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.

As an example, not a single Democrat wanted to protect women's sports recently. There is certainly something of a left / right divide.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/save-womens-sports-bill-passes-house-zero-votes-dems-transgender-bullying

"The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act passed in a 219-203 vote Thursday morning — all the "yes" votes came from Republicans, and all the "no" votes came from Democrats."

@PorcelinaV - it will be interesting to see how that fares in the Senate.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/senate-dem-blocks-bill-save-womens-sports-tuberville-quick-passage

But when Tuberville called on the Senate to pass the House bill by unanimous consent, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, objected on behalf of her party and said the bill would block people from participating in sports "consistent with their gender."

"They continue to hurl insulting lies about transgender girls dominating sports," Hirono said. "But what is true is that these bans are deeply hurtful to transgender girls, particularly transgender girls of color, girls who are gender-nonconforming, and cisgender girls as well."

"This isn't about supporting women and girls," she continued. "This is about power and control. My Republican colleagues are obsessed with controlling women’s bodies and our lives, as we are seeing today."

"We shouldn’t be banning anyone from playing sports, we should be fighting the discrimination that all women and girls — trans, cis or otherwise — continue to face athletics, in the classroom and in the workplace," Hirono added. "For these reasons, I object."

That objection is a sign Senate Democrats will never consider the bill and will not schedule it at all for debate in the upper chamber. Hirono's argument mirrored comments heard in the House debate, when Democrats accused Republicans of "bullying" transgender students by looking to ban their participation in school sports.

There shouldn't be an issue for pre.pubertal children to take part in mixed sports because the safety issue isn't there, but this is being transferred to the post-pubertal age group where it distinctly is.

I don’t understand why anyone believes it now.

years ago I did believe that people could be “born in the wrong body” and have a sex change operation. I guess I didn’t ever really believe that MTF transsexuals were actually women but went along with it.

i changed my mind a number of ago when I realised it didn’t actually make any sense
but I suspect the insanity of the last few years would have peaked me anyway.

I also think a lot of people don’t believe but are bullied by eg people with trans children who weaponise the children and accuse anyone who disagrees with them as the reason for their child’a mental health. Not their piss poor parenting and failing to
teach the child how to cope with reality.

Fairness is still a factor - males as a sex class outperform females from birth. There will always be some girls who can be competitive with most boys but it is never level playing field. Any many girls find it very off-putting paying with and against boys. How many fathers routinely take their daughters out to kick a ball around? Girls need a space they can feel competitive to future their sporting instincts.

That's not quite correct. Boys start to have an advantage from about the age of 9, as testosterone levels start to rise pre-puberty. The degree of advantage depends on the sport, and strength differences aren't great, so mixed sex teams are safe, but the girls will already be at a performance disadvantage.

"For these reasons, I object."

As they are made up reasons then she's not actually objecting to the bill, but to her own BS.

What a numpty.

@Hepwo - virtue signalling.

I think the main reason why this stuff has caught is social media (sorry if this has been said before - I haven't read the whole thread). If you read and like things on SM, you see similar content, right? So if you are politically left-leaning, socially liberal, supportive of LGB rights, etc, and that is content that you view and 'like' then you'll naturally see more and more similar stuff some of that will inevitably be from the trans lobby. You won't see the stuff from people with differing views. So your SM feed becomes an echo chamber dominated by people whose views are pro-trans, who constantly feed you diet of 'anything else is transphobia, bigotry, etc'. I honestly don't think all this culture wars stuff could have gained any traction before SM, because its reach and its algorithms are unparalleled.

I don’t understand why anyone believes it now.

Yes this really baffles me. It's becoming so obvious that a significant number of "TW" are criminal chancers who transition post-crime, or who clearly see an opportunity to access vulnerable women or girls through transitioning. And that a significant number of younger people regret transition and were not told the truth about it, and in retrospect see they were not able to consent because of their age or state of mental health. And that whole gangs of teenage girls are assuming trans identities in one to the clearest cases of social contagion you can imagine. And that men in women's sports are destroying women's sporting opportunities and careers and just don't care because they're grabbing the money and glory.

How can anyone look at these cases and really believe that the second someone announces they're trans, they magically really "are" the opposite sex? It's just so clearly not the reality, and even plenty of trans people themselves have been pointing this out.

To still "believe" and promote this idea now you'd have to be hugely brainwashed, or maybe having doubts but too scared to risk speaking up among your friends or in your workplace. I wonder if there are whole communities and workplaces where everyone now doesn't really believe it but has to keep saying they do because they think everyone else does.

I don’t understand why anyone believes it now.

Nor do I, but then I don't understand why they ever believed it in the first place. I've not seen or heard any remotely convincing arguments.

To me there are two things and it can be summed up with the whole Michfest history:

1970's Feminism is new and becomes culturally powerful. This women only Lesbian focused music festival was born "an entire city run by and for lesbian feminists."

1980's It does well.

1990's In 1991, trans woman Nancy Jean Burkholder was asked to leave the festival.
trans women were excluded from the festival, which became the subject of increasing criticism.

1995, Camp Trans, an annual protest event held concurrently with Michfest that operated adjacent to the festival venue, was launched.[25][26] It was restored as "Son of Camp Trans" in 1999 and lasted until 2010, when the United States Forest Service thereafter revoked its camping permit due to "allegations of violence and vandalism at the Festival, and...a confrontation...near the gates of MichFest".[27]

In 2014, LGBT advocacy group Equality Michigan boycotted Michfest.[7] The boycott was joined by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC),[8] GLAAD,[9] the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), and the National LGBTQ Task Force. Michfest accused the boycott of being "based on misrepresentations, purposeful omissions, and selective editing of prior Festival statements on this issue,"[32] with Vogel referring to the boycott as "McCarthy-era blacklist tactics".[33]
Members of The Butchies and Le Tigre claimed to have been "verbally attacked, endlessly harassed and physically threatened" for deciding to play at the festival.[38]

2015. On April 21, Lisa Vogel announced via Facebook that it would also be the last festival.

I think that 2014 was when social media allowed activists to link together and use it to attack individuals with a new 'weapon'- as someone described it - 'like a swarm of bees'.
#'Me Too' was 2017 had very different aims but it also used this same new cultural power to attack powerful men and get them removed from their jobs or prosecuted.

