(Saidit) PEAK TRANS I: Please continue to share your stories!!

crystalskies · 2022-12-12T21:59:52+00:00

Growing up, I struggled to accept trans "women" were women due to the performative aspect. It felt like they were dressing up as women. I bought into it for a while but I think what really turned me was when they started talking about how "sex doesn’t equal gender".

My other peak was when dysphoria apparently stopped being included as a criterion for being trans.

FeralSelkie · 2022-08-21T18:26:15+00:00

Long time lurker here, making my way to the first post.

I recently lost the last "true" best friend I had in years.

The start of the war in Ukraine and spillover economic disaster in my country drove a wedge between us, because I had been the most affected by it. I found myself jobless and struggling in the inflation with extended family also impacted by the repercussions of the war. By the time things settled somewhat a few months later and we could properly spend time together and catch back up on our friendship, she had changed. From a fairly reasonable if overly male-centered woman to a "he/him transmasc gay man non-binary" whose biggest struggle at present was not being able to live as her "authentic self" and have "affirming surgery". This corner of the world is burning, often quite literally, and THAT was her most pressing problem in life?

I was... at a loss for words. Still am. I don’t know if things would have been different if we hadn't lost contact during my difficult post-job loss months, if I could have helped with whatever had set her on this path. Bad influences? Too much internet? The cult?? All at once?

Didn't display immediate happiness at the news and I reacted with enough confusion (and a bit of fear) each time she tried to broach the subject that it must've instantly labeled me as GC in her mind and led to her cutting me off entirely.

She thought she was finally being her truest self. I thought that I was witnessing a body snatcher in action. What happened to my friend while I was gone?

It is one thing to read about this happening to other people on forums and another to find yourself in the position of seeing this in action right before your eyes. I am still shocked. I peaked hard, there is no going back from here.

pakibiterf · 2022-03-27T12:51:57+00:00

I'm a mid-20 something bi man from a conservative muslim country.

And yeah, this TRA ideology has spread here too. However, there is a distinction I'd like make between the TRA ideology and like ages old "third gender" concept that's existed here for a while. I'm only referring to the earlier since the latter aren't really a threat and has historically been reserved for intersex people.

Okay with that out of the way, it's almost strange writing this but I had my "peak" (hope I'm using this correctly) 3 years back. Not long after for a brief time, I almost saw myself as trans or NB myself. I happened to actually come across the whole JK Rowling controversy and decided to read what she actually said and well... it made a lot of sense. I've always been a really critical person so speak and I don't subscribe to anything without really seeing what it's all about.

It's permeated a lot within a certain upper-class/elite class segment of liberal (using it differently from the connotations it has in the west) society here and it's strange, when you live in a country with so many issues related to patriarchy and conservative mindset in general, and you have "activists" going on and on about using the wrong pronouns literally causes them to have mental breakdown.

It doesn't help that most of my friends who are now trans or NB are also mentally ill and act like teenagers well into their late 20s, can't hold down jobs and pretty much supported my parents or generational wealth.

I feel like it's wrong trans women to bully ciswomen into their spaces. There are common experiences that 99% of woman have. And biological sex is a big part of that.

It's weird seeing feminist marches in a country where you still have honor killings and there are issues of woman going out to have jobs or be financially independent being grouped together with first-world nonsense like Gender identity politics.

Beyond that, I feel NB or Trans movement in general actually reinforce gender stereotypes even more. A man or a woman can do whatever they damn well like, without them needing to construct a whole new identity.

sunnycosmos · 2021-12-29T01:24:06+00:00

One moment that led me here recently was a Twitter post that insisted instead of the current sports system of women and men, we should just have weight or muscle classes open to everyone. I grew up playing basketball and had an especially bad experience the time that I did a co-league. Our physiology is different and that's why women's sports are a protected class. But noo, our women sports are discriminatory towards 1-5% of the population, so we have to uproot the whole system and screw over women's sports in particular.

It feels like it's womens spaces that are ALWAYS facing the brunt of these new gender politics. We get the short end of the stick with everything. I also just hate some of the language I see, like "men can get pregnant too, so abortion rights are not a womens issue only" etc. And then if you argue that there IS a correlation and shared experience among women, in general, for issues like periods and reproductive rights, people say that you are reducing womanhood to having a uterus. What are YOU reducing it to, then? A feeling? Wearing a dress?

Moutonelectrique · 2021-11-05T12:39:48+00:00

I missed you guys on Reddit for some reason, probably because I tried to be a good left leaning feminist. However, I've been quite wary about the gender ideology for several years now. I think it started with the takeover of the LGB+ community. Suddenly everything seemed to be centered around the T, progressing to lesbians should accept girldick, gays should accept boypussy and bi's were TRANSPHOBIC as Bi means two. Well then. But as a straight woman in a relationship with a bisexual, I didn't think it was my place to say it out loud and furthermore, I thought I just wasn't being accepting and I didn't hear any backlash from within the LGB community.

Then the takeover of women's issues and spaces, erasing women, trans identifying males claiming to have periods, the transing of children, transing of almost everybody (including me, I am apparently a non-binary according to some as I watch football), going backwards to the 1950s gender stereotypes, claiming hormone therapy is completely innocent and reversible, the pronouns and so on. I also noticed the overlap with the incels from back in the day.

I felt, and sometimes still feel like I'm a bad person for not accepting it. But I just can't agree with it, I can't agree with the erasure of women, the erasure of years of fighting for women's rights and LGB rights and going back to insane strict gender roles.

I'm rambling a bit, sorry about that.

Slavic_Insider · 2021-10-25T08:55:24+00:00

Few days ago, I found another horror story. This one is about Tashmica Torok, ironically the founder and CEO of the charity of rape survivors. She was actively harassing lesbians on TikTok for "punishing" trans women by denying them access to their bodies... For someone who works with rape victims, she surely has Harvey Weinstein's grasp of consent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uddDyVSN8c&t=2s

Prude-aligned · 2021-10-12T00:26:43+00:00

I can't really claim a "peak" moment, because I never fully bought into the gender movement. As soon as I learned sex and gender are different and gender is a social construct it made sense to me. Some moments that pushed me towards being gender critical are: 1. The non-binary male in my college art class who confused a group of prospective students by forcing them to do a pronoun circle. 2. The heavily pro-gender local theater community where I live/work. Immediate hatred for JK Rowling (she said nothing unkind imo), emails to performers and crew about having to "do better about misgendering" non-binary (mostly female) performers, and upper level staff going on social media screeds about trans-rights. 3. The silencing/harassing of GC voices, the terror of medicalizing children, the erasure of homosexuality and women, and the invasion of women’s sports and other spaces. 4. Close (male) member of household suddenly focusing on gender to explain/improve his mental/physical health issues during the pandemic. The easy indoctrination red flags are numerous. He is surrounded by gender cheerleaders.

Recently I revealed I am gender critical to this person. The conversation was rough and I'm fearful of what will become of our relationship and my life in this hyper-progressive area we live in. He agreed with me on a few points, but gave off "as a gender expert I will change your mind" and "radfems = bad" vibes (I don't align with radfems on all points so I don't consider myself one personally). His closing statement was to recommend Contrapoints to me, which I immediately shot down because I find those videos disingenuously biased. I suppose it's better to have it out there, but I worry my one refuge from gender ideology, my home, has been too deeply infected.

selfalt · 2021-09-22T14:06:59+00:00

I peaked when I went to a small women's liberal arts college in the Northeast. They had just enacted a new policy to accept trans women to the college. At the time I didn't see a problem with it, but after seeing the way the student body responded - vehemently demanding trans rights at a historically WOMEN'S college with a rich history of lesbian culture was the spark of suspicion. At the same time, witnessing how trans women acted - always demanding, complaining, policing language - made me realize there was something unequivocally male about constantly moving the goal posts, expecting free labor from women, and the general aggression toward dissenters. You can put on a dress, but you can't undo male socialization.

Now 5 years later I'm extremely gender critical, find gender ideology to be sexist and eroding the accomplishments of women (if you're an exceptional woman in certain subjects, then you must be a man etc.), and find the medical industrial complex that transes children and adolescents horrifying. I'm not anti-trans, but I won't be pushed around or forced into any ideology that privileges male feelings over women and children.

Bookshelf · 2021-09-02T20:17:36+00:00

Twenty years ago I did a lot of reading on trans topics because I was interested in a relationship with someone who was transitioning. (Definitely dodged a bullet with that!) I was pretty accepting of trans stuff and particularly gender non-conforming presentation for a very long time because I thought I understood trans-related issues thoroughly. Since childhood, I have felt that, deep down, my sex didn't really matter that much to my thoughts, interests and friendships. So I didn't emotionally "get" why someone would want to transition instead of just being GNC, but I was accepting nonetheless.

However, about 5 years ago I had a few conversations with a trans "woman" about trans topics and my thoughts about self-acceptance rather than medical interventions. I realized that some of the things I said to him were not being well-received due to his body language (no actual voiced objections) and not long after that I started researching trans topics again to figure out why. This was near the time of the Women's March after Trump's inaguration and the media reporting on trans complaints about pussy hats being transphobic and demands to "center trans women", which made my eyes roll, but then I got disgusted that they were being taken seriously by the organizers.

Around this point, I searched for "critical of gender" and found r/GC. I was a little dismayed that radical feminists were running the show (due to some previous experience with radical feminist discourse that was off-putting to me). But I quickly found a lot of interesting perspectives and enjoyed reading the peak trans threads. I soon realized that trans activism had changed enormously in the 15 or so years since I last heavily researched the topic and had become very disconnected from reality. Ideas that had been considered controversial even in trans circles in the past like hormones and puberty blockers for <18s were now being pushed into mainstream acceptance without safe guards and therapy was now "gate-keeping".

My real wtf moment was seeing the censorship around Yaniv and how free speech principles were being violated. Of course it has only gotten worse since then. But this is when I became determined to fight back against the nonsense. After r/GC got banned, I realized the full extent of the current dystopia. I have felt so much dismay observing how the left has embraced totalitarianism around this issue and other "wrong-think".

I've been lurking r/GC and Ovarit nearly daily for several years. I have a lot of thoughts and ideas that I want to share with the gender critical community that are much too long for a single post. My main goal in creating this account and posting this story is to get an Ovarit invite, so if anybody can help me out with that, it would be very appreciated. Seeing the courageous Afghan women protesting despite the danger has increased my resolve to speak out and engage with the GC community.

Actia · 2021-08-26T22:54:04+00:00

I peaked around February this year. I remember reading an Atlantic article about Ovarit months prior, and decided to check the website out. Now, I was never a hardcore TRA; I was one of those people who thought ‘let them be, they aren’t harming anyone.’ Then I started reading, and the pieces finally connected. Their muddling of language*, their hatred of women and the LGB, the rewriting of history, and so much more. They were harming people, and no one can do a thing about it! If you do, you essentially ruined your life; there was no debate allowed.

What solidified my position is how this affects autistic people. I haven’t looked into it much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason why so many autistic people are ‘trans’ is because we have a hard time fitting in. TRAs know this, and swoop in to try to convince us that being trans will help us. And sadly, it looks like many are falling for it. Seeing this just makes me sad that I can’t really do anything to help them, and scared because that could’ve been me.

There is so much more I could go into, but I don’t want to make this comment long. I do want to thank you all for these sorts of community, though. Without it, I think I may of gone insane!

*A personal anecdote, but I always mixed up terms like transwoman and transman before I peaked. I wonder how many others also mix them up.

puzzleskulls · 2021-08-23T06:35:34+00:00

The TRA's struggle to deny the truth is never more desperate than when reality is at total odds with their fantasy. Acknowledgment of reality would undermine the foundations of their world view, and they can't allow that to happen. They will loudly and violently push their agenda to seek validation for their lies at the expense of the truth and how it applies to others.

They don't want equality or the right to just exist like everyone else, that much is obvious. This is all about control, power, fear, and domination. They wouldn't be denying basic biology, playing on people's sense of fairness, erasing women and homosexuals, invading our institutions, removing parents rights, and manipulating our language if they wanted equality.

