Help me work out how to alert my friends to what's happening. Also is my panic irrational?

[FriendofJoanne]

I've posted the Sex Matters petition and all my family and some of my closest friends have signed, but others have said nothing. When we get together we are usually in a group catching up on our lives in general, and I try to talk but haven't managed to so far.

I've shared the petition on our Whatsapp group but only had one contact me separately. I've written a letter but not shared it as there's so much to say. I want to share my worries succinctly - about women's rights being eroded, children being taught that gender is more important than sex, children and vulnerable adults being medicated and given surgery instead of therapy to help them with trauma.

This is affecting my mental health now, I feel sick, depressed and anxious about the world we live in because of this. I care about global warming and the financial inequality of the world too, but this issue has taken over my life. For you others in this who post regularly how do you manage your anxiety? Do you feel anxious? How do you keep going?

I try to put time boundaries around how long I spend reading, but I do tend to listen to podcasts while doing other things.

My husband suggested I step away for a bit, I do need to, but I feel strongly that once I've shared my concerns it will relieve my anxiety and I'll be able to stop obsessing about it.

So please help me very succinctly explain why this issue is so important. Thank you :) Or just some headlines to catch peoples attention to read more. I think a lot of people still don't think its relevant to their lives.

It's a deeply troubling and worrying topic and if you're fairly new to actually seeing it, you can feel a bit like shouting 'can nobody else see this!'

Once you see it, you can't unsee it and you feel like Cassandra warning Troy of impending doom while everyone ignores you.

Yes that's exactly how I feel! I can't unsee it and I want to shout about it. Thank you all for your words of support, I do feel better knowing we're in this together. I have no worries about how my friends will respond, or if they respond. I just want to feel I've 'shouted it out' in the most effective way.

I did post an open letter to Eddie Izzard which I put on my FB and had some supportive responses (I sent it to EI on Messenger but unsuprisingly didn't hear back - I don't expect EI manages EIs own FB account, I did think I might get booted off FB but I'm still there), so I am out on there.

Yesterday I was thinking that if the numbers are so small are we having an overzealous 'transpanic' (as some TRAs would suggest). But no, how can we protect women from male violence if we can't even name them?

For those who suggested I see a GP I do have depression and am on anti-depressants, but tbh I feel that depression is a natural response to the world atm. Plus you know, hormones 🙄- peri-menopausal woman here.

Well done @FriendofJoanne. I think we sane ones are in the majority, it's just that people are scared of the horrible public reactions some of the TRA zealots do online. I have mainly private conversations with people and almost everyone I speak to is GC (academics and lefties so not groups you'd generally consider reactionary). Welcome, well done and yes, take care of yourself and make some lovely new friends

Remember it's a relay race and not all down to you. Even JK Rowling takes a bit of time off to be a parent, write books and get squiffy with her besties. X

Am I having a panic that some women may be raped in prison today by a convicted sex offender they were locked up with and couldn't get away from because the sex offender had rights she didn't?

A panic that some women in prison may be being made to shower with an intact male, with all the utter humiliation that will involve? (And that's the best case scenario for them, if the male person chooses to be nice.)

A panic that some women will end up dying in dangerous relationships because they can't go to a refuge or services because male people are there and they can't be in a mixed sex space because their trauma acts on their perceptions and isn't controlled by how a male person feels about their identity? This one's only a matter of time if it hasn't already happened. And we'll never know, they'll just be in the three a week statistics we accept as normality in the UK.

A panic that vulnerable and marginalised women are being forced out of public spaces and equality of access to facilities and resources because a political lobby claiming to represent the interests of male people with TQ+ identities refuse to consider female need or inclusion and assert their primacy of right over women's spaces?

A panic that some women may avoid or refuse needed health care or admission because they are unable (and in some cases forbidden and prevented) from a mixed sex space, and said lobby will not listen or show the generosity or compassion to meet their needs too , asserting the primacy of male need and that male needs are only met if women obey or leave?

A panic? This isn't a bloody drill, this is now. Any woman not seeing the above as a very major problem, not just to these individual women but to their entire sex class and their fundamental equality in society and their legal rights, is a part of the problem.

How does the misquote go -

^if you can keep your head when all about you
are losing theirs and blaming it on you^

Then you have not fully understood the situation.

