Reasons you once believed in gender identity

I never believed it.

I am old, and read about dysphoric males years ago. These men dressed like women and spent some or all of their lives pretending to be women, and really wanted to be women, but I never heard of any of them claiming they actually were women. I got the impression that, like most of the young women identifying as trans today, that they were driven more by a rejection of their own sex, or at least the stereotypes and expectations imposed on their sex, which they felt they couldn't live up to.

I felt sorry for them, and saw them as victims of a patriarchal society, and truly believed the number of such men would just dwindle away as feminism reshaped society. I was obviously completely oblivious of the sexually motivated AGP males then.

I became aware about fifteen or twenty years ago that some men were claiming to actually be women, and that as they were females they had female penises. I laughed about it -I didn't see this as any kind of a threat, just the ramblings of some Californian New Age loonies. I would have been absolutely gobsmacked had I known then that I would live to hear the Prime Minister of the UK say in an interview that some women have penises.

I still sometimes find it hard to believe that so many people in government, the media, education and medicine really either believed or pretended to believe something which is so obviously complete and utter nonsense. My opinion of the average intellect of these people has plummeted.

Years ago I was able to get along with trans friends on the basis of a shared understanding:

that they thought they had a body-incongruent gender identity that required medical and legal solutions

and I didn't believe in gender identity but did accept that they were free to seek physical alterations, and that laws exist enabling them to be treated as if they had changed sex.

I could be completely honest and they did not call me a bigot, just someone a bit literal-minded who needed to be educated at every opportunity.

I wasn't really listening. Then - for personal reasons - I decided to read up on the topic, and discovered (scare music, insert very bad consequences of GI here 😱).

I took my insights back to my friends, but now I had a problem. I could tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but telling the whole truth was obviously going to cause emotional carnage. My friends have delusional beliefs, and they are defending them (presumably unconsciously, as they are clever and well educated) with every manner of sleight of hand: bait and switch, false syllogisms, undistributed middles, claims to arcane knowledge, appeals to authority, emotional blackmail, category errors, applying the benefit of the doubt to the complementary assertion, you name it.

Just one example: 'single-sex spaces are a great idea as an alternative to trans-inclusion, but is it realistic? We can't pander to every niche request'.

(Just to add, allies are even worse, because they quickly detect, and disapprove of, my terfiness, whilst trans friends of both sexes blithely assume I agree with them about everything unless I wear an I❤️JKR t-shirt. Which I don't)

So I keep trucking on. Trans friends are paranoid and unhappy because of all the 'hate' so I still see them, but my tentative truthfulness will never change their minds.

I realise this all makes me look a bit stupid and treacherous. But what can I say? It's all mad, just mad.

I never believed TW were actually women or TM were actually men, but I did think that it was the right thing to treat them as their preferred sex as a harmless kindness. Particularly as I thought that it was true that social/medical transition is necessary to prevent suicide (I have since found that there is no real evidence for this and that there is no effective follow up for medical transition).

I was open to the idea there could be unknown male/female brain factors that are the wrong way round (I would still be open to this if there were any evidence but there is not).

I thought that transsexualism was innate, very rare and difficult to live with, something that noone would choose, present from childhood. That it was wrong to second guess somebody's lived experience. I still do believe that some extent in that it don't rule it out as a possibility for some trans people. I assumed that there were rigorous diagnostic criteria. (I now come to see that there are no objective criteria, self ID is enough, there is a very obvious element of social contagion for many, and a very obvious element of sexual fetish for many. And indeed those extreme high profile cases of male sexual predators exploiting a trans identity to gain access to women and/or to terrorise and gaslight their victims. Which I truly to be a horrifying scandal and shows how little misogyny seems to count against all the other "-phobias", including trans).

I've always wanted to defend the vulnerable and look after the rights of minorities and that's still a very big part of my moral/political philosophy but I now believe that those good intentions have been hijacked by the trans movement at women's expense.

