Do you ever wonder, what else have I been horribly wrong on all this time?

[JaneorEleven]

Do you ever wonder, what else have I been horribly wrong on all this time? If I was SO wrong on those that are GC, what else have I been wrong on?

All my life I’ve been solidly left leaning, and pretty much agreed with most points on the left. I’ve described myself as an old fashioned socialist, love the idea of the NHS, a safety net for lower income people and unemployed, social and economic equality, disability rights, rights for women all tied up with feminism including being pro-choice, LGB and the TQ etc rights, you name it, I supported it.

I had previously been very sympathetic to Trans issues, and had a friend who transitioned, and I supported this person as best I could. But after some time of researching and I guess educating myself for lack of a better expression, I did a complete uturn on this, and found myself agreeing with many wise GC women. It was a bell I couldn’t unring. And Mumsnet played a large part in this.

I’m British now living in the US, and find myself busy Terfing USA. I’ve listened to NPR for years, nodding along, but now almost daily, they have a segment that infuriates me with regards to Trans issues. Could be anything from “trans kids” not getting their meds, to prisons, to bathrooms, schools, and they support it all. Female reporters who I held in high esteem, interviewing and fawning over transwomen, platforming them and letting them hold court without challenging them.

These past few weeks, I’ve started to question myself. How could I have been so wrong on this? I thought GC peeps, or Terfs, were full of hate and lacked patience and understanding.

Which leads me to ask, on what else have I been so badly wrong? Anyone else think like this? Now I don’t think I’m a closet right winger, but is it possible I’ve allowed the left to lead me up the garden path on other issues too?

For me it was the news black out in left leaning press on attacks in Cologne. Then Rotherham.
Same here, preceded by the Jimmy Savile revelations and the way a number of my left wing friends greeted the news with, 'Oh no this looks really bad for the BBC'.

It's made me question pretty much everything I read and hear now, which is not a nice place to be but I find it highly improbable that this can be the only issue the left has ever got wrong.

IIRC, when you examine their annual reports, BLM has given out far more money to Trans related groups than they have to black advocacy groups! I just had a quick google and found this article which sums up the financial oddities, I think the Washington Post covered it a while ago too:

www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/14/black-lives-matters-missing-billions/

I’ve listened to NPR for years

In case you've not seen it @JaneorEleven you might find the youtube video linked to in this thread a good watch, and grimly amusing too:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4664291-lgbtq-communitys-battle-for-the-dinosaur-emoji-on-peter-boghossians-show

Pri0n1 your post is fascinating and I agree about the depth of capture. Because of MN and what I'd found out about this issue, I was instantly curious about the origins of Covid. I won't derail this thread but there seems to have been a lot of activity in the States, using FOIA, which is getting at issues that perhaps some vested interests would like to keep well out of the public domain.

This was a big one for me, BloodandFire. I never bought into the trans stuff, and that pushed me away from feminism, but the narrative around brexit and Trump pushed me to start questioning my long-held leftist views too. By the time we got to covid I was definitely feeling pretty heterodox. Anyway, around the time my Trump Derangement Syndrome was starting to abate, I listened to a podcast interview with Melanie Phillips where she calmly took apart all the propaganda around Israel. It was completely devastating and I realised that a) I had no fucking clue what I was talking about when it came to this situation; b) neither did anyone else who I'd considered to be knowledgeable on the subject; and c) I probably had no clue about a lot of other stuff I thought I understood as well. It really opened my eyes.

People used to say the only certainties in life are death and taxes.

Now I feel the certainties are
that everything is definitely more complicated than you think, so your opinion is probably insufficiently informed.

Everyone else is in the same boat.

The majority of people are centrists and agree on the majority of issues. A few key areas are driving division and making our politics more extreme than is justified.

Wow @Roomba ... that article.

With trans 'rights', I too changed my views. Perhaps if child safeguarding processes had been robust from the start, and the transwomen allowed into women's prisons had behaved more like, um, women, rather than male sex offenders, and so on, we would all still be being kind.

But once you perceive something, you can't go back, and then you ask more questions, and it unravels a bit more.

And I hope that people with your views are completely familiar with the waay anti-semitism was deliberately weaponised in labour by Israel in order to minimise the chances of Palestine support from a labour government.

Its definitely made me look very critically at a lot more things, but im still very left wing. I cant think of any other issue that is about redefining reality. I am not one of the GCs hanging out with the far right though either.

