Help a brother out

[Glinner]

Hello, you coven of squints far right Nazi witches!

I'd like to collect some anecdotes about when and why you first became involved in the debate about gender ideology and activism. I've also asked on Twitter but thought this might be good for longer answers.

Please tell me your stories!

My friend forwarded me a newspaper article about the IOC allowing trans women to compete against women. I thought it was a joke, then I thought I had got it wrong and I kept re-reading the article to find the bit that would make it all make sense. Peak trans in an instant.

ThinkTwiceFirst your post demonstrates just how brave and dignified women can be. I'm so sorry for all you have been through

For me I think it was the All Women Shortlist thing, which I read more about on here, having avoided FWR for years...
Then I got curious and hung around.
Datun is the one though. I lose patience with academic waffle and Datun just nails the points, everytime.
I have peaked wrt children and the need to protect them. I also thought the "transboy" epidemic was just in little pockets of London and am realising it's not.
I'm RAGING at schools, at the BBC-the institutions we are supposed to trust.
I'm also raging that little girls with short hair are being groomed to potentially mutilate their perfect little selves because of insane gender stereotypes.

I was told talking about my periods was "triggering" and "violent" because a trans woman couldn't experience the "joy" of a period. I was being transphobic. I wasn't allowed to talk about being a woman anymore. I had to call myself "cis". I was punched by a "lesbian trans woman" (AKA a straight man) because I - a bisexual woman (who at the time, after being raped by my ex boyfriend) - was only exclusively dating women and I wouldn't have sex with him and wanted no part of being near his penis (no I won't call him a her). I peaked last year and I wish it had happened sooner. I'm 25 and I have wasted so long being polite. Not anymore. Why can't feminism just be for women? Why does it have to include everyone else? Let feminism just be for women!

Yiskasha, the good news is that femisim is the liberation of women. It just is.

Watching Magdalen Berns. Gosh how I miss her lucid commentary. I hope she is doing ok XX

I think it is the sports issue that started it for me even though I am profoundly uninterested in playing or watching sports, it is the utter unfairness of men thinking they can compete against women in women's sports.

The prisons issue too because vulnerable female prisoners cannot get away from men if they are placed in prison with them and the toilets and changing rooms issue. It's kind of a catch 22 situation, the men who actively seek to be in women's toilets and changing rooms are the last men you would want in there.

It's also the lies that are told and the bullying that takes place. Humans can't change sex and men as a class are statistically more dangerous than women as a class.

Everyone should feel free to wear what they like but they should always recognise that their sex cannot be changed even if they take hormones or have surgery, there is no such thing as being born in the wrong body, your body is the only one you have and it is a sexed one from conception.

I argue with people on Twitter about it all intermittently, gender is a prison and I am constantly amazed at how the conflating of sex and gender and intersex and transgender happens. I try to be polite on there but they make it very difficult because as soon as they are challenged they start with the insults because their ideology is based on lies and falls apart when critical thinking is applied to it.

@Trousering I wish everyone knew this though. The word is constantly getting bastardised.

Yiskasha, I'm so sorry that happened to you.

I've been involved in these discussions online and off for a long time now.

I've organized a few conferences and talks to allow women to discuss this stuff and hear women who can articulate things well.

I'm glad my daughter was at the first one and saw Gail Dines and Sheila Jeffreys - I think that insulated her a bit from this kind of gender identity bubble a lot of children seem to have to face.

I just want women to be seen as fully human and to have bodily autonomy.

I want lesbians to be able to celebrate and archive our history and culture without it being called 'LGBT' or queer.

What with having late-transitioning male colleagues in the workplace, and facing a 'big-boned' transwoman in an amateur golf competition in my leisure time, I must have been a glutton for punishment because I joined the Green Party.

Members submit policy motions, which are debated online, redrafted and then put to a Conference for a further debate and vote. As the years went by, there was a spike of motions coming from Aimee Challoner, LGBT and the Young Greens on transgender rights.

The Manifesto for Women was renamed the Gender Equality Manifesto. There had been a 'find and replace' makeover to remove the word 'woman' in favour of 'people' - except when talking about migrants and women in Third World Countries. Discussion in the members' forum turned nasty as beardy blokes told dissenters to shut the feck up and take their transphobia elsewhere.

The Party, to this day, states that transwomen are women and form part of the 'non-men' group. The Greens have a shameful history (like the Labour Party) of disciplining, suspending, smearing and piling-on non-believers: a foretaste of the worst kind of Trans activism.

