Is anyone else finding being gender critical has affected their mental health?

👆 what @Catiette says
It is fundamental to women having a voice or not

This from Chamomileteaplease:
"so bloody worrying about what may become of our children. What kind of world will they live in, especially our daughters".

It's the capture of schools, abandoning political impartiality and allowing some of the most unsuitable people in the world to influence policy that keeps me awake at night. The open gaslighting of children to believe that they could be born in the wrong body, watching them believing that mutilating their healthy bodies & taking drugs to halt the development of their minds and bodies is a future for them. And to know that this is pushed by so many who I once considered to be kind ethical people. Sigh.

Catiette's advice is important. Step away and take breaks regularly for our own sanity.

I’m not sure about my mental health but certainly my blood pressure and heart rate are regularly raised in anger and frustration.
when people like Ash Sarker say stuff like ‘why do you have a problem with unisex toilets, you have one in your house’ or when people say excluding TWs from single sex spaces is the same as segregation of black women I regularly want to smash things up.
my kids often notice and ask why I have an angry face or why am I marching around the kitchen….

Pretty similar here. I'm hanging on to my relationship with my son, but we're under pressure from ideologues who are both too fragile to cope with anyone disagreeing and too self-righteous to cope with anyone disagreeing ... My mental health is not great; I'm obsessed with trans stuff and in danger of getting far too angry.

Hugs to you, or flowers or whatever you would prefer, and I hope your situation improves.

We could start Salons (not hair studios, I mean a la Bloomsbury Group!). Where you open your sitting room up for conversation with like-minded women. No-one can dictate who we have in our own homes.

We rebuild from the ground up again.

Sorry, I think I'm going quite mad now, Ted.

Thank you for this thread OP and everyone's insightful comments.

I agree that this issue has affected my mental health, mostly in that it is so bloody worrying about what may become of our children. What kind of world will they live in, especially our daughters.

We have to be optimistic or else we would sink deeper.

I think it's a great idea to join a local women's group but I have not been able to find one. When I googled it, of course The Women's Institute came up - the irony.

And yes to someone upthread saying that somehow it is now apparently perfectly fine for a group of masked men in black to harass and threaten a group of peaceful women - it's just so dystopian.

If I think about it too much, I find it genuinely terrifying that we're in a society that now permits young masked males to scream abuse at middle aged women for meeting.

I find it mind blowing that to say 'you can't change sex' is in any way controversial.

I found it appalling that our institutions - the police, schools, NHS swallow the lie and will positively take action which has the potential to seriously harm harm women and children.

I find it abhorrent that big pharma are making a fortune from experimenting on young children and feeding babies chemical secretions from male breasts and it's celebrated.

Just because you know clothes are just cloth, makeup us face paint and sex can't be changed.

I genuinely wish I could suspend my disbelief & get on the TWAW train but it just will not compute. On any level.

@Catiette

For me, the hardest lesson has been how susceptible people are to authoritarian thinking, & how easily women are being othered & dismissed. To watch this happening actually in the name of granting rights to another group, under the guise proud progressiveness - & that not only is that irony not perceived, but our concerns are actively framed as bigotry - has been, frankly, a terrifying revelation. I really mean that. It's scary as heck.

And so, too, how vulnerable our hard-won rights seem to be.

This, linked with what @LightlySearedontheRealityGrill says about the very visible misogyny now, especially online, but also in the way being female is erased except in pornography, sex work, and surrogacy, is what has made me depressed and despondent and very very frightened.

But I am also worried, more widely, about the arrival of a new Age of Endarkenment where logic, critical thought, open courteous debate and even the belief in any commonly accepted set of facts are getting increasingly rare.

This is linked to the destruction of agreed definitions in language and also driven by it, but it's something wider and more diffuse than that, and makes conversations with those who have opposite views nearly impossible. It's not coming from only one political camp, either, as far as I can tell.

I dont think being GC is what effects my mental health, its seeing the rampant misogyny that is so embedded in our society that I find devastating. Once you see it, you see it everywhere, in everything. The trans male privileges movement is just one aspect of that. And so many women, particularly younger ones are completely in its thrall, its most ardent defenders in some cases. But I live my life on my own terms entirely, with only myself to answer to, so in that sense my mental health is protected.

It's the NHS's 'Annexe B' I'm afraid of, @LonginesPrime (I think you are a wonderful poster btw).

When I have the energy, I will challenge it.

Being GC isn't having a negative effect on your mental health any more than you knowing the earth isn't flat or that things stick to it because of gravity. Its other people's bullying that is the problem.
But if you know something is untrue, or even wrong and harmful, going along with it would also have a negative effect on your mental health. You'd feel like you were 'undercover', and live in constant fear of being found out.

@NegevNights I know we compare the TRAs to a religion and there are some similarities. But this ideology is like religion sans the good bits.

Like forgiveness, compassion, redemption. I get the JWs coming round and we disagree on pretty much everything. But they never tried to get me fired. Or told my friends I am a bigot.

In the context of what @NegevNights says, I should add that of course I recognise that there IS an immediate concrete impact in those senses & in so many others relating to women's rights (&, of course, it doesn't get much more literally concrete than the ramifications for children & teens).

I think what I mean is just that blissful ignorance/denial seems viable to so many people in part because it feels safer that way - physically less threatening, emotionally less distressing, mentally less disorientating. But the harm is there, even if you feel able or determined to close your eyes to it. And I won't. Which, yes, OP, can be very difficult.

