I'm very grateful to Mumsnet for allowing this discussion to take place. It really shouldn't be a big deal to allow women to talk about the political issues that affect them but, with this one, it really is.
I have wondered what my views would be and what I would be doing now if I hadn't stumbled onto Mumsnet - and I really did just stumble here by chance some time ago. I was googling for information on something and it led me to a thread in one of the forums. From there, I started getting engrossed in all the AIBU threads and then, over time, started seeing stuff about self-ID which at first I just had a knee jerk reaction against as being transphobic but, over time, I actually started paying attention to what was being said and it made sense.
As a member of the LGBT community I was seeing some of the issues first hand and there was a lot of cognitive dissonance involved but I just ignored it for a long time, because this was the progressive 'pro-LGBT' stance and because I had known and lived alongside so many traditional transsexuals without any problems - I just thought that I knew from experience that there was no reason to be concerned.
Hearing the views of other women on here helped me to make sense of what I was starting to see in real life (e,g. males who lived as men for most of the week but identified as a lesbian part-time to attend lesbian and bisexual women's groups) ie how the trans umbrella had been expanded so far beyond traditional transsexuals to include other groups such as cross dressers.
The way women have been silenced on this issue and the glee with which so many men (particularly right-on lefty men) have belittled women's concerns and hurled abuse at women who speak up has really opened my eyes to the levels of misogyny in society. Although I would have always said I was a feminist, I wasn't a particularly active one, but this has inspired me to get involved and I am now a member of an (off-line) feminist group and want to get a lot more involved in feminism in future. I have also distanced myself from the LGBT community which I have been part of for over 20 years which has been difficult but I have become more and more concerned about what I have been seeing. From being an obsessive AIBU reader, I now mainly frequent the feminism forum, which it didn't even occur to me to look at when I first came here. I'd like to think that I would have come to this conclusion eventually myself but it is such a complicated area and there is so much misinformation about it I don't know whether I would.
Thank-you Mumsnet. 