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?

I was never TWAW, I'm a sport scientist, know far too much about the advantages of a male body. But I was wholly behind transpeople knowing best as to what facilities, treatment etc they required.

I was the post surgery support human for a transman and a long term friend of a transwoman who started her social transition back in the 80/90s. I was sure I knew better than many what they had been through and what they deserved form society.

Then a thread here made me stop and think. And yes, I had been utterly arrogant and had not even bothered to ask them for their opinion on how it is living as a transperson in the UK.

So I asked them and found that neither of them had any objections to being refused access to single sex spaces; neither thought they had actually changed sex. The transman ( who had all possible surgeries) felt that most of his work colleagues were disinterested at best. Transwoman (who has breast implants and facial feminisation surgery) long ago stopped using women's loos -her partner, a gay man, had always said it was a crap idea and, even after surgery the mirror showed her father's face looking out.

And in their trans circles they aren't unusual. Though about 8 years ago they did have to change their support groups as they had been 'hijacked' by TRAs.

So about 5 years ago I stopped being conflicted over trans rights and came back here to learn more about gender critical feminism, it being entirely dissimilar, often entirely conflicting, with my old skool 80s feminism.

That was a while ago, mid cyclist years perhaps. It was directly complained about and added to the banned lexicon, for making some people feel badly.

There may have been a specific thread and a specific post, I think I'm right with the cyclist reference. I'm sure someone who can make the search thing work could find it 😜

I recognise so much of this. Similarly, I have always considered myself a feminist, but I remember in my 20s I really thought that women were the problem - if we just were tougher, whined less, cried less, we'd be just fine and would do brilliantly in all areas. And I think the trans thing was an element of this - it was like, "oh, but if he is so unhappy as a man, why not let him be a woman? What's the difference really? We're all just people."

I don't specifically remember, but I also suspect that if asked, I'd have agreed that men could have an opinion on abortion or what type of birth a woman could have. I would have seen it as "equality". That just like women had to stop "whining" about being excluded from men's stuff, we had to stop excluding them from women's. And I just wouldn't have understood the difference between women being excluded from the decisions in the boardroom vs men being excluded from decisions about a woman's body during pregnancy/childbirth.

Thanks for explaining Samphire.

Also apologies for the rambling nature of my post and terrible grammar. I was trying I get it all typed out before my toddler woke up!

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

I never for one moment believed that TWAW or ever could be. Even before TWAW was a thing, I never believed in the concept of 'being trapped in the wrong body'. As an atheist and a totally non-woo person, my reaction was always to ask what is supposedly trapped. You are your body. Your personality etc is created by your brain, which is... part of your body!

I was always theoretically happy for TW to be 'treated as women' socially. But as soon as I became aware of the infringement of women's spaces, the pronoun bollocks and the ludicrous doublethink of being expected to believe people coukd actually change sex, I realised what a slippery slope that was. I have MN to thank for that realisation.

I never thought TW were actual women, I just thought we said it to be kind.

I assumed it was like the Santa thing with children - where they believe wholeheartedly and you don't want to upset them by contradicting, so you either actively go along with it or just don't mention it.

However, there's also a bit of a blurring there, as when an adult/older child declares that Santa doesn't exist, instead of doing the sensible thing and telling believing children that not everybody believes in Santa but that doesn't stop him being real and important in children's lives, there's usually somebody (adult) who will bluster on, red-faced and angrily insist that Santa does exist and thus this other person is telling nasty, wicked, outright lies. Thus belief equals undeniable truth and the person who shouts most loudly is always the one telling the truth.

I have a very strong faith which is extremely important to me, but I am a grown-up (and was brought up as a child to be respectable), so I don't get angry and gaslighty with people of other faiths or none. I'm very happy to discuss and debate if people want to, but I would never expect somebody else to categorically declare their absolute faith in something that they do not in fact believe; whatever would be the point of that? Their lack of/different faith doesn't affect me and my faith, so why would I take it as a personal insult?

'Live and let live' only really works if everybody does it, and, crucially, it works both ways with mutual respect and consideration. If you treat life like you're in the final of Goldenballs - where you demand that other people 'share' whilst you feel fully entitled to 'steal' (all the while insisting that you will/do in fact 'share'), that's a disgraceful and dishonourable state of affairs. You might win once, but you can't then suddenly be surprised when nobody trusts or respects you or your motives anymore in the future.

I think I've been 'im Spitzenmodus' since I realised that 'changed sex' was no longer a soothing but rare metaphor but supposed to be taken literally, and no longer rare, and comes with hugely negative consequences for women & children and benefits for men.

All this at the same time as the ridiculous conflation of the terms 'sex' and 'gender' to dress it all up in a pretty outfit.

