Just been “unfriended” for believing in biology

[Somethingthecatdraggedin7]

I posted links about the Supreme Court ruling on my fb feed and have just been unfriended and blocked by a real life friend.
I hadn’t seen her for a long time so we had never talked about the issue because the last time we met (about 8 years ago) transgender wasn’t a thing. Well certainly not in my little corner of the UK anyway.
I am bemused. This is someone I had helped a lot with certain situations. She knows me, she knows that I am a kind and decent person.
But now because I post about the legal reclamation of the word woman I am suddenly persona non grata.
I have friends of differing views on all sorts of topics and we accept that we don’t have to agree on everything. Clearly this particular friend can’t accommodate diverse opinions.
So much for tolerance and inclusion then.

Where is the evidence that he would be at risk in the men's? I am sure your friend is a lovely person but you can't possibly know that his presence in women's spaces didn't bother any women.

I can see that he could be open to ridicule from other men, who can't understand why someone would want to lose his penis. But do you know what? Why is it women's problem to solve? Who asked us? No one.

I’m sorry, @Somethingthecatdraggedin7 , it happens to a lot of us.

I expect to be able to disagree respectfully with friends. However, I’ve learned the hard way that some people are spineless weasels or just a bit pathetic and will join in a pile-on to virtue signal or so they’re seen to be on “the right side” and don’t get picked on. So I created a FB list of friend who I can trust to be more grown-up about this issue and only post GC stuff to that list.

Send screen shots to James Esses on Twitter. He’s collating documentary evidence of companies trying to flout the ruling.

Trust me. They would get rid somehow. They've done it recently to someone for voicing similar views. They can get around it. They will do in the next round of redundancies

I almost unfriended someone who has been posting a load of TRA nonsense since the SC ruling, but in the end I just snoozed for 30 days. It’s someone that I like and agree with on a lot of other issues. She’s an intelligent woman with a biological science degree who I know would call herself a feminist, and I would be very surprised is she hasn’t changed her mind in a few more years!

Quite. Women’s spaces aren’t a refuge for men who don’t want to use the men’s spaces.

@Rklap ‘This person is no risk to anyone’

Same goes for my husband- absolutely no risk to anyone. Do you think he should use the women’s changing rooms at the gym? If not, why not?

Exactly and most men wouldn’t do anything anyway. I know DH would be surprised/bemused if he saw a “woman” in the gents but he wouldn’t say anything. Probably would just get out of there asap.
If trans women are scared of going to the gents it’s because of a minority of toxic men, which is exactly why women don’t want any men in the ladies whether they look like women or not. Why is it always women that need to change our behaviour and step aside? I haven’t seen any campaigns asking men to “be kind” to other men who “just want to pee”.

My fb feed is made up of cats / dogs / horses welfare stuff sometimes with rehoming links from local charities

I do hope that none of those charities are focused on looking after, protecting and rehoming only cats; because if they are, that clearly and unequivocally betrays the whole organisation as wickedly dog-phobic. Who are these nasty, evil people wanting to look after the welfare of cats? What do you think might have led them to hate and fear dogs so very much? Why would they actually want dogs to be the victims of literal violence? Why do they actually want dogs to die? Dogs just want to be loved. Don't dogs need the many existing dog charities that look out for them too..........?

The problem with the people urging GC folk to 'keep the peace' by not bringing up issues that matter to and affect them greatly is that the 'other side' have absolutely no wish whatsoever to reciprocate in that respect or desire to avoid confrontation by keeping their own GI views to themselves. On the contrary, they're constantly forced into the public arena and celebrated - often by scary, threatening, aggressive people insisting that they are the poor defenceless, vulnerable victims in all of this!

I got unfriended by someone about 10yrs ago for criticising Russell Brand.

He’s got a dick presumably

I'd like to think that if you know someone is a good and kind person, you might wonder why they disagree with your own position rather than assuming they must be an awful person.

One of the really odd things now about the progressive viewpoint is a real inability to understand that good people may be on the other side of the political fence. You saw the same thing with Trump voters or Brexit, there is an utterly immature assurance that people only take these positions because they are evil. Even if you know them, through personal interactions to be good people that is all wiped away.

Women are not just humans without a dick

As do the large majority of transwomen.

I completely agree with you and I'm the same as are most sensible people.

Unfortunately some people view the world with a 'you're either with me or you're against me' attitude whether that's politics, trans, feminism, food choices, brexit, the environment etc etc

I put it largely down to the influence of social media where people can live in an echo chamber and a news system that feeds off discord for clicks.

It's very sad and very bad for society. I suppose people with a closed mind have always existed it's just that now they can congregate online in a 'community' that encourages them further away from different opinions.

