Why do you care so much about gender issues?

[GCScot]

Longtime lurker, first time poster.

I'm fully GC, mainly due to this board. So first of all, thank you for all the excellent thoughtful discussion!

DH and most of my family are also GC. But they don't care about it anywhere near as much as me. This got me wondering - why do some of us care so much about gender ideology?

My reasons are:

1. I'm a lifelong feminist. Gender ideology causes so many issues for women. But the attempted redefinition of the very word woman feels like an actual existential threat

1. I'm a lifelong lefty. Finding myself on 'the other side' to left-wing political parties, friends, and institutions I have trusted all my life (The Guardian, BBC, NHS, universities) has completely thrown me. Am I wrong? If I'm not wrong, how have they gone so spectacularly wrong?

1. I have a science background. The (wilful?) ignorance of the basic science of biological sex and the prioritisation of feelings over facts enrages me

1. I have personally had a double mastectomy and hormone therapy for breast cancer. These were extreme medical treatments to save my life and have long-term health repercussions - I am at high risk of heart disease and osteoporosis. The fact that physically healthy children and vulnerable young people are being encouraged to undergo these treatments makes me sad and angry

1. The 'No debate' aspect of this issue is totally against my values. I work for a fully captured institution (Scottish university) and being unable to freely speak about this issue means that it is frequently running through my mind

Do any of the above resonate with others? Do you have any additional reasons why you care so much about this issue?

The word 'them' is also often used to other a person or group, as in 'them versus us'

@Theeyeballsinthesky That's a really helpful way of looking at it. I've never thought of people as being "system thinking" (me) and "how it affects me" thinking, and that actually makes sense of a few things! I remember once making a comment about the bad time Chinese women had (historically) when they moved into their parents' in law's house on marriage and were often treated very badly by their mother in law. The response was a quick put down about how I must have had a bad experience with a mother in law. Not at all, and I was nonplussed by the immediate assumption that this was about my personal prejudices based on personal experience, not my having read up on the history and, you know, actually thinking about other people and their lives and even caring about them. Everything is assumed to be personal.

I was on a public forum page about 6 years ago where a trans sexual male speaking at a women’s event was being discussed. I realised it couldn’t be stopped so I thought a good compromise would be if he spoke about how he experienced misogyny as a trans sexual male. I would have found that interesting. I was still so naive lol. The barage of furious, unhinged responses put me straight into ‘systems thinking’ mode and I haven’t changed back since. The penny dropped that they actually wanted us to pretend that TWAW all the time. Not just TWAW when it doesn’t matter all that much to anyone., So many women still don’t realise this though, and the implications on a broad scale. Or they just don’t care.

Why do some people mind about anything?
I wonder if there’s a difference between people who are more typical detail focussed or those who are more conceptual? I suspect that there will be people from both camps but who object to GI in different ways?

For me I relied on the BBC and Guardian so their mangling of language left me clueless. I think it’s the same for a lot of the general public who haven’t been put on “training” courses snd subjected to direct coercion and social contagion at work.

Resisting that sort of training and social pressure would be very tough - remember this has come from government and the civil service at the very top so is difficult for anyone to resist.

And it’s Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion in reverse. Firstly likeability - lose that and it’s difficult to get anything done at work. Second - and maybe most important - if you’ve made any public declaration of support for a cause then it’s almost impossible psychologically to row back on it. Which is why the email footers/pronouns and rainbow lanyards/stonewall rankings are so sinister. Anyone who’s done that will struggle to undo it even if not a true believer?

Yes, I was relying on the Guardian and BBC too. I still feel let down by them.

It was actually 'trans awareness' training at work that first triggered my doubts about transgender ideology. We were shown a video which explained that women have pink brains that make them like handbags and men have blue brains that make them like football. And sometimes a pink brain can be in a male body or a blue brain can be in a female body. I wanted to say "These are sexist stereotypes!" I literally opened my mouth to say so but my manager started speaking and moved the conversation on.

It's hard to speak out if you don't quite know what is happening/how important this issue might become/if you don't want confrontation or to upset people (my trans and non-binary identifying colleagues are nice people). The thing is, if no-one says anything early on, the ideology gets more extreme and more entrenched and then it's even harder to speak out

I do agree it must also be difficult to back down once you've started adorning yourself with rainbows and pronouns. If you remove them it might cause comment. And you may not even want to admit to yourself that you were wrong

It was actually 'trans awareness' training at work that first triggered my doubts about transgender ideology. We were shown a video which explained that women have pink brains that make them like handbags and men have blue brains that make them like football.

