Welcome New Members Peak Trans Reprise V: Tell your story here

I'm sorry, this one is a bit long. Ever since I started hearing more and more about self-id and pronouns, I had a terrible gut feeling of what it all would bring if it were to become mainstream. I wanted to be supportive to minorities and the oppressed, because as a woman I have empathy for those who are also struggling and just want to live without discrimination. I had friends who began to change their pronouns, and insist that everyone should list their pronouns on social media. I have never done that despite the social pressure, because it feels incredibly performative and I failed to see a reason to do so. (a few later went on to say that if you don't list your pronouns, it marks you as transphobic.) I still went along with other people's preferred pronouns, as I never thought of the implications it would all bring if I were to play along. I wanted the people I interacted with to feel comfortable, and that meant respecting their "identity".

Some of my background shaped my GC views and it all makes sense after I thought critically about it. I used to be a tomboy around 12 years old, and continued to shift through various "phases" of presenting myself as I explored different fashion looks and genres well into high school. I felt terribly uncomfortable about puberty, especially growing breasts, and I would refuse to wear bras for a long time until I was pressured by my parents to do so. I felt so embarrassed about my anatomy, and while I never thought I was born in the wrong body or that I was possibly a male, I was just very uncomfortable with the changes in my body. I was horrified upon my first period. It was already clear to me at that age that male and female have inalienable biological differences, as the boys would joke about trying to sneak into the girl's change room. None of the girls would joke about the boy's changing room, aside from laughing at how much Axe body spray you could smell coming from it. Definitely no jokes about violating the opposite sexes sacred boundaries. It made me see very early on that some boys and men display predatory behavior towards girls and women, and opened my eyes to the fear such situations can generate. I didn't want to be objectified by them, so I was a bit ashamed of being female. (I'm very proud to be a woman now, and feel the need to finally speak up for women as a class. I truly believe self-ID and gender ideology is affecting women negatively, despite so many people claiming that Trans doesn't harm anyone.)

The first time I was exposed to transgenderism was when one of my best friends at middle school age decided to go for a he/them identity and cut her hair short. She seemed very uncomfortable with being female and before this shift in identity she was beautiful but slowly started to change her appearance, which was absolutely fine - she rocked her styles. But at a certain point she looked so different from her former self that people began to get concerned for her. I remember a classmate greeting her after her extreme change in appearance, and then was surprised to learn it was actually said best friend. I think one asked her to her face what happened to her. People in our grade seemed to silently judge her for a variety of reasons and I felt so bad for her. She had a friend who was into self harm and sadly my friend also got addicted to it. Her friend would post attention seeking self harm photos on instagram, and made a lot of people extremely worried. I can't help but think this behavior influenced my friend, since it actually affected me and made me try it as well. She had a traumatic childhood and I think she felt the need to identify out of her female identity to try and escape how she felt. She has since began identifying as female again, however the gender ideology lurks still and I believe she may still be dysphoric.

Through her, I met a second transgender, this time a TiM. This was a little recent as well, probably around 2019. This was my first peak that completely shook my previously accepting beliefs around trans people. He was lanky, tall, and has dyed his hair seemingly after watching girls do the "e-girl" hair trend. (Dying your bangs, or the sides of your part only) He wore chokers and skirts and seemed extremely strange socially. Something was just "off" aside from how he presented. I will say I have no issues with men wearing skirts, makeup, or anything that they want. (just don't be creepy like the teacher that wears fake balloon breasts to the classroom...) Same with women, it's okay to be gender non-conforming, which is what I originally took the trans movement to be about. Shocker, that instead they are trying to enforce gender roles and stereotypes to the point that some mothers believe their sons to be transgender because they would like to play with the barbies or littlest pet shops. Well, this TiM had a forced voice, like he was trying hard to emulate how women speak. He would make creepy, sexual jokes, and focus a lot on sexual topics in general. I didn't like this at all but tried my best to not be visibly discomforted by the obvious male thought process. We had a few things in common, so I'd try to steer conversations in a better direction since he had moved in for a few months with my best friend (she's not interacted with me in months despite me reaching out, she has cut me off I suppose. I am unsure why) and I couldn't come to her house without having to interact with the TiM. One time, we were all drinking and having a fun time listening to music. We definitely drank way too much as I was ready to just pass out. As I was drifting to sleep, both of them were still up. My friend seemed very tired as well. Suddenly, the TiM began to get way too close to her, cuddling right up. I was so drunk I didn't know what to do about this aside from call him out after she told him to get off of her, he literally got on top and was practically grinding. He backed off when he realized I saw what was happening and I was horrified for the rest of the night as to what I had just witnessed. She asked me about that night and I told her what happened. She was terrified, and I don't think they have spoken since. I also learned from her that he has admitted a really fucked up kink/fetish to her, and she was extremely uncomfortable with it. He built up like , "I have such a weird kink, it's baaad, like 9th level of hell..." when he was talking about it to me. He never admitted what it was to me, but she told me that he said he gets off to horses and wants to have sex with them. I was horrified and immediately blocked him on everything, it was beyond fucked. I tried my hardest to be accepting of him before the creepy behavior got out of control, I had invited him to hang out on three separate occasions to include him. I tried to educate my family on him being trans and that they should be accepting. They just wanted him to feel comfortable too, even though we agreed we could never see him as a woman. I tried to see him as a woman, but when I tried, my instincts were going off clocking him as a male. I regret inviting him on a hike now after learning about his disgusting fetish and probable tendency to other such degeneracy. My friend did not deserve to be sexually violated, he took advantage of her kindness and trust just for his sick sexual desires & instincts.

