Reasons you once believed in gender identity

@Mermoose I think ones first experience with a transgender person probably has a big impact too. I can see how if the first you come across is someone you love, respect or just like then you would really want to subscribe to "be kind" for their sake. If your first encounter is with a creepy, oversexed fetishist then "be kind" isn't on the table!

I’ve had to rethink my whole view about everything, having seen the consequences of where this self identity nonsense has ended up. Which is a place where words have no meaning anymore and if your perception of someone doesn’t match theirs, you’re hateful and can be arrested. I’ve always considered myself to be on the left but the identity stuff is damaging to children and society at large.

I don’t, after all, know it all.

I'd add that, for people who think of themselves as left-wing or progressive, there's a real fear of seeming prudish or judgmental. I stopped going to Pride years ago, because it was being taken over by the fetishists, and lots of people thought that was very weird of me. Apparently we should all be accepting of strange fetishes being paraded down the high street in broad daylight.

But a lot of people quietly opted out. Not just the lesbians, but the normie gay men who weren't into the fetish scene. Hardly anyone remembers that Pride used to be dominated by lesbians and gays in normal clothes or even work uniforms asserting that they were just like everyone else.

Where judgmentalism seems to creep back in is with young people influenced by intersectional politics who are obsessed with totting up privilege points so they can assess whether there's a minute power differential in a relationship. No wonder they aren't getting laid.

But yeah, lots of this is privilege theory and the progressive stack. It's the type of politics that says you can't have an opinion about an oppressed group unless you belong to that group - which is not in itself stupid, I don't know what it's like to be black etc, but it's often applied in a stupid way. Hence "I'm a cis woman, so I'm going to allow the trans folx to tell me their truth."

This might mean a 20yo woman deferring to a 50yo bloke on the grounds that his trans identity makes him vulnerable and her an oppressor, but it doesn't do to think too hard about these things.

@Mermoose I'd also add, for those of us who always thought of ourselves as left-wing, it was presented as the modern, up-to-date, progressive view. Certainly for me at the beginning, I had a bit of an arrogant attitude of "Keep up grandad, don't you know this is the thinking now?". Even though I was never personally attached to it. There was just a tribal "nodding along" and even humouring the concept. Like "even if it sounds a bit weird, who am I to look into other people's personal proclivities and make a fuss about them, how unseemly I would appear to my fellow lefties".

I actually think that, in a way, there's a link between prudishness and permissiveness. Like "oh, something unusual is going on that has something to do with sex... Look away, let them get on with it, nothing for me to see here, stop talking about people's private parts!".

I think that my BIL does not truly believe it. But he thinks that in order to protect these people, we have to pretend we do. I wonder how many people are like him?

I think that each person has the value of 1 human being.

Many people appear to think that (or looking at how they decide the worth of causes appear to function as though) a male person has a value of 1.5 human beings and that a female person has a value of 0.5 human beings.

This is why sad transwomen (who everyone knows are male despite pretending otherwise) are far more important than women (who everyone knows are female).

I have seen a lot in transactivism that is explained by this. As it has been said many times, it is a mens rights movement and sadly some women also put mens wants and demands before the needs of women and girls. This allows them to do that and to feel good about it (for being OTRSOH and so, so kind, for example).

I never believed in TWAW, largely because I grew up seeing the glam rockers and disco of the 70s, images of Studio 54 gender-bending glamorous NYC people inc Bowie, Rocky Horror, the New Romantics of the early 80s and then Kurt Cobain, Brad Pitt and (even) David Beckham sometimes wearing skirts.

They were unabashedly men. Creatively playful men, changing up their looks with fashion, hair and makeup as entertainers have for centuries.

What happened? Children and teenagers marinading themselves in unsupervised internet Wild West spaces; not discussing or analysing anything with parents (partly because a significant factor in this phenomenon is about threatening rejection of them unless they’re unquestionably accepting of anything).

I remain convinced that this has been driven in large part by paedophiles and other types of predator (including US pharmaceutical giants, insane surgeons touting for business - “Yeet the teats!” - and corporates who immediately spotted customer demand for all sorts of paraphernalia. The sinister Be Kind girls’ t shirts everywhere, the bloody trans zebra crossings.

ive been bewildered and horrified by the absence of meaningful pushback at Govt level here; as a society we cannot have large numbers of young people making themselves sterile and suffering from lifelong surgical injuries and even disabilities that will limit their futures profoundly. Far more important than piddling about with possible cigarette-buying laws I feel.

