Why do you care so much about gender issues?

Because my son is young and impressionable.

So much good sense being expressed on this thread!

For me, it's the lies. Not just the fundamental one, that humans can change sex. Lies start off by corroding trust between people and spread to corrupt institutions.

Obviously anything founded on a lie has to be supported by more lies, eg calling men 'she', falsifying official documents such as passports and birth certificates, allowing men to claim prizes in women's sports etc etc.
And these then have to be supported by people pretending to believe them, like the NHS staff who swore, when a patient said another patient had raped her, that she was lying because there were no men on her ward (the rapist was a 'transwoman').
And if you play along pretending to believe the lies, you have to denounce those who won't play the game, and they have to be punished. So even if you want to stop lying, it gets harder and harder to dare.

To shore up the lie -
Organisations have to exclude members who commit 'wrongthink'
Employers have to sack guiltless workers.
Colleagues have to shun colleagues.
Trade unions have to abandon their female members.
Police have to interrogate those who express conflicting opinions.

As the lies spread to disrupt society -
Women's single-sex organisations and spaces have to allow men in.
Lesbians have to accept male sex partners or risk being excluded.
Laws against indecent exposure have to be quietly ignored so men can freely parade naked in front of women and children.
Children are taught that people can be 'born in the wrong body' and need drugs and surgery to put them right.
Governments pass laws to entrench the lie, eg self-ID
Etc

At every level, as the edifice grows, I suspect the pretenders feel more and more desperate, but no longer dare to challenge the lie.

It will all come tumbling down eventually, because nothing built on a lie is stable. But many young lives will have been ruined before then.

I started off caring when I saw how it was pushed at children and how they can so easily go down a path of social and medical intervention that can not be rolled back.

I don't know whether I care but I'm sure as hell angry.

I'm angry because it does not make sense, it has never made sense, but so many people are spewing this ridiculous nonsense, despite the fact that it's a load of hogwash.

I'm angry because we've come full circle and men are again getting to decide what it is to be a women, what women must say, what women must think.

I'm angry because so many women who declare themselves to be feminists are the main force behind this stupidity.

I'm angry because we're forcing children to tell lies and punishing them when they don't

I'm angry because women who have worked so hard to achieve something are having it taken from them because some male cheat has declared himself a women.

I'm angry about every single thing this mentally deluded ideology stands for.

I was taught you cannot defend what you cannot define. If the definition of women is "adult human female - oh and some men with non quantifiable lady feelings" then it is impossible to define women as a sex class. At a stroke there is nothing that is fir women at all.

as for the institutional capture, I am a member of the public sector 'lanyard class' which in my personal experience is populated by ppl who go to lots of meetings with other ppl from the lanyard class and everyone is polite and most discussions are entirely theoretical discussions about the public and what the public think whilst never actually interacting with the public beyond an Amazon delivery driver or the person on the tills in the supermarket

I have been a feminist, though not a campaigner, all my adult life. I never felt disadvantaged in my working life, being confident to speak my mind in all scenarios at senior management level. I am now retired but my feminist views have hardened in recent years because I don't like being told what I can say, or even think, without the opportunity to have a reasoned discussion. I think it's the "no debate" issue that has swung it for me, along with an increasing awareness of the appalling treatment meted out to the few women (some of whom we know well from ET cases on these threads), who have tried to defend their right to privacy, security and dignity in what should be, single sex spaces. I can quite see why Naomi Cunningham says she is "fuelled by rage", because I am definitely going the same way.

As pp have said, it's the basic lie that biology is not immutable. Everything else flows from that.

Essentially, laziness. A litmus test.
If someone claims that twaw, or are 'special' i know that they are either stupid or cowards.
So I don't have to pay attention to them.
It makes life much easier.

I agree with the thrust of your argument. Knowing facts shouldn’t need justification.

I’m trying to think of other facts where there is a currently accepted broad institutional capture claiming lies are truth and I can’t think of one.

So maybe that’s one reason it’s so important to so many. If flat-earthers gained ascendancy and we were all expected to dance around it, there would be a lot of arguments about it, for sure. That wouldn’t also involve overriding/invading other people’s rights though, so there’s a double whammy.

I do worry about what other lies we are being fed though. This whole situation is horribly unsettling for a multitude of reasons.

I was blithely oblivious and in the #bekind camp until 9 years ago when my autistic/aspie daughter started puberty and decided she wanted to be a boy. She was so angry that her puberty was so shit in comparison to a boy’s. I could see that it was a response to puberty, to feeling other, to possibly being bi/lesbian, to the impact of Weinstein’s arrest and Trump’s ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ tapes being in the media, fallout from #MeToo where every woman who had ever been whistled at by a builder claimed trauma. I could go on.

