Not the ally I once was. Sad or liberated?

[Lwrenagain]

How did you journey into your feelings and beliefs on the great trans issues?
I'd love to hear your thoughts/opinions and stories on how your thoughts all came together because mine have been jumbled for a long time now.

So I've lurked and occasionally joined in with some threads. Sadly my first one I posted was deleted by the AI I believe MN told me.

I've grown up with kids who had gender dysmorphia from VERY young. I've met kids with it at work also, who've not got the stereotype parents raising non binary kids, I'm talking parents who were actually mortified at the start of their child's journey with their identity.

I have 3 trans pals, the TWomen both struggled since childhood with feeling born into the wrong body. The Tman has the usual story around why a woman, possibly undiagnosed asd would want to change, so I'm not sure about gender dysmorphia, I've never asked if I'm honest.

I have always supported the trans community within reason, I'm not blind to dodgy people or things involving children that make my heckles go up.
My last deleted post was actually regarding the vulnerability of trans kids and predators. (Local paedophile started harassing transgirls who were almost delighted for the attention, in a nutshell)

Anyway, I'm chatting to my friend TW, and she has no desire to encroach the spaces of biological women, she's in awe of women, loves and respects us. Appreciates she's not biologically a woman, but feels more at home in her body after surgery to be in a category of woman, even if its prefaced with "trans".
She won't ever demand to use a changing room with women, or children, she'll often use a disabled toilet as she doesn't want to use the women's, unisex toilets work for her, because they are inclusive of everybody.

Anyway I judged the trans community largely on my personal experiences and now I'm struggling with more and more batshit behaviour each day.
Forcing lesbians to date TW. Erm, fuck off. Very obviously intact males dressing in women's clothes wanting access to changing areas, no. Piss off, my friends who've had the surgery won't even go into these spaces, wtf is wrong with these people? There is no compromise.
We can support people to dress as they wish, tbh if Barry wants me to call him Brenda it's no skin off my nose, but he doesn't need to be left alone with women in a changing area, just no.

My TW friends are devastated that they're being lumped into the category of these (my friends words, not mine) "creepy chancers" and this behaviour is really going to bite transfolk with only good intentions to live their lives with peace, in a body they can relate too, in the arse.

I feel angry, not just because of the way women are being treated. In equal measure, the way there is going to be a huge amount of violence and anger directed to people with legitimate reasons for living in a body different to their bio sex, because predatory males have jumped on a bandwagon to allow access to women, vulnerable ones especially and even more vulnerable, kids.

I hate the lack of compromise from this new wave of trans activism, society needs to adjust to this and provisions made to ensure safety and comfort of everyone, not a single group. Just calm your new tits and accept you can be accepted and live how you wish, but let everyone else catch up, let us build more unisex bathrooms, let us sort out specialist prison wings, sport divisions etc, because it's women taking the knock each time. Not good enough for them though is it? Which makes me think they don't want to be included, they're simply just wanting access to our spaces. Why? Why is that something you feel entitled too? At least meet us half way, ffs.

I've supported in work (back in the old days) men who crossed dressed as it was known back in the day, all struggling to accept sexuality and with intellectual disabilities. But even then, these men had zero interest in using the bathrooms of women etc, it's just terribly sad at a time we could be inclusive of men wearing what they liked, women wearing what they wanted, for sexuality to be as open as free without judgement, society finds a way to reject that, give uncertain people life altering surgery and still quash the rights and safety of women.

I struggle with "allies with naice friends" to be honest.
Other women spoke. They said what was happening but the allies don't listen because "have you met my naice friends?"

"The women" said it was an issue coming for your friends but fingers in ears and away with the unkind words.

Now the issue affects those who you failed to protect out of "love for them". Love would have been shielding your friends from these issues in the first place by watching out for the actual wolf by the door. Not shielding them from those talking about the wolf. Now is better than never but the fundamental behaviour that allowed things to get this far doesn't sound like it has changed.

It’s terrifying being behind a door when you know your child is on the floor unconscious on the other side and you can’t get to them. Makes you see public toilets very differently.

I honestly think in years to come we'll find that this whole cultural moment has been funded by dodgy right wing/Russian/Chinese etc groups who want to widen divides in Western culture. They find pre-existing debates and then just fund the shit out of opposing groups to maximise polarisation.

