What broader issues has the trans (lack of) debate opened your eyes to?

I’ve become a much more vociferous defender of free speech. Let others say their piece, because you never know when your own perfectly reasonable beliefs such as facts, science and biology will also be deemed “offensive” and be outside the Overton window.

I no longer view the press as being divided into “good” and “bad” and a newspaper or media organisation’s supposed political slant - left or right wing - doesn’t mean anything any more. All there is is good reporting and bad reporting and all of the main media organisations are capable of both. I won’t respect or hate any particular news media publication just because of perceptions about their editorial stances on any issue. Individual journalists are much more important.

I have most of all been astonished that many of my medical colleagues are utterly divorced from biological reality. The fact that no one seems to care that “assigned male/female at birth” is so utterly wrong and yet is being written into legislation shows that many doctors are blind to such issues.

I will also no longer be complicit in blowing smoke up the arses of our so-called eminent medical institutions. The semi-joke in Australia is that the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne models itself as the 4th best children’s hospital in the world, but they fully support a clinic that is taking the healthy bodies of children and altering them for life and setting them up for a lifetime of medicalisation based on poor evidence, and no one - not the hospital itself, not the state or federal government - seems bothered by it. So I now no longer believe anyone is free from scrutiny on the basis of reputation and social standing. “Because the Children’s Hospital does it” is not good enough justification for anything any more, it still needs good evidence.

I've learned just how DEEPLY men hate womem, especially after looking at the "Terf is a slur: documenting" site.

Unfashionable views, nit so much the unfathomable views

Everything you said in your OP and I value freedom of speech much more after the experience if the past few years.

I’d been cheering Laurence Fox on for his GC views and initially got a bit of a shock over his Question Time performance, but it made me realise that actually he should have the right to voice an opinion and we should all be free to agree or disagree. Also that it’s important that minority or unfathomable views get airtime or print space in the MSM. No societal problem has ever been made worse by polite discussion.

Great thread and great posts!

For me, how utterly divorced from the physical, natural world some people are. I wonder how much of this would disappear if they went to live in the forest with no Wi-Fi or mirrors for a while...

And I've been utterly baffled by the equating of asking honest, logical questions with causing harm. Or being screamed at to just be kind. How readily people shut down thinking if they're accused of being mean - we really are attached to an image of ourselves as 'a nice person'
How did kind = uncritically letting people (especially kids!) do whatever they want = society's highest good?!

Any rights for which women have fought, including the vote and not being 'owned by' a man, were granted by men. it has rarely been directly stated (except by MRAs TRAs, men who cannot pressure a woman into a relationship, etc), but is often implied, is we are now at a point where some men are actively attempting to have these 'rights' removed.

How can something be a 'right' if it is granted by one group who also have the power to remove that right?

As others have said on this thread, many men see women as sub men, broken men or not really human.

Safeguarding. I knew nothing about safeguarding until I started reading Lisa Muggeridge, very early after the attack on Maria which was what first alerted me to the violent males hiding behind the trans veneer.

Yes, I think part of my unpleasant shock was not the existence of men who have pure contempt for women, I sadly knew that. It wasn't even how women eagerly form part of the system to shunt all women down, I knew that too.

It's the amount of people who disavow both of those positions and still support and promote those positions as long as they are packaged more neatly, and act as the brute squad against those who object.

I've been shocked to the core how easy it is to persuade large numbers of apparently rational adults to parrot something that they know cannot possibly be true, because they want to go along with the crowd and not be unpopular.

I'm not talking about the misogynists, but the people who are prepared to turn a blind eye to their behaviour and pretend it will all turn out ok.

Also. On a personal level, how little courage I have. As I’m still largely publicly silent on this issue through fear

It honestly never even occurred to me that a lot of men simply hate women.

Every part of this #nodebate has proven that women’s rights don’t belong to women. They belong to men. Who give or take away as they see fit.