They are actively encouraging people to report others that refuse to buy what they're selling. People are being cancelled left, right, and center. There is now a feature on FB to report your "extremist" friends. A move that was obviously and disturbingly pulled from Stalin's playbook. I don't know about you guys, but I absolutely do not want to live under their totalitarian lunatic regime.

anxietyaccount8 · 2021-08-11T04:17:18+00:00

I don't know if I can say I'm "re-peaking". But I just came across a trend which is horrifying so I hope radfems pay attention to this.

Non-binaries and TQ are already non-feminist. But I fear this could turn into active anti-feminism. One reason is because of their inexplicable hatred towards "cis women" and "straight women". They're always gatekeeping and criticizing random things, even if there's no reason or logic behind it.

It could be very plausible that they'll go after straight women who don't follow or subvert gender roles for "fetishizing and appropriating non-binary queerness" or something. That sounds exactly like something they would say.

I would have never thought that people on the left could turn into misogynists who love gender roles more than any conservative

SaltySkank · 2021-07-30T22:54:26+00:00

Greetings.

Firstly, glad to see this community again. I'm fairly certain I found it and lurked around some just before the great purge of a year prior on reddit thanks to the TRAs. I missed y'all.

My peaking has been a long time coming, but I think my actual legit final Peak happened a few days ago. I have always had some concerns and issues with the whole Gender Theory thing, at least what I understood of it, but I was largely okay with just letting it be. Like some other people on here, I assumed that "I identify as X, so I am" was meant at a more personal level, as in self acceptance, and I was and still am entirely okay with that. What I didn't realize until much more recently is that the trans movement is obsessed with abolishing the concept of biological sex altogether and replacing it with self identified "gender", and in the process, means to redefine language AND law. That goes way too far, and is not only ridiculous but outright dangerous in light of how rampant sexism still is. If humans were not a sexually dimorphic species, this would not be an issue, but we are, and I am not about to ignore that just because reality may hurt someone's feelings.

Some of my friends have recently become some form of trans, and the vast majority of the rest of them fully support this. I was heavily skeptical at first, since a lot of these friends struggle with mental health issues and have for a long time, and I suspected it might play a role in this. However, I largely just tolerated it and tried not to say much until it started to get more and more extreme over time. Eventually, I started to raise some questions and voice some concerns when the relatively chill "I just don't feel like I fit into either gender very well, so I would rather just not confine myself to them" became "Anyone who feels like they are X are X, in every way shape and form." and ANY opposition to that, no matter how small, became tantamount to a personal hate crime.

I have friends in the LGB community. Talking with them especially has opened my eyes as to how harmful TRA rhetoric can be, and how backwards parts of this movement are. Suddenly a man with a dick can be a "lesbian" just because he feels like he's a woman, and nobody can question that without being a "transphobe" or worse. Suddenly "anyone can menstruate" and "girls can have dicks" and I'm being cruel and "gatekeeping" for insisting that a vagina is a female sex organ and my lesbian friend's attraction to them is not a CHOICE or a PREFERENCE and that "lesbian" means SAME SEX attraction to NATAL FEMALE characteristics.

I was implied to be a TERF and a hurtful bigot for defending my lesbian friend's right to exclude dicks from her dating pool, because TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN and apparently what's between your legs has nothing to do with your gender. (Nevermind that I was talking about SEX, but apparently that word doesn't exist anymore.) I was apparently supposed to be content with that circular, bullshit non-definition, because pressing the issue and asking for clarification on what a "woman" even is anymore just resulted in TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN being repeated incessantly at me, like it was God's fucking judgement and nothing but full and unquestioning acceptance was tolerable.

My friends now either completely lack self awareness or are somehow oblivious to how stupid that non-argument is and how little sense it makes. I will go as far as to agree that Gender can largely be a social construct and refers largely to how you present yourself, but by no means can you use it to replace biological sex in either definition or importance. The "woke" section of my friend group evidently thinks that it is "closed minded", "hurtful," "transphobic," and "devastating" to identify someone based on their biological sex/gentials AND to acknowledge that homosexuality means SAME SEX attraction and has fuck all to do with gender identity.

Nonetheless, I actually attempted again to have legitimate, good faith discussion on this, and honest to god innocently and delicately as I could ask questions to try to fucking understand this shit, (I have in the past as well) and EVERY TIME I get either flat out ignored (as in the subject is instantly changed) or get snubbed and everyone pretends I never said anything and that I no longer exist for some hours/days.

I came to realize over time, and especially after the last incident, that this is not how healthy and normal people act, much less people who are supposed to be my friends. No, we're so culty and TRA-brainwashed now that even asking QUESTIONS is offensive and is somehow "invalidating" someone. We can't even talk about it now, at all. Fuck that. Apparently it is entirely possible to be a lady some days and a dude other days despite having no dick, BUT ONLY SOMETIMES when a person FEELS LIKE A MAN. This shit has gone balls off the walls insane and I'm done. My god, the entitled narcissism coming off some of these people. I was trying to be respectful, I was legitimately trying to understand their viewpoint and ideology, but every attempt was either ignored or met with spiteful ACKSHUALLY UR WRONG AND STILL A BIGOT BASED ON THIS TINY TECHNICALITY THAT YOU MISSED like I was being an intentional asshole and obstinate idiot.

I was never a normal female growing up. I was the biggest damn Tomboy, but nobody c a r e d. My parents didn't care, my family didn't care, my friends didn't care. It wasn't a big deal. I still don't fit in the gender binary. Probably. (I don't even know what the hell that is supposed to mean anymore??) My parents and family subscribed to the belief that boy-stuff and girl-stuff were really just stereotypes anyway, and what did it matter in the end because a girl could do just about anything a boy could do! Obviously sex played some role in how things play out, but it's you underneath that matters. I am sure some idiot would try to ID me as trans-something, but A.) I don't give a FUCK what society thinks and what random blowhards think of me / identify me as? and B.) I don't need constant validation from everyone around me in order to not self destruct, and C.) I don't care about labels. How would I have turned out, I wonder, if I was being raised today in hyper TRA culture?

Of course I had moments where I hated my body, loathed menstruation and wanted to chop off my boobs, wanted my non-huge hips back, and hated that my stupid body changed itself because BAYBEEZ and THATS WHAT WOMEN BODIES DO. As a teenager, I may have wished more than a few times that I was a male instead, and that I wouldn't have to be stuck with a monthly subscription to crotch bleeding forever and all the societal bullshit that comes with being female, but I got over it and accepted reality and learned to accept myself. I think that is a far more healthy outcome than living in some delusion that I was never really a girl and am secretly a boy somehow.

I'm disappointed in my friends, who are both smarter than this and should fucking know better than to buy into such stupidity, and in the entire fucking attitude surrounding TRAs and the trans movement. Erasing sex is stupid and dangerous to women and homosexuals. I'm done being gaslighted, ignored, and attacked and treated like garbage for asking a fucking question and living in reality where biology exists and is relevant. I'm sick of my lesbian friend having "girldick" forced on her constantly and being an automatic TERF!111 and bigot for wanting nothing to do with a fucking penis. Most of all, I'm disgusted by the demonization of homosexuality that a vast majority of TRAs refuse to see or acknowledge. Society should not be catering to this. People with actual Gender Dysphoria need therapy and proper medical care to learn to accept their bodies, not mutilating surgeries that promise shit they can never deliver and constant validation of their delusions. And god DAMN, being "trans" is not fucking trendy, and the sooner people can figure this out the better.

Not to mention the hypocrisy and misogyny. "DON'T REDUCE PEOPLE TO THEIR GENITALS!!" meanwhile, we can't say Mother's Day anymore, it has to be "Birthing People's Day" and I should be called a "Menstruating Person" because calling myself a Woman excludes trans people. I have to accept dicks in my women safe spaces now, and let natal men ONCE AGAIN barge into my spaces, business, legal protections, and reproductive rights, because who fucking cares about us, can't invalidate a trans person!! Fuck off.

...like I said. P E A K E D.

clitoriana · 2021-07-30T22:19:46+00:00

I "peaked" almost 5 years ago, and I thought at this point nothing would surprise me, but I've spent so long now surrounded by intelligent, reality-acknowledging people and normies that today, when I heard the news about Chris-Chan, a mentally ill TiM allegedly raping his elderly demented mother, and saw tons of posts on Twitter and Tumblr asking people not to "misgender" him & lamenting how "transphobes" will use this against trans people... I realized I fucking hate these people. I literally hate them. They're horrible people with no moral center, just an all-consuming obsession with their personal identity. No sympathy left for people so heartless and selfish that they cry about how an old woman possibly having been raped affects them.

myloudneighbors · 2021-07-18T20:42:59+00:00

Before i got peaked, i was naive to the fact that trans people could be a danger to me. Thought that most trans people were actually just severly mentally ill people who thought they lived in the wrong bodies.
I live in a somewhat conservative country where female sexual assault is dismissed.
After trans people have gotten more accepted, it's more like in your face "hah, feminists, you wanted this, well you got it". If women get assaulted in their own bathrooms, they get blamed. But most actual women never supported it. It was all trans activists and idiot politicians.
I was on reddit when GenderCritical got cancelled. I waited until it popped up again in various places.
Another trigger my own brother, who had always been physically violent against me and my mother, and has very sexist views against women. Despite beating me up and harassing our mother he is suddenly pro-women now? Oh no, wait, it's not real women he is for, he's just scared of the new 3rd 'feminism' movement.

ygrek · 2021-07-02T20:11:11+00:00

I peak very early, but don't really realise it. When i was teenanger and started adventure with internet. Oh my it was about 20 years ago.:) There was site for women, about cosmetics, health, lifestyle etc. There were comments and profile keep wrote nasty things about women. Misogynic shit and weird stuff: that she better then biological women: more feminine and so on; men more wanted "her". Then I realise that someone is... trans. Keep remember this, even for years was woke person. Second peak I had about few years ago. It stared with libfeminists fanpaige, which wrote about SWERF. I didn't know that word and google it. I found Feminist Current and some site where was written that: "swerfs are also terf". So check out another mysterious word. I found terfislur com. There were tons of hate, misoginia and violence. From trans and nobody tell them to stop.

WhoKnewWhoKnew · 2021-06-27T17:12:08+00:00

New here. If I’m understanding correctly, I peaked after my husband came out as trans and wanted to become a woman. The narcissistic drivel he spewed was so unlike him and eventually I realized was the most male entitlement I’d ever heard in my life. He believed being a woman was a feeling and consisted of looking feminine and being submissive in bed. In my experience, being a woman is all of the sacrifice I give for my family. So in choosing his feelings over his family, he chose the most anti-woman behaviors he could. Family men transitioning MtF is Male Entitlement.

Data_Doctor · 2021-05-07T23:46:40+00:00

Yesterday I got banned from a reddit sub for not regurgitating all the TRA slogans like a good, obedient woman. Being banned has convinced me I'm ready to officially hang out with y'all.

I peaked around this time last year. I was on a forum talking about trans issues and my ambivalence about some of the rhetoric and how I'm sick of "TERF" being the default insult for anyone who has concerns, no matter how slight. One of my concerns is how gate-keeping has been deemed "transphobic" and thus unacceptable. Anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, I was told robotically by multiple posters--people I'd been "friends" with for ages. These people were not only saying that anyone who says they are a woman is* a woman, but they are also female and thus should be able to change their legal designation to "F" and enjoy all the benefits and protections associated with that "F". Even if they haven't altered their biology in any way. Even if they have no plan on altering their biology in any way. Even if they had just started identifying as a woman yesterday.

So I asked one of the posters to explain this to me since it's crazy bananas.

He explained it to me like this: A female person doesn't have to wear feminine clothing to be called a woman. A female person can alter her biology and still be a woman. So why should it be any different for a male?

Leading up to that moment, I thought that gender ideology was stupid drek but mainly harmless. But as this ally mansplained what it means to be a woman to me, I realized that gender ideology is oppressive. It's dangerous. And I realized that this guy--who I had always thought was smart and decent--had been brainwashed. And so had all the other posters, who called me a hateful monster for not wanting every Tom, Dick, and Harry to feel entitled to women's spaces. I no longer post on that forum because I just can't with those people. I can't suffer that kind of foolishness anymore.

So I guess you can say that experience opened my eyes. I haven't been able to close them since.

