Is anyone else struggling with the obvious unfairness of this issue

But agree. It’s impossible currently not to end up continually thinking about or reliving your experience as a girl/woman, times you’ve been followed home, assaulted, abused, endured violence or harassment, whether that’s within the context of the threat that men pose to women and the vital importance of female spaces, or just the complete steamrollering of the female experience and what it means to be a woman. The obvious, blatant fucking trollery of violent rapists and murderers who are men until they put on some joke shop wig and change their name to Karen so they can access female prisons. No wonder we’re all feeling fucking triggered.

Anyway, I will return to my small efforts with making donations etc now and try to get that awfulness out of my head for a while.

You're not alone Fariha.
Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
It helps to play the long game.
Look after yourself, take breaks from this, do things that make you happy and don’t feel obliged to fight women’s corner individually if it feels too much. There are lots of other women feeling the exact same as you and this idealogical supertanker (our old friend misogyny in shiny new clothes) won’t be turned around overnight, whatever we can or can’t do individually. Take care.

It is stressful. It’s gaslighting on a global scale and watching powerless as your rights are stripped away in some kind of terrifying mass delusion that has suckered governments, corporations, the media etc.
Having to suppress your feelings online in case you get trolled, or it affects your career, or you’re accused of a hate crime.
The mental disconnect of people like Owen Jones or fucking Lammy talking about the need to protect women while calling us transphobes and dinosaurs for trying to protect single spaces. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking and disorienting, and sometimes I feel like I’m having a low key panic attack.

But we aren’t powerless and we are fighting back and have voices and the message is starting to cut through.

I find the best way to cope is by taking small actions - donating to and supporting organisations and individuals, raising issues with your MP, signing petitions, offering to volunteer, sharing/retweeting posts and stories, buying GC books, even small things like buying Robert Webb’s book (How Not To Be A Boy) or voting for him on Strictly (which I have never done before lol!). Supporting the people who have been cancelled trying to support/protect women and girls.

There is a huge support network of women out there and a huge network of women fighting effectively for our rights and connecting with them really helps.

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.

Yes, this. I really struggle with this.

You're not alone Fariha. As a survivor of coercive control I find the tactics very reminiscent and distressing. The misogyny, both casual and overt, which is shown up by this issue can be overwhelming.

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.

Completely agree, Ova.

I think that most of these threads get deleted sadly. Any time anyone starts discussing how it makes them feel or the events causing them to form their opinion, it tends to get deleted.

You are not alone though OP

I understand that it must be very overwhelming at the moment and take a big toll mentally but I think that things are better than they were and will continue to get better. There are some positives that you can look at (they will reform the police culture). It’s just because it is very much in the news at the moment that it seems all is lost but it isn’t!

Yes. We had a thread like this a couple of years ago that ended up being derailed and removed.

I'm in my mid 40s and I've never experienced a worse time to be a woman or girl. Now women much older than me may disagree with that because women of my mother and grandmother's generation undoubtedly had far less freedoms and rights.

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.

It makes me feel like the first half of my life was just a bit of an illusion and it's really hard to stay positive in this current dystopian headfuck era.

I think I know how you feel.

There are no big demons in my past, but it feels like gaslighting for all the hundreds (thousands?) of little things over the years to he waved away as unimportant... Like those things weren't because of my sex, but because of some kind of nebulous gender identity.

How many times I've lied to men on public transport about my name, where I'm going and who I'm meeting.
How many times I've had a man 'accidentally' brush against my boobs or bum in a busy environment.
I'm supposed to believe that I'm just paranoid... Those men weren't really following me along the street, even though I changed direction more than once and they still followed.
The list goes on and on and on, and I know that pretty much every woman when she stops and thinks about it has a list too.

The problem is that the church of gender identity forces us to think about these little things that we've brushed off over the years too.
We are forced to confront the unfairness of all the small things in an attempt to defend against the big things, and are chastised for doing so. We're 'weaponising our trauma' while in the same breath not supposed to have any trauma at all... He was just being friendly, it was an accident, it was a coincidence.

It is unfair. It does affect mental health.

Honestly it’s normal to feel like this. In a world where the government has said effectively that it can’t make misogyny a hate crime because there’s just too much of it, where women are discriminated against every day because of their sex, the fact that so many ppl are clapping along with the idea that men can become women because feelings is almost unbelievable- and yet Hete we are

I find that sometimes you just have to step away Abd that’s ok! There are many many of us and we will keep on fighting. Step back when you feel able