My fears for the future.

[RealityFan]

Borne of being a bit of a glass empty person, never "happier" than when fussing and worrying.

Despite fighting talk on this forum, I'm less and less sure that the gender critical battle will come around our way.

If Starmer feels he can get away with it, he'll more and more sideline the What Is A Woman? question. FWIW, I'm unsure how salient it is across all voters, let alone all women. Trans issues are almost negligible in highlighted concerns amongst voters in opinion polls.

Unfortunately Mumsnet is not the outside world. Women especially may either neglect, or de-prioritise unease with gender issues, to get a government that will fund the NHS, social care, housing, nursery education etc.

If Starmer botches things and it's a Hung parliament or minority Labour administration, the LDs, Greens and SNP will extract such concessions that Starmer likely will cave on demands from Leftist Progessives in his own party and minority parties to kowtow on at least the direction of travel being Self ID, at the very least absolute draconian laws on conversion therapy ban to include trans, rigid hate speech laws as being passed in Ireland where any skepticism expressed will be stamped on, enforced pronouns and absolute ban on misgendering locked tight.

So, a sweeping Labour win brings changes in, or Starmer does another U-turn when in power. Anyone happy to vote for him hoping helltvo lukewarm in power? A marginal win, and we're in unpredictable progessive overreach territory.

And the Conservatives, my natural party to vote for, a busted flush over 14 years by the time of the GE, only now upping their game on trans issues, yet too late and too incompetent, so that the only party half decent in this area, is almost guaranteed to hand over the keys.

So, that's our political landscape. Further pessimistic feelings generate reading Eliza Mondegreen's report on EPATH conference, just a Hellish narrative of total child abuse, being driven through into the medical mainstream.

Throw in the recent UNESCO and WHO proposals, a de facto prospectus to revitalise the PIE agenda, Self ID and hate speech laws ramping up all way across the West.

And sane voices to the contrary, obviously speaking to the ordinary man and woman in the street (JKR, Billboard Chris, Sharon Davies, Graham Linehan, Posie Parker etc), effectively still marginalised by the anxiety-laden freeze in public discourse.

This feels like a never ending (un)civil war, the TRA forces now strategically embedded in every leftist/centrist party throughout the West, MSM, and more and more rightist parties, civic society, either enthusiastic or acquiescing. Woke capitalism rounding up the forces of capital, actors and musicians and writers on board making the case, "social capital" so to speak.

So, as our brave GC rearguard action creates hits that truly shake this edifice, the direction of travel from the TRA leviathan feels inexorable.

It feels weird for big wins like the end of No Debate, Tavistock expose, IOC ruling, Starmer having to consider his messaging, Sturgeon falling on her sword over Adam Bryson, Nike and Bud Light humiliated in public.

But I'd say these remain skirmishes, the trans edifice is rolling over us slowly but surely.

For the last few decades I always argued as an atheist with my devout Christian friend that humans fuck it up but also fix it.

On trans issues, I'm now only believing the first bit of that sentence.

Am I right to be this down hearted? Who wants to pick me up? Lol.

AI and climate change are existential threats. Gender ideology is also an existential threat, but a more insidious one because it's less external and operates like a cult or religion. To me it's a fundamental issue of truth - if we can get people to lie about something as obvious as biology, then build a new world on their lies, then we have no foundation for a decent society.

Plus I am fucking SICK of the misogyny and women always coming off worst.

@PennineWay The many very real changes that are likely to be happening over the next 5 years are quite scary. We should all be re-evaluating how we live and what we prioritise and put our energies into.

Not sure how to quote properly!

Penine, if you are putting your energy into spreading the word about these threats and encouraging others to do the same, could you offer more detail on these threats, which specific aspect, what do we think it will look like? I don't disagree with you, but I don't have a crystal ball to predict how these are likeliest to emerge and manifest.

Which elements (if you don't mind me asking) of you're own life have you evaluated and adjusted accordingly to how you perceive things are going to pan out? Where is your energy being redirected?

