Reasons you once believed in gender identity

You could make a more recent comparison with American evangelicals who believe that science proves the world was created in six days 4000 years ago and so humans must have coexisted with dinosaurs..

I don't remember anyone until recently saying that sex was anything other than binary. Now, since the rise of the trans lobby, some people are trying very hard to say sex is a spectrum.

Both groups are desperate to jam the science into their beliefs.

I remember seeing this online and feeling immediately nauseous and furious.

I mean Ellen Page WAS harrassed on set, and frankly she just looks very young in addition to having natural talent and timing. That youthful appearance has always been a magnet to all sorts of creeps in Hollywood (see: young Britney Spears). I do not even want to know the things she has experienced. For sure this is a way to cope with sth. horrific.

Sorry to be blunt: The medical staff who supported this up to the point were she had healthy body parts removed belong in jail. She will never fully get over this, even if she starts to heal mentally at some point and to de-transition.

I'd say pretty much the same.

Growing up, my DF had a (male) friend who was married to a woman but then after she'd had a child, she decided she was living in the wrong body and should have been a man. She 'transitioned' and the last time I saw her (around 1984ish), she had no breasts, she had a full on beard and had completely changed her life (the child was traumatised by it!) So from then on, I had this 'sympathy' for people who 'were born in the wrong bodies'. My parents sneered at it all and called her a weirdo and they supported my DF's friend during the divorce but I thought the ex-wife must have had very strong feelings to go through all that in the 1980s where there would have been very little support around at that time. So I sympathised with what I thought was a genuine issue.

Not anymore. I'm utterly outraged at the TRA's aggressiveness, bullying, cruel, demeaning behaviour towards women when we tell them they can't be a woman. It's a fucking disgrace, quite frankly, how yet again, women are being told to shut up and put up with it. Well, not me anymore and I thank the wonderful PP's on these threads to have educated me.

That’s how I stopped being a trans ally. By “educating myself”. After being screamed at and bullied and called an “ignorant bigot bitch”. By someone who was supposed to love me. So I took their advice. As PP have said, the more I read and listened, the more I realised how crazy this ideology was and the more I felt able to refute the arguments. Best thing I could have done.

They kept screaming at me to educate myself so I did. And the more I read, the more obvious it became that trans women are not women and trans men are not men and it is not just a case of "letting people live their life", people are being harmed, really badly harmed by all this.

"Educate yourself" is very good advice, which trans people and their allies would do well to follow for themselves.

Interesting that you said 'screaming' even though these were friends and people you loved. Whether or not they literally screamed, the disproportionate fury is something we can all recognise. It looks and feels exactly like narcissistic injury, a wound to the ego experienced as a death blow. So do the catchphrases about existence: nobody's suggested people who identify as trans don't exist! What we've said is that transgender's a self-image at odds with the reality of the whole person.

I'm happy that you've found places to be sane and people who share your disquiet about the madness.

I always felt a bit weird about it but the vast, vast majority of my friend group were very pro trans and one person I genuinely loved identified as trans. And they were a truly kind, supportive, caring, loving friend to me and instead of looking any further I looked at them and thought "X is amazing and kind and lovely and trans so what can really be wrong with it all? I just need to learn more/ grow more/ try harder to be decent and understanding, and this feeling of it all being a bit weird and off will go away".

It took the debacle of the male boxers battering women at the Olympics to tip me into public disavowal of TWAW. Not because those boxers are trans, of course, they aren't- but because it was the pro trans arguments and beliefs and approach that meant all my kind, loving, caring, social justice conscious friends were on the side of said male boxers. And once I had started stating publically that I was very much against these people being allowed to box in the female category and having arguments with my friends about it, the sheer fucking stupidity and lack of science behind them became more and more obvious. They kept screaming at me to educate myself so I did. And the more I read, the more obvious it became that trans women are not women and trans men are not men and it is not just a case of "letting people live their life", people are being harmed, really badly harmed by all this.

I had never read JKR's essay. I had heard a million times how awful and evil she was, that terf bitch, how she wished death and pain and all sorts on poor vulnerable trans people. I read it. I cried. I felt like a complete idiot. I shared it on my social media and discussed at length how unlike the things I had been told it said it actually was. The response was overwhelming screaming and anger and bullshit about what harm she did and what terrible pain the gender critical movement caused and how vulnerable trans people are. Not all my friends. Some privately messaged me to say they agreed but were too afraid to say so. That just made me more angry. Too afraid to say so. Women bullied into silence and that silence used to pretend they were in support of the trans agenda and those who spoke up were a tiny minority of fascists.

It genuinely breaks my heart that my honesty hurt that one friend I mentioned who is trans and who I so loved. It does. I will never resolve on a personal level the feelings that come with the knowledge that I have caused them the pain I have done... But I couldn't lie any more. It would utterly destroy my sanity to do so. I couldn't pretend, and even though I know they believe with all they have that they do no harm and that this belief system and associated movement they are part of is just and right, I don't believe that. I believe they have been harmed themselves and I believe that what they are part of imperils and harms many others.

