I'm having an "are we the baddies" moment

[JakeyRolling]

Please talk me down.

Company has an internal newsletter/magazine which people can write for.

Colleague has written a piece about trans issues and it's like a bingo card - cis, terf, the trans suicide stat and the "intersex people are neither male or female" argument. Goes on to say we should let them pee in pieces (in womens spaces) because they're women and fear men as much as we do 🙄

Comments from other colleagues are full of praise for it.

I feel so out of step and wrong, despite knowing the arguments don't make sense.

It just feels like it would be easier to give in.

Also speaking of the wrong kind of ally - the Iranian government gives gay men one choice: transition or execution. These ghouls are on the same side as that bunch of fundamentalist bastards.

Anyone going along with this just sorts that out by going 'they aren't women'

It's just language. Just change the language and reality won't matter. That's how they work, it's pure 1984.

Going with the trans thing is so easy because of this. So if you're a bit dim it's easier, and if you're just into following the crowd or benefit from this in some way it's easy.

That's why it's so impossible to convince people who've decided to be lazy or dishonest.

I've actually convinced about three people who have told me explicitly but two were willing to listen and one was someone who is very involved in our child's life so I wouldn't let it go.

They are all now the other way.

But with people who've actually chosen to follow this you have literally no chance because they are not lacking logic, they are choosing to ignore it.

A lot of you are making the distinction between sex and gender, which is understandable, but I genuinely don't think that gender is a real thing, at least not in the sense of any sort of innate identity. It's more of a cultural shorthand for the expectations, restrictions and stereotypes put on people on the basis of their sex.
And of course many of us will chafe under that.

I think gender can become an internal significant part of your identity at which point being innate doesn't matter

It depends on how you respond to social conditions

‘but I genuinely don't think that gender is a real thing, at least not in the sense of any sort of innate identity. It's more of a cultural shorthand for the expectations, restrictions and stereotypes put on people on the basis of their sex.’

I agree that this is (very likely) what most of what we call gender is. Naturally we are going to say so, and naturally some of us are going to have a critical attitude towards it.

‘I think gender can become an internal significant part of your identity at which point being innate doesn't matter.’

It does and it doesn’t. We obviously should be allowed to express ourselves, including aspects of our personalities that have been formed in gendered ways. The issue is when others try to straitjacket us into conforming to their perceptions of innate gender.

You know, ‘Women are naturally caring and therefore we’re going to leave parenting to you.’ Or ‘Women enjoy having a strong man in their lives and therefore I’m going to tell you where you can go and what you can do.’

I don’t particularly care to change what people believe, as long as they don’t try to make their beliefs the basis of my experiences.

Menopause happens to me because of biology. It is nothing to do with my innate gender expression or identity. It affects my working life, my relationships, my equilibrium. Throughout my life before the menopause I did or did not various things that people associate with gender stereotype. Which is all fine but I cannot identify out of the menopause. The same way a transwoman cannot identity into it.
The reason a lot of GC voices are my age is because we are experiencing Right Now the reality of our sex. And some younger woman who has absolutely no idea about what's coming to them, thinks it's all about feelings and being kind.

mudgetastic yes I can actually think of a fair number of things that feel quite real but are in fact just cultural concepts that are ingrained from an early age.
I think in the case of gender it hugely complicates the conversation as one person's innate, almost factual sense of gender is another person's frustrating sens that it's a belief system, and one they don't subscribe to.

I think also that people who buy into it the most have the most to gain from the eradication of it

• people who end up going through surgery and such to make them align better

I agree OP, I go through something similar every now and then. I even started a thread on here a few weeks ago because I heard a young trans person on the radio and they sounded so fearful of us, really believing that we hated them and wanted to erase them!
I kept thinking are we really so horrible, because we don't agree that men should be in women's spaces, or that vulnerable children should be medicated before they are mature enough to understand the consequences.

But in the end I keep coming back to this - not agreeing with someone is not hatred. And despite the 'we just want to pee in peace' brigade, it's not just a case of live and let live - there is actual harm being done on the back of this ideology, mostly to women and girls. Bathrooms is just the tip of a very big iceberg.