And still no news of arrests let alone charges for the wannabe-terrorists advertising their torture and murder fantasies on cardboard signs or social media. It seems they are too cowardly to pull at the threads of the cult.

I never believed it. The first transgender person I ever came across was a total creep who was overly sexual and just downright weird so from the get go that was what I associated "trans" with. After he mentioned trans in passing (he was not "out" until much later) it wasn't something I came across again for many years until Caitlin Jenner won woman of the year and I started to read FWR and thought "what the ever loving fuck is going on".

Glad this thread's back! It's interesting. I'll catch up when I'm not supposed to be asleep.

I never for a minute thought TWAW and refused to 'use pronouns'. This caused a couple of arguments among my very many fem-styled male friends during the 1980s-90s (well, flouncing tantrums actually) but we made up again straight after.

Maybe I was just good at explaining my commitment to reality, but I think it's more that 'gender identity' hadn't yet got its claws into the public psyche. Their identities were personal to them, not everyone else's responsibility.

I used not to be bothered about the few MCW in the Ladies. They never ponced around play-acting femininity or took up extra space. If another woman had found their presence upsetting, though, I'd have asked them to leave. My friends, who were performative, used the Gents as far as I'm aware. At some clubs they had their own room. If in doubt, they'd go with a friend - just like women, only to the other loo!

I will add that some, regrettably, did get bashed up sometimes. This was due to homophobia - not 'transphobia' as there was no such thing. The aggressors felt their masculinity was being threatened, or some such nonsense.

I do feel sorry for the loss of privileges to old-school 'tru trans'. Even glammed-up show-offs like my friends are likely to find the world a little more hostile for a while. Their advocates are to blame for that, though. We gave an inch here and there to be kind: they took all the miles and demanded still more. Lesson learned. Don't give an inch.

I never believed in gender identity but I believed that people could be "born in the wrong body" in that there was a mismatch between the brain and the rest of the body, and that's what caused gender dysphoria. Female brains in male bodies, male brains in female bodies.

It was only when someone kindly pointed out that the modern trans movement wasn't about gender dysphoria any more, now it was all about gender identity, and a person could be trans without having gender dysphoria at all, that I took a closer look.

For a while I believed there were "true trans" who were the gender dysphorics. But after reading so many posts on FWR taking this idea apart, as well as the Gender Critical forum on Reddit and then Ovarit, I stopped believing that too.

About a decade ago I genuinely thought that a very, very small number of people had gender dysphoria from childhood and should be allowed access to puberty blockers until they were adults and could make an adult decision on whether to physically transition. My DH occasionally reminds me of this now - he was always anti. I thought it only applied to a tiny number of people and they would undergo surgery, get a GRA and get on with their lives.

Then two things started to make me change my mind:-

1. the sudden appearance of unhappy girls in my DD2's friendship group who were announcing they were trans or non-binary. They were obviously deeply uncomfortable with their adolescent bodies (& in a lot of cases had ASD traits). And WTF was non-binary? I've had short hair for 30 years, have been called Sir a few times & work in IT but I was always a woman. (And most of the glamorous pop stars of my youth played with make up & big shirts but were still M or F.)
2. the increasing prevalence of weird TIM in the press. "Women" with beards or wearing fetish gear in public. Their demands they were actually women & their hatred if anyone who didn't go along with their version of reality.

It was Jess de Wahl's cancellation by the RA shop after 1 complaint about her GC beliefs - despite the shop only selling her flower embroideries and her having already published her views before they started selling her goods that peaked me. She came out all guns blazing on the Today programme and then two blokes came on to discuss it, dripping with male condescension & calling Justin Webb cis (& him telling them off for making assumptions about him.) I needed to talk to some other sane people so ended up on here (thank you Mumsnet) and buying a load of Jess' Big Swinging Ovaries badges, which I have been using as a conversation starter / gift ever since.

Then JKR & the wholesale dismissal of her views as bigoted despite most people having never read her statement. Then I went on Twitter (to report a dead deer carcass to the Highways Agency) and found a load of amazing, frequently very funny, sane campaigners who've kept me informed of first the madness and now the sanity (thank you FWS and the Supreme Court) when a lot of media wants to tell me how sad the TIM are, rather than ask the women about safety & fairness.

‘cis woman’ made me angry for years and I never even knew why until I started listening to Magdalen Berns.

My dd telling me I was a cis-woman. I did some research. It’s the whole pretence side of it that I find so hard. Being friends with religious people doesn’t require me to believe in God. I don’t have to not eat meat if I’m out at a restaurant with a vegan friend. I can (if I like) take a sensible interest in their beliefs. But I’m expected to just swallow that make and female is a some sort of sliding scale that you can pick and choose from whenever you like? And that gender is real? And to shut up and accept it with no argument.

