Feminist Current: I supported Trans ideology until I couldn't any more

[BernardBlacksWineIcelolly]

Really interesting article about by a woman who changed her mind on trans issues this year

www.feministcurrent.com/2019/04/10/i-supported-trans-ideology-until-i-couldnt-anymore/

I thought this was interesting

Now, when I reflect on my “switch” from being an unrelenting trans activist/“ally” to being critical of gender identity ideology and legislation, I’m chilled at how easy it was for me — a psychologist (now retired), ostensibly trained to understand the human mind — to become so caught up in the momentum of “trans rights” that I avoided critical thought, much like a new member of a cult

Should referring to a self-identified transwoman as “he,” even inadvertently, mean that women deserve to have online methods of communication (a vital tool for women, enabling them to participate in both public and private conversations) cut off?

Also, one of the key things that got her rethinking her stance was talking with Morgane Oger - who'd have thought it eh?

In fact, I just remembered that when a man I know 'came out' as a woman I looked up a lot of articles online about how to gaslight myself better because I just could NOT see him as a woman. It was easier to believe it when it was theoretical, but when it was a person I actually knew it got a lot harder. Like, Bob, a woman? Really???

I agree with MagicMix.

I'm an atheist so I just don't 'buy' the idea of souls, or genders, or anything much except bodies & personalities.

Also, being one of those gothy/alternative types I've been around trans people forever, since waaaay before we were expected to believe that so-and-so who likes wearing a LBD, eyeliner, fishnets & New Rocks to go dancing on a Friday night is in fact a woman rather than a bloke who likes wearing etc etc.

So my position was always 'some people like to present as the opposite sex. Cool. Only a real meanie would object to that'

Then various friends started up with TWAW & I thought 'well...no, I don't believe that; at best it could be a legal fiction, but it's probably kind to play along.'

THEN lots of shouty AWA started doing their thing, & the same friends were cheerleading all that - & I discovered that I wasn't on board with any of it, all of a sudden.

Except blokes in fishnets & eyeliner. Still quite a fan of that!

Excellent article. It takes courage to change your mind publicly.

I agree on the cult points.

This article on cults targeting students from 2001 seems to me so similar to transactivism - it's eerie.
www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/06/highereducation.students

Are you young, of above average intelligence, from an economically advantaged background, well educated and idealistic? If you answered yes to the above, you may well be a student. But you also fit the bill for recruitment into a cult.

"To define a cult we use five characteristics, the most important of which is the use of mind-control techniques to recruit people," says Ian Howorth of the Cult Information Centre. "Although cults recruit people of all ages, students - who are intelligent and often intellectually or spiritually curious - are prime targets."

...

Ian Howorth says that when the average person is recruited into a cult, they undergo a drastic personality change. "With new students, it may take longer for family and friends to notice and fully understand the change. Parents may put the change down to leaving home and meeting a new crowd, and by the time they have realised what has happened, it's too late."

For those recruited into some groups, targeting others and "fund-raising" for the cause can become a full-time activity. Reports of students being asked to apply for personal loans with banks or loan sharks are not uncommon.

That's absolutely nuts heresay but o can totally see that! I completely changed in my first year at uni - I was young, naive and suffering terrible mental health I would have been such an easy target and I was really militant in my leftie beliefs at that time - I still am, albeit a less shouty and willing to listen to others and accept difference of opinion.

Just realised it is heresy - sorry!!

Interesting article. Thanks for posting.

I’ve never been full blown trans ally, went from hmm, probably shouldn’t be mean if this doesn’t affect me to ‘wow this is misogynistic bollocks’ about three years ago.

Seeing intelligent educated people having such massive blind spots, makes me wonder what my own blind spots are.

It's an interesting article. It's always good to think about what kinds of things make people change their minds, or prevent them.

I think there are going to be a variety of reasons people believe the TWAW argument. For many it seems to me they just go along with whatever their group thinks, be they progressives, conservatives, or something else. They have never really spent time thinking carefully about what is being said, they just repeat catch phrases and surface arguments that sound right.

A lot of the ideas you hear are really borrowed one way or another from civil rights, or marriage equality, or other kinds of rights movements. In a lot of cases, they don't even make sense when applied to a different set of ideas, or sometimes they were always catch phrases without much substance. But either way, lots of people believe them in the original context and so now they are just repeated about this new idea as if they are obvious accepted truths.

