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.

This has been my exact experience/thought process too.

I was very sympathetic at first. I thought trans = some very vulnerable gay men who simply couldn't live with male expectations. I thought such people were at the extreme end of rejection of masculine stereotypes, to the point where they couldn't live with them at all. I wanted to be kind to those people. But I never thought we all have a wired-in gender-identity that trumps sex.

I think initially I could nod along politely, in a similar way that, as an atheist, I might when someone mentioned their god or an element of their religion. So in a ‘live and let live’ be kind of way.

But as time went on, and as I read more and more brilliant and articulate posts on here, I just couldn’t square it in my head. And it became clear to me that the belief that TWAW wasn’t just something I didn’t believe in, but was something that was actively harmful. And not just harmful to women, but to vulnerable people searching for an identity or a means of belonging.

Oh yeah, and also when I realised that one virtue-signalling man in particular at my work with his pronouns proudly displayed in his email signature was one of the most misogynistic people I’d ever met.

I never believed it, but I felt empathy for people who felt as though they were in the wrong body, and I thought Live and Let Live. I didn't realise until quite recently how harmful the whole movement actually is. Watching Dr Upton speak in court really opened my eyes to the ideology, the indoctrination, and to the narcissistic personality type associated with transvestitism. I've met a fair few trans people over the years, some of whom seemed reasonable, and some of whom seemed delusional. Despite their self-identified specialness, I found them all quite boring to talk to, because they had no interests other than trans-ness.

Looking back, I realise the signs were there that I maybe knew unconsciously that something wasn't right. I have never said TWAW, because it's illogical. I've never responded to the "what are your pronouns?" question, and never put them on my emails. I had no idea I was making a political statement! I just don't care what pronouns people use when they talk about me. Everyone knows fine well what pronouns they should be using, so I'm not going to spell it out for them.

Last year I was at an event for a very woke charity. I wore a name badge, but declined a pronoun badge. I was the only person not wearing one, and nobody mentioned it. I had a long conversation with a non-binary person about sexism and gender stereotypes, and I was totally oblivious to the fact that I was the heretic in the room. 😂

Same here.

Dittany took me by the hand (metaphorically speaking) and led me step by step, waiting as the penny dropped, v patient she was.

Almost simultaneously there was also a Tw on the main boards who was building up to a penis inversion and open wound creation, and I was so keen to be kind and supportive. He had his op and his first thoughts were about how deep his created vault was.

The TW I knew growing up - a family friend, a neighbour - were obviously to me gay men who for reasons of sexism, culture of origin and homophobia couldn't come out. I saw them go from having been very sad, depressed and closeted to being happier in themselves. Crucially neither of them ever claimed to be female and I thought - this is just the solution for their crushing mental illness and it seemed to have really helped them. They appeared to me to be utterly non-threatening and it was just a kindness to go along with what made them happier and more comfortable in society, it was no skin off my nose what they wore or called themselves or medical treatments they opted into as consenting adults to alleviate their huge distress. I never believed they were female (and neither did they, they were very aware they were not female) but like @Darkgreendarkbark it was a polite fiction to treat them "as women".

Then a number of things happened - I had a baby and went on to breastfeed, and one of them had a real issue with being around me doing something so exclusively biologically female and was alternately aggressive and creepy about it. The other had "bottom surgery" and it went very badly, and then started having health issues from hormones, which was my first realisation that these "gender affirming" treatments are really serious and dangerous. And finally, I realised that other TW were not just claiming to be TW but actually women, and that felt completely dishonest. Then when TW started invading areas that were hard fought for women, like Caitlin Jenner being named "Woman of the Year", I realised this wasn't about a few sad men who wanted a quiet life and relief from mental anguish, this was in fact a very significant threat to women's rights.

Using outdated terminology here, because otherwise it's difficult to explain why.

Had always been live and let live. Had spent my teens in youth theatre where there was a lot of gay and lesbian teens, we socialised in the gay scene, so I was familiar with the few transexuals (post op) who were in the scene too. We tolerated them in the ladies because they were mostly quiet, unassuming and just wanted to fit in.
There was also a group of cross dressers,who would go to the same clubs of a weekend,as it was one of the few places they could freely display their fetish ( talking mid 80's here).
Everyone knew the difference, these men weren't welcome in the ladies, because they were straight and a potential threat.

So initially I was ok with genuine transexuals and supported their wishes to just live their lives.

Then came stonewalls expansion of the transgender umbrella to include what we had previously called transvestites that made me go. 'woah a minute'. I knew that they were mainly straight men with a fetish, who were therefore just as much of a risk as other men.

