Non Binary Niece Syndrome

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I think this article provides a very interesting insight into some of the social and class-based reasons why a lot of women refuse to join the fight to protect women's rights from genderism.

https://peaked.substack.com/p/non-binary-niece-syndrome

Róisín also wrote one of my favourite articles relating to the class-based, institutional lack of understanding and support for the gender critical movement:

https://4w.pub/you-meet-more-perverts-when-poor/

The leverage of twisted language to exploit the laudable educated progressive fear of unwittingly imposing their own subconscious prejudices as cultural values or objective facts.

Feminist women are especially vulnerable to this because we know, from our own lived experience and feminist history, what it is to be judged primarily on how we look, and to be restricted and defined by the unconscious beliefs of ones culture.

So "a woman can be anything she wants to be regardless of her sex" becomes "Anyone can be a woman regardless of her sex"

"Don't make assumptions about me because of my body when my body isn't relevant" becomes "My body is never relevant"

"Women should not be shamed for being sexual" becomes "Nothing sexual should ever be shamed"

"There's no right way to be a woman, we are all individuals" becomes "if an individual says they are a woman no one can disagree"

Hear, hear. This is precisely how we got here.

And it’s also, unfortunately, the reason why some (right-wing) groups say things like “well you asked for this women’s lib, equality nonsense - this is the natural outcome so suck it up, it’s all your fault.”

Thanks for commenting 👍

Having been a teenage girl, and having seen eating disorders (among a few other fads) sweep through my cohorts at school, college and Uni, I can't understand why the fads that left Tumblr and entered the real world aren't being identified as such.

In my experience, if you allow a lot of teenage girls poorly gatekept access to ways of physically altering their bodies they will take advantage of those ways to rid themselves of the things they hate about themselves. And, sadly, a lot of teenage girls have an amazing capacity to hate themselves.

The difference between eating disorders and genderism is that medics try to prevent and cure eating disorders rather than handing the teenager a menu from which she can pick and choose to permanently rid herself of/change healthy body parts.

Becoming a woman is really hard.

If you go through puberty early, your body is ahead of your brain which is still a pre-puberty girl enjoying life and being a girl. Suddenly you're dealing with drastic physical and emotional changes and the expectations and desires of adults around you. Some of whom are practically drooling over you. So you want to stop it.

If you go through puberty at around 14, you've seen your friends go through it and struggle with puberty and you don't want that to happen to you. So you want to stop it.

If you go through puberty later still, you worry there's something wrong with you and again you want to stop it.

The only cure sadly, is to go through puberty and that's hard to comprehend when you're at the beginning. It's also bloody hard years into it when you realise you've got years more.

For boys, it's amazing. Aside from embarrassment at vocal changes, and unexpected erections in public, you're stronger, taller, and you've got sex on the brain and you're encouraged to embrace it. Not just by easy available porn, but by the leeway available, the benefit of the doubt you're given, and the praise you get for exercising your masculinity.

No wonder girls will starve themselves or binge eat to hide they're bodies. No wonder they'll resort to butchering their own bodies. It's a form of avoiding it.

I agree with everything wholeheartedly, up until the bit where you say for boys it’s amazing. I would revise slightly - from the vantage point of being a girl, it looks like for boys it’s amazing. And I only say that now, having watched my sensitive, change-averse, probably autistic son go through a late-ish puberty and absolutely fall to pieces. It was the cause of him being sucked in to trans ideology. He didn’t want his voice to change, he didn’t want to start growing hair everywhere, he didn’t want to have feelings and body parts that all of a sudden had a mind of their own. He had lost control of his body; trans was a way of regaining control, much in the way that anorexia or self-harm is ultimately about regaining control.

eta: I will grant you that the narrative around how boys and girls are supposed to respond to puberty is def very different.

Sorry to be NATGALT, but me and my friends loved the whole puberty thing. We were excited to get our periods, excited to get bras, excited to be becoming grown up. (Too much Judy Blume at a formative age maybe) Looking back we were very naive, but it was definitely not a time of dread and fear for us.

I am in no way saying this to deny that many girls, especially autistic girls, have a hard time and do struggle with the internal changes, the social expectations and with having sexualisation imposed on them by adults, and I can absolutely believe that the number of girls in this boat has greatly increased due to social media and society's pornification.

I guess I just felt the other side needs to be said as well - the dreadfulness of puberty for girls is also driven by the social environment.

