What brought you here?

Late to the party here but I think I commented on a similar thread some months ago.
I’ve been on MN since DS was small, and have drifted in and out. I’ve always liked MN’s general no nonsense, even take no prisoners, intelligent, funny approach to life, and it’s refreshing and reassuring to know there’s this online community of women with common sense.
Ive always considered myself a feminist - I’m Gen X, over 50 now, grew up in the 70s/80s, read Susan Faludi’s Backlash as a student in the early 90s and hated the whole “empowered” ladette nonsense. I’ve been very enthusiastic and liberated about sex but not to the extent that culture has validated women’s right to take their clothes off compared to men’s seeming right to remain clothed in the same situations. I’m very eye-rolly about it. The older you get, the worse it gets.
Then MN really educated me about feminism based on motherhood, the importance of validating the mother baby bond, of valuing child rearing. I was obviously a mother myself by then and although I was in a senior position in work and therefore insulated from most consequences (I was the higher earner at home too), I could see the impact on other women all around me. When I was growing up motherhood wasn’t valued, it was all about having a career. My feminism became more, well, women centred, instead of being about getting on in the world of work and money and men.
Around 2018 I became the lead in a work DEI group. I led a lot of work on equal pay, equal bonuses and improving maternity benefits and shared parental leave. We had a LGBT strand and they started pushing Stonewall and used the “most vulnerable” narrative a lot. I found “most vulnerable” difficult to swallow because I can think of a lot of categories who are truly vulnerable and most of them are children and young women. I started to read more about it. Like many others I struggled to get it past my common sense “surely not” filter but once I accepted that this lot were serious I became much more cynical and much more combative. I left that employer is couple of years ago so didn’t have to fully engage with the bullshit anymore although I never validated it and the tide had started to turn, we had conversations about conflicting rights. Last I heard they had decided to ditch Stonewall.
Like others I read the JKR essay (true role model!) and followed some of the cases on here. It adds up doesn’t it. I sigh more than I did.
Sport particularly winds me up. I am a runner and the Park Run nonsense does my head in. The Olympics does my head in, Lia Thomas made me angry. Thankfully some sports bodies now know better. But it’s not correcting itself fast enough.
And yes, the language manipulation - oh boy. In the last year I have read two books that are all about freedom of speech and conscience in very different circumstances- Wolf Hall, and Life and Fate. Tudor England, and Stalinist Russia. In both your life and family depended on saying and “believing” the right things. The echoes are chilling, and illuminating.

I'm finding everyone's stories fascinating. Great thread, @CyclingSam.

I'm another permanent migrant from the other forum already mentioned, although I've had an account on MN since DC (now teens) were infants so I could read, lurkily, about parenting stuff.

I didn't start regularly posting on MN until Brexit, when I found the relative plurality of views here more stimulating than the near-complete agreement on my "main" forum.

Spending more time on MN then led to my discovering FWR, reading what was going on, and my eyebrows gradually disappearing up into my hairline. As it became clear that MN was practically the only place on the internet where women could properly discuss the actual rights and needs of actual women, it was a no-brainer to completely cut ties with the other forum, when things went nuclear over there.

NB: I've always been a reality-based sex-is-binary-and-real gender-atheist, so that hasn't changed, but I am eternally grateful to the magnificent women of FWR for really educating me on all the issues.

I'm not I'm talking about why the good outcome of trying to minimise homophobia might have led to the bad outcome of not reporting about people being trans

A lot of "transphobia" in men is actually homophobia

But also a lot of trans ideology is homophobia. So I'm not sure you can use it as an argument for one position being prioritised over the other.

I don't agree with what's happened regarding reporting on trans people so let's illustrate the principle I'm talking about with another example.

There is a difference between privacy and "censorship". Press regulations were designed to protect people's privacy. Sexuality, relationships, private medical issues all deemed to be subject of privacy laws.

It is possible to argue the privacy laws have had unintended consequences and I'd argue what happened with Huw Edwards showed that it does. But equally I think most people would think its reasonable for some things to be private. Especially given homophobia, racism etc.

It's not in the nature or history of the democratic West to censor factual information in case it leads to someone objecting to it so much that they consider breaking the law. If that were the case, then almost anything could be censored on those grounds.

In any case, I don't see how falsely reporting a male rapist to be female, or omitting factual information on the deleterious and disabling effects on children of puberty blockers, could reasonably be said to lead to "rampant homophobia, gay murders, and terror attacks against gay people".

Because of the previous period of rampant homophobia, gay murders, and terror attacks against gay people maybe? (E.g. Admiral Duncan).

A lot of "transphobia" in men is actually homophobia and I think its easy to forget how risky being gay was until fairly recently.

Yes. I genuinely find quite alarming that mainstream media sources in a Western country are willing to censor words, news and manipulate language to the extent that has happened with the trans thing.

Obviously censorship has happened in the Western media a lot in cases of national importance such as WW2 when the UK newspapers censored the reality of the breakdown in law and order in London during the blitz. But I would say there were clear national security reasons for doing this and they were justified for the greater good.

I honestly do not understand why anyone ever thought it was justifiable in the case of transgenderism.

My post has been restored, which is a relief because that was a lot.of typing. Still no clue why it was hidden - anyone spot what the trigger word was?

Ah, I also have background with E. Europe, so like you picked up on that stuff for the same reasons you did. Once you see, you cannot unsee...

I'm finding this thread really fascinating and I'm enjoying reading all the stories of how we got here.