I recently found this article which was very interesting from a historical standpoint. It was written in 1917 about a boy who had been brought up completely as a girl in a small welsh community.

That's not quite correct. Boys start to have an advantage from about the age of 9, as testosterone levels start to rise pre-puberty. The degree of advantage depends on the sport, and strength differences aren't great, so mixed sex teams are safe, but the girls will already be at a performance disadvantage.

Oh that's really interesting. Is there something concrete one can point to? Primary school do separate girls and boys races for Y5-6 sports day, but secondary school did all sports mixed in Y7-8. Including rugby with contact tackling in Y8. I really hope they've changed that by the time DD goes through but if not I would like to be ready with resources.

I am not sure you can open this Greek one but see if you can find a way.

There is this Greek study and an Australian study that might help you answer your question.

Physical fitness normative values for 6–18-year-old Greek boys and girls, using the empirical distribution and the lambda, mu, and sigma statistical method

Konstantinos D. Tambalis, Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos, Glykeria Psarra, Stelios Daskalakis, Stavros A. Kavouras, Nickos Geladas,

Published online: 24 Sep 2015

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2015.1088577?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab&aria-labelledby=full-article

And the Australian one.

Catley MJ, Tomkinson GR.

Normative health-related fitness values for children: analysis of 85347 test results on 9–17-year-old Australians since 1985.

Br J Sports Med. 2013

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22021354/

Both are mentioned in Hilton and Lundberg

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

By the way, for anyone in doubt about the potential harm ideologically believing in gender and fully supporting male people to attempt to fully emulate the sex they claim they are, there are ramifications in every part of life where being female matters.

Including breastfeeding infants as per NHS Brighton.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4810003-brighton-nhs-trust-recommends-drug-induced-male-breastfeeding-in-their-maternity-protocols

I have no idea. I don't understand it either. Bit done very sensible people I know who I previously respected are saying things like 'science is always moving on, we're making new discoveries about chromosomes, sex is not binary, it's not black and white' and my response is WTF?

I honestly don't understand it. And these people don't seem to care or understand that trans rights do conflict with women's rights, or that it's not fair for men to compete in woman's sports. It's baffling.

Bit done - but some
🙄

I recently found this article which was very interesting from a historical standpoint. It was written in 1917 about a boy who had been brought up completely as a girl in a small welsh community.

That's fascinating. He must have been quite small and slight, as they didn't have any way of restricting growth then. I wonder if he knew he was male before the police examination.

I have no idea. I don't understand it either. Bit done very sensible people I know who I previously respected are saying things like 'science is always moving on, we're making new discoveries about chromosomes, sex is not binary, it's not black and white' and my response is WTF?

They blithely say these things so they don't have to think about it too deeply, including the lack of fairness to women and girls and the effect on children.

I think people who wanted to wear clothes associated with the opposite sex were mistreated in the past. I saw it happen. And people who were upset at this treatment equated it to other mistreatments they witnessed e.g. mistreatment of homosexuals. So many of us wanted to create a tolerant society for everyone. I know I did.

And then I saw G Greer simply ask - what does it even mean to be a woman? And then I started to think. Wait what does it all mean.

So I still want to be tolerant and kind but I started to think there are no winners here. The more rigid a society with strict gender expectations the more problems we create.

I think the problem is societal in the main. I think there are genuinely people who honestly feel they are the opposite sex and dress in the expected way for that sex rather than be who they are and dress how they want. It feels to me that in the past there was more acceptance of dressing different to expectations. Seems more rigid now.

It’s the blitheness that gets me.
I am a scientist who knows a lot about chromosomes so I can easily debunk that crap (and risk my close relationships in the process…) But it’s made me realize what utter rubbish people will spout, basically regurgitating nonsense they’ve gleaned from a source they apparently trust, to maintain their image of themselves as progressive or ‘right on’ (as we used to say). Honestly it’s shocking- I’m talking educated people who I previously thought could actually think for themselves.

saying things like 'science is always moving on, we're making new discoveries about chromosomes

It's tricky because science does move on and should always be open to new discoveries that rewrite the "facts". That happens all the time. So that realise has been co-opted and is used to sneer at people who understand that sex is in fact a binary system and that's how it works, accusing them of only understanding "grade 5 biology" etc.

However this "sex isn't binary, proper scientists know that" stuff is also so stupid and meaningless and doesn't support their argument anyway. If chromosomal science has found sex isn't binary, that suggests there are some in-between states based on chromosomal evidence. If chromosomal evidence is the determiner, then you can't change sex and men and women are defined biologically, which is antithetical to self-ID. Furthermore, if sex was a spectrum why would that somehow mean you can identify as something you're not? Race is a spectrum, age is a spectrum, these things can sometimes be hard to prove or observe, but that STILL doesn't mean you can ID as something you're not and magically become that thing.

This is what has struck me. How many intelligent, educated, socially engaged people - middle aged people with responsible jobs, not just naive students - will regurgitate the most outrageous bollocks, which they evidence with the flimsiest of made up stories.

How many people have just made a choice, whether consciously or not, to just completely abandon critical thinking and accept what the propaganda tells them, as long as the propaganda source is trustworthy in their eyes.

Mind boggling.