Views that won't change

absolutely, most people have no idea what is really going on. My mum today showed me a fundraising newsletter from a women's charity that mentioned 'LBTQIA+' (if she was quoting it accurately it was interesting that G wasn't mentioned) most of the content was standard about helping women in developing countries then there was a story about 'a girl who was born a boy' in Nepal, and what do you know, this child preferred playing with dolls to playing football.

Anyway we agreed that little boys should be able to play with dolls if they want. But when I explained about men in women's spaces she didn't get it immediately until I said, well what if you went for a smear and asked for a female nurse but you got a man who said he was a woman? She just frowned and said, well, yes, but that would never happen really would it.....

gardenbird, what you are saying about your DH makes perfect sense - once you are 'in' this world it is properly horrifying but I honestly think most people have no idea of where we are at. Because TWAW taken literally is so obviously ludicrous, 'normal' people assume that it couldn't possibly be applied literally in situations like refuges, intimate care, girl guiding, teenagers on school trips etc etc. Or that if it is, it is in a vanishingly small number of situations involving people who have had full surgical reassignment. I think most people have no idea what the reality of self ID means.

Have you shown him the sex-ed porn dice thing? That also helped DH sit up and take notice.

Oh no. It everyone is one thing or another but some people don’t have a lot of empathy when they are blinded by one side of an argument. I’m the opposite - I have always had splinters in my bum and mum used to say I could argue two sides of the same debate at the same time.

He is hard of imagination then isn’t he? People like that only ‘gets it’ when it directly impacts their life or security.

gardenbird48

Is his Mum still around? If so, how would he feel about her personal care if she needed carers or to go into a home some point in the future. If she asked for female carers for her own privacy and dignity and a trans woman was sent instead. Would he think that was fine even if she was uncomfortable with it?

(Ok so that was for a thread about the weather.)👆

It just stinks doesn’t it? A friends brother lived in Sicily and I asked her how he managed - apparently he just zipped home on his scooter at lunchtime and had a swim in the pool then a nice lunch. What a life Ed?

hi Purpleboy, Cheese and Merrymouse, thanks for that - I've had a brief conversation about women's sport and that hasn't hit home as yet but I am incorporating some details about that into my preparations for our next conversation (any more tips gratefully received).
He is the loveliest man and I don't want it to seem like he doesn't care about us but he is very 'glass half full' and I think the scale of this issue is so massive that it is easy for it to come across as some massive conspiracy theory that I have been trawling Twitter and the Daily Mail for some 'bad stuff' and found some. I think it seems quite abstract to him at the moment and that, coupled with an enormous amount of pressure on him at work atm means that he literally hasn't got time to engage with such a big issue.
I think the fact that we live in a very rural area which is mostly pretty traditional/old fashioned means that we haven't come across mixed sex toilets, inappropriate mixed sex sports etc so finding those real life examples of how it affects me and our DDs on a day to day basis are tricky.
It hasn't really come to his attention from any sources other than me and he was worried about how upset I was from my disastrous conversation with friends and how much it has worried me since then (a lot) so would rather I just left it alone until it all goes away.
I have said to him that while I would prefer for him to fully understand the issue, I can't sit around and do nothing so have been trying to do what I can with letter writing/fb engagement etc but am working on getting the facts together in an organised manner so that he will eventually understand. I'll get there one day :¬)

I make a point of avoiding cornering people into feeling they have to take a public position of TWAW. This is because it is clearly nonsense, is fashionable, is unravelling and I want it to be as easy as possible for them to pretend they never truly went along with it. Easy reverse ferret.

Bit like my parents' generation who always thought drink driving was bad and heartily approved of both seat belts and cycle lanes, honest, yeah, OK, dad, course you did.

Many of them wouldn't have said TWAW 10 years ago. Thirty years ago you'd have struggled to find anyone who did

Many only say it now because they worry what other peope think too much and will sacrifice themselves for the approval of others , or are too scared to say otherwise.

If we want to change people's minds I guess we have to keep working on trying to make it safe to do so.

But until we can compete with baseball bats, barbed wire, and rape threats , which lets face it we will not lower ourselves to that, and violence is never the answer , we will continue to have a massive fight on our hands..

Many of them wouldn't have said TWAW 10 years ago. Thirty years ago you'd have struggled to find anyone who did.

Things can change quickly.

