The cost

Contentious I feel for you. My eldest just turned 10 and we've talked about JKR etc a bit but I'm not about to lay it all on her at this age. We've talked about how boys and girls can like anything, wear anything, play with any toys, read any books, be attracted to boys or girls. I got a few copies of My Body Is Me by Rachel Rooney and Jessica Ahlberg (sp?) via Transgender Trend and that's great for my 4yo. Got copies for friends too. Great message: your body is perfect just the way it is.

I'm not bothered about friendships, but this topic is an open wound between me and two of my kids. I actively self censor around them to avoid losing them. It's sad, embarassing, and makes me feel that I failed as their mother.

It’s hard Dancing - tumblr will reinforce all her feelings and more, at least half the people I knew were struggling with anxiety, feelings of disconnection with society, an inability to form real life relationships & feelings of hopelessness. On line life feels so safe in comparison

I asked her if Jessica Yaniv was justified in suing beauty salons in Canada for refusing to wax his nuts and she said yes. Also said that women dying in menstrual huts in Nepal should be able to identify out of their oppression...

Sister actively campaigns for trans women to be in women’s prisons.

I read comments like this and I just despair. The world has gone collectively insane. How any woman can look at Yaniv and see anything other than a vile sexual predator, or know about the likes of Karen White and think putting TW in women's prisons is a good thing, or look at the suffering imposed on women in menstrual huts and victim blame by saying "why didn't they identify out of it?" I just don't understand it.

How can women do this to other women?

Kit19 one family member is very into that scene. 18 years old and now nonbinary, wears binders etc... I love her very much but I don't want to preach to her.

I only became GC a few months ago. It's been a real eye-opener.

If I said what I do and don’t believe? My sister, my best friend at work, and one of my university friends all have ‘trans’ daughters or stepdaughters (presenting male, I mean). Sister actively campaigns for trans women to be in women’s prisons.

I stay off the whole subject and meet up less often because of it.

I was in a fandom/fan fiction scene that was based on tumblr which is why I’m very aware of how bloody dangerous it is. There are a huge number of young teens on there who are clearly struggling with life & feel very isolated posting absolute shite as fact - history is constantly trans washed, 14 year old girls insisting they’re aeromantic queer NB, that trans women are absolutely identical in every way to women “say it louder for the people at the back” and screaming TERF at anyone who even vaguely suggests that’s not the case

Thanks Glinner for starting this thread. It has made me so sad to fall out with good friends and family members over this one issue. And that they now see me as possibly hateful and bigoted. I use my real name on Twitter and keep my tweets part work related/part GC. Being doxxed is a worry. I'm a lifelong Labour voter but feel (cliched but true) politically homeless over thing. Greens might be my best bet.

TyroSaysMeow that sounds devastating. I was part of a group of women, mostly lesbians, who worked on an arts project a couple of decades (!) ago. We kept in touch over the years and now they all think I'm bigoted.

My husband agrees with me on some issues (e.g., transitioning kids, TW in women's sport) but works in a female-heavy media industry where pretty much all his colleagues have pronouns in their bios (rolling my eyes so hard). So he's nervous of being seen as a bigot, I guess.

A friend I'd known for 20 years. Not a close friend, but celebrated the birth of my daughter with me, knew my MH struggles and I knew hers, we saw each other a few times a year and mostly kept up on social media. A few mutual friends who I now realise are TWAW liberal feminists.

My niece, hopefully not forever. She's 18, super smart and super woke, but now thinks I'm a bigot.

A close friend who I haven't discussed this with but when I've said things on group chats she's made clear she agrees with TWAW. We've seen each other a lot over the past few months (socially distancing... our DDs are best friends) and it's been stilted and a bit awkward.

My younger sister, the most lefty socialist communist Corbynite you've ever met. I asked her if Jessica Yaniv was justified in suing beauty salons in Canada for refusing to wax his nuts and she said yes. Also said that women dying in menstrual huts in Nepal should be able to identify out of their oppression... She's very smart and brilliant and compassionate in so many ways, but we're polarised on this.

Last few months have felt very sad and lonely, only on MN, Twitter and a handful of irl friends seem to agree with me that women are women and TW are TW.