Around this same time, but a bit before that incident with the other TiM, I was involved with a discord friend group who was pretty "woke" on pronouns and stuff. I'd try my best to play along, but I could only bite my tongue for so long before breaking over the extremely forced bending of reality to make people feel "accepted". I was dating a guy for half a year that I had met there and lived close by, it was going pretty good. I should have known though that he would trans out, due to him expressing that he has had gender dysphoria since middle school. Again, I was naive and supported him no matter what. I got suspicious when he changed his online name to something feminine and started using profile pictures of female anime art. He came out to me a month or two after that change after becoming a LOT more distant. He broke up a week after coming out. He was in a frat, and then suddenly dropped out and began his transition. He'd talk about HRT and "titty skittles", (blech that ~cutesy~ nickname is awful) and spent a lot of time talking to his fellow TiM friend, who he previously stopped interacting with because of how awful that person treated me in front of all our friends. I felt really betrayed when I leaned over his shoulder to see texts about transing with that person, and got very upset and started crying. (this was before he came out) That person had started insulting me and targeting issues I have been open about struggling with like my weight issues, all because I had told them they have been posting a bit too many frantic rants about their gender identity, suicide baiting etc. and yet after a week of the friend group agreeing that person is very toxic, they let him back in. I don't know why, because this person has been a problem in the group before I even arrived there, always causing needless drama. That person had their own discord server which I had joined, and to my horror there was a "secret" channel that only the trusted people could see that was FILLED with anime girls, or real girls all sexualized or straight up porn. Yep, you guessed it, there was literal loli in there too. I was disgusted and spoke up about it immediately, that along with how that TiM spoke about women and girls was always hate fueled and jealousy fueled. I was labelled transphobic and prudish, and got made fun of for being disturbed by how much sexual content these people consume. "It's just art", he says, as he talks about how the age of consent should be lowered. I was SO shocked that I was the only one who immediately attacked him for saying something like that, and horrified that no one else seemed to have any issue with what he said. There was even a handmaiden in there to defend him and his group of freaks. He 100% tries to groom others into becoming "transgirls" and has been successful after making friends with people who are clearly not mentally well, despite knowing that he can never be a woman. The misogyny was so obvious but no one wanted to stand against it. I feel so stupid for continuing to stick around, the first server was still a decent space with lots of friends, but the second server was just out of association that I didn't straight up just leave it. One of the mutual friends involved in both servers, a very proud and open about it gay man transitioned. He claimed to be a "non-binary woman". One of his first outfits he posted? The fucking programmer socks. I poked at the self-id of "non-binary woman" because it's clearly contradictory and means nothing. The handmaiden, who was a friend at the time, began to try to defend the trans at all costs, and tried to somehow explain to me that you can be both a woman and not conform to the binary. It was hilarious, but also very sad, because everyone is clearly pulling the wool over their eyes to protect trans feelings when their rhetoric and what they fight for makes no sense in reality. My friendship with both groups ended after I drank a bit then started talking about how I really felt about all of this. I was deemed transphobic and bigoted, and banned. All of them blocked me. Thank fucking God. In the other server, my TiM ex was in the voice chat playing a game with me and some friends. He ended up having an epic freakout and yelled at me to "shut the fuck up", which was the final straw. It was over a miscommunicated location. I will never go back to any spaces that treat these people as "real women", they are contributing to womens spaces being taken from us. I feel so bad for TiFs though, I believe 100% that men and women transition for completely different reasons. I have found much healthier friend groups that have no signs of such degeneracy. I have a loving boyfriend who listens to me talk about gender critical thoughts and rant about the craziness of the trans plague, I'm so much better off no longer having to keep my true thoughts to myself. It wasn't healthy getting angry all the time internally about some of the bullshit ideology the people in the creepy anime channel server would try to nail into peoples minds. I can't help but feel dread around hulking men wearing what is essentially "womanface" now, and have an endless amount of fury for the people who are allowing violent men to be let into women's jails because they "feel" like a woman. I don't even know what "feeling" like a woman is, yet I am one. The way men troon out is always in the most overtly sexualized way, it's as if our oppression and our misogynistic stereotypes are their fetish and they would like to live it out. They will never get rid of their male privilege just as you cannot identify out of oppression. I have so much more to say, and I'll definitely be posting here more.