Those dodgy right wing communist countries? This is coming from the dodgy left. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if it includes cultural division sown by China and Russia. Just look at one of the main platforms pushing it - Chinese owned TikTok.

Before history gets rewritten I was encountering TW over 20 years ago. I was an ally originally although I did wonder why I was unlucky enough that every TW I met was weird and scary in their interactions with me. Finally the penny dropped that those Allies with a naice TW friend in their group of friends had a TW friend that had got what they wanted, inclusion in a friendship group of women, and was playing naice as a result.

In tech there was never going to be enough women for there to be a group of women the TW could be welcomed into to play at being a girly and the women tended to be gender non confirming anyway so further limiting their attempts to play at being girly with us. So they just didn’t bother playing at being naice as it got them nothing that they wanted. They used the ladies toilets then and left the seat up, what were we going to do? We know we didn’t have the power.

”Anyway, I'm chatting to my friend TW, and she has no desire to encroach the spaces of biological women, she's in awe of women, loves and respects us. Appreciates she's not biologically a woman, but feels more at home in her body after surgery to be in a category of woman, even if its prefaced with "trans". “

Your friend is encroaching on women’s spaces. Those spaces are defined by language and your friend is stealing our language, our categorisation.

Back in maybe 1997 ish I saw what was being attempted. I saw words being changed, i saw the three letter acronym played out in front of me. I saw where that would potentially lead to.
I wrote to MPs, i got screeds back about be kind and just like gay rights.

I never imagined prisons and rape centres would be taken over, naive for sure.

I thought shit our toilets, our changing rooms. I thought young girls growing up knowing nothing else. I never saw rogd, naive again.

Even though I had some idea of what was to come should the right conditions prevail, I had no idea just how bad it would be.

I thought, we will have to fight for our single sex spaces, I meant toilets, gym changing rooms.
I thought christ it's going to be difficult, I never foresaw prisons, hospital wards sports etc. All this made it even harder to get people to see. I knew as each one fell to identity politics it was going to take forever to row back.
I wrote to MPs about the gra before it became law, I got back screeds again.

I took faith that safeguarding which had had so much time spent acquiring and it was being fine tuned often as incidents happened, I thought safeguarding will win out. But nope.

I got angry and then I found MN and the one and only space we could talk about it, with caveats.
Thank God for MN, I think we really would be no further forward without it. Even with the rules we had to abide by. And kjk and jk Rowling and all the fabulous women who took this shit to court and then the posters who's sense of humour got me through the last many years.

And tunnocks tea cakes.

After watching The Undeclared War and the Cambridge Analytica film it wouldn’t surprise me.

Unfortunately post operative trans people may well have genuine reason to use the disabled toilet due to medical complications.

I've had a journey from the ideology doesn't make sense, but tentative to say anything because of the mental fragility of the people involved so be kind. To seeing the consequences of the ideology being accepted wholesale and seeing it as actively harmful.

I empathise with the detransitioners feelings and experiences and see how I could have gotten caught up in it too if it had been the zeitgeist when I was a teen. I also know how much I have valued the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in my life. But I may not have foreseen that as a short haired teen avoiding anything pink and girly.

Not conforming with gender stereotypes didn't stop me being female. These teens shouldn't have their future options closed off like that.

Left wing and right wing are useful concepts when looking at old-fashioned, functioning democracies. They are becoming redundant now when the divide is between those old fashioned democracies and totalitarian states run by and for the very very rich.

Any politician in a democracy who questions that system, attack the courts, attacks the electoral process, attacks old-fashioned news media, is part of (or trying to become part of) the new totalitarianism.

And yes, they're playing a divide and rule game with us, very successfully, and yes, women are the most disposable people.

For me, I think I don’t have much patience for any of it any more. I had to face up to and deal with a terrifying experience of giving birth and live with the consequences daily, I have elderly relatives who have really tough health issues to deal with, there are people in my life with difficult relationship issues, painful dilemmas and so on.

The needle of my ‘giving a shit about people expressing their identity’ gauge is pretty much pointing at zero. I don’t care.

