Thousands of people shared their Peak Trans stories on r/GenderCritical before trans activists managed to pressure Reddit into censoring us. If you shared there before, please share again.
Many of us accepted the claims of trans activists, wanting to be tolerant and kind, until we really listened to what they were saying and compared it to our own knowledge and experience.
Can "woman" be just an identity, divorced from biology? Can penises be female? Can men give birth? Do trans women really have periods?
Is it fair for males to compete with girls and women in women's sports?
Should people be forced to "accept" that trans women are women, and be compelled to say so? Should people really be censored for disagreeing, or saying anything contrary about it?
Should women be called "cis women" even when they don't identify with sexist gender roles, just because they aren't trans? Doesn't the claim that gender is some kind of natural, inborn psychological phenomenon contradict decades of feminists saying gender is a limiting social construct that is forced on us by society?
Should girls who don't like dolls or dresses be treated with double mastectomies and lifelong hormones? Should we be cavalier about prescribing puberty blockers to children when they can cause life-long health problems?
Should women be shamed as trans-exclusionary for talking about our reproductive health and anatomy? Are "pussy hats" transphobic?
Is it acceptable for lesbians to be bullied for not wanting to have relationships with trans women? Doesn't the struggle against the "cotton ceiling" contradict everything we've been saying about enthusiastic consent and rape culture?
Should women be denied the option of not seeing a penis in a women's shower room? Is it really transphobia that makes women alarmed at seeing males in women-only spaces? Is it actually transphobic for women to not want trans women in women-only rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, or prisons?
Should women never be allowed to exclude males from any women's spaces, groups, or events? Are people who disagree with what trans activists say really all "trans exclusionary radical feminists" or "TERFs," even when they aren't feminists or trans-exclusionary?
What is peak trans?
Many of us called this “peak trans”—that moment when you realize “trans rights” are not really about supporting a marginalized population, but about undermining the rights of girls and women and bullying people into accepting transgender ideology. –Thistle Peterson: How I Became the Most Hated Folk Singer in Madison
Are you ready to reach peak trans? Or you just want to know what those "TERFs" you've heard about are saying so you can debunk them? Read on... and get ready to add your own story!
NOTE: Please reserve this space for peak trans stories only! Brief messages of welcome are fine, but if something here inspires you to more discussion, please make a new post.
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.