I enjoyed reading the stories here, I feel I finally have a place that I can let all this out to. I peak every time there is an inevitable horror story about TiP, whether it is a story about violence or a story about children being transitioned by their parents. I peak every time I see a balding man who claims he "just wants to pee" in the room that has women in it. Thanks, Ovarit. I love this site.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I think this is more a way for me to order my thoughts than anything else. But why not? I am a straight woman, quite leftist with often a laissez-faire attitude.

• I started getting more and more iffy when every LGBT forum, organisation and local group started to become more and more about the T. While simultaneously screaming everybody ignored the T. I started to notice this around 2013, I think. 'Girldick' wasn't a subject yet but the screaming for attention was there.

• Around the same time, the more feminist and leftist groups I was in, started to put the T more and more on the foreground, forgetting the working class, the ongoing poverty, inequality and women. A decent discussion, because normally there were different opinions, became impossible. Women's issues were taken over by TiMs and handmaiden males. Brocialists always were a problem but you could tell them to shut up and listen before. Furthermore, the hyperindivualism and idpol became more and more clear, something I couldn't relate with fighting for a better, more fair society. 'What about ME?!' and 'Not my personal problem, /care' were things we used to be against.

So, I wasn't sold on the idea early on but I begrudgingly nodded and focused on things that imo truely mattered. As that became harder, I started to withdraw. Especially the made up labels like demisexuality, pansexual, omnisexual and non-binary annoyed the fuck out of me. A) you are not special and B) non-binary is incredibly regressive in my book: not acting 'femme' or 'masculine' enough? You are not your birth sex! What?

That being said: the former genderneutral that was pushed, also didn't fly with me as most seemed to think 'stereotypical male = default genderneutral' I can't count the times I had to defend I danced, while nobody would have questioned me if I played football (soccer). I also grew up with a more tomboy mum who was often quite disappointed I didn't give a fuck about playing in the mud, playing basketball and the likes.

However, I suppose I was never truely sold on transsexualism or later on transgenderism. I recall seeing a day time talkshow episode about TiMs when I was a kid and... yeah, they were still onviously male, especially the one saying he was a lesbian.

Starting with the T becoming more on the foreground, I had the displeasure of meeting several trans identying people IRL. This will sound harsh but they all had in common that they were unpleasant people: selfish, lazy, hardly ever taking responsibility for their own fuck ups, and pushy. In the early years, you could push back somewhat. "No bro, women most likely didn't run away from you because you were a boy and presenting a such, and all girls and women always are instantly panicked when they see a dude. They probably turned you because you are insufferable, in their face, have a horrid attitude or even because you have a bad breath." Unlikely you could say that in current times, even if you wrap it in the most friendly phrases.

Everything happnening after that, the girldick, the bigot screaming, the taking over of women's spaces, the grooming, and we could go on for ages, just solidified my opinion. I wasn't even surprised it happened.

I'm still quite laissez-faire in most things. Dude wearing make-up? I don't give a shit. Woman not wearing make-up? Couldn't care less. But don't think or expect the world revolving about you.

