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

I admit to passively accepting of all of this stuff for quite a while. I adopted a "not my business" flavor of tolerance. But eventually the blatant misogyny of that world finally pushed me to look at it critically, and I am very glad I did.

Over quarantine I joined a good number of Discords for making friends and gaming, specifically focused on women when I could find them, and "LGBT" branded ones when I could not. I eventually became a moderator of one large women's discord group which had strict rules for admitting members. Every applicant had to send in a voice recording with a brief description of how they found the place and why they wanted to join. This was to weed out the literal hundreds of boys and men trying to weasel their way into the discord to harass the female users. Most of these guys quickly exited the group after seeing they would have had to fake a female voice recording to get in. From the moderator side, I immediately saw how necessary this practice was. It's the only thing that kept our server pleasant and focused on its mission to connect women with shared interests.

At some point I found a post on the girl gamer subreddit slamming discords using voice verification as transphobic and hostile. The comments had a resounding theme: How dare we pressure these fragile, delicate people with the trauma-inducing act of simply recording their voice? It didn't matter that they could go somewhere else without those hurdles. There should never be a place that poses a single inconvenience to TiMs. Dozens of comments were saying it didn't matter if women's groups wanted to screen for men joining in bad faith -- if it at all could possibly upset a TiM, then it was a horribly bigoted practice that could not stand. This sentiment... in a subreddit whose most frequent topic is about men harassing women in games suddenly was against common-sense measures to prevent said harassment. I was shocked! None of it made any sense at all. All of this hostility was so different from the vibe in my groups, including the ones with a sprinkling of trans-identified users in them.

I spent some time reflecting on my internal reaction after reading that post and its comments. As I said before, I passively accepted gender ideology because I didn't have a lot of interactions with it in my own life. I just thought it was one of those "live and let live" things. But that was the first time I personally felt the dismissal of women's concerns. Our safety and peace did not matter, even in our own created spaces. That aggravated me, big time. I also felt defensive of the community I had helped cultivate, one that was an obvious net positive for the women and girls who spent time there.

Lots of other smaller things happened over the past 2+ years after that experience that pushed me further down this road. One significant one was the emergence of these freeform/easygoing identities like "nonbinary" -- seeing how many people in my life decided to pick these brand new identities up overnight made me even more skeptical. All of them, except one, are pretty typical gender-conforming people to begin with, and none of them have changed a single thing besides slapping on a new set of pronouns. All of them, except one, are straight women who can now conveniently count themselves in the "queer community". I started to recall how I felt long ago about tumblr-minted sexual orientations like demisexual, or sapiosexual, and realized nonbinary is in the same category of "I Am Special" nonsense. That opened the floodgates to critically examining the entire concept of gender identity.

Last, the straw that broke the camel's back -- earlier this year I unfortunately stumbled upon some AGP bragging about hormone treatments or whatever, posted a pic of himself on twitter wearing pigtails, making his face look stupid, sticking his tongue out, etc. in the e-girl fashion with a caption of "I finally am the brainless b---- I have always wanted to be! Teehee!" (paraphrased). And it just hit me, like, holy shit, these people just watch anime and spend all their time on the internet and all they know is the most horrible, objectified, sexist interpretation of women possible. Their entire lives revolve around their fetishes. They are self-absorbed, shallow, and do not see women as people. The whole thing disgusts me so much now. Thank god I found this place, and this thread, so I could get this all off my chest.

I was never a TRA, but I didn't want know myself to be a bigot. I thought TIPs were harmless and we should be more tolerant of them because it must suck to be 'born in the wrong body', especially since in my country they're treated like shit by the religious authorities and the government. And many had to resort to participating in the sex industry. Life is shit for them in my country.