Roswell
I agree sometimes I engage online just to get a feel of the TWAW
'argument', but these are not our audience, we need to engage with every day people who can see the unfairness of transwomen in sport and how if women can't define ourselves we can't protect ourselves. It is the quiet conversations whilst out walking or having coffee. I don't talk to my sister and my niece anymore as their retort is always what if your daughter was trans she wouldn't be supported! Of course my daughter would never be trans as she knows the difference between sex and gender.

I find it quite useful actually. If someone truly believes that TWAW, I can get the measure of them as a person

Yeah this is find too tbh.

You can garuntee that they wont be able to explaim why, and then merely try to sound intelligent by throwing in some big words.

Sometimes its worth talking to them for the amusement of the complete knots they tie themselves in trying to be a good "ally"

But ultimately you sometimes just have to write them.off as a lost cause and save your energy for something else.

As far as I see it, there’s no point in trying to argue the toss. It might seem defeatist and fatalistic, and the road will be strewn with casualties, but I think change will come when the effort of cognitive dissonance becomes overwhelming. We will see more Karen Whites, more Julie Marshalls, more detransitioners from childhood treatment, more court cases over the long term effects of drugs, surgery and hormones on very young bodies. Different factions within the trans rights movement are already turning in each other, and gay and lesbian people will become ever more aware that they’re being talked out of existence by the sophistry and homophobia of people who are, in reality, straight.
The whole house of cards will collapse eventually, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t deny the existence of gravity.

and can’t see how it directly affects our everyday lives

'Invisible Women' is a good book on how sex affects everyday life. Also recent reporting on how women's health concerns are often ignored, partly because women often aren't included in studies incase their hormones skew the data (as though 50% of the population are somehow 'outliers').

gardenbird, how does your DH feel about trans women in women's sports? That's what peaked my DH, together with the issues surrounding compelled speech / freedom of speech.

Wow - top man. I think once people start to realise that this is a thing, it’s not going away and that it has real implications for laws, life and work (plus women only spaces and lists being swept away) then they will speak out.

@gardenbird48 how can he think it doesn't affect him when he has a dd and a wife?
Being very new to this topic, my DH is raging and has come out full gc on his twitter account. I warned him it might get him in trouble with work etc.. his response was his family is worth any backlash.

It’s like belief in God. I still remember the moment when I thought ‘hang on...this doesn’t actually add up...what if.........’. You don’t just repeat the lines anymore, you begin to wonder and question and once you see it, you can’t unsee it, no matter how much you want to.

After a disastrous evening with close friends I can’t discuss it with them any more (I was caught out by their twaw pushback and had too much wine to argue effectively against three of them at once). I’ve tried a few times with DH and am now writing it down as he finds the whole topic very unpleasant to think about and can’t see how it directly affects our everyday lives (slightly tricky as I currently have no real examples to give, partly due to where we live). I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations with teenage DDand she seems to have moved slightly from be kind to ‘ooh, what they did to Allison Bailey was very unfair’ so I have hope. DS just laughs at me when he sees I’m on Mn again checking progress in the fight to maintain our legal status as women. I think if I can get the message across to DH about how serious and fundamental this is I will feel better. I don’t really want to come across any examples of it directly affecting me or my daughters for obvious reasons but it would help my argument. @IAintentDead - sounds like you’ve made good progress

The diehard idealogs are just unlikely to see the light... but I find its the silent ones on twitter who sidle up IRL and say that the stuff I've been posting has opened their eyes. They are your target audience.

TWAW is a thought terminating cliche that seeks to erase the difference between adjectives that modify nouns, tall woman & Black woman for example, and compound words which change the meaning of the noun, Seahorses are not horses, hot dogs are not dogs, trans women are not women.

Talking to young people about all the different ways though terminating cliches and logical fallacies work in advertising and con artistry can be effective if they like puzzling things out.

My daughter's first response was TWAW, very upset with me for saying different and shut down the conversation, not up for discussion.

4 months, and 3 specific conversations later she understands. The final sticking point was toilets and changing rooms.

We agreed on
1 someone who was living as a woman full time, would use female toilets quietly and as unobtrusively as possible but would avoid communal changing rooms because 'as women' they wouldn't want to make other women uncomfortable.
2 there should be a third space.
4 Trans Women still need testing for prostate cancer and not cervical cancer.
5 Teenage girls should not be expected to share changing or sleeping spaces with trans girls.

I have to be careful - she (understandably) doesn't like me lecturing her or 'going on about it' as it hasn't really affected either of us directly but we are getting there.