Terms like bigot and racist have become almost like calling a person a heretic, it seems to turn off the brain for a lot of people. People who want to manipulate others use this, maybe sometimes unconsciously.

But the science thing is more complicated than it seems I suspect. To me it seems obviously unfounded, but I think it doesn't to many. They see articles in Scientific American or National Geographic, or know health professionals that treat people who are trans. So - they figure people like that know more about the science. Which seems like it should be true, yk?

just saw this on Twitter & came here to start a thread on it, but see it's already been done!

I just saw it on reddit and wondered was i brave enough to start a thread

Very interesting article

HeyDuggeesCakeBadge
Being a student is such a time of upheaval. Actual cults figuring out they can target young people this way is... interesting to compare with transactivism. University students will likely go on to have influential careers, too, so if you indoctrinate teach them early... I think about the silencing atmosphere reported in universities on the trans topic, pressure from students to conform to the mantra transwomen are women, reports from parents on how their children completely change when they adopt a new gender identity (plus if the family doesn't play along they'll get completely cut off) and how many crowdfunders I've seen for transition procedures....

I've posted a comment saying that she was in fact the bigot all along. I wonder if she will accept it.

I have seen this before with some academic types - intelligent and book smart but a complete lack of critical reasoning or independent thought.
I think it is very brave that this clinical psych with a PHD no less has had the humility to catalogue her about face re TRA... however I am astounded that she was ever taken in by it in the first place, to the extent that she admits she did not research the basic tenets of her activism but instead chose to mindlessly repeat mantras such as TWAW whilst dismissing those who attempted to draw her attention to the ideology’s inconsistencies and just plain wrongness.

Group think is definitely a part of it, defining yourself as part of a group and taking your cue for 'acceptable opinions' from the opinions you hear being expressed around you by your peers. I think it would be a rare young person who didn't go through some kind of phase like this.

I don't think it's quite fair to say that believers don't have the capacity for critical or independent thought, though. She was having the thoughts all right (Certain aspects of trans activism would occasionally unsettle me). It's more a matter of not allowing yourself to fully engage with those thoughts because you've been so thoroughly convinced that only bad people think those thoughts that you ruthlessly self censor.

I was never able to make a true believer of myself but I pretended to be and I really wanted to be because in my mind the alternative was to be a hateful transphobe. I believed that deep down I was a bigot and I was ashamed of that and did everything I could to quash it.

The way to help people out of it, the people who aren't driven by misogyny but by a desire to be kind and inclusive and not bigoted, is just to do exactly what this forum does. Just give people permission to trust their own judgement again and let them see that it is not coming from a place of hate, but that their concerns and misgivings are valid. Lots of people believe all kinds of nonsense that directly contradicts observable reality and it's not because they're all thick.

And I don't think kicking people when they are big enough to stand up and admit they made a mistake, by calling them a bigot, is really very helpful at all.

Good article. I like how she outlines her thought process and what triggered her change of mind. Anyone who cares about women’s safety and dignity, i.e. anyone who is a feminist, can’t possibly agree with males being in women’s spaces. It’s total cognitive dissonance.

I think lefty women like the author cling to the TRA stuff so much, because otherwise they are ‘on the wrong side of history’ and that’s a scary place to be if you’re used to being always right.

I find it scary myself that I am agreeing with articles published in the Times or the National Review because I disagree with 90% of their stance on everything else. It’s alarming to me and I don’t even have a public reputation to think about. For a lot of old school feminists, I can imagine they have doubts but the cost of speaking out is too high.

Similar to some on here, I was very much in the ‘TWAW, why be mean, why exclude people who have sacrificed so much to be women from our spaces?’

Then I found out that 80+% of trans women do not go for reassignment surgery and are fully intact males who have sacrificed very little to be women and that was what triggered the change in my attitude.

This wrong side of history trope coming from people decades younger than me is nonsense and arrant stupidly. I am the history you are telling me I am the wrong side of. I am the woman forced into sex stereotype subjects at school, cooking and sewing, I am the school girl that sat feeling alone in the top stream for maths and sciences in the 60s and 70s and I am the woman that was discriminated against in work for decades, all of my working life having babies in the 90s and writing maternity policies when women simply did not even try to struggle back to work against the odds and I still am the fucking history now working in equal pay putting pay right for 60year old women who have gone through these decades with me. How dare these people even breathe the words wrong side of history to women for whom this is not only their history, its their present and their future and their fucking retirement.

