What brought you here?

[CyclingSam]

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

Yes. I genuinely find quite alarming that mainstream media sources in a Western country are willing to censor words, news and manipulate language to the extent that has happened with the trans thing.

Obviously censorship has happened in the Western media a lot in cases of national importance such as WW2 when the UK newspapers censored the reality of the breakdown in law and order in London during the blitz. But I would say there were clear national security reasons for doing this and they were justified for the greater good.

I honestly do not understand why anyone ever thought it was justifiable in the case of transgenderism.

Because of the previous period of rampant homophobia, gay murders, and terror attacks against gay people maybe? (E.g. Admiral Duncan).

A lot of "transphobia" in men is actually homophobia and I think its easy to forget how risky being gay was until fairly recently.

It's not in the nature or history of the democratic West to censor factual information in case it leads to someone objecting to it so much that they consider breaking the law. If that were the case, then almost anything could be censored on those grounds.

In any case, I don't see how falsely reporting a male rapist to be female, or omitting factual information on the deleterious and disabling effects on children of puberty blockers, could reasonably be said to lead to "rampant homophobia, gay murders, and terror attacks against gay people".

I don't agree with what's happened regarding reporting on trans people so let's illustrate the principle I'm talking about with another example.

There is a difference between privacy and "censorship". Press regulations were designed to protect people's privacy. Sexuality, relationships, private medical issues all deemed to be subject of privacy laws.

It is possible to argue the privacy laws have had unintended consequences and I'd argue what happened with Huw Edwards showed that it does. But equally I think most people would think its reasonable for some things to be private. Especially given homophobia, racism etc.

A lot of "transphobia" in men is actually homophobia

But also a lot of trans ideology is homophobia. So I'm not sure you can use it as an argument for one position being prioritised over the other.

I'm not I'm talking about why the good outcome of trying to minimise homophobia might have led to the bad outcome of not reporting about people being trans

I'm another permanent migrant from the other forum already mentioned, although I've had an account on MN since DC (now teens) were infants so I could read, lurkily, about parenting stuff.

I didn't start regularly posting on MN until Brexit, when I found the relative plurality of views here more stimulating than the near-complete agreement on my "main" forum.

Spending more time on MN then led to my discovering FWR, reading what was going on, and my eyebrows gradually disappearing up into my hairline. As it became clear that MN was practically the only place on the internet where women could properly discuss the actual rights and needs of actual women, it was a no-brainer to completely cut ties with the other forum, when things went nuclear over there.

NB: I've always been a reality-based sex-is-binary-and-real gender-atheist, so that hasn't changed, but I am eternally grateful to the magnificent women of FWR for really educating me on all the issues.

I'm finding everyone's stories fascinating. Great thread, @CyclingSam.

Late to the party here but I think I commented on a similar thread some months ago.
I’ve been on MN since DS was small, and have drifted in and out. I’ve always liked MN’s general no nonsense, even take no prisoners, intelligent, funny approach to life, and it’s refreshing and reassuring to know there’s this online community of women with common sense.
Ive always considered myself a feminist - I’m Gen X, over 50 now, grew up in the 70s/80s, read Susan Faludi’s Backlash as a student in the early 90s and hated the whole “empowered” ladette nonsense. I’ve been very enthusiastic and liberated about sex but not to the extent that culture has validated women’s right to take their clothes off compared to men’s seeming right to remain clothed in the same situations. I’m very eye-rolly about it. The older you get, the worse it gets.
Then MN really educated me about feminism based on motherhood, the importance of validating the mother baby bond, of valuing child rearing. I was obviously a mother myself by then and although I was in a senior position in work and therefore insulated from most consequences (I was the higher earner at home too), I could see the impact on other women all around me. When I was growing up motherhood wasn’t valued, it was all about having a career. My feminism became more, well, women centred, instead of being about getting on in the world of work and money and men.
Around 2018 I became the lead in a work DEI group. I led a lot of work on equal pay, equal bonuses and improving maternity benefits and shared parental leave. We had a LGBT strand and they started pushing Stonewall and used the “most vulnerable” narrative a lot. I found “most vulnerable” difficult to swallow because I can think of a lot of categories who are truly vulnerable and most of them are children and young women. I started to read more about it. Like many others I struggled to get it past my common sense “surely not” filter but once I accepted that this lot were serious I became much more cynical and much more combative. I left that employer is couple of years ago so didn’t have to fully engage with the bullshit anymore although I never validated it and the tide had started to turn, we had conversations about conflicting rights. Last I heard they had decided to ditch Stonewall.
Like others I read the JKR essay (true role model!) and followed some of the cases on here. It adds up doesn’t it. I sigh more than I did.
Sport particularly winds me up. I am a runner and the Park Run nonsense does my head in. The Olympics does my head in, Lia Thomas made me angry. Thankfully some sports bodies now know better. But it’s not correcting itself fast enough.
And yes, the language manipulation - oh boy. In the last year I have read two books that are all about freedom of speech and conscience in very different circumstances- Wolf Hall, and Life and Fate. Tudor England, and Stalinist Russia. In both your life and family depended on saying and “believing” the right things. The echoes are chilling, and illuminating.

