Trapped in the Trans world

[trappedbytrans]

Have done a name change for reasons that will be obvious.

I work in a civil society organisation where being pro-trans is religion. Not a single person is GC and to be honest when I joined I was totally with them. TWAW, TRAHR repeat to fade.

Reality and common sense has gone to me. I'm seeing healthy women in our organisation (staff not clients, we don't have clients as such) having mastectomies and changing pronouns. We even have one person who has to tell us their pronouns each morning as they are likely to change at least once each day.

I am in a very senior role and I could blow the doors off if I quit and went public. The problem is that I would be unemployable in a field where I am a national leader / expert, and I would lose 80% of my friends (we are a very pro-social organisation and network).

So that's it. I'm not here for advice (though that would be welcome!) but more to express my tiredness and frustration at my situation. I guess I'm hoping that more people blow the doors off and eventually I am forced to escape with a fat redundancy package.

This makes me think of vicars who are secretly atheist. I guess, if you really can’t buy into it, redundancy and a new role in a different type of organisation is the way to go.

It is a religion, but I don't think it offers people much in the long term. I really believe it'll fade away - and already has in a lot of places.

You have one life and one life only. Nothing is worth living a life that kills your spirit. Only you can know if this is what you are doing. Go well xxx

Sounds awful, I wish you well. I hope someone else blows the bloody doors off!

Would it blow the doors off? I suspect it would make you unemployable without changing anything. I think take your talent somewhere less captured. Sympathies op. It must be thoroughly irritating to be surrounded by idiots.

Well OP you can carry on being a wet lettuce, until the day you retire, and then you can live in guilt on your pension.

Or you could wait for somebody else to do the blowing of the door and be seen with your pants on the wrong way around.

Or you could be a bigger person and do as others have and blow the door of. Look at some of our hero’s that all seem to be doing more than okay, and making a positive contribution to the push back.

Go on get the dynamite out and do it, you know you want to.

Maybe we will see you on the other side where new friends await, i hope so.

One piece of advice, e mail JKR she may want to help you.

Really! Do they change their minds and then get trapped? Interesting.

As for the OP. Good grief. I’d have to leave

Are they your friends if you fundamentally disagree with their viewpoint and they wouldn't be able to see past that to have a friendship? Or vice versa I suppose.

Not sure if that makes things any easier tbh but it was something that stood out for me. Could you move and retain your professionalis, but then distance yourself from the aspects you feel uneasy with?

OP that sounds grim. But as the mother of a child who has been ensnared by this ideology, I hope from the bottom if my heart that you do blow the doors off.

It's actually terrifying how difficult it is to find healthcare personnel who can express a coherent critical opinion on 'transness' in children. Most either affirm or profess ignorance, and the critical ones are very quiet about it.

Please, if you can see a way, make a noise about this.

I think if you blow the doors off then you will find others in other places to replace the friends you loose. I came out as GC and lost a few friends but a couple people I knew but wasn't close to made the effort befriend me because they too were GC.

If financially you would be ok I think we have a duty to speak out. The more of us who do the easier it is for the next person. But it's reasonable to protect yourself financially. I'm self employed so couldn't loose my job over the things I say but I'd hide my beliefs if it meant I couldn't pay the mortgage.

I heard an excellent Sam Harris podcast where this was discussed. The guest explained research with Christian ministers in the US, can’t remember which denomination(s), which showed something surprising like 5-10% of them had stopped believing in God. Their wider church community, livelihood and often tied housing kept them practising but they were going through the motions. Basically they were all in with the lifestyle and couldn’t walk away. I was on a podcast playlist on a long car journey playing on someone else’s phone. SH’s podcast has so many episodes I haven’t been able to pin down which one it was.

is it really a case of 'blow the doors off' or 'do nothing'? are there other smaller things you can do like activities that support women's health? Or any activities that promote dialogue?

I'm familiar with a set of materials on 'disagreeing well' that tries to let people express a variety of opinions without taking offence. You might find something here that you could promote in your organization to start broadening people's outlook.

www.ucl.ac.uk/about/disagreeing-well/resources/additional-resources

I do believe that just refusing to take part - not adding pronouns to signatures, using the phrase 'pregnant women' and other outmoded terms - is not nothing. Increasingly I see it as a small signal - 'You're not alone'. Just focusing on the other protected characteristics when needed rebalances things a bit imo.