Are you sure that wasn't a Harry Enfield sketch?

😂
Much of TRA ideology is like a comedy sketch
(not the violent bits, obvs)

I have a young trans relative, they have a trans partner. They should have been healthy same sex attracted people. Instead both have increasingly poor health, one unable to work full time. It makes me furious that they were lied to by the NHS and their parents were lied to by the NHS. It also annoys me when relatives claim you must support family. I would not "support" children putting their hands in a fire, I wont support self harm.

Other annoyances like "no debate", the fake science, the treating women and girls as less important than males, the sporting nonsense influence me but it is the harm to young people that makes me most passionate.

No, that genuinely was the video! It had a pink brain with a handbag in it and a blue brain with a football in it. Both slowly moving across the screen swapping between a girl and a boy

@anyolddinosaur If you feel able to say so on here, how are the young people and their families reacting to their bad health? Do they accept that it's caused by the trans-affirming treatment, and do they now regret that treatment? Have they become disillusioned with gender ideology or are they doubling down?

Because the trans issue has been weaponised and I'm against punching down and scapegoating in general.

Which way is one punching when one forces a woman to show 'respect' to her male assailant or rapist, and does it make a difference if he has punched the woman?

Because my daughter thinks she is a boy.

She’s not a boy she’s an autistic young woman with complex mental health issues and somehow she’s got caught up in this gender lunacy. ‘Gender is a social construct’ she parrots back at me from the on-line propaganda she’s been taken in by, then there is the support she’s received from the NHS affirming her, our GP refusing to advise her against the use of binders, her friends and my friends congratulating her on her name change.

If this didn’t affect me personally, I like to think that Kiera Bell, Sandra Peggie, the Darlington nurses and drag queen story time for under 5s would mean I still cared just as much because gender ideology is lunacy and actually dangerous.

Oh, Nightmare. That must be so very hard. I hope she comes through it okay. It's good she has you there as an anchor.

"Weaponised" would suggest that there are no real-life problems with people wanting to pretend sex is unimportant. This is just not true and pretending it is is just another of the many ways people (but mostly men) are trying to silence women's voices.

@HorizonHoe "Because the trans issue has been weaponised and I'm against punching down and scapegoating in general."

Yes, it has been weaponised. Mostly by the trans identifying community. Violence against women and girls has never been more prevalent, and god knows women have suffered oppression, discrimination, rape, murder and the rest for millenia. They are the most marginalised group across the globe and men have been, and always will be, their greatest threat. And yet, having fought tooth and claw for centuries for every bit of liberty, dignity and safety, women are accused of wrong thinking, hysteria or worse when being told that biological men should have the right to share female rape crisis centres.

You think women who don't want to share their single self spaces with men, perhaps because they've been abused by men, or they're sick/disabled, or they're incarcerated, or they follow an orthodox religion are weaponising that?

I have no words for that. How little thought you must have for women to come to that conclusion. To suggest that these women are 'punching down' is just extraordinary to me.

@Tadpolesinponds It's complicated for some of them by the nature of their employment so I dont feel able to say much about it.

The Scottish Prison Service had a policy up until last year where violent male sex offenders were placed in the female prison estate. The current SPS policy allows violent male offenders to be placed in the female prison estate.

The driving force behind the policy was the lobbying group, Scottish Trans, whose then CEO said the following -

'We strategized – we strategized – that by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise’.

It's hard to think of a better example of 'punching down' than vulnerable female prisoners (80% of Scottish female prisoners have previously suffered a head injury through domestic violence) being used in a grotesque experiment to ensure that men get what they want, all the time.

Oh my word I'd have lost my shit!

😂

The previous trans awareness training I'd had at work was just 'use people's preferred names because it's the kind thing to do', so the pink/blue brains caught me off guard. I wasn't prepared!

'We strategized – we strategized...

Always with a 'zee', I notice.

As subtle as the Blitz, as they used say, then? 😀

In the days of yore we'd call these men transvestites and they'd just get on with it but now we have to really believe Bob is Bella or we are just big mean nasty terfs.
It just screams of men telling women what to do and to get back in their place.
Proudly GC.

I'm just horrified by what I see. The post-war advances that women have made have been threatened, and in some cases seem to have been reversed, all on the account of a dangerous pressure group. And just as bad, if not worse, the direction being to our children seems even worse. I never thought I'd have grand-children, but other people do, and I feared for them. And now, it turns out, I do have a grand-daughter after all, she is only six months old, and I'm sure this rubbish will still be around when she starts school.