Early puberty was fine for me as I was at an all girls boarding school and we never saw any boys, so had the freedom to be curious and open about our changing bodies. I think most of us were fascinated more than anything. That changed for me when I left that school and went to a mixed school. I was absolutely horrified by teenage boys en masse and found their (pretty normal really) behaviour very difficult to be around, but then I'd been sheltered from them for a long time beforehand.

Going through puberty now must be horrible for many girls. In my youth even sexist culture was very tame compared to today..

My first exposure was seeing Lesbians thrown off the Pride parade a good few years ago. Following that, the discovery that young lesbians out on the scene were being bullied into having sex with men.
After that, directly in my workplace when vulnerable women were being forced to share locked hospital wards with men. And the trans ideology creeping, no, bulldozing into child and adolescent hospital wards. Those poor kids started to think there was something wrong with them if they weren't NB or trans and many were easily led/groomed. Let's not forget the trans members of staff who were few, but a massive pain in the arse. Pronoun bullies. Crying transphobia at every turn. Reporting 80 year old patients with dementia for misgendering even though Nurse Bill had only started wearing a skirt and lippy a week prior. Nurse Bill who had suddenly turned up in a skirt and said I'm nurse Beth from now on and berated them for being transphobic

I've always been a Terf, or perhaps more accurately a Twerf. I am loathe to include Woman in any description of a trans identifying Male but Timerf doesn't sound quite roll off the tongue.
I for one am delighted to see increasing numbers of people less afraid to talk about this.
Although many still fear losing friends/jobs, I remain hopefull that the tide is in fact turning.
And on that note, I'm off to read the full article. The quotes alone are rather fantastic

This article left me in tears.
I had expected some sardonic, comic relief but I now feel more pessimistic about the trans juggernaut than I have in years.
And I have to let go of the fantasy that the whole awful craziness will have ebbed and flowed away before my neice gets to the top of her surgery waitlist.
My dear neice.

I'm a little bit shocked to discover how socially conservative the circles I move in are (I do live in the arse end of nowhere, mind). But it's helpful to have some insight into the world my sister lives in. I feel more compassion for her, too, now.

It must feel very lonely and, frankly, desperate when a family member wants to do something that you know, objectively, will harm them, and all through the process they are being cheered on and celebrated by swathes of society for this bad choice. It's all very well people being able to virtue signal by supporting and affirming these children but at the end of the day none of those people will have to deal with the negative outcomes the family member will suffer.

I'm so sorry the article left you feeling upset but I'm glad it provided insight too. This issue is so important and yet treated in such a cavalier manner by so many politicians, medics, charities, academics, and journalists. It's a mass psychogenic epidemic that will burn itself out and I sincerely hope as many as possible, of the adults and institutions that supported/promoted it, will be held accountable for what they did to assist the medical harm of children.

I agree, Utopia, that the institutions and cheerleading adults should be held accountable.

Today, I read on PITTstack an article that essentially asked all gender critical thinkers to not mock the children caught up in this. And that’s one thing that the vast majority of feminists and women’s rights and mothers are not doing. We aren’t just in this for women but for all the nieces.

Don't be sorry @UtopiaPlanitia I'm so glad I read it.
This has been going on for years with my neice and I've done plenty of rolling my eyes and laughing at those gosh-darn city folks but I've never once cried. I sobbed after reading the article, I cried writing my last post and I'm crying again now.
I guess it's my this-is-not-a-drill moment. The adults have left the building and no higher power is there to swoop in and say "WTAF" as she's prepped and taken in for her double mastectomy. The slap in the face from reality that I have hidden from
I've been stupid and wasted any chance of helping her by thinking I'm too clever for all that, not like the silly headed other girls who run after social crazes like empty headed nitwits.

Except what good does it do to be the clever one when noone trusts you because you've been sneering at them for years and never once let your heart loose to rage and reach across the distance?

"If we can find ways of harvesting the energy in women's oceanic grief we shall move mountains." - Germaine Greer (sorrow, The Whole Woman)

That was an excellent read. I’m a bit more optimistic than that though. My entree to genderism was a friend’s daughter (autistic, all the red flags) coming out as trans. I tried to be supportive but when I found out she’d had a double mastectomy it broke my heart because I’d known this kid since she was a baby and she was always non conforming in every way and it seemed a tragedy to me that she is now a lifelong medical patient on top of the very significant problems she was already facing. It really shifted my perspective and when I heard the phrase ‘gendered soul’ that sealed it for me. I tried really hard to find reasons to believe in it but I simply don’t.