The first time I stumbled across Magdalene's video I was appalled that a feminist would say such uncharitable things about a minority group, even though at that time I had a dim view of feminists in general since I thought that feminism was bullshit because I thought it's just about relatively well-to-do women whinging and claiming victimhood and, of course, girl power merch and slut walks. It doesn't help that I was also consuming a lot of right wing media at that point because the world was being tumblrised beyond recognition, and the right seemed sane in comparison. So, I avoided her videos ever since and didn't allow myself to question not just the trans movement but the concept of trans itself.

It wasn't until I found out, a year or so later, that this shit is actively being promoted to children and CELEBRATED that my alarm bells went ringing at full force. I knew that I must be right in thinking that this is wrong. I tried looking for trans voices speaking against this shit because I thought, hey, I wouldn't be that much of a bigot if some trans people also thought that this has gone too far. So I found Blaire White.

After a while I remembered Magdalene and I binged her videos in a few days. Totally peaked at that point, but it was difficult, not because I actually thought that TWAW before that but I finally recognised the misogyny of it all. I didn't have people to talk to, not because they're TRAs (far from it, since the chances of my friends being TRAs are quite low given that I was in a rather conservative country -- not that my friends are in any way conservative) but trans stuff just isn't something on most people's radars here, unless you're LGB, or T. A few good months after I've completely peaked, a good friend visited and I told her about all these and bawled my eyes out. A couple of months after that, Magdalene passed away.

I was 28 and being peak-transed is my first introduction to proper feminism (of course not just the trans bs if it came off that way). It probably wouldn't have happened as quickly if it wasn't for Magdalene's videos, so I always feel a tinge of guilt for dismissing her as 'just another snowflake feminist' the first time I came across her videos. Rest in power.

Hey, another belatedly peaked woman here.

For the longest time, I was fine with most trans ideology. I didn't fully buy-in and, for instance, was happy when testosterone limits were introduced at the Olympics, was unhappy when the Women's Health section at my local bookstore was renamed "Female and Uterine Health", never thought anything Rowling or Chappelle said was that bad, never understood "non-binary" people, and thought pronoun circles were stupid and performative as hell. I had objections, but I also knew what happened to people who spoke up against mainstream left beliefs, so I figured I'd keep my head down and wait for it to all blow over.

Then Amy Schneider became "the most successful woman ever" on Jeopardy and something flipped. Something felt wrong. I explained my issues to my boyfriend (that, even without an immediately apparent physical advantage, men are statistically more aggressive and have faster reaction times; advantages that amplify themselves in the higher percentiles) and worries that an actual woman might never hold that record again. I also realized he was the only one I could really share this with.

Then Lia Thomas broke onto the scene. "Okay," I thought. "Amy Schneider's advantages were debatable, but this clearly wrong. People will have to object to this one, won't they? All you have to do is LOOK and see the difference." And they didn't. Media outlets wrote piece after piece on how "brave" Lia was and how "she" was breaking barriers by swimming despite the hate. They used filtered photos. Started making strawman arguments about Michael Phelps.

In response, I started doing my own research. I learned about how "trans" had gone from being a medical issue to self-id. I learned about the issue with self-id and prisons. I learned about Jessica Yaniv. I learned about Wi Spa. I learned about the puberty-blocking drug Lupron and its horrifying side effects and how it most definitely is NOT reversible. I learned about the detrans community. I learned about Reddit's moderators and how most female-centric subs are now run by males. I started noticing more and more how often this moderation banned innocent questions and the users who asked them. I started searching by controversial.

Then the Roe v Wade leak happened. The word "woman" was nowhere to be seen. Politicians weren't using it, newspapers weren't using it, health organizations weren't using it... in fact, people were getting BANNED for using it. No. That's not quite right. WOMEN were getting BANNED for using it. WOMEN were getting "CORRECTED" for using it.

I went peak trans.

Earlier this year, I'd found r/TiA after searching all of Reddit for anyone speaking out against Lia Thomas, and while lurking there I found a mention of this site, and... well. Now I'm here, hoping to fight the good fight because godDAMN does it never end. Still figuring out what that fight looks like for me due to job considerations, but yeah. That's about that.

I never bought into it.