Rage-Xion · 2021-04-07T22:56:53+00:00

I'm a 28 years old gay man and I only recently embraced "transphobia". I chaged my views gradually for many reasons. For many years, everytime I was questioning the validity of Trans right activism, I was worried that I was a bigot just as bad as homophobes so I struggled a lot.

When I was a teenager struggling with my sexuality (among other things), I kinda found it weird that LGB people were lumped with the transgender folk since LGB is about attraction while T is about identity. Nonetheless, I was supportive especially while watching a crappy reality TV that had a fairly sympathetic transman.

I subscribe to the mentality that transexuals were female souls trapped inside man body (and vice versa). This was way before non-binary shits became popular.

Catlyn Jenner was maybe one of the first crack. Althought I was supportive, I was weirded out by the odd revisionism. Not only should we acccept that Jenner is a woman named Caitlyn since 2015 became we must act like it has always been he case. Somehow, a woman was allowed to compete in men's sport, a woman married a heterosexual Kris and a woman fathered children. makes sense.

I've also noticed that TRAs became more and more demanding after same sex marriage was legalized in the USA and LGBT websites that I regularly consulted were suddenly almost all about trans rights and less about LGB.

Another crack happened when Riley J Dennis makes the infamous video about genital preferences. The video was (rightfully) downvoted to hell and saw many trans folk arguing against his rapey rhetoric. So I believed at the time that this kind of mental gymnastic was unpopular among Ts and only a few were supporting of the "cotton ceiling".(cringe)

Last year Rowling was demonized for defending biological sex and the right for lesbians to refuse to sleep with transgender women. I've read her article and didn't find anything offensive at all. I also wondered why no one talked about her abusive husband as if she deserved it.

The final straw was the Super Straight movemont. A 16 years old guy was harassed for not wanting to date woman and make a joke about starting sexuality and then suddenly all the website were on board that excluding trans people from dating pool is transphobic.

Then I started to read more about insanity like the erasure of basic biology and the transition of children. The latter really break my hearft. They go throuh irreversible body alteration and it's now hateful to protest about it. While I've never personally experienced gender disphoria but during my teenagehood, I really hated my body. The facial hair was growing in irregular patches, I had severe acne that wouldn't go away no matter how many creams, stinking lotions or even pills I took, having nocturnal emisions almost every nights,... I luckily gog over it but If I had spent my teengehood in a woke era, I might have decided to be nonbinary, have my penis chopped off and then regretting it.

PluckyAgain · 2021-03-26T13:40:48+00:00

Happily submitting my old story that was on r/gc too. Used to think that if someone feels theyre born in the wrong body, and do so much work to change genders, the least we can do is be supportive. Was happily chugging along like that, but i 'm part of an ethnic/religious minority where menstruation and the strict rules around it are still pretty taboo. Was in an fb womens group belonging to said minority, the issue came up, there was a very open and insightful and important discussion about menstruation and the rules surrounding it. Then one woman pipes up its "triggering" her. I didnt know what that meant at the time. The discussion got derailed, half the women starting fawning over the TIM, forty percent checked out and one or two stayed to argue. And were called words id never heard before. TERF and such. I asked a friend, she sent me a link on trans widows, i peaked, and admit to being an evil terven since. Glad to be back! Edit: i wrote windows...:-) makes sense too in a way

EvaWumben · 2021-03-14T22:45:20+00:00

If I may update? It's been several months, and while I keep certain things private for anonymity, myself and several friends (few of us white or straight) have been brutally attacked by hordes of white kids online who immediately scream "TR*NSPHOBE" the second any of us say a single thing. They are terrorists (and zero of these young people identified as REMOTELY nonbinary, trans, gq, etc. until about a year ago), and this seems to be a pattern in every social circle that doesn't involve majority POC populations, tbh. I'm older, meanwhile a younger woman I know was just subjected to severe abuse by a "nonbinary..." whatever, he is a man. A MAN. For having to have surgery for severe medical issues that could've killed her. Her crime? She was accused of flouting her privilege at being born with female anatomy and getting healthcare for a serious actual health concern when trans people have to get a gofundme and "don't get to have ovaries". I am told her friend group peaktransed over this. I am so irate all the time. It was bad enough growing up knowing that once we hit a certain age we're discarded and considered irrelevant as women, now we're being appropriated by men while white girls who have only known sex based oppression are throwing out their womanhood (on paper at least) in order to......everyone knows what I mean.

The utter and complete racism involved in this movement as well, I am infuriated nonstop (and I am NOT sharing my worst story here lest I want to blast it elsewhere). All I see is groups of white kids appropriating the mantle of oppression by claiming random gender identities, and apologies if this offends, I don't have any hatred for any racial group, but this is so blatantly obvious and most of us are sick of this. Claiming a gender ID most never heard of till recently is suddenly widespread and more oppressed than racial minorities, EFF THEM ALL.

PeachesAndSnakes · 2021-03-13T11:00:34+00:00

Peaking again. A TiM I know recently put im some pictures flexing his arms saying 'ready to be someone's buff girlfriend' and let me tell you, I've never seen any of my female friends with arms that big, not even the ones who work out regularly. This person has been on hormones for ages, had SRS, and the advantage they still have when it comes to building muscle is just so clearly there. I don't know how he can look in the mirror and still not see the advantage he has.

Moms_undies · 2021-02-27T05:25:07+00:00

I'm an older millennial and as a kid, I was a tomboy. My mom told me that it was okay for girls to like "boy stuff" because the distinction is just based on stereotypes. She told me that I could be anything I wanted to be because girls are just as smart and capable as boys.

Two things peaked me:

I work in academia in a STEM field. Being a woman in STEM can suck because it has enclaves of old boys clubs that don't even try to hide their misogyny. I'm a mom and that makes it even harder. But I feel like I have a duty to girls interested in STEM to blaze the trail for them and stand up to discrimination. It makes me really fuckin mad whenever I see a TIM invited to panels on being a woman in academia and/or STEM because they have no idea. They never had to be the only girl in middle school programming classes. They never had to be constantly interrupted at meetings. They never had to deal with comments about having baby brain while visibly pregnant at work. F them.
The girls who should be told that it's fine to prefer toys marketed to boys or wearing jeans and a t-shirt or being good at math are being told that they're not girls. We're going backwards.

ontheVerge · 2021-02-26T22:49:11+00:00

I'm new to saidit, and confused. But I am here to at least get some of my peaking off my chest. I never really was on board the trans train, I guess, it just seemed nutty to me from the get go, because you can't be born in the wrong body. I was peaked a few years back, but never went to reddit, or other sites to discuss it, I mostly stayed on pinterest, and was peaked by absolute denial of biological facts. Some troll was trying to convince me, that if a man said his penis was a clitoris, then it was, because of intersex people. My refutation was, my genetics professor disagrees with that, and would tell you what a selfish dunce you are for using intersex individuals. Magdalen is probably who made it clear for, I felt less confused, and that I wasn't the only one who found this all a farce. The first video I watched of hers, was of Charlotte Clymer. I felt for a long time though, that Germany would not go the way of the anglosphere, that because of the lack of the word for gender, that it would be harder to obfuscate reality, and that, Germans, don't really liked being told to fall in line with group think, you, having gone through two authoritarian regimes in the last 100 years. (yes, Nazi Germany was worse in my opinion than the DDR, I think I shouldn't have to explain why, it is obvious to me, the DDR was however non the less an authoritarian regime) Well, I don't know about that now, but the reason I have decided to come to Saidit, is because I feel at a loss. To me, having been peaked for about 5 years, from the biological denial, the digusting caricatures of what TiMs believe women are, the threats of sexual violence, hanging effigies of terfs, of violence (of the attack on Maria MacLachlan, to rats nailed to VRR Center), ach and the cotton ceiling, so rapey and so gross. My heart goes out to my lesbian sisters that have dealt with these TiMs. And reading the accounts of trans widows, how narcissistic and vile their husbands are. I peaked again there, over and over again, maybe it's because of having been in a relationship with a narcissist, and how the emtional abuse hits, a little too close to home. I have hit a block in my personal life in being able to talk about it. I guess a kind of allegory of the cave. I guess, I'ved peaked on the lengths this ideology is able to reach. I haven't been too shy about it with my parents, my mother loves to comment, on how I let this "trans stufff" make me so angry, and I need to stop caring about it, because it's bad for my mental health. Despite the fact that my mental health, is actually great, being angry it medical experimentation on children isn't mental illness. My one sister, believes I hate trans people, because I don't believe TiMs should be in women's spaces, and because I use medical terms like, double masectomy, or penile inversion, and take issue with the misuse of the chemical and pharmacological term of trans and cis. Also, I shouldn't have issues with porn, because it's not that bad, and is wrong to take away women's choice to be beaten, strangled and raped for their male partner's sexual gratification (but when questioned, on why is it okay for men to get off on beating women for sex, the conversation needs to end, and I need to stop hating trans people, because they are suffering). Sorry for all the rambling, the final nail in the coffin, was discussing with my other sister. She used to be, well gender critical in her views, because she hadn't looked into it, but that I was off my rocker, and that the fetishistic men, were just a niche, of a niche, and that I must be kind to dysphoric individuals. Until JK Rowling's essay: she said it was hateful, and I answered, "I thought it was tame, and actually very kind to trans individuals, what exactly in it makes you think she hates trans individuals." She read it, agreed, that I might not be too unfairly angry, to the next week, saying, "Well they are not cancelling gender critical views, because Rowling still has a twitter!!!" On further questioning about all the other women having kicked off for expressing gender critical views, and stating the biological that woman is adult human female, no, that's not why these women were kicked off, they did something wrong, they deserved to be kicked off. A couple weeks ago, she was explaining to my mom that, sometimes 2+2 does equal 5. This doesn't really sound like your typical peak experience, sounds probably like family drama. I am sorry if it is not really coherent, and rambly, drinking maybe a bit too much wine, to even write this all out. I feel a little nuts, to be honest, and no one to really talk to. There are amazing voices and people speaking out, I just love Karen Davis, she speaks to my soul. And maybe Germany, as of yet will not write women out of law, like America has, but so much is happening with out ANYONE being told. I can not kowtow to this vile nonsense, I don't really know how to speak up about it either. Sorry for my ramblings, maybe I just needed to get that off my chest.

persistentlywoman · 2021-02-23T23:03:34+00:00

I just submitted my story to noconflicttheysaid.org and while I planned to tell a more detailed version here, tbh this sums up why I reached my peak trans suddenly very rapidly after years of being a pretty staunch ally. I have definitely been veerrrrryyyy sloooowwwwllllyyyy peaking for a decade or so, after witnessing what the trans tsunami, as I call it, did to butch lesbians in my community. the peakening started increasing the last two years as the ideology grew more and more unscientific and gaslighty. but this piece of shit definitely pushed me right over the edge. I am as staunchly anti-trans now as I ever was pro-trans. it's a mental illness and the below individual illustrate all the reasons why indulging and coddling it only leads to more harm:

last year a male trans identfified person started attending social events I was organising. he claimed he was a trans butch lesbian. he attempted to latch onto me and through our conversations (I wanted to be kind and inclusive) I learned more about his identity that troubled me: he didn't identify as a woman but insisted he wasn't a man. he had no genital dysphoria and ensured he was still sexually active. he lied to doctors to get estrogen, but just enough to grow breasts. he prefers he/him pronouns and a male name and presenting entirely masculine as he gets 'dysphoric' otherwise. despite all of this he insists his experience is that of a butch lesbian and that our community is where he belongs, without question. and he was very quick to frame any confusion about all of this as transphobic.

I noticed he was quite misogynistic and I reacted against this a couple of times - a reaction which he framed as abusive to him. of particular note is him standing over me in my own home, after I had cooked and fed him dinner, yelling at me about what a terrible, harmful person I am for the way I reacted to misogyny in the community. a terf. I sat there and cowered because I was too afraid of further escalation to name the gaslighting (not to mention profound disrespect and cruelty) that was going on.

finally, in the lead up that confrontation, he had presented himself as having been the victim of false accusations of rape and the victim of a witch hunt in his former city's community. but as he revealed the details of this story that same night I realised with horror that he absolutely HAD committed rape (of a trans woman no less!) and was trying to pass it off as something more 'nuanced', as he claimed. something I have experienced many rapists doing in trying to absolve themselves of responsibility. after I asked him to leave subsequent to his attacking me, I investigated further into his past as the communities between these cities are linked, and found out his predatory behaviour was serial.