This has become far too long already and I could rant and emotionally blurt for hours about this so I will stop myself there. I am so grateful to spaces like this and women like you all. I was grateful when I found ovarit because for all its issues it was a place that wasn't pretending the madness was sanity. I am so ashamed of myself for playing along for so long.

I’m the same. I didn’t ever believe they were in the wrong body, for me it was always dysphoria. I was ok with supporting them with dysphoria, but it became TWAW and don’t you dare contradict us.

I was in a public loo in the park in my city recently, and a sticker on the door said:
ARE YOU A TRANS ALLY? PROVE IT! and then a link to someone's 'top surgery' fundraiser.

Emotionally blackmailing strangers. The mind boggles.

I earnestly thought about saving up money for "top surgery" when I was about 23 and living completely isolated from my family. Which is absolutely insane, in hindsight, since I wished to have kids someday, too. Just did not want to be seen as a woman anymore, which is why I also dressed in super-baggy clothes. Whenever a guy my age would use eyeliner, dress up as a woman (yeah, that's all it is), get hormone injections and what have you, I would genuinelly go: "Wow, so brave, so out-there, feminine hands with the nail varnish, so alluring, he must be in touch with his feminine side, he must be the opposite of cruel and sadistic". Oh boy was I wrong.

One of the moments that made me realise what a fetish it is was when I read about just how many "trans-women" use the given names of real-life family members or acquaintances as "their" new name. Why are you called Lilly all of a sudden, Keith? Because that was either the name of your co-worker, your ex-girlfriend or some porn actress.

It is a minstrel show, and it is done my men world-wide for the exact same purpose as minstrel shows were: to put the lesser human in its place, to steal the attention and respect that is normally reserved for the lesser human. In this case, the lesser human is also the pornified human. Handmaidens support the cause in order to make sure they will be picked. Goodbye horses!

I didn't have a moment of realising a person could not 'become' a different sex to the one they were born. That's because I thought the notion so absurd that I had failed to understand it. My DD using pronouns prompted me to give it more attention. Then I realised I had understood it, and it was and is indeed absurd. DD branded me a TERF (fine by me) and impossibly intolerant (not fine). What I find frustrating is the lack of nuance in the discussion. No-one sensible should doubt that a person may feel they are female while being biologically male, and vice versa. @Seethlaw you have expressed this so much better than I could because for you it is lived experience.

its very refreshing to read this @Seethlaw and I guess this how I used to think of trans people, and why I had no problem with them. If a man feels better dressing and presenting 'as a woman' whatever he feels that is, he is more than welcome to do that as far as I am concerned on the understanding he knows he is still a man and will be treated as such in certain circumstances.

Thank you for taking the time to explain to me.

No problem, I've been open on here about these things :)

I think of myself as my own definition of a transman, that is, a woman who presents as a man. It's more than transvestite, because it's not just about clothes, but it's not transsexual either because nobody actually changes sex, ever. It's in-between, where I do everything I can to present as a man 24/7, but I don't believe I am a man.

I'm female because I've got a female body, no matter that I made changes to it. I'm a woman because I'm female and I grew up as a girl. I don't know what it's like to grow up as a boy or to be a man or to have a male body, so I'm not and never will be a man.

I just have something weird going on in my head (whether neurological or psychological, I don't know), which makes me map my body as male, so I prefer to present as a man because it makes me feel better about myself and my interactions with others.

And honestly, it feels so freeing to be able to claim all the sides of me, my femaleness along with the male mental map of my body, rather than forcing myself to call myself something I can never be - a man - just because some other people yell that I should.

How do you think of yourself now? (If you don't mind me asking a very personal thing on a public forum)

Agree!

I remember that article.

I’ve never seen third spaces as an answer tbh because there would have to be third and fourth spaces, because people of both sexes have transitioned.
I hope tbh that transition becomes something that some people do in private but that nobody except their immediate friends has to pay much attention, and they use sex-specific services when needed. Like padel, or needle felting.