When a political party aggressively pursues men's rights at the expense of women, it's time to leave and look for allies left, right, centre or apolitical.

The peak happened in 2015 when I cleared the room at a party. The conversation turned towards Amnesty International’s policy on prostitution. I stated my objection to the labelling of prostitution as sex work, as work, which led to mentioning female anatomy. I used the word woman and unconsciously gestured to myself and another woman present. The male host immediately castigated me for not including the young man dressed in a skirt. Well, yes, I had been discussing anatomy. The exchange got rather heated, and after being informed that some men have clitorises, and some women have penises, I found myself asking, well then, what label am I supposed to use for myself? (I pointed to my crotch.) I was told I should say “people who have clitorises”, or “ciswomen”. The absurdity of the situation, that I was being asked to defer to a biological male, half my age, over what I should call myself, hit me pretty hard. I rather forcefully refused to acquiesce. The others all behaved as if I had committed some form of terrible violence with my word choices and stormed out of the apartment. I was left sitting alone until the hosts remembered that they lived there and I didn’t. The young transwoman called me a TERF. I went home and looked it up on the internet, and I haven’t looked back since.

Frankly, at my age, I'm beginning to think it's quite an accomplishment to clear a dinner party. My peak trans moment was number two.

Lily Madigan really did it for me. Then I stumbled around on the internet just as the Jess Bradley story was breaking and found the FWR boards.

Then I found I'd put on terfblocker just for liking a few moderate GC tweets and was incensed that the Green Party was silencing women, got myself a new Twitter, found Magdalen Berns, Miranda Yardley etc

Even if this changed tomorrow (clearly it won't), I will not forget how it was enabled by mainstream institutions and cultural forces (like the guardian) that I trusted and how few people in the public eye have spoken out. The prison issue peaked me most (that vulnerable women who have largely been shat on by society can be incarcerated with male rapists in the name of progression) then kids. And sports is just clearly, so clearly visually wrong yet still it's disputed.

It's the politicians, especially those who promote themselves as feminists and yet say nothing, that gets me most. That the only MP who has stood up for us in the GRA campaign is a Tory man, crushes me

I will never again trust what I am 'supposed to' believe

Hiii!, seeing as I’m banned from twitter now, I’ll tell it here. Lily Madigan was my wake up call, with the women leaving labour, and the more I looked, the more I saw. And the angrier I got.

For me the beginning was watching the girls in my daughters friendship group one by one bind their breasts, cut their hair, change their name and declare themselves boys. 4 out of 6. My daughter felt immense pressure from this group to ‘join in’ and even went so far to cut her hair short and ask to change her name too. She felt ostracised and bullied and was excluded for calling one of her friends by their former name. She refused to go back to school for 3 months, the school punished us

We changed schools and she’s thriving, above target for all her GCSEs but the epidemic is spreading, and there are now 3 transboys in her year group since going back after Christmas.

The person who sometimes wears a frock and a wig (and sometimes presents as male) winning a women's award for his work.

Millwall football club cancelling a meeting to discuss the GRA as part of the general no platforming and no debate. Millwall. Scared of trans activists.

I had always been fairly sympathetic to the stories of individuals with gender dysphoria and generally bought into the whole brain/body mismatch theory, thought
probably with its origin in fetal development.

In my first ten years as a pediatrician, I had one patient with gender identity concerns. She was an adolescent female, highly distressed with her changing body. I did my best for her and referred her to the appropriate specialists, but she was told there were no options to treat her until she was at least 18.

Fast forward to 2017. In one year alone, I had FIVE patients present with gender identity concerns. Most were offered blockers and/or cross-sex hormones on their FIRST visit to a gender clinic. (I'm in the US.) That's when I fell down the rabbit hole and started reading about this issue, both in medical and lay resources. The professional literature had a paucity of information about what was going on, and completely supports early irreversible transition. I found parenting communities to be far more insightful. (Thank you fourthwavenow and Mumsnet!)

In the process, I discovered gender critical feminism, and couldn't be more grateful for my own awakening. I now see how my views have always been in line with radical feminist thinking; I just didn't have a name for what I believed.

And now it's all so crystal clear how this movement is the ultimate of misogyny and will greatly harm women and vulnerable children. My challenge is trying to speak out, despite the fact that laws and my professional organizations have effectively gagged me from discussing this honestly and openly. The cracks are forming, though. All concerned individuals of ANY background and political persuasion MUST come together to fight this.

This thread has been so moving. So many personal stories.
Thank you

So many things but two incidents that stand out:
There was the time that petition came round to send Tara Hudson to a women's prison and the whole room went quiet when I said, 'Are you fucking kidding me?'

