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!

Hmm, interesting question.
Before I retired I worked in a University so obviously the Kool Aid was on tap.

I'd only had a few experiences of trans gender people before, all mtf. Firstly when I was a child in Singapore in the 60s with the glamorous cross dressers in Bugis Street who used to ask my mother for make up tips. Fascinating but obviously they never claimed to be women.

Then my BFF told me about her first husband. They had 4 small children in the 1970s when he decided that he "needed to be a woman" She went to the Beaumont Society with him, tried to help him all she could. An early transwidow I suppose, although she was convinced that he was actually gay and that his religious upbringing (they were Mormons) wouldn't allow him to accept it.
Her husband wrote to Jan Morris who promptly wrote back telling him that he was selfish to be putting his children through this! They divorced, he didn't transition and she was excommunicated from the Mormons as she was considered at fault!

My next experience was with a lecturer at the University who transitioned from mtf. They were very sweet and gentle and their joy at transitioning was quite touching. Never made any move to colonize women's spaces, didn't get stampy about accidental misgendering. No problems.

So the thing that actually peak transed me was ridiculously trivial I suppose.
It was bloody Jenner saying that the hardest part of being a woman was deciding what to wear!!

I thought about my recently deceased BFF whose husbands actions had put her into poverty until she remarried her first love and was happy until her premature death. About my disabling lipedema, a predominantly female condition. About my aunt,a midwife in the 1950s and the tragic things she'd seen.

And I thought fuck it, I'm not having this shit and found my way here.
Sorry for rambling on, I've never written this down before

Sport girl guides deptford lefty lesbians sport male crims being described as women
NSPCC

Delusions being facts
Lies lies lies and we are expected to believe them or pretend we do
Gawd the list is endless but at but women and girls getting shafted basically

I've been gender critical for a long time (though I did start out as a lib fem 30 years ago - was at Cambridge when the Germaine Greer/Rachel Padman thing blew up and naively, stupidly, thought "what's the harm?" despite being a physicist and knowing only 10% of us at undergraduate level were female, and knowing how tough it was to be taken seriously as a woman scientist... talk about young and stupid.)

I think the thing that really pushed me over the edge was reading trans-identifying people in their own words talking about the cotton ceiling - talk about rape culture writ large.

Since then - well, women's prisons, women's sports, the medicalisation of gender non-conforming teenage girls.

But above all it's the sense that this is the canary in the coalmine for the rise of authoritarianism - James Caspian, Jenny Murray, Greer herself being no-platformed, Venice Allen and and Linda Bellos being taken to court, your good self and the ridiculous police caution. The idea that we are sleepwalking into a society where people are being punished for thought crimes is terrifying.

I went to Goldsmiths as a mature student and noticed the loos downstairs at the SU were 'men' and 'unisex'. And I started to question what was going on.

What tipped me over was the cotton ceiling. My lesbian sisters don't owe sex to anyone.

Long one
About five years ago DH and I were mr and Mrs Woke.
DH is on the committee for a hobby group. A member told DH and I he was planning to transition MtF. We said we would support him and DH pre empted any issues with a proposed discrimination policy - which was accepted. DH and I wrote letters for person to various Drs to say person was attending club as a woman (he wasn't ... we were lying but thought we were doing the right thing) . We saw no evidence of being a woman ... beard still there etc. They just became nastier and nastier. Couldn't have a grown up conversation with this person.
Eventually all committee knew (told by person) and were as supportive as DH and I.
Person then started to bully members of hobby group. And would call committee members up during the night to scream abuse at us. DH and committee had to go through process to reprimand person ...person turned even nastier and accused us all of transphobia threatening legal action.
DH told person to wind neck in.
Person then sulks for a year whilst committee support bullied members.
Person then starts talking dirty to anyone who would listen.. no small talk just filth. Eg person now orgasmed when nipples touched or walked. Like we wanted to know!

My biggest issue was his wife...a woman who looks like she has shell shock. He told us she had mental health issues...we now know why. I felt so bloody sorry for her.

Person has now left hobby group and hobby group now feels better.

All that and seeing 'cotton ceiling'... CC took me down the rabbit hole....

• Jenner made me uncomfortable.

• being told off by a known MRA bandwaggoner for pointing that "people with a cervix" on cancer information is unclear for women who don't read English well (whether that's EFL or SEN) made me angry.

• two friends (who are probably on here ) posting links to A Woman's Place made me curious (and worried about my job just for following them).

• seeing fantastic female YA authors at a lit fest panel on feminism chant TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN like the fucking Borg to a roomful for teenagers in response to needling from a scruffy bloke. That made me rage.

I joined Mumsnet and was radicalised on many things, not least safeguarding.

Well I got very bored finding kittens to kick and old ladies to push over so thought I'd find a new group to pick on.

In reality, it was Jenner who first raised my awareness. I read the hardest bit of being a woman being choosing which frock to wear and thought, well no it's the PMT, sexual harassment, being murdered and stuff that's really a problem.