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Firstly I think politics and social change and ever-growing economic disparity and the CoL and climate crises and this age of social media and the muscle flexing of key global players like Russia and China… and now AI as PP rightly point out…. all combined mean the future is extremely hard to predict. I think all we can do is our best now to make the issues known and to work out the right people to speak to that we personally can influence, to try to put the pressure on for democratic legal change. That’s going to look different for everyone which is a great strength. So many bases are being covered.

Its taken me an embarrassingly long time to understand that women have always and will always, need to fight hard against misogyny. (and that gender identity politics is just a relatively new presentation of that.) There will be others we can’t think of yet ,coming at us in our lifetimes.

It’s a hard realisation because like many people now in mid life I remember my mother and grandmother telling me how much better things are now for women than they had been for them. I could see historically how starkly and dreadfully women had been oppressed. I naively fell for a post war, sheltered assumption that (like the standard of living…. !) , because this change had come for them, because they had fought and lived it, that their sacrifices must be worth a permanent change, and that there would be an upward linear social ‘progress’, as part of which women’s equality would continue to improve, generation by generation.

I took comfort in knowing things like equal pay or relatively accessible access to abortion were already the law (… !) so although the daily sexual harassment on the street was awful, and although globally women were still having a terrible time, because I could go out and earn a living, even though I felt a bit gaslit I hoped for the best and it took me having kids and working to really, completely open my eyes to how far women in the UK still had to come.

i hadn’t properly factored that things would also go backwards, though I did imagine that with our daughters and future generations we also we have new different challenges now, that our grandmothers and mothers didn’t have to face. That’s not to be disrespectful in any way to the horrific experiences they had lived through.

So the best response as I can think to that is just as far as we can, let’s each do what we can, and let’s keep this fight up for our whole lives. And then we will get somewhere. And that’s because we are many. There’s more of us [women] than there are of you, as the women sing at the screaming counter- protesting TRAs at Hyde Park Corner.

If it’s feeling like it’s overwhelming and you’re getting burnt out, have a break, step away from social media, do what you need to recharge and restore yourself. This work will always be there, but there’s so many women thinking and talking about it now. That’s a massive cause for hope. It also isn’t ever on any one women’s shoulders to fix this . That’s just an impossible dream of personal power and is a guilt trip burden that we all need to let go of. Take care OP.

OP, no need to worry that the trans BS will extinguish reality. Doesn't happen. Reality always wins.

Now, whether it'll win in our lifetimes ... that's another question 😞. Although the outlook does seem better to me than it did a couple of years ago.

The biggest problem I see is that as people wake up to the bollocks, they'll also decide that it proves right wing gender straitjackets were always the way to go. After all, the right wing were the only ones who spoke up early on. (Nobody hears feminists. We're in the ultrasonic.) So they'll swallow a whole lot of sexist Tory BS with it, and damage everyone.

One of the first things I read on this was about a decade ago. An American journalist writing about his misogynist journalist colleague who out of the blue in middle age IDd as female, and made life hell for any female who crossed swords with him.

He told his friend that this situation couldn't hold. That the public couldn't be forced to distort their sense of reality, what they saw. And that there could only be losers in the long run with the inevitable reaction.

And that reaction is starting...

Yes, all this, too.

The transgender mashup of male/female seems to - ironically - be paralleled by increasing distance and polarisation between what are termed "women's interests" and "men's interests". BOTH need to be taken into account and carefully calibrated and balanced, if we are to have any hope of maintaining a positive and cohesive social fabric over the next century, while all the other Big-Name existential threats play out.

"The respect that men give to women is not innate, it is a social contract and varies in different times and places."

Quite. And whilst I'd like to invert that quote as well - the respect that women give to men is also not innate; it is a social contract and varies likewise over time and place - we are all aware that men have the physical strength advantage over women, so it is never in women's interests to alienate, belittle or generally make enemies of men.

