Does anyone ever have a "are we the baddies"* moment?

[Menstrualcycledisplayteam]

• it's a Mitchell & Webb sketch, probably on Youtube.

I'm a bit disheartened this week, if I'm honest. I sometimes feel like this is a fight that we're just not going to win. Two main things recently, one personal, one geo-political I suppose.

On the geo-political level, I look across the Pond to the US, where the only people who are saying the same things as us are frigging Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene, neither of which are people that I associate my politics as being anywhere close to. There is just no bloody way that the Left, my home, will align with us now, given who our "allies" are in the States. They just can't, even those that agree with us will never position themselves as having the same concerns as Marjorie Q-Anon Parkland Taylor Bloody Greene.

The second is personal. I work for a large global organisation in a senior role. We had our Global Leadership "Away Day" a few weeks ago (on Teams, of course) and there was a presentation from some US colleagues on LGBTQ+, being able to bring your whole self to work, that kind of thing, from two gay colleagues, one lesbian one gay. So far, so good - absolutely the right thing for my organisation to be doing. Then they got onto pronouns and how everyone should start every meeting asking what pronouns attendees want to have used and encouraging everyone to put them in our email sign-offs. I'm never going to do that, but I can already see it happening around the organisation (particularly the US, but some of the easily led/want to be noticed over here will soon follow suit).

My husband won't listen to me talk about this sort of stuff anymore - he agrees with me, but says that it is basically like someone saying they "don't agree with all that Black Lives Matter stuff". My best friend works with young people and whilst I've tried to approach it with her very gently, including all of the stats about single sex spaces and how women and children's safety is negatively affected as a result, her reaction is that she gets all of that but she works with children every day who are tortured by their own bodies.

I know that our concerns are justified, I know that women's safety/opportunities are going to be negatively affected but - if I'm completely honest with myself - I just can't see how we're going to stop it. Julie Bindel has a tweet pinned to her feed which is basically that the misogyny at the moment is like a tidal wave and that's how it feels.

I'm not sure why I'm writing this really - certainly not to bring anyone down but there's no-one I can speak to about this in real life. How do you even go about discussing these things when, in my work at least, it would probably get me fired and everyone around me in my personal life has either bought into the nonsense hook line and sinker, or just doesn't want to hear it?

For me the "wrong brain for your body" argument falls down in two ways.

1 - there will be a range of brain features and shapes just like any body part. Some may resemble the typical brain of the opposite sex, just like some noses, hands, body shapes, heights etc. And no one addresses whether non-trans people - perhaps gender nonconforming people, gay people or people who are none of these - could also sometimes have these brain differences. That needs to be answered before we can decide if it means anything.

1. If it was actually true or could be shown that there is scannable brain evidence that makes you undeniably trans, then that's not compatible with self-ID. You're either trans or you're not and that could be shown by a physical test. So why do people who talk about brain evidence also support self-ID?

And conversely, I’d never presume to bring my whole self to work either! There are many aspects of myself that I keep to myself, because I’m not out to make everything about me all the time and I don’t need everyone at work to know all about me or be involved in everything I think or feel or do. When I’m at work I’m there to work.

On brain sex, even if men and women had appreciably different brains and we find that those males with gender dysphoria or autogynaephilia have brains with more similarities to female brains than other men, all that means is that there is a large range of male brains .
That's it.

It doesn't mean that they have either the wrong brain nor the wrong body.

Self reflection is nice and all that, don't waste to much time or head space on it though.
You know you are on the right track stop letting people guilt you in order to persuade you otherwise, they do not have good intentions. A lot of pages here of women over analysing and trying so hard to #bekind.
I suggest when told our views allign with baddies we say "So fucking what? Maybe I can get them to wise up on other issues too"

@HerselfIndoors

For me the "wrong brain for your body" argument falls down in two ways.

1 - there will be a range of brain features and shapes just like any body part. Some may resemble the typical brain of the opposite sex, just like some noses, hands, body shapes, heights etc. And no one addresses whether non-trans people - perhaps gender nonconforming people, gay people or people who are none of these - could also sometimes have these brain differences. That needs to be answered before we can decide if it means anything.

1. If it was actually true or could be shown that there is scannable brain evidence that makes you undeniably trans, then that's not compatible with self-ID. You're either trans or you're not and that could be shown by a physical test. So why do people who talk about brain evidence also support self-ID?

I think there is also

1. What part of the brain is 'wrong'? Because it isn't the part that signals the body to produce certain hormones and controls things like sexed puberty, so which part is it?

It seems less about the brain and more about some sense of consciousness.

It seems less about the brain and more about some sense of consciousness.

YY. The way they conceptualise it seems to be very "woo".

Re the Christian right - I think the average fire-and-brimstone zealot is more likely to embrace the idea of gender identity. Those parents who try to beat the feminine out of their little boy until they suddenly decide that the child is 'trans' rather than possibly gay? Not exactly GC allies, are they?

Self-identified progressives who celebrate 'trans kids' are curiously silent about this dark side of gender identity ideology.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

It seems less about the brain and more about some sense of consciousness.