I did notice some irritating voices in the corners of discussions had online in a community I respected. I was perplexed as to how members bowed down to this fog of illogic. It didn’t make sense at all, I wondered, was I maybe missing something?

I realized that nope, I wasn’t missing a beat when these turds intervened - in a massively entitled way - on a conversation about menstruation and medical sexism. “It’s getting Terfy in here”, someone whined. And all these smart ladies, who’d freely talked about this sort of thing not long before, just shut up. I couldn’t believe it. That’s when I knew there was a naked emperor in town. I was pissed.

Any objectors were kicked off the site. I was still pissed, now highly concerned.

A little later I was banned from Reddit’s 2x sub for arguing that male socialization couldn’t be forgotten. This is a basic tenet of psychology and sociology, learning and development of gender roles, just straight up memory, was being thrown out as a concept. What in the fuck poisonous thinking was this?

I found r/GC around the time The Vagina Monologues was banned at an all-woman college. (Another massive WTF moment.)

I’m lucky I’m old enough to have bypassed this bullshit and still somewhat surprised few are publicly saying “is this for real?”. It’s part of the nightmare of this timeline. Inescapable and everywhere.

Hello, newbie here... thank you so much for accepting my request for invitation. Like many who consider themselves to be of a liberal or progressive bent, I too bought into the "trans oppression" narrative until I began to look closer. Ironically it was the pandemic that got me to realize that the ostensible right wing does not have a monopoly on quackery. I no longer see any difference between those pushing horse paste and the consumption of Clorox cocktails to "cure" COVID, and those pushing surgical butchery and hormone regimens for a "condition" that does not exist. (Especially on kids. The people responsible for this barbarism should be behind bars.) Not just butchering bodies but butchering language, and warping the broader sense of objective reality itself.

But the unfortunate and frightening fact IMHO is that the "medical establishment" has ended up discrediting itself and giving ammunition to "science deniers" with the cognitive dissonance of embracing the latter -- and expecting the rest of society to do the same -- while criticizing the former. I feel politically homeless, because I can't in good conscience support a party that wags its finger at its opponents for not "following the science," when they won't do the same. Only problem is the science itself has been corrupted by a snake oil ideology that the ostensible left has swallowed, and been swallowed up by as well. I call it Woke Scientology, and I hope that someday this destructive cabal will have to face down its own version of Leah Remini.

I'm glad I found Ovarit, because there aren't too many spaces, if any at all, online or in public in the US where you won't be "cancelled" for stating what used to be universally accepted as a fact. Water is wet, men are not women and women are not men. If that makes me a Suppressive Person then so be it.

I can understand why trans orthodoxy is so attractive to young women and men. We live in a misogynistic world that depends on rigid gender roles to perpetuate itself. I was one of those young women. I thought for years I should have been born a gay man. Thankfully, I never believed I could become one.

In the process of coming to peace with the whole thing, I realized there’s nothing wrong with me. I just wanted a sexual relationship where nobody had to be the woman. Being the woman is nothing but a fucking burden and dealing with a man who is working out his shit pertaining to women is also a drag.

A friend suggested I try dating trans men, and that was the first inkling I had that the new gender paradigm was not all it was cracked up to be. These women were even more invested in propping up their masculinity and working out their shit about women than straight men were. And they didn’t smell like men. It just didn’t work on a gut level.

Leave it to Americans to attack a major systemic problem with an individual solution that doesn’t really help the individual and makes the systemic problem worse. We incubated this craziness and infected the world with it.

I’ve peaked a number of times in the past 10 years, but one peak I've been thinking about a lot lately is a pair videos I saw of the George Floyd protests. One was a very slight young woman. She was incredibly stoic while she was bear-sprayed, thrown to the ground and cuffed, with a big paramilitary guy kneeing her in her back.

