I work in engineering, so generally find myself surrounded by STEM grads, most of whom find gender ideology total nonsense. It is mostly blokes so could be argued they are not directly affected by some of the issues concerned so are not very 'terfy'. My organisation has not been captured, there are no demands for pronouns on emails, no celebrating various awareness days or months, toilets are not gender neutral etc. Its a very multicultural organisation with people from all over the world. Everyone just cracks on with their job.
My sister on the other hand works in the arts where there is very much a culture of 'celebrating' every aspect of gender woo, pride flags, pride lanyards, mixed toilets, constant stream of circular emails reinforcing correct speech and thought, pronouns, training days, she toes the line as to be critical of anything carries the very real risk of 'special treatment'. At first she was very laid back and 'whatever' about it but roll on several years she is now is utterly fed up with the constant policing and in her words the 'borderline narcissim' of a couple of the (much younger) gender fluid non binary pan sexual types whose very existence seems to be only defined by their desire for constant affirmation.
I was fairly meh about the trans issues initially, mainly because I was fairly ignorant and very much fell into the live and let live camp that many on here have expressed.
As mentioned before I am very involved in sport (coach, club captain, committee etc) and I started to notice (especially in cycling, rugby and athletics)a minority of transwomen bossing the results. That was my 'peaking' moment as i thought it was absolutely batshit that biological males were being allowed to compete against women and that sports governing bodies were falling over themselves to be inclusive (while compromising fairness and safety of women). As I dug deeper and spoke to other clubs and people that were dealing with the safeguarding issues around TW wanting access to changing rooms and inclusion on the women's teams I was very much 'this is insane can't anyone see what is going on'. As it turned out plenty of sportswomen could see what was going on and were approaching me in my leadership role to approach the sports governing body to have another look at their policies.
To me now the literal legal definition of what it is to be a women was under attack. I did not like how an adult biologically female woman was now increasingly prefixed with 'cis' whether she likes it or not.
The social landscape had changed massively from 20 years ago. It started out as transgender people simply asking to be protected from being treated unfairly because they are transgender. People were asked to respect someone’s gender identity by treating a man “as if he were a woman”. It was a courtesy, a kindness extended to people who suffered from gender dysphoria. We all know that trans people aren’t literally the sex they identify as. It was simply polite to use “preferred pronouns” and repeat the platitude that “transwomen are women”. I was fully on board with that.
But this approach has now been fundamentally changed by trans activists. It is no longer enough to treat a man ‘as if he was a woman’. To respect his gender identity, it is now being demanded that we must now believe that he is literally female, that he hadn’t even been born the male sex at all and that all previous women and girls only spaces be obliged to recognise that the biological man in the corner who might not have undergone any gender reassignment treatment at all is in fact 100% a woman. So no, I was not going to let a biological man get changed in front of the women down my club, or benefit from the massive physical advantage that his male puberty bestowed upon him as he takes a spot on a team or podium place off some hard working woman athlete.
My sports governing body conducted a survey last year of its membership where overwhelmingly people voted that transwomen should not compete against biological women and they (reluctantly) changed their policy.
Fuck my coffee has gone cold now.