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 was going to say that I have never believed that TWAW, but actually in the 90s when I was a teenager, I heard about transsexuals and because I didn’t have good scientific or medical knowledge, I think I might have believed that some men were becoming women when they had the surgery- I didn’t give it much thought as these people seemed to be such a tiny number. Then I forgot all about transsexuals for a while until about 2014 when I first heard the word ‘transgender’. Shortly after that, I discovered threads on here and went down the rabbit hole. I quickly understood then that nobody was ever changing sex.

I never did, I thought everyone agreed that it is a mental illness. I couldn't imagine that people actually believed it.

I don’t think I ever really believed it, but the Vanity Fair cover was when I wasn’t prepared to accept it at all.

The duper’s delight smirk, and of course it’s no coincidence that Caitlyn Jenner is dressed like the aging starlet youthful Jenner would have been looking at as a teenager. - I did wonder whether Liebowitz did that deliberately or who made that decision.

never believed in it

@rebmacesrevda yes I had that experience too, though was too shocked to do/say anything. I thought oh so this must be normal…. Just about sums up my assumption of the world back then.

Tbh I never believed TWAW, but at first I didn’t really think it mattered, it wasn’t harming anyone? Was it?

Then, I started seeing exactly what harm it was doing. Women forced out of jobs, made to feel unsafe. The shutting down of opposing views through threats of economic hardship, being excommunicated from social media, threats of the law, threats of violence. The pushing of false science, the infiltration of areas of education and support for the young. The destruction of knowledge. The cult like nature, people following through often unacknowledged fear, thinking they were right. It all seemed so familiar- exactly the same as 17th century witch hunts. The 15th/16th century heretic hunts and verging on some of the tactics of the Nazis and Communists.

I saw it as part of a larger Brave New World. I watched in horror as the sheep read the barn wall with its changing rules without much as a baa. I wasn’t prepared to stand by and watch piggy being killed over and over!

There’s so many wider lessons to this than just the immediate trans debate. We need to be looking who is controlling the narrative through MSM and SM. The dangers of removing critical thinking, the rise of the virtual tribe in place of the physical one, the dangers of all easily manipulated AI providing our main source of information.

I wish people would look to the past more to understand the present. Nothing we see now hasn’t been played out before in history, it just wears different clothes each time. With history, we can see how things play out - it’s never very good for women

I think there were a lot of things that led me to believe it to begin with, and a key turning point;

• I was born in 1989 and grew up wanting to "be a boy"; I have a few masculine traits too such as being tall with a deeper voice. I also have some quite strong autistic traits, but I've no desire to go and get a diagnosis, so who knows!
• I had a very misogynistic step father who went on about how shit women were, used to put down my mum all the time. I'm ashamed to say I used to believe him and also make fun of my mum (as a younger child).
• My step mum had borderline personality disorder so wasn't exactly the most fun woman to be around, further solidifying the idea that women were insane illogical and crap.
• After uni, I moved to Bristol where I became very left wing and woke. I used to hang out a lot with trans people who told me about them being the most vulnerable, just wanting to pee etc. I totally believed it and was almost scared to think anything else, almost like those kind of thoughts would contaminate my mind and make me a bad person.

• Me being gender non conforming made me think it would mean I was non binary, but I could never bring myself to ask for they/them pronouns because, if I'm honest, I thought it was completely cringey and self absorbed. I think was the beginning of the cognitive dissonance that planted the seed for my future terfery 😂

• Aged 32 I fell pregnant with my daughter and started spending more time on Mumsnet for parenting things only. I started reading the FWR board and actually listening to others' opinions and the feminist position on this and other thoughts on misogyny. I realised that there were infinite ways to be a woman but the unifying traits of us were rooted in biology, I realised that I had been brought up surrounded by both blatant and covert misogyny and I myself had put women at the bottom of the pecking order of whose opinion I should respect and listen to, with men (including TIM) at the top.

• Bit by bit the scales fell from my eyes, and here I am today fighting for a positive future for my daughter and other girls and women - not only from gender ideology but from the insidious misogyny that has surrounded us from both sides of the political spectrum.

Yes I was "radicalised" by Mumsnet 😂 or, as rational people who are not prone to hyperbole might say... The older and much, much wiser women made me see sense.

