Reasons you once believed in gender identity

I wonder if that trance-like state is related to “fawn” in fight/flight/fawn. I realize you probably weren’t afraid, per se, but you want to make sure the stranger feels welcome and that nobody is being unreasonably discriminatory. The big lie of course being, that this was not a different kind of woman (who ought to be welcomed) but a man, who shouldn’t. These are complex feelings and situations.

I only ever 'believed in gender identity' inasmuch I believed the anorexics I knew really did have a 'feeling' that was causing them to starve themselves and believed that the schizophrenic person I knew really did hear the devil that was speaking out of the smoke they could see.

I know the mentally ill can have feelings sane people don't have. I cannot imagine what 'having a gender' feels like. I don't think running your society to support the delusions of the unwell is good for anyone.

I liked toying with the postmodern idea that words are made up by people and so only mean what people agree they mean, so meanings are constantly changing. Also that the word is just a representation of the thing - not the thing itself. That the actual ‘real’ thing - reality- is always somewhere beyond reach - beyond description or comprehension. I understood this in cultural contexts, regarding nationalistic sentiments, claims of cultural purity etc which I didn’t and still don’t buy into. I thought ‘well if it’s true of culture, then why not of gender, and why not of sex’. I didn’t think about it much further than that because I genuinely believed it didn’t matter much in any case if a few men thought they were really women so why spend too much brain power thinking about it. A few things started to change my mind. One of the first was the Canadian ‘rats nailed to the door’ rape crisis case, and the beauticians/waxing guy going after those poor women. I also realised the implications for kids - I noticed parents starting to push kids more and more into gender stereotypical behaviour as if they were scared that someone might remark that maybe their child was possibly in the wrong body. That’s when I revisited my postmodern studies and woke up to the implications of these academic thought experiments on real women and children. That’s when I realised it wasn’t a game and that to let men, even just a few, try to redefine the word ‘woman’ to include men, was actually very dangerous. That agreeing what words mean and defending those meanings is extremely important in this case. That women must never give up the words that unite us as women because if we do that we give up our key source of power - that is that we can talk to each other as women and share information to help each other as women. And that this is especially important for the most vulnerable amongst us - like rape victims and those beautician women in Canada for a start.

I always assumed it was a polite fiction and that nobody actually believed it was literally true.

I also assumed it was reasonable for those men (who I assumed really, really needed to because of their medical condition) should use women’s spaces. I wasn’t that bothered and I hadn’t considered the women that would negatively affect. The idea didn’t bother me, until that is, I saw some of the kind of men that were now demanding access. Like many others, I was thinking Hayley from Corrie and not Aimee Challenor or Heather Herbert.

I did believe it was true that some people genuinely felt like they were the opposite sex and that transition was the appropriate treatment, because the NHS and the BBC told us that, on children’s TV.

It didn’t cross my mind to question how a man could genuinely feel like he was a woman, or how he could possibly know. I suspect many, like me, hadn’t thought about it much and had transactivists campaigned to ensure that scenario was the one that should become the norm, I have no doubt they could have pushed it through without significant opposition.

I didn’t believe TWAW, but I figured it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel ‘like a woman’ so bought the ‘all on a spectrum’ stuff and believed we could all do what we wanted and just get along.

Then I had a daughter, and my eyes opened (mainly on here), and realised that although I still think presentation should be a free for all, it’s just personality, we don’t need to label it ‘gender’, and it’s separate from sex, where the line is very clear and that’s more important.

I was fully into 'be kind'. I guess I never really stopped to dissect the arguments being made, I just thought that would be unkind, and even questioning it felt wrong. Of course that's intentional because the arguments often fall apart once you do start to look more closely.

This will be an interesting thread........to be able to get inside the rationale or lack of it that encouraged people to accept trans ideology.

Personally, I've never bought into it, and my first response on becoming aware of it was to feel deeply offended and angry, especially when I found out that lots of people, including the Labour Party, had signed up wholesale and were making threats of censure.

I only knew nice but seemingly quite vulnerable transwomen.
I prided myself on being open minded and bringing my children up to be caring open minded people.
I'd read the glossy articles by mermaids about boys who grew up feeling that they were girls from a young age and I assumed the right thing to do with these very rare children was to get them help so that they might pass, as adults.
I didn't realise people thought TW were women but I thought we all were joining in with a polite pretence and that we all knew that and TW knew that.

What changed? It started with Germaine Greer, "I don't care" I thought it was harsh, given my first point but I was curious.

I heard the term TWAW for the first time and I thought hang on! I'm never going to be able to make my brain do all the mental hoops to believe that.

My eldest reached his mid teens and suddenly I was aware that lots of girls around us were claiming they were trans boys. Something seemed off about that and these girls in general were not happy, thriving teenagers.

The vulnerable TW I speak of in my first point seemed to be getting more and more angry at accidentally being misgendered. They no longer seemed quite so vulnerable with these displays of righteous anger.

But mainly it was the teens. Sending teenagers off down a route that swallowed up a lot of their teen years with so much navel gazing and ultimately could lead to life changing consequences is unforgivable.

I also never believed it. I was, however, accommodating - then they took the entire piss and I thought “FOTTFSOF”

I’d say none of those. I was in an intersectional women’s group on FB and I got to meet a trans woman who I really liked and of course the mantra of TWAW was never questioned by me. Honestly. Ridiculous now nothing about it. He used to write stories and it was often SM or sexually deviant stuff. All the women in the group were sending him money as he was obviously skint (shilling for donations)
Then one day he posted a meme of something along the lines of a picture of a young woman (as a cartoon) being choked with the lines I like it when you choke me. And suddenly I mentally acknowledged, only a dude would post this. This is a bloody man. Ergo TWAM. And I was insta angry. Like inflamed. And I was ejected from the group for saying something. It was like I’d been in a weird trance. So actually now I write it it was classic #bekind behaviour. Awful. I am ashamed. Thank goodness I woke up.