Jaw on the Floor - when did YOU peak?

[WomanBornNotWorn]

Can you pinpoint your peak start moment? When you went - Huh? What ... ?

I started my ascent to the peaks sometime last summer over on Twitter when I started noticing #stickerwoman conversations featuring a photo of a cute little flowery pink .... cock and balls ... labelled 'women don't have penises'.

Well obviousl - what??

There's ... an actual conversation going on? Huh??

And that's where it started for me.

It's starting to feel almost like being part of a fandom, the most gripping drama out there, with an astonishing cast, complicated plots and gobsmacking themes. I HAVE to keep checking in with Woman's Place meeting news, @goinglikeelsie's heroic coverage, the latest Riley Dennis aaarrrrggg-inducing offering, Glinner ... I'm addicted.

But the difference between this and Game of Thrones is it's REAL. The implications for women and children including young boys is seismic.

So when did you first go - 'Huh?? ..... '

Yes, when Rose McGowan was abused I couldn't believe what I was reading.

I never thought men could become women or vice versa.
There is no such thing as being born in the wrong body, it is your body and therefore it's fine.
I am about 8 years into speaking about this openly, and peak transing people regularly.

I don't think that the twitter thread linked to by turboteddy is true. It reads like a fantasy wank by mistress hate or whoever made it up so she could report it :( fucking men eh?

I always found trans ideology sexist and never believed twaw but until self-id came along it wasn't really on my radar. Caitlyn Jenner saying something ridiculous like 'I get it ladies it's all about the dress' infuriated me and I've just got more angry since. Before I found mumsnet and radical feminism I thought the problem was with me and I wasn't accepting enough, definitely don't think that now.

Lilly Madigan.

To be honest it’s never been hugely on my radar until I found this board on here last year. I’m honest to god shocked at what is going on.

It all became serious for me when the then teenage Madigan was appointed Labour Womens Officer.
From believing it was some sort of mistake,surely,I left the Labour Party a,supporter of 54 years.
More recently,Khan ,Burnham et al and other males insisting that self Id must be pushed through as a matter of urgency.

Girl guides letting male-bodied people share intimate spaces with girls. That peaked my interest in a "that makes no sense, that can't be their policy way.

Joss Prior telling me that having concerns for my daughters safety was me being "hysterical" was what peak transed me.

My peak moment was when a poster I knew on another board, whom I considered 'lovely' was transitioning. I was all supportive and joined in with the chorus of how brave she was - and I did feel that, because I hadn't realised it was a widespread thing. Then one day this person casually mentioned they were a lesbian and I said "What? How can you be a lesbian, you're a heterosexual". Everyone piled on and lots of links were provided to all the different genders, including agender and aromantic, and nasty remarks about how transphobic MN was. I had never even thought about MN, thought it was purely for women with small babies, but I cautiously dipped my toe in the water... Then I saw lots of other women also saying "WTF?" and knew I wasn't alone. 😂

ChattyLion - fabulous post and I just want to say how much your energy and passion always shine through everything you say hereabouts.

I had never thought about it. And I was oblivious to all of it. My only vague thought on it was that the T was like the LGB and it was right to be supportive. But I had no idea what was being demanded.

Then I was on MN and noticed in Active a thread about trans ideology harming autistic girls. As someone newly diagnosed as being on the spectrum I was still finding out what it meant - so I decided to read. And from there I wandered further around FWR and everything i read made me .

Wasn't really something I thought about. I'd read stunning and brave type articles before. Didn't think TWAW but thought they were living socially as close to what they believed women could be (ie clothes and make up) and thought ok. Never thought that makes them female but had no problem with it.

In 2013 I found out I was pregnant. Suddenly aware of the big gender divide in the shops with pink and blue toys and clothes. Thought back to my childhood where although I wasn't treated the same as my brother's, there was not this big split like I see now. So I did some research on it. I think the let toys be toys campaign had recently begun or was in the process of begining around then, which I thought was great.

Then I read about a family who said they were raising their children "gender neutral". I thought, cool, that's what I plan to do. I'll let my baby play with what it wants to play with and have its own interests rather than try to pushing it one way or the other. If it likes dolls and ballet that's fine, if it likes football and cars that's fine, if it likes all of the above or none of the above that is fine but I will try and give it the options and not restrict it. (I didn't know the sex).