I call it the 'never kissed a Tory' effect 😂

Agreed. I have two trump supporting friends and several brexit voting friends.
I still love them as my friends for who else they are.
If we talk about those issues then we do so with tolerance and humour.
The older I get the more I see that very few people are 100% “good” or “bad” and life is about shades of grey.
I think a lot of extreme trans activism is driven by people who lack that perspective either due to age or limited life experience for some other reason.

I almost unfriended someone who has been posting a load of TRA nonsense since the SC ruling, but in the end I just snoozed for 30 days. It’s someone that I like and agree with on a lot of other issues. She’s an intelligent woman with a biological science degree who I know would call herself a feminist, and I would be very surprised is she hasn’t changed her mind in a few more years!

I had a very similar experience, although I don't know whether the friend's degree is in biology. I almost unfriended her, but instead sent an email telling her why I couldn't 'like' her post and why I welcomed the SC ruling. She didn't reply, but she was never good at answering emails anyway. I can't have been alone because her next post rowed back a little but criticised the SC judgement as lacking rigour. I doubt whether she's read all 88 pages, which I made a point of doing. I thought it very thorough.

She is very much of the Be Kind school and I hope that in a few years time she realises that being kind to one small group of people means being unkind to considerably more.

Happened to me too. An otherwise really really sane, intelligent woman. Would not even entertain the conversation.

This. When i first found out about trans activism and JKR etc my first thought wasnt, oh man JKR is a bigot. It was, hmmm ive never disagreed with anything shes ever said, and I respect her hugely, so why has she got this opinion?
Same for Germaine Greer.

I’ve unfriended people I know who post pro-trans/anti-women (‘poor Imane Khelif’ posts, for example). If I’d not seen them since before Covid I didn’t really feel it was much of a loss.

@Greyskybluesky said:

"The confidence with which some people assert that their lovely trans friend, or even they themselves, are "no threat" to women astounds me sometimes. It is not necessarily about the "threat", it is merely the presence. And it is impossible to know whether that bothers someone else or not."

It's a little bit like dogs in parks that come bounding up to you and jumping up, and the owner gets all snippy when you ask them to restrain it. "He's very friendly, just wants to play!" And my poor daughter is dodging around to keep out of its way, scared stiff of strange dogs (and very wary of familiar ones), having been bitten on the face as a very small child.

If you think you are likely to be made redundant then expressing your perfectly legal views and making them aware you know your legal right could be a good way to either avoid redundancy or turn your redundancy payment into a more lucrative unfair dismissal payment.

With or without a penis your friend is still a man. You may think he passes, but he almost certainly doesn’t and we don’t want men in our spaces. This includes, but is not limited to-
gay men
straight men
bisexual men
asexual men
hairy men
bearded men
tall men
short men
men who think they’re women
men who believe the earth is flat
men who believe the earth is spherical
men who believe any old shit about anything
MEN

slam dunk win for you in the employment tribunal.

The banking regulator staff would not be happy bunnies either. When the senior court in the land rules the culture of the Bank reply should be the law is the law is the law.
Plus if discussions lead to staff saying they approve of breaking the law the bank has a problem.

@Horrace not sure what area you work in or how/ if your role/ career path is exposed to legal sanctions but i would note who (senior down) around you has no idea on what the ruling was about and who is anti-law and look up your whistleblowing process for generic rather than specific issue reporting

I am so lucky that I don't feel I need other people that much - I can go weeks or months without seeing friends, then when the time comes a quiet night in appeals more than walking 20 minutes to the pub to see people I have known for 35 years or more. What I am saying is I am not worried about offending and losing friends.

But in my experience I don't lose friends, they lose me.

"I expect to be able to disagree respectfully with friends". I agree.

What I do not expect is to have people who claim to be very interested in politics and the success of the left at election time say to me "what's the problem? This is a niche issue that no-one really cares about. I do not want to listen to your opinion on the way this is harming women's and LGB rights and impacting the health and fertility of young people. Trans people are a tiny vulnerable minority. It is a non issue." Sorry, but that level of stupidity, misogyny, homophobia, smugness, privileged-bubble dwelling idiocy, etc etc leads me to have zero respect for someone, and whilst I can pity them and hope they see the light, and hope we can have a friendship going forward, in the short to medium term I quite simply have no respect form them or interest in a single word that comes out of their mouths.

I had another friend (married, two daughters in all girls schools) say to me (paraphrased) "I do not give a shit about this issue - it doesn't affect me or my family. If it does one day I will worry about it then". Sorry, but how am I supposed to respect someone as a human being after that?