When the sh*t hits the fan - whether via AI, or climate change, or gender insanity - sane women and men need to be standing side by side, to have any hope of prevailing.

OK OP well I hadn’t RTFT before posting and have a few issues now:

OP, your experience of feminism is completely your own experience and doesn’t chime with mine at all in any way.

I don't recall a single vocal feminist in the 80s-00s period who viewed stay at home mums as anything other than second class and sell outs.

It was all Nicola Horlick "you can have it all, a successful City career and satisfied mother", I really can't remember the likes of Suzanne Moore having anything other than barely restrained disdain for women who chose the more traditional path.

I do believe this is fuelling young women's attitudes in being TWAW...if women indeed CAN have it all, and gender gaps are narrowing or non existent, then it's a natural consequence for not only men wanting to be women, but quite literally becoming them as well

You seem to be blaming feminists (in the way you imagine them which sounds to me more like a strange subset of media talking heads..) for today’s ills. That’s nonsense. Suzanne Moore is not to blame for TRAs. How ridiculous.

Actually today’s ills IMO are caused by a men’s sexual rights and sexual access campaign. Men who fucking hate feminism. And men who see all women as lesser other. And are anti safeguarding. And are anti science and anti reality. And are massively pro- individualistic narcissistic consumerism and so on and so on. And pro- transition of children to provide convenient poster children for a cause

I know nobody apart from Tv chat show presenters who ever paid attention to or held up Nicola Horlick and her umpteen children and city job as any kind of an achievable reality for women or anything to aspire to in the first place. The feminist women I knew in the 80s and 90s were way too busy trying to navigate their lives balancing unemployment, then work and need for childcare and then having a partners’ economic support and not having it, or dealing with domestic violence, or trying not to have their heads done in by policies arising from the Thatcher and Major Tories’ stigmatising of single mothers, young (‘gymslip’) mothers, lesbian mothers, working mothers.

They were all preoccupied with earning enough as a family to feed their kids and beimg able to spend some time with their kids not judging SAHMs. They protested when they could at Greenham Common, against clause 28, and against apartheid. They wanted choice for women ;not to be appointing themselves to prescribe what that choice should look like. They just wanted the radical notion that women are people.

also OP despite as posters have pointed out for years on here this is not a left/right party political split. I get it that for some people the Tories come out as preferable on this which seems like misplaced confidence to me, since we are supposed to value evidence, although I do see it said a lot on here.

Yes the Tories will say anything to retain power, that’s not new, but I’m still wondering What GC Things (in their 13 years in power with a big parliamentary majority to act), Have the Tories Actually Done?

What good did ‘Boris knowing what a woman is’ actually do for GC women? and then Liz, and now Rishi?

The GC advances that I see are based on legal cases funded by women like us and professionals raising concerns (Cass report) and on excellent media attention-building by JKR and Posie.

Plus I can’t completely ignore the ruination of this country under the Tories, which is blighting women and children’s lives economically and socially, so there’s that.

I agree with Quixote analysis:

The biggest problem I see is that as people wake up to the bollocks, they'll also decide that it proves right wing gender straitjackets were always the way to go. After all, the right wing were the only ones who spoke up early on. (Nobody hears feminists. We're in the ultrasonic.) So they'll swallow a whole lot of sexist Tory BS with it, and damage everyone.

All parties need to wake up and not by having a knee jerk reaction when they do do so, they all still need to learn to trust women; and we will have to make them do it ourselves in our own lifetimes, and certainly at this stage there isn’t a single GC party to support, even if you are a single issue voter.

I think you're being a bit disingenuous, Sloth, in making out that feminism has never had a difficult relationship with the concept of motherhood.

You said "They wanted choice for women ;not to be appointing themselves to prescribe what that choice should look like."

But really, they wanted women to be able to choose NOT to be SAHMs, and to be able to be like all the men, for whom having offspring did not imply any change (explicitly negative or not) in their lives/freedom/careers.