And going to a coffee shop and finding there were no women's toilets; and the way all the women there insisted they didn't mind but wouldn't use them.

Both are small things compared to some people's stories but they made me realise that, not only was something kind of weird going on, but that women were not supposed to notice it was happening, much less talk about it.

And then just to ensure I can never go back:
Hearing about autogynephilia.
Hearing they were using drugs on children without researching the effects.
The way TRAs don't seem to be able to talk about it without accusations abuse or threats

And James Kirkup writing about how MPs come and whisper their concerns in his ear but won't go public.
I can remember the abortion act, the sex and race discrimination acts and more recently the same sex marriage act - all viewed as controversial in their day, and each time there was open discussion and open dissent. The radio silence about this from our elected representatives scares the shit out of me.

Thanks for everything you do Glinner

So much of my own personal journey has already been covered by others but here it is briefly.

I was a regular reader of the Feminism boards here - the experience of pregnancy and breastfeeding woke my feminism up again and I began to want to share perspectives more with other women.
Over the course of a few years, I followed the main issues as they broke here on this board - the shutting down of women’s meetings, the threats of violence, Jenni Murray...
Each time I thought ‘WTF is going on? Why is no-one reporting this properly?’
The dismantling of safeguarding and the creation of a group which is not allowed to be criticised or subject to scrutiny, is dangerous to women and children.
I won’t forget those who have ignored the issues and who have ridden rough-shod over the rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces.

And going to a coffee shop and finding there were no women's toilets; and the way all the women there insisted they didn't mind but wouldn't use them.
Soz if that's not clear - the toilets were unisex cubicles - not self contained.

Several things made me think beyond my initial instinctive support,

• being told that some nasty hate-filled women had co-opted / were pretending to be feminists to spread transphobic hate. But then having their position described to me and realising this was classic 2nd wave feminism (eg on the damage caused by gender stereotypes). I declined to have “real feminism” explained to me - because the 2nd wavers had a point - and got called a bigot.
• I heard people describe mumsnet as an evil, bigoted place, and I was “woah, that’s not the mumsnet I have been reading for So many years” so I investigated and had my eyes opened
• then girl guides, periods, chestfeeding, bleeders etc
• and some family stuff with a person who is AGP.

That reminds me;

Whichever female Tory MP it was that referenced "Women purporting to be feminists". That really set all my alarms clanging.

yes and TRAs refusing to talk about the concerns of women, just shouting No Debate and Transphobia! to close us down.
And hyper sexualised TRAs. There a few prominent trans women in the media who think that they "pass" (but don't) and therefore they are the same as born women. The idea that you just chuck on a shitload of makeup, a wig, get your face fixed surgically and wear super "feminine" (whatever the fuck that means) sexy clothes is what makes a woman. Nope. Not even close.

I live in America and have seen this coming a long time. I just got this from a friend in Scotland and feel so validated reading these posts! I knew right away that they killed womens sports and researched the roots of this. I found it started at John Hopkins hospital with two male doctors who disagreed over this and went their seperate ways. One is total theory and not real science the other is on real science. The theory one is wrecking havoc in womens lives who are trying to recover from childhood sexual abuse or sexual assaults. I keep on hearing from common sense people where are the feminist speaking out about this? In California right now the politicians in Sacramento are pushing thru a law to protect pedophiles from being prosecuted for child rape!!! I wrote Feinstein and the President with my alarmed concerns. I have been aware for years the problems that were going to occur. I am a survivor of child sexual abuse and began therapy in 1085 and have been a child advocate ever since. I have PTSD and in my PTSD group I shared my concerns and was poo pooed but there was a few of us who said no to introducing sexuality to children in the public schools thru the transgender education. I was also banned and I was the most popular member and was there for six years. I know they are pushing Obamas transgender policies in Ca public schools as they hate the President. The president is the only president that declared war against pedophilia and child sex trafficking something the legacy media never covers and the tech giants censure more and more each day. I have felt alone for a long time speaking up anyway. To be here and be able to share with others is like getting an infusion of validation I have not known. The world hates President Trump because he has declared war against pedophilia as a legal right.

I warned people about the danger of allowing transwomen into womens and girls safe spaces for a very long time. I think I saw this because of how hard I have worked to get my own life back.

Thanks friends for speaking the truth here. I was able to share this with a white liberal male who is not aware yet. I continue to try each day to open peoples eyes to these truths. I look forward to being part of this public square vital conversation. Thanks all