Reasons you once believed in gender identity

And a large percentage of transwomen don’t have genuine dysphoria - they are fetishists who feel entitled to make women feel uncomfortable because dressing as women arouses them. Most of them have penises.

And you’re saying it’s not my business not to want some man with a dick, stripping off in the gym changing room next to my 5 year old daughter and me? Hell to the no!

I don't think I ever believed it and was shocked when my work started pushing it and I remember laughing about it with an older colleague who was no nonsense about lots of things. He just said how ridiculous it was and we moved the conversation on.

Now I'm in a new team at the same work and they are all "be kinders" and I feel a sort of fear for not being part of the group but at the same time it's lowered my opinion of people that prior to moving into the team I really thought were educated and well read. That desire to be so open minded and progressive their brains have fallen out.

It's a more interesting job now but I do miss my old team as there were a good few of us who were definitely GC and just laughed at the nonsense the equalities team would post up on the intranet. I remember one about pansexual awareness. I mean, how is that even relevant to our jobs????

Really interesting thread.

I suppose I hadn't really thought about it. I suppose I'd thought 'why not be kind?'. Then when I was up in the middle of the night, breastfeeding a newborn, at the beginning of COVID, crying because of the pain of mastitis, I discovered FWR.

And realised what was happening here in Scotland. The institutional capture. The women locked in prisons with violent male sex offenders, on the say so of a lobby group.

I lurked for a year before I started posting, trying to get a handle on everything in case I made a fool of myself.

And then I watched the Forensic Medical Examiner Services Bill being debated on Holyrood TV and realised that women's rights were being sacrificed on the altar for men's feelings.

@bonnieweelass This sounds v v much like my work, in fact I think it is my work. I find the head of equality creepy, at an all staff event recently he was trying to get everyone who asked a question to state their pronouns. Happily, no one did. Their annual equality and inclusion week is coming up soon and I'm expected (in my new team) to take part and I'm a bit wary. I know he's clocked that I don't have pronouns in my email unlike the rest of my new team but I'm not doing it. I'm glad the supreme court judgement was so clear and I think I will speak up, gently, if I can to question certain things. It's madness.

Edited as I meant to tag the poster in

It was watching Magdalen Berns that really opened my eyes up to it all, and showed me how I'd been pulled in to it. I was/am a left leaning, 'social warrior' type (I cringe now), so very much like many of the women who are TRAs. I'm very much pro gay rights, which is another reason I think I was initially sucked in as being pro trans rights was framed as being the same. But my pro-lesbian rights stance is a large part of why I'm now against this harmful ideology.

Great prompt to go back over one's timeline, thanks!

My main exposure to ideas about gender was being involved/on the fringes of feminist/ queer/performance art events where diverse gender expression seemed exciting and creative.

Actual 24/7 trans people seemed weird and sad though. I remember being introduced to a cross-dressing colleague in the 90s wearing his leather boots and badly fitting blouse, and it was incredibly awkward. I think they were introduced as, this is Frank, he's transitioning to be a woman, so make sure you call him Veronica...

Read bits and pieces of Gender Trouble in the 90s, and was interested in the general mashup of gender identity. I was frustrated with the constraints of femininity, so a flexible understanding of gender appeared to be advantageous.

Attended an event with Annie Sprinkle where she showed a film featuring her transmale lover - first time I'd seen a constructed penis. It wasn't for me but I found Annie compelling and impressive, and they seemed to have a nice relationship.

Read and watched Tales of The City, with lovely Mrs Madrigal as house mother. It just seemed bad taste to refer to her past life as a man - if you even clocked that.

Felt a certain protectiveness towards trans women. One stopped me in the street to ask directions to a well-known gender clinic in my city (I worked for the NHS) and I felt oddly flattered they'd chosen to approach me, that I'd appeared safe to them. They seemed vulnerable and I was worried for them. This was in the period where you had to live as a woman for X years before you could get hormones/surgery, which seemed like a trial by fire.

Fast forward to the mid 2010s, and it started feeling problematic. Male friends on the music scene would turn up in bad drag with a new female name, and the assumption was that nobody should laugh or question it and that they were effectively the same as me now (albeit none of the men would "date" them). I felt huge social pressure especially from male friends to accept them without question, that it would be small-minded not to, which irritated me. I was never rude, but the conflation of transwomen with women made me feel as if I was at the bottom of some hierarchy. They had male advantage, but were weaponising femininity too.

