Reasons you once believed in gender identity

Talking of films, did anyone watch Transamerica with Felicity Huffman? She (by virtue of being a tall woman with a strong jawline and deep voice) plays a TW on a roadtrip with her teenage son. I was so naive when this film came out that I was like "But how could she have fathered a son?! What are the odds of someone doing that, then having a sex change?!". The conception was explained in the film as "the most pathetically lesbian experience". I just sort of nodded along thinking "whatever, nowt so queer as folk, strange things happen in America".

Edit: I have just looked this film up, and it's far weirder than I remember, with the teenage son being a rent boy and ends up working in porn, hooray, totally normal happy ending for all.

Remember that funny blip about 10 years ago when it was trendy to be a ‘feminist’? That moved on quickly…

This made my stomach turn! Horrific.

Surely nobody actually, truly believes TWAW. I think there’s a difference between believing and just accepting.

I didn’t question it because it didn’t seem that big a deal. Plus I did believe all the stories and difficulties about the internal, emotional struggle, the hardship of living as a woman for two years and then having to go through difficult and painful surgeries. All how they were being murdered just for being trans all the time. I also did believe it was a mental health disorder.

I couldn’t even say if there was one particular thing that changed my mind or if was a boiled frog thing with lots of little things: realising most TW don’t actually have surgery, that they no longer wanted it to be considered MH and just something anyone could do, that in fact not only were they not being murdered, they were the safest demographic in the UK. And of course, spend two minutes of Reddit and it’s very clear that for many, it’s just a fetish.

I will say it’s really hard now to look at any and consider them the ‘true trans’ now. When I started changing my mind in 2019 I still tried to be kind and do the pronoun thing even if I didn’t really agree. I don’t even care anymore though after watching their ever escalating abuse towards women. TW are just men and should be referred to as such.

I never believed TWAW BUT I did believe that transwomen should be allowed to just get on with their lives, use women's spaces etc. I believed this because I had absorbed the "Hollywood" version - I thought we were talking about a tiny tiny tiny tiny number of people, all of whom were doing their upmost to "be" women, including, where they could afford it, medicine and surgery. I honestly believed that if a transwoman came into the bathroom with me, at WORST, I might wonder if they were a transwoman but I wouldn't be certain. If anything, I think I thought that transwomen probably struggled feeling constantly excluded and that as a result THEY would be even MORE stereotypically female - caring, kind, considerate etc.

I remember being challenged on this by someone and asking her what stats there were about transwomen.

And then, suddenly, I realised that stats were irrelevant because there were plenty of "transwomen" who were just playing and using it to take advantage.I still felt desperately sorry and sympathetic for the group of transwomen I saw (and stil do, in a way) as "true transwomen" but I was furious at all these other men who were fucking it up for them as much as they were for women.

when a man, who only dressed as a woman SOMETIMES, was selected by the FT as one of their "Women of the year" and then, round about the same time, women's cycling was being completely overtaken by men.... that's when I really truly lost it and realised that we couldn't keep being kind becuase the genuinely small number of transpeople who needed this kindness were no longer who we were talking about.

This is a very powerful reminder of how far we’ve come WRT free speech (or clawed back some of the regression in free speech 😢). Heartbreaking really.

Oh, I also followed Upworthy and similar guff on FB until I realised what a load of disingenuous shite it peddled. But it’s amazing how you can suppress your misgivings when constantly bombarded with messages about how good and kind it is to suppress your misgivings

This was a long time ago btw, well before we were all Spartacus.

I'm not even familiar with these cases but will go look these up after this.

Interestingly, I have an Autistic teen son. He is incredibly black and white in his view and always has been vocal in his view that the trans ideology makes no sense, is confusing and he refuses to pander to it. I was always miffed as to where this came from. ( With me being a be kind person).

My son has however been correct and logical in his view all along.

The difficulty here is the implications for him in being too vocal. He has a young relative on the other side of family who is a girl now asking to be called a boy, with a new name. Son's refusing to do this and it's causing issues.