I don't believe there's an over arching conspiracy. I think, laughably, it's a bit like ants and termites can build amazing structures by following some basic rules even if there is no overarching plan.

I've certainly rethought about the Times and the DM, and the Guardian, and ffs the Tory Party.

I won't be replying to you again because I had enough of being gaslighted and abused throughout 2015-2019. My children and I, as well as other family members and my community were directly, personally at the sharp end of the actual (not 'weaponised') antisemitism that Corbyn and his supporters deliberately encouraged. This is after having been a member of the Labour Party all my adult life. So fuck off with your antisemitic conspiracy theory bullshit. This is my actual life. Fuck off.

Thank you xxx

I was given a rare gift by my parents- I grew up in a completely apolitical household with my parents refusing to discuss how they voted. I thought of this when I saw a friend post a pic on FB of her holding up her postal vote for Corbyn whilst posing with her young children. I've always been slightly uncomfortable around people who are tribal, dogmatic and unyielding with their politics.

Has Britain ever been governed by a far left or far right party? Our two main parties are centre left or centre right. Many pretty, sunny "nice" countries that Brits like to visit on holiday have far more powerful and extreme far right groups than we do. The trans issue has just made me think even more about how the words "left" and "right" don't mean what people believe they do. See the recent revelation that Hadley Freeman was discouraged from writing about Corbynism from a Jewish perspective, by her employer, the kindly liberal lefty Grauniad.

I posted on another thread about how I wish Donald Trump would develop a gleeful sense of humour and announce he now identifies as a woman. Wouldn't it be glorious to see Owen Jones have to declare Donna Trump is now literally and actually a woman, and part of an oppressed marginalised minority, whose behaviour can be excused and every statement fawned over. Would he worry about being horribly wrong I wonder?

Right with you, OP. I question everything these days!

One point is that the meanings of 'right' and 'left' have shifted. Neoliberal geopolitics is more complex than 'Labour' and 'Tory'.

Everything's more bloody complicated, the more I look at it.

@PriOn1 Gabriel Gatehouse has just been on Radio 4's Today Programme trailing a new series which he's still in the process of completing, though it starts on Sunday, called The Mid Terms. The first episode is titled 'Groomers'. It's following on from his series on Q Anon and Trump. I really hope he is going to cover this in a balanced way, because unlike Q Anon's Satanists or Icke's lizards, what is happening regarding institutional capture and the safeguarding of children here, in the US, UK and many other countries, is very real. Can you honestly report about institutional capture from an institution that has been captured? It'll be an interesting litmus test for the BBC.

I think that I've learnt to be a bit more careful before just going along with sloganeering like "TWAW, be kind".

But mainly I have realised that the left comes in two parts -

(1) The economic left. The left that says "increase taxes on the rich, increase benefits and public spending, ensure that the problems caused by inequality are not let gt out of hand, and ensure that the chances of economic growth are maximised by ensuring money is in the hand or ordinary spenders and not rich hoarders." This part of the left is evidence-based, compassionate, kind, rational, essential.

(2) The identity left. The left that is woke, BLM, QT, CRT, TRA etc etc. This part of the left is utterly irrational, and very often not compassionate or kind, either to the people it is claiming to support (does BLM really help black people, do TRAs really help people who think they may be trans?), or the victims left in their wake. The identity left is a combination of three sets of people -
(a) Very naive, kind, left wing people
(b) People on the hard left who are trying to destroy capitalism
(c) People on the right who are trying to destroy the left by making it a nasty, ludicrous, unelectable farce.

I have realised that despite the undoubted superiority of the economic left over the economic right (in terms of helping the economy overall AND helping the most vulnerable within it), the right might sometimes be the best option in order to avoid the identity left having much power.

I don't think that I am overly concerned about being wrong about too much else. I try to be rational, I hold opinions which are nuanced and somewhat contradictory because I get that the world is complex. I'm not some lemming just following what any one person or group says.

It has increased my belief that those who push ideas based on positions which are not evidence based (eg Tories in terms of economics, religious people in terms of anything, TRAs in terms of transitioning) are INCREDIBLY dangerous, not only short term with regards the issue in question, but medium and long term in the sense that they are a genuine risk to democracy.