The Guardian used to have a column called The Secret Civil Servant. You should pitch them The Secret GC Civil Servant/NGO/Blob member, it would blow their minds.
Or an outlet that might actually publish it. Or start a blog - I’d tune in for Mx New Pronouns Every Day. Lol, fucking hell!

just be pro woman, try and facilitate female health related issues. Mesopause. Breast cancer. Birthing. Pregnancy. Period poverty.

Ok so for years you have promoted an ideology and it's only now, when impacting you that you finally "see sense".

Even then, your expectation is to find sympathy that it's hard for you to live within a culture you helped to create and for understanding permission as to why you can't won't do anything to change it.

Well I'm sorry. Boo fucking hoo....

You helped make the bed...

So you can:

• find somewhere else to sleep and leave it to someone else to changed your soiled bed linen
• keep pretending to sleep in rotting bedsheets until you get your pension and move house entirely whilst waiting for some else to whistleblow about the stench
• demonstrate some actual leadership and start pealing back the bedcovers one by one.

I've lost friends over this issue. I've gone out on a limb at work because this is an existential threat to women's rights and the safeguarding of vulnerable children.

I couldn't sleep if I'd not done otherwise.

That doesn't mean going in all guns blazing it means questioning policy and culture using the available research and evidence to back your stance - especially Cass and recent tribunals.

Demonstrating how an utter capture to gender ideology puts the organisation at risk of litigation.

So meh....make your decision but don't expect respect for moaning about the splinters in your arse after sitting on a shoddy fence.

Can you make more of a fuss about men's and women's issues on IWD and IMD, eg the awful abuses in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria etc which women and girls cannot identify out of? Get speakers in, do some fundraising etc? Or DV charities?

Oh I get it. There’s people like you that are gender critical you cannot stand trans people fair enough but what does it matter if people are trans that work in your organisation? How are they living their own lives affecting you? They’re not making you be trans is it because you don’t want to call them the pronoun that they want to be I’m trying to understand why them being trans affects you

Everything I would agree with, but people being trans doesn’t take anything away from that in fact I’m sure the trans people would be fine with it. What I’m trying to understand. Here is why people being trans working with this lady is affecting this lady so much

@Littlemissgobby can you explain what you mean by trans?

I am not going to play that game with you. We all know what it means if you don’t know what it means go Google it.

When a woman feels so dissociated from her body that she pays a private surgeon to have a mastectomy just so that she doesn't have breasts any more, yeah it affects me. I'm a feminist and seeing toxic sexist cultural change like that affects me. Just like it affects me when women are suffering in other ways. The pronouns are so irrelevant, I'll call a woman 'he' if somehow that helps her get through the day, but it doesn't make me think of her as a man, it makes me think more about women in the 60s who insisted they liked being called 'dollybirds' because that was whatvthe culture approved in them at the time.

Or just maybe I’m gonna stretch this out a little bit maybe she is really trans and has gender dysphoria and actually feels a damn site better being a man. Maybe that could be a reality for some people because some people seem to be living very happily after they’ve had the surgery, it’s almost like you guys don’t see that.

You are deliberately obfuscating the difference between organisational gender ideology capture, the rights trans people rightly have not to be discriminated/harassed at work and the right for people who hold gender critical beliefs not be discriminated/harassed either.

Working in a GI captured organisation means GC people, unlike their GI counterparts cannot (ironically) bring their "authentic" self to work, rather they work in a very non inclusive environment where it's not acceptable to voice biological fact.

Identifying as gender fluid is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. Nor I would suggest, if it were, is it reasonable to expect as a reasonable adjustment for entire workforce to take note of daily pronoun preferences.

When you say voice your authentic self what that means is you want to be able to tell everybody that they’re wrong being trans or how you think it’s wrong that we accept trans people because I’m trying to find out how are you not being able to say that stuff affects you being you When you compare that it’s not even comparable to people who feel utter distress living day-to-day life with the body, they don’t think they belong in. I really think you saw you guys are living some sort of melodramatic life that you claim the other side I see with your side as well.
do you know what if Janice was next to me telling me oh they wanted to be called John and then next day they changed their mind? I would probably roll my eyes but I will just be like alright then I will respect what you say and just move the fuck on because what does it matter? It’s not affecting you next week we’re gonna have people that are racist aren’t we? Want to be able to say well black people shouldn’t be working here but they will be saying it’s okay because it’s my free speech is affecting me that I’m not allowed to say this stuff. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s me. I just don’t get why you are so upset by it.