When I was about 12, probably just on the cusp of puberty, I felt clearly less feminine and girly than everyone else I encountered at my single sex school. I didn't feel I fitted in. And, I sincerely wondered if, perhaps I had been misidentified and was actually male.

Puberty put paid to that in a couple of years and for several years after that, I gave it very little thought.

In 2016, when I had been a primary school governor for about 18 months, one of my fellow governors went on an LA training course and came back to report to us all that approx 10% - 15% of people were trans and that would include the school pupil population and this was something we needed to build into our thinking.

I was astounded and said 'But, that means 2 or 3 of us (there were about 20 people at the meeting) are trans. Surely that can't be right? And he said it was. And, when I asked to look at the slides from the course, that was what he had been told.

I was fairly new to safeguarding not having a background in education and I was worried about whether I had misunderstood and how to do my job and make sure the school kept children safe. And, I thought back to how confused I had been for a short period and was worried confused children would be medicalised unnecessarily. So, I started looking for more research /evidence.

And, amongst other things, I found FWR and started reading. I found Lang Cleg enormously helpful and, with my governor hat on, I had several quite robust arguments about spaces being separated on anatomy not thoughts in the next 5 years!

Since then, I've come across a couple of transboys in my teenagers friendship groups and several middle aged transwomen in my daily and work life There are 5 transwomen that I can think of that I have to interact regularly with (eg one drives the bus I take regularly to a hobby evening). 2 of them always make me feel uncomfortable - one of the two traps you in corners to stand too close and talk at you if he gets the chance and sometimes shares medical information I don't want to know. I am now careful never to walk near the edges of rooms when he is present.

Have polls switched off so comments only for me. But I never believed TWAW.

I worked in an LGBTQ friendly city in the charitable sector supporting many charities with tech and did a lot of work for trans charities for quite a few years in the late 90s, early 2000s. I met quite a lot of trans folk. The transwomen were always clearly men to me. But I believed the rhetoric about suicide risk and some of the transwomen were lovely and genuine in their desire to be female (Others were clearly disturbed, but so were quite a lot of the LGBTQ community. They were disenfranchised, often rejected by family and old friends, and many had drug and alcohol habits. It was understandable that some had mental health issues and/or were lacking emotional stability.)

I was in my 30s and being into computing. Single sex spaces normally excluded me and female only tech spaces were overwhelmed by women who thought blogging was being techy. So I was not keen on most single sex social spaces and I searched out mixed environments. But it was also a time when, acceptance seemed to be kept to groups that had agreed to it. Not pushed out on the wider community.

Once that flipped, and I started to hear arguments about how transwomen deserved to be in women's sports, on all women shortlists, and how they were really female, I started to ask questions and get shut down. And then I started to see pro-trans arguments posted that used dodgy logic and science that didn't support the assertions. I was still quite immersed in the Be Kind/Most Vulnerable mind set and thought transwomen deserved our support. But it was researching those arguments in order to improve them and use them that made me realise what a crock of shit it was and to really see the misogyny at the heart of the transmovement. I'd changed my mind entirely about "Be Kind" by 2015ish.

Around about 20 years ago I was a member of a Livejournal women’s group. I remember a very earnest post by a FTM who said they were “devastated” but they could no longer be a part of the group as they has now openly transitioned. The group had several very loud, vocal trans women in it, and I really started to notice how jarring they were, two in particular, a well known liberal councillor and a software engineer who has been on TV in recent years on programmes about model trains, were particularly strident, aggressive and when I stopped to think about it, just male. They were visibly fawned over by others in the group when they posted asking for clothes and makeup advice. (Stunning and brave!). I went on a meet up of the online group, and was dismayed that out of a gathering of about 12 people, three were very obviously men. It changed the whole dynamic of the group. I didn’t go back.
Then there was that revolting little Labour women’s officer - Lily something? And Jonathan Yaniv, “Aimee” Challenor, Karen White. It seemed to be never ending.

I never thought that TWAW in the literal sense. However, for a long time I thought that homosexuality was the only cause of gender dysphoria, so I didn't realise the risk for women.

I wish I had so few real life things to deal with other than the first world privilege that is males cosplaying as girls and demanding women and girls lose our safe female only sex-based spaces and rights, but you keep pandering to men and making rape survivors like me less safe while you campaign to tear down my single sex spaces, @BigHeadBertha . How proud you must be, striking a blow for men and male supremacy. Never mind the trauma you cause rape survivors and DV victims.

