What have you learned from the trans takeover

I think you are right about this. There are complex factors, and probably not the same for everyone. This is almost self-evident if you look at the rang of historical behaviours, and there are lots of other solid reasons to doubt it is all one innate thing for each person.

And you are certainly right that the science is not settled. That has been a major mantra, but it is simply false, we do not know that, and never did. It was adopted because some people thought that it would be useful politically.

And what we have now is a situation where a great man people seem to think that any politically useful mantra should go unquestioned. This has been a very dangerous way of thinking and we are now reaping the results.

Most people don’t appreciate just how much stronger the average man is compared to the average woman.

I’ve learned that, in recent years, our hard-won rights are being eroded across the globe. And the trans situation is only part of it. Just a few examples:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have banned women and teenage girls from taking part in many aspects of daily life, restricting them from attending secondary school and universities, working in many jobs, and even moving freely outside of the home.

In China, the government has silenced feminists as it tightens social control, imposing strict censorship policies, including by banning feminist terms and content they see as “harmful speech” or “inciting conflict between the genders.”

In Poland, the government under the ruling party has actively targeted women’s rights activists and organizations, smearing them and punishing them for their activism. The government has spearheaded retrogressive laws and policies, obstructing efforts to address gender-based violence, and using its politically compromised Constitutional Tribunal to undermine women’s and girls’ reproductive rights.

In the United States, women and girls are facing increasing restrictions to their sexual and reproductive health and rights as the Supreme Court and multiple states have banned or heavily restricted access to legal abortions.

South Korea’s government has been considering a series of anti-feminist initiatives, including a pledge to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Disregarding the harsh realities that women and girls face, the term “women” is being eliminated from policies that initially addressed gendered discrimination, such as violence against women.

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March in honor of International Women’s Day has been the target of extremist backlash by the Pakistani Taliban, which have previously threatened women’s rights activists and the march’s organizers, demanding they be prosecuted for blasphemy.

I’ve also learned that whilst I could never have been Miss World… DS could be. What a world we live in?

I’ve learned that Germaine Greer’s statement that “women fail to understand how much men hate them” is much more accurate than I wanted it to be. Lots of men despise women and fewer of them are hiding it as it becomes socially more acceptable

Exactly this.

That while the left make all the noise and the right make all the money, women and children get shafted.

That women are dying unnecessarily in childbirth. In the UK. Due to appalling care and conditions. That this disgusting truth is treated as less important than pronoun badges.

And fuck me, were the Spartacus threads really in 2016?

I hear you. My only reply is that whether you're born gay, or environmental factors lead to you becoming gay, being gay is an objective phenomenon, attraction to the same sex.

Trans OTOH is a pure impossibility. One cannot change sex. In the grand scheme, gender is pure subjectivism, but there's no objective changing sex.

The more the trans lobby pushed this, the more I realised it was BS, the legendary Helen Joyce confirming this.

Just how could those in their ivory towers, their grammar school/private school/European finishing school/Russell Group uni/Cambridge Oxford elite educations, their widespread reading and travelling, their awareness of history and women's struggles and hard-fought rights, their knowledge of child development especially brain chemistry, and 101 other relevant things...how could they deny knowledge, natural justice, common sense, child safety...to pitch themselves to this particular wagon?

I think some of it stems from the notion (that started doing the rounds a few years before gender identity ideology in its current form took hold) that people are born gay and that's that.

As a lesbian, I did wonder at the time if that was definitely scientifically proven beyond all doubt, as I feel my instincts and lots of anecdotal evidence (including my own childhood and other factors that I strongly suspect might be relevant to my sexuality personally) suggest to me that while there might be a genetic susceptibility to homosexuality, I don't think it's that far-fetched to believe that very early childhood can influence sexual orientation too in some cases.

Furthermore, genetic predisposition and environmental factors aren't mutually exclusive when it comes to something as complex as psychology and sexual orientation, so I didn't see this as particularly controversial. Until I gingerly voiced this opinion to others in LGB circles and got lambasted in an almost identical way to the way gender critical people do nowadays. This was a few years before the gender identity stuff took off.

