I feel stupid for supporting trans activists and now I have no one to talk to

[Redead]

I might get flamed for saying this. I just had no one to be honest with. All of my friends are on the liberal trans rights bandwagon. If I was ever honest about my feelings they would eat me alive.

I've been doubting the movement for awhile but today I broke. I saw a post online in trans group where a detransitioner who was seemingly a happy transperson before was really raw and honest about how they wanted to go back to their original sex because they where having a lot of problems with their surgery and hormones and they had doubts before the transition. It's really terrible they now pee and poop in a bag. They and very young. They are 20. They've never had sex and feel they never will now. They walk with a cane now and the cross sex hormones are making them sick. I thought it was the most awful tragic story. I thought that the trans group would be supportive of them especially since they've been a loving member for so long. And who are we to tell them how to identify right?

Well... I was naive and stupid. Their replies were horrible. A lot of them started out with "That's a really sad sorry but..." Some of them told them they aren't trans and never were trans and they don't belong. Many of them accused them off internalized transphobia.

This person when through something horrible and they absolutely devoured them without a second thought. The mods deleted the post and they were banned from the group. I cried. The hypocrisy! So many of them going on about suicide and mental health problems and supporting one another when they are vulnerable. Well I can't possibly imagine a frame of mind and body when one is more vulnerable. But they treated this person like a leper.

I'm just horrified. I feel lost alone and I hate myself for fighting so hard for something that has turned into... This... I don't know what to call it. But it is awful.

Sorry for the rant. I don't know what I'm looking for from this post. If you got this far thanks for reading I guess.

Owen Jones has been pushing this position on Twitter recently, the idea that parents should be shut out of the discussion leaving a confused child to turn to groups such as Mermaids.

@Redead

“I just think that most people match their birth sex”

Everyone does. The sex that you are born with is immutable, and you are that sex forever.

People can’t change sex. It has never happened. It can’t happen.

I really wanted to like that but it made me feel extremely old and, I dunno, uncultured? Plebeian?

It just read like self indulgent tosh to me. Obviously went over my head!

I wouldn't particularly disagree picklemewalnuts but I thought this paragraph was interesting.
Becoming a trans man, for Redcar, was a liberation, though not an easy one. He finds himself in conflict with what is expected of him. “I am in resistance to the approach of trans identity that there has to be hormones and operations,” he says. “It’s abiding by a binary system that I don’t believe in. Binarism has been made to control. The system itself imposes a lot of performance on everybody from birth and I want to free myself and everybody else in the conversation. I am sick of having to define myself with their grotesque tools of oppression. And I don’t think I owe anyone scars, to be precise.”

This seems to me the place where GC feminists and gender ideology are so so close to agreeing!

Every day I am thankful that I saw this for what is from early on. This enabled me to protect my own dd who is an absolutely perfect candidate for this ideology - teen, autistic, socially isolated, and who made a very small step down the path a few years ago. I came down that hard, I described it before as an iron fist inside a velvet glove.

The more I observe this nonsense the more I believe it's mostly about separating children from parents, making them unmoored and conditioning them to believe those who love them the most are unsafe and cannot be trusted. If they can get children away from those who would protect them with their lives, well they can pretty much do anything to them can't they...?

Dissenters must be ruthlessly bullied into line or shamed and ostracised from their society. Isolate the dissenter and they can be "disappeared". It's terrifying and I cannot fathom those, who are not activists but who just go along with it, as being "kind" and "inclusive". I have no patience with it anymore.

Does anyone know why my post was deleted? It didn’t seem to break any rules; it mentioned that a type of activism shared some traits associated with cults.

Owen Jones has been pushing this position on Twitter recently, the idea that parents should be shut out of the discussion leaving a confused child to turn to groups such as Mermaids.

Yes. They can use children who hate their parents and family and so have no secure footing or protection, to do pretty anything they want can't they? Turn them into little activists who despise and denounce their family and society. Just look at the Chinese Cultural Revolution for example, that's the end of the line. I can't say what I think about the fanatical LOJ but I it begins with a big G.

This is great- And I don’t think I owe anyone scars, to be precise.

Sex is binary. She's female. Absolutely allowed a masculine aesthetic with no judgement. If she were male and wanting skirts, tights and makeup, especially if straight, she'd struggle more.

I don't understand the angst. I mean good on red for resisting the pull toward a full transition, but still there's no actual transition necessary.

I mean, I could spend ages worrying about how to manage walking across the path outside my house without touching the floor, but it's really not necessary. I quite simply cannot grasp what they are talking about. And generally I'm pretty sympathetic!

@Redead

Welcome!

You are not a bad person. It's unfortunately a weird world that might have started from a good place (ie being kind to trans people), but which has very badly malfunctioned and misfired. Until you see it, you just see "kind liberals" being persecuted by "horrible old women" (btw I'm 36 and a mother of two, but there is an assumption as to the right "young" position).

You say that you have been on the receiving end of comments about being pregnant and breastfeeding. I'm afraid that this just demonstrates that, whilst being trans might be your happiest self (and will be for some people - those who have very severe dysphoria), it's not the magic wand it is being sold as (and sold extremely dangerously to minors). Ultimately, even if you transition happily, you have to accept the sex you are born on some level, because you can't acquire the fertility or exact same body parts or health profile of a person of the opposite sex. This is just truth.

If you are a trans woman inflating/dilating your neovagina on a daily basis, you have to do maintenance that other women don't - they instead have to suffer periods and smear tests etc. it's not the same, unless you just see a vagina as an orifice for a penis (and even then it's not going to have the same pleasure component as for a biological woman) - ie through the eyes of a man only. Same for a trans man, who needs to pump up their penis to have sex and will most likely have no feeling in it. It's not the same. For some, this is still the best possible option, but it is not the same.