YY. The way they conceptualise it seems to be very "woo".

The whole idea of wrong brain/body is completely ludicrous, how the hell did it gain so much traction?

males with gender dysphoria or autogynaephilia have brains with more similarities to female brains than other men

There aren't that many of these brain studies and they are based on small groups. Where the researchers bothered to differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual MTF trans people, they found that the homosexual males shared brain structure similarities with the female control group, but the heterosexual ones did not. They did however have a difference from the control groups of both sexes in the part of the brain linked to body self perception.

But yes I take your wider point that all it shows is that there is a large range of male brains (and female ones). It doesn't mean that the body is wrong for the brain.

The Christian Right is a US thing and has absolutely no relevance to the discussion of Law and Legislation and Protections/Rights in the U.K.

US discourse in general also doesn’t have any relevance here when it comes to social attitudes and behaviours. Most people in the U.K. are extremely moderate in their beliefs and attitudes and there isn’t any of the extremist politics.

Our playing field is completely different, politically and socially. Which is why I can’t stand it when people run in and ‘plop’ with utter rubbish about Christian Right or Conservative/Liberal blah blah blah. It means they don’t have the first clue.

how the hell did it gain so much traction?

I see it as a collective psychological trend, exacerbated by the growth of social media and a focus on the individual as the centre of their personal universe.

Psychologist Lisa Marchiano terms it a "psychic epidemic".

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804

It’s a cultic ideology and it preys on the kinds of people who are susceptible to cultic thinking. Of which there are many.

What does a "female brain" even mean if it is in a male body?

Exactly. It's like saying that gay men have a female sexuality. No, ~5% men are just attracted to men, like ~95% of women usually are. Doesn't them women. And the other 5% of women are still women.

The "gender identity" thing makes even less sense. So a few percent of men have a strong feeling they want or should have a female body. How many women have a strong feeling they want a female body? An increasing number seem to not want it.

I believe wanting a female body appears to be a male-typical trait, even though only a few want it enough to start doing something about it.

I've also tried to imagine what it would be like to have a 'female brain' in a male body.

I would have thought that a child with that condition would be showing signs of distress even before they could speak - horrified by this appendage that 'doesn't belong to them'.

But I'm less sure that the child would grow up as an ordinary boy, then on hitting puberty start to feel aroused by the image of themselves as a woman - which is what TRAs like Julia Serrano report.

What worries me is the age at which we start to give children these ideas.
In the Dysphoric documentary, a psychologist talks about the age at which children have a concrete sense of sex permanence. That before this age, children will believe that boys can change into girls and vice versa depending on what they wear.

She says (and I haven't found the studies that back it up yet, but will look again) that the age children attain an understanding that sex is a fixed thing is somewhere around 7/8 years old.

If that is true, then how dangerous is it to approach a child before that age and affirm their understanding that sex changes according to dress?!

I can remember when my sister was little, she announced that 'when I grow up I want to be a yellow motorbike' and I laughed and said that wasn't possible. She said 'but Mum says I can be whatever I want to be!'

Children listen to what we say and take us literally. So it is dangerous to take an impressionable child and tell them that things that are impossible are, in fact, absolutely possible.

Yes - you can be whatever you want to be. You can change your sex if you don't like it.

No!

Yes. All the time. Because the difficulty is my problem is with the source, at the beginning of the argument, and I don't always end up in the same place further down.

I cannot, and will not, say TWAW, TMAM. They're not. Men are not women, women are not men. It is only a right wing, 'gender stereotypes are great' worldview that would require someone who finds it better to present as the opposite sex to actually be the other sex.

If we can reach a point where TWAW/TMAM is thrown out, for me then we should be able to let go of a lot of other things. Public toilets are self policing. Mimmymum and others are right that individual stalls fix it and tbh even without stalls, it's not the biggest deal. Men and women saying that they're going to beat up TW in toilets or that we should be ablr to discuss lipstick in a single sex environment- thats all gender nonsense to me.

But prisons, sport, refuges, statistics, hospital wards and really anywhere that sex actually matters - I still feel exactly the same. And if children are tortured by their bodies, much more and differently than a few years ago, why is that?

how the hell did it gain so much traction?

I think a massive part of it is the concept of LGBT, and putting trans transsexual as it was originally) in with minority sexuality as a cause. It never made sense as it's a completely different thing, but you could see why it happened when very few people were trans.

But when society did start to recognise gay rights, it became fashionable among the left/right-on/arty to be open-minded and celebrate gay culture and so on (and that has always been there to an extent). Loads of my friends in the 80s and early 90s announced they gay because it was cool and alternative (although most changed their minds longer-term), and as a tomboy type I had pressure put on me by some to "admit I was gay". Similar to the trans trend among the young now - but the big difference is it harmed no one and there was no ideology involved, as same sex preference is really just that, a preference and doesn't make any demands on anyone's rights.

