What happens on MN affects my health LESS than the real life impact of it all.
I find solace in knowing the penny has dropped with so many. It took a long time for me to article my gut feeling that something was off kilter and did not sit well with me, despite my belief in liberal values and tolerance.
I've spent a number of years battling anxiety and the conflict between your rational brain and your emotional brain. And how this effects how you see studies and ideas. Learning to step back and learning the need to balance the two rather than taking one too far so that you are neither ruled by blind emotion at the expense of sense or ideological purity and a sense of morality at the expense of humanity - which extends to all and not just your own situation. Its a very useless and practical process to go through for anyone and everyone as it highlights your subconscious bias and helps you to question and think critically.
I've never came at this from a strictly feminist POV.
From my own personal experience, I feel like it is like looking in a cracked mirror. The reflection you see if not quite right. You know its not quite right but you can't put you finger on why. And that makes you feel uncomfortable.
Part of it, is in physical presentation. Part of it, is from an ideological point of view separated from people.
In terms of the physical side of it, it reminds me of the uncanny valley phenomenon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Indeed I would not be at all surprised if psychologically, many of us are being affected by something of a similar effect. I note that the Uncanny Valley feeling is driven through a need to identify and assess risk which is deep seated within us at an instinctive level and beyond what we can actively control. It is emotionally thus more powerful that logical.
By the same token, if you have had experience of a situation which has been traumatic your sense to protect yourself would be heightened. And you would have a inability to over come that, even if you wished. You simply view the world in a very different way to others who have lived a closet life and have merely been fed on a diet of high minded priniciples. Your sense of instinct and what you view as needing to do to survive are a part of anxiety.
And this very much plays into the ideological side of things, combined with the current political narratives and wider changes in our society which many of us, see as a threat or harmful to the interests of women. Which feels equally off kilter and distopian in nature.
Neither being driven by emotion or logic is intristinctly right or wrong. Just neutral. Both have their flaws as a way of thinking. But if the evidence starts to back up with the instinct, and is ignored by those who put their principles and ideology first, then yes there would really be an issue. Equally if we let our brains be dominated by fear without due cause and there not being a root cause to it, that can become simple prejudice.
The dynamic we see, is one where there is what some people see as a suppression of evidence through language, which will add to anxieties and the instinct of personal experience. We see evidence that is being deliberately twisted and used against people to smear them as being 'hysterical' and letting the fear take over to become prejudice.
If you suffer from anxiety independentally of it all, already, of course this will all be overwhelming and difficult to deal with. (Notably women are much more likely to have anxiety disorders anyway - is that social or chromosonal?)
The reality is you need to understand this dynamic and work through it. You need to offer the correct reassurance, because if you don't you just set off more alarm bells and produce more anxiety.
And yes there is possibly a deliberate strategy to do that, if there is something amiss or some people have nefarious ambitions. By provoking the anxiety, they can use the anxiety against individuals by making them incapable to act in a rational, intellegent and productive way.
I find it helpful to understand the roots of anxiety and why you feel a certain way - outside your actual experience - and at the core forces that drive you psychologically. It also helps to understand the dynamics of how there is such conflict between gender critical feminists and extreme trans ideology.
Its very much not pink brain/blue brain but how your brain has been shaped psychologically by your need to survive driven by negative experiences. Socialisation thus will lead us to very different points, simply on sex grounds. And replacing sex with gender will not work on a psychological level, even if the actual risk associated with it, is overstated. (And stepping back and looking at the data alone, I'm not sure that is the case either).
The idea that you can be converted by the law or censorship is therefore bollocks. All it does is work at odds with the experience and psychology of women who have had bad experience at the hands of male psychicality. That can not be placed into law. All it will do is, literally harm women mentally and cause greater resentment suspicion and hostility. Not achieve the ambition and ideals that good hearted idealists want. It will only serve those who really do have an agenda which does not have the interests of women at heart (and that isn't just TRAs. Its also far right anti-women types who can exploit these anxieties to their political advantage at the expense of both women and trans people).
The very concept of Self ID, is very much at odds with an understanding of the mental health needs of women. Again, noting that anxiety is predominately a women's health issue in the first place. And arguably as a result technically disablist and sexist, merely by its failure to acknowledge the need to understand how it will have a particular affect on women with anxiety health conditions.
My concern, is that those with money are well aware of the whole dynamic - afterall its been utilised to influence how some of us might vote through Facebook. What we do or don't do, is well known. Thus the need to resist our subconscious emotional reactions which can be predicted, is even more pressing. We have a need to fight instincts, precisely in order to protect ourselves.
I dunno. I'm kinda rambling here and perhaps not making as much sense as I should. This is one of those streams of consciousness that I just need to splurge and refine in my own head later!
Its very much a battle of hearts and minds, but we have to understand how our hearts and minds work because this is a propaganda war being waged in our homes and through our phones and most of us are completely unaware of it. Indeed particularly those who should be most aware of it: politicians and key decision makers in state institutions.
What amazes me most, is the political blindness to this. It demonstrates very very clearly the dangers in people in power only being privileged. You need to understand the psychology of it as well as any issues over how evidence is presented or indeed misrepresented or indeed completely withheld or simply completely factually untrue.
/ends Brain Fart.