Womb I love this:
The lengths you will have to go to in order to appease the developing orthodoxies will eventually be lengths you won't want to go to.
OP, you seem to be shifting your viewpoint now but I think you were initially taken in by the fallacy spouted by the likes of Owen Jones, that the ONLY basis for questioning transactivist ideology is that of right wing reactionaries who are all about traditional values and standing in the way of glorious progress.
This is so untrue it's ridiculous that it even needs to be stated and yet those lefty dudebros have done a bang up job of making out it really is the case, sadly supported by a frightening number of women, even though it's clear that "TERFs" are predominantly left wing, feminist, and very often lesbians.
The cognitive dissonance beggars belief. Owen Jones lectures women about their hatefulness, apparently oblivious to structural misogyny and his own male privilege, as if we - women - actually wield the power in society and are phobically "excluding" TIMs from our wonderful, elitist "club".
How do you even begin to unpick a scenario so false, so entirely divorced from reality? When people actually draw parallels between sex segregated spaces and racial segregation in the USA and SA, and other people nod their heads wildly and no one sees the huge, glaring false equivalence of it all? Why has it become so easy for TRAs to posit women as the "privileged" class, holding onto our precious "privilege" at the expense of our poor, oppressed, trans "sisters", when we ALL know this simply isn't the way our society works?
I agree with those who say this movement has all the hallmarks of any abusive relationship, and as the product of a deeply dysfunctional, EA family myself I know how it can happen that the LEAST powerful and MOST vulnerable member of a family can be scapegoated and assigned the role of villain, despite actually being the victim. I know how that narrative can be repeated and reinforced to the point that those in the family actually believe it to be true, despite ALL the evidence proving the opposite. Likewise in society.
I think you, OP, need to see the situation in that context. You have been caught up in an abusive relationship, on a societal level, where you have been fed lies by the abusers and are part way between being a victim of it yourself, and an enabler. The part of you that is starting to question it is your authentic self, the part of you that genuinely cares about the most vulnerable in society, as Sophocles so eloquently pointed out, and you can trust it.
It has NOTHING to do with the likes of Trump, but unfortunately for now most of the public voices opposing this ideology come from right of centre and so we are forced to forge some strange new alliances with the more moderate of those on the centre right, which then is seized on by TRAs to prove we're all right wing bigots after all, and they are perfectly entitled to dismiss everything we say.
This may be the hardest fight you have to fight because it's not all clear cut, and you risk losing friendships and your sense of identity as a left wing, right on woman. But it is the left that is at fault here, not you, the left that has abandoned women and particularly lesbians, and children who may well grow up to be gay, and is currently displaying a truly loathsome level of misogyny, along with other hateful attitudes.
I think the left and the right as we knew them are in total flux. I don't know how it's all going to play out, but the old ideas of the left as being the voice for social justice and the right as the voice of oppression just don't fit any more. Maybe they never did. Communism has never worked out too well, after all. I say all that as a lifelong lefty myself.
Speaking as a survivor, who knows what denial looks like and what it does to people, fighting for the truth is the single most revolutionary and world changing thing you can do. Even if you're only fighting to be able to acknowledge the truth within yourself, that's a huge thing to do - the environment we're in now is so toxic that it genuinely isn't always safe for women to go public with their opposition to TRA ideology. But trust that your heart is indeed in the right place with this questioning.