Ooh I think I've hit on exactly why I'm GC...

[musicalfrog]

Been mulling it over in my head for ages.

I have an extremely low tolerance for liars and narcissists.

Oh, I'm denying your reality? Well what about MY reality? Because I know what you really are, and guess what, my reality also happens to be the truth which is far more powerful.

You want to find your authentic self well maybe you should start with your reality. There is nothing more authentic than that.

Honestly that's it, I just hate lies and being lied to. It's the most hideous feeling.

Just to clarify.

You want to find your authentic self well maybe you should start with your reality the actual, real, truthful one. There is nothing more authentic than that.

Yep me too. We being asked to lie to validate lies. It’s an uncomfortable place to be if you value honesty and authenticity. Bring your ‘authentic self’ to work doesn’t apply if you’re a GC woman.

It made me wonder about women having to refer to their rapists as 'she' in court. Apart from anything else, what about the victim's reality and why does it matter less?

I agree with you. It's an identity thing. I can't accept who I am so I am going be who I want to be. Problem is you are who you are, whatever you call yourself or how much you change your body.

I agree.
I'm fine for people to lie to themselves if they want, I'll be sympathetic and understanding. It's extremely unreasonable for anyone to force me to lie too though. That's crossing a line.

Yeah - it’s that old “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” thing.

I don’t like being gaslit by men (in particular) in any other walk of life. I’m not rolling over and accepting it in the case of gender ideology, either.

Not to mention that this splits people into two groups:

the ones who get to figure out their special inner identity

and the ones who get to do nothing more than enable them. And shut up. And suffer whatever is necessary in the name of protecting others from reality.

No thanks.

“I'm fine for people to lie to themselves if they want, I'll be sympathetic and understanding.”

I’m even uncomfortable about people lying to themselves tbh. This is where we are now - people taking ‘sympathetic and understanding’ and taking a mile… we should be challenging and robust like the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes and saying ‘WTF’ - no, you can’t use female changing rooms, no you can’t join a woman’s sports team, no you can’t have life changing surgery when you are still a child…

Me too. It's just gaslighting pure and simple. I had this discussion with my close relative who said there were over 100 sexes. All I could think about was the Emperor's new Clothes.

I knew she would like me more if I agreed with her, and I just couldn't do it. Doors slammed and I was ignored for a long time. #bekind clearly didn't apply to me.

#KindlyBeComplicit

Nothing is ‘real’ these days. I work with a lot of young women (early 20s) and we were talking about cosmetics and places to get decent haircuts. One then went on to describe her Botox, lip fillers, cosmetic surgery, hair weaves, how knackered her nails were because of constant falsies, her other falsies, and something that she’d had done to her teeth (which her friend had done and was now convinced they were all falling out).

Blimey - even when I was that age I’d roll out of bed, wash, brush my teeth, put a brush through my hair, and rarely use makeup. Looking at old photos I had a fresh wee face, bright eyes and mad curly hair. I don’t even recognise some of these women in their filter enhanced social media photos. And lord knows how much this must all cost.

Even DH has commented on seeing women with white stripes down their noses and dark patches in their flat pan coloured faces.

It’s all just show.

I was thinking last night about Rachel Dolezal - remember her?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
She was white and she had her hair tightly permed and wore a ton of dark fake tan and assumed a Black identity, and even claimed to to the police that she was a victim of racist hate crimes...

Much later, she admitted being "born white to white parents" but maintained that she self-identified as Black.

I don't think anyone thought that was ok - at BEST people felt that she had some trauma or mental health crisis that had caused this identity crisis, and led to web of pathological lies. At worst, she's a crazed Narcissist who wanted attention as a 'disadvantaged minority/hate crime victim' and trampled over people who legitimately had that identity, invading their spaces, causing real harm in the process.

If anyone can explain to me how someone "born male in a male body" but self-identifying as a woman is any different, then I'd be keen to know.

@WoolyMammoth55 I would absolutely love to talk about Rachel thinking she is black and trans women thinking they are women. What the hell is the difference?

