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!

It's interesting that on Glinner's twitter and here, women are producing fact after fact which demonstrate their concerns yet all the TRAs do is call bigot. They are behaving like the very definition of bigot that they keep posting.

It's like a pros and cons list where one has about 50 different scenarios which have raised concerns for the safety, dignity and fairness for women and on the other side it has one word: bigot

They literally have no counter arguments at all. None.

I was a live and let live kind of person. But I work in a stereotypical male industry and went to a women's conference for women involved in the industry to discuss issues that affect them travelling up the career, maternity leave, childcare etc.
A tw stood up in the middle of the discussion and tried to force the conversation towards transwomen issues in (insert industry here).
I was quite shocked at the shouty nature of their interruption, but thought maybe there were issues for tw, different from the ones women encounter but still issues.
That was until the break when we all went to the hall for tea and coffee and I saw the tw up close and recognised them. They wrre/still are chair of one of the industry institutions, held as a man a very senior position within the industry and still do.
They had male privilege to gain these positions, and when they transitioned nothing changed. They continued to try to railroad the conversation throughout the day, and I noticed recently they are still running their business under their dead name?

I then started looking up the issues, found mn fwr board and peak trans on a daily basis.

I'm so glad you're hi lighting this, I have two small kids and I really worry for their future, at 15 I would have been pushed into the trans route as I wasn't girly, loved maths and physics and felt more comfortable around boys.
Don't start me on that bloody jelly baby chart. 😤

I was broadly GC in the sense of thinking gender was a load of made up bollocks, but I initially thought the rise in people identifying as transgender or gender fluid would hasten the demise of the stereotypes and enable everybody to feel more comfortable expressing themselves in whatever way they wished. It was only in the last couple of years that I realised trans ideology reinforced, and indeed relied on, those stereotypes.

As violence and online abuse from TRAs against women increased, I could see that it was a woke cover for MRA bullies who despised the very people whose sex they were claiming to share.

But one of the most significant 'peaks' for me was when trans activists spread the false story about Mumsnet supposedly calling for a 'trans Section 28'. As many on this thread will remember, this was on the strength of a trans rights supporter sarcastically suggesting it in an attempt to convince MNers that they were aligning themselves with homophobes. This episode was sinister for several reasons:

1. Trans activists outright lied in order to discredit Mumsnet and GC women in general.
2. Certain politicians blindly accepted these lies without doing the most cursory check of the original source.
3. The activists were prepared to throw one of their own supporters under the bus by knowingly misrepresenting her sarcasm as a serious suggestion, thereby showing that even women on their side aren't deemed worthy of respect. She was just collateral damage.

This occurrence was what made me think it wasn't just a few loud bullies, it was an organised attempt to attain political influence through lies.

Hey, Hey. I wanted to add my voice to those above.

First, thank you Glinner for taking such flack on such a regular basis from the TRAs. I've observed the extraordinary abuse you've been getting on twitter for MONTHS, and I am so grateful for your efforts at countering their claims and spreading the GC word.

Second, re: your question. I first became involved in the debate, primarily given the safeguarding issues. For me, there are way too many red flags in the TRAs policy agenda:

1. Early and inappropriate sexualisation of very young children by transgender activism in schools, including erotic drag queen shows.
2. Early and unacceptable training of children to suppress their boundaries should they feel uncomfortable or indeed violated by another trans child's insistence to enter their single sex spaces.
3. Early and unacceptable training of children to suppress their boundaries (lest they be called transphobic bigots) should they feel uncomfortable or indeed violated by a trans adult's insistence to enter their single sex spaces.
4. The encouragement of female toddlers, children as young as 3 years old, to wear synthetic penises in their underwear to support their transitioning.
5. Active attempts to remove parental authority and parental involvement in child protection issues should the child consider themselves to be trans, when all available evidence suggests that this increases child abuse risk.
6. The whitewashing surrounding the criminally negligent employment of a child rapist and torturer by Aimee Challenor. Aimee was trans advisor to Stonewall and the government at a time when changes were made to school and girl guiding policies with reference to trans inclusion, that those policies have not been reconsidered given the Veritas report's conclusion regarding Aimee's catastrophic grasp of safeguarding is extremely worrying conatusnews.com/green-party-verita-report-challenor/
7. Desmond.

Sam your perspectives and experiences are invaluable; intersex conditions are appropriated often by TRAs. Sex and gender are very different.