Anywho, read more about this family (they may have had a blog) and discovered that one of their male children who had always gone for things considered to be "for girls", had decided he was a girl and they were fully supporting "her". I think one or two of their other children they said were "non-binary" (that was a new one on me).

And I was flabbergasted! Surely the whole point of this gender neutral parenting is to try and limit enforcing stereotypes on your children. Why are they now claiming that their child's biology is wrong because they adhere to the "wrong" stereotypes. And that was that.

I was blissfully ignorant about the new wave transgenders until last year.

I remember hearing about Jenner and Manning, and made a sort of mental game of trying to change my pronouns when I thought about them. I'm interested in linguistics and language change, so it was interesting to me from that angle. Then, an ex from decades ago, who I'm still very fond of and exchange the odd email with, told me about getting punched for wearing a skirt. I wrote back saying how cool I thought he was for breaking gender conventions, and told him how I thought of myself as a wannabe "gender deconstructionist." (That's a word I picked up from reading the formidable Stan Goff, an ex-special forces guy who introduced me to radical feminism, ironically enough. Recommended: Sex and War, Full Spectrum Disorder, Borderline). When my ex emailed back to say he was transing, I felt disappointed, I'd thought he was "hipper" than that, but mostly I was worried about what effects the hormones might have on his health. I didn't give the matter much thought beyond that, and tried to change my mental pronouns for him, too. (couldn't).
Then one day I followed a Twitter link to a language blog, which I thought was about how the pronoun "they" is becoming more accepted than "he/she." It was written by an elderly, well respected professor who had come across an article expecting the same thing, but found out it was dealing with a non-binary person.

He pointed out that while he was willing to go along with this new pronoun gendering system, (ALERT: linguistickyspeak)- pronouns are function words (like prepositions or conjunctions), which aren't as easy to mess with as content words (like nouns, verbs, etc) and that it would take time for folks to get used to.
The article was followed by a mystifying pile on of aggressive, self-righteous replies, the like of which I had never seen... (all too familiar now).
I wondered what the hell was going on, and not knowing where to start, and thinking about my masculine ex, I searched something like "how to tell if you are trans." I got a bunch of stuff about whacking off in sister's undies...wondered who these dreadful "terfs" were, searched that, and, well, I think it took me a couple of hours to peak, followed by binge watching Magdalen Berns.
When I read Jane Clare Jone's "Terf Wars," it was too hilarious how accurately she nailed me with entrance of the "women" in 2018... "Where are the feminists?" Ouch...
I worry about how my ex seems to be getting screwed up by the ideology, I think he'd have done much better just realizing he was AGP.

Lots of pennies dropping when I read the widow's threads, tho.

I've never believed people can change sex, but had no clue what was happening until watching Celeb Big Brother.

Watching IW opened my eyes and I started noticing threads in feminism chat (a section I had avoided before, sorry!)

I then spent my maternity leave getting more and more angry at the sneaky, underhanded way this is being pushed on us and the rot starts at the very top.
It's so disheartening to feel that this shit is already a done deal.

Then I feel proud of all the amazing women fighting for all of us and try to do what I am able to help spread the truth. Even if sometimes it's just giving money to the fundraisers or talking to friends and family.

For me it was when I read an article in the paper "Man gives birth."

For my mum it was last night when I was telling her about transwomen telling their wives that they (the wives) are now lesbians.

I never thought that you could actually change sex. But I did wonder at one time if perhaps some people had feminised parts of their brain, or in any case I thought that the real issue was over a small number of people with dysphoria around their sexual organs. My dad had a good friend years ago who he met in group therapy who was very much like that, and that was my main image of such a person.

I think where I became more interested and skeptical was around a lot of the medical interventions, and social interventions, around children. The medical stuff made little sense and seemed to have so little research behind it for what were very invasive treatments for minors, things that would normally have a lot of care around them. How differently it was being treated to other forms of dysphoria.
As far as the social element, I work with kids all day, and I remember being a child who said she was actually a boy. I could not see socially transitioning a child, telling them they could change sex, without it having some pretty significant consequences.

The stuff around adults with TWAW, and especially the effect in universities, clicked in for me after the parliamentary presentations by Meghan Murphy and Jordan Peterson. I had been very concerned about the direction of universities for a while so it dovetailed into that.

