I started posting on FWR in about 2011; because I was struggling with coercive control in my marriage. It was a board full of eloquent women who debated all sorts on things from prostitution and pornography, through abortion and reproductive rights to every day domestic matters and why who cleans the toilet matters.
The first threads on trans issues came in 2012 if I am correct when the rad fem conference at Conway Hall was targeted by protestors in advance for not allowing transwomen in.
Bearing in mind that the OP is not likely to be reading further, and I am tired, I will keep it short.
As the trans activist campaigns (attacks?) on women’s venues and opinions increased, so did the threads on here.
So Germaine Greer was no-platformed for saying that men could not become women and #nodebate. There was Maria Miller’s report (in which incidentally, prison officers expressed concerns about the number of sex offenders identifying as trans). There were transwomen campaigning against very experienced women and ousting them in their public and political positions for transphobia. As these incidences multiplied, so did the threads on here.
And the issues to discuss ranged from ‘gender non-confirming’ men seeking access to changing rooms in Top Shop (beloved of teenage girls) to schools affirming ‘gender identity’ choices and allowing male born children to change with female born children to the issues surrounding whether transwomen should lead girl guiding groups and whether transboys should be allowed in and the safe guarding issues this raises. All issues which one would expect to be discussed on a parenting forum because they affect children and young people.
So if there is an explosion of trans topics, it is because of the number of things which need to be discussed - and the #nodebate predominance elsewhere. If a parenting board cannot discuss these issues, where then? (And MNHQ have come under relentless attack for allowing this discussion to happen)
But it does not stop at our concern about the implications for children and young people (and I realise I have not mentioned hormones and breastbinding and the long term on fertility and health for young people at all, surely that is an issue worth discussion, so yes, more threads).
But I was going to move on to students who are being advised by the NUS to be positive to self-ID (and in reality have it anyway). Never mind that one of the directors -a transwoman - turned out to have a penchant for getting his willy out and posing for photos in his NUS office and more dodgy stuff. These are the thought-leaders of the future.
And their teachers (academics) who offer critical thinking and discuss the issues surrounding the very rights the OP says she is egalitarian about are subject to online abuse and campaigns to have them sacked.
And what about the politicians who might be expected to raise questions about these issues. If they hold critical views, they are scared to raise them. Or unwilling. The Speaker of the House of Commons refused to allow questions in Parliament on Karen White.
But it is not only that a convicted rapist was allowed in a women’s prison by identifying as a woman (whatever that means), it is worse than that (if that is possible). A man on bail for raping and torturing a ten year old (whilst wearing adult nappies and a dress) was engaged as an election agent for a candidate in the Green Party (who happened to be his daughter and a transwoman).
So if there has been an explosion, nay an obsession, with trans topics, it is because of the increase in things to talk about (both in number and awfulness).
And in that, the people who are gender dysphoric and the old-fashioned transsexuals lose out too. So yes, what of their rights, being unwittingly mixed up in all of this? Some also post on MN and a number talk in the media but I bet many just get on with their lives. No-one here hates them or does not want them to be equal. The concerns relate to how to facilitate their comfort and well-being in society without eroding the safe space and hard won rights of women.
And yes, it is to the detriment of all those topics which were there seven years ago. Because that is how coercive control works - all your energies are taken up responding to the controller so that you cannot attend to the issues which are important to you.
But you have no choice but to attend to and resist the controller if you want to get out of the situation and back to freedom and autonomy.