What made you change your mind?

[JellySaurus]

There have been many discussions on MN with supporters of trans ideology. For thoughtful, engaged posters, the main sticking points appear to be TWAW and Tw are at greater danger/risk of suicide. Posters appear to be deeply committed to these beliefs regardless of the lack of supporting evidence.

It seems to me that there is a parallel here with people deeply committed to religious beliefs, such as life after death. Beliefs that inform their conduct and without which they cannot consider themselves to be ‘good people’.

We used to describe the process of becoming gender critical in mountaineering terms (now banned) but for some people is this perhaps more of a conversion? From believer to atheist.

Is this meaningful to you? In terms of a change in your beliefs, what made you change your mind?

Never changed it. I’ve always believed what I believe now.

Are you asking what made me become gender critical and not buy into TWAW? Your OP is a bit unclear. But if you are, it was 2 things:

1. Transwomen in women's sport. So blatantly unfair.
2. The realisation that the transwomen I was supporting where the ones I saw on TV - often who'd had surgery etc etc but that sadly, the whole process of self ID meant that there were many many many men who wanted to self-id purely as a way to live out their own fetishes and fantasies.

I still have enormous sympathy for transpeople. But being asked to accept Self ID, and then accept men into women's spaces, has made me extremely uncomfortable.

I was never full on TWAW, more live and let live.

What changed my mind, was Lily Madigan and the treatment of Ann Ruzylo.

My attitude probably changed. Before I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is and it’s none of my business’.

The absurd demands of trans activism changed my mind about that.

A man coming into work dressed as Little Bo Peep on his day off...still makes me shudder. With pigtails.

[Work was a place open to the public with daily school visits.]

I don't think I've ever been twaw. I think, especially since having dd, I feel sad and almost betrayed by trans men, being a woman is awful but wonderful and I feel so sad that we have swathes of young beautiful amazing women who want to pretend to be men rather than challenge the status quo by being women who can do anything.

I had a transexual primary teacher for a bit in 1985 ish so there were a lot of questions early doors! I think I was very live and let live until a uni FB friend started posting his AGP photos and I was supposed to "pretend" that his experience of womanhood was identical to mine. And then there was the path of schools, changing rooms, prisons. I'm not sure it was one thing.

For me I was happy to adopt the Stonewall approved "TWAW", "#bekind" position, because, obviously, trans women are a kind of women and obviously we need to be kind to as many people as we can.

As I started delving deeper I began to object to the idea that I was a bigot for not considering sex outside of my sexual orientation. I then realised that TWAW and bekind are meaningless slogans designed to shut down the "debate", and "debate" which is "#nodebate" due to TRAs have #noargument. If TWAW is literal then the group who used to be called women have no rights as a group, not even to name themselves. If it is not literal then it has no meaning other than as a way of riding roughshod over women's rights.

If the TRA position did not rely on sexual orientation being bigotry, and it had a handful of arguments that made some sense then maybe I'd still be on the other side.

TL/DR:
What made you change from the deeply held belief that TWAW to TWAM?

What made you lose the belief?

Sorry, GCRich, cross-posted. The TL:DR referred to my OP, not your thoughtful post!

I never changed my mind but I was of the live and let live and TW are rare opinion.

I knew from very young that boys and girls suffered from gender stereotypes and remember a young boy in my class verbally wishing he could be a girl when we were around 5, because the boys were picking on him for playing in the home corner. That was v early 80s.

What shocked me was the absolute lack of gatekeeping and safeguarding. And the absolute bonkers beliefs TRAs have. I assumed everyone knew what biological sex was!

To try to answer the TLDR specifically. I used to think that TW were women in a loose sense. Women exist, and TW are obviously not a subset of the biological group "women", but they are also women. This nonsensical position was implicitly believed as part of a position which trusted Stonewall and it's progressive agenda.

I lost the belief when I realised that to have the belief meant abandoning women's rights (and gay rights, and indeed the rights of heterosexuals to identify as straight).

Does anyone actually truly believe TWAW? I never did but I do believe there are trans people and until I started fully looking into it I just thought what's the harm of a couple of men born in the wrong bodies being treated as a woman. But I never thought they were an actual woman.