NC as this could be outing.
I was an equalities champion in a large public sector organisation for a long time when it was just normal BAME, disability, age and gender equality meant biological women. Then stonewall joined our organisation's equality advisory group, one of my new colleagues in the equalities team used to work for stonewall, rainbow laces started to get introduced, we started attending pride events, pronouns had to be added to signatures, they recruited a new head of equalities who was the former head of a controversial LGBT charity, we had awareness training from a transgender awareness charity, we had keynote speakers who were transgender, and despite working with young people, at the time of my departure, they were talking about adapting multiple young people's records, like every young person in Scotland pretty much, to reflect their gender identity as opposed to just sex. There was no alternative point of view given to staff other than TWAW so I was not as educated as I am now, but I was definitely uncomfortable with the equalities focus being entirely on the T and other protected characteristics getting less, or even no, attention. I'm glad to be away from that place but as my background is still DEI jobs, I stay quiet.

I never believed that people could change sex, but was happy to respect someone's pronouns, etc, if they'd been so unhappy they'd required surgery. I always thought of them as a transwoman, or transman - something new and distinct from biological women and men.

I thought that the human body is so complicated, perhaps there's a hidden medical reason they feel the way they do - after all, people used to believe that being gay was a choice, rather than an innate trait. And to be honest, I still wonder this.

But I used to think that all transfolk would have reassignment surgery. The modern definition of trans, where you have transwomen prancing around in a very sexualised fashion and proud of their 'ladydicks' and calling lesbians 'genital fetishists' for not being interested, or transmen happily giving birth and demanding to be recorded as the father on the birth certificate - well, it's all a bit mental, isn't it?

As I got older, I also started asking questions like, "What makes me a woman?", and I couldn't answer that without resorting to biology. It's not my personality, or interests, or fashion choices (which are arguably more 'male' coded) - it's the female body I have.

Why is transgenderism accepted, but identifying as transracial isn't? There's less difference, biologically speaking, between a white person and a black person, than between a man and a woman. Both are biological states that inform how society interacts with them. I've never had anyone able to give me a good answer to that one.

How can a rapist who raped with his penis ever, ever be considered a woman? How can his victim ever be castigated for referring to him as male? Why are transwomen overrepresented in the sex and violent offender categories?

Honestly, I tie myself in knots about it because I know a fully transitioned transwoman, and she's lovely. If you didn't know, you wouldn't know. But she was also a very 'effeminate' boy as a child, who suffered from homophobic bullying, and I can't help but wonder if she would still be a he if boys were allowed to express what's traditionally regarded as feminine traits without castigation.

I can honestly say that I never believed it.

I never believed Transwomen were anything other than men.

What I did believe was that they were men that were so unhappy that they castrated themselves and therefore deserved some empathy.

Cross dressers were not the same thing. They were just men with a fetish.

It wasn't until a friend came out as trans that my eyes were opened to the utter madness of it all.

Until 2021I was living abroad in another European country which was slightly behind the UK in terms of gender ideology (and is behind the curve now, aka still fully TWAW). So I wasn’t bathed in any of this cultural indoctrination which led up to TWAW. I first heard about it when JKR wrote her famous essay in 2020 and at the time I was flabbergasted that anyone ACTUALLY could think TWAW. I thought it was just a slogan like “the future is female” or something.

But I was very much on the side of “be kind” and felt slightly embarrassed on behalf of JKR as I thought it was unseemly.

Nevertheless I started reading, and after a couple of hours of the MtF Reddit board I was almost fully peaked.

The thing that held me back was the existence of intersex/DSDs. As I thought, “How can you clearly define male and female as there are people in the middle”? But when that misunderstanding was cleared up, I summitted. And promptly wrote a long and enthusiastic letter to JKR!

Ah interesting I had a similar experience to PP frequenting a gay club in London in the 90s. Occasional transsexual tolerated in the ladies, but transvestites (who greatly outnumbered them) used the mens.
Edit to add it wasn't actually a gay night, but it was a famous gay venue for the other 6 nights of the week so had an incredibly eclectic crowd.

I never really questioned it but looking back I never really believed it either, but was much more empathetic and desperate to ‘be kind’ and modern in thinking. I have never believed TWAW.
Looking back I think that film The Danish Girl was very effective propaganda for the trans community. I remember having lots of inflamed conversations with my father whose views I regarded as bigoted back then.
To paraphrase Wes Streeting, I now realise I was wrong.
Being kind is not to affirm delusions but to help people bravely face the truth. You cannot change sex.

Honestly, I didn’t give it much critical thought at the time. I went along with what seemed like the accepted progressive view and placed any discomfort I felt in the same category as homophobia. However, it didn’t sit right with me deep down, but I pushed those feelings aside, afraid of being labelled a bigot and wanting to remain aligned with my left wing values. I followed prominent trans activists like Munroe Bergdorf on Instagram and absorbed their views uncritically, in part because that’s what my peers were doing.