Males are not 'vulnerable'. Trans are the most powerful, most privileged and most protected sacred caste their own. And you pushing the suicide myth (it's been proven that actually in fact, they have no higher suicide rates than any other group) as a weapon to manipulate, control and gaslight vulnerable women and girls into giving up our rights is disgusting!

When these Mens Rights Activists and privileged males mind their business and STAY THE FUCK OUT OF FEMALE ONLY SPACES, then and only THEN will we 'mind our business'.

Take your misogynistic, hate-filled gaslighting mens rights agenda elsewhere.

@Namechangedfortheterfasaurs sadly not, I have looked for it as well.

I also remember an article most likely in the Guardian or Observer about a Beaumont society event in which the journalist commented on how the women all appeared to be tolerating the situation rather than enjoying it at all. It was subtly damning.

1970s …first job. Didn’t even know about these men,but knew I felt creeped out by having to share a changing room with one.
1980s.. being told I had to call a man with a beard hitting on women a female, while watching him elbow his way to the bar with male privilege .
the whole post modernism crap
Seeing some of them accessing women’s and lesbian events and groups.
1990s when they asserted their right to be in Lesbian groups which then inexplicably folded.
never thought any of them were women
2000 s, when the dangers of children and young people being told they could change sex and social services colluded.
I am Sparticus was hugely influential, but only confirmed what I already knew to be true.

I remember that article - do you have a link? I have searched for it several times but haven’t found it. Has it been memory holed? He was a Scottish psychiatrist IIRC. There was also an article about it in the New Yorker which I am 99% sure has been deleted.

Back in the day there was some very interesting research indicating that there was an overlap between people with gender dysphoria and those with BIID (bodily integrity identity disorder, ie those who believe they should have fewer limbs than they have). It was way beyond the margin of error and was thought to be caused by disturbances in adjacent cortices of the brain. Of course you’d never get research funding on that now, because as you say it would raise interesting ethical questions about how we treat one and not the other (and also about whether GD is something that is a disorder and which can be treated in other ways than by affirmation).

Also, have a google about the current demands in the US of those who have BIID. They have already got there and their demands to be treated analogously to trans identified people are - interesting and disturbing.

The only trans people I have ever met other than dh's sibling who is still in the closet (surprising cos I live in London and am millennial) are at my synagogue when I was converting. There seems to be a small correlation though most converts aren't trans, recent article said rise in conversions to Judaism was due to popularity in genetic testing. I suppose people who want to change religion may also want to change everything else.

I was asked to refer to the trans person as they which made no sense to me though I apologised and tried to comply..there was also a really strange man who said he was converting as a woman. He said he wasn't wearing a skirt that day as it takes lots of time to do himself up as a woman. I did remember thinking that I don't mind if converting as a woman meant not having to go through adult circumcision! I think it's not compulsory in liberal judaism anyway but I suspect it is strongly encouraged.

For me turning point was when I became pregnant and was confronted with my biology and medical misogyny. Refused tubal ligation until I had 3 children, dh got his vasectomy when I was 7 months pregnant with his first and only child

I thought I understood it briefly. It was after the Guardian had featured that doctor who had amputated two people who were convinced they should have been amputees. His reasoning was that it was the only way of relieving their mental distress. About 2002. Then a few years later Channel 4 had a series following a group of trans people and they expressed similar happiness following surgery. I thought, oh I get it, it’s like the amputees. But the men especially were just performing a type of femininity that is alien to me, so I never really thought they were any kind of woman. And despite thinking I understood their motivations I still found it insulting.

Fast forward a few years and I discovered that the doctor was banned shortly after those two amputations for unethical practice. It was then completely clear that trans surgery suffered from the same ethical problems but for some reason people’s brains had fallen out.

That was roughly at the I am Spartacus thread time.

The idea that there is such a thing as a 'sense of gender' is a very recent invention. Barely two decades old. There used to be expectations around the presentation and behavior of people related to their sex. Everyone has a sex, either male or female, even if they have DSD.

The rules tended to be stricter for the more wealthy - poor people slogged away regardless. From the nineteenth century, women increasingly demanded the removal of restrictions on their rights to control their money, to leave an abusive relationship, to work, to vote. Hardworking middle class women in the two world wars needed to wear different, practical styles of clothing, and once that changed, they didn't go back. Not because they wanted to change 'gender'.

A small percentage of unfortunate people suffer distress from mental/emotional causes. That has always been the case, and they need therapy.