What brought you here?

[CyclingSam]

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

The propaganda on TV news was quite something, wasn’t it? I still can’t believe they blurred out her hand and claimed she was making a far right hate signal. On the evening news. Funny how Shaneel Lal making the exact same ‘OK’ sign was given the benefit of the doubt. Fully captured media make it an uphill battle in NZ.

Slow burn for me. Started on mumsnet when pregnant and searching for advice then stuck around to doom scroll on AIBU. Would occasionally stray to these boards and think everyone was a bit unhinged. Admittedly I initially just totally accepted the groupthink and assumed that of course we must all support trans rights!

I only really started to think a bit differently when I heard JK had been cancelled for being a massive transphobe. But then I actually read her tweet and thought "But ... this just seems... reasonable. Where's the transphobe bit?"

Bit by bit my straying here turned into lurking, which turned into clicking through links, until I suddenly found myself thinking quite differently.

Probably the biggest catalyst in shifting my thinking was my dismay that people just didn't seem to actually be listening to what was actually being said (all eminently reasonable stuff!)

I think Miranda started to appreciate that this was a space for women and as such he decided not to be here, but I could be wrong.

I must say it was his website and writing that did help to clarify some questions I had as he was so very blunt about it. it was the first time I'd heard of and read about agp.

I came here around 2011 for pregnancy and then baby boards.

Found the Spartacus threads around 2016 and started reading here to work out what the issue was initially, then posting around 2017.

I've been "GC" since I was around 6 due to something that happened in my class at school and then later again with a child I taught around 2009 - it was I obvious that sexist gender stereotyping was an issue for these children and then the added impact of media click bait which then was more TV.

Well who knows. There were a subset of posters who made it clear males aren't welcome, regardless of how much of an "ally" they are.

Probably the biggest catalyst in shifting my thinking was my dismay that people just didn't seem to actually be listening to what was actually being said (all eminently reasonable stuff!)

yes. Even before I read any of the actual arguments, I could tell that the posters on here were articulate, reasonable and incredibly insightful.

Just in the way they wrote.

Probably the biggest catalyst in shifting my thinking was my dismay that people just didn't seem to actually be listening to what was actually being said (all eminently reasonable stuff!)

This is a key feature of the transactivist movement, sadly. And yet another thing that sent me scaling that mountain. The constant lying about what people were saying. The bad faith misinterpretations. The "I'll tell you what that person secretly thinks so you don't have to see what they said for yourself" or "Let's cancel them so nobody can read or hear their ideas."

No genuine civil rights movement ever has had to do this. And once you see someone telling or spreading a big old lie about an event or history you were part of, or about a person you know, that's it. Their whole base crumbles. The lying, DARVO and projection is so notable and consistent, and so reminiscent of both abusers and people with dark triad personalities, that you then realise the misinformation, demonisation, smears, language tricks and gaslighting must be a deliberate strategy from those instigating it. Plus the power moves and entryism, the "under the radar" stuff, the deliberate glomming onto more popular causes and forced teaming, all the Denton's report stuff.

Again, nobody who needs to do all that to succeed is going to have good intent, integrity or care about equality; it's all about forced imposition and trying to remove any opposition, questioning or barriers. And that's cult religion territory.

When Stephanie Davis Arai of transgender trend wrote a school's guide, transactivists went ballistic in their desperation for no one to read it.

The mammoth, foot-shooting insanity of telling people to shred it before they read it was almost hilarious.

They were an actually saying 'Don't Read This'😂.

Which, of course, made it completely irresistible.

I've been here a while but can't remember exactly when I joined - I previously thought Mumsnet was just for mothers (which I'm not) sharing childcare tips but it was seeing the venom directed at the site by rabid transactivists on Twitter, trying to get Mumsnet's advertisers like Flora to quit and destroy the site, Twitter posters like 'mumsnet madness', made me curious - a lot of angry men who wanted access to women's toilets, and parents who were encouraging their probably gay offspring to chop bits off themselves wanted a site where women talk amongst themselves shut down. The Guardian and BBC were captured, as was Twitter & FB - this turned out to be a surviving place where women could still air their views and concerns, like the Gaulish village in Asterix holding out against the colonisers.

It has been extremely painful to see the misinformation coming from formerly trusted places like the Guardian and the BBC (or rather, an awful lot of "misdirection through omission") allowing the narrative to successfully take hold among lefties in particular that giving a shit about this was all just part of an evil "Tory culture war". A great many people do still only get their info from those sources. When academia is at it too, the ideological bullshit seen as "the clever" or superior way to think, when it's quite obviously nonsense. That supposedly left wing politicians have been parroting it too has been appalling.The hate and the actual harms being done both to our rights and to kids has been dragged out for SO long because of those enablers.

I've lost trust in so many things and people, and have never in my life before had to be extremely careful what I say & to whom. That was another sign of something very, very wrong.

Just went down a rabbit hole of old threads. Would be interesting to see how a thread with this title went in 2024

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3500657-Can-transsexuals-truly-be-allies-to-women?page=1

(It's a very interesting thread)

It has been extremely painful to see the misinformation coming from formerly trusted places like the Guardian and the BBC

it really has.

I used to enjoy the BBC being called auntie.

It gave the impression of being a benevolent friendly person with biscuits.

Now I think it's an ideologically driven liar who thinks women should be props and validation tools.