I think the thoughts became clear when my pre teen son told me "some people can have an operation and change sex" and he was under the impression it was true. This was a few years ago.
I realised rather than quietly thinking gender woo was rubbish, but not saying anything to "be kind", actually it needs light.

My kids are still of the "you can't say that you might upset the transes" (quote DS2) but at least they know people can't change sex, and we discuss girls' sport etc at home.

Gradual process.

I was running an LGBT group years ago, several TQ+ members, one who had had a huge amount of support from the group (and me) demanded to be allowed to break a long standing group rule and when told no that they couldn't, launched a major flying monkeys attack on me with a whole lot of stuff about 'microaggression' and 'suppressing trans positive messaging' and apparently saying 'no' to them was transphobia. They nearly destroyed the group. Reading around in a shocked state of WTAF I discovered that no, this was not an unusual experience.

And then I watched Madigan be a women's officer while refusing to represent female type women, or any issues that did not equally apply to biological males, demonstrating that this 'TWAW' and can represent females too was not going to work.

And then read about the cotton ceiling (from a TQ+ person, writing in all angry honesty) and read some Twitter threads with my eyes coming out on stalks

And then discovered T*isaslur and had never seen such vile, hatefilled and violent stuff towards females in my life.

And that about did it.

I don't think I ever really believed TWAW, like others I just thought it was a kindness, and had the vision of the old school transexual who understood that they weren't really women and shouldn't have access to women's spaces. I' not on twitter so I guess I missed a lot of the madness, but saw a few threads on FWR and had my eyes opened.

Learning that Self ID is law in Ireland and has been since 2015 was a shock because I had no idea it was even happening - there wasn't even any public discussion about it. Then I got angry!

Here's a link to an interview with a gay guy who was previously very TWAW, until he changed sides - it's pretty interesting. It may have been posted before:

I have just read through Mumsnet Talk Guidelines specific to Sex and Gender topics and can't see any reference to "peak" being a banned term, nor can I see how it could be offensive as it isn't specific to GC thought.
It's worth a read anyway as I hadn't realised that some terminology I would happily use on twitter (and not been deleted) is not OK on this board.
I am grateful to Mumsnet for the existence of this board as I have found it educational and interesting.

I came into my understanding through feminist work. In my view the way women are held down in this world is very much based on gender norms and roles and stereotypes:

Women's place is in the kitchen, women are to be help meets, women are to be modest and gate-keep sex which their whole bodies signal, women are emotional, cannot do mathematics or drive, do not have leadership abilities etc. Religious texts say that men are the leaders of women in families etc.

So the antidote to all that is to relax gender norms, roles, and to change sexist stereotypes so that what someone can do is as little constrained by their sex as possible, while still taking into account biological sex where it clearly matters (tricky to agree on, of course, but not the same as an entirely gendered world).

What I read about trans women, in particular, a long time ago, suggested that their goals were the opposite in many ways: They absolutely demanded to have all those gender norms, roles, and stereotypes in place so that they could be seen as women by following them.

This made me uncomfortable, but as they were a tiny minority, I didn't focus on it too much and wanted them to be treated well and without prejudice.

What changed all this was when I realised the enormous differences between the gay-Lesbian fight for rights and the new transgender fight for rights:

The former didn't remove any of my rights at all, but the latter not only removed many of them but also seemed to require a whole new dictionary where all the common words feminism needs for its work would be redefined so that working against sex-based oppression would become almost impossible.

In other words, the trans activist movement (not individual trans people, but the vocal leaders many of whom are not trans themselves) is clearly sexist and does not care about the oppression of women (as exemplified by the status of women and girls in Afghanistan today). That oppression is sex-based, but the TRAs want all words denoting female sex to be erased.

Add to that how my own gender definition, based on inhabiting a female body is no longer allowed to exist, and I do feel erased.

I think for me there were a number of things that happened relatively close in time that caused me to really acknowledge the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing.

TL;DR:

1. Trans widows' stories
2. #NoDebate and Safeguarding
3. Autism, perspective taking and GIDS

The very long version:

To start with, I'm a scientist by training, so I never believed that trans women are literally women because I know that you cannot actually change your biological sex. I assumed that when people said that, they meant that it was a polite fiction and that trans women should be socially accepted as women (using preferred name and pronouns, access to women's social spaces etc). I didn't think too hard about it, because the spaces where I'd encountered trans women were very accommodating, so I did what everyone else did.

The three things that caused me to rethink were:

1. Reading an article about trans widows around the same time my abusive ex had done something egregiously awful (despite being many years an ex with no contact). I then ended up reading some of the trans widows threads on FWR. I saw the same patterns of coercion and sexual abuse in those posts as I had seen in my ex. That made me realize that there are some men who use transition as just another option for controlling and manipulating their victims.