The other was a TiM being pushed around by the same guys. He kept blubbering, "But I'm a woman! I'm a woman!" as if he could not wrap his head around the fact that women get the stuffing kicked out of us by men all the time. This is why I will never be able to claim these guys as sisters. They want nothing from womanhood but the dubious 'advantages' they think we have, and they want us to prioritize their access to those 'advantages' over our real problems (reproductive rights, violence against women, pay equity, etc. etc.).

A friend of mine has a daughter who recently detransitioned. She was on testosterone for a year. She now has facial hair to deal with, a deeper voice, a more masculine jaw. She did a 360 and is now suddenly more femme than she ever was before she transitioned. She looks like a drag queen. One of the things she said that really broke my heart is that she believed she could really become a man, and that's what she wanted--not to be a trans man. Realizing she can't really become a man is what broke the spell.

That's the evil story TRAs are telling these kids, and they are believing it. It's hard for me to blame them. I'm middle aged now and I've been celibate for long stretches of my life because of my dislike for the woman's role in sexual relationships. I never got married and I only had one long-term relationship, years ago. I have great friends and a family I love. But it makes me sad I have never been able to make that part of my life work, and I put that down in large part to living in a world that hates women and, like it or not, internalizing it.

Greetings! I recently got the courage to join ovarit. My journey started back in 2016, I am from an all woman high school that I will not name, and around that year the trans men in school started making some noise about how they don’t feel included because our school doesn’t center men. Which is mind blowing to me as a relatively recent alum. I mean go to literally any other coed institute and they will center men! This was all before the UK became terf island. That started the process, then I realised the concept for ‘men’ and ‘women’s’ brains was really sexist, and in fact something I had fought against my whole life as a woman in my late twenties in a male dominated STEM field.

The ‘peak’ itself though came with Rachel Dolezal. I tried and tried to understand why trans racialism was different than trans genderism and the only argument I was offered was ‘because they are totally different’. But how?! crickets

Then I read Rebecca Tuvels paper on it (this was before she was metaphorically disembowelled for daring to do such a thing). It was a great paper. No hyperbole, just straight talk presented in a scientific fashion. I just couldn’t refute it (on the off chance that you read this Ms Tuvel, I personally thank you for being brave enough to do that!). That was basically the peak for me.

Once I could get beyond the mental block of feeling like a bad ally, and a bad person for my wrong think I was actually able to see a lot of other things clearly too. How politics in nearly every country is divided into ‘left’ and ‘right’ but really they are all the same people with the same agenda which is NOT looking out for their constituents but their donors. How class differences were obscured by a focus on identity politics. How the world always has and always will simply dislike women for the fact that they are women. It was depressing but also so liberating.

I am not able to share my real feelings with anyone but a very few close to me. I find it’s easier to talk to my guys friends about it since they are less scared of wrong think (they face fewer consequences), and since it doesn’t affect them the same way as men they have more latitude to think about it. But I am tired of being afraid. I made the mistake of sharing jk Rowling article on social media that a sh*t storm. But I am slowly peaking people in my life. I know I am a coward for being in the shadows but I don’t have any family to fall back on if I lose my job, I would be homeless. Any way glad to be here! Thanks for keeping me sane ladies <3

this is quite an embarrassing story and it doesn't put me in a good light. but i want to share it for other women.

i have always considered myself a feminist. my mother had germaine greer, simone de beauvior and other feminist writers in our bookshelf and made it clear i was always able to read them whenever i wanted (as well as other books about sexual health that i was less keen to read due to embarrassment). i knew what being trans was because we had a neighbour who was a TIM and kept to himself, this was in the 00s. when i started venturing on the internet and learnt more about transgender people, i truly believed anyone could be the gender they wanted to be. but honestly, i didn't think about it as deeply as i probably should have or the implications for women and children.