I’ve seen a few of your posts now, Sam, and I just wanted to say how welcome your unique voice is, here on the FwR boards.

What Betty said from me too, Sam.

Thank you so much for sharing of yourself here.

thanks for kind words - it can be hard to confess it all, but I do appreciate the facts that so many women are waking up to the tiresome nonsense of the trans lobby

Much respect Sam. It is disgusting the way that intersex issues are being appropriated by the trans right cult.

Confess? it’s just (I say just, I don’t mean to minimise) a medical condition, not something youve done wrong.

Thanks, i appreciate your words and understand, it is crazy...
I just don't tell people at work and many friends, people do judge, and still stigma, about being a bit of both.

People are curious naturally, but can assume some crazy stuff, and yes I have had abuse sent to my house, and my work place. one gets the god squad who think i am "against god" - a freak of nature etc. Then one even gets the pervs who have some sort of fetish about hermaphrodites (taking Greek mythology a tad too literally) believe me it is NOT like that in any way -

But yes, it is a just a chromosome disorder - but our society is obsessed with sex etc.. i am fine, but i guess i am just programmed to not tell people.

at age of 9 it was a family secret and not talked about - (was 1974) - different time in many ways .

I soon found out that 9 yr old girls were not allowed to do things that 9 yr old boys were allowed - thankfully different 45 yrs later -

Sam, we are about the same age, and I can remember the absolute outrage age 9 of discovering that I wasn't allowed to play cricket (which I loved) but had to play rounders, and wasn't allowed to do woodwork, but had to do needlework*. I can only imagine how much worse this must have been for you given that up until 9 you were allowed to do those things, then suddenly it changed, seemingly utterly arbitrarily. Complete head fuck.

*This was school - my parents, thank god, were fine.

(PS, thanks for the reassurance @glinner. I'm fine so long as you're blanking out user names. And I do really appreciate your input to this, because people listen to you, in a way they don't listen to a plump middle aged wifey whose cricketing career was cut off in its prime.)

The Rose McGowan debacle. I felt like I was watching a completely different video to the Libfems on the boards and on Twitter. I saw an aggressive numpty harassing a sexual abuse survivor whose “crime” was suggesting that women and Transwomen have different life experiences on a podcast. Then it came out about this numpty’s past, their supporters still defended them and even suggested that the teenagers allegations against the numpty were lies. I thought the whole thing was batshit. I went down the rabbit hole.

SAME.

Oh and "Even if Andi Dier did do those things, it's still wrong to misgender her and makes you an awful person." OH FECK OFF!!!

exactly - total pain
No more football, had to play Net ball,
Not allowed to do metal work, had to do home economics
Was strict public school, so u can imagine the traditions they had, length of skirt measured - had to kneel at a board to measure...
and I has started periods at age 9, and had to use "belts and looped pads"
Was told to wear two pairs of pants to ensure no leaks etc
i was told i would be "a normal wife and mother"

Different age - different culture - no trans lessons NOR any nale teachers dressing up as women.. seems a life time ago, YET but just like yesterday

Being signposted to LM did it for me. That's all it took tbh 😂

Following that, reading these threads on MN and following both GC and the "TWAW" clan on Twitter (so I could be sure) though I unfollowed a certain male doctor as I was too enraged. I thought I was at risk of posting something when pissed and getting into trouble! I am a civil servant and would be hauled over the proverbials if not dismissed.

@Glinner I follow you on Twitter but don't post because of the above, but I very much appreciate what you're doing

De-lurking to say:

What first alerted me to the trans debate?

In the words of Bridget Jones' mother:

"Germaine sodding Greer!"

This policy is my latest summit of the Himalayas:

Civil Service Trans policy - what can I do?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3520371-civil-service-trans-policy-what-can-i-do

Several things at around a similar time early last year, all of which I'd been oblivious to until i read about them on Mumsnet.

1. The Scottish GRC consultation, hardly anyone in Scotland even knew about it. Never seen such a biased piece of shit either.

1. The girl guides cracking down on volunteer leaders who dared to question their ridiculous, never risk assessed policy changes on the QT.

1. Man Friday! I ended up on the threads somehow near the beginning after the initial enquiry to Swim England and have been pretty much agog at all the crazy ever since.

Following on from that the train wreck of certain Labour trans stars and in fact those of other parties too.

Indeed the fact that this would have almost got by us all unchecked if it wasn't for a lot of hard work and persistence in the face of cries of transphobia. Still freaks me out.

