Does anyone ever have a "are we the baddies"* moment?

We're not the baddies. Know how I know? It's because we're the ones that keep checking. I've seriously considered the opposing argument, tried hard to form it into a coherent world view and it can't be done. I don't think gender believer friends have done that in reverse.

I'm going to start this by saying - because I think it's possibly relevant to your post - that I am British and (US)American and have long lived - by choice - away from these two countries.

Yes, I know "are we the baddies?" - it's been used quite a bit as a meme among feminists challenged by popular orthodoxy. Generally, the consensus from reasonable people is: no, but if someone can demonstrate otherwise please do. No one can.

I look across the Pond to the US, where the only people who are saying the same things as us are frigging Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene, neither of which are people that I associate my politics as being anywhere close to. There is just no bloody way that the Left, my home, will align with us now, given who our "allies" are in the States. They just can't, even those that agree with us will never position themselves as having the same concerns as Marjorie Q-Anon Parkland Taylor Bloody Greene.

The situation in the US is really complicated, and what people see abroad is typically the federal level and ignores all the various things going on at the state and local level, which is where the action is in a federal system.

If you are saying that the UK and Europe and the rest of the world cannot change because the US politicians who are currently ascendant are bought and sold - I strongly believe that you are wrong. Look at what happened just this week in the UK House of Lords and in L'Académie Française, for example.

If you are saying that things are contentious in the USA, you are right, but there are many people besides those you name speaking out and working against this. Also I am not sure the people you've chosen to rail against are relevant: last time I was in the US, Rand Paul was a quirky hero of centrists, and I've never heard of Marjorie before this week.

The second is personal. I work for a large global organisation in a senior role. We had our Global Leadership "Away Day" a few weeks ago (on Teams, of course) and there was a presentation from some US colleagues on LGBTQ+, being able to bring your whole self to work, that kind of thing, from two gay colleagues, one lesbian one gay. So far, so good - absolutely the right thing for my organisation to be doing. Then they got onto pronouns and how everyone should start every meeting asking what pronouns attendees want to have used and encouraging everyone to put them in our email sign-offs. I'm never going to do that, but I can already see it happening around the organisation (particularly the US, but some of the easily led/want to be noticed over here will soon follow suit).

Do you really work for a global corporation, or just for an international corporation? I find it really hard to believe that what you describe would be allowed in a global corporation. The pronoun thing is idiotic and absolutely cannot work in a global corporation: just the multilingual context would defeat it.

My husband won't listen to me talk about this sort of stuff anymore - he agrees with me, but says that it is basically like someone saying they "don't agree with all that Black Lives Matter stuff". My best friend works with young people and whilst I've tried to approach it with her very gently, including all of the stats about single sex spaces and how women and children's safety is negatively affected as a result, her reaction is that she gets all of that but she works with children every day who are tortured by their own bodies.

I know that our concerns are justified, I know that women's safety/opportunities are going to be negatively affected but - if I'm completely honest with myself - I just can't see how we're going to stop it. Julie Bindel has a tweet pinned to her feed which is basically that the misogyny at the moment is like a tidal wave and that's how it feels.

Your husband sounds dim (and inappropriately appropriative unless he is black and American), but I still don't understand why YOU think that you (or we) are "the baddies"? It sounds more like you are surprised or shocked or disappointed that you encounter so many people in your daily life who don't have any critical thinking skills (or who don't evidence those skills to you). Are you challenging these people at all? If not, what is the worst that could happen if you did? If so, what is the worst thing that could happen if you did more strenuously?

Challenge to any lurking TRAs - link us to proof this type of introspection and consideration of other points of view goes on on trans forums.

No. The Mitchell and Webb sketch is relevant to one side of this debate though and not this side. Many parallels. My stance does not help me in any way, I wish I could put pronouns in my bio and pretend everything is rosy. It would make life so much easier but I think what is going on at the moment is deeply illiberal and deeply sinister. It has nothing to do with trans equality and is regressive. My conscience won't allow me to ignore this. I never considered myself a feminist or particularly political but I am a secular enlightenment liberal, we are a secular liberal society and I will defend that with everything I have.

No because everybody that I speak to agrees with me. Apart from my sister-in-law but she's a guardian reader who can't have an opinion of her own. The majority view seems to be that people can do what they want to themselves but as soon as it starts inflicting itself on children or affecting women's rights like in sports then we need boundaries.

I wonder are there many TRA forums having these discussions?

Maybe 10 years ago I believed there could have been some sort of compromise, but after all the "die in a fire" threats of rape and violence, political parties throwing women under the bus and the nastiness I am like nope. I am not the baddie, the baddies are the people who ignored the rape and murder of this 12 year old black girl to advocate for a Trans inmate failing to even mention her name.

www.womenarehuman.com/vicious-child-rapist-murderer-demands-sex-change-freedom-synthia-china-blast/

But no, the people that are standing up for safeguarding children against making life changing decisions that will threaten their health and maintaining women’s rights to single sex spaces for safety and privacy are not the bad guys.

I wonder are there many TRA forums having these discussions?

