I'm going to post this, and then I'm out.
@JustineMumsnet
I was sexually abused from a young age by my father. So were my two sisters. I also have two brothers, they weren't sexually abused, because that would have made my father a 'poof', something he despised.
He did however, frequently batter us all viciously, hit us with (the buckle end of) a belt. I still cower if my husband takes his belt off quickly. I have asked him not to, but he can forget, because he's not a fucking monster.
As children, we were locked outside the house in the cold for hours, locked in the bathroom, made to sit in ways that I now know are 'stress positions'. We were lined up by age, all to battered and beaten, one at time, according to age, each waiting for the others' beating to be finished before we got our own. My brothers and sisters have discussed how each of us had it better or worse. We have joked about how I, the fourth of five children, probably got the beatings easier because by that time in the proceedings, my father was a bit knackered. We have discussed how the youngest 'got it easy'. But then he didn't after we all left home.
Too many events to document: I went to school with a fully discernable handprint bruise on my face at age 12, and the teachers said nothing. Nor did they say anything to the visible belt strap marks on my legs during PE. (The same teachers did ensure that I had my big fucking blue gym pants under my gym skirt though). To know that all your school mates knew exactly what the fuck was going on though was pure humiliation.
I threatened him with telling my mother when I was a 19 year old student and was on the ground while he was kicking the shit out of me. Story too long to tell. My mother obviously knows about the beatings but not the sexual abuse (no, I don't want to go there). He tried to kill himself but the useless bastard didn't know which drugs to take. After they pumped his stomach, he descended into the finest display of DARVO I had ever seen until I saw the tactics of the TRA agenda
My father tried to do the same to my niece years later. She was 3. She was also the brightest little girl ever and told her mother. My sister confronted him. He denied it. He then stuck a vacuum hose in his tailgait.
There was never any remorse. He did it because he thought we would be sorry and because he wanted, once again, to punish us. 25 years later and there has never been a day that I haven't been glad that he was dead.
I was diagnosed with PTSD, have had some serious issues with trust and had it not been for my DH, I would be dead.
I will tell you why I am involved in this debate. Because I know the fear of men. Because I can't walk away and abandon women when vulnerable. Because I read the testimonies of women on your site and I know how devastating Self ID will be for them.
Trans people are not the most oppressed nor the most vulnerable. I am sure they have been treated extremely badly and we should all work to prevent that happening again.
But they are not the most oppressed people in the world. I am not even saying that women are at this point, because God knows my brothers lived through a particular Hell too.
But it's WOMEN who are going to be punished if the Self ID legislation is passed