Thing is I don't trust former TRAs doing a full 180, especially in a very short time. I don't believe the behaviour is instantly gone, the subject just changed. I keep my distance.

At the same time I still have some work to do on myself. While stemming from way different life experiences, I have the typical behaviour of keeping the peace and if necessary, just withdraw. This includes spaces like ovarit, not just the leftist groups I used to join and IRL.

Having grown up with a classic HSTS childhood GD case, I thought at first they were all like him and was sympathetic.

And in 2017 I'm on Reddit and the activism really kicked off. Being supportive but unfortunately very familiar with male sex offending behaviour, I get into a discussion with a TIM about the dangers of allowing males to self ID into women only spaces, because of sex offenders.

He says this has never happened.

So I hit Google and after five minutes I've got three recent cases enabled by self ID. He seems quite dismissive.

About an hour later I decide to creep his account, and he's having the exact same discussion with another woman. This guy literally knows of multiple examples of these assaults, but there is is telling some woman they've never happened. He's basically lying to her.

So I go further back into his account, he's been informed of these incidents multiple times. This guy is lying his ass off for a reason.

Joined the gender critical sub five minutes later. Boy was that educational, no wonder they wanted it taken down.

I peaked because my daughter got sucked into the cult, and we ended up losing her entirely. She has had anxiety and depression for a large part of her school life, and was recently diagnosed with BPD. She's biracial and had some early childhood trauma that has impacted her self identity and self-esteem, but she refused therapy or talk about those issues.

There are many factors that led her to where she is now, but one of the early triggers was her involvement and love of playing video games. As a tween and teen girl playing CS:GO and other war games, she encountered hateful teen and adult incels dripping with enough misogyny to make any girl or woman feel intimidated. She wanted to use a "robot voice changer" so the male players wouldn't know she was a girl and she could play in peace. It had nothing to do with INNATELY hating her gender; it was a reaction to being treated hatefully.

Anyway, without revealing too TOO much about her background, I just wanted to give some context as to why, when she suddenly started reporting feeling "gender fluid," I cast a suspicious eye immediately. She had never ever discussed or displayed any discomfort with her gender until she started getting treated differently because of it.

Over a period of time, her father and I tried to counsel her and guide her through a gender critical/feminist lens while still "supporting" her and tiptoeing around her feelings.

At 17, she confessed having suicidal thoughts so we immediately looked for "the best" inpatient therapy we could find for her. While there, she became secretly involved with a TIM teen. I totally believe he took advantage of her in a very vulnerable state. I absolutely blame that facility for allowing them to foster a relationship without noticing. I would sue them if I knew how...

Between the incels and the TIM relationship influence, she decided that she "felt like a boy." The more she was on pReddit, the more hysterical she became about it. Things finally came to a head when her father refused to call her by a different name or use he/him pronouns.

She ran away on her 18th birthday to go live with the TIM and family, where they convinced her to let them ADOPT her without our knowledge or consent, so we are no longer even her legal parents.

I can't even type out that last sentence without tears welling up. Anyway, I have been wildly anti-TRA ever since. My daughter needed therapy for her BPD and childhood trauma, not hormones and a beard. The TIM's mother transed him as a young boy, so they are on a completely different planet.

I try to check in on her as much as I can but she has gone no contact. I'm just at such a loss as to how suddenly everything happened, and how shocking the result was.

I already leaned radfem (ayyy WOMEN's studies certificate holder here ayyy), and I'm sure I would have ended up here anyway, and having it happen so closely made it so viscerally raw and real it makes me nauseated.

I hate this so much.

I peaked because I realised the majority of Trans People, especially Adult males, chose to marginalise themselves. But I have been suspicious of the adoption of gender ideology by the left, thanks to Ms Butler. From my experiences, and multiple news articles of the immediate successes of Trans people. I have concluded that Male Privilege is not over taken by Transphobia. TIMs do not become victims of the patriarchy simply by announcing they are women. I came across this at my student union, and other organising activities and I will never forget it.

I live in Brighton and while it's often thought of as "the gay capital". I don't find that there are many actually trans people, as compared to "Non-binary" people, and traditional LGB people. However, I myself am a young bisexual woman and I think it's so difficult to get close to people because so many people are so liberal in their beliefs around IdPol. I have found it hard to make connections to people who aren't GC. It's a little sad sometimes.