My teen is insistent it's a mental illness yet I have to try encourage him to be careful about expressing this. I don't feel comfortable saying this is a mental illness.

I'm very cautious who I discuss the topic with and what I say. I tend to stick to my true position which is that as an ideology, I'm against it all. If a loved one's child asked me to call them he when they're actually a girl, I would try accomodate that.

I did a mixed sport at a high level. This meant I never agreed TWIW.

At primary level I could take on anyone. As a teenager playing against a boy the power difference was huge. Also the injuries I got were from contact with boys in a game - not the sport I did at County/Nat, but another I played recreationally.

I also have a relative with ASD. I see the grooming and exploitation.

@rebmacesrevda ah yes we are both fully team TERF now!

Early on there was a clear distinction that male and female was understood as sex but that gender identity could be different - when I first saw the TWAW, I thought that it meant we would of course take into consideration their identity and that it was meant for those who have gender dysphoria. I never actually thought that trans women were actually female.

It wasn't long though before I noticed how much no debate was pushed and I could see the clear harms which can happen in society if you suddenly pretend that male and female aren't categories which matter in safeguarding. I saw the clear sex discrimination. It's been a long slow struggle of having to operate very covertly and underground (I had a VPN server and different social media accounts to post under just in order to speak out).

Even in newspaper comments, saying a trans woman was actually male would get deleted. Any reference to biological sex was deleted. The old biological sex is a transphobic dog whistle. It's resulted in complete loss of trust in institutions, in much of the media, in government and I'm so sad that so many tried to silence women.

I do though appreciate the justice system in this country and our judiciary wasn't able to be completely captured despite attempts to do so. It made me realise the value of the House of Lords. I was grateful for truly independent media and the few voices speaking out in the press. Our checks and balances still seem to work and just three brave women backed by so many of us were able to take on the government trying to discriminate against us and win! It makes me really emotional to think about it.

I never did, but I thought they were a tiny group, like flat earthers that exist, but no one takes any notice of.
I was horrified when I realised how mainstream it was to accept it.

I didn’t believe in the ideology as such, just was under the mistaken impression that it (transitioning, that is) was a vanishingly rare occurrence and that the people involved were incredibly vulnerable, needed support and were no threat to anyone. I also presumed that everyone had surgery and took hormones. Mainly informed by an acquaintance who was young, clearly troubled and went through a terrible time with surgery and follow-ups, and still does I believe.

I remember arguing with Dittany at least once, to my eternal shame. I was so naive.

Why did you once believe TWAW

I never have and never will. My stance has always been that TW are men.

It's a weird one. I watched it with a male friend and at the end, he said of the character "Ah, he was quite affecting, wasn't he?". And I just thought "Did we even watch the same film?". Looking back, the film seems a good example of TRAs saying the quiet bit out loud. It was the moment where I thought "If this is what sort of people want surgery, gender dysphoria is not what I thought it was".

Have you told your dad you were wrong?

My dad was a doctor, old-school conservative, kind, but also direct and fearless. He would not have tolerated this nonsense. I would have loved to see some woke Leftie NHS manager telling him to wear a pronoun badge. It would not have gone down well at all. 😂

I was also a Leftie, until my eyes were opened to this mess. For the first time in my life I'm considering voting Conservative, and I wish my dad was here so that I could tell him how wrong I was!

I'm also interested to hear this.

I've assumed that most people, whether they realise it or not, are exactly as you were, OP, in essentially being afraid of their own minds! I think a lot of people cut off their thought process whenever they realise, on some level, that they are approaching an inescapable conclusion that they know will get them into trouble.

It's psychologically safer in some ways to never consciously confront the conclusion because then you don't have to decide between continuing to say things you know to be untrue (psychologically stressful) and continuing to be accepted in your group, or telling the truth and potentially being ostracised by your group (which we're generally evolutionarily hardwired to try to avoid!)

