Does anyone else resent the gender/ TERF wars?

[TERFCat]

I met up with an old friend last night. The first two hours were magical! Everything was going great until the "what is a woman?" question popped up... Then, it all turned sour, and I don't think she and I will be catching up again for a long time.

Basically, whilst I think women's rights are paramount and should be defended whenever necessary, I'm really starting to resent the impact this had on my real life.

I have lost friends over this, and I've likely been stopped from making more too!

Does anyone else feel this way?

Yes, I do resent it.
I thought that we would win in a few years and we have been winning -Susie Green gone, Mermaids discredited,Stonewall losing funding, the Tavistock closing, the Labour Party backing away, Meghan Kelley peaking the Republicans and Trump ending men in women's sports but it keeps continuing- the NHS/Unions/BBC etc all keep pushing it and I think that it will be a generational process, I now feel like we will be stuck with it for years.

I used to ‘be kind’…
But, four and a half years ago I gave birth to my beautiful twin boys. As expected, I had the usual comments such as ‘rather you than me’ ‘how will you manage both’ etc but the one that really stood out to me was a person asked if I was disappointed they were both boys because I should know that it was now possible to change sex. I thought she was joking but I guess she wasn’t as some fools do actually believe it’s possible. 18 months later I had my adorable little girl but no further stupid comments from that same person.

Then I found MN ❤️

From the bottom of my heart and soul, I will be forever thankful and grateful for the wonderful women that frequent this board because without you all, I might have blindly allowed others to influence my children. They are perfect as they are.
I’m also thankful for my wonderful family and friends that they also believe in biological reality. No one in my life believes in the insanity of gender ideology.

I echo what everyone else has already said so well!

Yep, I resent that huge parts of society are taken up with this utter nonsense. I resent that it's the new secular orthodox quasireligion, to which complete obeisance is the only allowed path (even quietly keeping your head down often isn't enough). It's heartbreaking to see so many distressed and vulnerable people sucked in. It's infuriating to see nasty bullies using this as a Righteous stick to beat anybody who doesn't perform the rituals and chant the slogans.

I resent it. I struggle to stay quiet but know I would be unemployed very quickly.

It is surprising how many women don’t realise the privilege they have when they say they are fine sharing facilities with men, most don’t realise that affirmation and pandering about make up and clothing is providing wank fodder for trans identifying men.

The most disappointing one is a friend who worked in the prison system, has direct experience of the numerous vulnerable women, yet still actively virtue signals in support of trans identifying males.

Also disappointed that on IWD so many colleagues took the opportunity to fit in a statement about not only supporting women, but ‘other minorities and we should raise all women” with the trans subtext in there.

I wasn’t transphobic towards trans identifying males, until I had experience of them, their fetishes and understanding of what makes them tick. The worst thing that ever happened was preventing it being treated as the mental illness it actuaries.

In the last few years I have read a few books that have made me see this in a new light (stick with me here): the Wolf Hall series, and a WW2 epic called Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, often called the War and Peace of the 20thC.
I read them close together and at the same time as frequenting these boards and what stuck me was the commonality between the social and political environments they describe: group think, religion, blasphemy, right think and the power to denounce and be denounced (or cancelled as we call it now, I wonder how differentl it would be if we still said “denounce” would the penny drop I wonder?). In the 16thC it was wars of religion and one could not legally worship in one’s own vernacular language nor question the sacred presence of God in a communion wafer without the threat of dire consequences. In the 20thC in Russia you had to agree with what Stalin said was the truth or you could quite feasibly disappear and never be seen again. All of these things were just versions of stories that groups of people collectively agreed were The Truth and could not be questioned, and now we look back and think it was madness.

It opened my eyes somewhat. Not to the gender woo as I was already sceptical of that, but to the effect it has on society at large. When women lose jobs and livelihoods, lose titles and places in sport, get doxxed online and receive death threats, people (incl Glinner) lose entire careers - you can see the parallels. All because society decides that this is a story we now believe in. It’s scary.

(completely off toipic but gosh, Life and Fate is an absolute unit of a novel, but so much better than W&P - although i haven't given the latest translation of W&P a go yet)

I got that from Wolf Hall too!

I got it from the Crucible and a TV film based on that witch trial : 3 Sovereigns For Sarah.
And Thomas More's defence still doesn't work , alas.

I work for a very captured Scottish organisation. I feel fear every time I'm asked to be part of an equality meeting with the team members from that team and in particular the head of the department. If they had any inclination that I'm not a true believer I'm 100% sure they'd find a way to put my job at risk. And I really love it and I feel valued. My team bar a few are all displaying pronouns in their signatures. I suspect the head of equality team is already twitching against me as I don't have pronouns in mine.

Women will always be considered sub human to certain men. It's very depressing.

I'm so sick of this shit.

So much time and effort and money wasted on this utter nonsense.

And it's never going to end. We can never let our guard down again as these men will keep on pushing to get access to female spaces.

Well, don't. Idon't want people crawling either. But it will come down like a house of straw, because that is what it is. Funny how clever people fall for the most utter rubbish, though! The more 'intellectual' someone is the more likely they will fall for a scam, it seems to me. And genderism is a grade 1 scam.