Another problem I have is making connections with Marxists. I am a marxist. I would like to have more marxist friends, but because people are so traumatised by morality policing, open discussions are difficult to have, never mind sharing countercultural opinions. I feel really lonely, a lot of my friends are yet to be peaked, or bully they themselves into believing the anti-materialist, gender theory. Which generally lacks any kind of logic and is very narcissistic, and opposed to abolishing gender. I became a Marxist because Anarchists can never give me examples of how rapists would be dealt with. So the idea there are many Marxists in the UK that believe that it's fine for TIMs to be sent to women's prisons makes me quite upset, and divorced from the movement. My favourite Irish YouTuber posted a video Marxism and trans and I feel it was so short sighted, and too dismissive of GC, What does he know? I thought to myself. I'm not going to be told to indulge the beliefs of this often, very white, very western bourgeois ideology.

I think the trauma of the female body is such that we can recognise female presenting imposters far more easily and I refuse to give up this hypervigilence for the sake of the blushes of a very mentally ill demographic.

Finally I absolutely can't get my head around "first trans woman to do... " articles. If TIMs are indeed women, none of their activities should be a cause for celebration or attention.

Gender Ideology is absolutely useless and anti-worker bs, and puts people's lives at risk, Much like the normalisation of sex work.

*Thank you for letting me in! *

Hello. I'm still learning to articulate all that I feel is wrong. Probably because I see my nieces (10, 8, and 5) growing up in this world. I am grateful I am a child of the 90s from rural areas where "tomboy" was an acceptable way of being a woman and not an automatic sentence of dysmorphia. I keep telling myself--womanliness is whatever I am. I don't have to bake bread, but I can break bread and glory in the millenia of heritage of creating and nurturing bodies. I can win weightlifting competitions and not wear makeup and rather wear pants but have a favorite dress and like pretty things in my home but not care about design styles and play piano and also videogames and garden and EAT and keep my hair in a ponytail most days and never wear heals but always paint my toenails but keep my fingernails short and write a million journals and be afraid to walk alone at night in the city and gear up to be violent in self defense whenever I'm taking transit alone and also travel the world by myself. I couldn't decide between orange and purple as favorite colors. I loved books about girls but would play all day with hotwheel cars and Lego bricks. I would run barefoot and climb trees and run terrified from chickens. All of these are girl and woman and she and me. I don't like the idea that my identity is what morphs to societal expectation. I feel eternal. society and life and thought should morph around me [woman, female, she] as a creator of reality.

I have a dear friend who is a trans identifying male--we grew up together and part of me thinks the transition came because they wanted to show what a man should be like. I wanted to be so supportive and I am, of my friend and the life their family is trying to build. But loving my friend blinded me. I thought to love meant to believe 100% no questions asked. (daughter of 3 generations of women in abusive relationships). So I advocated for trans rights.

Then my grad advisor after many shoeless sessions sorting her huge collection of feminist and nuclear policy literature invited me to Ovarit. She had answered so many of my questions, very honestly, but also with encouragement that I could think through this critically. I found a blog post (maybe here, maybe from her collection) that described a mother's response to her daughter who wanted to transition but ended up realizing that wasn't truly what she wanted after I think 2 years. A co researcher on a google group messaged a story about being called a "him" at a medical clinic when she is a she and identifies as a butch lesbian but the person who insisted on calling her "him" was obviously female and insisted on being called "they" so once the researcher got fed up with being called a man, she called the "they" "she" once and got kicked out of the facility. Blew my mind. And started my mind in a different way of thinking. So here I am, learning how to try to articulate all the things I am feeling.

It's amazing how calm my mind gets once the confusion is kicked out and biology is once again true.

This is my first post.

I first believed everything I heard about trans people and vaguely supported the improvements of their rights while also knowing i was uncomfortable with some of the consequences, such as having males in women's prison, or the changing of language to remove 'woman' and 'female' from the discussions relating to our biological sex. i'm currently trying for a baby, if i am successful and then get called a 'pregnant person' i honestly will lose it. my handle is a reference to this erasure of women.

So how I peaked was interacting with a trans man, regarding sports and who lesbians should sleep with. This person prompted me to do some research, and I can confidently say that they are not happy with the results. I now know that women are losing out on sports scholarships, having to deal with people walking around with dicks hanging out in changing rooms, puberty blockers and other hormones do serious damage. You all know the drill.

