Reasons you once believed in gender identity

I have found that the groups I’m in, for autistic women are also being taken over by trans women. If you dare say anything which goes against TWAW, you’ll be removed from the group. Which means that autistic women are being silenced in all these spaces, too. I’ve yet to find a group for autistic women which isn’t also GC. There is usually always something about accepting transwomen as women in the rules.

None of those reasons. Years of LGB groups with a few trans people, gay men who were drag queens at the local gay pub and who were - in those days, honestly - lovely and funny people, I was wholly accepting of it being just another wonderful variation and it all being based on the honest good will of the gay communities I'd come out in. Then a young trans identified person who'd received huge amounts of support from an LGB group pretty much blew it apart with their politics and I started to research wtaf 'micro aggressions' and other phrases in their rants actually meant, and discovered that their behaviour wasn't just them, it was the behaviour of a political group. I read a lot of articles by people with trans identities to try and understand, but with my eyes getting steadily wider, particularly while reading the ones that were devoid of any respect for women and expected lesbians to provide sex to men regardless of their own feelings as some kind of 'duty', and the 'cotton ceiling'. And realised there was no good will or sanity in this at all it was profoundly homophobic and misogynist, and behaviour I very much recognised through personal experience as classic to abusive men.

And then the attack on women's spaces and rights started in earnest.

I'm not sure I ever believed TWAW. However, the political manoeuvres to position this in law passed me by until late 2017, (was this the time of the Tories and Self-Id?) when I realised what untruths were being parroted and how organisations were 'getting ahead of the law', coupled with the chilling "No Debate" instruction. I was asleep at the wheel, essentially: that won't be happening again.

I never paid that much attention to it tbh. I had a lesbian friend who was in an LGBT group who stated Off complaining that TW were taking it over and after a few months was “OMG TW are women!! And have it so much harder” I sort of nodded along because after all she was in the community & I wasn’t and I accepted her view as the correct one

but it never made any sense to me and then I realised that although I believed TWAW was a polite fiction we were parroting to be kind, we were meant to actually believe TW were literally women which is obviously nuts. Once I realised that, I found FWR and the rest is history!

It occurs to me that many of the responses are along the lines of "I didn't really think about it, I just went along with the "progressive" left wing, "kind" ideology." It's all a big vague. And then we get the peaking stories.

I think the best answer to the question from my perspective is -

Because I had not considered that if TWAW then sexual orientation is bigotry, and I don't think I'm a bigot, and nor are lesbians.

Because I did not know that men who identify as trans are much more likely to be sex offenders compared to other men.

Because I had not considered that if men are women then women's rights don;t exist.

Gender ideology relies on magical thinking and ignorance.

Thank you! She’s a university student. Communities like this are inclusive to a fault. Which, of course is usually good but not when it helps to erode women’s rights. I think she may be taking on board my explanations.

I spent some time last night also trying to explain this to my autistic dd, who is 16 and is vulnerable. I set it all out for her and she said ‘surely the best thing is for transwomen to have their own spaces’.

I didn’t ever believe it.

my first boyfriend was a transvestite. We were together for 5 years, I was 16 when we meet and he was 19. He kept it secret for 4 years, but the pressure got too much, he broke up with me then phoned me crying down the phone. So I drove over to his parents house, he let me in and spilled everything out. Showed me all his woman face gear. Naturally it was all lace and latex and stockings 🙄. Lots of things made sense then. The fact that he bought me so much sexy lingerie. His dad’s extensive porn collection that he discovered in his wardrobe aged 10.

we kind of limped on together for a while but it was all fucked up by then. He got more and more keen to start dressing up and going out with me 🙄. I eventually ended it, it was all too weird.

So yeah, an early warning I guess. I always knew that porn-addled cross-dressers are not women.