Ladybrain brought me to being GC. Discovering that people thought women had some sort of different pink fluffy brain, and through that having my eyes opened to the reimposition of harmful stereotypes, exactly the sort of thing we had rebelled against in the 1980s. And the combination of the inherent sexism of that taken with the inherent sexism of having male people being seen as spokemen (!) for women made me realise that this wasn't about being kind to a very small group of marginalised people who were deeply unhappy with their bodies or an extension of gay rights, which I had always strongly supported, but a new means of marginalising women.

I can't remember clearly but I think it was from following Graham Linehan on Twitter. I was already on MN from years ago and dipped in occasionally but I came back on when there was all the hoo hah about him being cancelled.

I just couldn't get my head around why what he was saying was thought to be wrong in a lot of circles, so I started reading more into it on this board. And I still can't get my head around why so many apparently intelligent people think he's out of order!

lots of different WTF moments led me back here for meaty reading about feminism in practice.

Did a history PhD back in the dark ages about the Dark Ages in the days when it was called Women’s History. Had to read Foucault, Cixous and Butler just when they were the cutting edge. Would struggle through these obscure densely written articles, and, as was my habit, try to summarise the key ideas. Basically 10,000 word academic articles always seemed to boil down to sex roles can be used to exert power and privilege but can be slippery to define, so let’s try to define them by making up new badly punning portmanteau nonsense words. Honestly, I kept scratching my head as to what all these thinkers, who took themselves so very seriously, had to say which was of substance. Just seemed like bollocks and look now how captured academia has become by this self-serving tautological garbage.

Then volunteered at LGB switchboard before it became the alphabet soup it is now. We had a regular caller who I didn’t mind who was trans but she only really want to chat about what she was wearing (always lingerie) and what her boyfriend was going to do to her when he got home. I think she was being cheap as it was in the days of phonelines for sex and we were freephone. After months of this, I did have to gently point out that she was tying up one of two lines and she hadn’t really moved on from her schtick and since we were there for counselling or info I didn’t think we were helping her progress much anymore. Then (in the late 90s) I kinda shrugged my shoulders. No harm no foul since I wasn’t easily shocked, but it was telling that other team members were not happy about her calls. I think I was being kind then but not really considering the consequences of the caller on others.

Then I remember this guy standing up in 2002 in an equalities conference, I was at for work, and asking what are we meant to do when one minority group’s rights impinged to the detriment of another’s? A gathering of 1000 experts in London and no one could answer him. Looked around me and wondered exactly what the point of all this was. As a POC I think this whole my oppression is worse than your oppression is an utterly zero sum game. No one has ever explained adequately to me how a man cosplaying a woman is OK from a white person putting on yellow-face is not.

Then I had my baby boy in the late 2000s and went back into toy shops and really could not get my head around how everything was sex-segregated and that we seemed to be going through a time where understandings of gender were so much more binary than when I was a kid. Progress was stalling and actually going backwards for feminists.

And then all this current weirdness converged into young people hating on JKR, Hadley Freeman, Kathleen Stock for saying perfectly sensible and quite funny things about the massive cognitive dissonance of TWAW. As a vanilla lesbian mummy I find all the queer pink/blue haired kids railing against and name-calling these wise women (with some actual life experience) and substituting sexuality for an actual personalities just bizarro. Young lesbians having to sleep with TW for fear of their peers thinking them transphobic and cancelling them is frankly offensive.

My favourite GC heretic is Helen Joyce as she is such a fiend for calling out and naming the logical fallacies in TRA arguments and pithily demolishing them. Same sort of thing that happens here at MN. No room for sloppy thinking with stakes this high ie children’s safeguarding which obvs trumps middle-aged dudes having mid-life crises and cosplaying being women.

Finally, it is blindingly obvious to me that feelings are not facts and substituting emotions for evidence is an express train to crazy town as far as policy making in all areas of work, health, education, government and family life. I am all for critical thinking which I think has almost all but disappeared for fear of trampling on the delicate fragile psyches of the vulnerable minorities out there.

The pushback is coming. My kids are super eye-rolly about it all and think virtue signalling is anathema. It does seem after about a decade of madness this too will pass.

Someone suggested here that all middle-aged women who run out the house, having not bothered with make up and stick to low maintenance haircuts should declare themselves enbies to kill that trend stone dead. By God that would work a treat. I declare my enby name is Scrabble Dee Shunerry.

Came for AIBU. Stayed for FWR. Over ten years ago. Loved the courageous Magdalene Berns. Thought this would never touch me then DD got sucked into the cult. She reckons she's non-binary now which at least is medication free but I worry how close to the edge she is and whether a determined TA could lure her back in.

Fair play to you. By the way love the username. Give my regards to Martha Longhurst!

