Mumsnet and gender: a thread (glosswitch)

[QuestioningStuffBanana]

Haven't seen this shared. Saw it on twitter today and thought some of you might like it.

twitter.com/glosswitch/status/991076286645854209?s=19

It made me cry a little bit tbh. I find twitter hard to follow at times but glosswitch is brilliant.

Really interesting....

What I find interesting is all the replies (the tweet thread is spot on, and super-emotional for me)..

Women saying 'YES!'

transwomen and men saying 'Whu?'

There's an illustration of shared experience if ever there was one.

Yes you're right disturbingly. It was emotional for me too. I know when I had my daughter my eyes were really opened. I would have called myself a feminist before that but I honestly had never given it much thought. The real changes pregnancy and becoming a mother brought to my life made it all obvious and real. Alongside that, I never found out the sex of the baby before she was born. I found myself examining my own girlhood and life as a woman and worrying about having a daughter because of my own experiences.

Motherhood definitely made me more feminist. It's very difficult to ignore just how biased the world is against your sex when suddenly, despite your plans and dreams, society forces you into a box.

Pre-motherhood there's limited boxes available, but post-motherhood it's just good mother/bad mother, and good mother is basically unattainable.

For me becoming a mother made me realise that I carried my own prejudices about what being a mother meant. I'd always prided myself on being a fair and open minded person but I realised I had made some judgements about mothers before I became one. I think I just didn't realise how hard it is to actually look after children, or how much of an impact it can have on your own sense of self. I now feel a real admiration for my own mum and realised how much I'd taken for granted before I had my own child.

Great writing. GlossWitch is so bloody good at communication.

The comments are telling, it seems that some people that my generation would call Transsexual are pissed off too. I've only really come across trans GC people here (through their posts). I've been signposted to splendid people like Miranda Yardley by MN FWR.

A couple of years ago me and my mum, after an argument, did a lot of talking about how we were with each other in my teens/early 20's. We both ended up still talking at 3am, drinking endless tea, crying and apologising to each other.
If you are lucky enough to have a mum you can do this with, I highly recommend it

That is a brilliant thread by Glossie. Made me well up. I also love Posie’s video, here , also made me cry. m.youtube.com/watch?v=L52dlDt4pFg

I'm so scared of this all. I wanted to be super tolerant and pro trans rights and this cool modern person who rejected gender norms etc and then I got pregnant. And gave birth. To a daughter. Nothing is the same. I'm scared that my voice is being silenced by men in lipstick telling me their experiences of womanhood are as valid or more important. I'm scared that my demanding for better post natal care, better support for pnd and more investment in women's spaces is being written off as transphobic and exclusive to trans women's experiences.

I recently had a dear friend told they were transphobic and called in to a meeting at work because they said they wouldn't date a trans woman with a penis as they were sexually attracted to vaginas. Apparently that's an awful thing to say as a heterosexual man saying they don't want to have sex with a person with a penis is transphobic now.

I'm terrified for my daughter

That's homophobic and she could counter claim for EA discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Wow. At 30 weeks pregnant that thread was both a sobering and a very necessary read. It's something I've been thinking more and more about, thanks in huge part to a post I made on Mumsnet when we first started TTCing - coming up to two years ago - basically asking how not to turn into one of 'those women' if I had a child, where some thoughtful women kindly pointed out what was wrong with my thinking (though I had still never encountered the 'matrophobia' idea until now, which has made some things click further into place). In the intervening time miscarriage has taught me a lot more about how while I am not my body, my body is also not the irrelevance that I had always thought it was. Pregnancy has taught me more; I'm sure motherhood itself will teach me things I don't know I don't know at the moment. But anyway, this is a long (and very self-indulgent) way of saying thank you for pointing me along a path that, while I have considered myself a feminist all my life, I'd always wilfully not wanted to look down.

I love @glosswitch and she put perfectly what I've been trying to put into words since I've had children.

I can't find the link now but I once read a really great essay about women coming together and talking and how men don't like it (really bad summary). I was thinking about it because of how Mumsnet is being targeted at the moment. I did find this which I thought was a good read.

www.thecut.com/2017/11/an-oral-history-of-feminist-group-new-york-radical-women.html