Question To former they/thems: what made you change your mind?

"However, shouldn't these women at the feminist bookstore know better?"

Most younger women do not actually understand what feminism is. Even not so young women don't even know. We are not taught about it. We are not taught about women's history.

And for about 25+ years (at least that I know of), the word feminism has been extensively bastardized to mean all sorts of things that it doesn't.

These young women are most likely getting bombarded with claims that feminism is about doing anal with anything that moves, claiming you are anything but a woman and punching lesbians in the face when they refuse to have sex with a TIM.

I wouldn't be surprised if that feminist bookstore had shelves full of books that entertain this.

I was on the precipice of identifying. Circa 2015 I distinctly remember thinking "I could identify as a gender fluid nonbinary person!" I thought better of it because I figured I'd have to start talking about myself more so people understood my identity (I'm a rather private person), and I imagined envy me getting angry more often (misgendering! microagressions! scary!) and I was like yeah no. The nonbinary version of myself in my mind was an insufferable person, and all of this gender stuff seems like a lot of extra work and brain power for me. I can just carry on being a GNC female and simply not play the gender game, so I went with that. I don't feel the need to tell people how to perceive me.

I really, really found the pronoun thing to be an imposition on others that made me feel like an ass, so I stopped that within 2 months of declaring my identity. I just stopped. Didn't even bother to put a "she/they" just why? Why add confusion?

After I stopped that, the self-reflection just lead me to realize nothing changes for women if I identify outside of womanhood in a bid to be accepted for my differences. So I pretty much had a mini peak about this while still had a "live and let live" about all the gender identity stuff (before I fully peaked with the aimee chanellor, jessica yaniv shit)

ETA: my total time IDing as a nonbinary lasted no more than 4 months. I'm so thankful my SO was patient with me and never argued (or was overly enthusiastic), I think he knew it was a temporary logical error that I would find my way out of on my own. I got out of it and was like "lol that was dumb sorry."

Agree, nothing to add from me. Just had to say:

dress like Peewee Herman (it's like a fucking uniform for those people)

I died, lol.

I started ID'ing as nb as a teenager while I was being groomed by my adult male "friends." I developed early and did modeling work so I was extremely hypersexualized in general. It was a coping mechanism - so that if I told the men who were sexualizing me that I wasn't a woman maybe they'd stop and think about what they were doing for a second. Really I just wanted an inkling of control over who I was and how I was perceived when I felt I had none.

I stopped ID'ing as NB around my sophmore year of college - when my life was a little more stable and people were interested in knowing me beyond being like a hypersexy baby teen. I was comfortable with being a woman and realized the way people treated me I couldn't particularly opt out of. I didn't really peak until I was 22 and I realized how taken advantage of I was.

Didnt change anything on the misogyny i experienced. Also noticed other women felt exactly like me on “feeling like a woman.” No woman “feels” like a woman. That’s a solely tim experience. But then i peaked around 2013/2014

LMAO at PeeWee as a "fucking uniform for those people."

I identified as nonbinary because I hated my breasts but I didn't want to be a man. I also didn't care when people mistook me for a guy (which obviously meant I wasnt cis, according to all the trans people I knew).

The way I stopped was a bit complex. I was sick of the overtly sexual nature of trans spaces and Google something like "why is everyone so sexual?" I found /r/detrans, then the GC subreddit (which I'd always avoided thanks to the propaganda machine). I read that lots of women hate their breasts, and that that didn't make me trans. It just made me a woman who happened to hate her breasts.

Now, granted, I was never full blown NB. I had spent my teen years on more edgy parts of the internet, and I actually kind of thought being NB was a made up attention seeking thing until I identified as it lol. So I snapped out of it really quickly (after less than a year), no hormones or surgery, etc. I never even really changed pronouns because I truly did not give a shit. I still have some issues with dysphoria though, but I've been working on accepting myself rather than looking at surgery or something.

I don't think I ever specifically went by they/them, but I did identify as NB for a number of years in my "gender journey" (🤢)

The thing is, if you're actually trying to "just get along" with the trans ideologues, the vast majority of us are NB.

There are two concurring views of the world:

Paradigm A, there is no such thing as gender. We're all either male or female.

Paradigm B, there is such a thing as gender, and the fact that the vast majority of people do not have a gender identity means the vast majority of people are agender/NB.

These are the two possible outcomes. We either end up in the first timeline, were we revert to the traditional definitions of sex where woman = adult human female.
Or we end up in the second timeline, where we reidentify as "agender/NB female-bodied people" and fight for our collective rights as "female-bodied people."

The thing is, right now the TIMs are denying us rights based on either vector. If we can't have rights "as women" where "woman" equals "adult human female," at the very least we should have sex-based rights and protections as females. But they're trying to deny that "female" even exists at this point.

Before anyone tries to accuse me of "capitulating" by suggesting we might want to consider organizing as "agender female-bodied people," it's not an outcome I want either. But if the alternative is a complete lack of sex-based rights and protections, I do think it's a point we should start making.

I've spoken briefly before about being an earlier-in adoptee of NB about a decade ago. I was raised in a very conservative environment with an unstable, abusive household that was in deep poverty. I also had undiagnosed ADHD that would only get treated in my thirties.

Oh! And I'm bisexual. With the classic GNC behavior of the gays.

It's estimated that kids with ADHD recieve 20,000 more negative messages about ourselves than other kids our age by the time we're 12. A lot of mine were about how I was a failure at this whole 'girl' thing. Then the concept of NB came along, and my young internet-addicted bi ass was like yes okay, because by sheer value of not telling me I was going to burn in hell forever the LGBTQIA+ community were Awesome People who Knew What They Were Talking About.

So I had a name for what people had always been saying about me! And that gap between what I was supposed to be and what I was and my feelings of shame and failure and oh the body dysphoria that came with being a CSA survivor! Woo-hoo!

Just, then I learned a lot about women's history through my investigative reporting bent, while researching generational trauma to understand what happened to me. And I came to understand why the women in my life growing up were such terrible people. And the systems that made them.

That more than learning about the trans issues made the concept of woman something I could begin identifying with. Before it was something I saw through the lens the patriarchy gave me. After I could begin putting together my own view of a group of people who had been historically enslaved.

US based info : Things like when women got to have credit cards (the 1970s). The number of states that require standardized testing for all kids who are homeschooled (9) vs the age of marriage with parental consent (usually 16, some with no guideline, one that's /12/). Put it all together and you can get a girl with no education married with no opportunity to say no to a man twice or three times her age. By 21 she can have three kids and if she does try to get out she's shunned by her community. Even ignoring the police and judges being from that community, supporting the children alone can lock her into an abusive situation...

Stuff like that. That changed it for me. People talking in granular detail about the horrible realities of the class oppression of women.