If you look at some older transitioners, the Debbie Haytons, this is a truth that they recognise - they want to live a peaceful life as close as they can be to a woman in form and accepting that they cannot be a woman (which leads them to compromise on other things, access to female spaces etc). This is a path to self acceptance. Unfortunately, there is a subset who want pretence and adulation - this is unhealthy and, when it comes to young people, it is unkind. They are extremely vocal and have captured the permitted narrative.

Giving up on opportunities for young people to be comfortable as their birth sex, whether or not as a gender non conforming version of it, is unkind. Living in one's birth sex is obviously objectively preferable to a life of surgery, side effects and constantly looking through a window at something that you are closer to, yes, but will never have. Some people cannot achieve that and that is fine - they deserve compassion and kindness, but it is unreasonable to expect to live in total denial.

Some of those who want pretence and adulation will also want this for nefarious reasons. Gatekeeping and safeguarding is not hatred.

I wish you the very best, OP. I hope you can build a network outside this - it doesn't have to be a GC network, obviously. Most people don't give it much thought either way (though surveys show that when you drill down they have GC positions on prisons, sports etc). Just a normal one in which you can raise your daughter in her birth sex to be her authentic self with as little baggage as possible.

@Beamur WOW that was a very difficult read. I kept wondering who this Redcar guy was at first and then I realised it was the (female) lead singer. I wonder why she's decided to name herself after a slightly down at heel Yorksire town? 😂

Apologies to anyone living in Redcar :)

I don't know why it got deleted. I guess someone watching the thread reported it or the mods simply acted of their own accord. I didn't have a problem with anything you said though. I found it very honest!

I really like their life perspective. I feel like surgery should always be a last resort after everything else had been attempted. If Red car can love themselves without all the changes them why go through with them? You can take back clothing and pronouns but you can't take your breasts and vagina back once you lose those.

@motherofthelittlescreamingone

Thank you. You are right. No matter how much they look like the sex they wish to be they will still have to live with the fact that there are some things you just cannot force to happen. They will still have a mixed sex body for lack of better terminology and that is something I think gender clinics will have to start being more honest with others about. I don't see many people talking about this in support groups.

"We know this is really important to you but we don't have the technology to make you female. Sorry the best we can do is make you look and feel as close to a female as a male body can get."

I agree though if society chooses to use the term gender as an identity statement then most people actually don't have a gender identity so can't match. We need to be clear what we're really talking about when we use the concept of matching.

Yes. I don’t have a gender identity. I am female, something that’s not open to debate or in any way subjective.

I also lost a friend who was a transwoman around the time that I had DS1 - at the time I found it a bit odd how she behaved at that time but in retrospect it must have just highlighted that she was biologically male and always would be, making comments like "I'm so sad I'm too old to have a baby" and "I always wanted to do that" etc. She had come to our wedding, was a dear friend and neighbour, we supported her through hormones and surgery which for a person in their 50s was completely debilitating (and permanently disabling). With what I know now looking back, I think she was really a very effeminate gay man who had been raised in a supremely macho, working class community surrounded by strong female matriarchs (I met her mum and her aunt) and negative male figures . I think she had been closeted all her life and absorbed the message from her family that it was more acceptable to be a transwoman than to be herself and had a huge amount of internalised homophobia.

I always find it ironic that TRAs tell us to educate ourselves and meet transpeople, as if we never have. In fact it is having close family and friends who are transwomen that cemented the knowledge (which is, incidentally, shared by them) that TW are not and never will be women. They are transwomen and are walking another path from me as a biological woman.

I suppose you both have a point. I'm just questioning everything now. If I'm being really very honest my family was very strict Christians to the point that it felt very constricting. They would always point to people and talk about their life choices saying that they were sinners because they divorced or had a pregnancy out of wedlock or because they were gay. So I think being raised with such strict unhealthy views I suppose gender ideology seemed more free and live and let live types. I thought I had broken free from the thought control but I simply fell into the next best one. It's really hard admitting that I was wrong because I grew up around so much shame for getting things wrong.

Yes I was shocked by the sudden silence around me during my pregnancy. There were also some very mean jealous comments. Us women can just never get a break. If it's not one thing is another.

A view that you’ll see expressed here (and which I agree with) is that the typical “trans” view of gender is far more constrictive and less “free” than the GC view in that GC says that no-one needs to confirm to the stereotypes associated with their gender; there really is no “girl-like” way to be; everyone who is female is by definition “girl like.”

The “trans” view on the other hand often says that a male who likes dresses, make-up, and so-on is not “really” male.

It’s not really any consolation at all to the detransitioner, but from experience when a group of people attack an individual like that it’s because they’ve made them question a core belief that’s held. “If person X feels like this, maybe this nagging thought in the back of my mind is right too. But I don’t want it to be right so person X is wrong and bad and evil and transphobic and we must attack”.

Well, I wasn't really expecting gushing comments but it was in stark contrast to another friend who was struggling with secondary infertility and going through IVF. The difference I felt was that my (female) friend had had a reasonable expectation of being able to fall pregnant and feel desperately sad that I was when she wasn't so I was really careful about what I said, didn't complain to her etc. But my (transwoman) friend could never have had such an expectation, so negative comments like "you don't have to rub it in" regarding my pregnancy really took me aback. I remember she didn't like me nursing either and seemed to take it personally.

@Redead I think you would really enjoy/relate to this podcast: www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-136-how-the-left-can-fight#details

In this episode there's an interview with a woman who was "cancelled" by her friends for not displaying right-think on social media, and who went on to start her own podcast called Fucking Cancelled (fuckingcancelled.libsyn.com/)