I thought that trans people could have kind, affirmative treatment without affecting women's rights because I believed in good faith that the trans movement did not want to diminish women's rights. (But I have since seen women negatively impacted in sport, sexual safety, health information and so on by the trans movement and GC feminists vilified for taking what is only a rational position).

I believed that JK Rowing had said something transphobic because I heard it repeated so often. I was actually engaging in disputes with people on MN, defending a trans rights position and this caused me to become curious about what she'd actually written. When I read her own words I realised that she hadn't said anything particularly hateful in the statements she'd been villified for, that her "transphobia" had been a lie. That's really when the house of cards came tumbling down because basically, my entire position had been founded upon taking the trans movements own account of itself in good faith.

I don't think I ever really believed it, but I do remember - with shame - using the TWAW phrase to an administrator at an organisation who had asked me to fill in a clumsily worded form that asked about sex and gender for no readily apparent reason. I still wonder from time to time what she thought about it then. If you're reading, I'm sorry. (I don't think I any longer have the information about precisely who it was, otherwise I'd be tempted to reach out now, a decade or more later, and apologise.) I ticked the top option because I think what would be accurate would be to say that I thought we all knew that it was a polite fiction but that it would be really REALLY rude to betray that we knew it was fiction; but I was afraid to think about why it would be rude, so I didn't.

I think there were a lot of things that led me to believe it to begin with, and a key turning point;

• I was born in 1989 and grew up wanting to "be a boy"; I have a few masculine traits too such as being tall with a deeper voice. I also have some quite strong autistic traits, but I've no desire to go and get a diagnosis, so who knows!
• I had a very misogynistic step father who went on about how shit women were, used to put down my mum all the time. I'm ashamed to say I used to believe him and also make fun of my mum (as a younger child).
• My step mum had borderline personality disorder so wasn't exactly the most fun woman to be around, further solidifying the idea that women were insane illogical and crap.
• After uni, I moved to Bristol where I became very left wing and woke. I used to hang out a lot with trans people who told me about them being the most vulnerable, just wanting to pee etc. I totally believed it and was almost scared to think anything else, almost like those kind of thoughts would contaminate my mind and make me a bad person.

• Me being gender non conforming made me think it would mean I was non binary, but I could never bring myself to ask for they/them pronouns because, if I'm honest, I thought it was completely cringey and self absorbed. I think was the beginning of the cognitive dissonance that planted the seed for my future terfery 😂

• Aged 32 I fell pregnant with my daughter and started spending more time on Mumsnet for parenting things only. I started reading the FWR board and actually listening to others' opinions and the feminist position on this and other thoughts on misogyny. I realised that there were infinite ways to be a woman but the unifying traits of us were rooted in biology, I realised that I had been brought up surrounded by both blatant and covert misogyny and I myself had put women at the bottom of the pecking order of whose opinion I should respect and listen to, with men (including TIM) at the top.

• Bit by bit the scales fell from my eyes, and here I am today fighting for a positive future for my daughter and other girls and women - not only from gender ideology but from the insidious misogyny that has surrounded us from both sides of the political spectrum.

Yes I was "radicalised" by Mumsnet 😂 or, as rational people who are not prone to hyperbole might say... The older and much, much wiser women made me see sense.

Tbh I never believed TWAW, but at first I didn’t really think it mattered, it wasn’t harming anyone? Was it?

Then, I started seeing exactly what harm it was doing. Women forced out of jobs, made to feel unsafe. The shutting down of opposing views through threats of economic hardship, being excommunicated from social media, threats of the law, threats of violence. The pushing of false science, the infiltration of areas of education and support for the young. The destruction of knowledge. The cult like nature, people following through often unacknowledged fear, thinking they were right. It all seemed so familiar- exactly the same as 17th century witch hunts. The 15th/16th century heretic hunts and verging on some of the tactics of the Nazis and Communists.

I saw it as part of a larger Brave New World. I watched in horror as the sheep read the barn wall with its changing rules without much as a baa. I wasn’t prepared to stand by and watch piggy being killed over and over!

