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

The realisation that the Germaine Greer quote that "women have very little idea of how much men hate them" is so true.

Same here.

On the flip side of finding out how rampant misogyny is, particularly amongst the wokebros, I've discovered that support has come from unlikely places. Who'd have thought that Graham Linehan would be the one showbiz person to come out definitively in favour of women's rights?

How so many public figures are essentially cowards, even if touted as “outspoken”. In a similar vein how so many I viewed as intelligent are actually quite shallow thinkers.

I'm shocked at the speed with which good intentions/ideas go bad. It's a tipping point not a gradual decline. The danger of optimism bias with new technology, connecting people wasn't supposed to be about connecting paedophiles and misogynists.
I look back and regret how I dismissed the thin edge of the wedge arguments of conservatives like Mary Whitehouse.
The state of academics and censorship of ideas in the very places which should fight tooth and nail to protect freedom of thought.
And everything others have said.

That the Spectator of all periodicals would come nearest to matching my current political approach.

Some of the articles appear to be from a different world than the one I inhabit but they declared for Brexit while having Matthew Parris and Nick Cohen write multiple columns showing how much they disagreed with it, plus they would have been happy to have a Trans columnist balance James Kirkup's excellent columns had anyone been willing to write for them.

My preferred approach is that of either of the female protesters in this clip - one's pro-life, one's pro-choice, they're side by side, completely disagree but each respects the other's right to protest. What makes it a sad indictment of today's politics is the guy who then turns up and proceeds to kick the phone out of the hand of one of the women (the woman is then prompty defended by the other woman, good for her).

Self-righteousness meaning that any and all acts against his opponents are justified or just someone looking for socially-acceptable outlets for their own violent urges, who knows? Anyway, it's a clip that speaks to me as it's the way the Lib Dems (for one) used to be before that political element was taken over by authoritarian Liberals who seem convinced that theirs is the one true path.

The realisation that the Germaine Greer quote that "women have very little idea of how much men hate them" is so true. I always thought it was a bit over the top and used to dismiss it.

The misogyny! Once seen it's so difficult to unsee. Even my DH sees it now and he is shocked. I get so cross at Judge John Deed when I used to think he was a lovable rogue.

I'm now much more of a feminist than I ever thought I was or would be.

I've been think a lot more about the idea of intellectual resilience, and as an educator, what kinds of things do people need to learn in order to be able to think through ideas clearly and come to conclusions, one where they know where they are making assumptions, and why they have chosen those ones rather than others.

Oh - that should be scientists, not socialists. Not sure if that is a brain fart or the computer thinking it knows what I want.

I was talking about this recently with a friend. It’s made me very wary of identity politics. It’s clarified the importance of freedom of speech and made me look more closely at all sides of debates. I try to avoid being offended by things. It’s had quite a profound effect on me I think for the better. I am far less black and white than I was a few years ago.

• How fragile free speech and freedom of thought were

• I had previously thought that both left and right were equally likely to get into these positions of political puritanism. I'm no longer sure that is true, the left may be particularly vulnerable to that.

• The extent to which liberal individualistic capitalism has captured the political discourse, and people's image of reality, across the political (and non-political) spectrum.

• The extent to which people who are considered society leaders and thinkers, like socialists, are really not more thoughtful than anyone else.

-The extent to which people, particularly beginning with the generation right behind mine, have been educated with a clear political agenda but very little actual information.

-The extent that media outlets I considered to be dedicated to good journalism have actually suppressed certain points of view.

-Like the OP said, I am far more likely to consider perspectives that seem wrong or weird, and to want to ask pointy questions about tropes and phrases and language that people, particularly of the left, take for granted.

• I've been surprised to see many areas where years ago conservatives predicted problems, and I dismissed them as unlikely, or slippery slope predictions - and they seem to have come true. What's more in a few instances it seems that there were people all along who hoped for that outcome.

What is the difference between a conservative telling a lesbian she should think seriously about marrying a man to deal with her 'disordered sexuality' and a progressive telling a lesbian she should be open to 'women with penises' because she can 'get over' her sexual orientation?

Quite. I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
Its like conservatives/right wing believe gender stereotypes are real because God/nature, and 'progressives' believe in gender stereotypes are real because of 'gender identity'.
Same old patriarchy whichever way you look at it.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
Khaled Hosseini

How they pass the blame onto women, as demonstrated on FWR, frequently.

Girl guides and women's sports.
I mean how on earth did we get to this?

Safeguarding children totally shoved aside to highlight the acting ability of the trans players.

I think I've mostly been surprised at how extremely conservative the 'progressive' part of society is.

Way back when I was vocally Pro life and embedded in Conservative evangelicalism, I had this perspective that liberal viewpoints were actually liberal and forward thinking, and when I managed to extricate myself from the clutches of conservative open patriarchy, it was a HUGE shock to discover the progressive end of Christianity, for example, pushing the idea that girls and boys had different innate personalities, and even that gay people who rejected trans people who claimed to be the opposite sex as sexual partners needed to deal with their own 'prejudice' against trans people.