I was firmly told that "the science was settled" (I think it was something about penguins or someone's uncle or something) and that I was completely incorrect and terribly homophobic to question whether gay people are all definitely born gay or whether environmental factors might also play a part in some cases.

Despite thinking "well, I'm no psychologist but even I can see various potential patterns in the large number of gay people I know and their stories", I reconciled this personally on the basis that the "gay people are born gay" narrative was deemed necessary and very effective in the fight to end horrific gay conversion therapy practices. Obviously, because you can't change it if it's just how people come out of the womb, whereas if there's even an inkling that it might have been influenced by early childhood, parental attachment, etc, then it gives weight to the idea that perhaps it can be changed by conversion therapy. (To clarify, I don't believe conversion therapy works and I personally think that sexual orientation is probably fixed as whatever it ends up being by early childhood at the latest).

Also, it's not like anyone nowadays is going to study the causes of homosexuality, as what would be the point other than to argue for conversion therapy or to suggest that being gay is less desirable and/or problematic? I don't care that we don't know why people are gay, but it did bother me that people were adamant that we were definitely born this way, as it made me wonder where that left me if that's actually true - It made me wonder whether there were two subclasses of gay people and whether, if my homosexuality was rooted in my early childhood attachment issues as I believed, conversion therapy might actually work for me after all.

Incidentally, it's similar to how when non-trans people tell me they're definitely "cis" and that they feel their gender identity for themselves, it made me question whether there was something wrong with me if that's what all people, trans or otherwise are experiencing, because I don't feel mine.

I can't have been the only gay person who had this experience of being told to shut up and just support gay rights when questioning the science behind the mantra. So I learned that "gay people are born gay" was a helpful message in the fight for gay rights, even though I didn't take it to be literally true. i never really said it myself as I can't personally justify it and I think the science doesn't seem completely settled - I just stopped questioning it as it did seem to be a helpful narrative that advanced gay rights. I just saw it as a potentially useful shortcut to convince people that you can't choose not to be gay, no matter how hard you try.

When ideas such as TWAW came around, I initially viewed these in a similar way to the way I'd got on board with "gay people are born gay". I thought no-one meant it literally but that it was more of a idea, around treating people with respect, and suchlike. That's how most LGB people I know took it at first too.

Stonewall et al knew exactly how to sell a phrase like this as they'd already done it incredibly successfully with "some people are gay - get over it" (which is the same message as "gay people are born gay"). Plus, gay people like me were already fully on board with the notion that even if you don't believe a statement is literally true, it can still be a very helpful mantra in explaining a minority group's position to the general public who don't understand "us" at all.

I also think another factor is that gay rights have only come about relatively recently, and the times of misunderstanding, suspicion and horrific homophobic discrimination are so fresh in people's memories that it's very easy to draw false parallels with how gay people were treated very recently. It's still very raw and painful for many LGB people, and heterosexual people still experience a lot of collective guilt for all the prejudice, which often colours their judgment massively on trans issues.

Obviously these aren't the only factors in why intelligent people jumped on the gender train so quickly and willingly. But I do think that given that the LGB community and their existing ally base were used as vehicles to spread the trans message initially, the conditions were ripe for this to go exactly the way it has.

I have learned: that Twitter is dangerous to women; that law is complicated and sometimes you need the law to say the opposite of what you think you'd want it to say to achieve the effect you want; to think very carefully about my politics and about my own beliefs and assumptions; to look at the evidence; to neither dismiss nor accept people's arguments on the grounds of who they are or what else they believe.

And finally I have learned that there will be no quick fix or sudden turn around; but if we all keep going then step by step we will get there.

Just gardened for Sybil Ruth.

How many individual women and organisations are going to have to fight this through court, with all the expense and stress and months of life involved, and get a clear legal judgement that proves that they were right and well within the law and the other party weren't, before something actually changes?

The results keep coming in. The batshit keeps on rolling. Today apparently, the met have decided that threatening violence is no biggie so everyone trot on. Of course we all know that what they meant was exclusively men threatening women is no biggie: if women do it I suspect PC Gull will be launched at high speed. To embarrass himself and CPS yet again and drag a woman through hell in order to months later admit they can't take it to court because it wouldn't stand up. But she's a very naughty girl anyway and they hope having stressed the living crap out of her she won't do anything like say no to men again.