There’s so many wider lessons to this than just the immediate trans debate. We need to be looking who is controlling the narrative through MSM and SM. The dangers of removing critical thinking, the rise of the virtual tribe in place of the physical one, the dangers of all easily manipulated AI providing our main source of information.

I wish people would look to the past more to understand the present. Nothing we see now hasn’t been played out before in history, it just wears different clothes each time. With history, we can see how things play out - it’s never very good for women

@rebmacesrevda yes I had that experience too, though was too shocked to do/say anything. I thought oh so this must be normal…. Just about sums up my assumption of the world back then.

never believed in it

I don’t think I ever really believed it, but the Vanity Fair cover was when I wasn’t prepared to accept it at all.

The duper’s delight smirk, and of course it’s no coincidence that Caitlyn Jenner is dressed like the aging starlet youthful Jenner would have been looking at as a teenager. - I did wonder whether Liebowitz did that deliberately or who made that decision.

I never did, I thought everyone agreed that it is a mental illness. I couldn't imagine that people actually believed it.

I was going to say that I have never believed that TWAW, but actually in the 90s when I was a teenager, I heard about transsexuals and because I didn’t have good scientific or medical knowledge, I think I might have believed that some men were becoming women when they had the surgery- I didn’t give it much thought as these people seemed to be such a tiny number. Then I forgot all about transsexuals for a while until about 2014 when I first heard the word ‘transgender’. Shortly after that, I discovered threads on here and went down the rabbit hole. I quickly understood then that nobody was ever changing sex.

@peanutbuttertoasty

OMG I'm SO glad I grew up before social media and online porn. When I was young, the most extreme sex-act I knew about was a blow-job! When I was about 30 I had a one-night-stand with a guy who seemed normal, until he tried to strangle me during sex. He thought this was a standard thing to do in bed, but I was having none of it. I can't believe young women are going along with it, and even claiming they enjoy it. Maybe some do, but I think the majority are saying that because they know the men want to hear it.

It’s so true. I used to be a pick me girl. Then I reached middle age and saw how much damage my low self esteem had wrought on my life and grew boundaries. And I grew up before the explosion in pornification. Quite glad I have a son.

I've never believed TWAW, and firmly assumed that everyone felt the same as me and were just keeping quiet to be nice. Then I spoke to a friend about it and she honestly believed that some people are born in the wrong bodies and can change sex. I felt like I was awake, she was asleep and I needed to find more awake people to prove I wasn't going mad.

I've name changed for this too

I never believed that TWAW, but that TIM were in some sense allied to feminism because they were actively rejecting gender stereotypes (TIW too I suppose)- so I thought we could accommodate them and behave 'as if' they were women, meaning use female pronouns etc I never really thought too much about TW accessing women's spaces because I thought they were such a tiny number it wouln't matter. Also at that point I wasn't aware of the AGP/fetishising aspect.

I remember at that time there was discussion on here about TW in women's sport- the olympics I think- and because I have no interest in sport I never bothered to read or think about this, or I might have peaked sooner

Anyway I got involved in a local project that was researching LGBT activism in our (small northern university) town. In truth, this was 99% LGB history. My part was to look at the wider picture and LGBT rights globally. This led me to some of the more batshit claims of transactivism, and i realised that these men are actually claiming that they actually are women. And I thought, 'wait...what????'

And then I started to read (here mostly) about all the harms being done, especially to young people, and became more and more GC.

I truly believe that no one actually believes TWAW. One day this will all be over as its not sustainable.

I do agree that parents are victims in this too, to a degree. I’ve listened to those podcasts, they are excellent.
The entire ideology needs unravelling to the top, potentially with class action lawsuits etc. There’s been massive harm inflicted on society.

We're also conditioned to please men, and put their "needs" above ours. It's so ingrained, and it takes real conscious effort to stop doing it! I'm pretty good at not pandering to men nowadays, but I sometimes catch myself doing it without thinking. I have no idea how to teach younger generations of women to stand up for themselves. I worry that it might take something even worse than gender ideology to make them see the light. I realise this probably sounds really patronising to young people, but I see it happening all the time and I wish they could see it too.