Get your own fucking history before you dare tell me I'm on the wrong side of mine because a man told you to say it.

Trousering

These people have no clue.

Thanks Erish. I do reach #peak fucking stupid now and again.

It is very worrying though when a professional person, a clinical psychologist, is taken in by black and white, ‘wrong side of history’ type thinking. Because if this is what is happening en mass in the NHS and places like the Tavistock then we are all truly stuffed.

Indeed, Trousering. I'm 41 but grew up in a more patriarchal country with a lot of sexism - cooking / sewing in school, having to go to the boys school for extra classes if we wanted to do advanced mathematics, career talks where the only options suggested to us were nurse, teacher, secretary (nothing wrong with those but wrong when they're the only options), getting sidelined at work for getting pregnant etc.

The main issue with 'intersectional' third wave feminism is that the women who advocate it have no actual experience of real sexism or what it's like to live under patriarchy. They think it's all a thing of the past and male-bodied people who enjoy behaving in stereotypically feminine ways are the truly oppressed ones, not us 'cis' women. They have no idea what it's like to experience real upfront misogyny so when they do, they don't even recognise it for what it is.

I honestly think a lot of these third wavers won't see sense until it's their turn to become mothers (if they choose to) and they experience the full-on misogyny of what it's like to have to do 90% of the biological labour to gestate & feed & raise a new human being and how hard that can be and how little the mainstream of society cares about it.

Then again who knows if this generation will ever see sense. I've seen stuff where younger women preface every single piece they write about the biological reality of femaleness with an apologia about how privileged they are to be 'cis' and able to menstruate, lactate, get pregnant etc. Some of these so-called feminists have drunk deep from the internalised misogyny Kool-aid.

I'm 41 but grew up in a more patriarchal country with a lot of sexism - cooking / sewing in school, having to go to the boys school for extra classes if we wanted to do advanced mathematics, career talks where the only options suggested to us were nurse, teacher, secretary (nothing wrong with those but wrong when they're the only options), getting sidelined at work for getting pregnant etc.

I grew up in the UK and am not much older than you. Everything you’ve written here apart from your maths lesson example is true of my own experience. My school did not put the very able girls forwards for Oxford or Cambridge (they had to fight for it & get parents involved) but I saw boys with even a chance of getting in put forwards for extra tuition and support to get in.

I'm still stewing on why I never thought TWAW. Back in the early 00's I worked with a guy who transitioned (he - sensibly - decided that complying with feminine stereotypes was not making him any happier, and desisted, so I think male pronouns are appropriate). He used the ladies toilet (until asked to stop), and was thoroughly male about it, making highly inappropriate and sexual comments to a number of members of staff. I think that experience inoculated me against ever believing TWAW.

I know that a number of people on here have trans friends, and this made them reluctant to take a gender critical stance (indeed, I have worked with other trans women who did not behave that way and were perfectly nice human beings, just male ones. I feel sad at the thought that my understanding of the importance of their biological sex upsets them).

I wonder how much personal experience plays into people buying into genderism - i.e. that pesky female desire to be nice?

Seeing intelligent educated people having such massive blind spots, makes me wonder what my own blind spots are.

This is such an insightful point. The whole issue has made me examine what I believe on a range of issues. It’s forced me to examine lazy thinking and reassess my position on quite a lot of stuff. I’ve tried very hard to weed out believing things just because it’s ‘right’ or progressive and exposed myself to opposing views like never before.

It’s been an interesting process so far and I doubt I’ve found everything.

Again, no this isn't exactly it from my experience anyway. It's just that if you can believe TWAW, the conflict doesn't exist. You can easily see that this is the way they think about it - they say this explicitly. If you believe in gender souls, it's easy to believe that TWAW.

This was my experience speaking to someone online last week. Their starting point was an unequivocal TWAW and from that they justified a plethora of nonsense including the idea that TW experience something akin to periods. I have to say I was aghast at how someone I know to be intelligent was coming out with ideas which suggested they were not familiar with their own biology (and what a period actually is and why the period pain exists).