Why do you care so much about gender issues?

Because women matter.

I've done a lot of things as a "first for women" only to have so many men dismiss my achievements out of hand, or minimise them. Try doing them on someone else's dime... it's almost impossible. Then you really "feel like a woman".

I've met lots of transwomen in my life - but they never been convincingly female. Mostly, I've felt parodied as a woman.

In my lifetime, women have had a tough slog to get nowhere near close to parity in income and opportunity, only for men to suddenly declare themselves us and subsequently get opportunities flung at them. Women? My arse.

When NZ sent a 40 year old man to the Olympics to compete against 20 -somethings , I finally went full-on terf.

It's insulting to pretend otherwise and I'm taking offence.

@Starbursthack's story resonated a lot with me. I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember, and have always rebelled against gender stereotypes and found it hard to fit in with expectations of femininity. Probably would count as gender dysphoria nowadays. I felt I was a person rather than a woman (though obviously I knew I was female) and my parents encouraged me to feel that no door was shut to me simply because of my sex. I found pregnancy incredibly difficult because it forced me to confront my ambivalence towards being female - and also brought me bang up against more gender stereotypes to push back against. Majority male friends at university and probably 50:50 at school.

Like @CautiousLurker2 I started off thinking that 'transwomen' were a small minority of deeply sad, gender dysphoric men who had had years of therapy and relied on surgery as a last resort. As such, they deserved my sympathy and my support. It did feel a bit like Gay Rights 2.0.

The thing that initially jarred with me was the talk of 'ladybrain', because that made it clear that this was all about regressive stereotypes. I might be female, but I don't have a pink fluffy ladybrain.

Then it was concern that 'transwomen' using women's toilets made them inaccessible for women with a history of being on the receiving end of male violence or whose religion prevented them being in a state of undress around non-related males. While I did not have a particular concern about mixed sex toilets for myself I could see it was an issue for others, and that it would further marginalise already-marginalised women.

Then it was the realisation that when people said 'transwomen are women' they meant 'actual women' as opposed to 'honorary women because we want to be nice'. Which meant that there was no non-circular definition of the word 'women', which meant EITHER the erasure of our sex class OR the mass imposition of gender stereotype expectations (neither of which was remotely a good thing). It is silly to think that the definition of a word can make that much of a difference, but it does.

And then it was realising how recent and fragile women's rights are (it's still less than a century since women had the right to vote on equal terms to men), and how this is yet another way to keep us in our places. Fuck that with a capital F.

1. Like you, I'm a lifelong lefty.
2. I have a bit of a science background (started studying a science, but changed subjects at uni).
3. I have several highly vulnerable girls in my family.
4. I know 25 women and girls who have been raped.
5. I am an atheist.
6. I work in a captured sector.
7. Group think and peer pressure rub me the wrong way.
8. The totalitarian aspects of the ideology.

Because it’s fundamentally crucial to girls’ safety to be able to say unequivocally ‘that person is male’ and then accurately risk assess any situation. It is beyond moronic to lie to girls.

Because I was brought up by truly awful deceitful people and I see their destructive patterns of behaviour in both men who say they are women and the shameless women who advocate for them.

Exactly.

I guess I thought people meant it when they supported women's rights. That it wasn't just about parroting the 'right thing to say' or following fashion.

I was very naive it seems

You have elegantly distilled the main thrust of my thesis. 😁

I agree, @TheKeatingFive . Even as a man, I find it frankly a bit scary. How thin and flimsy is the veneer of the social settlement, so easily overturned in next to no time. And the level of misogny that it demonstrates.

I’m also in that same political wilderness @Wetoldyousaurus

It's an interesting question. I sometimes feel like screaming at people in frustration that they can't see the same insanity I'm seeing.

Firstly, it's part of my job to understand human behaviour. And this is the most out of my depth I've ever been in my life. I feel like I'm getting closer to understanding how this has taken such a hold, but I'm still not fully there yet.

Secondly, the sheer speed with which women's rights, opportunities, safeguarding got overturned. That blows my mind completely.

The same people who would have fought for women's representation in sports, turning round and letting men take that from them. It's gobsmacking.

The same people who were advocates of 'me too', who argued for women choosing 'the bear' over men, who would have been stringent champions of safeguarding of young girls in sports/overnights, who would have been the biggest advocates for sensitive rape counselling. To see them throw that all away to accommodate delusion men - I can barely process that.

So I think it's the barefaced hypocrisy of it all. The blatant, widespread misogyny that I was naive to. I've found that out in the most brutal
way.

@ArabellaSaurus yeah I know :) But I was at a party a while ago and a woman approached me and she said her name and knew straight away she was someone who I had been in a private GC chat with but never met IRL. She did too and we just instinctively hugged each other and it was noisy so we managed a brief GC outpouring together before others joined us and we had to shut up again. This knowing that we could only say these ‘things’ under the cover of loud music because the other people in this ‘scene’ were a danger to us, professionally and socially if the knew the truth behind our association, it made me realise how strange this whole thing still is.