@peanutbuttertoasty
I understand why you feel that way, but in most cases, I really feel for the parents. They’re put in an impossible position faced with medical ‘experts’ and an ideology that presents a terrifying choice: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” So it’s no wonder many feel they have no option but to go along with it.

To me, this looks like a medical scandal. Many of the clinicians involved aren’t necessarily bad people, but they’ve become deeply entrenched in a belief system. One heavily shaped by organisations like WPATH, which has shifted from a medical authority to an activist-driven body. So questioning the current model would mean confronting the harm they’ve caused.

If you’re interested in exploring this perspective more deeply, I highly recommend this episode of Gender: A Wider Lens featuring the Journalist Mia Hughes:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/gender-a-wider-lens/id1542655295?i=1000650106616

It was ‘be kind’/‘live and let live’, thinking of it as part of the LGB family and assuming (foolishly) that as other people who mostly aligned with on left liberal issues were saying this, it can’t have been wrong that made me go along with TWAW for awhile.

What an eye-opener it has been to see how little women are considered and how our needs are completely invisible and not acknowledged.

I never really believed TWAW. My thought was always 'no they are transwomen but that's fine '.

But I do think that initially I thought they were a certain vulnerable type and if they really felt like that then there must be something in it although it felt like the emporers new clothes and I was confused that people seemed to really believe it to be true.

Unable to discuss any of this in my work environment I started reading things here. Then I came across Tinsel Angel's posts and the trans windows and realised just how self centered this was and the extent of these views being forced on others without their consent. Not to mention that once you've been introduced to the concept of AGP you can never unsee it. So thanks Tinsel (I can't find you to tag).

I never did think it. But I guess because I had a trans man family member, I wanted to think of them as a 'man' out of respect. So I obviously call them by male name and pronouns.

I guess I would always call people what they wished anyway. But maybe that clouded my ability to actually vocalise that TW aren't W. In case it was hurtful to my family member? Like it seemed double standards?

I first raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of Laurel Hubbard in the weightlifting in the World Championships.

Then I had an experience where I had to be chaperoned for my safety when treating a TG woman who had previously assaulted 2 nurses. This person was huge… and I kept thinking I could run into this person in toilet… then it just got weirder.

There was a TG woman who was in the pub quiz who was an absolute twat but no one could be arsed to deal with them. All the women would wait until they had gone to the toilet because they were so aggressive. Last Nov I was in the gym changing room and a TGwoman walked in, and I tried to get the gym to either make it female only OR write it in the policy and I was ignored.

I noticed the people talking most about it were TG women and gay men and all the women were trying to not rock the boat or were being demonised for it.

I work with a gay man who we agree on most things and really get on, but he was saying the most vile misogynistic things about JKRowling like it was rehearsed. I shit him a look last time and he hasn’t said anything since.

It’s really brought out the worst in people.

'Why did you once believe TWAW?'

I'm another who never believed it, simply because human beings cannot change sex.

I met old school transsexuals back in the day. However, they knew that they had not actually changed sex and did not expect me to pretend that they had.

I have watched in horror as this completely false idea (TWAW) has taken hold and has done so much damage, including to people with trans identities.

I used to look at horrific things that happened in the past, and I could never understand how they could have happened. Now I know, as I have seen a terrible lie grow, shut down dissenting voices and wreak havoc in so many countries, to so many people.

The biggest lesson is how we all need to be aware of how authoritarianism works and what the tactics are that keep a lie alive.

I thought I was being kind. I remember hearing about Germaine Greer getting cancelled for saying transwomen were men and thinking, “Oh come on Germaine, can’t we just live and let live?”

And then I found the Feminism section of MN

Apologies, Germaine, you were absolutely right.

I find women the hardest to talk to about these issues. The handmaidens. It gives me too much rage that they can be so bought into the bullshit. Not their/our fault really. We’re conditioned to not be believed and not believe ourselves. The be kind thing has been an absolute coup. My SIL and MIL make me boil!