What brought you here?

[CyclingSam]

I have Rachel McKinnon to thank, with a strong assist by Magdalen Berns.

My 14 year old and 12 year old boy are both allies. 14 year old son has autism and is a huge fan of The IT crowd and one day commented 'It's a shame Graham Lineham is an anti-trans bigot'.

Well. I talked him through all of that and thanks to many threads on here about how to approach such things I asked him to read Glinner's substack and tell me what he disagreed with. Turns out, nothing. Part of how his autism manifests is he deep dives (but only into things that interest him). Now he is full on ally, but very gentle with it. There is a bio girl but now transboy in his class and he just says 'X is a bit confused and right now wishes to be know as Y. That's fine. But she goes to the girls toilets and that's fine too'.

I asked both my Dcs what the other children think of Trans. There was a bit of eye rolling and a 'whatever' but a very big sense that it's all the rage right now, but it will pass.

There were several stories that had made me think wtf but it was the assault on Maria MacLachlan that really made me sit up and take notice.

I grew up in a socially conservative culture with left of centre leanings, started questioning the expected gender roles, dipped into Spare Rib and found it a bit extreme but recognised that there was at least some truth in it, and became at least sympathetic to some second wave feminist ideas. Lifelong Grauniad reader until recently, so I was fed a very one-sided picture of trans issues.

Then all of a sudden it was very close to home, and I had a need for a much deeper understanding. I knew that I didn't approve of strict gender boxes and that I had never believed it possible to change sex. I looked around, read some trans identity ideology books which contained some incoherent scientifically nonsensical claptrap, rapidly rejected sites like Gendered Intelligence and Mermaids, and started to find other viewpoints. At some point, someone suggested Mumsnet, and I found some much more coherent views which fitted with my understanding of sex and gender, but also gave me a much wider education in the societal impact of gender identity ideology.

I’ve no idea who he was, just another typically smug twat. I shall have a look and see if it’s on YouTube. I started watching it wondering why would anyone put that poster up and how on earth is it offensive to anyone, to actively cheering her on.

I started reading some threads on FWR around 2014/2015 and read about someone who had commented that the phrase "Female Genital Mutilation" was transphobic. I honestly couldn't understand any of this - it seemed utterly bizarre. But I kept reading and growing more concerned.

This period of time coincided with me being the LGBT representative of a major international law firm in the City. At the time I was living with my female partner. The firm starting hosting more LGBT events with more and more "queer" people, including a bloke in a satin skirt, with visible penis bulge, and bright red lipstick, who frequented the Ladies room and made me feel super uncomfortable.

Yes, I remember feeling confused and slightly offended at the idea that saying a woman is an adult human female but remembering that all the good leftwing people thought Kellie-Jay was a naughty lady! Took a few more years for me...

I have been on Mumsnet for about 18 years and having done a lot of partying was used to gender bending for fun. Then about 10 years ago a friend announced they were now a trans woman and Caitlyn Jenner did the photo shoot and everything spiralled. Me and trans friend swapped a lot of books. Now both my teens have multiple friends who are probably same sex attracted or autistic or just struggling being told they are in the wrong body and it's possible to change sex. Some are on medication and it's already like watching a car crash in slow motion. Weirdly enough my friend who declared a trans identity has come out the other side with no permanent damage. We must stop lying to children and young people

An article by Suzanne Moore in the Spectator a very long time ago. Upon reading the first few lines I thought why on earth is she worrying about Trans people - a tiny oppressed minority.

I read it to the end and the penny dropped.

@SinnerBoy

Yes, you were correct. If only he was as intelligent as he thinks he is. 🙄 I’ll try and link the video for anyone that’s interested in watching.

I have been involved in sports as a competitor, coach and club captain/committee member/dogsbody etc for decades and started to push back when my sports governing body (and others) starting falling over themselves to include transwomen into biological women's
competition under the then wave of happy clappy be kind bollocks. Anyone involved in competitive sport with half a brain could see it was grossly unfair and that a policy of suppressed testosterone was nonsense.

Putting the fairness issues to one side the expectation to compromise sports clubs safeguarding policies and womens privacy in changing rooms in order to 'be kind' turned me into more of a GC activist. This was reinforced further when you saw how people like Sharron Davies was treated for stating the obvious made me even more angry. From there I found myself pulled into the orbit of Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Helen Lewis, Maya Forstarter, Rachel Meade, Prof Jo Phoenix etc who all helped me to articulate my arguments better. I am a bloke so many of issues do not affect me directly but I have a wife, sisters, mother, neices and a few hundred women members of my sports club to keep a look out for so it would be a massive dereliction of duty on my part (and would make me a bit of a twat) if i sat on my hands.

As well as following all the usual GC accounts on X I take a peek on here from to time to see if I have missed any news.