I expressed my confusion and distress anonymously on a reddit sub, which he found. we had a charged exchange in which I named him as a rapist and detailed his manipulation and distortions about it.

I later found out he had gone on to commit rape here as well since relocating from his former city. in this instance it was a gnc woman, and he repeatedly forced her to say she was 'really a boy' throughout the experience.

relatedly, he was also in the butchlesbian subreddit pontificating about how gnc women should all identify as trans and it was denying reality to claim otherwise. the agenda was so obvious it made my stomach turn.

I was to be on the guest list of a recent event celebrating butch identity where I live. I had assisted the organisers with contacts. he was to be walking the runway of this event. the week before the event the organisers contacted me saying the reddit post (again - anonymous) had made them aware I held views which could be damaging to their brand as a safe, inclusive event and they could not have me on the guest list. I asked them if having a rapist on their stage would damage their brand. these two women replied they would not get involved in a personal conflict. when I pointed out that they already had and were excluding a lesbian from a lesbian event in favour of a rapist, they claimed the call was not productive and ended it - though I did tell them to go to hell before hanging up.

I am now left facing the sordid reality that a lesbian - a participating member of my local community for close to 20 years - was blocked from a lesbian event because an abusive male weaponised identity politics against her, whilst leveraging bogus claims of shared identity to coerce women into sex with him, either through intoxication or intimidation. or both. all the while telling everyone around him that they're transphobic for objecting to any of this. that he recruited other women into discriminating against a woman who knew too much about his true nature and intentions amongst us. that he is protecting himself behind crocodile tears about his own feelings and pain, like he hasn't devastated the lives of several women through sheer hate and a sense of entitlement towards us.

my only solace is knowing the word about him is circulating and most are distancing themselves. I can only hope this ideological cult crumbles soon. people like this are clearly a danger to women.

so that's my story in a highly condensed nutshell. this monster is also writing a 'memoir' he seriously thinks will be the next stone butch blues that is literally just a narcissist's self indulgent parade of misogyny and abuse apologism. I'd love to share it with all of you because the more people that amplify how misogynistic it is, the more grounded in reality I will feel. my only concern is if he can see where people are coming from and perhaps remove the book from the internet. let me know if you want to read the garbage.

and yeah, I am feeling pretty messed up about all this and welcome any words of support.

linda_senora · 2021-02-04T20:31:03+00:00

Hello, I had to open a new account.

My story:

I think it all stared with the late Magdalen Berns.

After watching her videos (I don't recall if YouTube's algorythm recommended them to me), I could not believe what was happening to lesbians. I could not believe that Alex Drummond was successfully conning people.

Then I remember reading a bunch of posts on Twitter about the cotton ceiling and then I began to look for more people on Twitter who knew more about the trans lobby than I did.

I became appalled at the comments TRAs and most trans people make about gender and sex, homosexuality, women's rights, and female genital mutilation. I cannot believe that TRAs and trans identified individuals have the audacity to go after survivors of FGM. It is unacceptable.

I also watched Posie Parker's videos and she has managed to convey how dangerous gender ideology has become.

I admit to watching a few videos by Rose of Dawn and he seems less deranged than other Trans Identified Males, but I have stopped watching those.

I think I might have become increasingly angry with trans identified individuals. I don't know that being this angry is healthy.

That's all folks.

Redditstinks · 2021-01-28T23:56:59+00:00

Some 6 years ago I was watching a documentary about a trans couple. A TiM, and a TiF. The TiF was pregnant, and the documentary was presenting it as this amazing thing that’s almost like a scientific mystery. I was amazed, too, as I was brainwashed by the gender agenda. So I decided to do some research to explain this phenomenon ( 🤡 ) and I stumbled upon a blog post. The blog was a radfem blog, a really funny one written by an author who humorously claimed to “identify as a squirrel” (it’s been banned for a while unfortunately). I was hooked. Then I read the comments. They were along the lines of “such a scientific miracle that a biological female got pregnant from a dick ejaculating inside of her”, “he femininely penetrated her”, and the one that struck me the most, commenting on the picture in the blog post: “the mother is looking at the baby lovingly, while the man is making eyes at the camera”. Boom. From that simple but accurate description of the image, I quickly dismantled years of brainwashing. They can try to perform as women, but there’s something deeper down there that if you didn’t experience, you’ll never understand.

And I’m sick and tired of people trying to respond “but what about x? And x?” Stop trying to delegitimise our struggle by highlighting and magnifying exceptions. Shut. Up.

PeachesAndSnakes · 2021-01-26T17:18:45+00:00

Peaking again. On a dating app looking for women and I STG half the profiles I look at are barely transitioned TiMs. Normally I would just keep scrolling but there's just SO MANY. There's all the classic stuff too, pictures of anime girls, oddly sexual pictures/text, "HRT turned me into a dragon", the list goes on. I'd gotten pretty good at spotting the signs because that's just not for me but with most of these I don't have to ask twice. Is it too much to ask to only see women on dating apps when that's what I'm looking for?

VdeVulva · 2021-01-25T15:26:26+00:00

Getting some peak trans in the morning on the endo thread of reddt. This user really wants to say that *not only women get endometriosis and of course invade our outlet. F* off! Asks the mods if "this is an inclusive space" and says that it's a waste of time to debate the meaning of "woman". I will never ever call myself a uterus-owner! You can get all the f*ckin way out of here!

lis · 2021-01-13T22:48:52+00:00

As an introverted and solitary lesbian with workaholic tendencies I had not paid much attention to the LGB community and/or policies until a year and a half ago, when one of the lesbian authors I was reading at the time stated “transwomen are women” and denounced lesbians who didn’t want to date them. I was genuinely shocked as at the time I still believed that most people understood the difference between sexes and viewed gender ideology as a coping mechanism for those who couldn’t handle enforced gender roles and stereotypes and needed to fit in. A quick search showed me just how wrong I was...

Catbug · 2021-01-04T10:20:51+00:00

Just repeaked after an absolutely disgusting TIM told me women owe their rapists help if the rapist is hurt while you defend yourself and of course a TIM mod backed him up. In the fuckin gcdebatesqt saidit.

I was informed that victim blaming is not breaking any rules or disrespectful enough to even address. Absolute disgrace.

Rationalmind · 2021-01-03T10:51:10+00:00

Repeaking with Gottmik on Drag Race.

Shesstealthy · 2020-12-25T22:12:04+00:00

This is probably peak virtue signalling more than anything else.

I follow Dominic Noble's book and movie reviews on YouTube. He's very woke - to the point where he was all "I completely owe my career to JKR because of Harry Potter but now that she is so terfy with her whole don't call me a menstruator thing I can no longer produce HP content ever again" - but his reviews are often sharp and funny and he has a nice soothing voice.

Anyway he has just pulled a presumably humorous review of a presumably m/m book about a sexy lumberjack because... he just found out that the author has come out as NB so his video misgenders and deadnames and makes assumptions about their gender so he has to redo it.

FFS.

I'm guessing this was a typical m/m sexy romance written by a woman who no longer identifies as one, so all his observations about how the characters don't act like men have to be reviewed. That's what I'm guessing.

I hate this obliteration of people's lived experience just so they can be "who they really are" no matter how recently they made their gender decision. If you're born and raised as a girl you're formed by that no matter how NLOG or manly you think of yourself as being.

butch_woman · 2020-12-19T00:52:32+00:00

I'm just tired of hearing I'm transphobic for not wanting a penis in me, or on me, or anywhere near me, or hearing about how the female penis has a different mouth-feel than the male penis. It's funny in that I used to be very accepting towards trans people before all of this shit started. I of course still support anti-discriminatory laws against trans people, but I won't encourage rape culture in the guise of progressiveness.

Lady_Merlin · 2020-12-14T00:44:49+00:00

For me, it’s the visceral fear/disgust over the idea of TIM in change rooms.

ravenclaww · 2020-12-08T00:06:33+00:00

I've peaked awhile back, where I've acknowledged that TRA is repackaged MRA and that misogynistic men would use it as a shield to attack women without any consequence, such as Rahul Kohli. What's making me peak again is seeing a tweet from an online acquaintance where she said that "Pregnant people make [her] sick". (Note that it's "pregnant people", instead of "pregnant woman".) It's one thing to be horrified at the prospect of being pregnant herself, or not wanting the side effects that come with pregnancy, but having a visceral reaction to OTHER WOMEN being in a state that only adult females experience is extreme and sad. I feel like TRAs are encouraging libfems to harbour a sense of internalized misogyny and erase their own sex-- no man would ever say that a male-exclusive thing makes them sick. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this woman comes out as "non-binary" or "trans", like Ellen Page did, just to separate herself from this aspect of the female sex. It's honestly very disappointing.

anxietyaccount8 · 2020-12-02T15:13:24+00:00

This isn't really a "peak" story, but just so you guys know, some "tru trans" people/HSTS have extremely and I mean EXTREMELY conservative views of gender, so I don't think GCs should be hanging with those ones.

itsnotaboutewe · 2020-11-29T03:30:53+00:00

Around four months ago I posted on here about a transgender identifying man who was moving to my small rural community and how I thought I would be the only person to not go along with his delusions. I feared I would become the odd person out and be ostracized from my own community for not accepting this man's fetishes. I was the only person who knew anything about trans-ideology and I thought he would ruin the great atmosphere we have here in our isolated village. This is an update.

The guy came here to do some odd-jobs and was house-sitting at a place on the main street. He would wander around in his pink tights, which caused a few raised eyebrows, but as he kept to himself he wasn't much of a problem. His other mental health problems soon surfaced when the home-owner returned six weeks later and he abruptly left the village without having done any work for anyone, so not many people had interacted with him in his time here.

I was relieved that my fears weren't realized because I had really stressed over the situation. He had left in a hurry so his room was a bit of a mess and when cleaning it up the home-owner found tampons, pads, and her own underwear with lipstick stains on them under the bed. She peaked. Slowly the word has gotten out about this guy (not by me) and now I think the whole village has peaked.

marmorsymphata · 2020-11-26T20:45:06+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/k0x0hu/this_dungeon_is_a_full_female_reproductive_system/gdmpfb0/

There is literally just no level of bending over backwards and pretending you believe their ideology that will satisfy these people. They NEED to erase EVERYTHING about sex on every level.

verypeaktrans · 2020-11-07T17:53:17+00:00

I used to think the whole "trans women are women" thing was legit. At least in the sense that they genuinely had a female brain and experienced consistent distress at their body and consistent improvement when that body was changed to match their brain.

Then I saw some transbians speculating on tumblr (of course) about how to unlearn the male gaze. This was years ago and would never be admitted to today, but I was confused: if you're a bona-fide female with a female brain, how do you have the male gaze? If you're gay, you don't "unlearn" straight behaviors. You might stop mimicking them to fit in, but you always had an innate sense of who you wanted to be. So the idea that some people had to forcibly train themselves to be less male instead of exposing their "true self" troubled me.

I notice that the general PR image of transgender people is the HSTS, meanwhile the AGP runs the TRA agenda. Then the RODG/NB types support it without (as I see it) the greater context. The NB thing really got me as I could tell these were straight women, often troubled with mental illness, chopping off their hair and insisting on special pronouns.

I started to feel uncomfortable because I couldn't have a debate in that environment without getting ostracized. People would blow up and scream on social media over much less. I felt I was being forced to validate a fantasy that I didn't believe in. There's no such thing as a non-binary brain, as brains and brain structures are not binary. It seemed that if they had dysphoria it was self-cultivated in the sense that by obsessing on their gender and tying their validation to their pronouns, misgendering and similar behaviors became an act that struck their ego deeply. If I see myself as an amazing musician, and everyone around me also told me so, if someone said bluntly that my music sucks my ego would be devastated. The conflicting statements of "it's just about decency and respect" and "if you don't do it, they'll kill themselves" especially drove me nuts.

I remember a comment from a female NB about how she wanted a PHD mostly because "Dr" is a gender neutral title. Perhaps that woman thought it was proof of how actually non-binary she was. But I just thought it must be a miserable existence to be so obsessed with how other people see you that you would devote years of your life to something you're not otherwise interested in.