Cubicles are not the answer because they can be the site of hidden cameras, and sexual assault. Gender neutral/unisex facilities see 90% of all assaults on women.

Sex segregated is the answer - as it always has been. The same goes for sports, refuges, prisons etc. And anything else that women want to be proper women only.

@User3456 ”Trans people exist”

There is no coherent definition of what a “trans” person is.

We should not be organising society around how people “feel inside”.

Most of the time it doesn’t matter what sex you are or what beliefs you may hold about the nature of “gender identity”.

When it doesn’t matter what sex you are, it tends to really matter. And so it should be your actual sex, not your “gender identity” that dictates which category you fall into.

“Trans” people are all either male and female like the rest of us and have the same rights as the rest of us. I really don’t understand what they want. The way they feel about themselves cannot and does not dictate how others perceive them or how they are treated in the circumstances where sex matters.

You can get it from a study of the Reformation, in fact.

Thomas More was one of them. He it was betrayed Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English. Then More fell foul of the same ideology. Which is just like the situation of TRAs - they only need one slip and they too will be cancelled/denounced.

Indeed. Then Calvin was a great Reformer. But he too had heretics burnt at the stake. Perhaps the TRA ideology will end like the French Reign of Terror , devouring its own children?

With any luck.

I resent that people are still banging on about the TERF ears and won't just let trans people live in peace.

I have two tran friends, both lovely people who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace but face abuse on an almost daily basis and the fact that people can't just leave them alone and let them live their lives in a way that makes them happy when they aren't harming anyone pisses me off. I resent the fact that most people here would relish in calling them men lapping as women, men in dresses, male bad actors and all sorts of other insults because it is cruel.

them men lapping as women, men in dresses, male bad actors

These things are all true.

I have absolutely no problem with people living their lives as they see fit.

But if transwomen are demanding access to women's spaces, then they're not just 'living their lives in peace' - are they? They're causing issues for vulnerable women.

And ultimately, if people are being coerced into saying men are actually
women, there will be pushback, because they aren't.

if Living their lives in peace means going into women’s single sex spaces then they are harming women

and honestly getting abuse on a daily basis is exactly what women experience

@Glitterknickerbockers I think you have an absolute cheek making out that they are the victims are not allowed to "live in peace".
They are the ones who won't let women and girls live in peace. They have invaded our safe spaces, invaded our sports and caused at least one girl to be paralysed by the strength of their ball strike. They have re-arranged society's definitions to the extent women and girls are now called 'bleeders', 'menstruators' and 'cervix havers'. They have had males in rape crisis centres, and any vulnerable traumatised girl that complains is themselves banned from the centre. They have made men's crimes of rape listed as womens crimes which has seen the crime of rape gone up to 33% a womans crime. They have managed to completely dismantle all safeguards women and girls and have and completely and utterly re-ordered society, to the extent that we can't even fucking have International Womens Day without a male being headlined to speak and lead a parade. And males shown in every IWD ad.

They have a level of power, privilege, protection and prestige that no other minority group EVER in history has had. Gay men never had anywhere near this power. Never before has any 'marginalised' minority group gained such MASSIVE POWER and INFLUENCE SO QUICKLY.

How FUCKING DARE you make out that transwomen are 'victims' and can't live in peace? Seriously, the brass neck of you! How fucking dare you even have the sheer gall! All WOMEN AND GIRLS want, is to live in fucking peace with fully intact males in our changerooms, sports, rape shelters etc.

We were all fine with trans people for decades until they started infiltrating womens spaces. Then, it was game on. They bullied, abused, hounded, harassed and attacked and threatened until they completely broke down society's social contract that protected women and girls.

FEMALES JUST WANT TO LIVE IN PEACE! We just want to have our sex-based rights back, to feel secure in society. So how absolute fucking dare you make out that these males are 'victims' when they have all the power and privilege and women and girls don't even have any safeguards anymore. How dare you have the gall to come here and tell us these invaders, colonisers and bullies are the 'victims' of us. How dare you!! These males are not victims, they are the recipients of Male Privilege that has re-ordered society completely to cater them them, and stripped females of every human right and safeguard we fought hard for.

These males are not and never were the victims. It is FEMALES that want only to live in peace, and have our rights back.

On the most basic level, trans people are harming fact: human beings cannot change sex.
Claiming that a person used to be a man but is now somehow a woman, or vice versa, isn't based on facts.

Other posters will point out the wider social harms that come from that, but I like to keep it simple: transwomen are men, and transmen are women, and claiming otherwise is going against facts.

I like facts - you know, observable, scientifically-provable facts. So I resent people e.g. trans people, even your two lovely friends, turning facts on their head and replacing them with inaccuracies, like 'transwomen are women'.

What exactly do you mean by “face abuse”? And are these friends of yours male or female?

Either way, adults who are appropriating the other sex and pretending to be something they are not likely to be popular - in the same way that Rachel Dolzeal is not popular.

Blackface, womanface, manface….all offensive and foolish to adopt.