@nilsmousehammer exactly

@nilsmousehammer absolutely spot on. So why have we only got 68 799 on the petition to make the equality act clear?! Where's the rest of the UK?! 😭

OP, wrt depression, can I make a book suggestion?

It's deathly boring, but it really did sort some unhealthy thought habits I had, largely by ploddingly and patiently explaining common tendencies that can often lead to or contribute to depressive thought patterns. It kind of thumps you over the head with it until you get it. I've not been depressed since I read it:

www.goodreads.com/book/show/46674.Feeling_Good

I know. I hear you.

It's one of those posts where I press send and sit there thinking 'am I the only one that can see the screaming wrongness of all this?'

Maybe we're the small remaining group of people with ethics still intact. I don't know.

Some good advice on this thread that I can't really better. But just wanted to show solidarity and support to you @FriendofJoanne and others here. The feelings many of your have described I have felt or continue to feel.

This might be a helpful thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4223539-Self-care-for-feminists

Turn it around. Instead of chasing people and feeling disappointed; set a boundary.
Post about safeguarding. Post that you don't support putting vulnerable women in situations that expose them to the risk of rape and unwanted pregnancy, and this is your red line. That people who are complicit or actively supporting these policies have different moral values. And leave it at that.
Then go on to focus your energies elsewhere.

Because people are allowed to think differently to you. And most do. If that terrifies you then I don't know what to suggest. Go live in a bunker and tweet about it for 16 hours a day every day like a certain male ex comedy writer.

Hold you're beliefs if they matter to you. Speak about them if you must. Don't expect others to change as a result of your words or actions. We have ears, eyes and brains of our own.

You're ok with women being raped to make men happier?

You're seriously ok with women losing equality of access to make less than 1% of men happier and able to have absolute freedom of choice?

You're ok with answers that work only for men and inclusion that excludes women to benefit men?

Seriously? You think most people understand and are good with this, and it's weird to have a problem?

Explain that thinking to me. Please.

Yes 👏

Did I say I was ok with women being raped?

Believing that trans lives matter doesn't necessarily erase womens' rights, not if you believe that trans women are women.

Of course absolutely nobody here will agree with that statement. But our family and friendship group is associated with several trans women (a few of whom are reasonably high profile) and you absolutely cannot convince me that I or my children are at any harm from them at all. And to kerb their freedoms and right to live their lives in the way that feels authentic to them would be to kill them.

I see our friends celebrating their birthdays, getting their shopping in Tesco, working in jobs, saving for mortgages and so on. You see dangerous calculating predators that want to invade female spaces and violate women.

It's much more mundane than that. Trans women just want to be able to have a piss without being beaten up by men. They're not in the cubicles chiselling little peep holes and whacking off.

I agree.

Op if you want to post about your views and effectively preach to your friends about this, that’s absolutely fine and you’re entitled to do so but you have to accept you will alienate some people and lose some of those friends by doing so. If you are okay with that then that’s absolutely fine. That’s your choice. I don’t like anyone I know socially trying to tell me what to think or assuming that I need educating because- shock horror- I might have a different view to them. There’s nothing more patronising.
I will do my own thing and come to my own conclusions and when I socialise I don’t want to have these types of conversations or other political type discussions. Many of your friends will feel that way.

OP I'm not saying you can't hold your views. But I am saying you can't expect people to hold them too.

Such drama, if they can't use the women's loos it would kill them!

It really wouldn't.

How lovely though that you live a life untouched by this.

I can assure you that having had female family members in prison though, that this is of great concern to some of us. We may not discuss it with our friends, because, who wants to hear about such things from friends . But the realities of what males are demanding is quite real to many women.

Also the friends and family members who now self-exclude without saying anything to anyone. The ones who limit their activities of going into some toilets because they know that the place is not somewhere that males seeking to use the toilets are likely to go, and who will now not go to the gyms where males access the changing rooms.

You see, while you are celebrating only the wonderful things about your friends, some women are negatively impacted. Some of them will never tell their friends the true reasons they stop doing things though. But they will tell their close friends.

Why? Because did you know that most transitioned male do not pass without extensive surgery and hormones. 85%+ retain their penis. And do you understand that females are very good at working out through body cues who is male and who is female.

