Anyone else have a woke teen?

[Catsfriend]

I am so tired of having to listen to my teen who has swallowed the whole Stonewall playbook hook line and sinker.
I would type out a whole rant here but after two hours of arguing back and forth, I am angry, tired and frustrated.
It doesn’t help that she is incapable of acknowledging that grey areas even exist.
I told her that we fundamentally agree on two premises: 1) everyone should be able to live the life that they want to and 2) everyone should be able to do this in a safe space. As you may have guessed, excluding trans women from toilets is where we disagree. I ended the discussion this evening by telling her that until she fully understands what it means to be a woman and navigate life as a woman in society she would never comprehend why I and so many other women (I didn’t even dare tell her that this includes several relatives and friends) are concerned about the ramifications for women’s rights.
And that next time she wants to cite statistics, she would do well to check and cross-check the source first.
I love her dearly but this just keeps on coming up again and again... so fed up of these heated discussions.
When I mentioned the Cyclepath’s “disown” tweet, she did have the good sense to say that that was just plain stupid.

In the house, I ban the use of woke bullshit language such as ‘identity’ , ‘identify as’....I have made it clear that they are akin to swear words to me. I don’t want to be part of normalising this way of talking.....saying meaningless big words that are cobbled up in a complicated string, pretending to be a sentence, which actually does make any sense, either to the people hearing it and not even to the people who say it.

Dd knows I feel quite angry and passionate about this whole thing.

DOESN’ T make any sense..

Mine went in a massive huff when I told him that every should live their lives as they see fit - wear what you want, have the hair you like etc etc - but I just don’t believe that transwomen are women. You’d think I’d punched a baby in the face the way he carried on.

The Happy Hooker narrative.

Yes, that's the one. The glamorous world where attractive, intelligent young women are wined and dined, and earning £3k+ a week for a few hrs pleasant "work" with handsome, wealthy businessmen who are just too busy for a relationship. It's "empowering work for confident, self-assured women", as glossy magazines suggest.

Nobody talks about the overwhelming majority of women in "sex work" who are trading the only commodity they feel they have left to offer - their bodies- to men who view them as nothing more than a fuck hole to be bought for £20.

There is a video on YouTube which occasionally gets shared on Facebook, of a young, clearly vulnerable woman who has given oral sex to an old man (named as Mr Singh by locals) who then handed her £2. A £2 coin. The girl was crying, while a passer by filmed her asking the old man for the rest of her money. He then hits her with his walking stick. The comments make me lose faith in humanity, as the vast majority of them think it's "fucking hilarious 😂"
She's being called a crackhead, a junkie, a hooker...any judgement for the fact this 70ish year old man is overshadowed by the disgust at the girl selling herself.

"Sex work is Empowering"? How fucking offensive.

NamechangeforTransStuff I know it may seem cruel, but when the "Oh they can't go into the men's loo, they would be beaten up" card is played that is your cue to tell your DD that it's not women's problem to solve. I know your DD was just being sympathetic, but this is an oft used tactic.

See how we (women) instantly understand that men will be aggressive knobs, and instead of making the men change, we decide women simply have to budge up.

One of his friends from his school has transitioned female to male and he says that this is because times are progressive now compared to when I was young- everyone is freer now to present how they really are.

But in the past people presented in all sorts of gender non-conforming ways. The difference is that back then nobody thought this made them change sex. Surely that makes the past more progressive than now, where everyone is encouraged to fit into a 'box'.

I don't have DC of an age where I have come across any of this and in terms of people I know of my own age, I haven't met anyone who talks about any of this stuff so it's all new and extremely confusing to me. I really don't know what to think. I feel as though the young people/teenagers of today are far more confusing and mystifying to me than my age group were to our grandparents or even great grandparents. They found some of the clothes/music a bit shocking and some of them weren't comfortable with the idea of teenagers having boyfriends staying over, but that was the extent of it. I really don't know whether all these ideas everyone is talking about will become the norm and universally understood and accepted by everyone, or it will be something that drifts away in time.

I think it is very important when discussing issues with teenagers to let them have their say, listen to them and discuss respectfully.

Firstly because they deserve that treatment and secondly because any other way is counterproductive.

I have known too many people whose adult children have taken a polar opposite stance to their parents perfectly reasonable opinions because they had said opinions forced down their throats.

I asked DS if he would date someone who was trans. He said "no" because it's ...... weird. A good school friend of his is non-binary and he has people on his course at his uni who are trans and non-binary. He says nobody believes in any of it but they all go along with it.

I just asked him if he thought TWAW. He said "scientifically no." Mentally? "sure, why not, it does't affect me."

... I'm on it!

No. I think it's a debt that I owe this board. I was able to preempt the woke tide before the teen years hit.

@SawingForTeens - good points, thanks. I'm learning from this board and discussing with DD.

She's adopted and can't get her head around the fact that she can't have the name of her birth mother (who relinquished her at 2 weeks old) removed from her birth certificate but trans people can have their sex changed on theirs!