Where the fuck is some government? Where have all the grown ups gone?

Of course. I just mean COVID seems to have in short order removed a lot of remaining barriers and judgements. Coupled with a unique never to be repeated (I hope) bunker period where kids dove very deep, and certain males became supremely bold.

I don't think we can seperate this from the George Floyd moment, and attempts to deconstruct our past. I feel this tearing down moment has only emboldened the bad men in our midst, and teens sense of dissociation from society (they hate the past, they hate us for being part of that past).

I'm an older woman, in my 70s, volunteering locally and acting as trustee for community assets and organisations. I've worked and had a family, looked after aging parents and ill husband. A former Guardian-reading feminist, trade union activist. I despair at the lack of sense shown by so many people who should know better, and how hard those affected by this must fight for justice.

I came on here to bump the cause of Ruth Sybil, 63 year old writer and editor, who had her precarious contract with Cornerstones terminated because of a Twitter post in which she stated what my generation learned in school: sex is determined at conception and is immutable..(Our lot knew James/Jan Morris's treatments didn't effect a magical transformation, but showed him/her respect. We were kind, if you like.)

Ruth wants to take her case to the Employment Tribunal. There is a thread on here, Gardening for ET - loss of work in Art for GC views, if you are interested.
To answer OP's question: I've learned women must keep on keeping on supporting those who need us - especially (vulnerable )women, girls and children.

I've been thinking thru it, for a long time now. I've reconciled to the narcissists: the Suzzzeee Edeeees, Z Cup Canadian teachers, and Mika Minios, the dangerous ones: the Adam Brysons, this "punch a TERF in the face!" Sarah character and similar others.

I get what's happening with them as phenomena, pushing boundaries, visibility, the limits of acceptability and public acceptance/pushback.

I even "get" Mermaids, it's a pressure group pure and simple. And any number of similar bodies.

What's been hardest to reconcile, and I'm only just doing so with the help of Helen Joyce, Eliza Mondegreen, Jo Bartosh and Victoria Smith in particular, is the elites societal contagion. We can see how it's happened to teens, but I'd cut them a ton of slack.

Just how could those in their ivory towers, their grammar school/private school/European finishing school/Russell Group uni/Cambridge Oxford elite educations, their widespread reading and travelling, their awareness of history and women's struggles and hard-fought rights, their knowledge of child development especially brain chemistry, and 101 other relevant things...how could they deny knowledge, natural justice, common sense, child safety...to pitch themselves to this particular wagon?

I believe I've got a possible rational explanation, more mundane than I thought was the case when I was struggling in my WTF???!!! phase.

It shows both how brittle and non reflective the West has become, how toxic social media is for all minds, and how tribal and stupid people can become, especially those who claim they're non tribal and intelligent.

Having extricated myself from one long term herd and a more recent one, and the purity spirals associated, and seeing this "madness of elites crowds" as the worst one that's ever existed, the cognitive dissonance is jarring.

Trans activism had a stranglehold on reality long long before Covid.

I remember having many wtf moments at work at the takeover of women’s spaces, awards etc well before covid. Working in tech it first became a problem for me nearly 20 years previously. I noticed TW now outnumbered women in my speciality more than 10 years prior to covid. I left a job just before covid because a TW at work was showing way too much sexual interest in me and with them allowed to go into women's toilets there was nowhere I could go to get away.

MN FWR was having plenty of discussions and what we said was being controlled and censored long before covid.

Women were getting thrown off twitter for saying men couldn’t become women long before covid.

I remember complaining about males using women’s toilet in tech companies more than 30 years ago (a mere 5 years after I was still having to go to different buildings to find the few women’s toilets).

That truth really is stranger than fiction!

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction etc. I’ve read about all kinds of alternative worlds, alternative histories, life on different planets or in different dimensions, beings of multiple sexes or none at all, societies built on every premise a writer’s imagination could come up with. I’ve certainly read stories in which the inhabitants of a world could change sex.

But I have never read, or seen on film, a story in which a political movement (on planet Earth, where mammals can’t change sex) has persuaded people to believe humans can change sex, and enforced this belief pretty much worldwide.

I wonder if it’s because that is very hard to believe?

