Thank you

[thankyouthankyou1]

I have been following this board for a while and I just need to say thank you for existing. I will ramble on, but that's the crux of it. I am self employed, have been a long time and have quite a 'small' existence in many ways. Also not a massive social media user so haven't been exposed to any online debates other than what I've read here. I've often worried that I'm existing in an echo chamber.

However, I've recently joined BlueSky and LinkedIn to try and boost my income and I've found myself quite upset by the conversations around transgender issues. I haven't sought these out, they have just appeared. A lot of anger and what seems to me like a serious lack of logic. (I've attached a couple of things I've seen.) I can't get beyond the fact that transgender ideology reinforces damaging stereotypes. Is it anything more than that? I'm yet to hear a convincing argument for why gender trumps sex, or for why it's wrong to even talk about the issues in a critical way. How is it hateful to want to protect women? How can we look at the Suffragettes or at what is happening in Afghanistan and not understand that sex rather than gender comes first? I'm honestly open to listening and learning. I don't necessarily think I'm right. It is not in my nature to be in conflict with others; I find it incredibly stressful and upsetting.

I'm full of sympathy for those experiencing gender dysphoria, truly I am. It must be horribly difficult and upsetting and I would never want to undermine their experience.

I have no more to say really. I can't speak up on social media. I need to earn money and the conflict would be hugely difficult for me. I just can't engage with it. That makes me feel like a terrible wimp if I'm honest. I guess I am!

P.s. the second attachment genuinely baffles me. I'm not if I'm misunderstanding it.

I answered you on the second attachment but I'll repeat here for clarity.

They think that the footballer being discussed, Barbra Banda, is a woman. Either they think BB is just an XX woman being targeted, or they think it doesn't matter whether BB is a male with a DSD, and BB should be allowed to compete against women.

They think that the only reason males with DSD in sports are singled out and complained about is "racism".

I mean to say I answered on the other thread.

@Ereshkigalangcleg I guess I just find it odd to gave GC views referred to as having 'invisible' ideas as surely it's exactly the opposite?

Your correct, however TRAs love to practice davro wherever and wherever possible

Hi @thankyouthankyou1
It's great that you signed up to this board, there's a lot of reading to do!

I can't get beyond the fact that transgender ideology reinforces damaging stereotypes. Is it anything more than that? I'm yet to hear a convincing argument for why gender trumps sex, or for why it's wrong to even talk about the issues in a critical way.

I had similar questions back in 2017. I was fairly "be kind" back then and I genuinely wanted to hear robust arguments and factual evidence from the 'other side' so I could make my own mind up. I'm still waiting.

This idelology twists and exploits women's and girls' experiences for its own ends.

I hear you when you say you can't speak up on social media, but you can speak up here. Posters are challenged on here and that's a good thing. But some arrive thinking it's going to be like Reddit and are shocked to discover it's not.

With regard to your first attachment, I don't have a problem with it. My gay friends do it a lot. But they're not being "boundary-busting feminine" (jeezz...), they're being camp. And they don't believe men are women!

I'm glad you find this board supportive, Thankyou.. - I recognise that feeling of WTF is happening?? when you realise that what seemed to be established facts and guaranteed rights for women are now thrown up in the air and have landed in a mess on what used to be the ground, but appears now to be the ceiling?

And the positive feeling that you are not alone when you find FWR on MN.
But I'm afraid conflict is inevitable, it is a stressful time in history for women, and for people who believe in science and reason. Being gender critical is not easy. But we have come to the conclusion that biological sex is real, is binary and is unchangeable, and there's so much evidence to support that that 'here we stand, we can't do otherwise..' [apparently he never actually said that, so I'm not bizarrely quoting Martin Luther in support of GC!]

That's the issue with Barbra Banda and the Olympic boxers e.g. Imane Khélif - it's not that they 'don't look like typical women' or 'don't look like typical White European ideals of women', it's that they've both been found to not be women at all, because biologically they are male.

