Reasons you once believed in gender identity

[Mermoose]

Edit: damnit I should have included "Never believed TWAW" in the poll. Sorry. There doesn't seem a way of editing the poll.

I read Victoria Smith's brilliant Substack "More Heat, More Light", which is about the impossible restrictions put on GC women's expression, but also about her journey from agreeing outwardly that TWAW, to consciously recognising that she didn't believe this. Fear and guilt stopped her from realising this earlier.

When I thought I believed TWAW it was also because I was afraid to think about it. I'd internalised the propaganda that there was something cruel and prurient in asking questions. "Why are you obsessed with other people's genitals" was quite effective for a while. (Of course sex is politically salient precisely because sex affects our entire bodies).

Some people never believed TWAW, I know. But for those of us who once did - or who believed we believed it, if that fits better - was it fear and guilt stopping you from really thinking about it, or was it that you did think about it and had what seemed like well-thought-out arguments? And if you had arguments that seemed sound at one time, what were they?

For people who still believe TWAW I think there are a lot of other threads where you can put forward arguments for this, so I'd like this thread just to be about people who did believe TWAW and have since changed their minds.

Well said @Mermoose

It is also asking to have a man in the changing room alongside young girls.

I am a great believer that people should be able to be who they are and do what they want. Up to the point where they are harming others. When you have males in women’s sport and aggressively pushing into women’s spaces a line has been crossed.

With sport the physical differences are dangerous if there is contact or places are taken based on difference in physical build. In women’s spaces there is a safety aspect and a loss off access to facilities/essential services: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj310jvzpd8o.amp

In short, I was 16, clueless about male violence, and I thought it was more important to be nice to men than it was to be fair to women.

I remain amazed at how prepared senior people are to beclown themselves in public and say things that every sane person (and many animals) knows to be untrue.

I never believed- I was a bit mystified for a little while by information that was starting to be pumped out by the trans propaganda machine in the early 2000s but I always kept coming back to the basic knowledge that it’s not possible to change sex.

I believed the 'sex is a spectrum' bit when I first came across genderism about four years ago. Then I read an article by Alex Byrne on what was necessary and sufficient to define 'woman' and several articles re DSDs which revealed these are sex specific. Suddenly I saw what utter nonsense I had believed (much based on what were said to be scientific diagrams of the arc of variation in genitals) - without thinking about it and having studied biology mainly because I was misinformed and only seeing one side of a story. More reading (and I read TWAW stuff when I can stomach it) showed me my complete error. Also personal experience which had been knocking at the back of my mind all the time I believed/was attracted by the sex spectrum guff.
I also learned to suspect the term 'love is love'. That's another (and wicked) narrative.

Ahh yes, the issue of transphobic animals. Where your parrot 'deadnames' you and the dog that is scared of men is still petrified of you, despite you being 'stunning and brave'.

Edit- that is a general 'you' and is not aimed at Bundle.

🤣🤣. Yes I sometimes have in mind the trans identifying male who apparently fooled a woman whose dog was barking at him. “She only barks at men…”.

I didn’t think much beyond feeling sorry for men who felt they had to change sex. I assumed that they all had full surgery etc.

It was years later I followed a link on Twitter to a site called Autostraddle (🤢) that had an article advising lesbians how to have sex with a transwoman. One part suggested the female partner should do the following to her transwoman lover:

’Gently stroke her scrotum’

I thought I’d misread it, but then it got worse.
I thought it was a joke, but sadly not. I then read other things, found out that the vast majority of men have no surgery etc. Then all the court cases, sport, the demands, the misogyny, the laughable made-up ‘non-binary’. On and on.

It’s complete rubbish and anyone who goes along with it is either still labouring under a misapprehension, very stupid, or lying. The worst part for me is that we’re supposed to go along with this ridiculous fiction to spare (mainly) men’s feelings. To quote Greer: I don’t care.

’Gently stroke her scrotum’ indeed.

I first came across a TiM at a new job in 2011. I’ve never believed TWAW (ridiculous suggestion!) though did feel a little sorry for this pathetic individual (he was a figure of ridicule by the men though not by the women!!). I don’t even feel pity anymore just disdain - my empathy is for his ex wife and three children.