I ended up on this board as every time a thread about anything transgender related appeared in AIBU certain posters would whinge and whine about how terribly awful it was that someone thought the subject was an acceptable one to be discussed in AIBU and did the OP not realise there was a whole board full of bigoted women that would be better suited for their thread and words of heresy. They'd then inform the OP they had reported their thread and puffff the thread would disappear to the naughty corner.

Eventually I ended up here as it seemed to be where all the interesting stuff vanished to. I lurked for a long time though as at the time the rules around being banned were terrifying and I didn't want to post without being totally sure of what was acceptable or not!

I am now squatting more or less permanently in FWR as I like this little corner of the internet.

@@DeanElderberry@SinnerBoy

Was it DSpy? If so, snap!

I was a long-time member with 10k+ posts over many, many years. It was my daily haunt for over a decade. Ventured into General Discussion (which I very rarely did - was more into the TV threads back then). Contributed to a topic on the "T". Mentioned the 4000% increase in teenage girls identifying as trans and said something disturbing was going on. Watched in disbelief as some power-mad moderator scrubbed my posts one by one, then received an email saying I was banned for putting LGBT members at risk!!

Soon found Mumsnet. The many highly informed women and posters here are a bastion of sanity. Never returned to DSpy after that. Fuck 'em!

The level of censorship is one of the most astonishing and frankly frightening aspects of this for me. I've seen so many other communities fall. My DP, a long-standing commenter, was booted from the Guardian's comment section for daring to champion women's rights. The gender critical subs big and small on Reddit were unjustly banned (apparently by being flooded with CSAM in order to get them taken down? This is the level of evil we are dealing with!)

So glad to have Mumsnet and FWR!

2022, a friend asked if I'd read JKR essay. I read it & things started clicking, previously I'd been 'be kind' & deliberately ignorant as I didn't really want to form an opinion on a controversial subject.

Then the Lia Thomas story dropped and I weeped on and off for two weeks. Profoundly peaked because this showed what it all really meant.

Then I found this corner of Mumsnet having been on here for years and not noticed FWR. Thank fuck.

I've been on mumsnet since 2006. I had hidden FWR though as I wasn't into militant feminism. 🙄

The first inkling I had was hearing on the radio about Germaine Greer being "anti trans". I thought it was a bit weird as I'd always thought she was a respected feminist.

Then a friend's husband came out as trans in 2017 and when she told us she was ranting about how misogynistic trans ideology is. I was baffled so did some googling. That led me to FWR and I did a lot of reading and educated myself and I thought "holy shit this is bad". And here I still am.

In 2019 one of my favourite sci fi novelists - Richard K Morgan - started getting a pile-on for supporting JKR. This was around the time she came out in support of Maya Forstater. It didn't make much sense to me as I knew he was a lefty feminist, so I started to look into it. Well, that was very eye opening. I think it was googling the 'cotton ceiling' that led me to Mumsnet FWR. I never looked back.

What set my mind off in this direction? Probably Vancouver Rape Relief. It was a long way away, so I could believe it was an outlier, but I filed it in the back of my head. And eventually other stories began to mount up.

Also, contact with friends who were lefty activists. Now I'd always been gay friendly and known some old school TW who just wanted to quietly live their lives. But suddenly lots of people who had never cared about trans issues were obsessed with it, and from the way some of these people (well, men) were talking... well, if you accept that the left has a misogyny problem (see also its antisemitism problem) then it became obvious that this was a perfect way for misogyny to hide in plain sight.

At that time I only had very moderate reservations - no to medically transitioning kids, self-ID looks like a giant can of worms from a safeguarding perspective, and surely you can argue your case without being an asshole about it.

It turned out that these moderate reservations weren't tolerated. Also, JKR's essay clarified a lot of my thinking. And since this was the only place where you could have a more or less open discussion, I learned a lot from lurking here.

I like it here. I hope I can stick around.

Oh I loved Altered Carbon! I hadn't heard he is a TERF. Good man!

One of my children declaring he was thinking about his gender identity.
It made no sense to me. I'd seen articles by mermaids on and off over the years and knew if my young child claimed to be the opposite sex I should believe him and get him puberty blockers so that he could "pass". For a child to have shown no such gender distress and grown up very comfortable in his own skin, to suddenly declare he might want to be a girl as a teenager just didn't ring true. I wanted to understand more about what the context was to it so I had a crash course in gender ideology.

Prior to that I'd already started questioning my own beliefs when an aquaintance who I'd always known by a female name and pronouns was to share a hotel room with me. I had to question why I felt very uncomfortable about this arrangement and came to the conclusion it is because he was a man and despite making a polite pretence otherwise I was as uncomfortable as I would be if I'd had to share with any other man. That person had all the medical interventions and seemed no happier. I felt sad for them and I feel it's cruel to lie to people about the reality of the path they're heading down.