Wasn't really something I thought about. I'd read stunning and brave type articles before. Didn't think TWAW but thought they were living socially as close to what they believed women could be (ie clothes and make up) and thought ok. Never thought that makes them female but had no problem with it.

Should add, I think was before we had the TWAW mantras and I never realised anyone would actually think they were the same as women. I don't even know if anyone did back then, or at least it wasn't a mainstream thought. And they were "transexuals", I'd not heard of transgender. I thought it was men who hated the male parts of their bodies and liked to wear dresses or something like that.

Never believed TWAW. Grew up knowing some “old school transsexuals” who just wanted to live a quiet regular life but still knew they were not women.

Then Caitlin Jenner happened. At first I thought, okay, maybe this is just like those transsexuals I knew? Then Caitlin was Women of the Year. And Caitlin was saying the hardest part of being a woman was deciding what to wear. And then it opened the doors for me to see what else was happening out there.

I am not very active on social media so I had no idea how crazy things had gone. And it was then I started being exposed to the trans activism, to the TWAW, to seeing silencing of women, and it has been “peak” after “peak”, from the Rio Olympics, to JY, to Karen White, to RMcK, to the deplatforming of feminist women, to the erasure of language to talk about women’s bodies, to finding out toddlers and children were being “transed” at risk to their healthy, to the Mermaids propaganda, to the erasure of even being able to use women to talk about ourselves! Now it never stops.

My mental path on this subject looks like a heartbeat trace, lots of peaks and troughs. I've written about some of them here. Some were delayed peaks.

A really really big peak for me was hearing that the Right Honourable Penny Mordaunt MP required the audience at a meeting to stand up and recite TWAW. I mean, I've read Wild Swans and other works describing ways of getting a population to conform to dangerous political nonsense for the benefit of the rulers. I just didn't expect a member of a Conservative government in the UK to use those techniques. It still blows my brain.

I never believed TWAW literally, but writing something on Twitter about how maintaining the definition of woman is crucial for women rights in international law, and the reaction I got (silence from my academic colleagues, coupled with 800+ new followers (women, overwhelmingly) and my subsequent ban from Twitter showed me how toxic and how dangerous this really is. Naively, I thought one could be a feminist just by living as a woman in the world with the conviction of being a full human being. Turns out if we do not fight for our hard won rights we will lose them again. Over my dead body

Rather than one moment it was a slow dawning from many incidents. Each incident seemed wrong, but it took a while before I understood that the whole things is rubbish. Some incidents:
Seeing video of a feminist being punched by a man pretending to be a woman - I’d never seen anything more ‘mannish’ than the way ‘she’ ran in and attacked.
The furore at the anarchist nook fair
Lily Madigan becoming woman’s officer, and an actual woman being bullied out of the party
Jenner being ‘woman of the year’
Pink pussy hats being hate speech
Lesbians being hounded out of pride
That cyclist who towered over her opponents on the podium, having just beaten them in a ‘fair’ race

All of these together showed me how awful this was becoming for women. However, a couple of things made me realise it’s not just awful but ridiculous:
Wives of transitioners being told they are now, and always have been, lesbians (as the partner always had been a woman!)
A man giving birth to a baby, and insisting on being called the father.
These last two example show that transitioners expect the entire universe to twist itself to accept their new ‘reality’. “I was always a woman, so everything that disagrees with this must change”: language, relationships, biology, families, history, sex, maternity ... everything has to be reinvented to make sense of these men’s ‘feeling’ that they are women.
This made me realise that not only is it wrong, unfair, and dangerous, it’s also insane. It makes as much sense as me saying I feel like I’m a banana therefore I am a banana. To validate this everyone else in the world has to change what they mean by yellow, as my skin must be yellow because I’m a banana.

I had a friend. Met them when working together and had no clue they had transitioned until they told me. They just got on with their life quietly, said they had always known and transitioned fairly young. I never had an issue with it
Then I had another friend who is drama all over, mental health issues, strings of ex girlfriends/fiancés, constant announcements about my life is shit or X is amazing, so in love. You know the type. Announced they were transitioning and now posts constant posts about women's issues and periods. Not on hormones, hasn't done anything except wear different clothes and makeup but feels they have the right to bang on about being a lesbian and women's problems
Then they turned up to my female only exercise class and were happily welcomed at which point I peaked

When my daughter announced she was a gay man.