The TRAs got bolder. Trans periods, truescum/no dysphoria to be trans, support of children transitioning, etc. Around then was when I started hearing TERF thrown around. People were treating terfs like those evil dirty stupid republicans, and I'd learned long ago that was hate propaganda. So I had a look. I don't agree with most radfem beliefs but it seemed that we shared concerns about free speech, about liberal sentiments that weren't actually helping people, and some actual good data about transgenderism, ROGD, and medical transition. Looking at things like the ratio of TIMs/TIFs, the problems with puberty blockers and hormones, the stories of detransitioners whose sexual trauma had made them hate their bodies, helped me go beyond the simple "born in the wrong body" narrative and understand how complex this thing actually was.

You won't be long on GC before you hear about AGP and check out itsafetish, and then it was pretty much over Trans Everest. I knew itsafetish couldn't last - it was too revealing to show AGP TRAs speaking honestly. No one would look at that stuff and see a woman, because AGPs are not women. And then seeing that for some TIMs, the fetish isn't just them but also enacting feminization on young people, I was done with all of this stupid shit.

Locastor · 2020-11-01T03:15:55+00:00

Hi again everyone! Just found out about SaidIt and delighted to see you all again!

Meta but is there a place where I can see a list of communities sent down the memory hole on Reddit that have been resurrected here?

diapason · 2020-10-16T05:06:37+00:00

I had kind of been sick of trans/'queer' ideology for a few years already by this point, but what really shocked me and pissed me off about it recently was when a few months ago my younger sibling (early teens) expressed the opinion that people who refuse to date trans people are horrible people. I was shocked and wondered where they had heard this, because there was no way they came up with this on their own… Needless to say, I told them that they had the right to reject anyone for whatever reason they want and they should not be labeled bigoted or a bad person for it. The fact that children and teens (especially LGB ones) are being groomed into this mindset is abhorrent to me, and I hate what the TQ+ are doing to the rest of the LGB community and what transgender ideology is doing to women's rights. Around the same time, there was uproar on social media coming from some of my former classmates who were offended by JK Rowling's "transphobic" essay, but hadn't seemed to have read it themselves, so I read it, thought it was reasonable, started looking, and wound up here.

So, all in all, I wouldn't say there was one specific thing that was my "peak trans" moment, it was more of a slow burn with a lot of stuff chipping away at my initial support for trans ideology (trans and non-binary friends and classmates, pansexual snobbery, noticing r/actuallesbians was like a third transbians, every LGBT online community being mainly about the T, stopping believing in the concept of gendered souls, lack of evidence for gendered brains, trans-women in women's sports, TRAs denying the differences between male and female socialization and their response to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's comments, "genital preference" discourse, the increasing obviousness of how reliant on gender stereotypes this shit was, TRAs' denial of biological sex, pronoun madness, non-binary obviously just being an attempt to escape misogyny, insistence on using gender-neutral language in sex-ed which would make it inaccessible to those who needed the info the most, how liberals had a religious fervor about their support for trans ideology, getting corrected in class by a teacher and a liberal friend that sex and gender were different, seeing kids getting corrected in class on classmates' pronouns, when I first saw the fearmongering about Drop the T being a hate movement when it made perfect sense to me and didn't seem hateful at all, the "you owe your rights to trans women" shit, the highjacking of feminism, the gaslighting of saying that the vast majority of transgender people are nice people and therefore the problematic and violent ones don't matter, logical inconsistency, learning about how harmful puberty blockers were to children, finding out about the astroturfing in the trans movement and seeing how they were deliberately holding LGB rights back, TiMs getting women's scholarships and political seats, the high amount of TiFs in an online eating disorder support group I was in, the pathetic state of my school's GSA, "queer sex" guide articles floating around talking about PIV sex being a type of lesbian sex, noticing the grooming in all this stuff, noticing how conservatives I knew were more likely to be supportive of/sympathetic to trans than LGB, seeing how transgenderism ran in certain social circles, observing how transgender people behaved more similarly to what was typical of others of their biological sex than their gender identity, the likes of Danielle Muscato, the pressure to be open to dating trans people, the fact that I didn't have a sense of gender identity like they insisted I must, the insistence that trans people were the most oppressed group in america despite nothing to really back up that claim, the beggars on social media, the way gender identity kept constantly being likened to sexual orientation, and so much more.), but to hear something that reeked of such obvious grooming from my beloved younger sibling made me just 100% done with this shit.

N.B. My sibling isn't a "they", I just used gender-neutral language and an approximate age to refer to my sibling to avoid identifying information.

TL;DR: Younger sibling said people who weren't open to dating trans people were horrible people, whole thing reeked of grooming, said fuck this shit.

PS I'm probably younger than most of the people here and this transgender ideology stuff has been around all throughout my teenage years, so it's interesting reading stories from people older than me here to get a different perspective on the whole thing!

jjdub7 · 2020-10-12T23:55:30+00:00

When Mike "Zoey" Tur assaulted Ben Shapiro on Dr. Drew for pointing out that Tur was still biologically male in perpetuity.

"[blaspheme trans dogma again] and you'll be going home in an ambulence."

Not only was it shocking to see an obvious, 6'4" man wrap his ham-sized hand around Shaprio's head and neck, but the juxtaposition of the 6-7 other panelists, insisting that not just anything about this aggressive (even on HRT), hulking individual was feminine, but that the entire display was the pinnacle of female social achievement, asserting its "human rights" as never done before throughout the course of human history.

I then realized we were dealing with a cult.

BiologyIsReal · 2020-10-12T23:13:04+00:00

I can't say I really peaked as I've never believe in TWAW. I've never feel really feminine despite being a women, for that reason I always found something ofensive about a effeminate man claiming womanhood. Also I know enough about biology to not buy the "but intersex!" excuse. However, I didn't pay attention to this topic because I take a "live and let live" philosophy as long noone is harming anyone and I though trans were a tiny minority, anyway.

Several things make me reconsider this approach, though. First, I noticed how the world seemed to be more obsessed with gender roles than 20 or even 10 years ago and I started worrying that transgenderism supporters were re-enforcing the very same gender roles and stereotypes that they claimed to defy. Moreover, I heard about the so called “cis privilege”, and rejected this concept from the beginning because I didn’t think any woman, including the very feminine ones, was privileged just for the fact of being born female. Some people were arguing TW should use the women's bathroom, an idea I found ridiculous because they weren't women and beacuse sex predators were bound to abuse this. I also heard some people arguing things like sexual orientation was based not on sex but on gender and a transgender individual didn’t have to disclose their biological sex to their romantic or sexual partners, all which sounded pretty rape-y to me.

In short, I was growing wary of gender ideology and the fact the only pushback I saw came from people who didn’t buy in the sex change narrative but still believed in and supported gender roles, didn’t help. The last straw for me was when the UN decided to include transwoman on International Women’s Day! At this point, it really felt like I’ve stepped in an alternative universe were things worked differently from ours. I mean, I even stumbled upon a graffiti claiming something like there were boys with vulvas and girls with penises! Such disregard for biology was maddening and I still hadn’t heard the worst of it.

This March, I find out more about trans rights activists’ goals, by chance. I ended up in a radical feminist website while searching for another topic. In the side-bar there were some articles about transgenderism which picked my curiosity. The more I read the more horrified I got: not only the future I feared was much closer than I thought, it was also way worse than anything I ever imagined! In a matter of a few days, I learned about things like self-ID laws, the “cotton ceiling”, male rapists in women’s prisons, autogynephilia, children and teenagers being medically transitioned, girls surpassing boys in gender dysphoria statistics, the increasing number of young detransitioners, legitimate research on the topic being shut down because it were against the official narrative, the rape and death threats towards women with opposing views, the butchering of the language 1984-style, and more.

I can’t describe how mad and frightened I was and I still am! I’m angry with all the scientists and health professionals endorsing this ideology despite they should know better than to think sex is neither binary nor immutable. I’m angry with all those involved on the transitioning of children and I can’t believe this is not a huge medical scandal already. Neither, I can’t understand how a lot of self-proclaimed feminist are championing the erasure of women’s rights and tolerating all the rape threats sent to Rowling and all the other women who dare to speak out. How can they not see the misoginy of this?

But it gets worse. About two months ago, I learned I was wrong in thinking the gender ideology was concentrated in the English speaking countries. I thought the peak of this insanity have yet to come to my country, but it turns out both self-ID and transition of minors are already legal here in Argentina since 2012. Oh, and there are more insane laws incoming! I'm in despair...

vodka_gimli · 2020-10-12T14:59:34+00:00

I had a former close friend who first came out to me as trans. He and I had drifted apart due to moving across the country, but he knew that I wouldn't judge him. And I didn't. I had never been a fan of the whole 'TWAW' mantra because I don't like being told what to think and it came across as overly religious and preachy, but I really didn't mind treating transwomen as women. I gave him open feedback about his clothing choices and picking out cosmetics. One day we were chatting and he brought up the bane to transwomen that is TERFs. I didn't know what that meant so I started researching and found r/GC and their arguments were cogent and made sense. I didn't know what an AGP was but my friend was a textbook case. I started reading Andrea Dworkin and I had never had feminist literature resonate with me like she did. This newfound class analysis made me see so much misogyny which I would have dismissed before. I especially saw it in the trans rhetoric toward women/TERFs.

Erised · 2020-10-07T20:06:28+00:00

I spent years and years of giving the benefit of the doubt to trans ideology that I never quite believed but just nodded along to be nice. And besides, who doesn’t want to be on the “right” side of history? But the biggest thing I could never quite believe was the whole “Trans Women are Women” thing. Whichever way I tried to justify it or reason it out, I could never TRULY believe TWAW— that we shared a similar enough experience for us both to be grouped under the “woman” umbrella. But, I concluded that including trans women in feminist circles, doing what I could to make them feel valid and accepted did more good than harm. It was kind of like calling a close family friend “Aunt So-and-So.” Yes, she wasn’t really a family member and I wouldn’t ask her about her 23 and Me results to learn about my family lineage, but everyone was on the same page so there’s no harm in calling her Aunt So-and-So.

Ironically, I finally got peaked by Contrapoints, whose channel is supposed to educate people about the trans experience. Her video “Gender Critical” first introduced me to GC theory which lead me to the Gender Critical subreddit (R.I.P.). I looked it up purely out of curiosity, but found that, actually, the GC stance made a LOT more sense than the theories I’d been nodding along with for the past 3-4 years. Rather than telling boys who like to wear dresses that they’re trans and need to get surgeries/ they’re trans and therefore should be able to access any female space they want, shouldn’t we be working on telling boys they CAN be boys and wear dresses and put the pressure on men NOT to harass said boys in male spaces?

And then contrapoints released her video called “Men,” in which contrapoints spends half an hour using the good ol “I have experience as a man AND as a woman, so I can definitively say who has it worse” while only reading ONE book as “research” (MRA-fodder “The Myth of Male Power”) and coddling men for having it “so hard nowadays” for suffering under a patriarchy they choose to prop up. Men are lonely because no one pays attention to them— should I, as a man, take the initiative to call my male friends to check up on them and build a strong relationship with them? No, it’s the feminists that are wrong. Of COURSE men are going to gravitate to misogynistic MRA groups! They have nowhere to turn to for help under toxic masculinity and the pressures of patriarchy... except for Men’s Liberation? Which is an incredibly positive community that contrapoints fails to mention once in her video.

No, it’s actually the men who are oppressed because men’s greatest weakness is their perceived power and women’s greatest power is their perceived weakness. Thanks Contra, I’ll remember that all the times I’m being told I’m overreacting when standing up for myself after being sexually harassed, when states continue to erode the rights over my own body, when I receive 80% of the salary my male colleagues get, while I’m married and doing all the housework, all the childcare, AND a full time job. But at least men will automatically just DO things for me that I never asked for in the first place, because it would be a shame for me to actually have to figure something out and build a skills I can use for a lifetime, right? AND I’ll get showered in male (false) praise and (duplicitous) affection... until I turn 40 and get treated as though I were invisible.

