the author’s actual experience that she really started to question it.

As a Jewish woman, she knew that the meeting referred to did not resemble 1930s Berlin.
Her experience and knowledge of toddlers meant she knew they cannot articulate gender preference - much less care about it.

They went too far; asked her to believe what she knew was impossible.

I am the history you are telling me I am the wrong side of. I am the woman forced into sex stereotype subjects at school, cooking and sewing, I am the school girl that sat feeling alone in the top stream for maths and sciences in the 60s and 70s and I am the woman that was discriminated against in work for decades

This sums it up for me. I’m in my mid forties, but it rings so true.

I’ve pointed out many times that self-id means his teenage daughters coming face to face with male genitalia in female changing rooms, being beaten by teenage self identifying girls at sport and the horrors of male rapists identifying as women to get transferred to women’s prisons. Intellectually he nods and agrees but at an emotional level he clearly finds it very hard to accept as this means somehow damaging his self image as a tolerant progressive liberal.

So does he think it's progressive and liberal to say women and girls shouldn't have any rights? Because all those things you've mentioned are about taking rights away from women and girls.

I think that for some people the need to feel virtuous and present themselves as liberal is overwhelming and makes it difficult not to support any cause that is presented as ‘progressive. Layla Moran is a great example - here is a science graduate standing in Westminster saying she can see into people’s souls to see if they are male or female. Now if as an elected MP you are as willing as that to make an absolute twat of yourself in public then your desire to score virtue points must be overwhelming. My husband is a bit like this. I’ve pointed out many times that self-id means his teenage daughters coming face to face with male genitalia in female changing rooms, being beaten by teenage self identifying girls at sport and the horrors of male rapists identifying as women to get transferred to women’s prisons. Intellectually he nods and agrees but at an emotional level he clearly finds it very hard to accept as this means somehow damaging his self image as a tolerant progressive liberal.

I think this is a fantastic article and one I’ll keep to show to others mired in the cult. Trans ideaogy makes no sense - you are a woman because you ‘feel’ like one? So do all women feel the same? How do you know? Does Rosemary West feel the same inside as Theresa May? Can you mind read? Professor Gina Rippon and Dr Cordelia Fine as scientists have made an excellent job of showing that there is no such thing as an identifiable ‘female’ or ‘male’ identity - we are all individuals and a mixture of many traits. You can’t identify with something that doesn’t exist. The illogical nonsense of gender identity is quickly exposed which is why TRAs don’t want to talk about it.

I find it scary myself that I am agreeing with articles published in the Times or the National Review because I disagree with 90% of their stance on everything else.

For me, the shock is seeing myself agreeing with articles published in the Daily Mail -- a rag I have hitherto always dismissed as trash.

This wrong side of history trope coming from people decades younger than me is nonsense and arrant stupidly. I am the history you are telling me I am the wrong side of. .......How dare these people even breathe the words wrong side of history to women for whom this is not only their history, its their present and their future and their fucking retirement.

This, absolutely this. I've spent decades of this life learning, growing, gaining wisdom, travelling the world, living in a variety of cultures, connecting with other women, poor women, horribly oppressed women. I can well remember the megalomania of my youth, thinking I have ALL the answers, and life has made me so much more humble and then these babies come along throwing tantrums to the effect that I, my generation, knows nothing, that our age and experience mean nothing, that they have all the answers and are trying to overturn female wisdom and knowledge and struggles gathered over centuries because, just because, it's the latest trend who are trying to change the world my precious granddaughters will grow up in into something where women become even more oppressed than they ever were it's outrageous.

I'm still stewing on why I never thought TWAW.

I'm more perplexed by the fact that anyone can actually believe TWAW, because they're clearly not.

I've always been deeply mystified by the whole 'living as the opposite sex' idea, and up until very recently (2 or 3 years ago) I had assumed that being 'trans' was to do with a deep dislike of your own genitalia and a need to have extensive body modification in order not to be repelled by your own body.

The idea of a man 'living as a woman' makes absolutely no sense at all to me.

Again, no this isn't exactly it from my experience anyway. It's just that if you can believe TWAW, the conflict doesn't exist. You can easily see that this is the way they think about it - they say this explicitly. If you believe in gender souls, it's easy to believe that TWAW.

This was my experience speaking to someone online last week. Their starting point was an unequivocal TWAW and from that they justified a plethora of nonsense including the idea that TW experience something akin to periods. I have to say I was aghast at how someone I know to be intelligent was coming out with ideas which suggested they were not familiar with their own biology (and what a period actually is and why the period pain exists).

Seeing intelligent educated people having such massive blind spots, makes me wonder what my own blind spots are.

This is such an insightful point. The whole issue has made me examine what I believe on a range of issues. It’s forced me to examine lazy thinking and reassess my position on quite a lot of stuff. I’ve tried very hard to weed out believing things just because it’s ‘right’ or progressive and exposed myself to opposing views like never before.

It’s been an interesting process so far and I doubt I’ve found everything.