I must have missed those Guardian articles commemorating the first men to win women's sports contests, clamouring for convicted rapists to be placed in women's prisons, and celebrating the increasing number of children prescribed puberty blockers by the NHS. I wasn't so much swayed by biased coverage as left in the dark.

And I never even considered the idea that TWAW, because I'd never heard anyone say it, or perhaps I hadn't paid attention or taken it seriously.

All the same, I nodded along with a lot out of a spirit of live and let live. If someone wants to change the sex on his or her passport or birth certificate it's no skin off my nose. Why should I begrudge a man who wants to be referred to as 'she' that small courtesy?

I only really started taking notice when the Tavistock scandal broke. Plus an introduction to gender woo in its full, crazy, glory when Stack Overflow introduced a pronoun policy.

You asked about people who did believe TWAW, of course; but from talking to others, it seems quite a few were, or still are, like I was, just uninformed and incurious about what was going on.

Nothing has changed in my mind, except as a consequence of the TRA behaviour I’ve become more vocal and less willing to give a millimetre.

Women, children and the LGB community have suffered due to the TRA obsessed dick obsessed (cos let’s face it, they don’t chop it off despite their desperation to appropriate women) misogynists.

Same here. I was fine with self-ID back when Teresa May was proposing it, but now that TRAs are saying there's no way to stop them invading women's spaces without 'genital inspections' ... let's repeal the GRA and go back to accurate documents that can be asked for when needed.

Never believed it for one day

You can’t be transracial

You can’t be trans age

You can’t be trans ability/ disability

You can’t be trans sex

Gender is made up.

Also - BIID - Body integrity identity disorder, or body integrity dysphoria, is when your perception or mental image of your body doesn't match you physically.

If you want to remove a limb it’s a disorder. If you want to remove your tits you are a trans man?

If someone started using a wheelchair and wanting to be affirmed for a non existent disability we’d get them to seek medical help.

If someone starts wearing skirts and crying when spoken to by a colleague - we are supposed to say that man is a woman? It’s nothing to do with gender ideology rather than just plain stupidity.

It’s like having disability ideology- or race ideology affirming your choice of race. No one tolerates it for a minute. Look at Rachel Dolezal. Her before and after are no different to a trans person but it doesn’t mean she changed race.

I thought trans ideology was absurd from the very moment I encountered it. I think I literally laughed out loud. I offended a lot of people. My second thought was that the way its devotees talked about trans sounded a lot like the fanatics of the Reformation discussing the subtle distinctions between transubstantiation and consubstantion and why those who believed in the latter but not the former needed to be killed; or like the iconoclastic controversies of the Byzantine empire - irrational and cultish, in other words. I've never been given any reason to change my mind about this.

• Re-realised as an adult what I felt as a child: I "feel like a man".
• That was what a transsexual was, as far as I knew.
• So I looked for a trans association.
• Went to my first meeting.
• Got into a disagreement about how I was sad that I would never be a "real man".
• Was told very firmly that transmen are men like any other.
• It didn't sit right with me but who was I to go against the dogma? I should have known to trust my instincts, but I didn't :/

I never believed in it, but did try to be kind, until I watched Baby Reindeer. Then there were a few months during which I thought I "got it", that Transwomen really were women, because I believed the illusion that was that character. But of course that character was no more a woman that Superman really is a Superhero. Less so, indeed, because even the main character didn't believe that the transwoman was a woman. He specifically went looking for a transwoman on that website. He wasn't looking for a woman.

I still believe in GI but I’m still GC. By that I mean believing you are the opposite sex internally has always existed but has been leaped on in this generation due to the social contagion of the movement.

The notion that sex is not what determines toilets, changing rooms and sports and things put in place to support women is completely outrageous to me.

Third spaces were always the answer not attempts to colonise women’s spaces. Trans men would have no chance trying this with men, which shows just how male this behaviour is and depressingly how female it is to go along with any attempt to enforce the male dominance hierarchy.

I come from a background that preaches tolerance and acceptance. I knew some cross-dressing men and they were pleasant and inoffensive.

Then I worked in an IT team with a transwoman who it turned out was quite a campaigner and lived in Brighton. This was my first moment of real discomfort as “she” walked around with a full face, a pencil skirt and heels which was totally impractical for a job that often involves crawling around connecting cables. Absolutely no women dressed so overtly feminine in the office and it felt to me performative, stereotyped and provocative. But in fairness, “she” was fine to work with and never brought her politics to work as long as you used the new feminine pronoun and name. Which I dutifully did.

