Oh OP.
I was where you are now in 2015. Couldn’t believe it. So shocked I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, with this new knowledge. I didn’t know how to make sense of the world in this new light. Truly grim - I really feel for you!
The bad news is I sometimes still feel like this. Six years on and I still haven’t got my head around it because it’s so outrageous: the lies, the injustice, the irrationality of it all and the stupidity of all these people in positions of power and influence who have waved it all through, sometimes through a sheer lack of critical thinking, sometimes because they’re paid up believers in this (as I see it) frankly terrifying ideology.
I was watching Kathleen Stock on Triggernometry last night and at one point she just said “it’s just fucking nuts” (or words to that effect) - and i couldn’t have agreed more. It really is. Absolutely fucking nutso.
The good news is there has been an incredible amount of amazing work done in those years. As Empressaurus says, it’s primarily women who have done this, setting up grassroots orgs, organising, meeting, contacting our MPs, campaigning, TALKING. Women talking about this is what stopped self ID being made law in the UK.
And women crowdfunding. There have been so many significant legal cases and we’re continuing to challenge as much as we can through the courts. Maya’s case was a landmark. Women successfully challenged the census guidelines on answering the sex question on the basis of self ID. We are having an impact.
One of the upsides to all this is that a new form of feminism is emerging, and there will be many more benefits to that ultimately than just dealing with this current attack on our rights and safety. Women are waking up and realising just how deep and far misogyny goes, how little worth, status and power we as women still have relative to men, how thoroughly patriarchal the western world still is, not just those parts of the world where it’s more obvious.
And while it’s immensely painful to be in this position, the first step to being able to address issues is to recognise them, so we have to start here. I felt as if the world I knew had been swept away but the truth is, the world had always been like this, I just hadn’t recognised it. It’s the illusion that fell away - as others have said, the scales falling from our eyes.
And the more women like me, back then, and you, now, and everyone in between and before and still to come - the more of us wake up and find the scales falling from our eyes, the stronger we get; the more of us there are, the more of an impact we have; the more of us get involved, the further our reach and the less isolated those incredibly brave women who have put themselves in the firing line are. The easier it will become, ultimately, for other women to stand up and be counted.
Things are moving all the time. The BBC putting out the Nolan Stonewall podcasts and the cotton ceiling article would have been unthinkable even a couple of years ago. The difference between the judge’s ruling at Maya’s first case and her second one was immense. A lot of ground has already been covered and there are ways to take part and contribute that just didn’t exist at all a few years ago, so in some ways it’s a good time to come on board, the shock and trauma of the realisation notwithstanding!
It’s not going to be a quick or easy process though. This ideology is too far embedded in society and it is too well supported by the pre-existing mechanisms of male dominance and primacy. The situation in the USA (and Canada) is even worse and will continue to exert an influence on the situation here.
But we are not taking this lying down. We are resisting. We are fighting back. And every single woman who wakes up to what’s going on and comes over to the side of the resistance makes a difference. Every single one of us counts. All our efforts, however small or large, count. So a very warm welcome to you and to everyone else who’s only just realised what’s happening and is joining in.
Being part of this movement (and I use the term in a very loose way, as it’s so truly grassroots and essentially unstructured) really is something to be very proud of. It is something we will look back on, hopefully from a future where sanity has prevailed, and know that we did what had to be done. And of course there’s the huge benefit of meeting so many amazing women, either virtually or IRL, along the way!