What brought you here?

[CyclingSam]

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

A general notion that feminism and transgender ideology were incompatible, followed by the discovery of the old gender critical subreddit and the realisation that other people thought the same thing.

Thanks for the contributions to this thread. A little bump to see if there are any more.

As a guy, my skin in the game has been the free speech issues (I've been banned from a few forums for outing myself as a sex realist). My wife, who used to work in the City, was aware of Pips Bunce, but didn't find herself directly impacted until she got perved on earlier this year by a trans-identified male in a medical setting.

I actually stumbled into FWR first (via the usual gateway of AIBU) and introduced her to it. I also check in at Ovarit, which I used to think was the wild west until someone here pointed the way to the Farms....

I've lost my sister and it is a difficult question to be asked by strangers, and even almost 16 years down the line I still find it odd and I'll have a reaction when asked. Do I tell the truth and say yes and then have to make things awkward by explaining and saying she died (as the follow up questions are always oh, what do they do or do they live nearby)? Or just say no I have none? I never like lying so I just say, yes I had a sister, she was my best friend, she died. People's reactions don't bother me as much anymore.

This has been an interesting thread to read, thanks @CyclingSam . I think with the ERCC stuff there might be a few more people starting to realise how bad things have got and maybe they'll join us here in FWR. I saw one on one of the ERCC threads. I'm sad reading the real life family suffering that's got people here though. It just shows how damaging this ideology is for so many.

Someone posted a link to the article on kindness. Can’t remember which thread it was on… (anyone who does?) but ‘kindness’ is mentioned here as in the constant instruction order to ‘be kind’ as one of their triggering events. Seems that when talking about gender, the kindness only goes one way.

Not surprising in that it must feel irritating to TRAs that women are not staying in their male-ascribed role of being the kind sex as they assumed that our social conditioning was what would enable them to live out their misogynistic fetish whilst simultaneously exerting control over women by silencing them. All the under the scolding finger pointing angrily toned ‘be kind!’.

It’s been FWR that showed me just how the compassion edict (“be kind”) and the ‘sacred victim’ role are polar opposites. In fact, the victims are self aggrandising and virtue signalling whilst being very unkind and spiteful towards women.

'be kind' is shorthand for 'put up and shut up'

I've been on FWR since it was 'Feminism and Women's Rights'. I'm a female scientist, with a daughter who from an early age was interested in engineering so of course it was a natural area of interest! I can't remember when I first posted on the board (having been on MN for some years already) but iirc it was a piece of naive whataboutery which rightly got my arse handed to me.

I came across the term 'gender critical' here when it really had nothing at all to do with transgenderism but was clearly about rejecting gender stereotypes because of their harmful effects on individuals and society.
I was on the thread which spawned 'let toys be toys', which wiki tells me as 2012

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LetToyssBeToys

Issues around transgenderism didn't really start to come to the fore till a bit later - I think Caitlin Jenner in 2015 brought the issue to many people's attention, and there was a transwoman prisoner whose name escapes me who got a lot of publicity somewhere around that time.

I remember Let Toys Be Toys! (and was it Let Clothes Be Clothes or similar?)

It was the 4-5 years before that campaign that I started to think "WTF is going on?"

I too had grown up "gender critical" in the old sense i.e. thinking that gender stereotypes were sexist bollocks and that men and women could do anything, apart from things related to our sexed bodies obviously. Having cruised through my 20s in a cloud of post-feminist everything-is-sorted smuggery, I was now in my 30s and the first lot of my friend group started having babies. I remember going to buy New Baby gifts and being startled by the pink/blue everything. IIRC the toy companies had produced special Pink Zebras and Pink Globes. By the time I was pregnant a couple of years later, the extremely gendered merchandise seemed all-pervasive unless you made a special effort to shop in particular (usually more expensive) places.

