Tide turning

America is fucked.

Their leading word-usage resource, Merriam Webster, recently changed the definitions of male and female to "someone with a female gender identity" with gender identity being defined as "someone's internal sense of being either male or female".

Yes, up to an extent.

We also need a Stonewall public inquiry in UK, they don't stand up well when asked to explain themselves in court, as they sound insane.

By Goddess, that would well and truly turn the tide in this country

I would have thought that a possible accelerator of the demise of forced Gender Ideology compliance will come from the inability to get insurance coverage.

Once the lawsuits start really making a financial impact insurance companies will have to factor in the risks that are now starting to appear - medical negligence, discrimination, safeguarding failures.

I think women will never be able to stop fighting this.

Hopefully people are coming to their senses over sports.

I think I (unfortunately as damage is done) the huge damage caused to children will stop the medicalisation

When it comes to males wanting access to females only spaces however, I fear we will never not be under attack.

Tides turn, that is what they do.
For a while they go out, then they come in again, followed by going back out.

I think it may only fall properly apart when the well-off families of the girls in the US who are being encouraged into cutting their breasts off and being sterilised realise that it hasn’t cured anything, but instead has caused a monstrous level of harm and no grandchildren.

Once the weight of those suing for negligence outweighs the profit, the whole thing will go into sharp reverse. I’d also suspect the scandal will cause a backlash against the entire industry, which will finally assess the evidence properly and realise that transitioning doesn’t actually work in any meaningful way, and it will become as rare as lobotomy currently is.

I hope, as a PP said, that the UK (and hopefully other European countries) will come back to reality without having to wait for those young women to grow up and wake up, but every time I think the tide is turning, I see that there’s another huge wave behind the one that’s receding. It’s horrifically embedded in places I wouldn’t have expected, like the police, the NHS and almost all political parties. We were asleep at the wheel when that happened. But we aren’t asleep any more.

Yes. So I think that's over to HoC/HoL, isn't it?

Exactly, which it is in the GRA. We need a reverse 6 word amendment on that legislation to ensure it's clear for all you you can't actually change your bloody sex!

Once gender is coded into law over sex, it becomes extremely difficult to fight. Individuals at the sharp end have to endure a long, costly, enormously stressful fight in court - who wants to get involved with that? A woman who's been raped in hospital? A young person who's been made sterile? A woman in prison? A rape victim who has suffered extra trauma and gaslighting from the service that's supposed to support her? A mother who's been dragged to court to try and clear her name?

On the whole, with some extraordinarily brave exceptions, these women want to try and heal and get on with their lives, which is utterly understandable.

Once something has become legislation it seems that there is an immense resistance to undoing that.

I suppose the GRA could be extensively reformed - or the EA could be clarified massively so that its made totally clear that sex and gender are not the same thing. We'd need the EHRC to really step up to the plate and I'm not quite sure they are strong enough to do that.

I guess once people start to be sued there may be some reversing. But I'm afraid I don't share much optimism for genderism being suddenly overturned any time soon. I'm sorry. Too many people are still too scared to talk about it, for a start.

I'd say it's more likely that the fatal blow will come from trans becoming uncool among the young so that it splits back into young people exploring readily changeable identities like being gender non-conforming, being a Goth, etc, and a very small group having meaningful gender dysphoria. To me I think this will undermine the ideology more than it being fought to a standstill in the courts, or by continual challenging politicians to make them adopt evidence-based and reality-compliant positions.

Don't imagine that showing evidence and rational arguments will be enough to demonstrate the risks, harms and fallacies within genderism. It's not about 'belief' and understanding, so much as performative compliance & social currency.

I agree entirely - rational argument hasn't helped very much. It's just that one hopes that really extreme cases (young girls having double mastectomies, for example, or rapists being put in women's prisons, or child sex abusers identifying as trans women) might shock people into sense. However, that doesn't seem to have worked either.

So what needs to happen to change people's minds? The adherents of this ideology need to reach a point where it is no longer considered fashionable or socially admirable. The only thing I can think of is to raise awareness of what's going on amongst ordinary, decent people - the ones who don't normally pay much attention to political issues. You need those people to start feeling outraged, because only when you have a majority resisting this do you have hope of changing things in institutions such as universities, the NHS, police etc.

When you see a movement being pushed by elderly white males from the White House down, their school and college teachers and saturating mainstream teen-oriented media to the point that it ceases to be edgy and cool, teenagers are surely going to start asking questions about why mainstream society is so keen to make so many of them do this, and who profits?

I share people's pessimism about Stonewall, Mermaids, the captured BeKiiind organisations and the Twitter wokebros telling women to sit down and shut up (and worse).

And yet...the recent YouGov survey, even with flaws in its definitions, showed large majorities against things like transwomen in sport, transwomen in changing rooms, medical treatments for kids. [As usual, no-one seems to give a fuck about transmen!] The more people see of single-sex spaces being turned into mixed-sex ones, blokes pushing into women's sport, poorly-evidenced medicine, etc, the less they like it, and can see quite clearly it's gone way beyond compassion for the tiny group of people with debilitating dysphoria.

