This is my first thread in Women's Rights but I've been on MN for about a year. I'm having a bit of a mental growth period I think.
I always used to consider myself pro-trans. We have more than ten friends who are all trans, including my husband's closest friend. The only people I ever saw talking about the issues surrounding trans people were the people themselves, and their staunch allies who are practiced at shutting down every rational debate.
In the past week, never mind that the whole world has two really important problems to deal with - black lives matter is waking up society to the concept of systemic injustices, which will benefit everyone who is systemically disempowered, and obviously we've got this dirty great pandemic going on too that's causing another, more insidious pandemic - domestic violence.
But guess what all my "friends" on Facebook are talking about? Oh, yeah, trans rights. Actively misrepresenting the other side and making GC feminists out to be evil bigots.
Because people who grew up with toxic male privilege are of course far more important than anyone or anything else and we all have to get on their bandwagon or suffer the consequences.
I have been especially lonely during lockdown as I have a young baby and had just undertaken a massive career change.
I have always found the term "cis" offensive because we are not isomers, but honestly I was happy to live and let live until the past week. I'm just so upset and disappointed that people I thought were intelligent, critical thinkers are all just full of groupthink. The nastiness I've seen aimed at JKR... it's like they didn't understand the theme of the books at all.
I don't want to talk to pretty much anyone I know anymore. People I went to uni with. People I worked with. People from schools.
I lived in women's refuges for 6 months at one point, when my mum fled my stepdad, and knowing the women who go there, and the reasons they are there, and what a state they (and we) arrived in, I just can't support trans women having access to refuges. They don't even get men in to repair things, or let the postman in with a parcel. You're not even allowed to give your real address if you live in one, not even to the doctor's or schools, you give a PO box address.
No. Trans women shouldn't be in these spaces. They need a third space where they can rant and rave by themselves without making natal women suffer.
But none of them are understanding this in their quest to get access to places they can't usually go. As far as I can tell, they just want what they perceive as "privilege" of going to those places, and any argument is twisted into mud-slinging very quickly.
But I don't know where to find new friends who support natal women but who aren't phobic of the LGB community.
I'm not sure what I'm asking really, I just had to get this off my chest. I don't want my baby raised in a world where dangerous experimental medication is handed out to nine-year-olds, and where schools have the audacity to tell my son he isn't a boy because he likes to play with some girly stuff, or to tell my daughter that the feeling of loneliness and "otherness" she's feeling is because she isn't a girl, rather than because she IS a girl and is growing up, and I don't want to be friends with people who support this nonsense.
Am I really so wrong for questioning all this stuff? It's so hard to try and unstick myself from the groupthink.
Sorry if I'm rambling, I think I just need a handhold and some sound advice, because I feel like I'm waking up from a mass delusion by myself, and so alone.