It prompted me to order a pack from FPFW ands become a stealth leaflet dropper to try and help.

I was supporting a close relative on their trans-journey (ROGD young female) and found myself suffering nagging cognitive dissonance, feeling protective of my niece while struggling to reconcile this with the increasingly unhinged extreme anti-science rhetoric I was coming across on her FB feed, ironically centering transwomen despite niece identifying as a transman. I was so intent on being an ally (being a left-leaning woman in a caring profession) that I actually remember deciding to suspend my critical faculties, thinking it was a fault of mine that I couldn't just get my head around TWAW. It was while trying to become a better ally that I came across people like Riley J Dennis on YouTube, and so stumbled across Peach Yoghurt and Magdalen Burns, who sorted me out. Already a relative veteran of MN it came as a surprise that FWR was busy dismantling this crap right under my nose and could have fixed it for me straight away. So I've been hanging around here for a few years, with a particular interest in safeguarding as my professional role is in this area.

Actually, another factor was some years ago when a friend added me to a lefty feminist group on FB, which is quite possibly the most oppressive space I have encountered; a couple of transwomen perpetually demanding to be centered in any discussion, whether it be women's health, DV, careers and employment rights or austerity; telling 'cis women' to 'sit down' and check their privilege, and women falling over themselves to submit to being 'educated' and 'calling out' transphobia just about anywhere on behalf of their oppressors. Urgh... The culture was so toxic and authoritarian it scared the pants off me. I do wonder whether anyone from there ever defected to here...

Probably the website t"rf is a slur. Google it.

Can't say the word t"rf here now. (Rightly so) but I think you get the gist.

I think I may have been a member of a similar, if not the same, lefty women group on FB. I left after I was verbally attacked by many members over my concerns about trans women using the female changing at my local gym (no cubicles, only one big open changing and shower area).

So I’m a ‘bigot’ who has remained silent for a while, reading, worrying and getting up the nerve to converse again. Thanks MN for making me feel safe.

So many stories. Thank you Glinner for asking to hear them, and for your incredible fortitude and bravery. It's much appreciated, believe me.

My experience - never really thought much about trans issues, very 'live and let live', until working with someone mtf brought up many questions in my mind. Such as: why is this person in the office doing 'womanface', complete with miniskirts, high heels, low-cut tops and much giggling about make-up, when all the women in the room.....just...aren't? Started me pondering what a woman is, and is not.

Special allowances had to be made for this person, it seemed, which bothered me obscurely, although I didn't really put it all together until - quite some time later - I strayed into the FWR boards here and it started to crystallise. I remember the Lauren Jeska case really horrified me.

As others have said, every day is a peak day now. Hell, every minute. My Dh isn't quite sure where this swivel-eyed harpy muttering under her breath has materialised from, but I can't unsee any of it now.

I really engaged with the conversation in the last couple of years. My experience - my uniquely female experience of recurrent miscarriage - awoke the radical feminist in me. Because to go through something so biologically exclusive makes you feel quite protective of that experience. I found a closer connection to the meaning of being a woman and thus closer to women in general. Everyday I am in awe of what women, including myself, can survive, sustain and achieve. So I find it absolutely outrageous and insulting when people try to argue that sex is socially constructed, or that you can simply identify as a woman. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain and rage felt by women who have been abused and/or acutely oppressed because of their sex, who’s discrimination is undermined by the claim that you can simply identify your way out of the source of your oppression. I, too, have been on the receiving end of mundane, everyday sexism, discrimination and sexual harassment. Anyone who thinks they can simply identify their way into womanhood, clearly has not shared the experiences of women, otherwise they wouldn’t have the audacity to make a claim to the space we have so resiliently built.

Waves at Mother A few of us stuck our heads above the parapet, and the backlash was bloody savage. Welcome!
Just came back to mention the notion of womanface and performative femininity, woman as a costume, and see you just did as well, Zeugma.
Robberrs, such a powerful post.

My Dh isn't quite sure where this swivel-eyed harpy muttering under her breath has materialised from, but I can't unsee any of it now.
Hahaha Mine is on the same wavelength but I see his eyes glance towards his I Pad, to try to sneak a read at anything else, when I'm reading (too much) stuff out.
I've just spent hours on the Census debate in the Scottish Parliament-thread here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3520786-Joan-McAlpine-on-sex-and-census-Wow