Maybe lots of us have worked with teenage girls for years and years and know that adolescence is a time of questioning and uncertainty and that NO life altering medicalisation should ever be considered.

No, we are not the baddies (I remember the M&W sketch )

But. I am in an odd position where my 18yr old ASD daughter has announced she is transgender. For all that we disagree politically, some middle way will have to be found for our relationship to continue alongside her gender dysphoria.

I cannot agree that TWAW or TMAM in our case (which my teens very much agree with), so we are facing a very uncertain future. Focusing on my DD's circumstances, I would be horrified with her using a male toilet - because I've only ever known her as female, because I can imagine that some men would not be welcoming of a small, slight, "male presenting" person.

Perhaps, as a friend described it, transgender people will become more and more common and social acceptance will follow suit. But for me, that has to be a third category and not a takeover of existing single sex categories.

Until our daughter's announcement recently, DH would pretty much zone out of my rants discussions because he felt it was bleeding obvious and no sane person would buy into gender identity. But now that it's happening to us, he has shocked me with an about-face. I suppose that's not all bad, if it helps him to support our daughter.

How do you even go about discussing these things when, in my work at least, it would probably get me fired and everyone around me in my personal life has either bought into the nonsense hook line and sinker, or just doesn't want to hear it?

My husband finds the whole topic intensely uncomfortable and quite honestly hasn’t got the mental bandwidth to deal with it (huge stuff going on at work) so, while I know he agrees about the major issue, we can’t discuss it.

I had a disastrous conversation with friends nearly a year ago when I had started to discover the problems but didn’t have enough facts at my fingertips to counter their ‘gender is a spectrum, sex is a social construct’ argument (we have 14 kids between us and waay too much wine in board to deal with objections to all my points x 3 We haven’t managed to talk about it since and I’m not sure that they will twig until something major happens directly to one of them.

I have directed my efforts to writing letters and challenging the bazillion policies in government organisations (hospitals, schools etc) and staying involved in the conversations on here which are a constant source of learning.

I think that many people find the topic too vast. The rot has gone so deep a d it can feel quite overwhelming. I am only now, after more than a year of immersion in this, feeling like a) we are making some progress and b) I understand the issues effectively enough that I can challenge the lies and misinformation and underhand tactics.

I'm with those who wonder this.

But I think it through and have always settled on No. You can't change sex.
Sometimes objective sex trumps gender identity.

Nothing has changed about human sex. It's the same as it's always been, show me if it's not.

Nothings changed about human behaviour either, unfortunately. It's still the ones of the make sex that carry out most of the murders, rapes, all the way down to arse grabbing on dance floors.

It's nice to feel 98% safer. So I support single sex spaces.

I do. I have 2 daughters that think I should just 'be kind' and I spent 15 years working in secondary schools seeing more and more of the girls I supported, particularly autistic girls, identify as transgender.
And yet, I'm convinced I'm not the 'baddie'. I'm a middle aged woman that has been the victim of male violence and misogyny. I know that so many rights that women have ,have been hard fought for and only recently won. If we don't defend what we have, we will lose it.
I'm glad my kids don't fear male violence the way I do. I'm glad they haven't grown up in such an overtly sexist time as I did. This gives them a false sense of security that all will be well. They don't understand yet what they risk losing - I hope they never do.

And no, I did in the past consider this, but I don't any more, for reasons which I won't share here.

And maybe not. Maybe it's the people who are medicalising children for life with little concern for the ones who would get past their gender questioning phase. Maybe it's the ones sending death and rape threats, and those who want validation of their personal identity by destroying all the hard won sex based rights of the oppressed sex class, who are the baddies.

Great contribution, blackice

Maybe because... you are?

Yeah I think so dalyesque

It’s so much like being suffragettes in the past

Guess their friends were like what were you thinking

But here we are.

None of my friends or family have any truck with this madness

I also question myself a lot. I recently quit my job though, as I found I can't in all honesty accept the pronouns and lies. I can't go along with it. I am continually surprised at what I see to be the moral cowardice of my peers. So I guess, yes I do doubt. But when it comes down to it I can't reconcile myself to accepting lies.

Whilst Brexit was being argued thought I THOUGHT leaving the EU was a stupid idea, but realised the Brexiters were running a fearful campaign that seemed to capture a good many, usually reasonable people.

Whilst GC issues are being argued about I KNOW deep down with every fibre of my being that TRAs are running a fearful campaign that seems to have captured a good many, usually reasonable people.

I used to. But then it turned out that the stuff that sounded ridiculous was actually happening.

Surely no-one is actually going to let males in women's prisons.

Or in women's sports.

And I'm sure Stonewall aren't really campaigning to abolish single-sex spaces.

Oh and of course the medical professionals dealing with dysphoric children are keeping accurate data and following up long term.

Oh, wait...

I would love to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, those claiming to be working on behalf of trans people keep proving the women of FWR right.

Plus I've read 1984.

I am the bigot/witch/woman that men have warned us about. Lost loads of friends who haven’t seen it . We have to see the small victories and keep going. It will change.