Losing friends/potential relationships due to gender-critical beliefs.

[CynicalCatLady]

Has anyone experienced this recently? To be honest, when some of my potential new acquaintences/colleagues express sympathy with certain views (e.g. hard left, Green Party, pro-trans), I begin to have some reservations about them but I generally don't allow this to really affect how I treat them. But, if I'm being honest, I judge them to be fairly low in intelligence or quite easily manipulated by whatever they've read in the Guardian etc. Therefore, I find it quite difficult to respect these people but will still remain pleasant to them.

Some people I know have lost friendship groups or even romantic relationships over gender-critical beliefs. What have been your experiences?

(full disclosure: I'm a centrist, gender-critical Feminist who has only ever voted Labour, married to a bloke)

There have been thousands of posts on this subject already if you care to take a look.

Considering there is reportedly someone scraping posts (as per threads about this happening yesterday) from this board particularly, I am not sure that you will get many people sharing experiences that might then be used to match up with that data.

That doesn’t sound like you losing friends, it sounds like you dropping friends.

Assuming that people who disagree with you are less intelligent than you is a dangerous position.

I don't think it's necessarily absolutely the case that if someone says they ie vote for a left wing party or believe trans women are women (TWAW) that they're of low intellect, although it does suggest they might not be good at critical thinking.

In my experience most people who say TWAW don't actually believe it - it's said entirely for social capital.

Ultimately most people say they are left wing because it makes them feel good about themselves - that they therefore must be good people - and because it might give them a community.

Most of us are not immune to this - I used to retweet a lot about environmental causes without actually knowing or caring anything at all about them - but simply because my tribe back then were bothered about the environment and good people don't like climate change, right?

I lost an old friend, who I actually hadn’t seen for a few years (ie before anyone I knew was ever thinking men could become women) but then had reconnected with via facebook.

She had sent me a message and we chatted happily and she was arranging to come and visit me as I am housebound.

I then sent her a fb friend request and she accepted and I assume looked through my profile.

My fb profile is mostly personal photos of pets and garden stuff but there were a few things I had shared about sex realism including a post where I had commented positively on the then recent supreme court judgement.

She ghosted me and then blocked me when I tried to ask her what was going on.

Initially I couldn’t think what on earth could have happened but it slowly dawned that I had been “cancelled” without a word of discussion.

This was someone I had helped a lot in the past, who I had liked very much. Plus she knew that I had developed stage 4 cancer since I last saw her. I wasn’t looking for sympathy but I did think surely as an old friend with limited time I at least deserved the chance to talk over a difference of opinion but clearly not.

In general I have friends of a range of views on different topics and frequently find myself in the minority because I live in a solid tory rural area, most of my friend are horsey people often with farming roots or contacts and I am a left wing anti hunting (yes, still a contested issue here) vegetarian.

I concentrate on what bonds us together rather than what separates us in my friendships.

I couldn’t have an actual romantic relationship with someone who had such opposing views, but for friendships I can happily agree to differ.

When it comes to trans ideology it definitely does make me think less of people who believe, in that I question their intellect regarding the basics of biology but I do understand that there are some vague sort of believers who mean well and just haven’t really examined the subject because it hasn’t as yet affected them personally.

Hard liners are a different kettle of fish.

Mostly though I find lots of people just live in their personal little bubble and have no idea and little interest or awareness about current affairs and issues of any sort.

This somewhat blows my mind but there you are, people are free to ignore the world going to hell in a handcart if they so choose.

uh-oh, are we being baited here?

I don't think I've lost friends over this ~ I consider that they've lost me.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who disagrees with me on this subject. Put that in your pipe and smoke it AidaP.

It's great that lots of new MNers are finding FWR, but there have been many threads on this recently.

This is the sort of board where it's good to read around a bit as lots of ground had been covered.

I didn't know about this but have seen the post now. What's the point of scraping posts on this topic? What does that individual do with them? Is it for some kind of court evidence/action?

I don't seem to have lost any friends by being pro-trans. I guess that feels more acceptable to the general public. Even though we have different views, I do feel for those who have lost friends by being GC. I have some very strong friendships and I am not sure how I would handle losing one of them for my belief. You have my sympathies.

I would assume that the lack of critical thinking in relation to such an important topic is a sign of low intelligence or at the very least the sign of someone who is quite gullible to propaganda/misinformation. I have quite a few friends who disagree with me on a variety of issues who are highly intelligent, but it is almost always the low intelligence bunch who disagree with me on this issue.

But like others have said, the farming for 'woke social cookies' is probably a form of posturing that people seem to be doing socially in some circles.

Assuming that people who disagree with you are less intelligent than you is a dangerous position.

Depends what it's about, doesn't it? If I met someone who thought the earth was flat, I'd think they were a bit thick.