However I was sort of sitting on the fence, until the houndings began, of women who didn't toe the line. Seeing women, including quite well-known figures in my local arts and music scene, isolated, othered and monstered as terfs was intimidating, depressing and obnoxious. And it's still going on.

I had always strongly felt that kids should be who they felt they were rather than conform to gender norms - dress how they wanted to dress, play with toys that they liked rather than being put in a gender box.

About six years ago I watched a programme about "trans kids" and just thought that supporting trans kids was the "nice" thing to do, and it was all framed as something magical, so I felt like I just didn't understand it. But it seemed to be about supporting vulnerable young people who felt like they didn't want to be squeezed into a gendered box.

But, I soon realised the huge elephant in the room, and that the trans rhetoric was actually the thing that was telling kids that if they liked certain toys/clothes then this wasn't because all clothes/toys can be played with by boys and girls, but because they were actually the opposite sex!! Madness. I was the first of my friendship group to see it, but gradually nearly everyone has had their eyes opened up to how abusive and cult like it is.

Just mind your own business and let other people handle theirs

i think you should take your own advice

Ah yes that most vulnerable of groups who have
checks notes -
. successfully convinced every government body
. The BBC, channel 4 & the majority of print media
. the BMA
. unions
. university
. The police
that men’s lady feelings are more important than women’s biological reality
and bullied & harrassed anyone who disagreed, pursuing them vindictively at work and at home trying to get them sacked or ostracised

if that what’s they achieved as the most vulnerable group ever, I hate to see what they would have done with a bit of power

A small percentage of unfortunate people do not have their gender and sex neatly lining up. There can be genetic, physical or mental/emotional causes.

If you are not a specialist in this area and not personally involved with someone who has this issue, the best thing you can do is sit down and shut up rather than believing you should have a say in other people's lives. You not believing it's real is highly uneducated and foolish and your personal investment in it highly suspect.

It's really about having someone to pick on and feel superior to, isn't it. And transpeople are just the right scapegoats, one of the most vulnerable groups among us, an easy target. Trans people also have astronomically high suicide rates, because of people who just can't resist the chance to smugly kick someone when they're down.

Just mind your own business and let other people handle theirs. Everyone sees what you're doing.

@Mermoose started this thread, and it's a great read.

I(F) did an MSC as an adult student, which required a 1 month work placement. I worked for a UNIX company in N. London, writing user documentation. Maybe 25 years ago?

When I started I was taken round by a harassed-looking guy and introduced to shedloads of techie people, mostly men, whose names I couldn't possibly remember. At some point in the tour he took me into a side room and explained that the next person was a little different and was (a bloke in a dress) and it was important that I didn't overreact to this. This appeared to mean using the wrong pronouns, looking visibly surprised/confused, etc. Presumably experience had taught him that previous work-experience students couldn't see past the 'it's a bloke in a dress'.

I was as polite as I knew how to be. And now I have an MSc!

I used to just about accept transwomen as a type of woman (but not as female) when I was younger. Now I’m older and better informed, I’ve realised that gender identity is a fallacy and that you can’t separate women from females. We shouldn’t be a sub-type of our own group (i.e. ciswomen instead of women) and a transwoman isn’t a description of woman in the same way that “tall woman” or “black woman” is (although I’ve heard this argument used by TRAs recently who claim that excluding transwomen from women’s toilets is like excluding black women or disabled women…!!! 😱)

As soon as transwomen started pushing to be seen as female as well as women, I could no longer go along with it.

I believed in non-binary identities because I'd experienced feeling not quite a woman / not quite a man for many, many years - long before non-binary had been coined actually.

Then I got pregnant which gave me the information that women could actually have any personality at all and still be women, and that there is no percentage of womanhood or manhood - you just are. I also felt proud of my body and my womanhood for what it could do rather than how it looked in the mirror.

I guess I got my dose of reality.

I do wonder if autistic women go one of two ways.
Either kind and progressive to the nth degree. Like needing to fit a certain persona.
Or absolutely unable to join the pretence.

In my early teens, a local male doctor transitioned (mid 1970s). A lot of his patients applied to change doctors despite him being an excellent physician. I thought this very sad, and although he was very tall (over 6ft) I was willing to go along with him wanting to be a woman, however, I had very little interaction with him but would always say hello if I saw him in town. I don’t know what happened to him he seemed to “melt away” before I started my family. He’s probably passed by now, he’d be in his late 80s.