Economics. Tory economic claims are generally about redefining reality, constantly pushing ideas and policies that have no basis whatsoever in how the real world works. eg "let's cut taxes for the rich so that the wealth can trickle down" despite 40 years plus of evidence that this simply is not how things work, and that tax cuts for the rich are nothing more than a way of filtering money up to the few.

In terms of things I’ve changed my view on as a result of discussions here and within GC Twitter (when I used it) are “sex work”, and surrogacy.

I think that what has happened for me is to have had my nieveity about what the media tell me completely broken.

To have the biggest search engines suppressing a list of view points from search results for example, the way fundmecompany's have shut down and discriminated against women, the utter failure of all the media for the last 10 years to report on a pretty big scandal...sterilising children with off book drugs. Universities and workplaces illegally and gleefully chucking out women

It's made me much more afraid, it's made my sources of information much more limited.
It's made me more socialist because men and there money and hunger for sex is driving the world. That's very very toxic.

It's not that I agree with the Tories on anything, but the total capture of the left makes them the lesser evil on our fundamental right to safety. I loathe the kabour party for it's betrayal.

Yes absolutely. Thats not a team id ever get behind though. I guess that lot have never given much of a shit about 'be kind' though, so maybe thats why they are more likely than the major left wing parties to stick their head up on the gender issue. It has made me just feel like ive got noone to vote for that isnt shit

Now I feel the certainties are
that everything is definitely more complicated than you think, so your opinion is probably insufficiently informed

Yes. I'd agree with this. Even if I don't agree with the other 'side' there's more to most issues than one being wholly right and the other being completely wrong.

Thé actual BLM foundation is closely aligned with « trans rights ». There have also been very credible reports of misappropriation of funds.

abcnews.go.com/US/start-black-lives-matter-lgbtq-lives/story?id=71320450

nypost.com/2022/05/17/black-lives-matter-spent-at-least-12-million-on-mansions/

I would say the whole GC thing makes me more sceptical in general and less likely to follow a party line. I might previously have gone along with left leaning views on things but now I don’t.

I have always been firmly aligned with left wing of Labour, but my first taste of being 'on the wrong side' was re: Israel. That and my terfery are still my only major deviations.

Personally my experiences relating to the two have been quite different. I am relatively centrist in both issues (eg wrt Israel I believe in a two-state solution which probably has 1967ish borders, I just really object to BDS, the disproportionate monstering of Israel, and the weird amount of energy the UK left has for fighting out this battle in other countries when there are plenty of problems much closer to home; wrt trans I am happy to politely pretend TWAW in most aspects of life but there are - for all TW - limits to this which should be respected socially and in law), but my Israel viewpoint is treated as WORIADS in my London lefty circles whereas my trans viewpoint needs instant condemnation and/or re-education. That was quite eye opening.

I shared a PP's previous impression that the MN FWR seemed to have gone a bit weird. For me the trans argument actually wasn't new at all, I'm a lesbian so have seen the sometimes-fraught philosophical debate of what it means to be trans and how really transitioned people are and where this means they sit in relation to the lesbian community over many many years now, and have seen people with quite radically divergent views mostly be able to debate them and/or maintain friendships in spite of them. I remember the outrage when LGB charity Stonewall nominated Julie Bindel for an award 😂 So a part of me was somewhat bemused that this discussion had started happening outside of specifically L(G)B(T) spaces. I assumed there was some misunderstanding, and very likely widespread transphobia.

I think the thing I hadn't really appreciated was how literal some people were being when they said "TWAW". I genuinely thought it was a polite falsehood (especially when I often heard it from lesbians who personally include trans men in their dating pool). It was quite a surprise to understand that people thought it was genuinely a good thing that someone born male had been given a job reserved for women only in the women's sector, or had no intention of distancing their beliefs from quite obviously cynical or fetishistic sex criminals who were able to be placed in women's prisons. I dismissed all of that as baseless moral panic dreamed up by the Internet, until I witnessed real people supporting it.

Interesting @Roomba also interesting how little the mainstream media has reported on this potential misuse of funds.

I heard Gabriel Gatehouse on the radio earlier as well @IvyTwines. I hope that The Coming Storm on Sunday acknowledges that gender critical ideas predate QAnon by quite some time (see below a thread from 2016, and there were posts earlier than that thread), relate to valid concerns, and the coopting of similar ideas by conspiracy theorists does not undermine the validity of gender critical concerns and discussions.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/2716595-TransAgenda-BullShit-The-I-am-Spartacus-Thread