What have you learned from the trans takeover

[Thatgirl1981]

what have you learned about
Your own political beliefs

has this issue made you think about others differently.

has this made you take a different look at other issues.

for me I now would say I have friends that are feminists 🤭
and I also started going to church and I never thought that would happen in my view we need religion a lot of the activists say they are secular but they are clearly in a cult religion

oh and I speak to my son about the importance of free speech more more than I ever thought I would need to

How many individual women and organisations are going to have to fight this through court, with all the expense and stress and months of life involved, and get a clear legal judgement that proves that they were right and well within the law and the other party weren't, before something actually changes?

The results keep coming in. The batshit keeps on rolling. Today apparently, the met have decided that threatening violence is no biggie so everyone trot on. Of course we all know that what they meant was exclusively men threatening women is no biggie: if women do it I suspect PC Gull will be launched at high speed. To embarrass himself and CPS yet again and drag a woman through hell in order to months later admit they can't take it to court because it wouldn't stand up. But she's a very naughty girl anyway and they hope having stressed the living crap out of her she won't do anything like say no to men again.

Where the fuck is some government? Where have all the grown ups gone?

I have learned: that Twitter is dangerous to women; that law is complicated and sometimes you need the law to say the opposite of what you think you'd want it to say to achieve the effect you want; to think very carefully about my politics and about my own beliefs and assumptions; to look at the evidence; to neither dismiss nor accept people's arguments on the grounds of who they are or what else they believe.

And finally I have learned that there will be no quick fix or sudden turn around; but if we all keep going then step by step we will get there.

Just gardened for Sybil Ruth.

Just how could those in their ivory towers, their grammar school/private school/European finishing school/Russell Group uni/Cambridge Oxford elite educations, their widespread reading and travelling, their awareness of history and women's struggles and hard-fought rights, their knowledge of child development especially brain chemistry, and 101 other relevant things...how could they deny knowledge, natural justice, common sense, child safety...to pitch themselves to this particular wagon?

I think some of it stems from the notion (that started doing the rounds a few years before gender identity ideology in its current form took hold) that people are born gay and that's that.

As a lesbian, I did wonder at the time if that was definitely scientifically proven beyond all doubt, as I feel my instincts and lots of anecdotal evidence (including my own childhood and other factors that I strongly suspect might be relevant to my sexuality personally) suggest to me that while there might be a genetic susceptibility to homosexuality, I don't think it's that far-fetched to believe that very early childhood can influence sexual orientation too in some cases.

Furthermore, genetic predisposition and environmental factors aren't mutually exclusive when it comes to something as complex as psychology and sexual orientation, so I didn't see this as particularly controversial. Until I gingerly voiced this opinion to others in LGB circles and got lambasted in an almost identical way to the way gender critical people do nowadays. This was a few years before the gender identity stuff took off.

I was firmly told that "the science was settled" (I think it was something about penguins or someone's uncle or something) and that I was completely incorrect and terribly homophobic to question whether gay people are all definitely born gay or whether environmental factors might also play a part in some cases.

Despite thinking "well, I'm no psychologist but even I can see various potential patterns in the large number of gay people I know and their stories", I reconciled this personally on the basis that the "gay people are born gay" narrative was deemed necessary and very effective in the fight to end horrific gay conversion therapy practices. Obviously, because you can't change it if it's just how people come out of the womb, whereas if there's even an inkling that it might have been influenced by early childhood, parental attachment, etc, then it gives weight to the idea that perhaps it can be changed by conversion therapy. (To clarify, I don't believe conversion therapy works and I personally think that sexual orientation is probably fixed as whatever it ends up being by early childhood at the latest).

Also, it's not like anyone nowadays is going to study the causes of homosexuality, as what would be the point other than to argue for conversion therapy or to suggest that being gay is less desirable and/or problematic? I don't care that we don't know why people are gay, but it did bother me that people were adamant that we were definitely born this way, as it made me wonder where that left me if that's actually true - It made me wonder whether there were two subclasses of gay people and whether, if my homosexuality was rooted in my early childhood attachment issues as I believed, conversion therapy might actually work for me after all.

Incidentally, it's similar to how when non-trans people tell me they're definitely "cis" and that they feel their gender identity for themselves, it made me question whether there was something wrong with me if that's what all people, trans or otherwise are experiencing, because I don't feel mine.

