Is anyone else furious/deflated at the amount of energy this is taking up?

[Dhalmeup]

There is just so much more that needed doing already.

The abysmal rape/murder rates in most countries, baby girls being murdered after birth because of their sex, FGM, so many issues around the world we could be banding together and putting our energy towards.

And instead, we have found ourselves having to turn around and defend what we already bloody had! Constantly fighting fires and trying cling on to rights and spaces that we took for granted as already permanently ours.

I know we can concentrate on more than one thing at once and great work is still being done.

It’s just so frustrating that the TRAs are taking up so much of our time and I resent it because we shouldn’t have to! We shouldn’t have to be fighting these fires at all.

Sorry, just feeling defeated this evening. SM has been manic the last few days and what has happened to Allison’s fundraiser has just tipped me over the edge.

I do feel that we will win. I’m just angry that we need to fight at all.

Yes, I'm exhausted and I look at my teenage daughter and I'm terrified for her future.

I’m with you. It was me sport that sucked me into this madness. I spent my youth fighting to be allowed to play a “boys” sport back in the 1980s. Now, girls play this sport at school because people like me fought for equal rights and it boils my piss that I’m having to fight again to maintain these rights.

Yes. I'm depressed about it to be honest. I feel like for my well-being I should step away but I just can't act like it's not happening.

I’m at that point too.

I’ve had a few little breaks in the last three years but it feels far too important to be away for too long.

Yes OP agree.

And those crimes against women at the start of your post - if TWAW they're not what the jeff have they and their mates like Dr Cradock, Stonewall etc been doing all these years to help?

Fuck all.

Sorry for the swearing but events of recent weeks have put me in a ver bad mood

I'm just baffled by the whole emperor's new clothes nature of it. Can't everybody see what I can? How am I having to spend energy convincing people of the obvious?

Yes and today has been particularly gruelling. My partner asks me why I get so angry as it doesn't affect me. Like hell it doesn't. It will affect my daughter in the future which is why I won't step away.

It's really affecting my mental health and making me worry so much for my daughter and other girls. I just can't take the constant gaslighting, pseudoscience (yes, i am a scientist and yes, most of the pro-TRA 'science' is either nonsense or heavily misrepresented), bullying and cruelty.

I always supported the rights of transgender people and had zero problem with them or the movement at all until a few years ago when it just all took a turn for the insane and the insane train just kept picking up speed.

Yes. I'm 65 and I first became a feminist when I was 15 - 1970. This is completely firing me up again and I'm more angry because I feel like - as I told my DH earlier - the whole human race is being gaslighted by these people and it's one of the most sinister things I've ever seen. But I'm getting old and tired and it's depressing. I was so boosted by Allison Bailey's fundraiser this morning, pledged some dosh, got really excited and then when they pulled it I was numb. This is hard fucking work and what's worse so many young women and young men are being sucked into not seeing what's going on so I feel like I'm seen as an old reactionary. It's horrible and terrifying and I will not give in to it.

It’s definitely the gas lighting that is getting to me the most. They can’t believe what they are yelling at us, can they?

I feel like intelligent people who I used to respect are standing in front of me and insisting that the colour blue is now called green. But only for some people. And I am a horrible person if I contradict them.

Well, that and the realisation that there are far more men that venomously hate women than I realised.

I know exactly what you mean.

I am exhausted by how cross it makes me. By how livid I am about the sheer injustice perpetrated on women by the one sided debate in the media, although this is changing now thank goodness.

It takes up so much mental energy. And I feel so cross with all my female friends who ignore my posts and don’t seem to care that we are in danger of losing everything we had taken for granted.

It's often wearing. I've been taking extended time off. Sometimes you really must. Don't ever feel you can't. None of this is on just one person - we all have to put the baton down at times, and trust that others will pick it up. You matter. That is the whole bloody point of what we're doing.

Yy it has been astonishing and depressing to realise just how much some men really hate women. Men who profess to be liberal and feminist but who simply don’t give a toss for actual women and who gleefully seize the opportunity to put the boot in whilst remaining ‘pure’ politically.

I had a bad patch with it last year but am feeling more resilient now. I have learned to avoid twitter when I'm feeling negative as it does distort what is really going on.

Yes, we should be looking at the real issues for women here and around the world instead of this insanity. It does no one any favours. Why people can't see that I don't know. How can they frame trans as the most vulnerable and oppressed people?

I just saw a thread about lockdown changing memories and it made me think about how it can actually be very easy sometimes to instill a thought in people's minds. We're all very conscious about social distancing now. It didn't take long at all to change our behaviour. It also didn't take much for the TWAW narrative to seed and grow into something people have accepted without any critical thinking.

Yes yes yes....

The Trans stuff is so bloody exhausting and equally important - if the category women and girls vanishes, as it increasingly is in so many contexts, we are well and truly....

And it all seems so obvious to me, that I can't understand why others don't see it - or worse, don't care

I would SO MUCH rather be putting time into other things that matter - like building community, other feminist issues, etc....