I don't think I ever really believed it, but I do remember - with shame - using the TWAW phrase to an administrator at an organisation who had asked me to fill in a clumsily worded form that asked about sex and gender for no readily apparent reason. I still wonder from time to time what she thought about it then. If you're reading, I'm sorry. (I don't think I any longer have the information about precisely who it was, otherwise I'd be tempted to reach out now, a decade or more later, and apologise.) I ticked the top option because I think what would be accurate would be to say that I thought we all knew that it was a polite fiction but that it would be really REALLY rude to betray that we knew it was fiction; but I was afraid to think about why it would be rude, so I didn't.

I never believed TW were actually women or TM were actually men, but I did think that it was the right thing to treat them as their preferred sex as a harmless kindness. Particularly as I thought that it was true that social/medical transition is necessary to prevent suicide (I have since found that there is no real evidence for this and that there is no effective follow up for medical transition).

I was open to the idea there could be unknown male/female brain factors that are the wrong way round (I would still be open to this if there were any evidence but there is not).

I thought that transsexualism was innate, very rare and difficult to live with, something that noone would choose, present from childhood. That it was wrong to second guess somebody's lived experience. I still do believe that some extent in that it don't rule it out as a possibility for some trans people. I assumed that there were rigorous diagnostic criteria. (I now come to see that there are no objective criteria, self ID is enough, there is a very obvious element of social contagion for many, and a very obvious element of sexual fetish for many. And indeed those extreme high profile cases of male sexual predators exploiting a trans identity to gain access to women and/or to terrorise and gaslight their victims. Which I truly to be a horrifying scandal and shows how little misogyny seems to count against all the other "-phobias", including trans).

I've always wanted to defend the vulnerable and look after the rights of minorities and that's still a very big part of my moral/political philosophy but I now believe that those good intentions have been hijacked by the trans movement at women's expense.

I thought that trans people could have kind, affirmative treatment without affecting women's rights because I believed in good faith that the trans movement did not want to diminish women's rights. (But I have since seen women negatively impacted in sport, sexual safety, health information and so on by the trans movement and GC feminists vilified for taking what is only a rational position).

I believed that JK Rowing had said something transphobic because I heard it repeated so often. I was actually engaging in disputes with people on MN, defending a trans rights position and this caused me to become curious about what she'd actually written. When I read her own words I realised that she hadn't said anything particularly hateful in the statements she'd been villified for, that her "transphobia" had been a lie. That's really when the house of cards came tumbling down because basically, my entire position had been founded upon taking the trans movements own account of itself in good faith.

Years ago I was able to get along with trans friends on the basis of a shared understanding:

that they thought they had a body-incongruent gender identity that required medical and legal solutions

and I didn't believe in gender identity but did accept that they were free to seek physical alterations, and that laws exist enabling them to be treated as if they had changed sex.

I could be completely honest and they did not call me a bigot, just someone a bit literal-minded who needed to be educated at every opportunity.

I wasn't really listening. Then - for personal reasons - I decided to read up on the topic, and discovered (scare music, insert very bad consequences of GI here 😱).

I took my insights back to my friends, but now I had a problem. I could tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but telling the whole truth was obviously going to cause emotional carnage. My friends have delusional beliefs, and they are defending them (presumably unconsciously, as they are clever and well educated) with every manner of sleight of hand: bait and switch, false syllogisms, undistributed middles, claims to arcane knowledge, appeals to authority, emotional blackmail, category errors, applying the benefit of the doubt to the complementary assertion, you name it.

Just one example: 'single-sex spaces are a great idea as an alternative to trans-inclusion, but is it realistic? We can't pander to every niche request'.

(Just to add, allies are even worse, because they quickly detect, and disapprove of, my terfiness, whilst trans friends of both sexes blithely assume I agree with them about everything unless I wear an I❤️JKR t-shirt. Which I don't)

So I keep trucking on. Trans friends are paranoid and unhappy because of all the 'hate' so I still see them, but my tentative truthfulness will never change their minds.

I realise this all makes me look a bit stupid and treacherous. But what can I say? It's all mad, just mad.

I never believed it.

I am old, and read about dysphoric males years ago. These men dressed like women and spent some or all of their lives pretending to be women, and really wanted to be women, but I never heard of any of them claiming they actually were women. I got the impression that, like most of the young women identifying as trans today, that they were driven more by a rejection of their own sex, or at least the stereotypes and expectations imposed on their sex, which they felt they couldn't live up to.