1. Seeing the impact of "No debate" on Twitter. A prominent social scientist who researches violence against women made some nasty subtweets about how she couldn't believe so many of her followers followed / retweeted stuff from another social scientist. Didn't they realize she was a TERF? The idea that I was morally obligated to refuse to engage totally with someone's academic discussion on unrelated matters because I disagreed with their views on trans women was a big moral reckoning for me. I just couldn't do it. That led me to go and read some of the essays this terrible TERF had written about safeguarding and transgender children ... And I found a lot that I agreed with.

At the time, I was working in a secure hospital with teenagers who had experienced various types of really awful abuse in childhood, so my eyes were already open to the really grim things that some adults will deliberately do to children. The idea that safeguarding basically goes out the window when a child (even an extremely vulnerable child already in the care system) says they are trans absolutely horrified me.

1. A slightly weird angle, but also on Twitter. I was following an autistic guy who works as a teacher. He had interesting threads about coping strategies he uses for managing sensory issues / burnout at work. Some of his tweets about autism were interesting but sometimes he was completely, rigidly unable to see things from anyone else's point of view. And would have huge angry rants if people disagreed with him (think "How can you as a parent write that you find your child's behaviour challenging/exhausting/upsetting. They have autism and can't help it. What you are doing is literally traumatising your autistic child"). He was also very vocally about trans rights and had big angry rants about how eg JKR was literally traumatising trans people. I got really fed up of the hyperbole around autism and noticed parallels in his hand-wringing about JKR. He also appeared to believe that trans women are literally women, which made no sense. Just before I muted him forever, I decided to read JKR's essay - and found she was also talking about coercive control and safeguarding. Then I ended up down the childhood transition / GIDS rabbit hole. And reading about the Tavistock whistleblowers and Keira Bell. After that, I was truly horrified. Particularly because there seemed to be a total assumption that children always know their own minds. So if they say they are trans - they are trans. Again, I was working with very vulnerable young people for whom applying this logic (about gender identity or many other things) would have been to completely fail them and cause demonstrable harm. That was the point where I realised the huge gulf between the simplified discourse of TWAW and its real-world implications.

The other two things that were somewhat important in making me see what was happening systemically were the silencing in universities - which was not just about gender but a few allied concerns, and the presentations before the Canadian Parliment by Meghan Murphy and Jordan Peterson. It was immediately clear to me that if the law unmoored the definition of man and woman from biology it would have some seriously significant effects.

I also was working in schools and seeing more and more concerning things targeted at young ages, and they all seemed to be coming from the same thinking.

I never believed TWAW, but encountered a few trans people through work or socially.
Of course I was polite and treated them like anyone else, even though I felt silly using other-sex pronouns when talking about them; I still did it, to be polite. I wasn’t bothered by them, though I would have been if I’d encountered a man in the women’s toilets. Didn’t give them much thought.

That all changed in 2017 when I read about a 60-year-old woman called Maria Maclachlan being surrounded by a crowd of angry transactivists, and assaulted.

www.itv.com/news/london/2017-10-26/60-year-old-woman-punched-in-the-face-during-a-brawl-at-a-transgender-rights-event-in-hyde-park

Once I started looking, I was stunned by the level of infiltration that had just slipped through unchallenged. All done on the quiet. I thought I kept up with politics, but I hadn’t seen that coming. We had lost so much. Maria’s assailant got a trivial fine while the magistrate rebuked Maria for not calling the attacker “she”!

I no longer use other-sex pronouns, and I talk about the loss of women’s single-sex rights at every opportunity. People really get it when they realise self-ID has slipped into use despite the government not officially allowing it. And that means any man (trans identifying or not) can stroll into any women’s space. A lot of people are appalled at the child safeguarding aspect too.

So similar to many posters here. Until about 5 years ago, I didn't really think about the whole TWAW thing. Just thought it was a very tiny minority of middle aged men who had body disphoria etc, very much "whatever floats your boat, live and let live" kind of attitude from me. First inkling that something felt off was watching the Louis Theroux documentary on "trans" children - I just immediately felt very very uncomfortable with the whole thing. Went against everything I thought about boys and girls being free to express themselves anyway they wish without having to conform to gender stereotypes. Then I joined the dots between the erosion of women's (hard fought for) sex based rights and the rise of transgender activism and the complete nonsense of concepts like "non binary". THEN I joined the dots between the complete retro-grade backward step that leads to lesbian, "masculine" presenting young women being told they are actually men and mutilating their bodies as a result. The ubiquity of my smart work colleagues doing the whole pro-nouns on their email signature and not questioning the absurdity of it all just pushed me over the edge.