when i was 18 i entered into a relationship with a man who i fell for quite quickly. he reached out to me online and i had 0 sexual experience. he was very misogynist when i look back on it now. when i found out that he was engaged to someone else i honestly thought he'd leave his fiancée for me because he said he would. it causes me great pain now to realise i was "the other woman" and the fact i let it happen. our relationship disintegrated when he refused to walk me home at night to the bus stop and then into the city to the train, because he wanted to play video games. i saw it as a very "male" thing. why didn't he understand why i felt unsafe? not an hour ago i'd performed oral sex on him. i should have left him when i found out he had a girlfriend, but i let it go on for those few more weeks because i thought i was special. months went by and he would contact me via text, calling, usually when he and his fiancée broke up and he wanted sexual favours. we got to talking one time and he told me he is actually a woman. i didn't understand and started to ask him more questions. he said he'd been diagnosed by a therapist for many years with gender dysphoria, and i should have known he is actually a woman all along. i just couldn't understand it and that led to him being verbally abusive to me. this then led to me starting to have doubts and reading more about radical feminism.

I was okay with it until I started noticing how misogynistic a lot of TIMs were, and how they seemed to be above criticism. I saw a lot of contrasts to behaviors I witnessed and dealt with as an autistic woman; autistic guys got sympathy and autistic girls got criticized. Experiencing being lied to as a gullible child led to me being confused as to why none of the TRAs are willing to consider that yes, people do lie when they can get something out of it.

They circle the wagons to support pedophiles in their ranks. They say nobody is allowed to criticize them because it will prove the "TERFs" are right. They're more concerned with being misgendered than a woman being raped.

I simply can't understand why anyone is okay with this. Anyone who points out how nutty it is, is now getting is told "literally nobody is doing that". There are STILL people who think it's all just terminally online clowns even as weirdos like Liar Thomas and Fallon Fox proudly beat women and their records.

i just want to get this all off my chest, thank you if u read it lol it might be long... i'm in my 20s and in the process of getting diagnosed for autism (put forward by a therapist) which i feel is relevant info :-)

anyway! while my parents were tech savvy they let me have my privacy with my iPod (and later phones) so i wound up on tumblr as a young teenager (13 or so) for the funny videos and art etc and eventually i learned about feminism and social justice and of course i was completely on board. i was chronically online basically and i realised lots of people who i followed were trans men or even "non-binary" i always knew that they were female but i used the right pronouns and then i realised i had never "felt female" either, i hated being made to wear uncomfortable clothes and get my hair or makeup done for special occasions, so i must also be a "they"!! i remember asking my mum to refer to me as "they" instead of "she" and she essentially said words to the effect of "don't be stupid" (obviously she was a cishet transphobe)

more specifically, i indentified as a "demigirl" because i felt a little bit like a girl, as i like having long hair and wearing makeup sometimes, but i hated being sexualised because of my big boobs and i hated shaving. looking back on it now is mortifying 😂😂😂 what kind of logic is that??

i couldn't get a binder so i would always wore 2 sports bras and baggy clothes to hide my body, but after leaving school and getting more self confidence i went back to being "cis" again (and yes i acknowledged my cis privilege 😭)

fast forward a couple of years and i hear about "terfs" from all my online friends, and i actually wound up peaking from stalking a radfem Tumblr page and i would send messages that i thought would absolutely crush the evil TERF ideology such as - "what about if you HAD TO talk about Laverne Cox? would you say he or she?" (orange is the new black was big at the time 😭😭😭💀) and while i rage-read her posts waiting for her reply, i found myself realising how reasonable everything was and how misrepresented "terfs" had always been, and i ended up actually losing all my (online) friends for being a "terf" because i shared a few posts on my own tumblr 🤣🤣

back then this was much more of a fringe issue than it is now. my sister actually identifies as non-binary now and has for the past couple of years since she went to uni and met a bunch of non-binary females (🧐) she is autistic like 99% of non binaries. my family call her by her new name even though it's ridiculous, they use her right pronouns but in private both my parents agree with me about it being regressive stereotypes, and my mum is especially offended given that she has always tried very hard to not impose stereotypes on us, i used to play with "boys" toys and was allowed to wear "boys" clothes and the same can be said for my sister.

glad to have somewhere to speak openly about this :-)