What brought you here?

Munroe Bergdorf.

I've been on MN for nearly 2 decades under various different usernames, but it was JK Rowling and the Body Shop during the pandemic. I'd started to be a bit perturbed in about 2018 by the peculiar things my then early teenage DD was being taught at her Stonewalled single-sex school, but that was the tipping point.

Glinner. I’d worked with and been friends with a lot of LGB ppl and worked with old school transexuals who never expected everyone to agree they were actual women

I’d always been very be kind/how does it hurt you to call them she but then the dial shifted and shifted and I realised I was being asked to believe these men had become actual women and that seemed utterly mad

i read Glinner and like him felt that utter baffled desperation and confusion as person after person I had hithero respected said with a straight face “TWAW” and meant that we all had to behave as if TW were literally women. In fact not only that we had to agree they were even more oppressed than actual women

glinner mentioned MN and the rest is history

I'm fairly old - an old school feminist from 1980s. So when DS1 who is gay, started spouting about terfs with such open hatred, I thought hang on, I have heard all this from the mouths of entitled males before: shut your mouth, do as I say, comply or you are an aberration of nature, your protected space is abnormal unnecessary and I need to violate it (I remember men at uni storming a women's group once because they thought we were chanting hate spells against them. I kid you not. We were dancing.)

So I'd seen it all before and I didn't buy it for a moment just because the men wore dresses. I knew we weren't the problem. I had an extremely heated discussion with DS about not bullying and coercing women after which he showed some respect and understanding.

Aimee Challenor and his sex offender father. Then Rhys/Rachel McKinnon and Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv.

Having issues with paid, non-familial surrogacy and being made to feel like a monster for worrying about women being treated like breeding dogs.

Hags by Victoria Smith

I was booted off another site, where I'd been part of the community for more than 20 years. The topic could only be discussed on one thread, and eventually even that became intolerable for the owner. It was at least the third wave of expulsions of feminists (I feel slightly ashamed that I didn't leave earlier). Some of those women, who had brought their feminism here (but still stayed on that site for other subjects), advised this as an alternative meeting and discussion space.

It is very interesting how much more relaxed the rules here are than they were at the back-end of 2022 - this place was so much more free than where I'd come from, but still very hedged about.