I emotionally supported a good friend through their transition including full genital removal and reshaping. I knew of their prior struggles and I saw how happy they were post transition. They passed as a young woman quite well and they were a lovely supportive human being to me too. This was my introduction to tw and she always spoke of transvestites as being fetishists not people with mental health problems for whom transition was a treatment. She said she was in the latter. She never denied she was male which made understanding it all so much easier for me. It was a treatment for a delusion that I believed didn’t harm anyone else. This was over 20 years ago.

when the twaw thing became louder I still never questioned my friend because she was living a happy life and wasn’t shouting about her rights and wants like the ones I was now coming across online. The anger with which they demanded I reprogramme my brain to agree with them and deny why I was seeing made me think something wasn’t quite right and then when I saw people defending the litigious waxing guy and the greens paedo guy I started to get really uncomfortable with the way things were going.

i know a lot of trans people through work and life and most of them fit into the category who believe their transition was a last line treatment for a mental health issue but I’m seeing more people I know, who would have previously been considered transvestites pushing their way into everyday life and forcing us to accept their kink and take part in it. These are the people I have a problem with but ultimately not being able to pick out the fetishist from someone who genuinely feels transition helps their mental health became impossible.

my original friend split with ther long term partner and I saw a very different side to them. I saw a tantruming, ranting entitled male not a heartbroken woman. I saw selfishness like never before and for the first time I struggled to believe they too were in any way a woman.

I come from a background that preaches tolerance and acceptance. I knew some cross-dressing men and they were pleasant and inoffensive.

Then I worked in an IT team with a transwoman who it turned out was quite a campaigner and lived in Brighton. This was my first moment of real discomfort as “she” walked around with a full face, a pencil skirt and heels which was totally impractical for a job that often involves crawling around connecting cables. Absolutely no women dressed so overtly feminine in the office and it felt to me performative, stereotyped and provocative. But in fairness, “she” was fine to work with and never brought her politics to work as long as you used the new feminine pronoun and name. Which I dutifully did.

In daily life it can be hard to object - do I have a right to misgender the 15 yo son of an acquaintance who has grown long hair and thinks he’s a girl? What do I do or say when she “corrects” me?

What do I do when global HR at work sends an EDI compliance e-training that has a quiz at the end which you must pass 100% “correct” but one question only accepts an answer that tacitly reinforces gender ideology? the system forces you to retake the test over and over until you submit the right answer. Do I refuse to complete the compliance quiz and go to a disciplinary, just for the sake of one measly question? I’m a busy woman ffs.

When everyone around you is going along with it, even my Tory DH, you start to question your own instincts.

Eventually - stories of the terrible mistakes made by gender clinics for young people, the issue of men in women’s sports, and a growing number of my friends cautiously saying “not sure where you stand on this but…”

So that’s why it took me so long to question

I literally only have one friend who is not GC and that’s not because I have selected friends “like me” - it’s everyone from my cleaner to the single black mum I worked with fifteen year ago. There’s a lot of quietly dissenting women, who want to raise their voices now.

I still believe in GI but I’m still GC. By that I mean believing you are the opposite sex internally has always existed but has been leaped on in this generation due to the social contagion of the movement.

The notion that sex is not what determines toilets, changing rooms and sports and things put in place to support women is completely outrageous to me.

Third spaces were always the answer not attempts to colonise women’s spaces. Trans men would have no chance trying this with men, which shows just how male this behaviour is and depressingly how female it is to go along with any attempt to enforce the male dominance hierarchy.

I never believed in it, but did try to be kind, until I watched Baby Reindeer. Then there were a few months during which I thought I "got it", that Transwomen really were women, because I believed the illusion that was that character. But of course that character was no more a woman that Superman really is a Superhero. Less so, indeed, because even the main character didn't believe that the transwoman was a woman. He specifically went looking for a transwoman on that website. He wasn't looking for a woman.

• Re-realised as an adult what I felt as a child: I "feel like a man".
• That was what a transsexual was, as far as I knew.
• So I looked for a trans association.
• Went to my first meeting.
• Got into a disagreement about how I was sad that I would never be a "real man".
• Was told very firmly that transmen are men like any other.
• It didn't sit right with me but who was I to go against the dogma? I should have known to trust my instincts, but I didn't :/

I thought trans ideology was absurd from the very moment I encountered it. I think I literally laughed out loud. I offended a lot of people. My second thought was that the way its devotees talked about trans sounded a lot like the fanatics of the Reformation discussing the subtle distinctions between transubstantiation and consubstantion and why those who believed in the latter but not the former needed to be killed; or like the iconoclastic controversies of the Byzantine empire - irrational and cultish, in other words. I've never been given any reason to change my mind about this.

Never believed it for one day

You can’t be transracial

You can’t be trans age

You can’t be trans ability/ disability

You can’t be trans sex

Gender is made up.

Also - BIID - Body integrity identity disorder, or body integrity dysphoria, is when your perception or mental image of your body doesn't match you physically.

If you want to remove a limb it’s a disorder. If you want to remove your tits you are a trans man?

If someone started using a wheelchair and wanting to be affirmed for a non existent disability we’d get them to seek medical help.

If someone starts wearing skirts and crying when spoken to by a colleague - we are supposed to say that man is a woman? It’s nothing to do with gender ideology rather than just plain stupidity.

It’s like having disability ideology- or race ideology affirming your choice of race. No one tolerates it for a minute. Look at Rachel Dolezal. Her before and after are no different to a trans person but it doesn’t mean she changed race.