I woke up to all this a couple of years ago - till then I had been blithely unaware, totally wrapped up in dealing with issues in my own life and not really engaging with feminism in the way I had done previously.
For me, it was like waking up and discovering that a cult had taken over the minds of vast numbers of otherwise apparently sane people - as if they'd been brainwashed into joining the Scientologists or something. All these people who you'd ordinarily have a lot of common ground with, people who you'd normally be on the same side as, fighting the same battles with - they've been sucked into this nightmarish cult, and they're so far into it that all they can do is spit venom at you if you don't line up with their distorted thinking.
The people who once you would have relied upon to denounce the cult along with you, they're the ones demanding you too join the cult and demonising you for refusing to. It's insane.
I still don't really understand how this could happen. How the TRAs managed to gain such control of the discourse. How women who spoke up against it right from the start have been so discredited and vilified and ultimately silenced.
Perhaps it's a measure of two things - one, the really appalling level of bone-deep misogyny that still exists in our society - that our society is actually founded upon; and two, the huge amount of denial and cognitive dissonance that people are so used to employing in other areas of life that it's easy to transfer it across to this issue.
For example, I tend to see things through the filter of identifying and healing from abuse, particularly child abuse. What I see is the sheer scale of it, and I look at what the dynamics are that enable it to flourish the way it does. It seems to me there is so much denial about it on so many levels; so many things still now are normalised that IMO are actually abusive (particularly wrt emotional abuse) in the same way that beating children in school used to be normalised, for example, or the right of men to rape their wives.
I find myself deeply alienated by a lot of the attitudes expressed on MN, which seem to me to spring from a perspective of child-hating/child-blaming just as MRAs/TRAs are entrenched in woman-hating/woman-blaming. And yet those attitudes are regarded as normal and healthy by many, people. To me, they reek of denial and cognitive dissonance; but denial by its very nature blinds people to the nature of reality so how do you challenge it?
Still, I wonder what it was/is about the trans issue that causes such phenomenal amounts of denial to coalesce in such great numbers of otherwise sane, rational people; that causes them to flock to the side of people who are so bigoted, so misogynist, so full of hate and utterly divorced from reality (as a cursory look at those Twitter comments demonstrates).
Anyway. Major tangent. Just wondered if anyone else ponders these issues in the way I do!