I’ll happily suspend my disbelief in time travel, supernatural powers etc, for the sake of enjoying the story, as long as the characters behave believably. But believing a man has become a woman because he says do? No. I accept that people believe in their own delusions. But they don’t usually believe other people’s delusions of this kind.

What’s psychologically plausible is that most people pretend to believe because they are scared of losing their job, social status etc. But that doesn’t explain how the ideology took such powerful hold in the first place.

That the majority of people are both stupid and cowardly.

That the majority of "journalism" is totally untrustworthy, biased and peddling utter lies.

That our great institutions, like the NHS, BBC, Parliament, Police, Armed Forces, universities etc are WEAK and have allowed, nay ENCOURAGED, parasites to invade them and set about on their mission to destroy 51% of the population.

That the majority of men hate women in a quiet, under the surface way, the kind that goes unnoticed, but given the right circumstances, these same men uncloak themselves, proudly proclaiming their hatred. To rounds of applause, often from young women.

That I have nobody to vote for.

That my own government saw fit to allow rapists to claim womanhood.

That my own government, ran by a woman, hates women so breathtakingly much that I amount to nothing.

That I am hated, for the crime of being born female. I grew up with the page 3 misogyny of the 70s and 80s, and this is the first time in my life that I know I am hated for being female.

That those that hate me include doctors, police officers, teachers, judges, lawyers, parliamentarians.

And I hate them right back.

Also, COVID rotted people's brains.
I went to the "Douglas Murray interviews Lionel Schriver" live event near Parliament with 1999 other people, literally just 12 months before the pandemic struck.

It seems like a century ago...the chat flitted from "trans, what's the deal?" to cultural appropriation, to affirmative action etc. The launch to Murray's "Madness Of Crowds" book.

It was the age before shutdown corroded our brains, before the explosion of George Floyd and BLM and Defund The Police, and of course before trans activism absolutely exploded.

I'm convinced that during COVID, so many young people went into their shells to only socialise and get info and opinions online on social media, and so many adult men felt this was their chance to break taboos all over the shop, weaponising overt and uncensored misogyny.

And the politics of the left went identarian toxic as the hate of the cisheteronormative patriarchy ramped up, racial and gender politics red in tooth and claw.

This then amongst many things created a giant divide amongst those feminists like Sarkar who saw trans rights as encompassing women's rights, and the rest of women who saw this new open aggressive trans misogyny, and the taking advantage of youth, as zero sum game.

COVID was the clincher. That Murray/Shriver talk, just four years ago, was a different world.

Younger people seem to think that 'gender identity' is really radical and rejecting of gender stereotypes. They seem to think that older women want to keep people in outdated and restrictive 'grooves' according to whether they are male or female.

This being information fed to them by activists who have an open agenda of separating them from trust in or connections to those with the life experience and intelligence to point out the issues with the batshittery they are being sold.

One of the most personally revolting parts of this to me is the experience of talking with zealots who state their claimed belief or take on facts. And you can explain, and explain, and evidence, and explain that no, 2+2 really does not equal 5. And you get a blank eyed stare and a repetition of the same batshit.

Anything that involves clinging to a fabricated reality over objectivity with this degree of denial and inability to think is not something that a society can tolerate ever escaping out of individual private free time.

I've also realised that each new generation doesn't seem to learn from the previous ones; or they certainly don't absorb the knowledge. They are compelled to repeat the same cycles, albeit in slighty different 'settings'.

Younger people seem to think that 'gender identity' is really radical and rejecting of gender stereotypes. They seem to think that older women want to keep people in outdated and restrictive 'grooves' according to whether they are male or female.

I also see how this has arisen from the kind of feminism which suggests that all differences between the sexes are socially constructed. I don't think they are. That doesn't mean, though, that all wo/men necessarily have a certain kind of preference or tendency - though the general patterns are definitely there.

So, in effect, this has made me question a lot of basic feminist tenets and orthodoxies too. I think there is something of a zeitgeist feel about this questioning - hence we see quite a few former radical feminists now re-assessing the whole project in the light of contemporary society. I'm thinking Mary Harrington, amongst others.

