Does anyone else resent the gender/ TERF wars?

I work for a very captured Scottish organisation. I feel fear every time I'm asked to be part of an equality meeting with the team members from that team and in particular the head of the department. If they had any inclination that I'm not a true believer I'm 100% sure they'd find a way to put my job at risk. And I really love it and I feel valued. My team bar a few are all displaying pronouns in their signatures. I suspect the head of equality team is already twitching against me as I don't have pronouns in mine.

Women will always be considered sub human to certain men. It's very depressing.

I got it from the Crucible and a TV film based on that witch trial : 3 Sovereigns For Sarah.
And Thomas More's defence still doesn't work , alas.

I got that from Wolf Hall too!

(completely off toipic but gosh, Life and Fate is an absolute unit of a novel, but so much better than W&P - although i haven't given the latest translation of W&P a go yet)

In the last few years I have read a few books that have made me see this in a new light (stick with me here): the Wolf Hall series, and a WW2 epic called Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, often called the War and Peace of the 20thC.
I read them close together and at the same time as frequenting these boards and what stuck me was the commonality between the social and political environments they describe: group think, religion, blasphemy, right think and the power to denounce and be denounced (or cancelled as we call it now, I wonder how differentl it would be if we still said “denounce” would the penny drop I wonder?). In the 16thC it was wars of religion and one could not legally worship in one’s own vernacular language nor question the sacred presence of God in a communion wafer without the threat of dire consequences. In the 20thC in Russia you had to agree with what Stalin said was the truth or you could quite feasibly disappear and never be seen again. All of these things were just versions of stories that groups of people collectively agreed were The Truth and could not be questioned, and now we look back and think it was madness.

It opened my eyes somewhat. Not to the gender woo as I was already sceptical of that, but to the effect it has on society at large. When women lose jobs and livelihoods, lose titles and places in sport, get doxxed online and receive death threats, people (incl Glinner) lose entire careers - you can see the parallels. All because society decides that this is a story we now believe in. It’s scary.

I resent it. I struggle to stay quiet but know I would be unemployed very quickly.

It is surprising how many women don’t realise the privilege they have when they say they are fine sharing facilities with men, most don’t realise that affirmation and pandering about make up and clothing is providing wank fodder for trans identifying men.

The most disappointing one is a friend who worked in the prison system, has direct experience of the numerous vulnerable women, yet still actively virtue signals in support of trans identifying males.

Also disappointed that on IWD so many colleagues took the opportunity to fit in a statement about not only supporting women, but ‘other minorities and we should raise all women” with the trans subtext in there.

I wasn’t transphobic towards trans identifying males, until I had experience of them, their fetishes and understanding of what makes them tick. The worst thing that ever happened was preventing it being treated as the mental illness it actuaries.

I echo what everyone else has already said so well!

Yep, I resent that huge parts of society are taken up with this utter nonsense. I resent that it's the new secular orthodox quasireligion, to which complete obeisance is the only allowed path (even quietly keeping your head down often isn't enough). It's heartbreaking to see so many distressed and vulnerable people sucked in. It's infuriating to see nasty bullies using this as a Righteous stick to beat anybody who doesn't perform the rituals and chant the slogans.

I used to ‘be kind’…
But, four and a half years ago I gave birth to my beautiful twin boys. As expected, I had the usual comments such as ‘rather you than me’ ‘how will you manage both’ etc but the one that really stood out to me was a person asked if I was disappointed they were both boys because I should know that it was now possible to change sex. I thought she was joking but I guess she wasn’t as some fools do actually believe it’s possible. 18 months later I had my adorable little girl but no further stupid comments from that same person.

Then I found MN ❤️

From the bottom of my heart and soul, I will be forever thankful and grateful for the wonderful women that frequent this board because without you all, I might have blindly allowed others to influence my children. They are perfect as they are.
I’m also thankful for my wonderful family and friends that they also believe in biological reality. No one in my life believes in the insanity of gender ideology.

Yes, I do resent it.
I thought that we would win in a few years and we have been winning -Susie Green gone, Mermaids discredited,Stonewall losing funding, the Tavistock closing, the Labour Party backing away, Meghan Kelley peaking the Republicans and Trump ending men in women's sports but it keeps continuing- the NHS/Unions/BBC etc all keep pushing it and I think that it will be a generational process, I now feel like we will be stuck with it for years.

Yes I resent everything about this destructive ideology that is built upon nothing but lies.

I resent the fuckwit leaders, politicians and lawmakers who should have had the sense to just say NO to this 25 years ago.

I'm massively angry about the movement.

Personally, it hasn't affected me negatively - I am openly GC at work and haven't lost friends over it. In fact, I've made friends through my Terfing.

But I'm angry that we need to Terf. I'm angry that women have lost work for speaking out; angry about men in women's sports/prisons/shelters/changing rooms etc

I'm angry that unhappy children and young people have been groomed into a cult and encouraged to do irreversible harm to their bodies.

I'm angry that fighting a battle against a stupid, misogynistic, homophobic ideology, takes time away from other kinds of activism.