In daily life it can be hard to object - do I have a right to misgender the 15 yo son of an acquaintance who has grown long hair and thinks he’s a girl? What do I do or say when she “corrects” me?

What do I do when global HR at work sends an EDI compliance e-training that has a quiz at the end which you must pass 100% “correct” but one question only accepts an answer that tacitly reinforces gender ideology? the system forces you to retake the test over and over until you submit the right answer. Do I refuse to complete the compliance quiz and go to a disciplinary, just for the sake of one measly question? I’m a busy woman ffs.

When everyone around you is going along with it, even my Tory DH, you start to question your own instincts.

Eventually - stories of the terrible mistakes made by gender clinics for young people, the issue of men in women’s sports, and a growing number of my friends cautiously saying “not sure where you stand on this but…”

So that’s why it took me so long to question

I literally only have one friend who is not GC and that’s not because I have selected friends “like me” - it’s everyone from my cleaner to the single black mum I worked with fifteen year ago. There’s a lot of quietly dissenting women, who want to raise their voices now.

I emotionally supported a good friend through their transition including full genital removal and reshaping. I knew of their prior struggles and I saw how happy they were post transition. They passed as a young woman quite well and they were a lovely supportive human being to me too. This was my introduction to tw and she always spoke of transvestites as being fetishists not people with mental health problems for whom transition was a treatment. She said she was in the latter. She never denied she was male which made understanding it all so much easier for me. It was a treatment for a delusion that I believed didn’t harm anyone else. This was over 20 years ago.

when the twaw thing became louder I still never questioned my friend because she was living a happy life and wasn’t shouting about her rights and wants like the ones I was now coming across online. The anger with which they demanded I reprogramme my brain to agree with them and deny why I was seeing made me think something wasn’t quite right and then when I saw people defending the litigious waxing guy and the greens paedo guy I started to get really uncomfortable with the way things were going.

i know a lot of trans people through work and life and most of them fit into the category who believe their transition was a last line treatment for a mental health issue but I’m seeing more people I know, who would have previously been considered transvestites pushing their way into everyday life and forcing us to accept their kink and take part in it. These are the people I have a problem with but ultimately not being able to pick out the fetishist from someone who genuinely feels transition helps their mental health became impossible.

my original friend split with ther long term partner and I saw a very different side to them. I saw a tantruming, ranting entitled male not a heartbroken woman. I saw selfishness like never before and for the first time I struggled to believe they too were in any way a woman.

I’ve never seen third spaces as an answer tbh because there would have to be third and fourth spaces, because people of both sexes have transitioned.
I hope tbh that transition becomes something that some people do in private but that nobody except their immediate friends has to pay much attention, and they use sex-specific services when needed. Like padel, or needle felting.

I remember that article.

Agree!

How do you think of yourself now? (If you don't mind me asking a very personal thing on a public forum)

No problem, I've been open on here about these things :)

I think of myself as my own definition of a transman, that is, a woman who presents as a man. It's more than transvestite, because it's not just about clothes, but it's not transsexual either because nobody actually changes sex, ever. It's in-between, where I do everything I can to present as a man 24/7, but I don't believe I am a man.

I'm female because I've got a female body, no matter that I made changes to it. I'm a woman because I'm female and I grew up as a girl. I don't know what it's like to grow up as a boy or to be a man or to have a male body, so I'm not and never will be a man.

I just have something weird going on in my head (whether neurological or psychological, I don't know), which makes me map my body as male, so I prefer to present as a man because it makes me feel better about myself and my interactions with others.

And honestly, it feels so freeing to be able to claim all the sides of me, my femaleness along with the male mental map of my body, rather than forcing myself to call myself something I can never be - a man - just because some other people yell that I should.

Thank you for taking the time to explain to me.

its very refreshing to read this @Seethlaw and I guess this how I used to think of trans people, and why I had no problem with them. If a man feels better dressing and presenting 'as a woman' whatever he feels that is, he is more than welcome to do that as far as I am concerned on the understanding he knows he is still a man and will be treated as such in certain circumstances.