Is anyone else struggling with the obvious unfairness of this issue

I agree OP, and I regularly feel the way you do. It's simultaneously depressing, and infuriating. I also give thanks for the women of FWR, otherwise I would have gone insane by now.

I walk around with this low level anxiety, constantly thinking about it, like a restlessness bubbling inside me all the time now. Feeling like I'm not doing enough, and there's so much to be done, and I should really be out on the streets shouting and waving banners and burning my bra. But everyone else carries on as normal, I don't know why - it's like the house is burning down, and people don't even see it, just carry on making the tea..

There's a little spreadsheet in my head called 'all the stupid bullshit things that have pissed me off today'. And it's usually filled with lists of genderwoo nonsense that I read in the paper, or on here, It seems never ending. My inner monologue is an angry, shouty, maniac who just want to let loose on people for not even seeing, or caring about what is happening right in front of our eyes. Even when you explain it to them, their eyes glaze over. It's just not important.

I was also a teenager in the late 90's, when it seemed like we really were equal and the battle was won. I guess I was wrong. But I know that we won't stop talking about this, and fighting back. I can't, I can't pretend that this is ok, and go about my life as normal ignoring it. I just can't. And I won't.

Unfortunately, it will be a marathon, not a sprint. So I also recommend taking a break when you need to, go hug a tree or something .

@WitchButNotTheFunKind thank you It genuinely gives me hope for humanity to know that there are people who can see through it.

Yep same here.
And the feeling we have gone backwards in loads of ways, especially what women can hope for.

Because basically young women are told they now have equality, there is nothing left to fight for. Which also means that what we have (which is nowhere near equality and even safety) is the best we will ever have :(

Yes, I feel the same as you @Fariha31 and @OvaHere.

You are not alone. And I have no answers. And it makes me despondent.

And I don't want to. It's not for me... I'm not vulnerable a prisoner or an athlete but it's unfair

It's all so frustrating. No one is 'against' trans having safe spaces and rights. Just not to co-opt our own. Sex is real but you don't hear any establishment asserting this and if it's a balance then it seems like women have to cede

Some days I just can’t internet any more. This pushed me over the edge today. I almost vomited.

Gaslighting, misogyny, pillaging of women rights because of the menz feelz. I have never been so angry.

@2319inprogress great poem - I've not seen it before

I saw some "hateful haberdashery" ribbons tied to a tree in a local park today and a sticker that women wouldn't be silenced. Gave me a brief flare of hope.

Nevertheless for someone who came of age in the 90s with the sense that big equality battles had been won it's shock to realise these things are not linear and they can and do go backwards.
This, so much this. Leaving a single sex school in the 90s we were told & believed we could do & be anything.

I am in the "don't get mad get even" camp & am fighting, but I do despair frequently.

I think of the attached poem often...

I keep thinking about Animal Farm, George Orwell..."All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Sheila Jeffreys describes sex castes. Inevitably, it's trans men at the bottom (for interesting reasons in line with yours but I can't find them right now).

“Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

“As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

“Men's sexual freedom has depended, and still does to a large extent, upon their ownership of women's bodies. Men have bought, sold and traded women as things to be used. Women are still regularly raped in marriage, even though most Western countries have now changed their laws to recognize that wives have a right not to be raped. Women are still bought and sold in marriage in many countries, and in the vast majority of countries of the world their bodies are still legally owned by their husbands. In prostitution and pornography, the mail-order bride business and reproductive surrogacy, the international trade in women is a burgeoning industry. Men's ownership of women's bodies has been the substrate on which their idea of sexual freedom was born and given its meaning. This is why it includes the right to buy access to women, men, and children as an important way of demonstrating that freedom. At the base of men's sexual freedom agenda is the concept of the rights of the male individual. Pateman points out that women cannot gain recognition as individuals, since the very concept of the 'individual' is male.”

“Women do not decide at some time in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an ‘identity’. Women’s experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the ‘gender identity’ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

I keep thinking about Animal Farm, George Orwell..."All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Top level = TW (men),
Top level = men
Bottom = subsets of men, the not-men group, the ones who cannot be equal, the ones who are just body parts.

I agree. I'm not Jewish but hearing friends defending the indefensible in recent years was surreal. The Labour Party is dead.

I say this a lot but - anthropologists have long recognised that

1. Biological sex is not a spectrum

1. However, cultural attitudes towards biological sex are on a great big fucking mentalist spectrum, of bewilderingly varied historical specificities.

I am Jewish and the way we have been treated and gaslighted and tormented over the past few years, in particular by what I thought were my political allies/friends, has been deeply destructive to my mental health and wellbeing.

I've lost lifelong friendships and feel completely betrayed by so many people. There are a lot of parallels with what's happening to women now.

To all these people who take a step back - how do you do this? I find when I try to preserve my sanity and avoid the topic - it's everywhere I look regardless, queer theory is being rammed down my throat from every direction. Probably doesn't help that I'm a student. But really staying connected with places like this is the only way to feel sane when the whole world is apparently adamant that up is down.

This is uplifting:

I think it's time this had another outing.
Always cheers me up!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=TZt53xZog_w

You’re very much not alone although it feels it when the activists have us all so scared to speak out. I find it illogical that so many will go along with what they know is false but am reminded of the many times dangerous ideologies have taken hold in history.

I find a donation to a legal case every so often helps me feel I am contributing to real change. I do the odd protest to organisations in the hope that there are others. And I tentatively sound out other women to find who else in my world disagrees with this (almost all it turns out but not all think it is a significant enough problem to actively protest).

Although cheered up a lot yesterday when a friend said out of nowhere she thought pansexual was bollox and they were just bisexual.

In many cases they're not even that. They've never had and would never consider a same-sex partner. But because they once went out with someone who identified as "non-binary", they can claim woke points.