When the cult of TWAW started I remembered our lovely doctor and thought trans men would be like him but they soon made me realise he was an exception rather than the rule!

Men can’t be women and women can’t be men.

None of those, really. Well, perhaps 'I didn't think properly about it'. I used to be an academic and 'queer theory' and 'theories of gender' were ALL OVER my discipline (and still are). I didn't do queer theory as I felt I didn't have the credentials, but dipped my toe into exploring theories of gender. It felt new and exciting and all the cool kids were doing their research like this! Judith bloody Butler defeated me but I used to read Lacan and so on, and apply those theories to my material. It got you noticed at conferences ... I never really thought about it though - not as a Real World matter. I was happy to apply these theories to cultures from a long time ago, and frankly the theoretical approach I was using was as good as another when looking at material 1000's of years old. But I never really thought - this has applications in the here and now. (I was a terrible academic!)

Outside of academia: shamefully, I was very slow to question. I used to love all the gender-twisting subculture, it felt free and playful and I HONESTLY believed that the vast majority of men who dressed in stereotypical women's clothing were actually a subset of gay men. I loved (and still enjoy reading) gay fiction - read my way through Armistead Maupin several times, etc was very much a gay ally. And I honestly thought, from my reading, and tv in the 80/90/00's that transexuals were gentle, gay men. I'd met a few. They did indeed come across as gentle, gay men. In dresses. (I mean yes, I also watched Silence of the Lambs but Hannibal Lecter makes it VERY clear that Jaime Gumb isn't a transsexual, he just thinks he is, etc etc, and who wouldn't trust Hannibal Lecter?) I kept thinking of that heartbreakingly poignant character Peter Capaldi played in Cracker that time. I was also interested in what we then called 'intersex' and devoured the Jeffery Eugenides novel 'Middlesex' (which I still think is really good). I loved the fact that there were 'drag kings' who were lesbian women who dressed as men and had rather unconvincing beards. I really enjoyed the novel Tipping the Velvet - lots of male-acting and male-impersonating lesbian women in the 19th century world of that novel.

It dawned on me very gradually that things had changed and that men who didn't fit the classic psychological profile of a 'transexual' were making themselves felt. I knew damn well that men in frocks had been sharing the women's loos with me on occasion, but up until about 7/8 years ago, I wasn't bothered because I absolutely assumed them to be gay men. (I know, we all deserve privacy from ALL men in the loos, but this wasn't something that bothered me that much.) Learning that this was not the case blew my mind. I think the point at which I started to get angry was in fact over a historical lesbian - it was the story about Anne Lister and her blue plaque - it had been put up by a local LGBTQ++ group and didn't mention the fact that she was either a She or a lesbian, I think it used very gender-neutral language! I think it had been linked to from here. I already knew a bit about Anne Lister (this was pre-Gentleman Jack) and was incensed that such an important historical figure was being glossed over like that. At about the same time, a good friend remarked on how crazy MN Feminist boards had gone (in a good way) and that every third post was about gender critical perspectives...

It kind of passed me by, in the sense that I haven't (to my knowledge anyway) come across a TW in any place/situation where I needed to validate them. I often thought that was unusual given all the hype about rights and so on. There may have been TW in the toilets and I didn't notice, but I would have noticed elsewhere like changing rooms and hospital wards etc. both of which I have used.

So I largely ignored it and/or raised my eyes to heaven in derision at some of the bizarre stuff emanating from TRAs.

To me it was an Emperor's new clothes situation at all times, and I was always waiting for someone to call it out. Now those brave and tenacious women in Scotland have done us all the favour of calling out the Emperor. I am so in awe of them.

Not gonna lie - there were times though I questioned my reasoning, but objectivity and realism, kept my feet grounded despite the constant criticism.

I was on a psychotherapy training course which literally hammered it into my brain. When I questioned - I was dealt with negatively. It took perseverance and a lot of courage to finally be heard and to be awarded a pay out and the activist (course lead) has since gone.

I’ve never believed humans could change sex or be born in the wrong body. And I see having a ‘gender identity’ as a choice, as relevant as reading horoscopes or following a diet guru.

But I used to admire men who wore make-up and/or skirts, high heels etc, because I thought they were subverting sex stereotypes. And I felt sorry for the ones with mental-health problems that I thought were harmless to anyone else.