I feel that the messaging I get, as a woman, for the shit I have to deal with is ‘suck it up’. If a bloke gets his undies in a twist because he wants to wear mascara and fantasise that he is Marilyn Monroe - can someone please tell me why I am supposed to give it any thought again? Why I am supposed to make any accommodations? It’s not like it is a disability or something others should be aware of and sensitive about. He is amusing himself and no one else. He is the one who should be sensitive to others and make accommodations.

I don't mean right wing in the sense of political parties etc - I mean extremist libertarian types who believe in the smallest possible form of government, social Darwinism, that a few powerful people should dictate everything, that cossetting the little people through taxpayer-funded things like benefits is bad.

They definitely hated feminism because those people like patriarchy with a capital Prick. This manages to defuse feminism entirely and then weaponise it so the left is a mass of infighting.

Yes, OP, this assertion that TWAW and that trans people are above and beyond the laws and social mores that everyone else has to observe is causing massive problems in society.

Which makes me think they don't want to be included, they're simply just wanting access to our spaces. Why? Why is that something you feel entitled too?

I think this question holds rather a lot of answers, tbh.

100% agree

I was once a really fucking stupid ally because I’d absorbed some of that female socialisation. I look back and wince at how fucking stupid and naive I was. They don’t give a shit about women whatever the women with naice TW ‘friends’ think.

But on the plus side it helped reawaken my feminism with a white hot fury.

Beautifully put.

And while I do think that Chinese/Russia thing is an interesting angle (I'll add the very illuminating documentary "Hypernormalisation" by the journalist Adam Smith in to the mix for a very in-depth exploration of how culture wars can be manufactured at state level - including in the US), I suspect that's a red herring. Also, I suspect that this thread may gain a few lurkers who are genuinely interested in understanding the thought processes people went through. The title will resonate with many people. Perhaps even more than it did last week thanks to the wonderful Streisand-effect PR campaign that has been spearheaded by Anne "I'm just a volunteer and I demand access to naked teenage girls" Coombes.

If the thread wanders off in to edgy conspiracy theories, it's probably going to look a bit batshit.

It would be interesting to hear more stories about people's journeys in thinking IMO.

Sad and liberated.

I honestly think in years to come we'll find that this whole cultural moment has been funded by dodgy right wing/Russian/Chinese etc groups who want to widen divides in Western culture.

Can we not do this? I'd rather recognise and accept our own responsibility for our own society. Unlike the brave @Ourladycheesusedatum I was a feminist who dropped the ball for a lot of years, didn't pay attention, didn't imagine that anyone would really take up the belief that TWAW or sacrifice women's spaces or promote transition to children (Mermaids existed but it was all boys back then and I assumed men would take care of their own.)

My mistake.

But gender ideology is very far from being about personal freedoms. Yes it is presented about being true to be ones true self but there is very little ‘self’ involved in this. Transwomen demand that everyone else obeys and sustain their fantasy. When a man identifies as a women he is telling YOU what YOU must do. Any dissent must be silenced, booked banned, critics must lose their jobs if they fail to uphold his belief. The schemes which promote it demand hundreds of pages evidence from companies, and hours or training of staff to comply with their wishes. It is anything but small governance. More like China where benefits are granted based on social capital.

Thanks for your interesting replies.
Some usernames I recognise and enjoy your points very much.

Whatever journey with this madness I end up on, it's very nice to speak to women about this topic and not feel as though I'm a horrible exclusionary person.
My feels towards inclusion currently feels Some of it is edging towards indoctrination.
It is a concern.

Whatever journey with this madness I end up on, it's very nice to speak to women about this topic and not feel as though I'm a horrible exclusionary person.
My feels towards inclusion currently feels Some of it is edging towards indoctrination.
It is a concern.

I feel exactly the same. Some of the conversations I've been in haven't been easy and there are many points where people don't always agree with each other (I'll happily use preferred pronouns for example - except for children and where the context is important, when I'll just repeat the name, both in real life and online).
It can get heated at times. That's because there's a lot at stake here and some people have been shouting in to a vacuum for years. One of my favourite contributors is someone who I've been "head to head" with a few times (I don't think you're on this thread but if you're reading this, I think you've recently had a name change... I recognise the same style.. I could be wrong!) where we have furiously debated some tough stuff. My baptism of fire came courtesy of this poster where my reasonableness and wanting to see things from multiple angles came across as "too reasonable" - it aroused suspicion. I can see why. Ostensible reasonableness is a tactic used to break down boundaries. Some people on this board are battle-scared from that and won't let it happen to themselves again. I've also been called naive because it may look like I don't see the gotchas coming. I'm not naive but one poster insisted on telling me that I am.