I know it's hard and frustrating, but keep going! I've always said that, if Sysiphus was given the option to convince an "ally" instead of rolling the boulder up the hill, he'll definitely keep rolling 😊
We had to start with the underlining of the importance of dialogue and debate without tears and stomping out. Many of times, at the beginning, I lost my cool and wished to shake her into waking up. I had to teach myself to stop, breathe, think, and start again. Now we can talk. It was especially hard because she spent way more time with her peers than at home. All my few hours work went down the drain in the following week.
I only want her to become aware of the massive lie that's going on. The ridiculousness of "day 326 of being a girl", the stereotyping of women, the cheek of "becoming a woman" before going to jail, the biological and medical truths and the harm that's done to children and so on. The insistence to indoctrinate children hurts and saddens me the most.
Wishing you patience and best of luck! ❤️

I never thought TWAW I always knew transwomen exist, deserve respect and actually I admired them. Never thought we were supposed to think they were actually women in and way shape or form. In fact the first time I came across the mantra "TWAW" I was shocked. I thought "can't trans people be proud of who they actually are?"
I stopped admiring TW after they expected us to lie and wanted to steal the definition of the word women.
So I never "peaked" exactly. I just started off neutral then my opinion dropped very low!

I think things are improving now, finally, with the American sports decision and our recent high court judgement.

Great thread thanks OP.

Its fair to say I never believed, I was aware that it was being presented as if I should believe but didn’t give it much thought. However, I didn’t take an interest in the whole issue until I twigged the implications of the GRA and proposed self id. Then I spent months panicking and trying to find out more.

The Harold/Hayley Cropper storyline confused me partly because I could see it was a female actor and I couldn’t work out the mechanics of the surgery (I like to know how things work) but I didn’t give the general topic much thought.

I worked with a guy who identified as a woman and he was quite rude to me despite me always being pleasant which I found a bit odd.

I didn't have a fear of thinking about it - I thought about it a lot because I wanted to understand and to learn. But whenever I asked honest questions, I got shot down in flames so I gave up engaging with the subject for a while. I'm trying again now but there is definitely a lot of hostility if you question some ideas.

I genuinely believed that it was possible to have a woman’s brain and be trapped in a man’s body, I used to imagine how I would feel if I woke up tomorrow in a man’s body and imagined that’s how trans people feel. Being a lesbian I also thought that I was doing the right thing by supporting other members of the LGBT community and just didn’t think about it too deeply.

I came on mumsnet a few years back to look into IVF and saw gender critical threads,

initially I was outraged and felt I had to defend trans rights, but during these debates posters pointed out the huge flaws in trans ideology that I never realised or questioned. I think the main one for me was I couldn’t actually answer the question of what is a woman? That deeply unsettled me and got me questioning everything.

My wife was part of an LGBT group at work around the same time and I listened to a teams meeting where they had people explain why they are non-binary and trans and that was really the straw that broke the camels back I suppose. I realised that gender ideology is built entirely around sexist gender stereotypes which I have always been completely against.

It was the Break It Down thread for me. I lost 2 days to it, and the research it prompted, and that was that. There‘s been a journey since then, though, which continues even now. I’ve become more confident in my views after a year or so of constant questioning and checking and worrying. And, reluctantly, rather more uncompromising. The BBC, NHS, government and TRAs have done that all by themselves. They’ve taught me just what we’re facing, and what’s potentially at stake.

Germaine Greer also helped me see that the trans movement is rooted in misogyny.

I never believed - it’s hard to imagine how I could have - but did once parrot the mantra in an unthinking attempt at conciliating some angry faithful. Like an earlier poster, I’m mildly haunted by the moment. I just hadn’t given it any thought - I trusted it was a kind gesture meaning little to me but potentially everything to them, whoever they were. But it felt uncomfortable as I said it, even then - almost humiliating, like giving up a part of myself. I knew it was a lie, and a lie that required a small verbal and emotional sacrifice of me. Because they’re not, are they. And if they are, then what am I?

I’m a traditionally left leaning person and I think I was caught up in not judging other people. And not understanding that a lot of trans women have no interest in even transitioning.

At that time, I started reading threads on Mumsnet, one of which pointed towards a GC YouTuber called Penny something. And then I started listening to what Magdalen Berns had to say about it and I realised how everything she said made perfect sense. Since then, I never subscribed to the TWAW mentality.

