How did people start to believe in this trans stuff?

[IsThereAnEchoInHere]

I’m talking about the ’allys’, the one’s who believe in all this?
How did it make sense to them that women have penis’ now, that transwomen can compete with women, that men who were so oppressive yesterday can today be the most oppressed transwomen?

How did they get to that point?
How did it make sense to them?

To be complitely honest, I tried/ am trying to ’be nice’ and understand, but the more I read (from trans people, allys) the less it makes sense.
I wanted to understand, but my brain won’t let me.

Because somehow not believing that people can change sex is ´homophobic’ and means that you are ‘allied with the far right’.

It's mind blowing.

A friend of 30 odd years, a man with a homophobic father who was a vicar, immediately after the GRA in 2004 started coming to the pub dressed as a woman. He went on to leave his wife and kids and start up relationships with men. It's so obvious what he's doing and yet apparently this internalised homophobia he has, where he can only accept his attraction to men by changing his name and spending hours shaving his body hair off, and putting on a costume, is progressive to liberals. He's almost 70 years old now.

That generation of men with such profoundly internalised homophobia have wreaked a lot of damage.

They are the ones that need to wake up.

It literally is mind-blowing.

The profound misogyny AND homophobia in transactivism is seen as ‘progressive’ by so many. 🤯

I just can’t wrap my head around it.

I can’t either but I have some hope that the current teens are seeing through it all apart from the ones who are mired in it (whole other story of sad girls with mental health issues) It’s definitely not ‘cool’ among my daughter’s peer group. There is a ‘transwoman’ in her college who came into the loo while she was at the basin and my daughters friend was in a cubicle. The transwoman spoke to someone and then left. Daughter’s friend came out and asked ‘why was there a man in the ladies loo?’ She hadn’t seen the person. It just summed it up for me. ‘Yes, exactly! Why is there a man in the ladies loo in my daughter’s college?!!’ Both girls were baffled and uncomfortable. This is not even someone who has made any attempt at transition apart from clothes.

My 21yr old won't speak to me because I'm a "TERF".
She's studying biology ffs.

The cognitive dissonance is unreal- it really is like a religion @TastesLikeStrawberriesOnASummerEvening maybe over time when she goes into biology in more depth she might begin to see the light. It’s hard though when a lot of science and medical journals have been captured.

My kids are young teens and tweens and I talk to them about it. DS is very dismissive and eye-rolly about it all.

DD plays a lot of sport. She doesn’t want to share changing rooms with, nor compete against, male bodied people - no matter how they identify.

At the moment, she does, because she’s 12 and a lot of the teams are mixed. But she can very much see the inherent unfairness of sports being mixed sex, post-puberty. I can sense that feeling of impotent powerlessness in her, that I think so many of us have where we consider this issue.

Her all-girls basketball team played against a boys’ team yesterday. They lost, but only narrowly. But some of those boys are huge and aggressive.

She plays waterpolo - and categorically does not want to share changing rooms where she’d have to get naked with male-bodied people.

Netball is her main sport, and for the most part, it’s girls. She follows the championship, and can luckily see only women playing other women. Every time I watch one of those games, I think how different it would be, if male-bodied people were also on the court, with their bigger size, faster pace, greater aggression in defending/boxing out, etc, and higher spring capacity. It would be ruined.

This is a long-winded way of pondering whether it’s the millennials and older Gen Z who’ve swallowed the ideology hook, line and sinker. But whether younger Gen Z are looking at it with their own critical eyes, minus the indoctrination. It’s just my tiny sample size, so who knows. But maybe there is some hope.

I have a theory that scientists are more likely to be captured because there's no real original thought until PhD level, it's more like facts. Of course that's not real science but the whole body of evidence stuff is actually talked about more in social sciences and humanities!

I don't get when it became a medical thing
In 1999 I was at school. There was a girl who used her surname instead of her female name, wore the boys uniform and had a shaved head. None of us questioned it. She was "yeah I'm female but I'm comfortable like this"
She used the girls toilets, and would change privately. Absolutely no bullying from anyone, it was just who she was and she didn't need hormones or breasts removing. Yet now she probably would have been pushed down the surgical route

Why can't that be a thing? If you want to dress as the opposite sex or have long hair or wear makeup or whatever

Even my mum called her lad
Me "she's female mum!"
Mum nooooo I've been calling her lad for years

It’s a long time since I studied science at university and I don’t think this was entirely true then - maybe in first and second year but in third or fourth we were writing dissertations and doing some research so we had to think about things properly. But definitely the real independent thinking comes at PhD level. I think younger students are desperate to fit in and so will go along with anything that gives them a sense of belonging.

It’s very hard to understand when you went through the gender nonconformity of the 80s how it has come to this! I used to bring photos of John Taylor from Duran Duran to the hairdressers and that was completely normal! And the 90s and the whole grunge thing/Pulp/Blur etc playing with gender stereotypes but everyone still knows who was a boy or a girl.
it’s all completely the wrong way around now. I really do despair. Agree with the pp though - I do think it’s a millenial/ older gen z thing.