Mumsnet has been an invaluable resource and has encouraged me to start being publicly gender critical. I've even used my 'woman' mug when hosting coffee!

It was about five years back, I became aware of the closing down of Michfest and also the lawsuit against the Canadian women's shelter. I was shocked that these things were happening in what I thought was a fairly civilised world (so naive, if only I'd known how bad it would get).

I mentioned it to a friend who also had noticed a creeping trend and she introduced me to the concept of the 'cotton ceiling'. Between us we kept abreast of the seeming deluge of similar occurrences and eventually discovered FWR and GenderTrender (RIP) which of course confirmed it was even worse than I could have imagined

I've been here for ages (albeit under a different name), I've worked with and known a couple of transwomen (both transexual), who were perfectly nice people in their own way, but I shared an office toilet with one of the two, and it made me uncomfortable. The way that people who had known the transwoman pre-change also made me uncomfortable though, and I work in IT, so generally with men, and I'm used to them making me feel a bit uncomfortable on occasion, so shrugged it off. But (I'll call the transwoman K) but K wasn't good at her job, she was rather a CF in fact. She was also a kawaii anime girl, despite pushing 40. Still I sympathized, but wanted to keep a distance, just like with all the other people I work with, but she kept making me uncomfortable with some 'forced friending' style stuff - 'girls together'..

Then later I came to mumsnet, and the GRA plans were raised, and I thought back to her, and how she acted, and how I felt about that, and saw that other women felt as I did, and how she acted seemed to tally with how so many other transwomen acted, and as fine as she was, the idea that she was legally materially the same as me, even though she definitely wasn't, nagged at me, and I could see wasn't right. She didn't need the same protections as me, she wanted to be sexually harrassed (validated - where she wasn't), whereas I had to hide in bars from people so I was left alone. She wanted to have colleagues do her work for her because she was feminine and weak, whereas I (and my 2 or 3 female colleagues) wanted to just get on with our work.

It boils down to the fact that I didn't like to hear people say nasty things about her, and defended her when she wasn't there, but she also wasn't subject to the same pressures as me, and was materially different, and I I needed to have that respected too.

When I got told I was a far right Nazi witch. Not nice, even as a joke.

There was a feminist convention being attacked for excluding transwomen. I was firmly pro-being nice at this point. Women were told to move over and allow transwomen in. I thought that sounded OK, enough room for everyone.

Then talking about biological issues at feminist conferences and in feminist spaces was not OK because it was not all about transwomen and it was 'triggering'.

Inevitable end point of this: feminist are no longer allowed to talk about FGM, pregnancy, birth injuries, women's pain being ignored, and by extension (because these things happen to biological girls and women) rape and sexual assault prevalence, child brides, sex work, wifework, loss of earning, being sidelined in work and anything else that happens to women.

Then women in sports, all the 'first women' to do things, 'cotton ceiling' and the way lesbians are being treated generally.

I don't know if this is what you are looking for but I'll add it anyway.

Mine was my own child. They came out to me 3 years ago as homosexual. They were scared about what it meant for their life, friendships etc. as a lot of young people are at first.

Then one day they came to me so so happy because they'd been looking into it online and actually they weren't gay at all. They were just a woman who fancied men. All they needed was a course of drugs to take for the rest of their life and a series of major operations and they'd be a women who could have relationships with men like any other woman...

The inbuilt homophobia horrified me. In what world is the "solution" to being gay to realign your entire body and life so that you can be seen to be heterosexual and how is it easier to embark on a transgender relationship than a gay one?

My child and I had many very frank and detailed conversations about the ability of a surgically created vagina to replicate a natural one. About how people (men) would react to being told their partner was formally male alongside a wealth of other things. They still feel being surgically altered is better than being gay because the magical people on the internet promised they could be a woman and every one else in the world would just accept that.

I'm now supporting my child (now adult) on one of the most horrendous journeys because someone told them being gay is wrong.

Where to start? I was in a large community feminism group in my city when a trans woman joined. Within a week they were centred in literally everything and the legitimate issues facing women were mocked and trivialised in comparison to this person’s suffering. They started identifying as a single mother, despite the fact they didn’t meet their son until he was an adult, never lived with them - and then suddenly everything was about how hard it was to be a single mother.

I was attacked for talking about my experiences with endometriosis in this group for women - it was apparently insensitive and there was apparently trans women who’d give anything to have “my problems”. I too was on GnrH analogs and they ruined my health and my life, the thought of them being given to physically healthy children breaks my heart.

Then Rachel Dolezal happened and the hypocrisy overwhelmed me - apparently RD couldn’t possibly know the struggles of women of colour, said the people who unquestioningly accepted that TWAW. It was then I realised that these “feminists” didn’t really believe that women are oppressed for being women.

I saw victims of sexual assault being attacked for distrusting male bodies in their spaces. I saw lesbians being talked about as if they have the privilege of straight white men, and the whole cotton ceiling thing... Fallon Fox. Pips Bunce. Kaitlyn Jenner, trans issues in sport, girl guides, Hampstead ponds, Topshop, Mermaids being sanctioned to brainwash school children. Seeing the statistics about Tavistock referrals for kids with ASD and having ND children myself, calling biological fact bigotry...

