If womens sex based rights are protected-what will the backlash be?

@happydappy2 You're right, I don't know why i would think something like that would make people sit up.

@BusterBluth Do you think we might have to give up the label 'woman'? I feel it is coming to mean 'anyone who feels they are a woman (whatever that may be unless it is female).' I wonder if we might have to take battle tactics and retreat from what is lost, to form a different position. I hope not, but things arent going well.

Sorry, I'm just feeling so awful and scared about all this at the moment.

I thought I knew how much society hates women. I had no idea until I saw the reaction to this.

For anyone not as famous and powerful, being cancelled is essentially being silenced - so having your platform removed, losing your job etc.

It's one of the most insidious and horrific results of the rise of social media, in my opinion. And yes, it's a calculated and co-ordinated pile-on. Sickening.

@CrazyToast - I was thinking about this earlier. If the law does change, it will take something horrific - or a series of horrific somethings - to happen to have it repealed (if that's the correct term).

It feels mad to even be considering allowing anyone who feels like it to declare themselves a woman and have it recognised as law with no regards for safeguarding.

I am from a predominantly female family, have mostly female cousins, three daughters myself, I went to an all-girls school, competed in women's sport, worked in a 99% female-dominant industry, and was elected onto a board of governors with the rather-back-handed comment of my presence being 'good for balance' since the rest of the board was male.

Looking at my life and how being female has shaped me in every way - shaped who I am, my response to the world and its response to me - and self-ID just erases all that in a second.

Tbh I don't even know what "cancelled" means... Does it mean that a group of people on Twitter denounce someone and/or abuse someone and/or announce that the individual concern is cancelled and should be boycotted and is persona non grata? ...Because if it does, then JKR is cancelled. (I often see things describing someone as cancelled in this confusing new sense of the word.) But if, on the other hand, it implies that she can no longer go ahead with her books and so on, then clearly she isn't.

I believe that the genie is out of the box. We can't go back to how it was before self-ID was proposed in the UK. If people are told no, now, I feel there could be sit-ins in female spaces.

Negative comment upcoming, if you don't want to read look away now...

I believe we will lose this and it will continue until several serious attacks happen in female spaces.

Either that or women will just stop using these spaces and women's spaces will just become spaces for trans people and perverts who sneak in.

@BusterBluth (great user name by the way!) I know, it is terrifying I hope those careers can be put back on track, we know there’s at least one agent and publisher who were prepared to stand up to the bullies and we just need a few more companies to follow their lead, we need to keep writing letters and doing what we can without endangering our own livelihoods to show these companies that the silent majority don’t agree with the TRAs, we need to follow the TRAs lead with writing campaigns and sticking to a short phrase as reasoned arguments seem to be lost on them, something like “women’s rights matter” - I remember about 20 years ago when gay rights started to become mainstream and lots of companies talking about ‘The Pink Pound’ we need to remind them who spends money with them, and for a lot of companies it’s women with children not stroppy students and single men.

There's no critical thinking, @TheSingingKettle49 and it may well be the 'cause du jour' - but real women's livelihoods, reputations and legacies are being destroyed.
It's terrifying for the very fact that it will hopefully be a fad that we look back on with horror, but in the meantime it's doing very real damage.

Pack mentality @TehBewilderness. And you're right - they're actually inspired by each other.

Jesus wept.

I feel like if the laws are tightened up and the blatant recruitment that is happening in schools is stopped then they won’t have as many people pushing the agenda, the non trans people are probably mostly young idealistic people who think they’re on the right side of history but as it doesn’t affect them directly they’ll probably find a new cause to cling on to, I honestly think it’s just a fashionable cause at the minute. Just a quick glance at twitter shows there’s no critical thinking going on at all.

History teaches us that there are always some who are inspired by online misogyny to take a rifle to where women gather and start shooting.
Some who are inspired to take women captive and imprison them.
Some are inspired to scream hatred at women and girls from passing cars.
Some are inspired to act out the abusive porn they watch on their sisters or girlfriends.

I agree @AnotherLass, they're bullies in a playground being allowed to get away with it and egging each other on.
And just like your narcissistic friend, most don't have the balls (except they do, lol ) to back it up once someone won't take their crap.
What we need is more companies to stand up for women. Considering we're the ones who spend, they're idiots to keep pandering - and the ones who do stand up to this will be remembered.

It all reminds me of a very manipulative bloke I knew (I think he had narcissistic personality disorder, but he didn't have a diagnosis). He made a lot of threats, as well as being extremely charming to the people who he couldn't threaten

Absolutely this.

I'm not convinced that a lot of it is actually anger. I think that a fair amount of it may just be calculated intimidation. This is partly because there hasn't been that much actual violence, compared to the simply staggering amount of violent talk. And partly because of all of the other manipulation, the lies, the emotional blackmail and suicide threats. Overall I think that all the signs suggest that they've just been doing the things that have worked, not that they're out of control with rage.

It all reminds me of a very manipulative bloke I knew (I think he had narcissistic personality disorder, but he didn't have a diagnosis). He made a lot of threats, as well as being extremely charming to the people who he couldn't threaten. But the second people actually stood up to him, he just gave up. He wasn't really angry or out of control - that was an act.

So I do think that there is a high chance that they will simply give up when (and if) people ever stand up to them.

I fear women will be made to suffer whatever happens. The state of things as they stand makes me despair.
Every time I think the world has regained its sanity (Stephen King (for all of 10 seconds), Damian Burr un-masking) something else happens that undermines everything we believe and are fighting for.

I've lost a friend recently to my being GC and her apparently "not having the mental space to deal with this conversation right now".
She was the one who'd brought it up originally, then she silenced me when she found out my stance.

If it weren't so important I'd give up, I really would. I want to.

I actually live in (perhaps vain) hope that if they start getting told NO, they will stop - maybe not right away but they'll lose momentum, steam and support.

I think the fire is fuelled but the fact that they are currently gaining so much traction, having women cancelled, getting away with the slurs and threats and suck my lady-dicks. They feel emboldened, like school bullies. They're getting away with it all, so it's not until someone - a 'grown-up' - like JKR's publishers, turns around and says NO, that they shut up. And they did, to an extent. They were told no, JKR isn't being cancelled, some non-entity authors flounced, no-one cared, so they moved on to attacking Baroness Nicholson and Gillian Phillip.

They've unsuccessfully tried to bully the big kids, so they move on to the 'smaller' ones. If enough companies just had to guts to just say NO, they'd lose steam and pipe down.