For me, the hardest lesson has been how susceptible people are to authoritarian thinking, & how easily women are being othered & dismissed. To watch this happening actually in the name of granting rights to another group, under the guise proud progressiveness - & that not only is that irony not perceived, but our concerns are actively framed as bigotry - has been, frankly, a terrifying revelation. I really mean that. It's scary as heck.

And so, too, how vulnerable our hard-won rights seem to be.

But gender critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act too!

Maya Forstater was just awarded over £100k by an employment tribunal for the discrimination she suffered as a result of her gender critical beliefs.

And remember that the protection of philosophical and religious beliefs under the Equality Act extend to a lack of any of those beliefs, so you're protected from discrimination for having a lack of belief in gender ideology too.

There have been times when I have seriously thought of setting up some kind of religious order, to be free of the risk of 'men who say they are women' coming anywhere near me, especially now I'm getting on a bit and being treated for medical problems. Religious orders seem to be be pretty bullet-proof in terms of EA2010 Exceptions?

I'm OK with male doctors and HCPs, and I'm OK with male rabbis / priests; but what I'm really not OK with are 'men who say they are women' wanting me, my body and my mind as a prop. And I don't need female practitioners collaborating in this crap. It's exhausting.

Did you ever see the interview that a black female intersectional feminist did with Rachel Dolezal?

Fascinating. The loathing the feminist had for Dolezal was palpable, ABSOLUTELY NO WHITE PERSON could ID as black, ZERO POSSIBILITY they could experience what it is to be black, to be descended from slavery etc.

But she has NO PROBLEM with a man identifying as a woman, here misogynist male supremacist attitudes have informed the miserable life experiences of natal women AND men who identify as women.

And so, trans racialism not permitted, but transgenderism very much is.

Because accepting that those two things are equivalent would prevent men from doing what they want.

My weekly offline > FWR-catch-up-treat has also helped me to realise why some people seem so surprised by, ignorant of or indifferent to what's happening. I took a 6-week break from it all recently, &, as it faded into the background, felt how very easy it would be just to carry on in blissful ignorance myself by never returning to the debate.

And this did lead me to wonder, Am I actually justified in being so concerned? Is it such a big deal after all? I mean, these issues aren't impacting on me in any immediate or concretely meaningful way when I don't seek them out...

But then I realised that, for me, this is analogous to women's enfranchisement: when we didn't have the vote, day-to-day life trundled on as usual, too. We didn't feel any different, act any differently, labour under tangible minute-by-minute harms per se, did we? (I mean, we did, in ways, obviously, but you know what I mean: being disenfranchised was background noise, or the water we swam in). But would anyone now dare to say that not having the vote "wasn't a big deal", or "it's not hurting you, so why are you bothered"? The vote was - is - utterly fundamental, but in an abstract, intellectual way some couldn't access, others couldn't afford to engage with (time, money, security, whatever), & many found too troubling to access (if that doesn't sound a bit arrogant).

I've actually found this quite a useful way to explain to people why I care about it so deeply.

I think gender ideologists are basically in a hate group. Becoming properly aware of another hate group, and the damage they're doing to oppressed women is depressing. Especially when you find that friends who you thought were genuinely open minded, liberal and caring are basically happy to throw women's rights down the pan.

Why is it OK to pretend to be a woman but its not OK to pretend to be black.

FWIW, I find it helps to put boundaries around when I engage with these issues, &, specifically, this forum! My posting history probably reflects that I aim to stay entirely off it for about 2/3 of the week, then spend a weekend day or two catching up. It creates a nice rhythm to the week, as I do enjoy the browsing & thought-provoking arguments. But it also means that that uncomfortable angry consciousness of what's going on is lifted for the majority of the week - & that when I do engage, I'm able do so properly, with time & mental space to process what I'm reading, to mitigate it by going for walks & seeing friends & also to, increasingly, combine it with some small piece of action (eg. sending a letter) so my weekly update becomes a teeny-tinily concrete & worthwhile engagement - as opposed to just doom-scrolling! 😂

Fortunately all of my friends are horrified by what is going on and are supportive and most of my DH’s family (I don’t have any immediate family), with the exception of one well meaning but completely “be kind” aunt who I avoid.

However, it still has taken a great personal toll. I don’t trust people the way I used to. I do as much as I can in the background, and often that means getting exceptionally patronising and condescending email responses which wears you down. I have to distance myself from it all, otherwise I would probably break.

I did a stint with a therapist but after a while realised I didn’t want to talk about it in therapy- it didn’t solve anything, it didn’t give me better coping mechanisms or whatever. I have found going to the gym is a much better answer (and I have NEVER been a gym person!)

There is light at the end of the tunnel. If you look online there are tens of thousands of people looking in horror at the transitioning of children with all the psychological and health damage this causes and aghast at what's happening with women's sport, drag queens and toddlers etc. - hundreds of thousands, probably millions.

How this will pan out in the long run I have no idea but the tide is turning and we're really not alone.

I think it's not so much the beliefs but people's reactions in your case.

If I'd had what you'd had it would affect my MH too. Sorry you've had that OP, let's hope things get better.

@NegevNights he's 23 and totally captured by this ideology. His housemates and partner are all trans. They all met at university and now live in a bubble.

Universities are prime recruitment places where it must be very difficult to be GC. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have encouraged him to go straight into work and skip uni entirely.