I have to keep reminding myself that people like that chap Dylan from the tampon thread are entitled to feel how they want about themselves, but should not compel others to agree, or punish them for disagreeing. I also admire Dylan's spirit, but roll my eyes at his self absorbed nonsense. If his fragile self image is so dependent on how others respond to him, they are issues that nobody else can solve.
Indeed, no other form of self image/ delusion is indulged in this way by institutions, government, media, medical establishments (with laws and policies and language being changed for everyone to align with the trans person's singular view, not just of themselves but of the world and everyone else in it).

I think some of the disbelief/ head shaking moments for me comes from how far this has gotten, how much actual false information is peddled by apparently respectable sources and how many rational people are just going along with this. People whom for everything else would be looking for evidence/ scientific rationality, logic etc.

I'm in Ireland, where Self ID is already the law, brought in by stealth and by a government who don't give a shit about women without public consultation. To say I'm angry is a fucking understatement.

It irked me so much when during the pandemic and vaccination rollout we heard 'listen to the science, trust the science' etc. over and over again, but for Self ID, science is irrelevant, hateful even!

What a load of bullshit.

You’re wrong about no trans people having been killed in the last 4 years.

I just don't believe in any of it. I can understand why they do but it's like any pseudoscience. I've occasionally had an "are we the baddies" moment in terms of my actions, on seeing how vulnerable many of the young people are, but I will never believe a deliberate lie is the right way to tackle it.

You’re wrong about no trans people having been killed in the last 4 years

In the UK?

Yes there was a murder of an MTF trans person in January 2019, I think.

So it's accurate to say there hasn't been a murder of a trans person in the last 3 years in the U.K.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual people and gender non-conforming people are entitled to lots of love and support

I agree with everything else you say in your post but this bit made me cringe. I'm a lesbian, not a stray kitten. I really don't want or need 'love and support' from random strangers which lets face it is not going to be any 'real' form of love, is it? We none of us go around 'loving' total strangers randomly. It's going to be virtue signalling and patronising a la current culture and it's a pat on the head.

As a disabled person and a homosexual, I want to be treated like anyone else without barriers to my equality of access to the world, or being seen as the special pet of more privileged groups. I don't want to be seen as other, or as a cause for someone else to feel nice about championing or patting.

The TQ+ lobby are the first civil rights movement I can think of who have introduced this idea of being vulnerable and special and wanting this kind of aww bless approach. Every other group I can think of would just find it really offensive and belittling.

The thing is, and it is hat i askyself all the time, who wins. In every situation ask yourself, who wins.

In any of this i don't see women winning and when they do, it's for having a baby whilst 'being a man'.

In not one situation at the moment are women winning.

It is males that win every single time.

BUT I LOVES YOU ARTICHOKE!

(Not because you are a homosexual, only because you are right.)

Fair enough. My words were very saccharine. Much like the TRAs. I suppose I was thinking about a young isolated person. You're right. They don't need randoms.

Fair enough. My words were very saccharine. Much like the TRAs. I suppose I was thinking about a young isolated person. You're right. They don't need randoms.

BUT I LOVES YOU ARTICHOKE!

There ya go, not creepy at all!

To justify my saccharine even more, I suppose I was trying to say that gender non-conforming children's own families should feel confident to just love their kids as they are and not think they need to be medicalised or operated on. At the moment it's all "your kid is a trans kid" - so follow The Path to The Rapture".

Really not getting at you Bellinisurge , just it's an increasing trend in culture that I'm seeing come out more and more as a nice thing to say, even politicians blurt out about we have to 'love' this group (patronise them, treat them as special pets) and which really makes my teeth grind.

Inclusion for me, means equality of access and after that no one seeing me as different or special or entitled to anything or in any way 'other'. To be treated as everyone else. The whole pet kitten thing is the complete opposite of progressive or inclusive, and I don't see it as a healthy way for anyone to be thinking of themselves.

@Artichokeleaves , my natural inclination is to tell people not to be so fucking flaky . Guess I was trying to be nice and kind.

About looking around and matching your views to the people you normally agree with.

On the one hand, yes I can see this issue being used by people trying to shore up Conservative votes.

On the other hand... I have forebears who were socialists and Fabians in the 20s and 30s. Some of them, not all, became useful idiots for Stalin because they thought he was anti Fascist, anti reactionary and communist and therefore must be better not just than Hitler but also than Churchill. So that cuts both ways for me; you have to interrogate your own beliefs constantly and not just assume the people around you are lovely and therefore everything's fine.