She can attest that, as a man, it stings when a woman walking alone at night and automatically assumes that you might be a predator. Ouch, poor men. Could it be that women LARGELY experience violence from men AND are then shamed for “putting themselves in that situation” when they experience violence? It doesn’t matter that women routinely have to make themselves small and cut themselves off from experiencing life at its fullest for fear of violence, harassment, and rape as pointed out from the Sylvia Plath passage that Contrapoints decided to put in her own video— but none of that freedom appeals to Contrapoints. And since it doesn’t matter to contrapoints, it shouldn’t matter to all other women.

Here was someone who made video after video explaining and rationalizing how she was a woman, and how everyone needed to believe her and validate her as a biological woman— how other biological women needed to fight for her rights in order to be “good intersectionalist feminists.” But then she puts out a 30 minute thirst trap (oh yeah, did I mention she wears lingerie for the majority of the video? Because this one is 4 da boisssss!) dismissing, belittling, and invalidating concerns women have had for years because those concerns don’t align with her view and experience of what “womanhood” is.

But that wasn’t what ultimately peaked me. People make mistakes, and hopefully they learn from those mistakes and grow. I wasn’t mad at Contrapoints, I was just.... disappointed.

What peaked me was the comments. More specifically, the responses to the comments that respectfully pointed out that contrapoints’s views on men and the safety concerns of women were most likely influenced by the fact that Contra was socialized as a man for about 80% or so of her life (as she’s very open about considering this ENTIRE VIDEO was drawing on HER OWN EXPERIENCES as a man). No, she wouldn’t mind getting so called “positively” cat called, because those comments AFFIRM her gender identity. That, as a former self proclaimed MRA shithead (her words), she might have some misogynistic attitudes and beliefs she still needs to work out. Plenty of biological women have internalized sexist beliefs, it should stand to reason that those beliefs likewise just don’t magically disappear for trans women.

But her supporters were having NONE of that. It’s transphobic to EVER point out that a trans woman USED to be a man (but then, what did they TRANSITION from them?) To critique and criticize ANY trans person’s views mean you’re trying to invalidate them and erase their identity, even if most TRA talking points are inherently contradictions of each other, kill yourself TERF!!!! (It’s okay for someone to be mistaken or misinformed about something. Pointing out that what you’re saying can be harmful to women who’ve been oppressed and brutalized for millennia isn’t an attack on you. Also, rude).

For years I had viewed TRA’s points in good faith and unquestioningly assumed the best when they shared their experiences and what it meant to be a woman to them. But whenever a biological woman spoke up with concerns or criticisms, she was met with hostility and the worse was assumed about her — she automatically hated trans women and wanted them dead, everything she said was just a dog whistle for hate. I watched as women lost their jobs over asserting that biological sex is real. I watched as the bar of entry for what constitutes “a woman” became lower and lower and the danger that comes with that as men can enter female spaces and redefine what womanhood means and what should be important to women. All the trust, validation, and support I’d been giving TRA’s for years wasn’t a two way street.

889250 · 2020-09-21T15:34:33+00:00

I started lurking at the Gender Critical subreddit a while ago, I was sad to see it was banned. I would say this was a peak moment for me in itself. Having seen the posts on there, I didn't see that any of it was hate speech or dehumanizing in any way. Anything that questions the trans movement is a huge no no on the internet. Great free speech there.

The hatred shown towards JK Rowling even after (especially after) her essay in response to the outrage of her latest tweet was definitely a huge peak moment for me. A woman being silenced, insulted, and threatened for daring to stand by scientific fact and biological reality really grinded my gears. And through that hearing about biological women who lost their jobs for believing science and voicing and standing by that belief? Important peak moments.

Boiling womanhood down to essentially "I feel like a woman so I am one regardless of any other factors" is a huge peak moment for me too. How does one feel like a woman? I don't even know. How do you feel like a man? Man and woman isn't a feeling.

Trying to find any articles or opinions questioning the trans movement at all is almost impossible, so when I found myself questioning a lot of what I was seeing i googled opposing positions and had a lot of trouble finding anything that wasn't supporting trans or "debunking" opposing views. Calling people terfs or transphobes when they so much as question the TRA narrative, utilizing cancel culture to silence any attempt at rational discord about the trans movement is frustrating and was a huge force in pushing me to be gender critical.

I didn't want to write a damn essay but when I started naming peak moments it got harder and harder to stop lol. I don't hate trans people and I believe they should receive all rights and protections everyone else has. But I don't agree with their attempt to rewrite history, biology, and language to suit their needs.

PrincessBubblegum · 2020-09-13T11:07:10+00:00

Hello. I guess I peeked a long time ago. I grew up Catholic, and no one let me read anything that would contradict what I was taught. I learned pretty quickly that not being allowed to read was the opposite of freedom of thought. My mother used to tell me when I asked her a question; because I said so; and that answer was never good enough for me. I kept asking her why, and she told me that one day we are able to learn to read and then we can decide the answer for ourselves. I think that's the most important thing she ever taught me. Sorry for my punctuation.

drunkthrowwaay · 2020-09-10T02:31:07+00:00

The thoroughness and viciousness of the Reddit purge, and how tra and supporters behaved during it, repeaked me. Celebrating shutting down not just opponents’ speech, but even just open discourse, like in the debate sub. Celebrating shutting down truelesbians. Lurking and threatening with possible shutdown the detrans sub, if their content wasn’t up to tra standards.

The fact that a major social media platform and public discussion host enacted such a ridiculous, widespread, and unrelenting purge based on political views that a minority of the population vehemently despises, as well as non political speech that this minority deemed not correct enough for them. I hate it so much. It’s suppression of free thought and the freedom to share and exchange such thought. Some might say, “It’s a private company and they’re free to regulate speech how they like.” They are a private company and can legally do what they like—but it seems obvious that this is the form that suppression and censoring of the public spheres of ideas would necessarily take in a late capitalist society. It’s 2020, and in the US most speech directed at the “public sphere” is conducted through private companies.

To paraphrase Justice Brandeis, the remedy for speech you hate is not suppression, but more, better speech. If TRA ideology is accckkkshuallly scientifically correct and logically valid and sound then they shouldn’t be suppressing opposing ideas—they should be meeting and defeating them in public discourse. I can’t respect a movement that shies away from such debate and can’t meet such challenges, that would prefer its opponents are simply not heard.

Edit: Honestly, it is depressing as hell. I only ever participated in the GC v QT debate sub, so I can only speak about that. There was nothing at all within the debate sub that could plausibly make it a “hate sub.” Things got heated sometimes, but “heated” for that sub didn’t include slurs, and certainly nothing actually hateful. I believe misgendering was actually against the rules, and mods were pretty strict about enforcement. Nothing about it was hateful. Redditors abusing the report button, Reddit employees with an agenda, and Reddit corporate that wants the easiest way to avoid controversy—fuck all of them.

Ailyn99 · 2020-09-08T13:15:22+00:00

i've always been a die hard feminist. I got introduced to radical feminism when i realized the prostitutes i saw in the streets were not the free sex workers i was told they were. Then, I found out about the word "terf" and googled why they were so evil... And the rest is history

ComeTheFuckOn · 2020-08-30T05:43:21+00:00

I always knew it was bullshit but I've been smart enough to play along because the alternative just wasn't worth it. Now, I'm over it.

leninsleftnipple · 2020-08-30T01:23:58+00:00

I discovered r/gendercritical about a week before it got banned (along with other various female subs being banned or overtaken by mods with trans agendas. I saw JK Rowling's essay and I was like how can anyone disagree with this, it makes perfect sense. But apparently that makes me a TERF. I'm sick of the TRAs destroying womanhood and female spaces.

saged · 2020-08-28T21:04:32+00:00

The first time I ever questioned anything trans was when this person I went to school with posted a picture of james charles going, "Since you guys don't get it, this is a feminine gay man. A straight man or lesbian would NOT be attracted to this person because they do not like men" So gay men, bisexuals and "pansexuals" would.

and then they had the same picture going, "If this were a trans woman, then gay men and straight women would NOT be attracted to them because they are female, it does not matter what a trans person looks like. If they say they are something then they are"

And it was the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Basically they were saying that if James charles said, "hey i'm trans now!" and just stayed his make up wearing self, then that means NO men would be attracted to him unless they were straight and all gay boys who liked him would no longer like him or would be forced to identify as straight or bisexual.

that and "not dating trans is transphobic" were some of the first things that made me give the movement a major side-eye.

exploratorium · 2020-08-26T18:49:05+00:00

I don’t have a long story to tell, but the main things that peaked me were 1) deciding to take a campus course for anyone at the uni who wanted to be a “safe space” for lgbt students and sitting there having to go around the table and tell our pronouns (still don’t understand for what purpose as it was a two hour thing and never saw those people again), 2) originally remembering when a lot of this was growing in popularity how people would say “gender is between your ears, sex is in your pants” (which at the time made some sort of sense to me), but it quickly changed to people claiming sex isn’t real and “girlcock” and “boicunts” are legit things (barf), and 3) the demanding from TiMs that lesbians accept them, date them, and have intercourse with them so they feel validated.

I get peaked on a daily basis though, really, since it seems like some TRA bullshit occurs every day.

msteacherlady · 2020-08-24T20:31:09+00:00

I just had a phone convo with an old friend who's work serves a lot of queer folks and he's kinda bought the dogma, but clearly annoyed by most of these people. He's a finance guy, not science and he's got a history of getting taken advantage of for his kindness, so he's kinda vulnerable to the rhetoric.

Anyway, he was bitterly describing the "them" who was "clearly female when THEY started working here" and had always been a lunch-stealing grump. (I've hear him complain about this person for like, over 2 years now?) Shortly after coming out this employee quit, and quickly after that was corralled back in but to a different division. Now this person is filing a complaint for poor and exclusionary work conditions. According to friend, they all bent over backwards to accommodate this person and make them feel included. Even the other trans people that work there had a hard time getting along with this person. Anyway, friend saw this person last week hovering around HR and had some scar tissue on their forearms. You know what that means!

I just remember thinking, who even wants that? We go on about how complex the female reproductive system is, because it truly is and it's so offensive how so many transwomen just think of it as a hole, and if you're lucky, a baby-bag. Penises and testicles don't hold a candle to what women's entire bodies have to do to be reproductively functional, but still, they're more than just a tube! So now there's this crabby chick walking around with a flippy floppy dongle that no hetero woman or gay man would know what to do with. Hopefully they just expect to play with it themselves.

threefingersam · 2020-08-24T04:18:18+00:00

I've already peaked before, but I peaked again when I saw a demo of this game: https://quinnk.itch.io/outcry It's about a nonbinary character with their head stuck up their ass while getting a cig to smoke. The protag came off as super self-important about "correcting pronouns" and overall, the game was mostly TRA propaganda.

bunchabaloney · 2020-08-22T11:32:37+00:00

Funnily enough, I had peaks one after another during an attempt to support my long-time friend who at the time just came out as MTF. Beforehand I was of the mindless school of thought that 'transwomen are women' and didn't think much of it when he came out to me. I had gone to r/egg_irl (subreddit that convinced him originally) to try to empathize with him and educate myself, and came out all sorts of confused at the backwards-ass logic being applied, which only got worse the more trans-related subreddits I/he visited. At first he didn't make much of a big deal about it, but after he became more involved in the community, he became way more sensitive and I found myself walking on eggshells whenever we would talk about anything gender or even sexuality related.

During that year or so I realized the guy has so many red flags (BPD, autism, trauma, has self-loathing that you would NOT believe) that it should be plainly obvious to anybody looking on that transitioning would not suddenly fix all the problems that he's retroactively made into signs of gender dysphoria. He fits so many online transwoman stereotypes that it's kind of frightening: cute anime girl fixation, furry, tech nerd, even the stupid 'programmer socks' and degenerate fetishes, the whole nine yards. It's abhorrent to me that TRA and the trans community can see his situation and still parade around the idea that living as a 'woman'/hormones will magically improve his life with no downsides, when realistically there are many. He's built like a brick shithouse, and while maybe he can attempt to pass online, there's not a chance in hell he can pass in real life. He has never once thought about anything from a woman's perspective; if I talk about something relating to lesbians/women, he will shoot back with something about gay men/men in general. If you look at it honestly, he's just a gay guy with deep-seated issues who likes to wear feminine clothing and more likely than not has AGP tendencies.