The amount of social force/pressure to affirm that comes along with these changes of identity is very hard to fight, especially if you're seemingly the only person in a social group who has concerns or reservations. The teenagers themselves wield the pressure against their family members (often with support from schools and doctors) and then, in turn, the family members wield it against the outside world in an effort to protect and show support for the child. In addition, the widespread irresponsible promotion of the suicide risk narrative has been the strongest method of enforcing compliance and I can completely understand why parents faced with that would be terrified of their child coming to harm.

Kurkara, a lot of the people on the feminism board are in similar situations to yourself and feel so much guilt for being unable to steer friends and family away from the harm that genderism causes. But, sadly, it's not always possible to prevent children, teenagers in particular, from doing harmful things. Especially if state institutions are working hard to promote these harms as though they are beneficial. The important thing is to remember that you will be available to support family members in the future when they are dealing with the outcomes of their decisions.

"age-appropriate female dress"...

Do we have to do that sexist ageism thing on the feminist board...?

On another note, the premise of this article is the main reason why JKR's recent criticism of Emma Watson falls apart for me: it was predicated on the idea that if Emma had "real-life experience", she wouldn't be of the opinion that TWAW. But we know that, sadly, large numbers of women who are neither famous nor (especially) rich, and with plenty of experience of "real" life, are on the TWAW bandwagon. I'm pretty sure that Emma Watson would have been one of those women whatever path she had taken in life.

I think it's easy for teens to rewrite their childhood, because their memory of those formative years is a lot more fuzzy, and it's easy to convince themselves of their own imaginings. It never seems to occur to them that the adults around them remember the same period of time a lot more clearly. And often documented those dear early days quite extensively.

"I never liked girly things" the newly-identified "Noah" will say. As if that picture of her holding a Baby Born, next to Barbie's Dream House and the hundred Sylvanian Families she begged Father Christmas for, was actually of her twin sister. Who you have presumably kept locked in the attic ever since, and feed a bucket of fish heads to once a week.

"See? I had long hair because even as a toddler, I knew I was a girl inside," Luna Kawaii (formerly known as Jack) will assure you. As if every other baby boy got a buzz cut and knuckle tatts for their first birthday, and looked proper hard. As if all his friends' mums didn't hold out as long as possible for that first haircut, just like you did, and didn't cry the same way when that first baby curl hit the floor. Oh, no. The decision couldn't have been about you. No, obviously, you didn't cut your son's hair because gender identity was beaming out of him like a sparkling pink strobe light, and scorched your fingers the second you tried. He was always destined to become an anime girl with cat ears, you see.

There can be no other explanation.

@SnoopyPajamas, that was lovely, but the chef’s kiss was Luna Kawaii (formerly known as Jack)

Róisín is as funny as fuck. Like Julie Burchill in a Vulcan mind meld with Hunter S Thompson. Is there a book? I'd buy all my friends a copy for Christmas.

She is, as we used to say, a quare geg. I'd buy a book.

Great article and great discussion BTL

Just read that second article and had to say what an awesome piece it was. Fantastically written and has opened my eyes - I already kind of knew about the inequalities, however, this hit it home with its nuance.

thank you for sharing, I’ll read the other one now.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. When I first read it a few years ago, it really helped me to crystallise in my own mind some of the major reasons as to why I was annoyed that there was no widespread class-based analysis (in addition to the sex-based analysis) of the effects of genderism on women and girls. The media seemed to be ignoring the fact that women and children from poorer backgrounds would have an even harder time if institutions and organisations imposed genderist-influenced policies and procedures on them because they didn't have any options to go elsewhere or to opt-out.

I've been following Róisín's work ever since. She's been working hard in Belgium to try and effect the same recognition of the danger of gender ideology that has come about here in the UK and (to a lesser extend) Ireland.

Such an important perspective - class-based analysis. You are right.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading both of the articles. The first one was longer and actually it kind of resonated with me. I hope it is ok to share, but I have felt similar to how she did when she mentioned the fawning over the trans-person. I’ve felt this way even about gay men and how they are simply accepted or even celebrated in women’s circles. I think to myself, a lot of women don’t get this level or kind of attention do they? And fawning is such a great way to put it as well!

I’d also buy her book… if there is one!