I never believed men could literally turn into women or ever really know what it's like to be a woman, but I had a trans friend/acquaintance and so was protective of them. It was when I saw the kind of shite that was posted on this friend's facebook wall, and this 'friend' transplaining to me what it's like to receive harassment on the street (because as a woman, how could I possibly know how that feels), and all the me me me and demands such as wanting a woman to search them at the airport amongst other things, whilst knowing full well that this person was a fetishist with sissification fantasies... So yeah, just the dawning, misogynistic reality of trans activism and the male entitlement of fetishists using their 'special status' to threaten and abuse anyone who disagreed with them whilst being patted on the back by the gullible 'be nice' crowd who don't realise how much these men hate them.

And then whilst I was burying my head in the sand and pretending it had nothing to do with me I read a piece in the Guardian which was supposed to be an apology from a TA for their intimidating and aggressive behaviour at one of the early WPUK meetings..

I remember that awful opinion piece, FOJN! Not apologetic at all, the writer was boasting about being physically aggressive to women and getting with it. I couldn’t believe the Guardian hadn’t seen this. But of course, the Guardian is totally captured and the editors were well aware that this was just a platform for a misogynist.

I used to read the Guardian practically every day, but I never buy it now. Sad loss of a once-great newspaper. I don’t think it will ever get back the reputation it’s thrown away.

Several reasons:

Things That Never Happened started happening, e.g. convicted rapists being placed in women’s prisons and women losing college scholarships and Olympic team places to trans women.

Realising that self ID combined with an ever-expanding trans umbrella would erase sex as a protected characteristic.

Seeing lots of lovely ladies on Twitter threatening to rape and choke “TERFs” with their lady dicks. How exactly could this be described as “living as a woman”?

Realising that men who expressed gender critical views didn’t get rape and death threats. They might just get a sorrowful, “do better”.

Going round in circles trying to understand the belief that a person could identify as a man or live as a woman without being able to define “man” or “woman”.

Worrying about the “inclusive language” in healthcare, which excludes some women who aren’t fluent in English or who have low levels of literacy or learning disabilities. Yet men still receive clear healthcare information which refers to them as “men”.

Disagreeing with an attempt by trans activists to change the legal definitions of “mother” and “father” unilaterally, even though this change wouldn’t centre the child and has potential legal consequences for everyone.

Here is a (partial) list of things many generations of women have had to give up or do without because they are women: the right to own property; the right to control their own finances; the right to dress as they want; the right to vote; the right to drive; the right to go out alone without fear of assault; the right to pursue a career; the right to have or not to have children. In many parts of the world despite the struggles of feminists women are still not able to do many of these things.

Yet if a trans woman wishes to compete in, say, cycling or swimming against people who ‘align with her gender’ but are at a disadvantage because of biology, is she required to give that up? If she wishes to access a female only space despite the fact that women there might find her presence traumatising, is she required to give that up? Of course not. She expects to have those rights despite the fact that there are alternatives available to her. And who has to give up their rights to fairness in sport, or to a safe male free space? Why, women of course! Again. And they are not even allowed to complain about it.

I was never TWAW. How can anyone actually think that? it’s ridiculous.

But there was a time I didn’t know much about this issue and would very much have been ‘live and let live’. Teens in my family focused my mind on this issue, seeing what they were watching and being ‘educated‘ on, seeing intelligent children accepting lies and going along with things so easily or face being called transphobic.

I’ve read and seen too much now to have any time for trans ideology. It is ruining so my children’s lives, directly and indirectly as well as being harmful to women and the whole of society. I am very thankful that I became fully aware of its harmful affects to be able to talk to my children about it and that they are capable of critical thinking about this.

*so MANY children’s lives

@respectmysex I too am just finding out now that that metaphor is banned here.What a very wide net.This ever-increasing restriction of free speech is abhorrent and very concerning.

It makes my day when I see a sticker, @SpringBadger ! Lovely that you've got a local Stickerwoman.

I feel the religion / atheist analogy makes a lot of sense to me.

I used to be on the "as supportive as possible" end of the spectrum, despite mixed experiences in person. For me two things I can't quite remember which came first...

1. Reading an 'expert' explain that what it meant to be trans was that someone was "in the wrong body" i.e. "a boy soul born in a girl's body or a girl soul in a boy's body" and I was like ok I can see why people who believe in souls might believe that was possible but...
2. When stonewall LITERALLY supported heterosexual men's right to declare that they would from now on be having sexual relationships solely with homosexual women by redefined the word "Lesbian" to accommodate them and began the process of eradicating any reference to 'homosexuality' or 'same-sex' relationships/marriage from their website and materials.