If it helps, there's a fuck of a lot of us in the same wilderness.

Reasons 2, 3, & 5 for me. As said upthread, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Fair question OP. So many reasons. Off the top of my head...

1. Yaniv. WTAF?
2. Brought up in a female family, men were always 'other' to me, learned to be wary of them very young. Men can hurt me in ways women can't.
3. Primary school teacher. When I first started I was surprised at how differently bright boys and bright girls approach tasks, I don't believe it's learned, it's innate. The system is loaded towards how bright boys do it. Since then have been staggered by the ways in which boys are given precedence at the expense of the girls. Boys' poor behaviour is permitted in class, they can assault and insult girls without consequences (I've seen this start in Y3, so 7 year olds). Well behaved girls used as sponges to sit either side of boys with significant behaviour issues, who quite frankly physically intimidate me, a grown woman. Girls just learn to get their heads down and stay out of the firing line. Mixed sports day events, so give out 32 stickers to the winners (8 events, place 1-4), only 4 of those stickers being for girls. Its non stop.
4. Reflecting on my & my friends' experiences of sexual assault and harassment when we were younger. It seemed so normal then. Again showing me that men are not always safe, and women are expected to make allowances for them. I want to be absolutely sure that if I make a complaint about a male in an area for females, it will be taken seriously, and that is won't be me who ends up being reported or blamed.
5. I know too many young people caught up in this. Their adhesion to the theory that they are unhappy because they were born in the wrong body (which is supported by the institutions around them, NHS, universities etc) is preventing them from dealing with their real problems, and they resort to black market hormones in the hope that this will make them better. When that fails they land the responsibility for their unhappiness on others, stalling them in an adolescent state.

Powerful post @Wetoldyousaurus

I care for lots of the same reasons as you OP. Lifelong leftie, and it was a big part of my identity. I when the penny dropped on gender for me I went through a grieving process as my political affiliation had been very important to me. I felt embarrassed that I had been fooled into going along with it or at least trying for as long as I did to ‘educate myself’ and ‘be kind’. I thought I was smart till then but it took me far too long to realise the truth about queer theory.

When my own child briefly got caught up, it sharpened my focus. But it’s not just that. I detest that it took this to really make me realise that I had been intellectually screwed with by my ‘tribe’. A type of intellectual grooming. The TRA propaganda that I consumed with an open heart and mind, only to realise with hindsight, when I saw the bigger picture, that it was all part of that ideological drive to fool women into obedience. I resent it so much. I will never trust or support another political or intellectual institution again in my life. I feel cast out into the wilderness in that sense and that’s why I know this matters a lot.

I'm a philosophy graduate too, and despite all the real world harms being caused by this ideology, I think the thing that incenses me the most is that it MAKES NO BLOODY SENSE!

I like things to make sense. I like people to define their terms, and not use circular definitions or scream 'no debate'. I hate the butchering of language, at the behest of a tiny fraction of the population.

I've questioned whether I'm missing something, read stuff by trans authors, but no. There are only two sexes, you can't change sex, and sex is an important category in law.

The number of Autistic young people swept up in all of this should ring enough alarm bells to drown out the most pernicious TRAs. Also gay, other trauma.

I think universities are vulnerable to ideological trends because making an academic reputation depends on rocking the previous boat, but it's safest if you do it in a fashionable way. So there has to be a continual succession of "new takes", but there's also a tendency for particular forms of iconoclasm to become a bandwagon for a while.

First it was Freud, and digging the sexual dirt on eminent Victorians etc ( the more apparently respectable, the bigger the academic scoop). There was Marxist analysis. Feminism (old style). Racism and slavery is another. And of course, all things "queer".

Obviously, reviewing the world, or bits of it, in the light of a new kind of theory is a perfectly proper thing for academics to do. But if intellectual life is in a healthy state, there will be room for the unfashionable voices too - both the ones who point out where the old ideas are still valid, and the ones putting forward new ideas that don't fit the current trends. But if finances are precarious, the tendency will be to produce and support work that is most likely to get published and widely cited (and funded), and likely to appeal to students.

I think this is also where I started. I've always really been interested in epistemology and the philosophy of science and how that interacts with medicine, so it seemed such a bizarre thing.

And as identity politics have taken over whole sections of the left I've found that kind of fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. The complete inability of the antiracist crowd to understand correlation vs causation, for example. The weird appeals to emotion.

I also have been involved in education a fair bit over the years and have been really horrified at what I've seen there.

Foremost is just the fact that it's based on a lie - the idea that a man can in any way become a woman, either biologically through surgery or socially by embodying or attempting to embody female sex-based stereotypes. The law and institutions should simply never have been allowed to perpetuate this lie (whether or not those doing so were true believers or just toeing the 'be kind' line).