Leaving Kindland

[IcakethereforeIam]

I read this article in the Critic and enjoyed it. Perhaps it doesn't deserve its own thread but....well here we are.

https://thecritic.co.uk/leaving-kindland-entering-reality/

If anyone else might want to write why they left Kindland, if they never visited or, even, why they're still there, I think it'll be interesting. I think some insight into why people have taken different paths could be useful. Or a bloodbath. If you don't want to, I will apologise in advance, if you feel that is necessary, and kindly suggest just scroll on by and get on with your day😊.

As for me. I have a clear memory of talking to my oldest, then quite young, about transpeople. All the reasons why someone might go down that path. I probably didn't have all the current buzzwords but we probably covered dsds, born in the wrong body, etc. I don't recall who instigated the conversation (why the fuck was I talking about such stuff to a primary aged child!!?) but i do remember feeling quite smug about how 'kind' I was being. I had no idea, how could I, of what lay in store.

My next memory is of a similar conversation perhaps a year or so later. This time I remember voicing concern about bad people taking advantage. How to stop that while still being kind to 'genuine' tp.

The next memory is crashing into MN. How I got here, I can't remember but I'm glad I found FWR.

I wish I could go back and get ahead of it, educate my kids before they were indoctrinated by kindness. And I'm lucky, so far, neither have adopted a trans identity requiring drugs, hormones or surgery.

Sorry, that last sentence came out wrong, I was interrupted when I pressed post. It sounded like 'if I were you I'd want to know'. That's not what I meant.

I think it's because transactivism will absolutely have it that there is some kind of chemical reason for it or a biological reason.

So if it's not any of the current theories, it would be really interesting to know if there was anything else to account for it.

I left Kindland when my burly, 6'5" bearded STEM-career-climbing weightlifter then-husband decided he had always been a girl, and started dressing up in girl clothing (and I mean girl clothing. Not women's clothing. He was in his 50s.)

And everyone expected me to help him, to cheerlead him, to celebrate him finding his "true self" while his true self seemed to be someone who now watched sissy porn 24/7 and flashed his family members because his short skirt was "accidentally" too short. I talked about this with my closest friends, who told me I had cis privilege and that I should be more understanding, more kind. Because there isn't a more oppressed creature on this Earth than a trans woman.

I'm sorry Zeev, that's awful. And so sad that you couldn't get any proper support.

It's very telling that the middle aged blokes always want to be girls, or very young women - not age appropriate peri or menopausal women. I guess that's not sexy enough for them. Which tells you everything you need to know about the motivation behind it.

I found this one a thread about Jess Philips from 2021 that I think Barracker has worded well that fits this thread. It was a thread that I found enlightening in other ways too. It almost directly answered some questions that had sprung in my mind over the past 4-5 days that I couldn't quite see answers to.

But this stood out and it really does say what many of us have said over and over but each in our own ways.

Barracker · 11/03/2021 11:35

Women must be enabled to live safe from male violence, she says, ushering men into women's spaces and castigating women for resisting it.

You cannot both decry male violence and facilitate it.
You cannot both raise up women's defences, and still punish those who would defend themselves.

What would Jess say to a woman who was made a victim of a man, if that man's identity gained him access to her, and Jess the protagonist who argued for that to be facilitated?

If you sacrifice the truth you lose everything. You cannot trade off one woman's life for another. Make one woman safer, at the cost of endangering others. Bargain for the safety of some women, paid for with the concession that others are placed at risk.

Jess perhaps thinks this is a numbers game. That she can negotiate for a limited number of men to have the right to destroy women's boundaries, by exempting only them from her loud objections to the other men who do it.

Only a fool would not realise that to argue against any woman's boundaries means you are endangering all women.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/4189035-This-is-why-I-love-Jess-Phillips

The numbers game argument is a curious one.

You can certainly make the point that allowing a small number of trans women into women's single sex spaces is unlikely to have much impact overall. I think this one can be argued both for and against.

But I am yet to hear anybody explain how it is possible to allow a small number of trans women into single sex spaces, whilst keeping all "cis men" out of them.

Sure, some people will point out that if, for example, a sexual predator wants access to a women's changing room, he only has to walk through the door. A sign on the door saying "women" isn't going to stop him from entering that space if he is determined to do so. But this has always been the case. The only defence we have ever had against that happening is the common societal knowledge that men shouldn't be in women only spaces, and that if you see a man in a women only space, then depending on your assessment of the situation, you ask them what they're doing in there, you tell them to leave, you go and complain to the manager, you scream and run away, whatever seems like the best course of action at the time. Now we don't even have that. In some places we even have pink, white and blue posters in the toilets telling us that if we see someone who looks like they shouldn't be in there, we should ignore our instincts and trust that they have as much right to be there as we do. Even if it means that we can no longer use that space because we don't feel safe or because it is against our religious beliefs to do so.

The reality is that people like Jess Phillips aren't just opening up women's spaces to a small number of trans women, which may only have a tiny impact on women as a whole. They are opening up women's spaces to literally anyone who decides to enter them, for any reason.

I don't know if anyone has ever publicly pointed this out to Jess Phillips or any other politican, but if they have, I'd love to know what the response was.