We are still friends (as much as it pains me to admit that), but I'm not sure how much longer for. I'm a people pleaser type who avoids most conflict, so I haven't made it known just how I feel about the whole situation, even though it goes against pretty much all of my values... The more he talks about how TERFs should be killed or how J.K Rowling is an awful person, the more I think/know I should cut him loose, for his sake and my own.

TarshishJupiter · 2020-08-21T20:38:24+00:00

I'll share my peak trans story here since my old one was on reddit and it was way too lengthy.

As a teenager I was indoctrinated into the Christian Patriarchy movement. (Yes, it is/was a real thing.) They believed that women should be basically owned by her father until she was married, from which point she should submit to her husband totally. If her husband died, she should submit to her sons or closest male relatives. She should have as many children as possible and raise them up to be Christians so she could "outbreed" the heathens. I never really believed most of those things, but being surrounded by girls and women who were so submissive, wore skirts and head coverings, and seemed happy to be feminine... it really screwed with me.

I bristled against the notion that I ought to be more feminine. I wanted to be a person, not a baby-making accessory. I began to think that since I felt resistance in myself against this idea of "womanhood", it must mean that I wasn't really a woman. I never came out to anyone as trans, but in my head I saw myself as such. I went through intense dysphoria about every part of my body that reminded me I was female - breasts, hips, facial structure, thin hands, lack of muscles... everything. I was happy if someone thought I was a boy. It was textbook gender dysphoria, and no one can tell me I didn't really experience it.

I peaked in 2015 when I started to realize that words had no meaning to the trans movement. Then I saw this video that College Humor put out about "Coming Out as Trans-Everything" and in the comments was someone saying "People are reaching peak trans". I was like, what's peak trans? So I looked it up, and found Gender Critical on Reddit. The image on the sidebar with the pink and blue brains in the "wrong" bodies caught my attention. I was fine the way I was? I could be a woman without the whole "womanhood" thing? It was an amazing feeling to realize that I didn't have to worship this idea of gender - whether I submitted to femininity or chased after some ideal of toxic masculinity.

My dysphoria slowly subsided over the next year or two, and now I'm happy to say that I love being a woman! I'm comfortable in my body without the chains of gender holding me down. If I had gone down the path of being trans, I would have felt increasingly more uncomfortable about my body, since there would always be something I would hate about myself. So thank you, Gender Critical.

yishengqingwa666 · 2020-08-18T17:36:02+00:00

[deleted]

blackrainbow · 2020-08-17T11:12:58+00:00

Repeaked when a friend of mine (an uninformed TRA) told me my sexuality is fluid just because sometimes I have sex with a strap on (in her mind that makes me a bisexual). Uh, and just because a girl likes to blow some guy from time to time, that does not make her any less of a lesbian. What counts is how a person identifies.

Fucking homophobe.

trumpetvine · 2020-08-12T20:30:42+00:00

Hi, former lurker of the now banned r/gendercritical. Never took a chance to post my peak trans story. It's long, sorry. Bi, not out to anyone that I didn't know before I met the father of my kids, my husband. Not unicorn-hunting or trying to align with the LGBT crowd for political points like Kate Brown. Very happy to be off-market now, because before I met my husband, I would not have been opposed to dating a trans man or woman because of their trans status. I don't know of any trans people who don't currently have completely repellent personalities, and they weren't obviously broken back then. The recent trans-fad may have discouraged them from maintaining their mental health or even giving an appearance of emotional stability. Dodged that bullet!

Currently SAHM, 2.5 kids, boy, girl, expecting another boy. Hopefully he turns into the third member of my little brood. BTW, womanly horror story might follow. Non-moms might not get it, so consider yourself warned. I have a somewhat complicated obstetric history, but if all goes well, I will, once again, demonstrate the most universally accepted affirmation of womanhood and push a whole human being out of my body, hopefully with less stitches this time. My pronouns are “I”, “Me”, “My” and “Mine”. Unless we're addressing the state, then it's “We”, “Us” “Our” and “Ours”. I get my pap whenever my OBGYN says I'm overdue, so if someone uses the wrong pronoun to describe me, they're stupid. I find it amusing when people online refer to me as “he” or “him”, and I seldom bother to correct them, because “there are no girls on the internet”.

It's hard to pick an isolated moment when I “peaked”. It's been building since the “cis” prefix came into use among woke libs. It probably happened around the time boys started playing girl's sports. I'm not necessarily opposed to inverted rapesticks in the ladies room since the surgery disarms them, but there aren't many opportunities for a female to physically compete against a male opponent, rapestick inverted or armed. In fact, I can only think of two, and they both have built-in equalizers, cars and guns – racecar driving, and sharpshooting. Some might claim that they aren't sports at all, which I would dispute. (Whatever they are, all women should be trained in firearm operation. I know my little girl will be when she's ready.) The invasion of women's athletics opened the door for abuses and violations that were unthinkable 10 years ago.

I come from a somewhat liberal background. Exmormon, anti-rape activist, anti-neocon activist, I voted for John Kerry in 2004 because he promised to end the war. (Back when the war was in Iraq.) I spent every Saturday in October of '04 canvassing for his campaign, and went to the election night party at the largest ballroom in Denver. I watched in horror and disillusionment as Ohio was called for Bush, and all the people over 21 swarmed to the bar. So much for ending the war that was killing my age-peers. I did a few protests against that war, including traveling to Crawford, Texass, to look at Dubya's ranch. I think I spat through his fence, but it was a long time ago. A lifetime for the younger adherents of this instagram/tumblr/twitter trans fad.

(God, I'm old. Not genX old or anything, I'm millenial-old. I'm old enough to be president.) Look at their hair, I used to do that. My canvassing-color was a very pretty shade of cyan-blue. And the piercings, nothing says youth fad like a facial piercing. When you get too old for it to be cool, just take it out, it'll heal up. At worst it'll look like an acne scar. Tats are a bit harder to get rid of, laser removal costs money, which kids don't have much of, and cover-up tats that don't look like shit cost even more money, so a young person with enough wisdom to recognize the inherent transitive nature of their age group won't get one until they're at least 25, and they'll abstain from hormones and medically-unnecessary surgery, just change their hair and clothing and say they're GNC. Unfortunately for their cooler counterparts, wisdom is NOT cool, never has been. Shitty tats, unnecessary surgery, and fucking with your hormones are very much in...right now.

There will surely be an epidemic of trans suicides eventually, when the more-permanently transitioned realize that they made a mistake and nothing can fix it. I fear that the very privileged men in very expensive dresses and very fancy makeup (TIMs who are leading this movement and their TIF “handymen”) will blame it on women. It's not hard to predict that women will be blamed for the actions of men. They'll use that degrading “TERF” slur to do it, and they'll appropriate terminology that describes women to obscure the fact that they were not “assigned” male at birth, because they were not born with ambiguous genitalia that needed assignment. They were “identified” as male at birth, or earlier if they were born after prenatal ultrasounds became routine.

The very damaged person who is the star of that really horrifying TV show (not saying their name or using their desired vocabulary) might bleed to death when they try out their newly-crafted fuckhole, because inverting a babydick and sewing it into a dick-sized pocket of thigh-skin...well, scar tissue doesn't hold up under stress very well. It tends to tear. If they get to a surgeon fast enough, they might survive long enough to die from despair when their age catches up with them and the trans fad dies off. I do not foresee a long life for this TV star. That famous track and field star from the 70's who posed for a racy Vanity Fair cover is old, so I can't say for sure which one will die first. If the old one can avoid the COVID, then probably the younger one with the more-experimental surgery. Poor kid. I feel sad for this very damaged person. That said...the CHILDREN's book which spawned that horrifying show should be BANNED from public libraries and schools.

Children are impressionable by nature. Some TRAs got the ODE to insert some vaguely described "gender education" into their health curriculum. Since I feel that my work experience with the rape crisis center, my lived experience as a woman, and my MOTHERLY-intuition makes me better qualified to teach MY kids about gender, I must now write to the school district and tell them that boys are boy and girls are girls, and that is the only gender education that is appropriate to teach MY children. Something like “Boys have penises, girls have vulvas, penises should never be allowed in rooms where vulvas are used to pee, gender education doesn't have a place in k-12 education, and it should probably only be available to people pursuing advanced degrees in psychology”. If I need to send my kids to a private christian school...fuck it, I'll home-school them. I will protect them to the hilt.

It is disturbing and upsetting that ultra-woke parents are actually fucking with their prepubescent kids' endocrine systems, and there are ethically-compromised pediatric endocrinologists who enable this abuse. Tons of them are in Portland. (Fucking Portland, the foulness that flows from that shithole gives people deadly infections if they're dumb enough to swim in that disgusting river. PSA, never touch the gross water in the Willamette, you'll surely catch something. If you have an open wound, you might die from it.)

Kids...they grow up, they reach puberty, and they become interested in sex. If they happen to be gay or lesbian, they become interested in sex with members of their own sex. If they hear from/are gas lit by their peers about the wokest gender fad, they might be persuaded to think that their sexual orientation is indication of their gender deviation, and decide that they're trans, not gay, because gay wants gay rights, and gay rights are for old married people, and they're too young to settle down. Young women are especially vulnerable to this, because the benefits of being a man are very appealing. Who wouldn't want to be free of the expectations of fucking makeup, and fucking hair removal, and fucking gussy-the-fuck-up-because-fucking-men-are-watching? I wish there were butch lesbian role models for young lesbians these days. Remember k. d. lang? Too talented for the riotgrrls, beautiful without the fake shit that TIMs adorn themselves with. And..she's old, older than me, fucking boomer-old. Why aren't there young versions of her? Maybe The L Word convinced them to either gussy-the-fuck-up, or transition into something less womanly. Now, actual women loving actual women, there's nothing wrong with that, right? Not if you're a very privileged straight man-in-a-dress experiencing deprivation of privilege for the first time. (Or a republican, but they're a different animal completely.) Making-up terms like “The cotton ceiling”, feeling deprived of the right to fuck whoever they want, actually suggesting that they should have a right to sex, these are the noisiest of the TRAs. Slave owners have a right to fuck their property in places where slavery is practiced, is that what they're talking about?

Maybe. This whole movement has set women's suffrage back...or simply derailed the progressing train from the track to a future of more equal rights and protections for women, and onto a track of...collapse. BTW, uterus implants for TIMs, have you heard this shit? I'm not currently an organ donor, and I never will be after reading about that. Atwood couldn't begin to imagine (well, certainly wouldn't be permitted to write about) anything like that in her dystopian nightmare fiction. But I can! The setting: A future world free of “cellulite”, where “reproductive organ hosts” are grown in, eh, “organ-growth facilities”, where their insides are “harvested” once they “ripen”, and the host is then discarded. Problem is, I can't think of characters or a story for the setting. Oh well, it wouldn't be any good without female characters.

thea · 2020-08-10T02:14:00+00:00

I peaked a few years ago due to an intersection of a few different things happening. In the past, I had been a very dedicated social justice advocate (including hosting a workshop on gender and identity in undergrad - with what is now a defunct "gender"bread person) and the idea of being considered bigoted or a TERF was terrifying to me. But in 2017 following the women's march I began to see a lot of criticism of the march being cis-centric and cis-sexist. Two women in my graduate program (one of whom identies as a nonbinary he/them) were laughing about the pussy hats and uterus/reproductive pun signs and how ridiculous the idea of them were - because they weren't inclusive of transwomen and were obviously indicative of white feminism. Why, I thought, were those women being ridiculed? For caring about their reproductive rights? For acknowledging the biology we are so shamed for? Overhearing their conversation unnerved me badly although I couldn't put my finger on exactly why yet.

Around the same time, I saw this post on celeb gossip blog ONTD. Well, I saw the first post which has since been deleted. Writer Chimamanda Adichie expressed quite eloquently imo that women and trans women are not the same. We have different experiences, different struggles, and require different activism. ONTD lost its collective mind, calling her TERF, transphobe, bigot, and (incredibly) a white feminist. Some user chided another to just "go back to gendercritical" essentially calling them a troll. What, I thought, was gendercritical? That led me to the subreddit. A later post accusing JK Rowling of following transphobes on Twitter led me to Magdalen Berns. And this post Pose Actress Indya Moore starts Twitter Debate "Trans Women's Penises are Biologically Female" fully woke me up to the full ridiculousness of gender ideology.

