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.

I didn't have a moment of realising a person could not 'become' a different sex to the one they were born. That's because I thought the notion so absurd that I had failed to understand it. My DD using pronouns prompted me to give it more attention. Then I realised I had understood it, and it was and is indeed absurd. DD branded me a TERF (fine by me) and impossibly intolerant (not fine). What I find frustrating is the lack of nuance in the discussion. No-one sensible should doubt that a person may feel they are female while being biologically male, and vice versa. @Seethlaw you have expressed this so much better than I could because for you it is lived experience.

I earnestly thought about saving up money for "top surgery" when I was about 23 and living completely isolated from my family. Which is absolutely insane, in hindsight, since I wished to have kids someday, too. Just did not want to be seen as a woman anymore, which is why I also dressed in super-baggy clothes. Whenever a guy my age would use eyeliner, dress up as a woman (yeah, that's all it is), get hormone injections and what have you, I would genuinelly go: "Wow, so brave, so out-there, feminine hands with the nail varnish, so alluring, he must be in touch with his feminine side, he must be the opposite of cruel and sadistic". Oh boy was I wrong.

One of the moments that made me realise what a fetish it is was when I read about just how many "trans-women" use the given names of real-life family members or acquaintances as "their" new name. Why are you called Lilly all of a sudden, Keith? Because that was either the name of your co-worker, your ex-girlfriend or some porn actress.

It is a minstrel show, and it is done my men world-wide for the exact same purpose as minstrel shows were: to put the lesser human in its place, to steal the attention and respect that is normally reserved for the lesser human. In this case, the lesser human is also the pornified human. Handmaidens support the cause in order to make sure they will be picked. Goodbye horses!

I was in a public loo in the park in my city recently, and a sticker on the door said:
ARE YOU A TRANS ALLY? PROVE IT! and then a link to someone's 'top surgery' fundraiser.

Emotionally blackmailing strangers. The mind boggles.

I’m the same. I didn’t ever believe they were in the wrong body, for me it was always dysphoria. I was ok with supporting them with dysphoria, but it became TWAW and don’t you dare contradict us.

I always felt a bit weird about it but the vast, vast majority of my friend group were very pro trans and one person I genuinely loved identified as trans. And they were a truly kind, supportive, caring, loving friend to me and instead of looking any further I looked at them and thought "X is amazing and kind and lovely and trans so what can really be wrong with it all? I just need to learn more/ grow more/ try harder to be decent and understanding, and this feeling of it all being a bit weird and off will go away".

It took the debacle of the male boxers battering women at the Olympics to tip me into public disavowal of TWAW. Not because those boxers are trans, of course, they aren't- but because it was the pro trans arguments and beliefs and approach that meant all my kind, loving, caring, social justice conscious friends were on the side of said male boxers. And once I had started stating publically that I was very much against these people being allowed to box in the female category and having arguments with my friends about it, the sheer fucking stupidity and lack of science behind them became more and more obvious. They kept screaming at me to educate myself so I did. And the more I read, the more obvious it became that trans women are not women and trans men are not men and it is not just a case of "letting people live their life", people are being harmed, really badly harmed by all this.

I had never read JKR's essay. I had heard a million times how awful and evil she was, that terf bitch, how she wished death and pain and all sorts on poor vulnerable trans people. I read it. I cried. I felt like a complete idiot. I shared it on my social media and discussed at length how unlike the things I had been told it said it actually was. The response was overwhelming screaming and anger and bullshit about what harm she did and what terrible pain the gender critical movement caused and how vulnerable trans people are. Not all my friends. Some privately messaged me to say they agreed but were too afraid to say so. That just made me more angry. Too afraid to say so. Women bullied into silence and that silence used to pretend they were in support of the trans agenda and those who spoke up were a tiny minority of fascists.

It genuinely breaks my heart that my honesty hurt that one friend I mentioned who is trans and who I so loved. It does. I will never resolve on a personal level the feelings that come with the knowledge that I have caused them the pain I have done... But I couldn't lie any more. It would utterly destroy my sanity to do so. I couldn't pretend, and even though I know they believe with all they have that they do no harm and that this belief system and associated movement they are part of is just and right, I don't believe that. I believe they have been harmed themselves and I believe that what they are part of imperils and harms many others.

This has become far too long already and I could rant and emotionally blurt for hours about this so I will stop myself there. I am so grateful to spaces like this and women like you all. I was grateful when I found ovarit because for all its issues it was a place that wasn't pretending the madness was sanity. I am so ashamed of myself for playing along for so long.

They kept screaming at me to educate myself so I did. And the more I read, the more obvious it became that trans women are not women and trans men are not men and it is not just a case of "letting people live their life", people are being harmed, really badly harmed by all this.

"Educate yourself" is very good advice, which trans people and their allies would do well to follow for themselves.

Interesting that you said 'screaming' even though these were friends and people you loved. Whether or not they literally screamed, the disproportionate fury is something we can all recognise. It looks and feels exactly like narcissistic injury, a wound to the ego experienced as a death blow. So do the catchphrases about existence: nobody's suggested people who identify as trans don't exist! What we've said is that transgender's a self-image at odds with the reality of the whole person.

I'm happy that you've found places to be sane and people who share your disquiet about the madness.

That’s how I stopped being a trans ally. By “educating myself”. After being screamed at and bullied and called an “ignorant bigot bitch”. By someone who was supposed to love me. So I took their advice. As PP have said, the more I read and listened, the more I realised how crazy this ideology was and the more I felt able to refute the arguments. Best thing I could have done.

I'd say pretty much the same.

Growing up, my DF had a (male) friend who was married to a woman but then after she'd had a child, she decided she was living in the wrong body and should have been a man. She 'transitioned' and the last time I saw her (around 1984ish), she had no breasts, she had a full on beard and had completely changed her life (the child was traumatised by it!) So from then on, I had this 'sympathy' for people who 'were born in the wrong bodies'. My parents sneered at it all and called her a weirdo and they supported my DF's friend during the divorce but I thought the ex-wife must have had very strong feelings to go through all that in the 1980s where there would have been very little support around at that time. So I sympathised with what I thought was a genuine issue.

Not anymore. I'm utterly outraged at the TRA's aggressiveness, bullying, cruel, demeaning behaviour towards women when we tell them they can't be a woman. It's a fucking disgrace, quite frankly, how yet again, women are being told to shut up and put up with it. Well, not me anymore and I thank the wonderful PP's on these threads to have educated me.

I mean Ellen Page WAS harrassed on set, and frankly she just looks very young in addition to having natural talent and timing. That youthful appearance has always been a magnet to all sorts of creeps in Hollywood (see: young Britney Spears). I do not even want to know the things she has experienced. For sure this is a way to cope with sth. horrific.

Sorry to be blunt: The medical staff who supported this up to the point were she had healthy body parts removed belong in jail. She will never fully get over this, even if she starts to heal mentally at some point and to de-transition.

I remember seeing this online and feeling immediately nauseous and furious.

You could make a more recent comparison with American evangelicals who believe that science proves the world was created in six days 4000 years ago and so humans must have coexisted with dinosaurs..

I don't remember anyone until recently saying that sex was anything other than binary. Now, since the rise of the trans lobby, some people are trying very hard to say sex is a spectrum.

Both groups are desperate to jam the science into their beliefs.