what did you know and when did you know it?

[truthsayers]

Brilliant article here. The tide is definitely turning:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/11/11/the-trans-reckoning-has-arrived/

I never believed it either, and I was 24 in 2018/19 when I first heard about the idea of being trans. My first thought was 'why would a man want to become a woman?' And I landed on the idea of womanhood being fetishised and seen as some sort of 'club', therefore othered and defined by men, so I somehow understood it was both a sexual and sexist thing even though I didnt know anything about agp or other paraphilias.

I also implicitly understood that women who wanted to become men were escaping sexism.

I dont know why I understood this so intuitively because I was quite naive about boys at 24, but i think it had something to do with having gone to an all-girls school and having a mother who had feminist values and talked to me about them. I've heard people say that misogyny is the water we swim in, especially in relation to porn, but I think because my childhood somewhat sheltered me from that I was able to recognise misogyny more easily because my water had been relatively clear of that toxin.

The other thought I have had as a younger person who never believed it is kind of surprise at the gullibility of many older people and anger at their complacency, particularly those in institutions of power. So many people have been harmed by that complacency. I feel especially sorry for detransitioners, and young trans-identifying people trapped in a lie, who have to live with the consequences of the adults who let them down so badly for the rest of their lives. I dont believe there will be justice sadly. The irresponsible adults will still be able to have orgasms.

I began to question a lot of things when a friend of mine's ADHD daughter transitioned to a he. She was at a Cambridge senior school/sixth form which later featured in the media as having what seemed to be particularly high levels of transitioning kids which suggested serious social contagion. It tore my friend's life apart. She and her husband argued about how to approach it, and the school withheld information. Their child was clearly being fed the 'your parents are evil and you need to cut them out of your life/ threaten suicide' mantra from Stonewall.

It seemed obvious to me that this was a dangerous cult which was being driven in the shadows of social media, a bit like the anorexia thing in earlier years.

I remember having lots of discussions with intelligent friends and being astonished to hit 'just be kind' brick wall responses - even from friends with medical and scientific backgrounds. I really felt like I was living in an Orwellian parallel universe!

I remember mentioning men taking medals in women's sports (mostly at college level at that stage) and was basically told they were isolated occurrences, and people were making a mountain out of a molehill.

Fast forward to men wining women's olympic medals, or men in women's prisons/ hospital wards etc and although my same friends now express some 'concern' about these things they never once acknowledge that I was correct with my concerns years ago!

I was also pissed off at the 'Miranda' character in Riot Women. Why?

• this is a show which is specifically about the issues faced by older women in real life and yet a it still had to be undermined by shoe-horning in a pretend man in a dress - it's offensive
• casting a TIM actor took a part away from a genuine female actor.
• The role didn't require a trans actor - this wasn't part of the story and since we're always being told straight actors can't play trans characters, why should trans actors be allowed to play straight roles?
• the inclusion of a trans actor was overrepresentation. Trans folk make up approx 0.5% of the population supposedly. That means an appropriate representation level would be one trans actor in every 200...
• the actor was also CRAP, which clearly shows they had been prioritised for their gender identity above any actual acting skills!

This still makes me so angry, a man saying women shouldn't centre their own needs and women bowing and scraping and acquiescing. I feel a weird hot mortification over it.

I'm more of a lurker than a poster but I have been reading this section since about 2017/18. I have also found Stella O'Malley very insightful. I think I saw a thread title that said something like "women don't have penises" and I thought, well of course they don't. I was working in the charity sector at the time (full of inclusivity and 'be kind') and became aware that men who 'identified' as women were announcing that they had actually become women. However it all seemed pretty academic as I had been raising my children to ignore gender stereotypes, no such thing as girls toy and boys toys etc. And at the time DS was 12 and DD was 9.

But as it turns out, DD is autistic, very unhappy at the onset of puberty, and school was (unknown to me) very free with the choose your own pronoun badge. I discovered after DD crashed out of school in MH crisis that she had been using a different name and pronoun at school, although confusingly only in some lessons. I am so angry that autistic young people have been swept up in this. DD has never 'come out' to me as trans, I think because I have always been very clear that I find gender identity regressive and based on sexist stereotypes. When we were engaging with CAMHS last year I found the Cass Report very useful to refer to when I was advocating for DD. However I feel she is still vulnerable and I am enraged how riddled with gender woo most autism support services are. Makes me feel alone all over again.

In the early seventies a bunch of us hippies were renting the basement of a large house converted into flats.
We became quite friendly with two transsexuals, (as they were known then) in an upper flat, probably because we were all living unconventional lives and the neighbours were uncomfortable with all of us, so we hung together.
I didn't have words for it, but it was clear that these two people were very different.

One could possibly have "passed" and desperately wanted to, didn't want to stand out, dressed very conventionally, had chosen a very normal female name and wouldn't have had any contact with people like us, or lived in such a ramshackle house, if things had been different.