I remember reading and talking to Dittany here. She predicted a lot. Id love to go back on the old threads to see where we all went wrong, but they're like swiss cheese and impossible to read.

People who think trans ideology is basically ok, and its the tories/stonewall who let it get out of control are kidding themselves. Women could see what was going to happen years before.

In my view, one of the most harmful things that's happened is the politicisation of women's concerns and the fact it's now being used as a wedge issue between left and right - in the USA as well as here.

It means there is infighting and that people can write off the concerns as being "right-wing bigotry" or "left-wing wokerati" rather than having a productive conversation.

When I was looking through old threads (linked a couple upthread) it was really striking how constructive the conversations were, even when people disagreed. There was no having a go at OPs for "wrongthink" in terms of topic or source.

A long time lurker, occasional poster with frequent name changes. I think it was 2016/7 that I noticed the old FWR posts started talking about gender ideology and the impact on women. I remember the total disbelief I had at the time, I just couldn't get my head around it. I was shocked and bewildered tbh. It took a while for me to process. I think it was the uproar around JKR liking a tweet by MB that it hit home.

Helen Steel and the anarchist book fair.

I read somewhere - probably the Guardian - about some trouble there. My instincts were to side with what I thought of as a marginalised group, but then read that they were claiming Helen Steel was some sort of fascist.

Helen Steel?! THE Helen Steel?! A fascist?!

I hunted around trying to find more info, but could find nothing in the mainstream press and only frothing misogyny elsewhere. Then I found mumsnet - what an eye-opener!
it took me a while to lose my blinkers entirely, but it wasn’t long afterwards that Bergdorf spouted anti-women hatred, and then there was rubber-wanking-at- work man. I kind of thought that would be the end of it all … how naive.

Though maybe it was the end of the beginning.

I’m male by the way, and constantly grateful to the marvelous women of mumsnet, for keeping me informed and teaching me a lot when nobody else was brave and honest enough.

A daughter who thinks she's a boy, together with a suspiciously high number of friends. A couple of awful months when the only resource that I found that was advising caution was 4thwavenow, but the posts at the time were quite old with no follow up. Finally finding Wider Lens, that at the time had a few episodes out. I think I found Mumsnet after I listened to the episode with Helen Joyce, while looking for info on her. The journey with our daughter continues, with some small progress.

Philosophy article by Alex Byrne via an article by Katherine Stock. I had bought the idea that sex is a spectrum and the philosophy piece on what was necessary and sufficient to define 'woman' brought me up short. I looked at the spectrum thing again and realised it was utter nonsense (had similar epiphany - but much quicker - reading descriptions of reading that said we did not 'hear' what the words on a page but 'absorbed' the meaning). Glad I came tho get my head snapped off occasionally.

I'm in my early 30s and for me it was the treatment of JK Rowling and how she became public enemy number one despite saying things that just felt like common sense to me! I'm a huge supporter of LGBT rights (I am bisexual myself although married to a man) but I started noticing that if you didn't agree that all toilets should be unisex or that any man who identifies as a woman is a woman then you were immediately a terf. I also really didn't like the pronoun in the workplace thing. I feel it puts women at a disadvantage for the sake of a very small minority. I also worry about young autistic girls being vulnerable to gender dysphoria as an explanation of any difficult feelings. I support trans people but I don't see why women have to give up their spaces/ rights in order for that to happen. Finally, Sam Smith saying "why can't I be a mummy if I want to identify as one" enraged me as someone who has laboured with a vagina.

He’s the absolute worst

I met a man a number of years ago who worked in a manual job and I clocked that he had long hair and perfectly manicured long nails, which I thought a bit strange given the impracticalities for the job that he did, but really didn't give it too much thought. Be kind and all that. He'd always given me the creeps tbh but as he transitioned his mannerisms changed and became "fluttery" - hand gestures and eyelashes, leaning in too close when talking etc which just gave me a visceral reaction whenever I saw him coming. Then there was a while where he disappeared and when he came back it was with a new (female) name, huge breast implants, low cut tops, too short skirts and stiletto heels. It was such a ridiculous spectacle on this huge lumbering man. I found it impossible to square the circle and believe that this man was now actually a real woman.

A few years later I discovered MN and following my divorce and subsequently living on my own for the first time I spent an awful long time on here and found myself reading the posts of some very wise and sadly long since banned women. I found people that agreed with me. I no longer bought the "be more kind" mantra while Madigan, Challoner and Yaniv were quite frankly taking the piss. Names kept coming up with more and more unsavoury stories. Rather than being investigated they were shut down with impunity. And it turned out that we were called out for being in the wrong, the eloquent, reasoned voices and rational discussion. Women were being arrested, losing their jobs and reputations. While the right side were making god awful threats, physically assaulting women and getting away with it.

MN thank you. It has been a bumpy ride and no doubt this will continue but you let us speak (despite some censure!) but I do feel that the tide is finally turning.

India on CBB telling all the women to be nice whilst