I felt sorry for them, and saw them as victims of a patriarchal society, and truly believed the number of such men would just dwindle away as feminism reshaped society. I was obviously completely oblivious of the sexually motivated AGP males then.

I became aware about fifteen or twenty years ago that some men were claiming to actually be women, and that as they were females they had female penises. I laughed about it -I didn't see this as any kind of a threat, just the ramblings of some Californian New Age loonies. I would have been absolutely gobsmacked had I known then that I would live to hear the Prime Minister of the UK say in an interview that some women have penises.

I still sometimes find it hard to believe that so many people in government, the media, education and medicine really either believed or pretended to believe something which is so obviously complete and utter nonsense. My opinion of the average intellect of these people has plummeted.

I never believed it and as I've previously stated, I worked in the NHS and couldn't believe it when they put TIM's on female wards. Trans posters all over adolescent wards etc..Additionally, I never met any nice ones, only weird aggressive creeps that tried to force me to go along with their delusions.
I remember years ago when a group of lesbians were kicked out of Manchester Pride, and I started reading about the GRA and SelfID, but I couldn't find many GC voices online apart from a few women who seemed to be universally hated (bigots terfs etc).
I couldn't find any GC voices anywhere on Reddit or FB which led me to think that I was almost alone in my views (I must be one of those hateful old bigoted dinosaurs that are dying out then?) - I hadn't realised that the reason there were no GC voices on Reddit was because they were all banned. I saw JKR speaking out but I mostly saw hate towards her and very little agreement or support. I wasn't on Twitter then though so I only saw what was reported in MSM. I stopped interacting with many FB 'friends' because they were posting #BeKind TWAW, leave Sam Smith Alone type nonsense. I really wish the trans rallies would get more MSM media coverage so the public could see what the TRA are really like.
It's only this past year since I discovered FWR that I realised there were lots of us. How had I never come across Magdalen Bern?? If only I had.
Discovering FWR and finding out about cases such as Sandie Peggie and FWS and the WRN has been a revelation. It was a relief to no longer feel that there was something wrong with my views, that I was unkind and I just needed to be more accepting and 'move with the times'

ETA: of course I knew about transexuals and cross dressers years ago but none claimed to be actual women and forced pronouns weren't a thing. The only time I ever heard a man being referred to as SHE was by gay men sarcastically

Like others i thought TWAW was a polite pretense

I stopped believing that when self ID came in and people seemed to start believing, or at least pretended to, that TWAW and if you just said the magic word that you would be allowed access to absolutely everything

i make no apologies for believing that someone is as thick as shit for thinking that males should be in female sports and that women should try harder to win

i still believe that trans is on a spectrum with one end desperately uncomfortable in their sexed body and feeling better presenting as the opposite sex right through to taking the fucking piss, passing trauma, autism and sexism on the way

its women like me they needed on side and self id fucked that up for everyone, gave an inch and they took a mile…not falling for that again

Ah, actually, I can find my mail, and it wasn't as bad as I thought, phew! The form (in 2014) had included

Male/Female/Trans Male/Trans Female*
*delete as appropriate

and my (politer and more tactful than memory made me fear) response asserted "trans males are male" - which could, of course, be read either to mean TWAW or the opposite, and indeed, looking at it now, it's not clear to me what the recipient will have thought, so I could have been interpreted as GC. Here's hoping. But I'm right in thinking I can't contact the recipient now; I only had a role-based address. (Then or now, I wouldn't normally comment on such forms at all, but on this occasion I did so because in practice the form didn't allow you to delete, so it asked for information and then didn't allow you to provide it!)

This . The wider realisation about how much of society truly doesn’t seem to see women as full human beings .

This issue made me see what Germaine Greer meant when she said 'Women have no idea how much men hate them'.

That woman was right about everything.

I approached it from a socio-cultural point of view, as a young student at university. There have always been men that liked to hang out with women, and there have always been tom boys that liked to think of themselves as one of the lads. I didn't actually think about the practicalities of a person actually declaring that they had changed sex and now needed to be treated as the new sex no matter what. I was all for being progressive - after all we women had won our rights and we were equal right? I started work in the late 90s and early 00s and it was all 'girl power' and girls being just as leery as boys. Wasn't quite my thing, but I thought it was empowering. We were being told that our bodies were powerful and we should not be ashamed of them. I look back now and think, hmm that wasn't really to the advantage of the girls to go around flashing our cleavage and thighs though, was it???