The other was large, loud and dressed in things like fishnet tights, feather boas, frills and so on. This person's chosen names (and there were four of them) were extravagant and showy, there were frequent references to their anatomy and sex life, and always something to create a scene about. It always seemed unreal, somehow. Nowadays I would say performative.

So my first meeting with trans identifying men allowed me to see what someone with gender dysphoria looked like and acted like. This person told me that, at five years old, when asked what they wanted to be when they were grown up, answered "a lady".
I always had the impression that this person was horribly embarrassed by the other, and wouldn't have been their friend, if they had been more accepted by the community generally.

It also allowed me to see what autogynephilia looked like, even if the concept hadn't been identified yet.

Years later, discussions on this bit of Mumsnet reminded me of these two people and finally gave me the concepts and vocabulary I lacked, as well as awakening me.

Absolutely. The title of the thread is asking a question that people are directly answering. But the article in the OP by Stella O’Malley is asking the question of those in official positions how they think they’re going to be able to claim ignorance when clearly they’ve known and done nothing.

This is why I send emails to official email addresses, particularly government organisations. They are obliged to keep them and I can’t point out to them they’ve been told, but done nothing.

100% this. I am yet to see a realistic(1) TW character. They are all overtly shoehorned in with either a LOOK AT ME role; or (more usually) "OMG nobody had one single inkling until the big reveal and this straight man completely fell for "her" and they lived happily ever after" nonsense.

And I have more than enough on my saved watchlist to simply pick something else and not give the studio my eyeball time and have them think I agree with their stupid plot devices. Ditto TV, ditto books etc.

(1)By realistic I mean actually realistic, does the dishes, snores at night, works a boring job to pay the boring bills, not the porn-addled sparkly version many of them advertise across social media)

I think now that people are talking about it more we will see more contact between the two positions. Hopefully we can move beyond the two alternate realities and find a way to work together. Obviously those complicit in the system who knew there were problems and went along with it will have one set of questions to answer. I still see good people in the therapy/psychology world who still think being trans is simply a question of saying you're trans and getting the medical treatment you need like any other healthcare. It's going to take time and may hurt more before it gets better.

I can't get excited about one trans character in Riot Women. It's up to the programme maker. Does it make me question her claim to be centring women? Well yes but to be honest issue tv is not my cup of tea anyway. It's didactic and leaves no space for critical thinking and making up your own mind and simply projects a different fake version of reality in opposition to another dominant version in the world. Still fake.

I agree. I was stunned to see teachers and entire education authorities kowtowing to what they must have known to be a harmful ideology that would do irreversible damage to children. Just unbelievable that they would surrender and hand the children over. I don't believe any sane adult believes the bullshit.

I knew what I know at 14. I'm 75 now. And I still know what I know.

I know it's not ok to demonize a group, any group for any reason. I know that there are some who will jump on a bandwagon and use it for their nefarious reasons, but that the entire group should not be condemned because of that.

I learned that a person should not be hated for who they feel themselves to be.

For me, it was an early Guitly Feminist podcast with Deborah thingy. They had a TW on (or were talking about them(, and Deborah said something like "Of course I just think of them as a woman". And it was said in such a rushed, glib way, that I thought....no you bloody don't! You don't sound like you believe it. It was just such a stupid, parroted phrase.....hit me right between the eyes

That's when I started paying attention.

You contradict yourself, @Kuretake . First you say there is a character who is trans (and that is basically a verb, it's an action, a male living as trans) so he obvious lives as and describes himself as trans at least.

Then you say "This guy didn't describe himself as a woman it was literally a bloke in a frock, existing."
The fact you, the audience knew he was trans means very well that he describes himself as and lives as trans. ie a woman. His name is MIRANDA, for goodness sake! Do you think his parents would have chosen that name, or him (yes, I'm aware it's only a character but the point remains). And he is referred to as 'she'.

Miranda. And 'she'.
That is more than a "bloke in frock" existing.

No one is "demonising" or "hating" males just because we don't want them in our spaces.... 🙄

You mean women here, right? Women should not be demonised for asserting their rights. They shouldn't be hated for feeling - and knowing - themselves to be as human as men. That people have jumped on the trans 'rights' bandwagon because it makes them untouchable in their misogyny, sexism and homophobia.

Thought so.

it's women who have been on the receiving end of hate but somehow I don't think you mean women do you?

trans women are men. It is not remotely hateful to say that men however they present, whatever surgery they may or may not have had, do not belong in spaces and places designated for women.

children are not "born in the wrong body". A 4 year old boy wearing a dress is just 4 year old boy wearing a dress. He is not demonstrating that he wants to be a girl. Being a girl has nothing to do with wearing dresses, playing with dolls or liking pink but simply and only to do with being born a juvenile human female. That adults have inflicted their own neuroses on children about gender and the educational establishment has gone along with it knowing full well no one can change sex is abhorrent

I’m grieved that people on the left still presume they are the good ones. The cruelty of the left wing, the tribalism, the censorship and the authoritarianism is so despicable that I’m astonished people still proudly and fondly call themselves an “old leftie” as if they are part of a nice group of people.