You know, with RD I'll admit I didn't quite 'get it' at the time. I absolutely accepted that people of colour were pissed off with her. I would never have questioned their feelings towards what she did but I didn't fully 'get it' until I felt the visceral, gut punch of a man appropriating my sex. Then I properly understood. I wonder if some people, maybe men in particular, just haven't had that feeling.

How can it be fair on a victim who is asked to describe what happened and what she experienced, if she will be penalised for describing the visceral reality that a man forced his cock into her body?

Seems to be that there is a risk that the jury will interpret her verbal stumbles as evidence she is lying about being raped at all.

It's absolutely part of it.

I cannot stand liars and once someone has lied to me once I will assume they're lying about everything until proven otherwise.
This is why I can't understand why people like Keir Starmer are OK with blatantly lying and saying not only women have a cervix. What else will he lie about with a straight face?

I remember watching piers Morgan asking Benjamin Butterworth to explain how could people identify as a 100 different genders . Piers said " how far is it going to go ? I could just now identify as a penguin". Butterworths reply was " well that would just be ridiculous Piers , noone can identify as I penguin"! .
WTAF really the penguin is where Butterworth thought it all became ridiculous .
I totally agree. Intelligent people being forced to lie and bullshit and enable others to live a life of lies and bullshit !

Yup, you've nailed it.
Men in frocks have been lying to and gaslighting women for millennia. The latest players are just a bit more heavy handed with the glitter.

It's going backwards, all the progress that was made with women's, children's, gay rights are bring lost, all that good will and acceptance (I believe we were doing well for a good few years) is being forgotten. For demanding, selfish, entitled men. I don't like demanding men who try to make me lie and cheat, who threaten my safety. Being lied to, laughed at and mocked is really horrid. It's like being trapped in an abusive relationship.

The irony is how blind people are to the obvious mental health costs to people who don't believe in gender identity; especially for those who have previous or ongoing experience of any kind of relational trauma (family, school bullying, abusive relationships)

Anyone who can't force themselves to radically alter their sense of reality (if they don't naturally believe in gender id), and who also has any experience of being bullied, silenced, coerced, gaslit, made to collude, surrounded by enablers, isolated, excluded, or forced to lie or keep secrets will feel traumatised by aspects of what's happening in the culture or in closer environments.

(I'm not saying its only those with trauma/family dysfunction who are experiencing disturbance, just that it might be more familiar and distressing to those who have, or who are aware of the dynamics)

The reality is that many of us just can't turn our sense of reality upside down as we are being asked (told) to- in a way that nothing else ever has.

Even if we really wanted to because we thought it would make life easier if we could choose to believe it's really just 'live and let live' and that we are fundamentally an identity rather than embodied beings. (I tried to choose to believe in Christianity once, so I could authentically be a godparent- and to see if it was possible. Interesting experience but didn't work)

I think many of us might have started with the cognitive dissonance and confusion (again, especially if the dynamics and tactics were familiar), and really tried to question our thinking and instinctive responses, and 'did the research'. But, what I was left with was an even clearer sense of what felt true and real and how at odds that was with the apparently new consensus (and expectations). And then felt even more disturbed!

If you are unable to speak or question freely, feel forced to conform, or to deny your own reality, how is it possible to 'live your best life', 'be true to yourself/the authentic you', or to ' feel relief from distress' and 'improved mental health' that are the supposed rights (?) for all?

Instead of having any costs, losses, or effects acknowledged, there is only vilification.

It seems like an impossible situation. If subjective truth and lived experience is paramount now, how exactly is this being reconciled?

I would say, maybe if this could be raised and discussed more openly it could open the door for some shared empathy and understanding- some resolution where a compromise could be reached.

Then I realise that's what JKR tried to do with her essay.

Yes, this is the thing for me too OP.

I'm autistic and I really struggled with the whole TWAW. As in, do they ACTUALLY believe they ARE women? And are people just saying that to be kind??