I never bought into it (though it didn't properly enter my consciousness until Maya's first instance case), but for one reason and another I was brought up to place a very high value on objective fact and reasoning. I was also fairly hardened to a certain amount of solitude and self-reliance when younger, so it is possible that the idea of ostracism is somewhat less frightening to me than it might be to some.

@Darkgreendarkbark i think I’d have a very different reaction if I watched it now (which I won’t). Also remember feeling sorry for the trans widow but a bit baffled as to why she put up with it all

I read Conundrum in my teens (borrowed from the the local library). To me it was a book by and about a man who had opted for fairly brutal surgery to satisfy his own feelings.

In the 1990s and 2000s I followed the legal arguments about Lydia Foy in Ireland, increasingly alarmed that a man's feelings were going to result in law being enacted on a basis of imaginative fiction. I never thought LF was a woman. I observed that LF's family's feelings were being disregarded while his were being regarded as central.

I always went on the basis of 'call people by the personal names they choose, give groups of people the collective nouns they prefer, don't use derogatory words'.

But I couldn't use words that were outright lies - call sheep 'rabbits', or lettuces 'songthrushes'. There are biological facts.

I had the opposite experience with The Danish Girl. I was struck that it starts off with him, a seemingly normal and red-blooded married man, secretly dressing up in his wife's underwear. That wasn't the sympathy hook I was expecting. Then he goes on his long journey to "become" a woman through surgery... Becoming a narcissistic bore in the process. Again, not the sympathetic journey I expected. I ended up feeling really sorry for his wife throughout, who bent over backwards to support him through his growing folly. I think she at least got a happy ending with the other chap, iirc? I hope she did.

Oh, just remembered another thing.... I never understood why the T got tacked on to LGB. Everyone seemed to accept it unquestioningly, but it wasn't logical to me, because sexuality and gender are not the same thing. I asked a friend about it (a gay man) and he didn't get it either. He said he'd been told they were "his people" but he felt no more affinity to trans people than he did to straight people.

Yes, it’s child abuse IMO. Parents who encourage their children down this path should be prosecuted I think.

Honestly, I didn’t give it much critical thought at the time. I went along with what seemed like the accepted progressive view and placed any discomfort I felt in the same category as homophobia. However, it didn’t sit right with me deep down, but I pushed those feelings aside, afraid of being labelled a bigot and wanting to remain aligned with my left wing values. I followed prominent trans activists like Munroe Bergdorf on Instagram and absorbed their views uncritically, in part because that’s what my peers were doing.

Things began to shift for me when I read J.K. Rowling’s open letter and found myself resonating with her concerns. That was the turning point when I really began to question and research what I’d previously taken at face value.

What unsettled me most were two things:

A) The insistence that I ignore biological reality and that I was wrong or hateful for trusting my own eyes and understanding of sex. It felt like gaslighting, and it was being imposed as unquestionable ideology.

B) The medicalisation of gender distress (particularly in teenagers). The deeply upsetting idea that children and adolescents, who aren’t developmentally equipped to give fully informed consent, are being put on a path toward irreversible changes including infertility and potentially lifelong sexual dysfunction.

I never really questioned it but looking back I never really believed it either, but was much more empathetic and desperate to ‘be kind’ and modern in thinking. I have never believed TWAW.
Looking back I think that film The Danish Girl was very effective propaganda for the trans community. I remember having lots of inflamed conversations with my father whose views I regarded as bigoted back then.
To paraphrase Wes Streeting, I now realise I was wrong.
Being kind is not to affirm delusions but to help people bravely face the truth. You cannot change sex.

Ah interesting I had a similar experience to PP frequenting a gay club in London in the 90s. Occasional transsexual tolerated in the ladies, but transvestites (who greatly outnumbered them) used the mens.
Edit to add it wasn't actually a gay night, but it was a famous gay venue for the other 6 nights of the week so had an incredibly eclectic crowd.