Check out this thread by Matt Goodwin twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1549813447990312960

At least a decade - when DD1 peers gets into work place and realised how the world works and starts dealing with stressed of paying for their own stuff.

I think in background a lot of tolerance and good will is being constantly eroded as more and more people have to deal with situations or become aware.

Also depends on how gets power and what changes they make to our laws but generally think UK population is fairly sane - no discrimination but that doesn't mean eroding women's rights or child safeguarding.

In US it will take much much longer and that is an issue with social media.

They really, really aren't. Just keep having the debate and working with the nuances.

However, we've seen what a strain a tribunal has been for Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey.

Even though Maya won her case she gets called a bigot etc more now than she ever did before.

I think the way forward would be for a co-worker to find a way to build a case around a flashing incident at work being swept under the carpet. I wouldn't envy anyone going down that route with its uncertainties, potentially nasty cross-examination, and possible impacts on livelihood.

I'd fund it to hear the arguments about a penis not being a penis in some contexts and to get the clash of intersecting rights into the open.

However, we've seen what a strain a tribunal has been for Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey. I can't think what it would be like for most people to have to discuss something even more striking like these circumstances and to have to sit calmly while being accused of bigotry, phobia, having unflattering comparisons made with Pol Pot etc.

I doubt the NHS will appeal the decision. It would mean challenging the transwoman and that would be easy to frame as being vindictive and transphobic.

What would the NHS gain from appealing? I don't see how they'd see any real benefit for them at all, but definite downsides.

I think the way forward would be for a co-worker to find a way to build a case around a flashing incident at work being swept under the carpet. I wouldn't envy anyone going down that route with its uncertainties, potentially nasty cross-examination, and possible impacts on livelihood.

Don't imagine that showing evidence and rational arguments will be enough to demonstrate the risks, harms and fallacies within genderism. It's not about 'belief' and understanding, so much as performative compliance & social currency.

Some of this is a subculture, and that will self-limit, and fall out of fashion. Youth culture is already eyeing genderism as passe. Media is rapid, but slapdash and mercurial; government and the law work slowly, partially, bluntly and badly for the most part. The populace has little idea, huge chunks don't understand the issues at stake. Emotionally motivated arguments are largely impervious to reason, evidence or logic.

I'm most worried about the EHRC's recent suggestion that a belief in biological sex was 'controversial'. We have a moral equivalence that gives equal weight to the idea that sex is a spectrum and there are over 100 sexgenders - many including the Scottish govt apparently see no difference between sex and gender.

Hopefully the Cass report will push the NHS towards more rational, evidence-based stances, and better care and treatment for gender-dysphoria. Sport will probably develop robust rules because for some reason people really care about sport. Schools may get more practical about' gender incongruity'.

The police seem gleeful about their continued expansion of thought-crime powers and in no hurry to sort deeply ingrained structural misogyny. Higher Education seems lost in a morass of ridiculously abstract nonsense. Lawyers can argue the number of gender-neutral angels on the head of a pin endlessly to their personal enrichment. Politicians can pontificate, flip-flop, and score points on either side with little regard for the consequences of their actions. The MoJ know the issues but have effectively shrugged about the extra risks to women incarcerated with males, whatever the history of those males.

We're nowhere near the end. Even if we were, it will take years to unpick and dislodge the affected policy, HR guidance etc.

NHS staff are being more cautious in public social media but they've not changed one jot. The same for HR in the Civil Service, leading companies and industries.

Look at what Allison Bailey's tribunal revealed about the mindset of some of our leading legal minds in the UK. What Maya Forstater's tribunal revealed about leading intellectuals in the global development space.

This one was pretty depressing. I hope the Trust appeals.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4593138-transwoman-wins-employment-discrimination-case-against-nhs-for-being-treated-differently-from-women-in-changing-room

I saw the aviation solicitor on GB News trying to distance and muddy the waters on who exactly are the ones being intimidated. The TRAs are reaping exactly what they sowed and it's all rotten.

I'm perhaps naively quietly optimistic that the house of cards will come crashing down sooner or later and I think the key to it is sport. Once you accept, as all but the staunchest of feelz types do, that there are in fact physical differences between women and men stemming from biology and that they are important, the rest of it unravels pretty bloody quickly IMO.

What was the NHS thing? I'm here daily but think I've missed something

I think about this a lot. Those of us who are involved in this have this constant sense of being in some kind of weird Alice-in-Wonderland situation where everyone else has adopted an absolutely insane belief and we keep asking ourselves when people are going to come to their senses. And it always feels as if it's going to happen any minute - every new victory, like govt depts pulling out of Stonewall, or the ruling in the Forstater case, or the change of heart by Fina, gives us fresh hope that we're nearing the end. Yet the end continues to recede, somehow, further into the distance.

It's hard to credit, but loads of people still believe this stuff. Forstater, Stonewall, the Cass Review haven't made a dent in their beliefs. They're still putting their pronouns in their signatures, they're still fundraising for Mermaids. I really think it's going to have to be something massive that wakes people up. But I don't know what that is.