It's likely that neither of them knew they had DSDs and I'm always prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt, ie that they got into women's sports because they were brought up as girls.
But when they get the results of tests that show that they are males with DSDs, the right thing to do is to step away from women's sports where their male physiques give them an unfair advantage.
I also feel somewhat sorry for them for having to do that, but my sympathy wears thin when I see the amounts of money that the likes of Caster Semenya, Banda and Khélif can make out of being top 'sportswomen', at the expense of actual sportswomen.

Hope you keep coming back here for more recharging of your GC batteries!

How can we look at the Suffragettes or at what is happening in Afghanistan and not understand that sex rather than gender comes first?

I also meant to add about this: I find it such a characteristic of those who are into this ideology that they rarely consider 'being a woman' outside their own little Western bubble. They remember the rest of the world exists when they want to leverage trans murders in South America (obviously dreadful) or bang on about the far right influence from the US. But women's issues and women's real lives in other parts of the world, like Afghanistan, just don't register on their radar.

I've been told with a straight face that Patriarchy is a white western invention. I don't know how anyone with the slightest awareness of women's lives globally and historically could believe that.

I feel like you OP, my work are totally captured it's the cognitive dissonance that gets me. Nothing makes sense. I just keep my head down. I'm not on social media and I'm glad of that as I think I'd find it hard not to argue back, especially when being lied to about scientific fact and biology.

Luckily most of my friends irl are similar to me, we all are pretty much on the same page. It's frustrating how academia and professional work places and government have embraced it all though, there's no science behind it so it seems crazy to base policies around feelings and not facts.

Nothing makes sense

I'd be careful about statements like this. They can be used to frame GC women as simply too stupid or prejudiced to understand the world has moved on.

I understand the genderist position and how it makes sense to them. Frankly I think I could argue their case better than half of them (and I don't need thought terminating cliches or calling everyone who disagrees with me a Nazi to do it either).

I simply believe they are wrong, because sex manifestly does exist and the sex we are does impact our lives physically and socially, and that means we need to retain the language and concepts to refer to it and describe those impacts.

Everything else follows from that basic fact.

@FlirtsWithRhinos your last two paragraphs sum it up for me really. I'm not sure I'm at the 'they are wrong' place, yet. But at the same time my core belief is that our biological sex exists and, as you say, affects our experiences.

I will say I feel this more and more the older I get. The more I encounter sexism and misogyny, the more I see the damage this does to both men and women, the more the feminist inside of me grows and burns.

I have a son, a beautiful innocent toddler who I want to grow up to be a gentle and kind young man who can be vulnerable and not feel he has to perform a certain 'masculine' role.

@INeedAPensieve Same. It rarely comes up in normal conversation, to be honest, and if it does I never hear anything other than what are essentially GC views, even if not expressed as such. And I live in one of the 'gay capitals' (albeit a boring suburb).

I think describing ‘naive hopefulness’ as a feminine energy is so sexist it’s the kind of bilge spouted by 19th century male novelists desperate to keep the ‘Angel of the hearth’ firmly situated in the hearth amongst the cinders. My feminine energy is dark and razor sharp thanks all the same.

I didn't realise there was a level of terfdom where you no longer feel sympathy for those with gender dysphoria.

I feel anger that they make life hard for everyone because they don't realise they should get help. They need help and they need it yesterday.

And everyone has to put up with it while they figure things out.

I've been told that "TERFS/GCs" are upholding the patriarchy by enforcing a gender binary. When I asked for clarification as to how I was told "if you understood you wouldn't be a TERF"

It's all stereotypes; religious levels of blind faith; and projection.

Trans rights ideology had one of the most openly racist slogans out there in "acceptable" society and are on record of planning to piggyback (ie appropriate) on other successful rights movements in order to achieve success. So of course they gotta fling racism accusations at anyone who opposes them.

