How it started...how it's going...where it'll go...

I joined the UK Terf Wars in around 2012. In my recollection it took until 2017 for a strategy to emerge on how to effectively fight in the landscape that has been ruled by Stonewall, GIRES, etc who had embedded themselves into public policy and law.

Around 2017, groups like WPUK, FPFW and many others sprung up. Court cases began. A few more brave journalists began to write about it.

Every step was a little victory. It was proclaimed on a frequent basis that the tide was turning, but bit by bit women realised the size of the enemy and the degree to which it was embedded in the media, courts, Westminster, corporations and more, and we dug in for a longer fight.

The public were still unaware of what was going on. Sports was the turning point for the person on the street. One might have thought (and hoped) that sterilising children, attacking lesbians or locking up women with violent men might have done it, but in the end it was sports.

More groups sprang up, positioned across the political spectrum. And the tiny cracks in the dam became clearer.

No debate was dismantled. Push back from TRAs became ever more unhinged. You can't defend the indefensible.

So, has the tide turned? The tide has stopped rising.

I agree with this. The lies at the centre are too big to hide and, as you say, the general population still aren’t buying it and won’t as there’s no logic behind what is essentially, a power grab.

The depth to which it’s been embedded is horrendous though, and (I suspect) is the reason why you and I and others find it so psychologically overwhelming on realization. I do continue to believe it will fail eventually.

A couple of things I would add from my own timeline, as a previously captured lefty 80's born millennial.

Bruce Jenner and maybe also Conchita Wurst, all that hysterical celebration around 'coming out' as a woman/you can be a woman with a beard. At the time I wasn't paying much attention to the likes of the Kardashians and knew nothing about feminism (rejected the term wholesale, was a cool girl) but I reacted a little bit to the strangeness of it. My cognitive dissonance rattled slightly. However, I accepted it as just the next lovely Liberal thing to go along with.

JK Rowling was my route to enlightenment. As a huge HP fan being in that age bracket, all the fuss around her made me want to actually look at this and understand. And when you do that, well, there's just no coming back - my woke bubble was smashed open.

It is funny because she had annoyed me with her stance on Corbyn as at that point I was fully captured by the idea of a woke socialist utopia. Something I'd not been able to break out of intellectually since I saw the film Zeitgeist as a student in 2000. (Yep, embarrassing. But important to admit so we understand how the young are influenced.)

Then, I had a child. And it all actually started to matter to me personally rather than being an interesting political debate.

Just a few cultural milestones along my journey to reality acceptance.

I am also hopeful, but was on the wrong side during your early fighting. Thank you, feminists.

I haven't any wisdom to add to the thread but I just wanted to jump on and say I too feel the tanker is turning. I am grateful to the men who wade in to support women. People like Ricky Gervais and Glinner have been fearless in exposing the BS. I am no Andrew Neil fan but his recent pronouncements on the trans crap did get noticed. It would be a brave trans activist who was willing to go a round or two with Neil in front of the cameras. Like the Stonewall v Beth Rigby meltdown on steroids. Think of the support dogs.
I've been switched on to this nonsense for a few years but hadn't found this corner of MN until recently. I've been reading through the threads and making a mental note of businesses to boycott and celebs to admire. Matthew Wright good Jeremy Vine bad. Body Shop and Lush bad.
Happy to have found my tribe.

Yeah, the timing of the Isla Bryson was so sweet for sunlight

The pie thing is really important, because it's what shapes people's deep mental constructions around what a right actually is.

We don't often get into the deep questions about what we mean by rights, who "gives" them, what their nature is. Most of this is stuff people take for granted. But it makes a real difference to haw people think about managing them.

With regards to piggybacking on the gay rights movement, that's also true, and quite a few popularized elements there have been been important. In terms of slogans, ideas around identity, but also many people have conceptualized gay rights, along with certain forms of feminism, as saying that legal and social structures based on the nature of human bodies are illegitimate and immoral. This seems backwards when you think, of course homosexuality is about, in part, what kinds of bodies people have. But many people internalized the argument that reproductive role is basically an irrelevancy and it's wrong to base legal categories around bological realities. So who can marry, who can be on a birth certificate - the material reality is not the appropriate measure, but rather more abstract feelings about identity, social role, or equality.

You can make all kinds or arguments against that kind of thinking, but many many people believe it.

Yes to much of this, though it's also important to view this whole movement as piggybacking on the Lesbian/gay movement which partly explains why it took root so well (that and the ready funding):

Because the rights Lesbians and gays asked for in many ways did match the often-repeated argument that "rights are not a pie where you get a smaller slice if others get a slice, too", it was easy (if unthinking) to assume that the same would apply to trans rights. It takes time to understand (because it seems so impossibly dystopic) that the demands truly are for the whole world to redefine 'men' and 'women' (but really only 'women' so far) as mixed sex categories where entry is completely free (defined as inclusion) and not based on any requirements at all.

And it takes time to understand that trying to hold on to one's own embodied gender identity or meaning will, shockingly, now be interpreted as bigotry. In short, someone else wants to eat all the pie and I'm not allowed to complain, even when my female ancestors baked much of that pie with effort and sacrifices.

Recently the extreme demands of the most fervent activists have become much more obvious, and people not closely following the developments are becoming more informed. Sunlight.