Then the sports came up, then that you had to lie and actually say you believe TWAW and then people saying they believe that TWAW. I was also directed to mumsnet and that has educated me a lot. While I had zero issue over the toilets there was no way I'd accept a man into other places. Now I find the whole thing so so sexualised. I've become very alerted to that. The dildo rainbow monkey, the queering the library, the transwomen who are biological males down on the floor at the library playing with kids crawling over them, the Wi spa, the woman there not being believed, the male aggression. There was one outright lie I was told that tipped me over though. That make me realise and now I'm here.

Aimee & Baloo Challoner and the Coventry Green Party.
I still feel the vomit rise thinking about it.

I never thought TW were actual women, I just thought we said it to be kind. It was when I realised that I was meant to believe that TW were actual literal women just like me, I thought “no way”. I refuse to accept that anyone really believes that and I’m embarrassed as the contortions ppl I previously respected go through to try & pretend they are

now I’m horrified at how much ground women have lost and how clueless so many ppl still are too the impact of allowing men to say they are women just cos feelings

I have never thought that TW were actually women, more that men with body dysmorphia so severe that the only way their lives were bearable was to 'live as women' including full genital surgery should be treated as honorary women.

Then I became aware that transwomen were not the same as transsexual women and began to row back a bit. Then learnt about the paraphilia that must not be named and rowed back some more. And saw Lisa Hauxwell on Crimewatch with the voiceover saying 'she may be living as a man' and thought ffs this is a violent criminal we're talking about here, lets have some accuracy please, what on earth is going on. And I started reading the FWR threads on Mumsnet and here I am.

Agreed. I know they're not women, and always have, but felt it wasn't that big a deal till suddenly it was and now I refuse to deny reality. If that's an issue for some people, that's for them to sort out. I will never again deny reality, and I don't care if that hurts their feefees.

I purposefully put my head in the sand over this for a while, not wanting to engage. I was a be kind type.

But seeing Lia Thomas's story break put me into a bit of a grief, I feel a totally 'got' the fragility of women's rights and it was quite overwhelming.

I've been learning and refining my opinion and understanding ever since about this issue because I want to be able to talk about it concisely, hopefully more freely in the future.

Like many PPs, I never believed it but I thought it was no big deal, and had heard the dodgy suicide stats. A couple of older relatives would sometimes make comments about the issue, and (in the arrogance of youth and thinking myself terribly current and metropolitan) I would wonder aloud why they had to make such an unseemly fuss. They weren't actually making a fuss, just speaking their minds in private about something they turned out to be better informed on than I was.

One day a leaflet came through the door about proposed changes to the GRA, and I was shocked at the idea of self-ID. I thought TWAW had only been intended as a polite fiction in a social context.

Around the same time, I followed a woman on social media who I shared an interest with. However, instead of posting about that interest, she was now a trans widow and posted a lot about that, and the proposed GRA changes. I was absolutely horrified. It was the nail in the coffin for my naive view of things - hearing about all these middle-aged men with daughters.

I then thought back to a story someone had told about her encounter with some TW, who she said had been staring at and imitating her, while also trying to flirt with her. At the time I thought the story was surely nonsense - why would they want to flirt with her if they'd gone to "all the trouble" of transitioning? It suddenly sounded very real.

I have also watched families with teenage girls following the typical trajectories of ROGD, none of them any better off for it.

Off topic: I read the FWR threads regularly here but rarely post. Did not know the top of the mountain was now a banned word. Wtf!

@JellySaurus

Are you hypothesising that people who are more religious are more likely to defend trans rights?

Neither did I.
I'd love to know the justification for that one. Still, I suppose one can say one crested instead.

One day a leaflet came through the door about proposed changes to the GRA, and I was shocked at the idea of self-ID. I thought TWAW had only been intended as a polite fiction in a social context.

😀Was that one of the red, white & black Hands Off My Rights leaflets from FPFW? I remember handing those out.

I didn’t see the harm for a long time. What really did it for me, around 2015, was the discovery that women prisoners could be locked up with violent men.

I never thought it was possible for humans to change sex. I still don't.
I haven't changed.
Some people have started to follow a new religion. I haven't.

I never gave it much thought other than "how awful to be trapped in the wrong body" then I read something written by Mermaids/Susie Green saying they were seeing 4 year olds brought to them because they were trans. The whole piece was so matter-of-fact and uncritical but something shifted with me. Then a few years ago I saw Munro Bergdorf spouting off about not talking about reproductive issues at a women's march and thinking how rude and ignorant that was.

Then one day I popped onto the Mumsnet board for this topic and never left 😉