Things began to shift for me when I read J.K. Rowling’s open letter and found myself resonating with her concerns. That was the turning point when I really began to question and research what I’d previously taken at face value.

What unsettled me most were two things:

A) The insistence that I ignore biological reality and that I was wrong or hateful for trusting my own eyes and understanding of sex. It felt like gaslighting, and it was being imposed as unquestionable ideology.

B) The medicalisation of gender distress (particularly in teenagers). The deeply upsetting idea that children and adolescents, who aren’t developmentally equipped to give fully informed consent, are being put on a path toward irreversible changes including infertility and potentially lifelong sexual dysfunction.

Yes, it’s child abuse IMO. Parents who encourage their children down this path should be prosecuted I think.

Oh, just remembered another thing.... I never understood why the T got tacked on to LGB. Everyone seemed to accept it unquestioningly, but it wasn't logical to me, because sexuality and gender are not the same thing. I asked a friend about it (a gay man) and he didn't get it either. He said he'd been told they were "his people" but he felt no more affinity to trans people than he did to straight people.

I had the opposite experience with The Danish Girl. I was struck that it starts off with him, a seemingly normal and red-blooded married man, secretly dressing up in his wife's underwear. That wasn't the sympathy hook I was expecting. Then he goes on his long journey to "become" a woman through surgery... Becoming a narcissistic bore in the process. Again, not the sympathetic journey I expected. I ended up feeling really sorry for his wife throughout, who bent over backwards to support him through his growing folly. I think she at least got a happy ending with the other chap, iirc? I hope she did.

I read Conundrum in my teens (borrowed from the the local library). To me it was a book by and about a man who had opted for fairly brutal surgery to satisfy his own feelings.

In the 1990s and 2000s I followed the legal arguments about Lydia Foy in Ireland, increasingly alarmed that a man's feelings were going to result in law being enacted on a basis of imaginative fiction. I never thought LF was a woman. I observed that LF's family's feelings were being disregarded while his were being regarded as central.

I always went on the basis of 'call people by the personal names they choose, give groups of people the collective nouns they prefer, don't use derogatory words'.

But I couldn't use words that were outright lies - call sheep 'rabbits', or lettuces 'songthrushes'. There are biological facts.

@Darkgreendarkbark i think I’d have a very different reaction if I watched it now (which I won’t). Also remember feeling sorry for the trans widow but a bit baffled as to why she put up with it all

I'm also interested to hear this.

I've assumed that most people, whether they realise it or not, are exactly as you were, OP, in essentially being afraid of their own minds! I think a lot of people cut off their thought process whenever they realise, on some level, that they are approaching an inescapable conclusion that they know will get them into trouble.

It's psychologically safer in some ways to never consciously confront the conclusion because then you don't have to decide between continuing to say things you know to be untrue (psychologically stressful) and continuing to be accepted in your group, or telling the truth and potentially being ostracised by your group (which we're generally evolutionarily hardwired to try to avoid!)

I never bought into it (though it didn't properly enter my consciousness until Maya's first instance case), but for one reason and another I was brought up to place a very high value on objective fact and reasoning. I was also fairly hardened to a certain amount of solitude and self-reliance when younger, so it is possible that the idea of ostracism is somewhat less frightening to me than it might be to some.

Have you told your dad you were wrong?

My dad was a doctor, old-school conservative, kind, but also direct and fearless. He would not have tolerated this nonsense. I would have loved to see some woke Leftie NHS manager telling him to wear a pronoun badge. It would not have gone down well at all. 😂

I was also a Leftie, until my eyes were opened to this mess. For the first time in my life I'm considering voting Conservative, and I wish my dad was here so that I could tell him how wrong I was!

It's a weird one. I watched it with a male friend and at the end, he said of the character "Ah, he was quite affecting, wasn't he?". And I just thought "Did we even watch the same film?". Looking back, the film seems a good example of TRAs saying the quiet bit out loud. It was the moment where I thought "If this is what sort of people want surgery, gender dysphoria is not what I thought it was".

Why did you once believe TWAW

I never have and never will. My stance has always been that TW are men.

I didn’t believe in the ideology as such, just was under the mistaken impression that it (transitioning, that is) was a vanishingly rare occurrence and that the people involved were incredibly vulnerable, needed support and were no threat to anyone. I also presumed that everyone had surgery and took hormones. Mainly informed by an acquaintance who was young, clearly troubled and went through a terrible time with surgery and follow-ups, and still does I believe.

I remember arguing with Dittany at least once, to my eternal shame. I was so naive.

I never did, but I thought they were a tiny group, like flat earthers that exist, but no one takes any notice of.
I was horrified when I realised how mainstream it was to accept it.