(I didn't create the term The Age of Endarkenment, but read it somewhere, possibly in a different context. It seems to describe the current slide into tribal, religious, and quasi-religious world views in so many different fields, not just in gender politics pretty well.)

It is interesting to see someone else's perspective on this, but I do think it's not the whole picture. If you look at the violence, for example, the first incident I became aware of was when a trans activist assaulted Maria Maclachlan in September 2017. When it came to court, the judge reprimanded Maria for referring to the assailant as "he".

Throughout 2018, Woman's Place UK meetings were subject to violent threats and attempts to cancel meetings by harassing venues. Some of the venues did in fact cancel the meetings. There was also a bomb threat against one of the venues. WPUK took to holding meetings in secret - when the trans activists found out the venues, they used some really nasty intimidation such as banging on windows and shouting abuse and letting off smokebombs. Most of this didn't reach the media, but it shows that the TRAs were already adopting the vicious tactics that are now being exposed more widely.

I think the really big game changer was JK Rowling's intervention in the Maya Forstater case, which brought the topic to much wider public attention. In the US, the Lia Thomas case achieved something similar.

I feel the future is brighter but only through the hard work and perseverance of (mostly) females fighting inch by inch to protect their rights in the courts. UK looking particularly bright. Not helped when Stonewall is casting its influence even over the judiciary.

I always reference https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/ article from late 2018 for the run up to all this nonsense.

I, too, am grateful & made more hopeful because the argument is being picked up in more & more mainstream places. Its being discussed openly is what should've happened years ago - & then maybe things would not have progressed so far & so badly. I hope we are on the way back. I'm not sure what the settling down of society will look like: a quick sweeping of it all under the carpet of denial? Some permanent changes?

The thing which has been on the cards for a while is now happening as part of what might be called the death throes of this phase of ideological revolution: the urgent pushing of pedophilia as an acceptable form of sexual activity. One might see it as an extinction burst; or I believe the US phrase is a 'hail Mary pass'.

Some things are better for sure, positive signs. Even here in Canada, more people seem aware, though many are oblivious.

I am still worried about the bigger picture, which seems to me to be getting worse rather than better. Though again, I guess there are increasing signs of people rejecting it, but more and more institutional capture with EDI and such. I worry a lot about the universities, whether they will survive.

Interesting timeline. It’s good to read others’ perspectives.

I began to realize just how embedded it was a good long time before Lia Thomas, so that seems late to me. What I will say was that it certainly began to come more into wider consciousness during that period and (for me) that was one of several shocked moments when I realized many things were still going in the wrong direction.

Periodically, I think the tide has changed, then something else comes along. The latest (for me) was realizing banks are closing people’s accounts for “wrongthink”. I find that equally terrifying in general, and much more so on a personal level.

I keep hoping there will be a reversal and the shocks will stop. At least they are sometimes making the news now and mainstream comedians at the top level have picked up on it.

I feel we’re going in the right direction, but it’s going to take a long time to reverse. And then there are those in power, who seem to have a higher chance than average of having a transitioned child. That is going to be a very difficult situation to unpick.

Anyway, thanks again RealityFan and anyone else who’s given their perspective. Always interesting to hear how others are doing.

I think you come at it the same way as my OH. The incredulousness of it all as it ramps up bit by bit but the bits get so much bigger each time and still, the left holds the line.

You do have to ask what it will take.

Men are allowed to have an opinion on all this! The more the merrier in my opinion.

I always like reading hopeful posts like this. And I'm glad you're feeling better about things, Op. Sometimes this stuff makes me feel quite ill, overwhelmed and hopeless, and utterly furious at the injustice of it all. Thinking about it, I haven't felt that way for while. Maybe change is afoot?

I dream that it'll go out of favour overnight, like lobotomies. But I fear it is all going to take a very long time to unpick and walk back, because it's become so embedded in all of our institutions. I do believe we move closer to success every day, though. Especially when the TRAs speak and people [gestures vaguely outside irl] start to realise what batshittery is going on.

I enjoyed reading your hopeful post. 18 months ago I too felt very afraid. Unlike you I was very new to this subject so it was all a bit much to suddenly get it and then see just how bad things had gotten.

How things have changed since I think Isla Bryson within MSM. I certainly felt more hopeful after Maya's win.

I still think too many people don't understand the competing rights at play, freedom of speech, the extent of that banned three lettered acronym, solidarity for plain, boring old women...the list could go on.

Many of us have boarded this train at different stations and that is perfectly fine, given that we are all going to the same destination.

I got on very early, around 2010, when I first saw what recent university graduates in feminism were advocating, and when the erasure of women from language began on women's reproductive sites. It was pretty clear to me from the beginning that classical feminist thought, aimed at destroying as many gender stereotypes, sexist concepts of feminism, and oppressive gender roles was in direct opposition to the gender ideology view which prioritised the concept of 'gender' over sex in analysing women's status in this world.

But I initially thought this new school of thought would stay marginal and wouldn't have to be met face on. I was wrong about it. Later my worries increased by the beginning of what some call the new Age of Endarkenment where canceling people, distorting science, silencing debate and bringing struggle sessions and various cult-like concepts into progressive politics have become increasingly common.

Feminism now fights against two fronts, one from each side in politics, and this is helping the traditional misogynists in places such as Afghanistan and Iran, not just in the West where the erasure of women is still only linguistic.

I am so very tired. But hopeful about the new resistance and the end of the #nodebate with its forced mantras.