It has been extremely painful to see the misinformation coming from formerly trusted places like the Guardian and the BBC (or rather, an awful lot of "misdirection through omission")

Hasn't it just. It just ideologically driven agenda now and not news. I can't believe for an instant that people are not aware of the key issues that concern women in which case they have made a choice that actively harms people and I will never forgive them or let them quietly forget the role they played.

Oooohhh man that clip is evergreen for me. I re-watch it when I need a pick-me-up.

KJK was magisterial and magnificent. The whole thing was so embarrassing for Harrop. Harrop in that interview was basically the intellectual equivalent of that famous scene in the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob is trying to walk forwards but at every step he steps on a rake and hits himself in the face

I'd been on a women only group on Livejournal many years ago, and they decided to let trans women in. And another woman wrote a highly pretentious post stating she was leaving the group as she was transitioning and was now no longer a woman! The transwomen - four that I recall - were all very opinionated, looking back, in a very male way. But I was still in my "be kind" phase and dismissed any reservations.

A meet up of the group was arranged and the two transwomen who attended dominated the group in a way that made me very uneasy. I never attended any other meetups.

I think it was Lily Madigan that peaked me, along with Yaniv and Magdalen Burns. As a PP said, once the scales have fallen from your eyes you can't unsee it.

There were many steps.

My interest in feminism was sparked by Glynis Johns and the Sherman brothers. Quite how I got to from there to the real story of the suffragettes I was too young to remember, but that song was what started me on the trail of womens rights. (There was brief wobble in the early 90s, when the LibFems almost persuaded me that I was an 'equalitist' rather than a feminist, but then I hit the sexism of the world of work and got over it). It was a firmly empirical feminism - based on stats, data and experience. I didn't come.to the theoretical and philosophical side until later.

That came when I discovered a talkboard I'd been on for ages had a feminism thread. Under a disguised title, hidden in the 'books' section. I hung about on there for a bit, picking up a large to-read pile when I realised that in jumping from Wollstonecroft to Pankhursts to the present I'd missed a lot of background discussion.Then we started asking why we were hiding, and I decided it was ridiculous - so I started a thread with 'feminism' in the title in a more obvious part of the site. At which point I learnt the meaning of 'pile on', a significant chunk of posters left, and the whole moderation system had to be revamped to hold the site together.

The addition of gender criticism to my beliefs is shrouded in the mists of time. I had a fairly ungendered 70s upbringing at a progressive school, but at some point I assume I was told 'Girls don't ...' or 'Only boys do...' and my natural stubbornness was activated. So the idea of sex defining social role, or of it being defined by clothes or interests, was something I saw as ridiculous for decades before the concept of trans came into it. I became aware of gender criticism as a wider movement through Let Toys be Toys and Let Clothes Be Clothes.

Life got in the way and I wandered away from the feminism thread for a bit. Then I'm not quite sure of the order of events that followed - the pussy hat controversy, man Friday, the Green Party designating women as 'non-men', a pile of increasingly insane things popping up on Twitter - an accumulation of bizarre events that meant I went back to the feminsim thread to ask WTF? and discovered it been forcibly split in two, much like.the feminism board here. Discussion was rigorously coralled and policed - you'd all recognise the pattern of reporting, goading and drive-by scolders. But even that wasn't enough for the site owner, who had the mother and father of all mantrums and threatened to shut the whole thing down unless the vile transphobes were defenestrated. So (along with Elderberry, Sinner, duc and some others) I jumped before I was pushed. And landed here.

Interesting. I have no idea what I said to get autohidden. Are we not allowed to discuss Mary Poppins?

Was it 'mantrum'?

Clearly not. Weird.

Here's another that I'm tempted to try
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3423086-Dr-Jane-Claire-Jones-hilarious-terrifying-true-blog-post-today

As I am over 60 and child free I am actually very new to MN! As someone else also said I cut my feminist teeth in the early 80's but my recent interest has been peaked by a few things, Kathleen Stock, JKR, womens sport, and Glinner! Really got a lot out of these threads so far. 😃

@Herawouldntstandforthis and @hihelenhi like you I found the sheer scale of the censorship and misinformation and obfuscating to be telling in itself.

As my parents and grandparents lived under communism and so I've always been told that anything that has to be censored to that degree is probably true

Also another red flag with my 'victim of communism' hat on was the twisting of language. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, when the powers that be have to start making language mean something different, and don't explicitly explain why, and moreover pretend that the new meaning has always been the true meaning, then that's usually a good sign that something malign is happening.

So when I started seeing lady-dique / her penis / cervix havers, that was a sign to me that something was up and start investigating.

It's interesting that as many people have arrived here because of what they did read, as because of what they weren't allowed to read.

(mangled sentence, I know)

I'm finding this thread really fascinating and I'm enjoying reading all the stories of how we got here.

Can I also say as a side note, I'm finished an online conference I was at today to do with my work and my god academia is really mental now isn't it??? Without being too outing; they are all so enthusiastic about the madness of this. These are meant to be clever people? It's all so bizarre to me. I'm glad I've joined online as I think I would have struggled to keep my expression neutral with the amount of total nonsense that's being spouted.

Ah, I also have background with E. Europe, so like you picked up on that stuff for the same reasons you did. Once you see, you cannot unsee...

My post has been restored, which is a relief because that was a lot.of typing. Still no clue why it was hidden - anyone spot what the trigger word was?