@eurochick

I'm just baffled by the whole emperor's new clothes nature of it. Can't everybody see what I can? How am I having to spend energy convincing people of the obvious?

I feel exactly like this. I seem to spend a lot of time spluttering "but..." and feeling perplexed.how are intelligent people not seeing what we're seeing.

Have full fact ever published anything on the 'sex is a spectrum' thing

Yy it has been astonishing and depressing to realise just how much some men really hate women.
Despite paying lip-service to equality, when challenged, seems many men don't really consider women as fully human beings, or think that it is our job to be kind, our job to just put-up with stuff, not make a fuss, put someone else before us, because our oppression isn't really that serious. Female lives don't matter that much, not really. When things get sticky or inconvenient, seems that equality for women was just some sort of luxury, the first to go instead of other more important things that need doing first.

The haters are slightly more understandable, it's the ordinary, everyday chaps, who will agree, yes, some things are wrong but......we should be kind, put others first, not make a fuss...........not be extreme....................It wasn't an accident after all that sex doesn't appear in the list of motivations for hate crime, because males can't see it, it is so pervasive, they really can't envisage what life would be like without it (apart from their lives would probably not be as convenient!).

Yes. I'm so tired of it. Male friends I respected telling me that I should listen more to trans women about what a woman actually is. Do they want to hear from me what my experience of being a woman is? Obviously not.

I take a break periodically. But then something will happen that I can’t ignore, and I get back up fighting. At some point reality will have to be recognized. The whole post-truth thing is getting a bit wearing these days.

These are the times that give me hope. The realization of the extreme misogyny directed at women everywhere is spreading through the general population and the documentation of it makes it undeniable.
There is a saying that the arc of the universe bends toward justice.
I have had my doubts since the eighties, but I am hopeful now.

It is exhausting and demoralizing. But I am also so proud of women in the UK, we are leading the push back against this misogynistic ideology. Using our relative freedom to speak out in a way that women in most other countries in the world cannot.

@FloralBunting

It's often wearing. I've been taking extended time off. Sometimes you really must. Don't ever feel you can't. None of this is on just one person - we all have to put the baton down at times, and trust that others will pick it up. You matter. That is the whole bloody point of what we're doing.

Yes. We all feel this. We all need to take breaks.

The horrible part is that I don't WANT to believe this. I was so happy when I was convinced the world was steadily improving, and increased human rights for trans people a brilliant development. The horror and disillusion of researching it all, to disprove the mean women saying mean things, only to find that they were right and this is a juggernaut of misogynistic oppression, which feeds every societal trope on prioritising men, while allowing a man to claim to being ultimately vulnerable by dint of the degradation of claiming to be a woman, and therefore women's needs just don't count at all compared to that person's demands... just, what the fuck? How is that the brave new feminism? It's undercover MRA. Plain and simple.

I bitterly resent having to be an activist on this. I hate it. But what choice have we? How can we just stand back and allow women's rights, protections, and our very identity to be erased, knowing the most vulnerable of women - prisons, shelters, rape crisis centres, hospital wards - will be those dealing with the fallout?

Taking a break is necessary sometimes. There are plenty of us. We can all take a turn in speaking up and out, and then a rest period. This is not fun in the least, because unlike the TRAs and their gleefully liberated misogyny, we don't, contrary to their claims, hate anyone. We don't need a target to offload all of our own personal fears and inadequacies, we'd love it if they could just agree to leave our rights the hell alone and contend with the battle to secure their own (a battle we would, and indeed did in the past, help with!) and though there are some genuine transphobes, I've not encountered many. We just want our rights and freedoms factored in,. Which should be a completely accepted, normal thing for us to require! Sex is real, and it matters. Lesbians have the right to same sex attraction, and there is no such thing as a woman's penis. None of this should even be controversial - yet now, it is hate speech.

It's genuinely Orwellian. And contending with that craziness, and having to hold the line against it, is exhausting. Your sanity does, as Floral Bunting said, matter.

Like many of you I also have to take a break from the madness. However, amidst all the gloom there are some massive green shoots. Take a look at the comments under Janice Turner's article in today's Times about the Baroness & JKR. Over a thousand comments and the vast majority supportive. These are mainly ordinary readers including hundreds of men, not just appreciating her excellent journalism but all calling out what is happening.
Despite the insane levels of regulatory capture, the silent majority of women and men are staring to understand what is happening and speak out against it - and that gives me some hope. Share token:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2245cbd4-b7e0-11ea-82eb-1588bf47a52f?shareToken=f369182fd04e99088b2759601d615232

I should say, though, that there are many trans people who support sex-based rights, too. TRAs are not speaking for those they so charmingly call, "Truscum." I don't want to tar those genuine, decent people who simply want to live their lives in a way that makes their dysphoria manageable with that brush, and who recognise the need to balance rights fairly, and I didn't make that clear enough.