TL;DR - i broadly accepted what i heard in media regarding trans people as true, then started my own reading and found out it was not.

What prompted me to join this community was a kind of peak peak trans, if that's possible, i.e. finding out that a male is (or at least was) head of Edinburgh rape crisis. I have had rape counselling, I can't be in an enclosed space with men i don't know, I honestly don't know what i would do if i'd have had a male counsellor. it wouldn't matter how well they pass, my amygdala responds to any male within a 100m radius.

i'm really concerned that these services are being forced to pander to trans people due to vandalism and pressures from TRAs, and the impact its having on women. i'm able to live a roughly normal life thanks to the help i received and its devastating to think women are losing the opportunity to have such support.

anyway, i will now read some of your stories, and look forward to getting to know the community.

Hello, first post here.

I used to be a TRA, as my username implies.

Some thoughts that changed my perspective are the following.

Growing up I considered woman = adult human female, the same way Julie Andrews sang in Sound of Music " Do(e), a deer, a female deer", like most people (still) do. I did have a concept of "womanhood" that encompassed a type of femininity that I myself did not possess, leaving me somewhat dysphoric from a very young age, before the internet really took off.  Somewhere in my late teens I first discovered "transmen" on YouTube. I found it highly fascinating. I don't think non-binary was around then yet, but the term genderf*ck or maybe even genderqueer was. I felt a sense of recognition and belonging. Years went by and and for a brief time I even had some thoughts of having a mastectomy. Finally I got to a point where I became more comfortable in my skin and decided that it wasn't necessarily my body that made me uncomfortable but rather society's expectations and view of how a woman is supposed to look and act. I concluded that I was fine as I was and that I was a woman because I was an adult human female and that every mental experience, interest or preferred aesthetic made me no less woman/female.

I was still a TRA at this point though, even though the seeds of a gendercritical mindset had already formed. It wasn't until years later when I wondered what happened to the few transguys I found on YouTube years ago, that things eventually began to crumble.

YouTube had changed. There were A LOT of trans people on there now. I watched mostly transguys and found their videos fun and interesting to watch. I even started watching a few transwomen such as Contrapoints.

I grew up quite a freethinker though and slowly but surely, whenever a trans YouTuber tried to take down gendercritical arguments, I was left with the impression that, for whatever reason, they couldn't. That is, if they weren't attacking strawmen arguments or simply not actually countering any arguments whatsoever.

This lead me to investigate "the other side" of things for myself. Even then it took a while and looking back I see a big reason for that and that reason was that the acronym that had been stamped into me was lgbT. Being a same sex attracted woman, whenever the T was attacked, I saw it as an attack on my same sex attraction as well. Even though there a good reasons to support same sex attraction contrary to the T.

More changes happened. TIMS in women's sports and shelters. Being called menstruators and the like. Having the meaning of homosexuality changed/erased. The transing of dead people because they were gender non-conforming. The silencing of critical and questioning opinions. Etc.

TRA's like to argue that "terfs" want to reduce women to their genitals. That we are so much more and... it actually sounds flattering at first. We know sex is more than genitals, but let's go with the argument for argument's sake.

I don't want to reduce women to their genitals. I would like to reduce womanHOOD to "genitals". Because anything else is regressive and harmful. Because aside from my genitals, I want to be free to be anything else. Have any hobby or interest, any personal aesthetic, any profession, any internal feeling and state of mind or belief.

Yes, as women, we are more than our genitals.

We are so much more.

But not because we are women.

But because we are human.

I don't deny the experiences of TIP's. I simply no longer label them the same way they do. Being a man/woman is a physical category to me, not a psychological one or its expression.

I've only heard two definitions from TRA's for what a woman is for example. The circular one (you all know it) and the gender = gender stereotype. I agree with neither. The first one doesn't say anything and the second is regressive incorrect bullshit, no doubt creating more dysphoric youth.

I honestly think being gendercritical can mitigate or even solve a lot of dysphoria for a lot of people. It did for me and for that I am forever grateful.

Glad to be here.

