Well, I've just come out as GC on Facebook...

[SapphireSeptember]

I watched this video this evening, and decided I couldn't keep quiet anymore. So I shared it on Facebook, along with the caption 'women are women, women's rights are human rights,' and thanked JK Rowling for standing up for women.

A male friend of mine replied with 'transwomen are women' said it was a TERF-y video and asked if I'd posted it accidentally. Guess he's no loss as a friend.

Front page of tomorrows Sunday Times. Cant make the article out though.

@Skateosaurus I'm from the same derby background and oh hell no could I post openly about this stuff!
I'm getting closer, braver but not just yet

The paper quoted a source as saying: 'In terms of changing what is on your birth certificate, you will still need to have proper medical approval.

Surely it will also show sex at birth and not wipe that out entirely?

And you're not going to be able to march in and find a hippie quack doctor who is willing to say you're a woman. That's not going to happen

At the same time, the Government was said to be preparing to set out new safeguards to protect female-only spaces – including refuges and public lavatories – to stop them being used by those with male anatomy.

From the DM article. This is fantastic news!

Today I posted JKR's essay on FB, I added one of my GC friends to FB (so she was the heavy, she's older and has been doing this a lot longer than me, and is less worried than me about offending my friends.) I also got some support from some surprising sources. I'm making notes of the likes I'm getting from people who may not want to say something but who may agree. We shall see.
Also noted are the males who utterly refuse to see where I'm coming from. My mum called one of them a patronising twat when she phoned me earlier.

good on your mum

sounds like it went well. the more sunlight the better. for me the last few weeks have been a massive eye-opener to misogyny- course i knew it was bad- but i see its off the scale...

Well, I've done it -- sort of.
A very woke friend of mine, male, who I've known virtually for over a decade and is friends with a whole brigade of woke people, posted something I HAD to reply to.
He posted a stupid meme that said this:
I’ve never in my life been scared to stand in a room w a lgbtq+, or a PoC. Or a Moslem. or a Hindu. Or any religion. Do you know who I have been scared to stand in a room with? Middle-aged straight white males.

He asked women for their opinions, and everyone was nodding and liking and agreeing.

So I replied: "Sorry, but I've been harassed and assaulted all my life by lots of young men, and black and mixed-race men. The problem is male, not the other qualifiers."

It's pretty tame, I know, but I'm wading into shark infested waters there. Being black myself I guess I'm protected from being called racist (by calling out black harassers).

On another FB thread, I replied to a woman who has a trans-girl kid. I find these mothers tricky, as they are so desperate and emotionally involved they can't think straight. I and another GC women tried to gently talk her down she cites intersex as proof that people can change sex, and says that it's possible to modify the body to make it in sync with the mind.

I did reply, but as a mother of a tb child I think it's almost impossible to convince her. She started by a mild attack on JK, and I pushed back on that too.

I feel I'm creeping forward.

Disorders (or preferably "Differences") of sex development (aka intersex, but a lot of them really don't like that name so they're trying to stick with DSDs instead) do not "change sex". She really needs to be told that is wrong - they're not frogs or clownfish!

They are usually born with ambiguous external genitalia (not always) and are indeed "assigned" a sex at birth so the parents can record the birth as one sex or the other, and carry on. Sometimes surgery is needed to create useful urogenital equipment, but sometimes the problems don't become apparent until puberty should happen - and doesn't. At that point it may be that a child who was assigned female at birth has genetic testing and is found to be have one of the DSDs, which shows a Y chromosome but it didn't allow for male genitalia to develop normally for whatever reason.
They haven't "changed sex" as such - because they will always have had the same genetics - but they might choose to change presentation.

Also, many people with DSD have been asking to be left out of the whole trans issue, as they don't feel it's appropriate to have their condition used in this way.