Can I also say as a side note, I'm finished an online conference I was at today to do with my work and my god academia is really mental now isn't it??? Without being too outing; they are all so enthusiastic about the madness of this. These are meant to be clever people? It's all so bizarre to me. I'm glad I've joined online as I think I would have struggled to keep my expression neutral with the amount of total nonsense that's being spouted.

It's interesting that as many people have arrived here because of what they did read, as because of what they weren't allowed to read.

(mangled sentence, I know)

@Herawouldntstandforthis and @hihelenhi like you I found the sheer scale of the censorship and misinformation and obfuscating to be telling in itself.

As my parents and grandparents lived under communism and so I've always been told that anything that has to be censored to that degree is probably true

Also another red flag with my 'victim of communism' hat on was the twisting of language. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, when the powers that be have to start making language mean something different, and don't explicitly explain why, and moreover pretend that the new meaning has always been the true meaning, then that's usually a good sign that something malign is happening.

So when I started seeing lady-dique / her penis / cervix havers, that was a sign to me that something was up and start investigating.

As I am over 60 and child free I am actually very new to MN! As someone else also said I cut my feminist teeth in the early 80's but my recent interest has been peaked by a few things, Kathleen Stock, JKR, womens sport, and Glinner! Really got a lot out of these threads so far. 😃

Here's another that I'm tempted to try
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3423086-Dr-Jane-Claire-Jones-hilarious-terrifying-true-blog-post-today

Clearly not. Weird.

Was it 'mantrum'?

Interesting. I have no idea what I said to get autohidden. Are we not allowed to discuss Mary Poppins?

There were many steps.

My interest in feminism was sparked by Glynis Johns and the Sherman brothers. Quite how I got to from there to the real story of the suffragettes I was too young to remember, but that song was what started me on the trail of womens rights. (There was brief wobble in the early 90s, when the LibFems almost persuaded me that I was an 'equalitist' rather than a feminist, but then I hit the sexism of the world of work and got over it). It was a firmly empirical feminism - based on stats, data and experience. I didn't come.to the theoretical and philosophical side until later.

That came when I discovered a talkboard I'd been on for ages had a feminism thread. Under a disguised title, hidden in the 'books' section. I hung about on there for a bit, picking up a large to-read pile when I realised that in jumping from Wollstonecroft to Pankhursts to the present I'd missed a lot of background discussion.Then we started asking why we were hiding, and I decided it was ridiculous - so I started a thread with 'feminism' in the title in a more obvious part of the site. At which point I learnt the meaning of 'pile on', a significant chunk of posters left, and the whole moderation system had to be revamped to hold the site together.

The addition of gender criticism to my beliefs is shrouded in the mists of time. I had a fairly ungendered 70s upbringing at a progressive school, but at some point I assume I was told 'Girls don't ...' or 'Only boys do...' and my natural stubbornness was activated. So the idea of sex defining social role, or of it being defined by clothes or interests, was something I saw as ridiculous for decades before the concept of trans came into it. I became aware of gender criticism as a wider movement through Let Toys be Toys and Let Clothes Be Clothes.

Life got in the way and I wandered away from the feminism thread for a bit. Then I'm not quite sure of the order of events that followed - the pussy hat controversy, man Friday, the Green Party designating women as 'non-men', a pile of increasingly insane things popping up on Twitter - an accumulation of bizarre events that meant I went back to the feminsim thread to ask WTF? and discovered it been forcibly split in two, much like.the feminism board here. Discussion was rigorously coralled and policed - you'd all recognise the pattern of reporting, goading and drive-by scolders. But even that wasn't enough for the site owner, who had the mother and father of all mantrums and threatened to shut the whole thing down unless the vile transphobes were defenestrated. So (along with Elderberry, Sinner, duc and some others) I jumped before I was pushed. And landed here.

I'd been on a women only group on Livejournal many years ago, and they decided to let trans women in. And another woman wrote a highly pretentious post stating she was leaving the group as she was transitioning and was now no longer a woman! The transwomen - four that I recall - were all very opinionated, looking back, in a very male way. But I was still in my "be kind" phase and dismissed any reservations.

A meet up of the group was arranged and the two transwomen who attended dominated the group in a way that made me very uneasy. I never attended any other meetups.

I think it was Lily Madigan that peaked me, along with Yaniv and Magdalen Burns. As a PP said, once the scales have fallen from your eyes you can't unsee it.

Oooohhh man that clip is evergreen for me. I re-watch it when I need a pick-me-up.

KJK was magisterial and magnificent. The whole thing was so embarrassing for Harrop. Harrop in that interview was basically the intellectual equivalent of that famous scene in the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob is trying to walk forwards but at every step he steps on a rake and hits himself in the face

It has been extremely painful to see the misinformation coming from formerly trusted places like the Guardian and the BBC (or rather, an awful lot of "misdirection through omission")

Hasn't it just. It just ideologically driven agenda now and not news. I can't believe for an instant that people are not aware of the key issues that concern women in which case they have made a choice that actively harms people and I will never forgive them or let them quietly forget the role they played.

It has been extremely painful to see the misinformation coming from formerly trusted places like the Guardian and the BBC

it really has.

I used to enjoy the BBC being called auntie.

It gave the impression of being a benevolent friendly person with biscuits.

Now I think it's an ideologically driven liar who thinks women should be props and validation tools.

Just went down a rabbit hole of old threads. Would be interesting to see how a thread with this title went in 2024

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3500657-Can-transsexuals-truly-be-allies-to-women?page=1

(It's a very interesting thread)