FWIW, I still think some of the same things as I did before along the lines of reasonableness. For example, I still think Caitlyn Jenner would be a great voice to have onside to call out the dangers to kids (she has set up a political activist group to achieve this.. although seems to be very quiet on it right now...). Yes, I am aware that Caitlyn secretly wore Caitlyn's daughter's clothes etc - repeat of name instead of a pronoun there as a nod to the harm of gaslighting that transwidows and their kids have experienced. Yes, I would be suspicious of Caitlyn's motives - fame, power (fine, have those), access to women's toilets (no).

But the main thing is debate. Healthy disagreement and challenge.
That happens in spades on here and people listen to and learn from each other.

I do think it's a shame that we don't get more nuanced conversations with transwomen and transmen (or anyone who believes in gender identity) often enough, but it does happen. Equally, sometimes there is a hit and run post and the OP never comes back, sometimes there are soundbite no-debate put downs... but also sometimes if someone does try and engage they get a pile-on of anger.

But mostly, it's robust and good debate.

Ps @Lwrenagain I forgot to say thank you for your kind words earlier on regarding my daughter and my situation xx

All the bad stuff happening to transgender people now comes from Stonewall. They did this with their insistence on no debate. Your friends should lobby Stonewall.

They should also campaign for their own spaces. Women campaigned for their own single sex toilets, prisons, etc. People with disabilities campaigned for their own accessible spaces.

Why does this particular group think they can take over something that someone else has fought for. Cuckoos in the nest.

I spent ages wondering what it meant to me to ‘be a woman’ and what it was I had in common with other women. I concluded it was just biology, and some broad experiences based on my biological pathway. It meant than when I first encountered the TWAW argument, I immediately thought it was bollocks, and never imagined anyone would give it any serious consideration. Then I saw a story about a drive-thru refusing to serve someone who had walked through. In a group of close friends (doctors, lawyers, senior business people) I joked that the customer should have just said he identified as a car. Tumbleweed 😱 😂. That’s when I realised this was a problem, I was lucky to find MN!

Ah I thank you and I shall take a bow. But I'm not brave. I was incandescent with rage for some time, oddly not at trans people, at the people who could not see what damage was coming.

In the end trans people have made the rules and used the rules and stayed within the rules. They got the chance to do that because men are listened to women didnt see. That's on women.
However now we have a unique time and place to get laws about us (unassailable laws as far as possible) made. Laws that protect us as a class. If we squander this opportunity, that too will be on us.

We need to repeal the gra first. Its now a useless piece of legislation. It was made for a time that is no longer.
Once we have no more "legal women" coming through, we can turn to demanding some spaces just for us. It'll be a hell of a battle, we are never listened to anyway, but I have faith here that enough of us will prevail.

I was very be kind and hurrah for LGB. Then the T got added on and I thought ok. Good on people for being themselves.

I heard about some Feminists being de-platformed, and didn’t quite understand why they shouldn’t be allowed to speak. They didn’t include TW in their feminism, but I am a kitchen-feminist anyway who think the differences between the sexes are pretty obvious, and TW are men, and I am strongly for free speech, so let them speak even if you disagree with them.

THEN I joined support groups for mums of autistic children on Facebook, watched Hannah Gadsby call jkr a terf and got called a terf myself for pointing out that biological sex matters a whole fucking great deal actually. And got booted out of the support groups 🤷🏽‍♀️

In trying to find out what a terf was,
I found FWR and was delighted to read the excellent posts of people who are clever and articulate. That was in 2018/19? So a bit late to the party.

I did try the Linguistics gymnastics of «persons owning their pronouns», but eventually gave up. It is just daft and makes no sense. Besides, I have enough trouble remembering names these days.

It was also so daft when biologists seriously compare humans to prawns or clownfish. I am a primate, mate. Not a fish or a exoskeletal miniscule see through sea bug.

So there we are.
I know more than I want to know now, and am eternally grateful to the Brave women and men who have stood against the onslaught.