I also thought at that time that all trans women were people who had been through years/decades of therapy before having all the surgeries as a last ditch attempt of being able to cope with life. They needed compassion and acceptance and were no threat to me. I thought.

However I am a feminist and science realist (one of my degrees is in Psychology with a strong neuroscience component, plus I’d done a dissertation on autism and modules on child development). I knew my daughter was not ‘born in the wrong body’, that this was a phase arising from distress, that she needed support and counselling. But was flabbergasted to be told by doctors, therapists, school, friends that I was guilty of wrong think and an abusive parent for not readily embracing the brave emergence of my new son.

Then I fell down the wormhole, met Tavistock whistleblowers, read the science, discovered what AGP is and watched the horror show that is the tra movement evolve.

So I care more with each passing day.

Good point, I shall start talking about gender colonisation. That should get the opinionated youngsters at work thinking.

All of your reasons plus the knowledge that I could have been caught up in this.

When I was at university most of my friends were blokes and I struggled to connect with other women. My nickname (and let's forget for a moment for offensive it is) was 'mental hermaphrodite' because people joked I was emotionally part man.

Silly student rubbish but if I'd been a student 20 years later I'd have people telling me I was non binary, encouraging life changing decisions etc. I was also very committed to being child free, would get angry when people even suggested I might change my mind.

Mum of 2 me now knows what could have been and how lucky I was to be born before all this nonsense.

As a woman, I find it extremely insulting that I am expected to accept men as women and to include them in my word, woman. Men, live as you want but where it matters, stay in your own lane.

PTSD from male sexual violence. I know a men's rights movement when I see one.

Kids who don't conform to rigid gender stereotypes - I'm furious that they're at risk of being groomed into hating their healthy bodies due to this.

But the thing that gets me on a daily basis is that it's all unscientific bollocks. People who say they believe it discredit all their other opinions by saying thus. I'm horrified by the public acceptance of authoritarianism and rejection of freedom of speech and a plain, common language. I'm devastated by what this pseudo religion is doing to the left. A hostile state / Reform couldn't have come up with a better plan.

If you could bear with me for a bit, I'd have to take issue with the OP, I think. For me the question as it's originally phrased puts all the onus on the respondent to justify something that shouldn't need justification at all; I think most of the posters or even lurkers on here know exactly why gender is so important. I'd rather ask the inverse question - why don't some people, women particularly, care about gender? It seems to me to be absolutely central to way this whole cultural hijacking has unfolded, the way that gender ideologists have taken the central foundation of feminism, the awareness that gender is neither innate or natural but constructed, imposed and political, and turned it so far inside out that it has become the central plank of the most profoundly anti-feminist insanity. Transactivism is merely the most appalling symptom of this twisted but ferociously effective backlash, patriarchal thought taking our most profound foundation and turning it into a hideous distortion of itself, all the better to make the idea of feminism itself pathetic and ridiculous. It's a line I've used on here before, but there have been many ideologies which throw the baby out with the bathwater; only trans ideology, so far as I am aware, has thrown out the baby and attempted to present the stinking, putrid bathwater as the finest Pol Roger*.

(*Other vintages are available!)

We cannot base our laws, policies, and societies on clear absurdity.

We just can't.

Because it is absurd, it requires coercion to uphold. So it fucks up freedom of speech and expression.

Because it disadvantages women, and girls.

Because it creates safeguarding loopholes.

Because it is wrong. It is false.

I don't honestly know anymore, OP, why I care so much, only that I know it's not TRUE.

So, pedantry, and a staunch commitment to truth, are my two main reasons. Although feminism and common sense are also involved.

And tbh also once one moves past the basic arguments, their absurdity, and gets into the violent, aggressive, and twisted antics of genderists, it does become more of a moral thing. And then once one sees some of the people who are pushing the genderist ideas, it becomes quite disturbing. Once you see the dynamics, the abusive nature of them becomes very very clear.

I see Eric Joyce is criticising women for wanting single sex spaces. Why is that?

It's not just cultural appropriation, it's colonisation.

The comparison with cultural appropriation is very interesting. When that happens, a fuss is made. I was concerned recently to read about the use of the term “gender incongruence” to move away from and dumb down more inflammatory conversations. Perhaps we need to start using gender appropriation, given it’s already accepted that appropriation is negative.

Largely the injustice and women losing jobs, opportunities etc due to the wrong version of the law being perpetuated