I'm a late 40s bloke and to my shame much of the early trans debate passed me by. I was never all in with the TWAW mantra but I was I guess passively riding along with 'bekind#' and believing a lot of 'marginalised oppressed minority' narrative. I have been involved in competitive sports for as a long as I can remember, initially playing decent grade rugby in my 20s before injury forced me to retire from that sport at which point I took up rowing. I never believed for an instance that transwomen didn't have an unfair advantage in women's sports despite various sporting governing bodies insisting that supressed testosterone negated any advantages. I was quite vocal on that issue and got exasperated arguing with people who honestly believed transwomen posed no threat to women's sports. It was probably first time I was called a bigot which actually hurt at the time. I have held various leadership roles at my club from coach to captain and as well as running the day to day club functions a massive part of my job was welfare and safeguarding. We have about 400 members over half of which are women and another 90 or so juniors so I had to be DBS checked and attended safeguarding training courses. The latter was pretty depressing as it was spelt out the extraordinary lengths predatory men would go to in order to get close to and isolate their victims. I have had to work with social workers, police, schools and parents in order to properly enforce safeguarding plans for children who had gone through the most appalling abuses (neglect, bullying, sexual assault) so the very idea that we should now then a blind eye to the most basic of safeguarding principles to pacify the self ID crowd basically made me furious and it was pretty much at that point went full on TERF. Plenty of women at my club were seriously vocal about fairness in sports and the protection of single sex spaces and I was fully supportive of them. Further reading of Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Hannah Barnes, Sharon Davies etc helped me articulate my argumenrs better. Interestingly we have a large LGB contingent at the club who wanted absolutely nothing to do with the TQ+ crowd who they just saw increasingly as a 'look at me narcisist fetish mob of furries and pup masks'. I work in engineering which was never a very captured industry despite some token corporate rainbow washing so I could be a bit more frank with my views in the workplace but I have lost a few friends along the way by not 'being kind' (especially with pronouns). One parent got annoyed with me for not taking the fact that her daughter was 'non binary' very seriously and suggesting she will grow out of it. Ah well. I was pretty late to the party compared to others but glad I crossed the Rubicon.

On sport, although my first 'peaking' was Rachel McKinnon, another one was people saying that separate sex categories exist because women were beating men in sport and men couldn't handle it 😂

If ever there was an example of twisting the truth to suit an agenda.

I’m an early adopter. I knew a trans person over 20 years ago who transitioned after doing tree protests in Oregon. She was autistic and had a tricky relationship with herself and others, so ‘trans’ was a fun and exciting (and positive?) way to express this. She’s currently living a very limited life without much independence or any social support, it’s sad.

At the same time, I’ve been working in secondary schools for 20 years. I’ve seen ‘emo’ tribes turn into ‘trans’ tribes. I’ve always asked questions rather than pushed back. It’s very much on the wane, last few ‘trans/NB’ kids are in Year 13.

MagdalenBerns videos enlightened me around 2019. Then in 2021 with help of merched cymru I responded to the RSE draft consultation which was 😫, the language used & how they were proposing to allow such confusion in education!!! So glad we're now seeing some sanity now.

Anyone who has been involved in sports at any level will tell you straight away that transwomen carry a massive advantage against biological women irrespective of testosterone levels. It is usually people who are not into sports who try and argue the 'no advantage' narrative. I remember arguing with someone who when presented with the scenario of 6ft 125kg Irish rugby prop Tadhg Furlong self IDing as female and playing against England scrum half Lucy Packer (5ft 3, 55kg) them insisting there would be no safety concerns (this was around the time world rugby banned transwomen from competing with actual women). Some people's brains really did melt.

I got it here in this space on MN. I don't post often but I read a lot. Luckily for me, this board helped me get it before my child came out as trans I have kept reading and learning on MN. Thank you all so much for preserving this space.

But entire sports adopted the idea that there was no advantage, based on testosterone levels only 😒Obviously none of them actually believed it because come on, but the went about their business as if they did.

I'm glad there were experienced people though to pick up on the fact that sportswomen couldn't freely object without their place in their sport being threatened. Anonymous surveys in sport on the subject changed everything.

It was MN for me too, as I'd not had much/any exposure to it before. After reading the "Break It Down For Me" thread in a fevered three days of growing horror at what was happening to women's rights, the pieces fell into place. As others have said above, there was a short period as a teen when I actually thought we'd made it in terms of equality - and then a much longer period when I grew out of that level of naivety, but at least thought we were en route... and then there was this. It's opened my eyes to how desperately far we still have to go (to be honest, to the sad conviction that we'll never truly make it, but will just have to keep on fighting the hydra...)