I’m sorry to hear that about your post re breast-binding, Sunkisses.
It’s strange and tragic, isn’t it, that just as we get to this point in history where there is more awareness then ever before of the reality and harms of all the different forms of abuse, of grooming and the other ways abusers operate, and indeed of social injustice and inequality - in this age where there is a policy to address everything that anyone can think of, where safeguarding is supposedly a top priority for all public organisations, and training in it is more widespread than ever before - that just as we get to this point, along comes a movement that, it turns out, can bypass every single one of the many, many measures put in place to protect children, to redress social injustice and inequality, to raise people’s awareness of (all kinds of) abuse?
It’s almost as if those whose main objective is their own gratification, and who don’t care tuppence for those more vulnerable than themselves, will always find new ways to carry on operating the way they always have - just as criminals always adapt to new crime prevention/detection systems and find new ways to pursue their criminal activity.
As if those who have power always find new ways to hold onto their power in the face of attempts to make things more equitable; patriarchy always reinvents itself and find a new way of expressing that same old male supremacy, whatever obstacles feminism and the “march of progress“ throw in its path.
(Disclaimer: I want to be very clear here that when I talk about “abuse”, I am referring primarily to a sort of structural emotional abuse, which it is my strongly held belief that we are seeing being inflicted on women and girls, gender non-confirming children, and indeed society at large. I am NOT implying that all or most biologically male trans people/trans rights activists in are abusers in the sense of being sexual predators, or are in any other way committing criminal offences; it is the ideology itself that I believe to be (emotionally) abusive. Just in case anyone should see the word “abuse” and jump to mistaken conclusions about what I mean.)
To think that the very organisations which are out there writing or informing policy and delivering training on safeguarding, on grooming, on preventing abuse, are the ones themselves being groomed and gaslit into abandoning all those safeguarding defences when it pertains to one particular demographic - lowering the drawbridge and laying out the welcome mat, in fact, for some of those they would in all other circumstances be highly suspicious of.
It’s a tragedy.