It's weird. It's even more divisive than Brexit. At least with Brexit there was a sense that the opposing sides understood each other, but once the wokeness has been partaken of, its adherents just stand there screaming "bigot" and losing pretty much all capacity for rational thought.

It really has the hallmarks of a kind of religious mania which has led to some sort of collective delusion.

A friend from uni who has been a good friend for 25 years and one of DH’s best friends. No longer wants to speak to us. Blames me for ‘corrupting’ DH with my hideous GC feminism and DH (who is extremely independent-minded and at least as GC as me) for being brainwashed by me.

I lost my cousin over this. She was a good friend too. We were always close but became especially close after my Mum died because my Mum had been a second mother to my cousin. She understood my loss, and I understood hers. We talked for hours about politics, family, the state of the world... And then somehow the topic of transwomen in women's sports came up. She has a DGD in team sports but was entirely taken aback that I did not think it was fair for someone who had gone through male puberty to compete against girls and women. Apparently I was a bigot. She hung up (we were on skype) and I have not heard from her since.

This hurts because I did not rush to that decision even though it seems a no-brainer. I read up, and yes it is not right and not fair on women and girls. But I am the bigot apparently.

Does anyone here remember VestalVirgin? She used to write gender critical fanfiction (largely satirical - she would take the loopier aspects of extreme genderist ideology, pop them into a fandom, play it with an absolutely straight bat, and watch the story unfold to its logical conclusion).

Maybe we need a gender critical fanfic writers group!

I was also quite active in fandom and fanfiction, though I haven't had much time since DS was born. I occasionally go on tumblr still and see friends I've had for years who preach tolerance and respect decrying the GC viewpoint as "hateful" and advocating for silencing and deploying violence towards GC women with seemingly no sense of irony. There's no attempt to see where GC women might be coming from and complete misrepresentation of GC views. They were the first people I ever felt brave enough to share my writing with, which was a huge step for me at the time. It seems a bit ridiculous, but that was my community for so long and it hurts so much to see how unwelcome I'd be (putting it mildly) if they knew how I truly felt. I don't want to let it to stop me from writing, but it's definitely lost its fun for me now.

Because there are many many people who still need it, many of them vulnerable, and in ne3d of a safer space than is currently available,

I hope, one day, a time will come that that fun activity can reconvene in an inclusive kind way Tyro. 💐

I was indeed, Highwind. Although I don't want to be too precise because it's potentially very outing, I was part of a collaborative multi-fandom writing community for several years. It was actually really good fun!

My own husband disagrees with me which is a bit depressing(he thinks JK Rowling was punching down, that the actions of a few shouldn'tchase for the many, that most people mean no harm so just let them be). We've agreed to just not talk about it for the sake of our marriage but I am obsessing about it a bit so I feel like I'm not being very honest with him

I have to admit I'm a coward - I just steer well away from the issue with my fandom friends (and I write in a fandom that isn't really susceptible to woke reinterpretations).

I'm out to all my RL friends, though, including a very close friend who is a lesbian and very trans-inclusive (we just seem to have a tacit agreement not to talk about it - it came up via an initiative round inclusivity, and I just quietly said "well, I think sometimes the feature underlying oppression is biology, and I'm gender critical", and she said "well, think of it as including transmen", and we agreed on a compromise with that.)

Tyro, may I ask if you were also in the fanfiction scene?

Absolutely, picklemewalnuts, but in my case it was fandom rather than gaming. The physical body really doesn't feel like it matters when you're living in a collaborative world made of words. We've had threads on it before but I wish there could be some proper research into who ends up living online instead of off, and why, and what the ramifications are. And then a comparison run with the typical rogd profile - anecdotally, the holy trinity of abused, neurodiverse, not-straight was rife in fandom twenty years ago.

I've actually been the person pulling back with a young (slightly distant) female family member who has gone fully down the t*rfs deserve violence route. I was polite about it but I don't want to see that rhetoric being posted.

I've pulled away from someone in the industry I was friendly with over her use of the term t*rf and her hissy fit over JKR

Tyro, I was reading on another thread the correlation between TWAW and gaming. There was a suggestion that people living in a very virtual world where we can all be whatever avatar we invest in were more inclined to forget the very real limitations of physical reality. That could explain your friends' susceptibility to trans ideology.

Not that eases the hurt any. 💐