And as for your paragraph blaming EVERYTHING solely on MEN - last I checked, Susie Green was female, that Irish surgeon in America jubilantly "yeeting the teets" off pubescent girls was female... I'm sure most of the TRAs would also (mysteriously) identify as feminists. You can't just blame it all on men.

Slothtoes · Today 09:53
What good did ‘Boris knowing what a woman is’ actually do for GC women? and then Liz, and now Rishi?

They did a lot by doing this because up until then saying such a thing publicly was almost considered a crime, and certainly considered to be transphobic.

Kier Starmer still can’t spit it out.

Boris did not create that climate- he rightly saw the way the tide was turning. Which is a great thing to hear, but two prime ministers later it needs to be followed up with concrete actions to support and protect women if that is the party view

Agree about Kier 100% but as a lawyer presumably he would point to GRA.. which is why GRA needs to be repealed

@RealityFan you have said yourself you have no skin in the game; can I ask why it is you care so much?

Freedom of speech, secular tolerance, material reality?

Interested in what @RealityFan has to say which is why I @'ed him.

Hi Mater, Forwarder got in there pretty quick. Like a German tourist at the beach or poolside, lol.

Partly this is a reaction to my anti feminist past. Not that I was a total bastard or alpha male, but I spent my youth and early adulthood being pretty spiky towards women, obsessed and scared stiff at the same time.

NOT the healthiest mindspace to have been in. However this was counterbalanced by my warmer empathetic side reflected in my work as a therapist where I see likely more women than men, and in having some close female friends and a fantastic GF, well, I actively moved to distance myself from previous more harsh attitudes.

No transformation, just an evolution to being more humane, which means I also like myself more as well.

So, whereas three decades ago I'd have viewed transactivism on a purely libertarian basis (do whatever you want to do to make yourself happy...if you as a woman don't like men in your rape refuge, well then create your own...aren't feminists saying women and men should be equal, what's more equal than a man becoming a woman or vice versa...it's all personal choice...etc) and shown no sympathy for women complaining, NOW my mindset and headspace and how I see the world has fundamentally shifted.

I used to see the selfish pursuit of purely personal happiness as the only game in town, a reaction to my religious upbringing which stressed duty, community, and a greater good.
For me, hedonistic pleasure and a strict libertarian attitude (legalise drugs, prostitution, euthanasia) was all.
As I got older, learnt from my clientele (just being around women helped me), and developed proper bonds, I've done a 180 on my harsh Darwinian attitudes.

What I haven't gone back on is my iron clad belief in free speech, the need to argue concepts, the need to base policy on empirical data not elusive lived experience (which is important but can't be basis of laws or ethics), basically the need to test all concepts, especially where one has to balance rights of one group against another.

And I maintain my dry as Saharan SOH, honed on Monty Python, Yes Minister, BlackAdder etc etc.

And much more stuff besides.

So imagine my dismay as I latch onto the first stories on trans that drift across my radar, and which don't leave my conciousness...the child specialist banned from her own child safeguarding conference for mentioning child safeguarding issues associated with the genderfication of education and direction of travel of Mermaids and Tavistock...Posie Parker vilified over intial Adult Human Female campaign...JKR modern day witch hunt, silencing of Rosie Kay etc...my therapist alarm bells ringing as scandal after scandal of instant affirmation/lifelong medicalisation cases come to light...reading the sheer poetry of Eliza Mondegreen resistance...moving onto following Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier, Kara Dansky.

Well, if a guy ever can become at least "feminist adjacent", that's me, lol.

And then I look back on how horrid I had been in the past and feel I can't shirk this fight. Making amends? Maybe. I certainly can't ignore or look the other way.

And by not looking the other way, I'm forced to take a stand. For me that means never looking for conflict. But if it's necessary to express my opinion, I will.

I won't kowtow to pronouns, I won't stop posting, I will argue (sensitively, in an informed manner). And I'll never vote for a left party, which really hurts me as someone who has a deep interest in politics, but my principles are now set.

So, nouveau feminist, free speech warrior, politically homeless, and Mumsnet afficionado. RealityFan indeed.