I also realised how lesbians have basically been under attack by men claiming to be ‘women with a penis’.

I’m still trying to convince my daughter who is 21. I only have her best interests at heart and I’m a mum of 4 girls….

The poll‘s wording has also led to some of the most interesting observations though, OP! Don’t kick yourself. The comments are more important and really thought-provoking.

It's much too interesting a thread to delete, but if it was possible, a separate poll-only one asking 'Did you ever believe TWAW?' and directing the discussion back here would be interesting.

You could ask mumsnet to delete your thread and start a new one with a sensible poll.

I never believed TWAW.

I remember in about 2017 in my part of the world a lone feminist payed a poster company for some posters to be put around the city with quotes from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the suffragettes I think - with ‘on the basis of sex’ . There was a newspaper story about how these were offensive somehow and that made me curious. The company was pressured to take them down and they did. I happened to get chatting to the owner of the company, very cool lefty bro type. I asked him about it and his attitude was so non-committal, as if he didn’t really care about the fact that he had effectively censored a woman exercising free speech who had payed him good money for a service. It was clear he couldn’t even be bothered formulating a good argument for taking them down, he just took the TRA’s word for it. I started googling the feminist and found her arguments very compelling, and then I felt really scared at how powerful the TRAs had become that they could force a company to censor this woman like this without any pushback, merely for stating that women’s rights were acquired on the basis of sex, not gender. I knew that if they cared about a few posters like this, then their intrusions on women and their demands of us were only going to escalate.

I have been a feminist for over 50 years. I never believed TWAW.

I spent most of my working life in computing. I refused society’s demands of femininity, I was happy being female, but learnt to be assertive when that wasn’t expected of women.

When in the early 2000s a man I’d known for over a decade came out to me as transgender, I was initially sympathetic. It was a complete surprise. He was a confident man, strong in his opinions, politics like mine whose hobby was fishing and who had split up with a woman I knew and he’d had a child with. We’d have occasional lunches over which he’d agonise about being trans. He always presented in public as a man. However, a different personality started to emerge. Someone who thought everyone was against them, who was dissatisfied with his therapist, his employers, his neighbours, his brother, everyone. Whether he became more narcissistic or just let it out more, I don’t know.

I never thought of him as a woman. I thought of him as a man who somehow believed he was a woman.

I became increasingly dubious about what that meant when he’d refer to “you know, those times you just want to dress up and put on a bit of slap”. No I didn’t, and having known me for such a long time, he might have noticed that he’d never seen me wearing anything but jeans and never wearing makeup.

Anyway, one January he invited me to a trans Burns supper at the flat he shared with his new girlfriend. There were four guests: two TIM academics like him, a TIM bus driver and me. Though the TIMs dressed like women but badly, they behaved liked men. The academics stuck together and had an academic conversation, forgetting about the bus driver. The bus driver sat in a chair on his own not making any effort to engage with anyone. They all let the girlfriend serve up the food and drink.

Some years later, a woman I’d been on a pink pussy hat march with asked a bunch of us if we thought Trans women were women. I said no. She’s now putting up notices on FB about how to tell trans people they’re safe with you. I’m here.

I thought TWAW meant that women transitioning and taking testosterone were still women, so should continue to use the Ladies'. 🤦‍♀️

I knew about GRA and paperwork etc, and remember watching something about it at the time - but it wasn't until I started to read threads here that I realised that people actually thought that changed paperwork actually changed their sex or gender or identity or whatever they named it. It was like they had invented a whole new imaginary universe that we had to join in 😬

I did have a lot of sympathy back in the day, but it eventually evaporated.

I never believed it. But 25 years ago I bent over backwards pretending I did as I worked with a transwoman who I felt sorry for, and wanted to show I wasn't like the nasty people who shouted insults in the street. I took a pride in presenting myself as inclusive and open minded and nice. I think I vaguely accepted being 'born in the wrong body' as a thing, but was always aware that the body was male and they were a man who we pretending was a woman to be kind.