If it's badly taught, maybe. And perhaps it also depends on the science.

My undergraduate zoology degree covered competing theories and evidence behind each one, previous wrong theories and how and why they were both developed and disproved [1], history and philosophy of science, being presented with raw evidence to analyse and interpret, original research...

[1] Did some of this at A-level as well. And analysing and interpreting data.

That's excellent, I'd hope and assume it's like that in all branches.

I was at the less capturable end of subjects. A rather large chunk of my degree was about the evolution of sex, and my dissertation was on disruption to the mechanisms of sex determination, so I started with quite sound defences against any 'it's a complicated spectrum' handwavey arguments. Something like theoretical physics may be less useful on that front.

Yes, although I do.love a debate about whether reality exists or string theory. Is consciousness even real? Quantum physics. Etc.

It started with be kind and embracing diversity and the glamorisation of drag. And liberal people wanting to do the right thing.

But how do people get convinced that lying about something you can see in front of your face is right? And how don't they feel weird about doing it? That's the bit I can't get over and makes me feel insane to see it happening.
Let's be honest, no one looks at Eddie Izzard and sees a woman, do they? Some will shout loudly about anyone who has womanly feels is a woman, but we all (adults at least) know the truth.
This is without even touching on puberty blockers and hormones/surgery for children and young people.

It think very few people who berate others, who shame others for not believing that any kind of practice - that is either medical treatment or simply a supposedly deeply held belief that it is just true - can make any male a woman or a girl, think it though. I particularly notice this when horrific incidences such as this occur.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-65610429

That there are still politicians gripping on to describing this male as a 'woman' is fucking grim. Are all those supporting male people's words that they are 'women' are complicit in this? Well, I have my thoughts on that. This is the result of lowering boundaries of children and woman. I remember when this male was posting on twitter about how horrific it was that people opposed the GRR in Scotland. Within weeks, this male was raping a schoolgirl!

Because of extreme activist action in Scotland, this schoolgirl might have very well had to have had a male medical examiner despite her choice. Because that is what a MALE CEO of a Rape Crisis group in Edinburgh was insisting happen, because that male, Mridul Wadhwa is a MALE who took a female role and who has told female victims that they must REFRAME their trauma to accomodate male people such as Wadwa who say they are women and want to be accepted as female in a female only support group.

That is the outcome of this blind acceptance. Whether people intend this with their support or not. That would have been the outcome if women did not campaign at a huge detriment to themselves to change the law with the addition of those few words, and by starting their own rape centres for female only people.

And yet, some people still try to defend these rapists right to be in female prison.

It’s the logical conclusion of left wing beliefs. When an ideologies core beliefs become dominant in the culture, institutions and power structures then these ideas eventually run to their logical conclusions. That’s where it came from.

I disagree. I'm pretty left wing, and so are many of the people I talk to on Mumsnet, and we see straight through this bullshit. It's very much a TRA tactic to tie GC opinions to right-wing politics.

Exactly @Britinme

It's difficult to say that "men are now women" is the logical conclusion of anything, because it makes no sense.

So I wouldn't say it exactly follows from previous left-wing beliefs. It doesn't follow from support for gay marriage for example.

However, the drive towards "inclusivity" and "non discrimination", it is playing out left-wing politics in some sort of sense imo.

GC women are not even viewed as merely right-wing by the TRAs - that’s too mild. No, we are all far-right fascists and nazis! Concerned women on the feminism corner of a parenting website called Mumsnet … are seen as far-right frothing bigots. Unbelievable. I’m left-wing and always have been, but the hard left is not a place I want to be. The TRAs refuse to acknowledge how many of us are left-wing because it doesn’t fit their narrative of the far-right t3rf bigots.

No, they have to smear, discredit and silence us as Nazis and fascists - it’s the only tactic they have.

But most women who identify as feminist are left-leaning (if we must place people in categories).

My first post on this thread acknowledged I am exactly that - left-leaning, liberal, progressive.

But it’s this very issue that has seen the scales fall from my eyes and reveal exactly how intolerant the left is these days. At least as intolerant as the right.

It’s a terrible place to be for social cohesion, and I am floundering at the moment.

My ‘movement’ has latched into a profoundly regressive, misogynistic, homophobic cause, and is not only embracing it, but silencing - and even acting violently - towards anyone who disagrees.

I can’t understand it. There are non so blind as those who will not see.

Not sure why being to the right politically is associated with racism tbh. It's labour who were anti immigration because it takes working mens jobs. Traditional aspirational conservativism sits well with most immigrants value sets of work ethic and education etc. As long as you work hard neoliberalism has no issue with different ethnicities. Plus the tories are a broad church so happy to include all on the right unlike some on the left who prefer tribal ideologies.

It was also labour unions against women having the right to work not so much the capitalist right 😆