I've been here in various guises for about a decade. I came for sleep and breastfeeding tips and stayed for the feminism. My GC interests started with Magdalene Burns, got peaked by Maya and JK's essay and started screaming in full amber alert mode when I realised they were putting male rapists in female prisons. Thank Gods, last year, the Isa Bryson debacle changed the policy for that.

Labour's been as dismal as I expected them to be on women's rights, and we have to keep fighting, but I hope (thanks to the Cass report and court cases) that we've passed peak batshit.

Discovering Mumsnet for the first time while I was breastfeeding in the wee hours of the night, realising what was going on and being utterly horrified at the institutional capture of just about every organisation in Scotland. Realising that my Government really couldn't give one single shit about women and discovering women's right networks so that I could contribute to the fight.

Was it Tara Hudson who had a petition going to get him and his 7" surprise transferred to a women's prison?

Govt lawyers argued that Hudson “is as a matter of biological fact a man” and add that the term “transwoman” has no legal significance. They used female pronouns ‘out of respect’.

Wonder if they’d take this stance now?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/20/tara-hudson-transgender-prisoner-sues-government

That's the one, it looks to have been around 2015 too.
Hell, nearly a decade of this shit.

I was a bit worried about Hudson going in a men's prison until RickRoll did her expose on here of Hudson's punter reviews and boasting about her 7 inch surprise 🤢🤮

That was about the same time as the Hauxwell "woman disguised as a man on the run" headline. Still one of my favourites - shows how far we've come in the right direction

Here we go:
https://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/missing-woman-dressed-as-man-seen-in-dronfield-64108

I've been on MN for years but rarely contribute, but I found that I needed a place where women were actively considering and discussing the collective madness that seems to surround us. I guess the trigger was hearing Sarah Owen (Women and Equalities Minister) on Womans Hour last week, she refused to define a woman and gave the usual "lets all be kind to one another" rubbish. It enraged me, actually made me feel unseen and I wondered if anyone else had heard it....turns out there was thread about it on MN and then I found this thread. It really helps to know I'm not the only person who is GC.

First used mumsnet to find out more about breastfeeding - found it really rude.
Only came back when stuck at home in lockdowns. I have always been an environmentalist and therefore leftie, anti-global-corporate, very cynical about government greenwashing and hypocrisy, and I had concerns about the power that corporations seemed to be gaining via govts over those times. Somehow at the same time my DH (very feminist!) started a deep dive into trans stuff, and I found myself moving away from the insanity of 'AIBU to call the police on my mum cos she went for a walk' to the feminist boards. I don't post much but I have a very odd background in both law and science, so I put my oar in when I feel the need to be a pedant about words and scientific reality (or sometimes just when I'm really really cross!)
I'm still not sure I like MN. And I still find it really rude 😂

Yeah. I quite like the rude, sometimes. Bracing.

Othertimes, not.

Haha Sometimes the rudeness does make me laugh! But I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it!

I don't find MN particularly rude. If anything, less rude than I expected. It certainly wouldn't be the term I'd use to define it. I've said this before, but I do very much see MN as a force for good in the world, and there really aren't many corners of the internet you can say that about.

duc748, I am a proper snowflake though 😂. Despite having incredibly strong views on practically everything, any form of conflict makes me cry in a corner 😂
I can see why there's a bit of rudeness here because this stuff matters. But the number of just really ignorant rude posts on some of the other threads. Well, I just think people should use their aggression for stuff that matters, not for lambasting some poor OP who just came on for advice about paint!

AIBU can be a bear pit, but other areas can be wells of kindness and good advice.

And some of it is unalloyed silliness which I adore.

The Christmas bargain threads are lovely - they’re like a safe haven. I do appreciate the bluntness on posts but the ones that are over the top mean, although it can sometimes be funny, I don’t enjoy so much. It very much depends on what the topic is. There is some very good advice on here on a massive variety of issues. It’s good to be informed of things and to have an idea of what you would say in a situation when it does arise.