I don't understand how people can say that TWAW. Because they're not. We all know what a bloody woman is. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. We all know they're not actually a woman, even those who say otherwise.

So what is actually going on? Are people just saying TWAW because they want to be kind? Sort of like "you can act like a woman if you want to and we'll pretend that we don't notice the difference"??

I'm just confused. Because TW are categorically not women, although they are of course free to live however they want to (providing they stay out of single sex spaces for women).

In my opinion they are all lying. No one believes that TW are women. There is no possible way that they believe a TW is exactly the same as their mum/sister/daughter.

They may have their own reasons for parroting it, like a family member being trans, but every single one of them is lying and it makes me doubt any other thing they say.

I find it really unkind that trans people that obviously don't pass are told they do, that they'll have no problems finding people to have relationships with, that all their problems will be solved. I don't get how people think any of that is kind.

None of it is true and in a few years when it all comes crashing down it's going to be horrific.

The difference is that it is possible, in fact it is common, for white people to be a little bit black, whereas no male can be a little bit female (and vice-versa in both examples,)

There are millions of people who have black genes from a parent, grandparent or great-gp. But nobody can be 75% male and 25% female.

So trans-racial makes far more sense.

This is one of the things that makes me wonder whether people with ASD are overrepresented in GC feminism just as they are in TRA and aligned groups (though perhaps not to the same extent).

I have an ASD diagnosis, and think it's related to the fact that while I can lie, I feel far more uncomfortable with doing so than my understanding of how the average person feels about it. It's impossible to truly know how everyone else feels, of course, but the impression I get is that it's normal to be reasonably comfortable speaking untruth if it would make things go more smoothly and wouldn't harm anyone. I didn't lie at all as a kid (made my parents so proud at the time… they didn't realise at the time that it wasn't just their excellent parenting but was actually deeply developmentally inappropriate 😂), and when I did learn to, it would turn out to be at the cost of quite strong mental discomfort. And I tend to differentiate types of deception along slightly different dividing lines to the ones people generally seem to use — there are things I'd think of as just plain lying which others use nicer words for.

Words coming from my mouth which don't match what I know reality to be… it makes me feel like I've accidentally walked naked into a roomful of people. Exposed, like everyone can see that what I've said and what's in my head aren't the same. Or… something like shame. There's a lurching feeling. It's hard to explain. But using "she" for someone I know to be male or "he" for someone I know to be female takes a conscious effort every single time I have to use one of the relevant words, with feelings of self-consciousness and exposure and guilt, sometimes layered with resentful feelings towards the people who expect this difficult task of me for the mental ease of others, and embarrassment that I'm submitting to an irrational social demand to obtain the approval of others.

It's not like a lot of other kinds of requests people make to change one's speech to save others' feelings — if you're a communist or a misogynist or deeply religious or an anti-vaccine campaigner or a gay rights activist or an anti-Semite or a vegan or an anti-poverty campaigner or an atheist or think gay marriage is an abomination or like to swear a lot, or any number of other things that mean that some things you might want to say could hurt some other people's feelings, you can choose to not say the potentially upsetting things. I've certainly chosen not to mention that, say, I don't believe in God, when someone's sharing something like the fact they get comfort from praying after their bereavement. But you're generally not required to actively make statements that are the opposite of what you believe. With gender, seemingly there is a social requirement to lie (if you don't genuinely think inside your head of that person as matching that pronoun), and for me it's a very difficult and uncomfortable task, one that I think is unfair to blithely demand of me as though it's nothing.

I think my difficulty with lying, and with telling when other people are lying, is also connected to my low tolerance for deception from others. I'm a reasonably forgiving person, as far as I can tell from my own subjective perspective, but discovering someone's lied to me is an alarm bell. When you struggle to detect deception, it's important to know you can trust the people you choose to spend time with. So I have a strong instinct to avoid people I know to be liars, and when someone is claiming to be something which I know they're not, it's hard work to turn off that alarm.

Took me ages to type that and ExhaustedFlamingo posted in the meantime