Have you ever once listened to a rape victim or an abused woman who has every right to demand single sex spaces?

Trans women just want to be able to have a piss without being beaten up by men.

There is actually no statistics published that show transitioned males are any more vulnerable to attack in male toilets than any other vulnerable male. Shall we also allow all the other vulnerable males into the female toilets too?

And considering the extreme trans activist tactic is to tell us all that being 'female only' has never stopped males with ill intentions from accessing female toilets, why on earth would any transitioned male want to be in a female toilet which seems to be (according to those activists) just as dangerous as the male toilets.

By the way, did you know that one of the fastest growing porn segments is indeed transitioned males masturbating in female toilets. The really popular ones seem to also included the voices of mothers taking their children to the toilet cubicle right beside the masturbating male.

So while your friends just want to piss. Have you also ever noticed all the other things that females do in the toilet that they might not want a male present for? Or have you only ever just taken yourself to the toilet as well? And never had to do anything other than piss.

Nor are the in the womens' ones plotting their evil sexual digressions. THAT'S a pretty dramatic view too.

No. We have also seen many threatening videos from transitioned males taken in female toilets. Maybe you don't ever see them. But we do.

They are pretty dramatic. Particular the ones with weapons or erections.

Of course, safeguarding is not based on some people's lovely friends.

Safeguarding is based on risk. There is not one shred of evidence that a male loses their male propensity to commit sex crime on transitioning. Not one shred.

Have you seen the latest census data? At worst 1 in 585 males who have declared the gender of 'woman' are a sex offender in a UK prison at the moment when you analyse the census data against the current UK prison statistics for transitioned males. At best, it is just over 1 in 1000-1500. It is still much higher than general male population.

That does not included transitioned males who are on the sex offender registry from previous convictions. Just the current ones.

I suggest that rather than shaming OP for her posts and worrying about other women, that maybe understand that just like not all males commit sex crime, but they have been excluded from toilets, changing rooms and any female single sex space for a reason.

That reason was not based on our lovely friends and husbands.

It was based on the risk some males present to women and children.

It's much more mundane than that. Trans women just want to be able to have a piss without being beaten up by men. They're not in the cubicles chiselling little peep holes and whacking off.

Some of them are, though.

I met a transwoman in the ladies' loo, once. I was seventeen. He was at the sink, masturbating by pressing/rubbing his penis against the counter. I didn't understand quite what was going on at the time - I was young and naive. I just left as quickly as I could.

(And no, monitors, I will not afford a masturbating, paraphiliac male that used a teenage girl as unwilling wank fodder female fucking pronouns. Report me, go the fuck ahead. )

So, you agree then? No tw will be killed because they can't use the women's toilet. That is just drama.

On the other hand. There are great long lists, on this very site, of women and children who have been harmed by transwomen. Then there are the children who have been, are being and will be conned into believing transition will solve all their problems. Then there are the women who self exclude because they don't wish to share a changing room with a male stranger, because of their religion or because what woman would? The girls who are getting uti's because the school toilets are gender neutral and they don't wish to use them. The women being displaced and injured by men in their sports. I could go on, and on. I've not mentioned prisons.

Your friends, and, sincerely, I wish them the best, are not all transpeople. I'm sure they're lovely and I'm sure you think yourself very kind. In fact I bet you are kind...to your friends.

Can you answer the Staniland question?

I can’t believe ppl still come on here using “my lovely trans women friends are lovely & therefore all trans women are fine” as an argument. (Also always with the toilets!)

my DH is lovely and no threat to any woman at all. Using the “my lovely trans friends” argument my DH should be able to go into womens spaces as he’s not a threat. I mean I can vouch for him so what’s the problem?

I have a job in a charity dealing with people in food poverty, and more recently living in fuel poverty. Insecure housing, lack of money, security, poor health, poverty of opportunity. This takes its toll so I tend not to actively engage in discussions or campaigns outside of my 9-5 and seek out ways to decompress and escape. Otherwise I would not be able to do my job. If I was sent a petition by a friend I may sign/ not sign with no further comment. Not because I hate the world or the friend but because I need to balance my life/ mood etc.

It is important for you to be able to get distance from things for perspective - feeling hopeless and weighed down by fear that the world is going to hell in a handcart is not constructive.