I can’t unsee it. I don’t know why I thought it was something else. How could it be anything other than this when no matter what women fought for it didn’t happen until it was ratified by men.

Yes a great book Wrath, it definitely opened my eyes as a teenager. I think I will reread it soon.

Definitely the misogyny, and the personal effect that has had on me. I see men differently. I don't trust them nor like them as a group and even as individuals, they need to prove to me they are truly and honestly good and supportive of women....no benefit of the doubt.

I think so many men have handed themselves over to evil in their sick and gleeful abuse of women, as evidenced by the cheering and goading men who push this ideology- I can think of no other way to describe it.

How little men understand women’s experience

This, many times over. Epitomised in "the midnight walk", it's when transvestites first go out "dressed" because they feel safe in the dark.

It's the misogyny.

The anger and bile that spews forth when women don't just sit down and shut up when they're told to.
The misogyny has always been there, but I have never been able to see it so clearly as I do in this 'debate.'

That people really think that women are sort of broken men.

That people love religious and magical beliefs.

That many men believe that men who don’t want to be men or don’t feel like men or don’t do very well at being men are repellent and disgusting and therefore must be women.

That some people, including very educated people, really do not think.

That people love to be part of a tribe especially one that claims to be the kind tribe.

That our governance is broken.

So much.
The misogyny thing definitely. Even now I'm reluctant to think men hate women but every day more and more evidence piles on to suggest it's true and someone on Twitter said a thing yesterday that shocked me in its truth. I can't find it now but basically saying that men will always work in their own best interests and TRA rhetoric and alienating lesbians / telling them they need to accept penises ticks that box.
How vile people will be to complete strangers.
How much time and energy people have to invest in being vile and working to oppress and silence women and LGB people.
How telling a generation of young people they were unique special snowflakes where all participants get a medal has fuelled a rampant narcissm.
Validation through visibility.
How feeble and self-serving academia is, churning out ridiculous 'peer-reviewed' but flimsy reasoning purely so people get their PhDs. And that these papers are held up as evidence because they serve the current doctrine.
How a rush to inclusion and to recognise privilege has fuelled lefties of both sexes throwing women under the TRA bus. But it's wrong to believe all white people are bad just because they're white or that everyone should be included just because they claim they're a member of a disadvantaged group.
How some charities will work against their stated aims in order to secure funding.
How blind so many people are to these issues.
How scary it is to speak up on these issues because of needing to work.
How quickly people will embrace totally unsuitable people in the name of diversity without thinking how inappropriate that is to the children in their care.
How biased Twitter is.
How easy it is to get sucked into ridiculous thinking just because some people say it emphatically / loudly enough and how oddly hard it can be to unpick those messages when someone is just shouting TERF in your face.
How people who are generally quite smart will repeat plainly ridiculous and untrue things in the name of being inclusive. (I was one of them.)

The power of the technology giants willfully ignoring the concerns of women.

Thanks BIN
From his book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, a great fiction book on the terrible hardships inflicted on women in Afghanistan.
A real eye opener.

How stupid, shallow, weak and desperate to be liked/popular so many politicians are.

That the small number who can be bothered to be active political (example as in student politics) get to set the agenda and make up the rules and that they’re often the last people who should be given this power. Scary

The willingness of supposedly intelligent people to believe illogical, incoherent, evidence free nonsense if they think that this is the ‘liberal’ position. Emperors clothes is a real thing.

This. Exactly this!

the idea that gentials dont matter when you have sex and calling lesbians vagina fetishists

'sex is about more than genitals' - sexual attraction is multi faceted but at the end of the day sex does include touching genitals whether thats with fingers, tongue, penis

im not a lesbian or bi and therefore i am never in a million years going to want to have sex with a woman because i dont want to touch another woman's genitals or breasts

the idea that this makes me some kind of cavewoman grunting deviant because im having sex with someone's body and not their inner gender "essense" makes my head explode

Also that’s a great quote, thanks for sharing Wrath.