In reality though, transgenderism actually reinforces the worst old stereotypes, especially that of fragile pretty-pink girlies. They revel in pretending to be fwightened of horrid scary women. And they are far from harmless.

I didn't vote but when I was very young, in my teens (in the late 90s) I was just the usual "be kind" sort of woman and felt sorry for men who wanted to be women so badly they had surgeries and didn't have any concept of how the often deeply sexual and fetishistic nature of their drive to transition and what that revealed about their feelings about women.

I did see a lecture by Germaine Greer at university in the early 2000's where she spoke about how men who wished to transition to become women really could never become women and that deep at the core of their desire to do this was actually something very intrinsically male and nothing to do with women's experience. I remember coming away thinking she's completely right, you can't change sex and while I was still then sympathetic to the psychological suffering these men experienced realised I wouldn't ever see them as women or even quasi women and that honestly I never had.

After that I also began to be quite critical of transition and the surgeries required, he use of cross sex hormones as I do think this is ultimately medically harmful to both males and females who undergo this process and that some kind of integration and acceptance would be better and I've always been puzzled as to why it seems only in this case is such invasive, harmful and irreversible medical treatment considered wise. This isn't the case for other forms of delusional thinking so why is it for gender dysphoria? It actually made me lose a lot of respect for the field of psychiatry and I actually discovered that psychiatry in general is not held in high regard within medicine, most doctors tend to look down on psychiatrists and that many don't even consider it proper medicine at all. I'm not saying I think that but finding that out does make be think twice about that field and their legitimacy.

Much later I did read about autogynephilia and the "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" by Janice Raymond and about the acceptance of trans as an alternative to acceptance of being gay and more and more the whole ideology along with trans identified males demands that cut across and removed women's hard won rights made me see just how backwards and regressive trans ideology is.

I can see why some people who oppose trans ideology may do so out of sheer prejudice and fear and I can almost see how to some people that it might seem like an easy win and "doing the right thing" to support trans ideology but it also doesn't take a huge amount of effort to actually step back and see how regressive and harmful it actually is. It makes me quite despairing that such a lack of insight and critical thought is so prevalent in our society and institutions.

The ruling of the Supreme Court and the voices of the women who fought so bravely to gain that clarity does bring me a great deal of comfort. I hope everyone is encouraged to think more critically in future because of this.

It’s ridiculous and very annoying. Nobody should assume that all autistic people want to go along with this nonsense.

I don’t know of a single autism charity that hasn’t been infiltrated by TRA. They get on the board as trustees and everything becomes about trans first, autism second

NC for this as outing when attached to previous posts.

A long time ago (before EqA) someone transitioned at work, full surgery, made a real effort to pass. Hard to emphasise how incredibly rare this felt at the time. I’d never met anyone transgender, non binary wasn’t a thing, SW was campaigning for same sex marriage. Anyway, it was a small workplace, all the loos were fully enclosed, so there weren’t any obvious “logistical” issues that might have brought it to a head, though even if there had been I suspect everyone would have been very “be kind” as the person was without hesitation admitted to the women’s networking etc. But it all felt like this was really unusual and the prevailing attitude was live and let live. I also don’t think the transperson actually felt they became female. They had been very unhappy in their sexed body and eventually decided it was the only thing that would give them some peace. They were mystified by people not being open about it or airbrushing childhood photos to appear to be female.

Looking back there were some dissenting voices - one male colleague said to me privately that this was a mental illness and he didn’t see why the person couldn’t just admit to being a cross dressing man. A female colleague said she felt uncomfortable at “letting them into the women’s tent.” And I was deeply but unexpressedly unhappy for a while when the TW had a period of copying everything I wore. It was only after reading about trans widows’ experiences many years later that I realised this was absolutely typical AGP behaviour. It felt at the time like having a stalker.

I started to wonder in about 2014 when the TW colleague mentioned a person they knew who had been given 2 security passes by their work, one for their female and one for their male identify. I expressed doubt about whether this was a “real” TP and my colleague got very offended and said they were and it was something the workplace “had” to do. I said nothing else but I just didn’t buy it, and started reading around the subject a bit and allowing myself to have doubts. Then I found Mumsnet and then the FWR board and by 2019 I was full on GC. By the way the colleague now militantly believes they are and always were female - so I think the hardening of attitudes has been on both sides as it were.