But of course! Little silly wimmin with our little silly ladybrains...

Out of all the controversial opinions I hold where I go against the grain, this is the one I resent the most by far.

Friends have abruptly cut me off under suspicion of not being trans-affirming enough, despite this never having caused so much as a disagreement between us. I've had to give up hobbies I loved because I was constantly expected to pledge allegiance to something I didn't believe and had no option of just avoiding it because it was everywhere. I've abandoned my dream of wanting to get into a certain creative industry, having seen how that industry treats people with my views. Someone senior to me was complaining about JK Rowling during a work social, and I had to keep my head down because she was connected to my TWAW friends and I didn't want her ruining both my work and social life.

I'm a very anxious person in real life and also quite politically reserved - I hate confrontation in general and I don't like talking about my opinions on big matters. I'm also a little afraid of people who I know would genuinely hate me if they knew me better - mostly social fear, but sometimes also physical fear. I'm just not someone who can match that energy. I can get annoyed and frustrated, but I've never experienced that level of boiling rage and hatred towards another person.

I think I also resent the realisation that I don't have a great deal of social courage - if I could just believe in the bloody gender woo I'd have a much more harmonious life - but on the plus side, I at least have the intellectual integrity to not kid myself that I believe in it...

Thank you. Very well written, powerful account.

The whole nonsense pisses me off hugely, because it's harmful, regressive nonsense, but it hasn't had any major effect on my life tbh. Although I feel strongly about it, I have discussed it with very few people in real life. I work in a girls' school which is tolerant of the few (and increasingly fewer in the last couple of years) girls who identify as boys, but doesn't transition them or change their names or pronouns without the say-so of their parents. I have no doubt some of my colleagues would be horrified by my terfy views.

💐You have my sympathy and (sadly) understanding. We're still just about in touch with our DS but hanging on by a thread, and our old comfortable supportive relationship seems to be gone completely. All because we won't be coerced into lying.

In my experience it's the men and women who transition and their "allies" who are likely to cut people out of their lives. Many have been persuaded that disagreement equals hatred, and that anyone who thinks differently from them is a bigot who deserves to be ostracised. It's blasphemy not to go along with gender identity ideology.

Damn right I resent it. This utter bollocks (for that is what it is, the belief that gender feelings should trump sex) has caused a rift in our family that I'm not sure will ever heal. I have lost friends and been ostracised from social groups I had been a member of for decades. The fact that many of these 'friends' message me privately to say they agree with me is no solace, frankly.

However, I would still do it all again. It's more important to me to be true to myself than live a fake life just to keep the peace with people who are completely unwilling to entertain the thought that they, actually, might be 'the baddies'.

On the positive side, I have met, worked with, and become friends with the most amazing women (and a few men), people I would never have met in my previous life. I have found that my DH truly has my back, even when members of his own family turned against me. I sleep well most nights knowing that when the world properly wakes up to this vile ideology, that if my granddaughters ask me what I did, I will be able to hold my head high and say I did my best not to fail them.

I hate it. I would rather have been doing so many other things, but I fought. And I will carry on fighting.

I resent this movement. One of my children has fallen under its spell and despite our supporting them to the best of our ability suddenly cut us off last year.

No idea where they live or what they do.

I’ve apologised for failing to meet their needs.

My other children have also lost touch with their sibling. My father doesn’t see one of his grandchildren, their cousins and all those who loved the serious little child no longer here from them.

Yes, I resent this enormously.

What did you say?

Of course it's easy peasy. Just a case of telling Eddie Izzard. Reasonable chap...

Yes, I do resent it, very much. Having to argue for everything we had previously won is a colossal waste of time when we could be doing more useful things. How can we help women recover from violent male abuse, for example, when they're being stuck in refuges with men? How can girls compete successfully in sports if they're being pitted against boys? It's beyond ridiculous.

And I resent the woman an old friend married, who appears to truly believe that men can become women and has managed to persuade him of this too. How she can think this way when she herself was abused in childhood is beyond me. They were friends but now I simply cannot be bothered with them and their bullshit. I don't care how long I've known someone, if they start spouting stuff that harms women and girls, then we're done.

Editing to add that thank fuck I'm self-employed and hardly have to talk to anyone.

This is how I also feel. I was a lifelong Guardianista but identity politics/genderism etc repelled be so much that I stopped seeing the left as a force for good.

On a day to day basis it doesn't affect me at all. I work in an arty, typically leftie field but I'm self employed and obviously never talk about culture wars/ politics with my clients because it's not appropriate or relevant.

I'm not aware of anyone I know who genuinely believes a man can become a woman or vice versa. Even my teenage/young adult children don't.

I think a tiny tiny minority believe in it, others love to stoke a culture war for whatever benefit and some support genderism only because they benefit financially or some other way.

Tbh OP, the people I most resent in all this are the other women who facilitate it because they really should know better.

I resent that we have to deal with the misogynistic unthink of trans activism when there is more important work to be done.

Being forced to deal with male tantrums and narcissistic fantasies at the expense of real world issues.

I really, really resent it.