A few things pushed me into coming to mumsnet. It was mainly because I wanted to look into trans issues on a deeper level. These are the contributing factors that brought me here:
- Back at the end of 2009 a close relative of my husband hanged himself by mistake while dressed as a woman. He was in his 50s at the time. After his death it transpired that he had been cross-dressing for many years and had at one stage sought medical advice about transitioning to be a woman. We found out from medical notes he had kept that he considered himself to be a woman trapped in a man's body, and that in the mid-1990s he had even started hormone treatment and was considering surgery. No one in his family had had any idea that this was going on. (He was not married and was not in a relationship so although this was a shock to the people who had to deal with the aftermath of his death, it did not affect a wife or children.) Clearly, my husband's relative chose not to go through with transition and by the late noughties that side of his life was a well-kept secret. However, I often wonder whether that would still be the case if he had lived longer. I noticed the rise to prominence of trans issues in the mainstream media in 2014 because I kept thinking 'but where was all this 5 years ago...?' At the time I believed the notion that one could be born with the wrong brain in the wrong body and presumed it applied to my husband's relative, although I found it very hard to reconcile the person I had known with the idea that he was actually a woman. It seemed absurd. However, I spent many years assuming there must have been some degree of truth to that claim and picturing how hard it must have been for him to go through life in the wrong body.
- On Facebook towards the end of last year someone posted an article about trans people having the wrong brain in the wrong body. I skimread it, vaguely approving of the content. Then a woman I know, who I like and respect very much commented on the article saying something like 'just be careful - there have been very few scientific studies done on this and there is no proof that someone can be born with the wrong brain'. That's all she wrote, but suddenly I felt like such a fool. I had blindly accepted this narrative and had never once properly questioned its validity or looked into its claims in more detail.
- Also at the end of last year I was asked to fill out a diversity questionnaire at work. I had to say whether I was 'cis', what gender I 'identified' as and what gender I had 'been assigned at birth'. It also asked me what race I identified as. The whole thing made me really quite annoyed. I didn't complete the survey out of sheer irritation and came away thinking that I needed to do more research into this subject.
I was vaguely aware of the term 'TERF', although did not know what that meant. However, I had heard somewhere that Mumsnet had a reputation for being terribly TERF-y, so I thought I would come here to see the arguments and then look into the rebuttals. I'm not sure that it was LOJ himself who effectively directed me here, but it would have been someone of his mindset.
Anyway, I got here and discovered a lot of well-educated women whose views stand up to scrutiny. Our MPs look hopelessly out of their depth and uninformed in comparison to the women on this site.
It was through this site as well that I was introduced to the existence of AGP (albeit obliquely, as threads discussing it in detail tend to get taken down). Once I knew about that, and had done some further research, everything about my husband's relative - the cross-dressing, the manner of his death, the hormones - made complete sense. A lot more sense than him having the wrong brain in his body, anyway.
I'm also glad to see on this site feminist arguments about pornography and prostitution. The views on these subjects chime with mine, but they are not often presented elsewhere.
So, thank you Mumsnet. After I started reading these threads, I wrote a thank you note to JKR when she stood up for Maya Forstater. JKR has since said that it was the amount of thank-yous she received that gave her the confidence to speak up further. I expect Mumsnet inspired a lot of people to do the same.