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.

@TWETMIRF that's a good call re. resources.

Does anyone have other suggestions?

Well done for speaking out. It's not easy. But you will be encouraging other people who privately share your views and don't yet feel confident to speak up. I do feel the tide is turning

Thanks! I also tried out a new gym yesterday. I told the guy showing me round that I hated mixed sex changing areas. He said he was questioning whether they should be single sex. I said I thought they should.

I've never been in a gym with mixed sex changing areas. Is that common?

Very common - because many gyms (with the exception of Bannatyne) allow men who say they are women to use the female changing rooms.

Worth checking the policy at the gym you go to.

Not sure what the latest on this case with David Lloyd is democracythree.org/help-emma-sue-david-lloyd

Good point, I haven't checked the policy. It's an independent one, though, not part of a chain.

To be fair I rarely use the changing facilities anyway as the gym is near my house and I normally change at home.

I'm thinking Donald Trump is dead right on this topic

The climbing gym that I go to is mixed sex. There are cubicles but the main central area is mixed. So even if you go into a cubicle you still have to walk through all the half naked men in their pants. The gym I went to yesterday is all mixed sex rooms. It’s a small gym and the rooms are tiny. I don’t like it.

I’m curious what you do about this. Do you write ‘pronouns tbc Mon’?

What a strange decision. I don't know any women who like mixed sex changing rooms! Even the ones who think TWAW prefer ostensibly if not actually single-sex spaces.

I think that's true. My daughter is very TWAW and supposedly all for everything being gender neutral etc (gave me a row for saying school toilets should be single sex), but recently was in a pub toilet (women's) cubicle, heard a masculine-sounding cough outside the cubicle, and hid inside until she was certain the person had gone. Perfectly normal and sensible behaviour but not quite in line with her stated opinions!

I know, it’s really weird.

@Haroldwilson have you ever had your job threatened for stating biological reality, or espousing the fairly standard ideas of 2nd wave feminism?

Because that's when these ideas go from being people "just living their lives", to being a culture of fear and intimidation. I know; I've been there.

Yes, live and let live. But too often, transactivism or gender extremist ideology wants to stop other people's living and let living.

Where I work, some colleagues said, at a meeting of our "inclusion group" that they thought we should go "beyond the law" in these matters. And my job was threatened by a seres of anonymous (to me) complaints which HR took seriously (HR knew who the complainants were) & investigated - merely for saying stuff that is absolutely biological reality, and defending girls & women's rights - to language, to single-sex spaces, to physical autonomy and safety.,

And @trappedbytrans those people saying that you should not be in your job if you're not brave enough to speak up are keyboard warriors with no idea, I'm afraid. I've spoken publicly about the experience of having my job threatened by transactivists: I keep a low profile now, because I figure by staying in my profession and gradually, drip by drip, reinstating reality & sanity, I can get some good out of my experience. When I spoke about this, I was overwhelmed with the kind responses from other women who said they're doing the same. There are many, many of us around, and what we do is significant. Maybe not as signifiant as the J K Rowlings or Maya Forstaters of thos fight (and I salute them) but still important.

Yes to that @YellowAsteroid we resist where we can depending on our own circumstances and appetite for risk. This is what it comes down to.

Thank goodness for the trailblazers who have made it easier for the rest of us.

Her instinct was to hide when she realised there was a man in the women’s toilets so not for one second does she really believe TWAW 🧐

Since the times of gender ideology, I've worked for two large public organisations. Although both were captured in having associations with Stonewall, the toilets have always been single sex. Pronouns are on a few people's email addresses, but it seems to be dying down.
I'm not outwardly gender critical and still don't think it's safe to be obvious, but I'm subtle and have met many others who are too.

Well it’s not remotely the same as race, though, is it. What you’ve described here is someone playing pretend, and expecting everyone else to go along with it to be kind. Would you pretend a colleague was really a flying bat or the Duke of Devonshire or had invented the internet if he or she felt better pretending it? No, you’d think it was ridiculous that you were expected to tell a lie at work.

Imagine I went into work one day and said I had finally realised I had terrible psychological issues because I had always wanted to be a doctor. And made everyone call me “Dr Julia” because it made me feel better. When do my colleagues get to dispense with the lie? What about when I start trying to give people first aid, diagnosing them or writing them prescriptions because I insist I’m a doctor? Does everyone still have to play along then? What other kinds of fake realities or lies should we be expected to pretend along with just so that someone’s mental health issues are assuaged?

@trappedbytrans OP I think you should look to move sideways to a similar role in a less captured org or sector. I’m in a sector which has had a bit of gender ideology, but there’s also a fair bit of resistance, especially from older people and older men in particular (who mostly ignore it). It seems to be dying down compared to a couple of years ago, and colleagues will frequently sound each other out and then out themselves as GC to each other, if not publicly. Lots of people saying to me sotto voce recently, “well of course it’s all a load of rubbish, isn’t it”, who probably still wouldn’t say it out loud in a big meeting.

So there are less captured places around. Yours sounds particularly bad - I couldn’t put up with all that nonsense! Jump ship sideways to somewhere where it’s less of a thing, and you can at least get on with other things while it all goes out of fashion.

Alex is mentally unwell, or taking the piss. Alex's line manager needs to intervene either way.

I had a colleague who started behaving erratically. She ended up being diagnosed with early onset dementia.

What do you mean by "what they have to be", and "what they have to do"?

OP, I'll share below two articles which aren't specifically about gender ideology in the workplace, but more broadly about how identity politics has lead many many excellent non profit organisations to eat themselves alive, allowing individuals with personal grievances or ordinary HR issues to turn them into social justice crusades, preventing the organisations from doing any work on the causes they ostensibly exist to pursue.

Both articles are from the US, but it was all too familiar-sounding to me. I work in the charity sector here in the UK and have watched at least three organisations brought to their knees in this way, two of them closed down. I also feel frightened and silenced about women's rights. There are plenty of us out there, I promise.

You can read this for free if you register: How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill

This blogpost is a response to it, and if you're at a high level within the organisation you might find it useful - so rather than 'blowing the doors off', or directly confronting gender ideology specifically, you might be able to see ways that you can identify how you can help refocus your organisation on doing the actual work rather than being some kind of safe-space magical playground for colleagues performing righteousness. Workplace and Hellscape

There was a lot of (black) humour for me reading this about Stonewall being relentlessly undermined by internal campaigners putting their beliefs about Gaza ahead of the organisation's own strategy and purpose. Exclusive: Stonewall told it must stop taking "blood money" from the arms trade - TFN I'd be sorry for the leadership, except they are being hoist by their own petard and deserve it.

Blocked & Reported podcast (BARpod) does some good stuff around woker than woke eating itself in organisations ...

And Sarah Haider is brilliant! I'm gutted that she & Meghan Daum have finished doing their "Special Place in Hell" podcast together ...

Me too. The way they’ve explored their generational differences has been enlightening on why some topics land differently in different age cohorts. I’ll miss them.

I am the same. Medium sized public organisation. There is a Stonewall connection but we never seem to hear about it, and pronouns in signatures are few and far between.

(I've mentioned this before, but my very senior manager did at one time have pronouns-in-signature but quietly dropped them one day. I'd love to know why.)