I guess the sea change for me began with a conversation with a friend, an academic, who had been at some academic meeting/conference thingy about 20 years ago where she was being asked to give space to someone's beliefs over actual scientific facts. She was gob-smacked and relayed it to me later on in astonishment. I filed it away under 'curious, but nothing to do with me'. Five years later I had my first child and well, you start to look at the world with different eyes then. I noticed all the pink and blue stuff and thought - it wasn't like this in my childhood. Then my second child was a tom boy and I had nutters trying to tell me that this meant she was a boy. You what?!?!? I started reading and reading and reading and researching and listening and came to the conclusion that gender was a load of bollocks. I was here at the start of Spartacus and have been here through thick and thin ever since. I'm not particularly clever but I can tell the difference between men and women and it ain't the clothes you wear or how you behave!

I’m not sure I ever believed in gender identity per se, but I did (and do) believe in gender dysphoria as a condition, and felt (and still do) that sometimes treatment for dysphoria requires surgery (after proper therapy and after the age of 25). I always advocated - and still do - for kindness and freedom for such people. They should be entitled to live their lives in peace and free from cruelty and oppression.

However, there was a huge turning point in how I approached this issue when TRAs started declaring that dysphoria is not a condition and they actually WERE women because of their feelings. It is a total dismissal of science and ignores the impacts of growing up a girl within a patriarchal society. Trans women - fine. Actual women - absolutely not.

By seeking to redefine what a woman is, it damaged our ability to hold onto rights that were set up specifically because of the need to protect ourselves because of the oppression we face based on our sex, not our gender. We’re not raped because of our gender. We’re not paid less because of it. We’re not facing poorer medical care (including research) because of gender.
“Woman” is a descriptor of sex. We are not a subset of our own political class. We should be entitled to our language and to fight against our oppression. It made me realise that “gender” is not sex - it is a tool of sex based oppression.

Yes, the power of wanting to be 'liked' and to belong to a group cannot be overstated.

I'm like you, something of a loner and happy with my own company.....I don't seek out or have lots of friends either...just few in number, and meaningful. I can get enough of my 'socialisation' needs met by talking to people in the street/neighbourhood etc 😂

Oh hail the mighty phallus........didn't you know a woman is just a man who's had his removed.

Like the first PP, I think it was realizing that I was encountering men without appropriate sexual boundaries that demolished my compliance. That might be the case for a lot of people, given the opinion swing on this issue. There was a guy in a fb group I’m in on a completely different topic who posted things I’d clocked as odd, and it all got odder until eventually he posted a misogynistic sex cartoon (not choking, something else) and was banned. The deletion and ban happened very quickly but anyone who saw it and the admins must have had food for thought.

Another thought about this - I think my ‘right on- be kind’ stage started to draw to a close after having children. I think with parenthood there becomes a time when you move from putting others (actual strangers and their movements) first and start to put your children - and then by extension own needs - ahead of others.

Having children also changed how I view women and myself. It’s been a really tricky thing to unpick but I think we become conditioned to how women exist only in relation to the men around them. After having children I’ve stopped caring whether I’m sexually appealing to men in general and started caring about what I actually want or need for myself.

When we see women as our own class and as individuals in our own right we begin to advocate for our needs first.

On reflection about why I never believed it, can I also just say that I have been incredibly privileged throughout my life have encountered so many wonderful women who planted seeds of down-to-earth feminism, self-respect, undoing the insidious notion that we should cater to men as a priority and a bone-deep sense that it was absurd to suggest that being female should hold me back from being or doing anything.

It wasn't one single powerhouse preacher, (though certain things stick out) it was a drip-drip-drip of influences over a lifetime (including women on these boards), and many of them will have had absolutely no idea of the lasting effect they had.

Barracker's 'Pronouns are Rohypnol', for example, was seismic for me and clarified my thoughts on that.

What we say, on here and elsewhere, really matters.

That's a good point re not wanting to be ostrasiced from a group.
I'm a loner myself and I've never enjoyed or wanted to be part of a social groups. I've always thought people didn't like me much anyway. This has probably made it easier for me to hold unpopular views because I've never worried about being excluded

I watched the Danish Girl on a long haul flight.
I hated the way he treatted his beautiful wife but ultimately it left me feeling very sorry for him. Which I guess is how I felt about trans women for a long time, informed by that film and the pathetic character he portrayed.