I think my jaw has dropped more than once because I had sort of assumed that by not being 'conservative' any more, I would obviously be 'progressive', but I honestly look at that segment of society with as much startled disdain as I do the conservative evangelicals who tell women to be silent in church.

What is the difference between a conservative telling a lesbian she should think seriously about marrying a man to deal with her 'disordered sexuality' and a progressive telling a lesbian she should be open to 'women with penises' because she can 'get over' her sexual orientation?

I still can't get my head around it, and I'm still so disappointed in a number of people I thought were brave and ground breaking in the church and I now see are every bit as bigoted and chained to traditional woman hatred and anti gay ideas as the conservatives they despise.

Which basically means all the 'love' talk is pure bullshit. They just like having a new target to loathe. It's been a shock.

How many lazy thinkers there are in academia and / or how many academics will do and say anything to further their careers, irrespective of how much damage it causes to others and to society at large.

back in the 70s I thought leftwing men were just being a bit slow in understanding feminism

I was an 18 year old in the late 70s, hanging out with CND type crowd as well as women's libbers.

I learnt very quickly that lefty men were just as much male chauvinist pigs as right wing men. And at least the right wing men didn't pretend to be interested in your politics and feminism to get you to sleep with them. Left wing men were appalling, in my experience.

Mostly just how misogyny is so deeply entrenched that its effectively invisible to a lot of people.

This. I've known it since I was around 12 - which is for almost 50 years. But when I say things like: "Well, most people don't consider women to be fully human" - I'm treated like a vicious man-hating "feminazi".

But I teach feminist history/theory, and I teach about structural oppression of women through patriarchy, not liberal "choice feminism" and it's extraordinary how young female undergrads start seeing the world differently. And how much pent up anxiety and anger there is, even amongst the young women we might think are "woke."

They need this stuff.

So I suppose I'm not surprised about what TRA highlights; I knew it already.

What I am pleased about is the renewed activity of the women's movement, although it's sad that a lot of younger women are having to reinvent the wheel. I try not to say too much, "Well, when I went to the Women's Lib conferences in the 1970s ..."

I think we are reaping the whirlwind if the "I don't need to be a feminist" movement of the 1980s.

The Wokebeard phenomenon has been a bit of a shocker for me, as I'm pretty much surrounded by the fuckers and I always assumed they were on my (women's) side. ... The group-think, thought-policing ... has left me feeling pretty disillusioned with left wing politics as a whole.

Speaking as another lifelong leftie, back in the 70s I thought leftwing men were just being a bit slow in understanding feminism. There was nothing, nothing I ever saw that hinted at the bottomless well of hatred and contempt for women that's now revealed.

I mean, I could see that some leftwing men were pretty reactionary in guarding their own privileges. That's just hypocrisy. A lot of it seemed to wear off over the past few decades.

I saw nothing to prepare anyone for men posing online with baseball bats, crowing about smashing women's faces in. Men demanding access to all women's spaces. Men campaigning to get rape crisis centres de-funded. Men getting feminists sacked from their jobs and threatened with violence. Men allowing other men to take the trophies in women's sports.

And leftwingers not only allow this but actively support it. I never saw that coming.

This is such a good thread. So many campaigning ideas to go forward with.

How little men understand women’s experience. My DH strongly supports female rights yet had to have it carefully spelled out to him why allowing any bloke to ‘self identify’ himself into womens facilities was a really really bad idea. But then he’s never been followed home, flashed at, had a bloke try to entice him onto waste ground, had dirty phone calls from a neighbour or seen horrific rapes and murders of women and thought ‘that could have been me’. He finds it hard to understand that a strange naked bloke in a female only facility is not the same experience for a woman as a strange naked female would be in a male only facility would be for a man. However he was all ‘TWAW’ until I asked if that meant he’d go to bed with a pre op transwoman......

Some people are so attached to their self-image as ‘progressive liberals’ that they will along with anything under that banner no matter what it is and no matter how much evidence is produced to the contrary.

The ideological purity and group think.

How it’s seemingly okay to breach procedure, and even the law, if the person is the ‘wrong sort’ of person.
Then they don’t matter.

First they came for the.....

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.

*have for

For me, it's how deeply pornography has shaped a whole generation's view of what justice is. Porn use used to be a bit of a secret, now it's the only true path to self actualisation for a lot of young people.

Hence the endless defense of sex work, the pleas not to be kink shamed (no matter what the kink actually is), the pride in defining your identity by your sexual tastes (or lack thereof), the insistance on adults having absolute freedom to get their rocks off no matter what risk it may pose to a vulnerable group (children, the disabled, the traumatised).

How little safeguarding is understood.

Yes, R0, that too.