When observing TRAs the phrase "actions speak louder than words" is so pertinent. The gay men who are suddenly well into biological essentialism when it comes to fucking. The young women who don't work the kind of jobs that require a changing room and who are highly unlikely to ever be incarcerated.

They are wrong that sex can just be overwritten by gender identity, keep everything else the same, and that this doesn't hurt women.

That doesn't mean they are wrong about everything. I've said many times I feel most trans people and TRAs are at heart our allies against patriarchy, they've just got a little lost on the way.

I believe patriarchy hurts men as well. I've got no issue with men wanting to explore or value parts of their chatacter that patriarchy dismisses, or men wearing makeup and dresses, or people challenging patriarchy's constructed roles, or people wanting to label themselves as a meaningful social group because they feel a commonality of mind rather than body. I think all that sounds pretty good actually.

My line is simply that all this is separate to sex and so should be done under its own language and argue for support and legitimacy from first principles, not commandeering the existing language of sex and using that cover to appropriate single sex supports without making an honest case as to why this is justifiable, or why the history of sex oppression and the sexed experiences of women especially suddenly no longer matter to people who consider themselves progressive.

FlirtsWithRhinos · Today 11:06

I've been told with a straight face that Patriarchy is a white western invention.

Well, it's true, isn't it? There's no Patriarchy in, for example, Afghanistan, or South Africa, is there?

Eyeroll...

@FlirtsWithRhinos you articulate everything so well. It feels like you say everything I want to say but don't know how to! Thank you for that.

Many of us have trod similar paths, OP.

I think you're at the 'bewilderment' stage.

Ask lots of questions, women here are happy to try and answer good faith questions. Test things out. Seek evidence, data, try and see the opposite viewpoints where possible.

I would say that over the years I've found out such horrible stuff about transgender ideology - including puberty blockers, prison onset gender dysphoria, crossdressing paraphilias, and the general aggression, threats, and hatred that many extremist trans activists use that I am beyond trying to figure out if there really is a good argument buried somewhere in genderism. I think even if there are/were possibly some useful tenets at some point, the ideology itself has been used to do such terrible things that it has to be countered.

Genderism is actively harming children and vulnerable people. Sterilising children! It's harming society. It's undermining trust in institutions, science, the media, the police, the judiciary, etc.

@Thankyou, I'm not surprised you're baffled by the second attachment, whose writer claims that feminists operate some sort of invisible moveable standard for what is feminine but is also racist.

Whether you agree with GC feminists or not, that claim is clearly and blatantly a lie. It's the opposite of what we do. We know that women are adult human females. Women have no need to meet any kind of standard of femininity -- we just are female. There is nothing invisible about it, much less moveable.

Femininity, on the other hand, is a set of male-approved stereotypes that most women consider outdated. But trans-identifying men believe performing these stereotypes makes them women.

Be glad you were baffled, Thankyou. It means your brain is functioning correctly!

The first attachment is just bog-standard sexist nonsense, men calling other men "she" if the men display a part of people that takes risks or makes mistakes, that is naively hopeful or in full disregard of the rules. No, they are men displaying that behaviour. Nothing to do with women.

I've been told that it's feminism's fault that we now have men in women's prison's and women's sport.
You wanted "equality" after all didn't you?

Wrap your head around that one.

There's just no arguing with stupid.

I was in a similar position to you OP when I found this board about 5 months ago. Although I have always had GC views, I have learnt so much!! If you can put time aside to follow links, watch some of the videos and read older threads, you will be rewarded by a wealth of information and a range of views that probably does not exist anywhere else.

They have to put up with figuring it out. I don't see anyone else has to?

The mainstream popularity of trans rights ideology really has brought the left wing misogynists and right wing misogynists to the yard. It's been an eye opener.

Seeing lefty men (some of whom I'd previously admired) use abortion to shame, goad and coerce women into letting men do whatever they want made me feel sick. Every single right women have in any country is granted - or revoked - at the behest of whichever men hold power.

Trans ideology didn't invent this state of affairs but it is a symptom of it and very much capitalises on it.