So up front, I am a desisted female and used to be deep in the gender cult, never got hormones bc health problems, anyways

It started with people saying "bisexual isn't inclusive enough for non-binary people!!" (which I think someone mentioned earlier down in this thread also happened to them), then it turned into people calling ME a TERF bc 1. I am autistic and couldn't get how "non-binary" and other "xenogenders" worked, I was called so much ableist crap and basically called stupid that I couldn't "figure it out" 2. I refused to bend my mother language to fit into their dogma, even though my mother tongue doesn't even have genders, its all context based. Still somehow transphobic (keep in mind at this time I STILL was a TIF, still trying to "unlearn" my biases)

But it was too much for me, I was in trans friendgroups that would harass and bully TERFs and radfems, I would message said women personally to learn their views bc I couldn't bring myself to bully random women online who frankly, had a point once I actually learned in secret.

I left the cult earlier this year thanks to leaving all those friendgroups (full of enough drama) and finally biting the bullet and diving straight into radfem literature and groups.

I hope this post made sense, I'm a bit anxious to post here for the first time haha, hope all the other women here in this thread are doing okay, happy days all ♥

Several years ago when the knitting site Ravely became so brave--the owner's partner, a man transitioned to female and Trump supporters were banned from selling Trump banners etc--I wondered about how his transition would impact his family. Exchanging message with other Ravelry posters, I questioned TIMs involvement in sports and their transfers to women's prisons and their demand that they get medical treatment in prison. Was very hesitant to talk about this because Raverly groups and posters seem to be very supportive of TIMs. I stopped exchanging messages and only read a couple of knitting forums. A year or so passed, but only after reading Pamela Paul's article ...Women Don't Count did I realize how militant and pervasive the trans movement had become.

I worked as a librarian in children's, academic, and public libraries and can't believe how doctrinaire pedagogs, books, and curriculums have twisted education to promote trans ideology. Democratic politicians haven't gotten the message from women yet and I hope to learn how to do more than just contact them. Joining Ovarit means that I can learn terminology and get ideas without engaging in the vitrolic world of social media. Many thanks for setting up this site and accepting me

Exhibit A: My TiF best friend, we had been best friends for nearly 3 years by then (We were all in our late teens, I was 18). I was always accepting of her - support, defended her from "transphobes", cut off one of my other friends for saying he wouldn't date a trans girl because he feels like they are still guys, all the works.

Then my boyfriend (20 at the time) did research about transgenders, and he didn't find any conclusive evidence that it's even a real thing, so of course he was sceptical. I told my best friend this, and she got "uncomfortable" and told me to talk to him. So for her sake, for the next few weeks, I argued with my boyfriend about this trans issue, he argued with me logically, but it was giving me cognitive dissonance, you know the drill.

Eventually, he came to a conclusion that gender transition isn't researched enough, but it doesn't mean trans people don't desrve basic human rights, duh. So I told my best friend, and she said it's still transphobic. We had an argument, and she hasn't spoken to me since. Almost 3 years of very close friendship down the drain, all because I didn't want to break up with my boyfriend over a differing opinion - they would never even likely meet each other!

Exhibit B: Jessica Yaniv, all those predators. "Not all of them are like this," I thought, "Only a few are like this. Look, Blaire White is calling them out.. although she's a "pick me trans girl" (lol)"

And taking over of female only spaces by TiMs only continued.

Exhibit C: As much as I don't like this guy, Jordan Peterson's conversation with a TRA as follows (roughly):

TRA: do you support trans rights? JP: I think they should have human rights. TRA: do you think trans women are women? JP: no. TRA: so you don't support trans rights. JP: I didn't say they shouldn't have rights, I just said I don't believe trans women are women.

Exhibit D: what really sold me was the r/detrans subreddit. I saw that not only were most things TRAs said lies (CHILDREN DON'T GET SURGERIES! HORMONE BLOCKERS ARE REVERSIBLE! TRANSITION IS ONLY ALLOWED AFTER SEVERAL YEARS OF THERAPY!), but also it was and is continuing to actively harm several people. I saw how children today in the west are told they could be trans, if they're GNC.

Then I saw how reddit was shutting down gender critical content like crazy, found this website through a reddit link. Lurking here has officially sold me as a gender critical. I don't agree fully with radical feminism, but you seem to be the only people calling out against this gender nonsense besides right wing conservatives who are against basic human rights, so I stand with you.

Yesterday, I also found Magdalen Bern's youtube channel, and I sorely wish she is still here with us. We need more strong voices like hers. RIP.