But in the past people presented in all sorts of gender non-conforming ways. The difference is that back then nobody thought this made them change sex. Surely that makes the past more progressive than now, where everyone is encouraged to fit into a 'box'
Very much this.
I had a conversation with my Grandad when I was 16 and knew everything. He smiled at my nonsense and gently pointed out that actually, although times change, people stay remarkably the same.
It was illuminating to my intense but naive self.
I've passed the same philosophy into my own DD. There have always been people who don't fit into the best box of the prevailing 'norm' and how that expresses changes accordingly. I definitely think growing up in the 1980's was a more expressive time for gender variance than it is now. Less open for sexuality though. Being publicly gay was probably harder than wearing makeup for men.

Totally agree:
The Slits, Poly Styrene, Marilyn, Boy George, Ian Dury, Girlschool, Marc Almond, Siouxsie Sioux, Pete Shelley, David Bowie, etc.

Yes, recently I was reflecting on my teenage years in the 80s. So many feminine men and we didn't really think anything of it. My dad on the other hand was totally puzzled by it all.
David Sylvian: absolutely beautiful.

Sylvester - You Make me Feel.

Nope. Like another poster, we live in the East Midlands where woke culture hasn't really reached yet. DD is a rugby player who loved beating up playing the boys in primary school years but would be horrified if a 'trans girl' joined her team now (and I know the coaches/club wouldn't stand for it).
Not a lot sinks in but in know that her whole class laughed and rolled their eyes when a blue haired representative from an LGBT group came to give a talk. Unfortunately I don't think anyone out and put challenged it though.
I always express to her that she can be a girl in whatever way she wants to be.

"I always express to her that she can be a girl in whatever way she wants to be."

And this is the absolute nub of the issue.
Being a "girl" is not a bunch of feminine stereotypes, it's about biology.
If a boy wants to look like a girl, dress like a girl, walk and talk like a girl then he should be allowed to without all this fucking nonsense.
Ditto the girl who refuses to wear skirts, dresses and make up, and has a buzzcut and is a welder. STILL female, despite not conforming to the bollocks gender stereotypes.

If this shit had all been around when I was a young teen I have no doubt that some well meaning woke type would have pushed me down the trans route - I was vehemently anti-girliness and wore only gender-nonspecific clothes such as jeans, tshirts, baggy jumpers etc. I did wear eyeliner but then so did most of the boys of my acquaintance (80s). And that scares me shitless - at that age, puberty can be quite scary, especially for those on the spectrum (not me but I still hated it) and a denial of it isn't unusual. But to then pathologise it and tell these kids that "they must be trans" is sickening.

Be who you want to be, dress how you want to dress but never expect you can change your biology - you can't.

By the dictionary definition, most teens are woke. "verb
past of wake1.
adjectiveINFORMAL•US
alert to injustice in society, especially racism.
"we need to stay angry, and stay woke"

My ds, almost 16, is bemused that society has got itself so torn in bits and is bemused. Most definitely doesn't believe people can change sex and listens to his gay uncles that there is more going on than is immediately apparent.

As a result of this thread, had a chat about all this with dd1 who I thought was moderately woke. Am relieved as it turns out she's largely unaware of stuff and when I point stuff out is open-minded enough to listen. She wanted proof of some of my claims (quite reasonably) - can anyone point me to a good single source for pictures of transwomen in sport? I know I've seen lots of individual examples but also individual threads etc with lots of examples - does anyone have any quick links on this so I can show her easily?

I think that this issue in particular works well visually.

I did show her a twitter thread on Hannah Mouncey which I found quickly, but she just said, with some reason, who cares about handball anyway?

I know there are loads more examples/pictures - anyone?

My dd2 however is extremely woke and literally cries if I try to discuss the subject (has trans friends etc) so we currently agree not to discuss it. I have hope that the conflict between her feminism and her wokeness will start to make her more aware of the issues as we get older.

My ds, meanwhile, has no truck with the woke at all and is very GC.

My son believes that transwomen do differ from natal women but we fall out over the fact that there is an explosion in the numbers of children presenting as trans

It would be interesting to ask him how many 'out' lesbians there are at school?

Maybe you could learn from your teens if you weren’t so superior and patronising.

There are plenty who don’t agree with your views, who fully understand’what it means to live as a woman’ 🙄

I got in early with DS14 and his best friend. They overheard me arguing with woke DH and asked me to explain. So I did. They are now GC. Helped along by having my DBro and SIL living with us, they are hugely GC and DS adores his uncle and hangs on his every word and view. DH will come round and be de-woked, but he is only just coming out of a LibDem fog, so needs some space to adjust...

And she had a point. I'd feel threatened by a man self ID-ing as a woman coming into the woman's loos but God help that trans woman if she'd gone into a men's toilet in the city

Feminists are often accused of castigating all men as violent potential rapists...which is clearly not the case....but are there really hordes of men waiting in toilets waiting to attack a feminine, slightly built man?

But in the past people presented in all sorts of gender non-conforming ways. The difference is that back then nobody thought this made them change sex. Surely that makes the past more progressive than now, where everyone is encouraged to fit into a 'box

Yes, where we are now is definitely retrograde. Totally reliant on the pharmaceutical and medical industries in order to feel like oneself. And even if presenting as 'non-binary' or 'pansexual' without the need for medical assistance - then there is an essential denial of earthly reality. And earthly reality is something we need to get to grips with pretty quick as a species living on the earth.

Simply more drugs, more technology and more consumeristic mentality is not where we need to be going. Mind/body integration is where it is at.