Rolling back a bit further and Germaine Greer "I don't care" piqued my curiosity despite me feeling at the time it was a bit harsh.

I'm quiet on here but I do a bit of gardening whenever I can afford to.

Sort of the same.

I’d been on MN for a decade on other threads, but when one DC started telling me how awful JKR was, I couldn’t believe it. Read her essay. Was shocked about how TW were mostly intact and what was happening to single sex spaces. That led me to FWR thank god.

So many brilliant informed women who have helped me find the words to articulate what I knew to be so wrong with gender ideology. A huge lifeline of sanity when I felt I was going crazy that the DC and others were saying we should accept at face value the men who say they are women as being women.

Tonight I just spoke with a long time dear friend who lives in another country. We spoke maybe a year ago. Then she was a similar sex realist. Tonight to my horror and sadness she’s spouting TRA nonsense. Anti JKR. ‘Trans kids’. Leave it to parents. Suicide myth. I tried to calmly refute these lies and myths and she kept saying we have to agree to disagree. I’m mystified as to this complete turn around on her part. We had so many conversations about the craziness of GI.

The only possibility is that I know she’s on SM nonstop and she’s been swayed by online lies. Which is a depressing realisation. She was, is, intelligent and used to be, more discerning in her consumption of news yet this has happened. Makes me feel like a gap has opened up where there hadn’t been one.

That's interesting. I didn't know anyone went from gender critical to supporting gender ideology. Is she in America?

I'm also thrilled to read this. He was on my list of don't-check-in-case-the-news-isn't-good.

Similar for me; read JKR's blog/essay and agreed with it but all my usual go-to news sources (eg Guardian) were full of articles saying 'why JKR is wrong' and I had several weeks of thinking 'how could I have got it so wrong?? ' and trying to put on these new mental 'be-kind' shoes that really hurt and just did not fit....finally found Mumsnet when searching for any article agreeing with JKR and threw my mentally crippling 'be-kind' shoes in the bin with a mighty clatter. This site saved my sanity and I am forever grateful

Been on MN since 2010 and can't remember when I became aware of this topic, I did click on threads randomly even if I thought I wouldn't agree with OP.

Miranda Yardley was posting at some point and accepted that she wasn't a woman and didn't give a fuck about pronouns.
She said that when she transitioned, in the 90s, she had to sign a disclaimer to say that she accepted that the surgery would not actually change her sex.
I can't remember why she stopped posting, but was sad that she did. Probably getting tons of shit flung at her from "her own side".
I hope she's OK.
She is the ONLY person I could not refer to as her birth sex.

Then we had the divine Magdalene Burns, hope I got spelling right, whose comment that people were so open minded their brains had fallen out delights me still, and I use it often.
She also commiserated with men who were worried about surgically transitioning " well I don't blame you mate, they chop your cock off".

Then there was 'Aimee' Challenor of the Green Party, whose charming father, kidnapped a 10 year old girl, kept her in his attic, and raped her while wearing little girl dresses and nappies. Aimee kept him as part of his team to get elected after he had been charged.
Madigan was around the same time I think.

Of course we've had Glinner soldiering on, JKR and her essay, and subsequent eloquent smiting!
And Yaniv in Canada, and Lia Thomas also Canada, and bollocks I can't remember the Scottish one in the pink leggings with the cock not chopped off? Isla something?
And Hubbard of course, New Zealand.

This is of course just a rant, sometimes get a little pissed off railing at the thunderclouds.
Some tiny bits of blue showing through recently, ffs it's about time sanity returned.
Um, sorry, what was the question?

I think what bought me to the naughty corner the first time was the NYE attacks on women in Cologne. I couldn't believe how the story was being actively buried and I kept searching for updates...I remember feeling really shocked and I stopped reading The Guardian shortly after. My search for alternative news sources bought me to Mumsnet and FWR. (Not being a mum, it never occurred to me to visit before then.) I've been here ever since. A corner of sanity, good discussion and debate. I've learned so much.

Came for the women's rights stayed for the general banter, style tips and recipes!

I lurked a bit on MN and then happened on one of the Man Friday threads back in 2018. I couldn't quite believe the TWAW madness existed. I dug around my local swimming pool's policies. And then my professional regulating body's policies. And then John Lewis. And then M&S. I saw the 800 schools, companies, charities, institutions, government departments and councils signed up to Stonewall and realised this ideology had been quietly wormed in everywhere.

I've been emailing and complaining and 'gardening' and following the court cases and bothering my MP ever since.

Thanks to all the wise women here for the education. I read and learn something on this board almost every day.