"I wish there was a way of making the whole discussion less fucking poisonous and polarized."
I completely agree.
I disagree with the ideology on almost every level. And I have tremendous compassion for parents whose children are trans, and for people with gender dysphoria.
It’s entirely possible to hold both those views at the same time.
One of the reasons it becomes polarised is because the ideology asserts that you have to agree with every dot and comma, otherwise it means you hate trans people and want them to die.
And if you want them to die, there is no point in talking to you. Hence #nodebate.
You become a terf, you are beyond redemption and it’s at that point where it becomes utterly ‘poisonous‘.
Women who are gender critical, concerned for children and women’s rights are not the ones doing the poisoning.
On here, you occasionally get people vehemently disagreeing if one is against the ideology. And you get called transphobic and bigoted. But that’s about it.
It doesn’t tend to degenerate into the quite shocking vitriol that plays out elsewhere online.
And it’s not coming from women, and it never comes from feminists.
If women are angry it’s because they have been goaded beyond endurance. But I’ve yet to see them degenerate to the name-calling, threatening and insulting that they are themselves subjected to.
And of course, we are talking about transactivists. Not someone’s mate who wants to present as female because they have gender dysphoria and is hameless and suffering.
But the ideology is on a trajectory which will harm far too many people for it to be ignored.
So there are two reasons to object. Firstly transactivists are mainly awful, entitled violent men who want to change laws and don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Secondly it’s challenging the very reason for transgenderism in the first place. Why do vulnerable people feel the need to change gender? What are we doing wrong as a society that is producing this, let’s face it, first world problem? Why are our young women coming out in droves and claiming they are men?
So when feminists do things like look at crime rate, look at suicide stats, they’re not trying to have a gotcha moment. They are trying to dismantle the rhetoric that clouds every single issue.
"I wish there was a way of making the whole discussion less fucking poisonous and polarized."
We can. On here, at least.