Oh dear. That is a long one. It was a few things, and not exactly one point though some of it is subjective I suppose.
First off a lot of TRA’s are very liberal and often also preach the concept of cultural appropriation. I am an animist as I mentioned previously and believe the earth has a spirit so I tend to go to a lot of pagan/witchy/native american shops for supplies.
And I once got a very good telling off for appropriating culture for buying things like sage, or wearing certain outfits. It didn’t sit right with me but I was afraid of that making me a terrible privileged racist white woman if I didn’t accept it unquestionably.
I went to my usual shop that is own by a card holding Cherokee family that I am friends with.
I decided to skip the some items that I was told by redditors that is now banned for us white pepper because otherwise we are stealing native american culture. My friend noticed I was buying less things than usual and commented on it. I nervously explained to her my concerns.
She said this
“Things are not that black and white. First who are these people on reddit? Are they white? Do they speak on our behalf? We native americans do not all think the same. Second many of us make our living off of these shops that sell handmade items that are symbolic of our culture. If all white people stopped buying it then we would go out of business and lose our primary source of income. In that respect many of us are harmed. I’m that way their attitudes are harming us. In Hawaii many have similar shops and tourist spots based on their culture. Should they suffer for this utopian view point?”
I agreed with her but hate to admit I still caved to the internet’s demands and slowly stopped shopping there for years. But her words always stuck with me.
There was also the time I started hanging out with some trans and nonbinary people. I noticed the nonbinary people often expressed very similar to their birth sex. I had a friend who was a transwoman but she had a very subtly patronizing way of speaking to me that I just can’t express in words. Nothing she said on paper was wrong in any way. Really it was just a feeling of I am being honest. Actually that was the problem. She always said all the right things. The only word that describes it was she was being insincere and I could sense that about her. We would invite her to girls night outs for drinks and the girls and I would talk about things like sex and periods and pregnancy and we could sense that she was very uncomfortable with these conversations or would try to join in as a weird sort of third wheel or talk about her boobs but it was awkward. We all felt it. So we eventually started avoiding the topics for her sake and the group slowly fell apart. There was also the frustrating policing of topics and language which we all put up with it but I think I started to resent it a little bit. Everything was not about us girls having girl fun anymore. It slowly shifted to lgbt+ topics and this persons feelings. There was a quiet shift and the group eventually fell apart.
When I got married she started talking down to me and when I was pregnant she stopped talking to me without explanation. I was told that I should accept the fact that my pregnancy made her uncomfortable and simply move on.
Then I had midwives call me a birthing person and ask for my pronouns and I actually hated it. I didn’t just hate it I LOATHED IT.
I had a friend ask me if I was going to assign my child female at birth like one of those lame straight cis white people? Or do the right thing and make her a theyby? A theyby is a gender neutral baby if you didn’t know. This hit me really hard because now it’s not about me or other adults anymore about my kid.
During my pregnancy I discovered that Chloe Cole existed. And for years my friends were telling me that minors weren’t being medically transitioned. I realized I was not only lied to but when I raised the issue they got angry at me and started justifying it which frustrated me.
I distance myself from them after that. I was never in support of medical transition of children. I was fine with puberty blockers only because at the time I thought they were harmless. I now know that is also incorrect. But never okay with cross sex hormones or surgeries.
With Chloe Cole everything really started to fall apart for me I think because I knew I had been lied to and that opened the gate up to “Well if they lied about that what else was I lied about too?”
Then I found out my niece was being bullied for being half mexican half white. Not not for her mexican side she was bullied for her white side and her very white appearance. She’s blonde and blue eyed you see. She was told she could not wear a sumbrero for her birthday because she was stealing mexican culture. She was being harassed by a mexican boy. She told him to stop and he said “What are you going to do? Steal my rights white girl?” right in front of the teachers parents and me. Everyone was physically uncomfortable and didn’t want to say anything. We just grabbed her hand and walked away. Her mother had a talk with the school later about it. There was also an incident where the kids told her if she holds a quinceanera they would not attend because she is too white and that seemed to break her and she stopped speaking spanish or bringing up her heritage because of it. It stayed with me.
I started learning about how detransitioners and how they are harassed by TRA’s which confused me. Why are they so furious about them tra sing back? If they just were mistaken about their gender and going back to the correct one why is that so bad? Why do they have to put a positive spin on it all? Why do they have to creep in the shadows? Don’t they share the same goal of living their truth and being who they really are? Unless it was never really about that…
Then the trans kids rights stuff really took off and the weird drag queen stuff. And after that I was really done. Blaire White, Buck Angel and amala ekpunobi helped me come to terms with my feelings I think. I no longer beat myself up for being an evil Terf. 😅 But I did for about a year. It was embarrassing and shameful to me.