Along with other realisations, I now relaise how misogynistic a lot of gay men are, and gay culture is. That has been a big disappointment

1...I never ever thought I'd see an active anti-free speech movement in my lifetime, especially after buying the New Atheists t-shirts in the 90s. The chilling of Enlightenment norms is quite something to behold.

2...after most of my lifetime of being a typical male, being pretty dismissive of women's concerns, having this absolutely challenged by the trans movement, and realising not only was I wrong, but this movement is an existential threat to girls and women everywhere. And how I've done a screeching 180 handbrake turn in my attitudes.

3...reading some of the best discourses in favour of a worldview (Helen Joyce, Kath Stock, Eliza Mondegreen, Jo Bartosh, Victoria Smith, Mary Harrington, Janice Turner etc), and having my tiny mind blown by such gems as "trans isn't a trans rights movement, it's a mens rights movement", and "the New Atheists were just another bunch of alpha males" and "the cleverest, most intelligent, and seemingly most caring, people at the top of their trades are disproportionately the most stupid, the most close minded and the most dismissive of real and present danger and harms to the most vulnerable"

4...realising how cognitively dissonant it is to feel cast out of your typical tribe (I'm a BSc level senior therapist running two clinics with staff, and should be rubbing elbows with those cultural elites who believe in this crap, now extricating myself, realising I'm like an anti vaxxer to these people with my GC views, ostensibly lonely amongst the greater therapy and educated medical professions, and the TRA obsessed profession's full stop, yet realising how liberating it actually is to wave at them from across the bridge, realising the terrible group psychosis decision and badge of honour they've taken for themselves.

5...finally understanding concepts like herd mentality, purity spirals, realising I'd been prone to them, pulled myself out of all, and seeing these in close up detail re this phenomenon.

6...sadly concluding that after four decades of active voting, taking a big interest in politics, that my side cannot prioritise a principled position (no action on the EHCR advice, Sunak chickening out on declaring he has no belief a trans conversion ban should be law, lukewarm attitude to trans/changing gender in schools, allowing Stonewallification of our institutions) and Labour lock step with every other Western nation hellbent on bringing in Self ID, trans conversion bans, anti free speech laws to chill all dissent on trans, medicalising of youth...that I have noone to vote for.

7...millenia of societal change etc, and in 2023, so many are still prone to tribal patterns and magical thinking. In many ways, nothing has changed. Just the stakes are higher.

Sadly , the rise of gender ideology, has made me realise how some truly awful ideas , such as eugenics gained credence amongst intellectuals.

That western democracy (which I had thought was reasonably robust) is actually quite vulnerable.

That kindness to those who are different (which I approve of) can so easily tip into fetishising victimhood, (which so many young people seem to want s part of)

That people will say any old cr@p to avoid being criticised in front of others, however damaging it is to other people. That those in senior positions will close their eyes rather than do the right thing (BBC, Guardian and Keir Starmer in particular take the bow of shame).

That men and younger women despise older women and see them as lesser beings. That older women actually are strong and together are stronger still.

That some men are deeply alarming.

This, ever since I saw the demonising of Hillary by Sanders fans when she held exactly the same beliefs (and he supported the war in Iraq with weapons votes, and wrote a rape-apologist essay for which he has never apologised). And now this new iteration.

Free speech is critically important. Without it, democracies will die.

Some people are fucking cunning and will go to all sorts of lengths to get their way.

More people than I realised are legit unhinged.

You don't need to believe in God to be a raging puritan ready to tell everybody else what they MUST do and what they MUST NOT do. And a lot of people like certainty and fitting in, so will trot along behind mouthing all the mantras. Seriously, it has been a revelation as regards things like the witch trials of the mid-C17th.

Societies need structure, and individualism appears to be leading to an implosion of any sort of common standards of behaviour / consideration / basic humanity towards others.

Just how deep and widespread misogyny is in our culture. It has been a horrible awakening to see how many men (LRM, for example) really relish and seize a chance to put the boot in, and how many others are quieter about it but still thrilled to put us back in the box labelled 'support human'.

I have become very cynical about some public intellectuals (not helped by discovering a few utter charlatans in my own field of arcane knowledge, who get paid to spout crap). It has probably pushed me slightly to the right, as the left looks COMPLETELY batshit about this (rather than just patchily batshit).

I'm sure there is more.