Then trans became the next cool thing and I think so many institutions and politicians think they should unquestioningly affirm it because it's basically just like being gay, and anyone who would doubt a person's statement that they are trans or deny them any rights for a second would obviously be a roaring bigot. The trans lobby have hugely run with this comparison and regularly use it to slap down questioners.

Now it's become polarised and mutated into full-on mccarthyism with only one view allowed, not accounting for the fact that this is nothing like being gay, it involves regressive stereotyping, denies same-sex attraction, and requires a faith-like adherence to an evidence-free ideology that literally TWAW, and also attracts some very unpleasant, predatory and misogynistic people. They can now openly declare they want to erase and physically harm women (yes, they can use "women" in its sex-based meaning, only women can't) and just get praise and support.

It's like a wide-open goal for misogyny and gender stereotyping, wearing a cloak of unassailable right-on-ness.

no i dont think im a baddie for being gender critical, but I do think it would be much easier if I wasnt and I kind of wish I couldnt see straight through all the bullshit, as they all seem so glittery and fun

Musings ; if the sexed body is irrelevant and people shouldnt be assigned sex by their genitals or be concerned whats in other peoples pants, why do TRAs demand hormone treatment and surgery and puberty blockers for children to enable them to appropriate the opposite sexed body. Shouldnt they be advocating for banning all these treatments, and a move to a model of acceptance of someone being female or male as a paper exercise .

I did put my if in bold.
Perhaps should have been clearer.

@Branleuse

no i dont think im a baddie for being gender critical, but I do think it would be much easier if I wasnt and I kind of wish I couldnt see straight through all the bullshit, as they all seem so glittery and fun

It’s all ‘glittery’ and ‘fun’ until you take a moment to scratch just beneath the extremely thin veneer...

There is so much of a dark and sinister underbelly to this.

I know what you mean about the bliss of ignorance.

Still, I’m incredibly proud to be fully aware and fully prepared to fight this relentless agenda of anti-womanhood, anti-safeguarding, anti-protections of children and females, anti-boundaries of any kind, and its insidious creep.

They cannot silence us all.

"as a tomboy type I had pressure put on me by some to "admit I was gay". "

There was a nasty campaign at the time to force people suspected of being gay to "come out".

Celebrities were bullied and had their images posted up: named and shamed for wanting to keep their private lives private. Jodie Foster was one victim and, although it mostly happened in the US, I also remember "Sir Humphrey Appleby" actor Nigel Hawthorne, a very private man, being distressed at having his privacy violated.

It was a group of gay activists responsible.
Seems that a certain type of activist just can't resist the excuse to bully and intimidate.

I'm not the baddie who tells healthy children that they are not perfect the way they are. Or that they should have surgery or take medication because they are not perfect.

I think it was Susan Faludi's book 'Backlash' which mentioned the amount of female energy and their very lives which are wasted because of eating disorders. Encouraged by a misogynistic society at a time when boys are focussing on getting their education and setting themselves up for an independent and rewarding life. That is why I think it is so important not to keep screwing up girl's lives. Society as a whole is all too happy to nobble females. If it is not one thing, it is another.

Healthy children and young people need to hear how their bodies are perfect and how thankful they should be for that. What they should do is treat that body well and look after it to maintain their health. Especially girls and young women.

Thanks @Ereshkigalangcleg for that link

I had an 'am I the bad guy' moment last year when JKR posted her blog and I fully agreed with it (still do), yet all the media (BBC, Guardian) I looked at was full of 'Why JKR is wrong, it's a generational thing', plus (my perceived) treachery of the actors she had made rich. I had a horrible weekend looking at Twitter, full of 'she's wrong X 1 million', vicious nasty stuff and I ended up shocked and bewildered. Even Pink News which at that time I had thought of as a lesbian newspaper, was telling me JKR (and by extension, me) was wrong wrong wrong......But I couldn't reconcile the cognitive dissonance, and carried on looking: then I found Mumsnet...at last, well argued viewpoints, and support for my views, and I now feel much more secure. It's a long slog but I do believe we will get there, 'there' being a place where women and trans people all have safe spaces. This time last year I trusted the BBC and the Guardian, now I don't and now I read the Times and the Spectator first. I do think there is a groundswell of change, the more people become aware the more support for this point of view there is. Just because certain groups are very vocal does not make them right.

OP it’s a shame you don’t like twitter. There are some people just like you. It doesn’t have to be an echo chamber or “circle jerk”. (I think you said that). You can follow different people with different ideas.

I don’t share politics with everyone who is GC but you can see how different people politically can reach the same conclusions with critical thinking. I don’t feel bad about it. But I have instead realised that political groups than I am not associated with can actually have elements that make them effective.

For example I didn’t realise the energy union members would have in organising women’s groups. There are some women who are so motivated and active that they have achieved so much by rallying women, encouraging discussions and spreading awareness.

So perhaps there is something in other people’s politics (further to right than you) in the GC movement that you will see as a positive at some point.

Personally for me, this is above politics. It’s a moral, scientifically robust, based in reality issue. We can question ourselves, think about the issues but really we can see exactly what is going on.