I can't have been the only gay person who had this experience of being told to shut up and just support gay rights when questioning the science behind the mantra. So I learned that "gay people are born gay" was a helpful message in the fight for gay rights, even though I didn't take it to be literally true. i never really said it myself as I can't personally justify it and I think the science doesn't seem completely settled - I just stopped questioning it as it did seem to be a helpful narrative that advanced gay rights. I just saw it as a potentially useful shortcut to convince people that you can't choose not to be gay, no matter how hard you try.

When ideas such as TWAW came around, I initially viewed these in a similar way to the way I'd got on board with "gay people are born gay". I thought no-one meant it literally but that it was more of a idea, around treating people with respect, and suchlike. That's how most LGB people I know took it at first too.

Stonewall et al knew exactly how to sell a phrase like this as they'd already done it incredibly successfully with "some people are gay - get over it" (which is the same message as "gay people are born gay"). Plus, gay people like me were already fully on board with the notion that even if you don't believe a statement is literally true, it can still be a very helpful mantra in explaining a minority group's position to the general public who don't understand "us" at all.

I also think another factor is that gay rights have only come about relatively recently, and the times of misunderstanding, suspicion and horrific homophobic discrimination are so fresh in people's memories that it's very easy to draw false parallels with how gay people were treated very recently. It's still very raw and painful for many LGB people, and heterosexual people still experience a lot of collective guilt for all the prejudice, which often colours their judgment massively on trans issues.

Obviously these aren't the only factors in why intelligent people jumped on the gender train so quickly and willingly. But I do think that given that the LGB community and their existing ally base were used as vehicles to spread the trans message initially, the conditions were ripe for this to go exactly the way it has.

I hear you. My only reply is that whether you're born gay, or environmental factors lead to you becoming gay, being gay is an objective phenomenon, attraction to the same sex.

Trans OTOH is a pure impossibility. One cannot change sex. In the grand scheme, gender is pure subjectivism, but there's no objective changing sex.

The more the trans lobby pushed this, the more I realised it was BS, the legendary Helen Joyce confirming this.

I’ve learned that Germaine Greer’s statement that “women fail to understand how much men hate them” is much more accurate than I wanted it to be. Lots of men despise women and fewer of them are hiding it as it becomes socially more acceptable

Exactly this.

That while the left make all the noise and the right make all the money, women and children get shafted.

That women are dying unnecessarily in childbirth. In the UK. Due to appalling care and conditions. That this disgusting truth is treated as less important than pronoun badges.

And fuck me, were the Spartacus threads really in 2016?

I’ve also learned that whilst I could never have been Miss World… DS could be. What a world we live in?

I’ve learned that, in recent years, our hard-won rights are being eroded across the globe. And the trans situation is only part of it. Just a few examples:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have banned women and teenage girls from taking part in many aspects of daily life, restricting them from attending secondary school and universities, working in many jobs, and even moving freely outside of the home.

In China, the government has silenced feminists as it tightens social control, imposing strict censorship policies, including by banning feminist terms and content they see as “harmful speech” or “inciting conflict between the genders.”

In Poland, the government under the ruling party has actively targeted women’s rights activists and organizations, smearing them and punishing them for their activism. The government has spearheaded retrogressive laws and policies, obstructing efforts to address gender-based violence, and using its politically compromised Constitutional Tribunal to undermine women’s and girls’ reproductive rights.

In the United States, women and girls are facing increasing restrictions to their sexual and reproductive health and rights as the Supreme Court and multiple states have banned or heavily restricted access to legal abortions.

South Korea’s government has been considering a series of anti-feminist initiatives, including a pledge to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Disregarding the harsh realities that women and girls face, the term “women” is being eliminated from policies that initially addressed gendered discrimination, such as violence against women.

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March in honor of International Women’s Day has been the target of extremist backlash by the Pakistani Taliban, which have previously threatened women’s rights activists and the march’s organizers, demanding they be prosecuted for blasphemy.

Most people don’t appreciate just how much stronger the average man is compared to the average woman.

I think you are right about this. There are complex factors, and probably not the same for everyone. This is almost self-evident if you look at the rang of historical behaviours, and there are lots of other solid reasons to doubt it is all one innate thing for each person.

And you are certainly right that the science is not settled. That has been a major mantra, but it is simply false, we do not know that, and never did. It was adopted because some people thought that it would be useful politically.

And what we have now is a situation where a great man people seem to think that any politically useful mantra should go unquestioned. This has been a very dangerous way of thinking and we are now reaping the results.