I'm 41 but grew up in a more patriarchal country with a lot of sexism - cooking / sewing in school, having to go to the boys school for extra classes if we wanted to do advanced mathematics, career talks where the only options suggested to us were nurse, teacher, secretary (nothing wrong with those but wrong when they're the only options), getting sidelined at work for getting pregnant etc.

I grew up in the UK and am not much older than you. Everything you’ve written here apart from your maths lesson example is true of my own experience. My school did not put the very able girls forwards for Oxford or Cambridge (they had to fight for it & get parents involved) but I saw boys with even a chance of getting in put forwards for extra tuition and support to get in.

I honestly think a lot of these third wavers won't see sense until it's their turn to become mothers (if they choose to) and they experience the full-on misogyny of what it's like to have to do 90% of the biological labour to gestate & feed & raise a new human being and how hard that can be and how little the mainstream of society cares about it.

Then again who knows if this generation will ever see sense. I've seen stuff where younger women preface every single piece they write about the biological reality of femaleness with an apologia about how privileged they are to be 'cis' and able to menstruate, lactate, get pregnant etc. Some of these so-called feminists have drunk deep from the internalised misogyny Kool-aid.

Indeed, Trousering. I'm 41 but grew up in a more patriarchal country with a lot of sexism - cooking / sewing in school, having to go to the boys school for extra classes if we wanted to do advanced mathematics, career talks where the only options suggested to us were nurse, teacher, secretary (nothing wrong with those but wrong when they're the only options), getting sidelined at work for getting pregnant etc.

The main issue with 'intersectional' third wave feminism is that the women who advocate it have no actual experience of real sexism or what it's like to live under patriarchy. They think it's all a thing of the past and male-bodied people who enjoy behaving in stereotypically feminine ways are the truly oppressed ones, not us 'cis' women. They have no idea what it's like to experience real upfront misogyny so when they do, they don't even recognise it for what it is.

It is very worrying though when a professional person, a clinical psychologist, is taken in by black and white, ‘wrong side of history’ type thinking. Because if this is what is happening en mass in the NHS and places like the Tavistock then we are all truly stuffed.

Thanks Erish. I do reach #peak fucking stupid now and again.

These people have no clue.

Trousering

This wrong side of history trope coming from people decades younger than me is nonsense and arrant stupidly. I am the history you are telling me I am the wrong side of. I am the woman forced into sex stereotype subjects at school, cooking and sewing, I am the school girl that sat feeling alone in the top stream for maths and sciences in the 60s and 70s and I am the woman that was discriminated against in work for decades, all of my working life having babies in the 90s and writing maternity policies when women simply did not even try to struggle back to work against the odds and I still am the fucking history now working in equal pay putting pay right for 60year old women who have gone through these decades with me. How dare these people even breathe the words wrong side of history to women for whom this is not only their history, its their present and their future and their fucking retirement.

Get your own fucking history before you dare tell me I'm on the wrong side of mine because a man told you to say it.

Good article. I like how she outlines her thought process and what triggered her change of mind. Anyone who cares about women’s safety and dignity, i.e. anyone who is a feminist, can’t possibly agree with males being in women’s spaces. It’s total cognitive dissonance.

I think lefty women like the author cling to the TRA stuff so much, because otherwise they are ‘on the wrong side of history’ and that’s a scary place to be if you’re used to being always right.

I find it scary myself that I am agreeing with articles published in the Times or the National Review because I disagree with 90% of their stance on everything else. It’s alarming to me and I don’t even have a public reputation to think about. For a lot of old school feminists, I can imagine they have doubts but the cost of speaking out is too high.

Similar to some on here, I was very much in the ‘TWAW, why be mean, why exclude people who have sacrificed so much to be women from our spaces?’

Then I found out that 80+% of trans women do not go for reassignment surgery and are fully intact males who have sacrificed very little to be women and that was what triggered the change in my attitude.

Group think is definitely a part of it, defining yourself as part of a group and taking your cue for 'acceptable opinions' from the opinions you hear being expressed around you by your peers. I think it would be a rare young person who didn't go through some kind of phase like this.

I don't think it's quite fair to say that believers don't have the capacity for critical or independent thought, though. She was having the thoughts all right (Certain aspects of trans activism would occasionally unsettle me). It's more a matter of not allowing yourself to fully engage with those thoughts because you've been so thoroughly convinced that only bad people think those thoughts that you ruthlessly self censor.

I was never able to make a true believer of myself but I pretended to be and I really wanted to be because in my mind the alternative was to be a hateful transphobe. I believed that deep down I was a bigot and I was ashamed of that and did everything I could to quash it.

The way to help people out of it, the people who aren't driven by misogyny but by a desire to be kind and inclusive and not bigoted, is just to do exactly what this forum does. Just give people permission to trust their own judgement again and let them see that it is not coming from a place of hate, but that their concerns and misgivings are valid. Lots of people believe all kinds of nonsense that directly contradicts observable reality and it's not because they're all thick.

And I don't think kicking people when they are big enough to stand up and admit they made a mistake, by calling them a bigot, is really very helpful at all.