I never went to kindland although I knew it existed. I had a discussion with my teenage daughter who had a couple of they/them friends where I said I didn't understand why people had to change gender to express who they are. I saw a horrific queer eye with a f to m transgender man having a mastectomy. The self mutilation involved in turning themselves into a parody of a man was so upsetting. I kind of assumed it was one of those things that older people don't understand. Then I saw Isla Bryson the rapist and realised what it all really meant for women. At that point I truly got angry about the whole desperate shit show. The cognitive dissonance involved. The misogynistic dismissal of women's concerns and the way they are made out to be far right. I am deeply glad that we have brave women and men standing up against this. I am not a brave woman but I am contributing to fighting funds and writing letters to MPs.

The reality is that people like Jess Phillips aren't just opening up women's spaces to a small number of trans women, which may only have a tiny impact on women as a whole. They are opening up women's spaces to literally anyone who decides to enter them, for any reason.

Exactly. They are opening up women's spaces to every predator in the land. Every bully, misogynist and creep.

Because that's who will want access to unconsenting women.

I like the phrase “Good men stay out so that bad men stand out”.

I think you mean Terfstory

I'm so sorry all of those things happened to you. It really is a life sentence. As for how many of us are affected, I used to think it was incredibly rare, but now I know otherwise.
I hope you know that you are a survivor and that it's possible to thrive. I read somewhere that we become stronger in the broken places.
Much love and respect to you.

@moderate "Most GC and GNC people are uncomfortable with their gender, i.e. with the expectations placed on them by society according to their sex. It's why we object to being called "cis"

That's an interesting point. I'd certainly like to hear more about why GC people object to cis. Perhaps a subject for another thread?

Genderless

That's an interesting point. I'd certainly like to hear more about why GC people object to cis. Perhaps a subject for another thread?

I’m sure others will answer for themselves but for me, being categorised as CIS is offensive. Transgender people have categorically not changed sex so there is absolutely no requirement to describe women as anything other than women.

I was evicted in 2015. I was pregnant and came to mumsnet because that's a good place to engage with women of the mother kind, isn't it? And I kinded it up on a thread and got my arse absolutely handed to me. Deservedly. I was sore and angry about it at the time and quietly stopped responding but kept reading and eventually understood that I wasn't a really nice and enlightened being, fortunate to be so lovely and giving, what I was actually doing was enabling the worst possible outcomes for other women - and the little baby girl I was growing.

I object to cis because I'm just a woman, not a type of woman or a subset of the collective category of woman. There is only one kind of woman, biological human females. That's what I am. There is no other set.

Exactly this. No one has changed sex. If people want to pretend they have and call themselves transwomen or transmen then that is their choice if it makes them happy. They can then respect my choice, which is to be called what I am, woman, which makes me happy.

Try telling men that they're cis men now. My betting is that no one will ask them to justify saying no.

That's an interesting point. I'd certainly like to hear more about why GC people object to cis. Perhaps a subject for another thread?

Hi.
I also object to cs. In addition to the points made earlier...
Cs means that your gender identity aligns with your body. So by labelling me, the ideology purports to tell me how I think - that I accept for myself feminine gender stereotypes and more fundamentally, that I accept that I have a gender identity and subscribe to gender ideology. None of which is true and nobody outside my head can know what I believe, anyway.
Opposing c*s and trans is also linguistic sleight of hand, which turns me into an oppressor of the class of men claiming to be women.
And it's yet another example of the gender movement co-opting words for political purposes.

Thanks to those who responded to my question. All good answers! Personally I reject cis because there's already a perfect word to describe me... WOMAN no prefix necessary.

For me there are essentially two reasons why I object to "cis".

Firstly it is based on the presumption that there are two types of women, the vast majority who were born female and a small minority who were born male, and that "women" is consequently a word for a mixed sex group of people who all share a gender identity. I don't agree with any of that at all, and don't want to use language or be referred to using language which implicitly includes this presumption.

Secondly, the distinction between cis women and trans women is frequently used to reframe the former as a privileged majority and the latter as an oppressed minority who need special protection. Given how genuinely oppressed and marginalised many women in the former category are, I find that argument grossly offensive.

Christ on a bike. That sounds horrendous. I hope you've found better friends -- or managed to peak them.

I'm sorry that happened to you.

I think the problem is that if you take the "kind" view that trans people should be accepted for who they are and supported to live their best lives, it's difficult to square that point of view with acknowledging that by deciding to live their best life a trans person may have hurled a grenade of chaos and misery into the lives of their loved ones. Because in Kindland the trans person must be supported unconditionally, it's easier to dismiss their unsupportive spouse/family as transphobic than acknowledge the conflict that exists. I'm not sure why, because I think most women support gay rights but also understand that they would not be happy if their husband decided he were gay.

My friend's husband has recently come out as a trans woman. She is publicly very supportive but I worry about her mental health. I don't feel able to ask her how she really feels about it all, so I hope she is OK.

It was the first time I heard the words Trans Women Are Women.
Until then I thought we were all making a polite pretence.
I couldn't twist my mind round actually seeing trans women as anything other than men pretending to be women and felt like a terrible person for a while for not being able to make that mental leap. It became much more comfortable to continue to believe in reality and I feel it's so much kinder to tell the truth, especially to young people.

Great thread, really interesting comments. I've never lived in Kindland (somehow I swerved all that female socialisation) so I have no story about leaving it.

Genderlessvoid and Crankywiddershins, all the SA survivors out there 💪❤💐

I've been told that if I'm not trans, then I must be cis.

That's like saying if I'm not Catholic, then I must be Protestant.

No! I'm an atheist. I reject the whole dogma.

(Sometimes I tell them I don't identify with my gender (i.e. the expectations placed upon me by society according to my sex) and they insist I must therefore be trans. So I tell them they now need to accept everything I say about trans issues. That's how it works, right?!)