Is that a long enough answer? Lol.

I agree that decent men and women need to stand shoulder to shoulder on this. It's one of the reasons I love KJK's approach. She clearly loves the decent men out there (the majority) and I think the attitude of many 'feminist's to SAHMs (which she famously was) is part of why she doesn't call herself a feminist.

I also strongly agree - having been a SAHM - that being a SAHM is sneered at by a certain demographic of 'feminists' in the UK as well as being seen as a bad choice in general in the UK. I've been a SAHM in the UK and also in another European country, the difference in the way I was treated was stark. It was seen as a valuable contribution to society and as valid as any other 'career' or life choice in the European country, not so in the UK.

I find in the UK mothers are simultaneously expected to be perfect mothers and excellent employees and there is never any ground given to the idea that it's actually quite difficult to do both well at once. Even the child dying when the mother was working at home during covid seems to have had little impact to this expectation that mothers can 'do it all' (often there's a gaslighty attempt to say 'have it all' when generally speaking this involves a lot of work).

Again, interestingly, child care workers were paid much more in that country and had to be qualified. It sort of had a bit of a double effect - more people chose to be SAHMs in children's early years because the cost of care was so high but of course also there was less turnover of staff in nurseries because work conditions were excellent and the nurseries were much better funded with excellent facilities and better ratios.

belief in free speech, the need to argue concepts, the need to base policy on empirical data not elusive lived experience (which is important but can't be basis of laws or ethics), basically the need to test all concepts, especially where one has to balance rights of one group against another.

I believe in all of this too. My fear of genderism goes beyond the real harms happening to women and children as a result.

If we live in a society where people can be forced to deny reality - even very basic realities like the fact there are two biological sexes in humans - then anything is possible. I keep thinking what next? Are we all going to be told that we have to say the earth is flat, or face censure (flatphobic hate crimes for which we'll be imprisoned?)?

I know it's probably been over quoted but Orwell's writing on this is so important - “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” That's what's happening. Women are not allowed to say if they see a male body in a dress. Fine if that man thinks he's a woman, whatever, but when all the institutional structures are colluding in the suppression of that woman's ability to name reality as she sees it and the impact that reality has upon her & her children- then the state can do anything to the populace and make any outrageous demand and we live in a totalitarian state.

It's happening in other areas too - politicians of all stripes now just say the most outrageous things which are provable lies and contradictions then spin and spin (as well as suppress alternative narratives) until the uninformed just believe it.

It's terrifying. The takeover of this anti-reality compelled speech on whether humans can change sex has happened by stealth largely and there are strong parallels with other dark times in humanity's history.

It's especially terrifying if you have children. The world is far more fucked up than when I was a child.

I try to hope that this is a force for exposing the true level and nature of misogyny in society, and that when we get through it, lessons will have been learned and women will be in a better position over all. I also think the tsunami of damage to gender confused children will force society to rethink social media and how to protect people from social contagion.

Dimorphism, when I pointed out that my early reading of feminism was that SAHMs we're pretty roundly ostracised, I was told I didn't know what I was talking about, so thanks for confirming I wasn't 100% wrong.

I think we're in full agreement, hence the title of my thread.

Well my lived experience as a SAHM is that you're absolutely right, and I believe KJK has said the same. I find most SAHM who also do much activism around women's rights have got stories of being criticised for their choice to care for their own children.

It does seem to be a societal thing in the UK. I found it a real shock when I returned from living abroad. It was frankly, an awful experience 'coming home' and sometimes I really regret the decision (which was one we made as a family).

@RealityFan @dimorphism I share your views about the attitude to SAHMs. I was one for several years and then worked a day or so a week from home for about a decade. Feminist writing in eg the Guardian never seemed to look at life from my angle and I always felt I was letting the side down but our circumstances made it the most viable choice. I felt completely adrift from feminism for a long time - very little time or brain space in which to think about it, and when I did, it had its back turned to me.

Rant over!