It’s all become absolutely ludicrous. The trans friends I have would never ever force their presence on to those who made them uncomfortable. They’d never call someone a bigot for not wanting to have sex with them. They wouldn’t call themselves women, they know they are trans women.

The whole thing is legitimately frightening.

I'm firmly of the "if everyone just plays nice everything will be fine" persuasion and shrugged off most things as that'll never happen or isolated incidents. Then Caitlin Jenner as Woman of the Year made me say hang on a minute..
I then had two daughters and the Girl Guides change in policy made me realise that my girls are at risk in so many ways from this ideology and the whole TRA lobby. Since then it's got steadily worse. I couldn't play nice and agree with the TRAs now:

1. I'd be letting my daughters down
2. No one knows the rules of the game except for a small contingent of people who are self centred beyond belief

@Glinner thank you for all you've done so far and for collecting these stories which really illustrate the breadth and depth of the issue

I started out defending the trans narrative. I looked into research to back up my arguments and was flummoxed to find it did not support what I expected it to. I also found that the TRA movement had become extreme and my protestations that it did not promote gender stereotypes or push the idea that gender nonconformity was an indication of being trans were no longer true. I finally started to argue against trans ideology when I saw how the trans women speaking out acted and argued like men, shutting down female voices and disparaging female perspectives. It made me really angry to see how many supposedly feminist organisations and leaders seemed to be doing nothing to protect the marginalised voices of vulnerable women and girls after we had worked so hard to elevate them.

Finally, the incredibly anti-science perspective had me totally turned. I can’t be supporting any movement that does that.

I am still pro-trans rights. I think transgender people are marginalised for the most part. I want to see them respected and able to live freely. I just think we can do that without shitting on women.

Mumsnet feminism boards, circa 2012/13.

I read, and read, and thought.
And eventually posted.
My degree was in biological sciences, so there was never any question about the impossibility of changing sex.
And having babies focuses the mind sharply on the relevance of female bodies contrasting with the unfairnesses of being treated like an irrelevant second class citizen. So 'gender' was pretty obvious too.

All I needed was to grant myself permission to say what I knew to be both true, yet taboo.

I'm certainly not as seasoned as Bindel or Long, but I've been knocking around for long enough to see the scale and pace of changes.
I read "the tide is turning" on a regular basis, which makes me smile. I don't think we're at that point yet.

I'm on here, on FB and on Twitter. I can see the relative importance of each forum.

This section of Mumsnet is unquestionably where the debate has exploded from into public consciousness. This is where people get to think out loud, and question, and challenge.
It's entirely public.
It's impossible to overstate the importance of this site.
Even though the rules drive me potty, they are worth tolerating purely to keep this conversation going.

I'm consistently blown away by the intelligence, wit and warmth of the women here. I owe them a great debt. I think most of them know who they are.

@Glinner
I don't know why you started down this road.
I'm glad but I missed the start of your journey.
Can you or someone enlighten me please?

I was born a feminist even before I knew what it was.

When Eddie Izzard started in the early 1990s with 'total clothing rights' I was fine. I used to think it was cool.
But when he couldn't see it was wrong for him to be in the women's toilets it sent me over the edge.

Oh yeah and the leader of every single political party saying TW are women

Just fuck off idiots

buffering

A couple of years ago. I noticed a thread on here in Active about girls with ASD getting caught up by this ideology.

And down the rabbit hole I plunged.

When I read about Transdiabled people. Having a healthy limb amputated because you thought you were disabled deep inside struck me as the mark of a profound mental illness. And logically I had to see that having healthy breasts or genitals amputated was the same class of illness. How could it not be? And then you fall down the rabbit hole and find out about AGP etc.

Children!
Decades of working with children with eating disorders, behaviour issues, self harm, suicidal, self sabotaging etc. Supporting them, keeping them safe, challenging them, putting in boundaries, loads of tough love, helping them stay on track with their education, confronting them, giving them consequences and every other damned strategy.

And then along came trans groups who told us that everything we know about child development, parenting and safeguarding doesn't apply to these children. They are so special that the rules of medical ethics, child development, parenting, consent and safeguarding do not apply to them. Children questioning their identity must be immediately affirmed.

Parents, teachers, families - everyone is policed to ensure that they back away and leave these children in the hands of their "glitter families" where kind doctors will ensure that they are promptly medicated and the online adults will ensure that these children are fully transitioned before they reach an age where they can fully comprehend the magnitude of the decisions they are making.

If I really thought about why this is happening........

Maria McLachlin being attacked by a transwoman transactivist and seeing the footage in 2018. She is Skepticat on twitter.

Also, reaching out a party i was a member of in 2018 (Green Party Scotland) and expressing concerns, only to be told by the leader Patrick Harvie that TWAW and transphobes were not welcome in the party. That sealed my understanding that no politicians were at all interested in LISTENING to women, never mind taking action.