I eventually called my younger sister (herself in undergrad at the time) to fearfully confess that I thought I might be gender critical - a "coming out" more frightening than telling her I was a lesbian a year before. She accepted it without much thought but we have since had an incredibly difficult crossways conversation about the subject. The reason? I brought up r/gendercritical getting deleted! We have mutually decided not to speak on the subject again to stay civil but that conversation pushed me to find where all the other gendercritical women had gathered!

bby_grl_lemons · 2020-08-09T23:58:06+00:00

Took me wayyy to long to find this place. So happy to be reunited with the crew!

RevengeOfTheCis · 2020-08-06T20:44:14+00:00

[deleted]

Baileyscheesecake · 2020-08-04T17:57:00+00:00

My peakening started with Caitlyn Jenner. What was all the fuss about? She wasn’t the first transgender person to make the news. Chaz Bono anyone? (who I remember as the little girl Cher brought out at the end of the ‘Sonny and Cher Show’). Dr. Renee Richards way back in the 70s? Then there were the bathroom and locker room debates. Surely, it was a ‘no brainer’ that men shouldn’t be in women’s areas, so I was stunned when people argued that this was perfectly acceptable and if women didn’t like it, THEY should be the ones to leave. Then came TWAW, and now it’s the idea that ‘woman’ is a feeling and that ‘people’ have cervixes. Before discovering gender critical sites, I felt like I was the only sane person in a world gone crazy. The stereotypes I thought we’d moved beyond have instead been resurrected with a vengeance. I wondered why feminists weren’t protesting this and was hit with a ‘stupify’ spell when I found out they were actually supporting this, including organizations like Planned Parenthood and NOW.

I remember the women’s movement of the 70s, how hard we fought to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as hysterical, on our periods, or just plain silly. We had to get men to understand how the racy pictures and condescending language created a ‘hostile work environment’ for us. We struggled to break free of the stereotypes that were used to limit us. I thought we had succeeded to a great extent, women more so than men, so that each sex could embrace aspects of humanity that were once denied them. Men could be sensitive and caring, and women could be brave and rational.

I was a tomboy. I preferred to play with Tonka trucks rather than dolls. I liked to wear pants rather than dresses. At one point, I even wanted to have a boy’s name. But I never thought I was a boy. I was a girl who liked boy things. I was a girl who saw that boys got to have all the fun, going out into the woods camping and having careers. Girls stayed at home and learned to cook, sew, clean, and take care of babies. Yuck! In the horror movies I loved, women were weak and ineffectual. They screamed, fell down, and waited for someone to save them. When my mom and I went swimming, she never dove underwater or splashed or played, but complained about getting her hair wet. I wanted none of it. I rejected the role that society would have me play, and fortunately, my parents let me be me. I didn’t like the idea of developing a woman’s body no more than I did the realization that I would end up being short, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I had to learn to cope. And I did. When puberty came on, I accepted it and lost my dislike of femaleness. The ultimate turnaround came with ballet. That was sissy stuff when I was younger, but then I fell in love with it. I shudder to think of what would have happened to me if I’d been brought up today. I would not have been allowed to work these feelings out for myself and come to my own conclusions. I would have been told I was trans and to go on hormones. I had no idea of what it was really like to be a boy, the socialization and pressures they endured. I saw it only from the outside, and it looked fun.

I tried writing to my 20 something niece, asking her if she could explain three things: why so much hostility to anyone who questioned trans, why women’s feelings were being ignored, and why gender stereotypes were being resurrected. Her first response was to ask if I was referring to a specific event. I gave her numerous examples I’d read about or personally observed. She never answered.

Any disagreement with trans ideology is deemed “hatred” and “hurtful.” We have to change how we speak so as to spare their feelings. Yet, self-help books and memes tell us to believe in ourselves and not rely on others for validation. Apparently, that doesn’t apply to trans people. They are made out to be emotionally fragile and utterly lacking in any coping mechanism or resiliency.

The Trans movement has made me “trans apprehensive.” Whereas before, I felt kindly toward transgender people, I now want to avoid them because I don’t want them insisting that I share female space or change my ideas and language to suit them. This has bled over to non-binary people. They can identify how they want and I will be polite in their presence, but they have no right to control what words I use to describe them (they/them rather than he/she/him/her) when they are not around.

When I hear of what children are being taught in schools and reading in magazines, I despair for the future and wonder how I am going to navigate this scary new world. For now, I plan to gather my things and leave if a transwoman enters the locker room; to say that I am uncomfortable if a transwoman comes in to do my mammogram or pelvic exam; to cross out “assigned at birth” on any form I am given; and to continue using the word “woman.”

Thank you for creating this site and offering a way for women to connect and support each other.

Eurowoman24 · 2020-08-02T03:48:39+00:00

earliest peak trans moment? A woke friend telling me I need to get over my unconscious bias and that it's transphobic for me to not be interested in trans men (women's bodies/vagina) as a straight woman. If I don't like TIFs then I should be into TiMs, because apparently it's unreasonable to not be attracted to men in dresses, makeup, who act feminine and who may or may not have boobs.

shinymudcrab · 2020-08-02T03:15:21+00:00

I peaked when I found out about the Vancouver Rape Relief shelter getting defunded and vandalized. I peaked again when JK Rowling came forward in support of women only to receive death threats and rape threats and attacks against her person. And then again when reddit started banning women's spaces and subreddits that dared question the TRA agenda. I'm done going along with this utter woke nonsense.

dancing_with_durga · 2020-08-01T02:29:23+00:00

CNN's "people with cervixes" nonsense while an article on men's health uses the word "men" 27 times has peaked me all over again: https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1288948978088804355

In a couple of years I think all the "Trans Women Are Women" brainwashed ninnies are going to be backtracking and retconning. We are going to get the word "woman" back. There are too many of us.

But this is the time when we know who the brave ones are. The ones who have a mind of their own. The ones who hear the first circular definition, or the first Orwellian argument that doesn't hold together, and immediately say "Hang on, this is bullshit."

I am going to remember the people who care about women.

windupcat · 2020-07-31T20:41:40+00:00

My peak started with small flashes. Little connections to the trans worldview that left me confused, worried, and afraid, emotions I learned to suppress because they didn’t jive with the responses of others. The day I learned what “cis” meant I hated it immediately. The word felt tinged with hateful derision, but it was championed by the social and mainstream media. The video of transgender-identified children with thousands of supportive comments that made me sick and left wondering when liking pink and having long hair made anyone a woman. The college acquaintance who transitioned over the summer into a “woman” and how we, all the dormmates needed to be extra supportive. Why couldn’t I stop questioning this transition? There was nothing feminine about this person that I could remember. He had long hair, but that couldn’t be all, could it? Then there was that one time at summer camp.

For most of the 2010s, I taught at a summer camp for tech-savvy teens. We had always had a problem with female enrollment. One year the camp even set up an aggressive marketing campaign and scholarships to attract more female campers. Every year was a battle to balance the gender ratio. A couple of years after this campaign and consequently the last year that I chose to work at the camp something changed. Suddenly we weren’t allowed to talk about the gender ratio. The one time it was brought up in a staff meeting before students arrived, to inform everyone that for the first time the ratio had flipped and more girls had registered than boys, we were informed that championing women in tech was no longer “PC.” Also, this information was wrong. In fact, two of the girls were not really girls, but “transmen” and the status quo of more “men” at the tech camp was assured for another year.

Things escalated during camper check-in, it was like a switch flipped in our camp director’s head. Any misgendering, deadnaming, or questioning was met with swift and fierce admonishment. That didn’t stop the utter confusion that hit on that first day. One of the trans-identified girls, whom I’ll call B for anonymity, was registered under her birth name, not her chosen male name. When we as staff and counselors used the information provided on her forms and name tag, we had to be individually re-educated until a new nametag could be created. The roommates these two girls were assigned to felt weird about rooming with “transmen” and we had to shuffle assignments so that they could room together. The modus operandi chosen for the week wasn’t to just let these two girls mingle with the other students and have fun and learn but to constantly affirm and congratulate these girls on their chosen identities.

The two girls were different from each other. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the first girl (A), the one who proudly wrote “transman” on her admission form, but if I had I would have called her non-binary. Her gender identity didn’t seem to come from an innate feeling for gender dysphoria, but rather the innate need to fuck the system that most teenagers seem to possess. She liked keeping the other students on their toes by wearing feminine clothes with a nametag proclaiming her pronouns as “he/him” stickied to her chest. The second (B), I can’t attest to a diagnosis, but looking back she had all the warning signs for ROGD: anti-social, anxious, lonely, and needing affirmation, not about her gender identity, but for anyone to assure her that she wasn’t as broken and messed up as she felt on the inside.

I felt weird all week, trying to remember not to use the wrong names or the wrong pronouns. I felt sick when I learned that B’s parents had not been encouraging her transition at home and had informed the camp of that fact in the hopes that we wouldn’t encourage it either. The senior staff, including the camp director, instead took this request as a challenge to prove that they were the superior guardian. "Fuck those parents, what do they know? We just met you today, but we can already tell that you’re really a boy. Change your name, change your pronouns, we’re your family now."

We had a presentation for the parents at the end of the week. B’s plan was to play at being a boy during the week and then change back when her parents came to pick her up. The senior staff didn’t see the point in that and came up with a plan of their own. They decided (and I’m absolutely serious about this) to support B in her gender identity during the presentation and rub the parents’ faces in this transition that they had helped facilitate. They just knew that if the parents could only see how much happier she was, now that she was a boy, that they would finally see the light. (Let me reiterated that at the point of this presentation the staff would have known this student for less than A WEEK).

I left camp that year with sunburn and mental anguish. For days aftward I wandered around the house rambling about my confusion and my guilty feelings. Was I the only one who felt this way? Everyone else was so supportive, so why did I feel like I was living in a sinister bizarro world? At this point, I wasn’t looking for answers outside of my self or my immediate family. I was content to stew and ponder alone.

The moment that hurled me into the arms of gender-critical theory occurred a week after camp ended when I attended a drag show with my husband. The questions and bizarro feelings continued to gnaw at my brain as I watched a man in drag rail against the gender identity movement to cheers and applause. "What is happening?" I wanted to shout at the gay couple sitting at my table. For some reason, I had always thought of the LGBT as a unified family. If the homosexuals think this shit is weird, hell if the guy who chooses to dress in drag thinks this shit is weird, then what the hell is wrong with me?

I hobbled home having added copious amounts of gin to the addled mess of what was left of my brain and hurled questions and incoherent sentences at the google machine. The search engine overlords took pity on me and gave me these stories. Peak stories. I read them all and when I found out there were more I read those too. And then the world exploded and now we’re here. I’m sorry it took so long to say something. To add my own experiences, my own voice to this courageous endeavor of pushing back against all the chaos and insanity that is the world at this present moment. But I’m here now.

Bumblebeezzz · 2020-07-31T00:40:38+00:00

My peak trans moment is when I watched Riley Dennis's video about demonizing sexual orientation of straight and LBG people. At the time people, thought it was crazy but now many agree with him.

TurtleFuzz · 2020-07-28T15:02:17+00:00

I am a stay at home mom in my early 30s,with two amazing young daughters. I don't really think I'm a feminist, but I of course support the idea that women are strong, smart and can do anything they want. But, I do think that the trans cult is damaging our children.

My husband and I have a friend who is transitioning from male to female, and while I have no problem with her as a person, I am starting to see that she has really drunk the kool-aid. She claims that "trans people know themselves better than almost every cis person" because they have "done research" to find out who they truly are. This friend also flies off the handle and thinks every little thing someone says Must be an attack on her. She says when someone calls her by her old name (which is her last name, not even a masculine sounding name) she gets eye twitches and it "brings up painful memories of her fabricated male persona". Like, come on. Get over yourself.

I seriously think her paranoia is a sign that she didn't get proper therapy or medication before she started her hormones, and now she's just using her lack of self-confidence to cry foul on people. It's very worrisome to me.

Anyway, I look forward to meeting more women (especially mothers) who share these concerns, and finding ways to make sure my daughters are safe growing up.

*edit typo

twam · 2020-07-28T00:02:42+00:00

I am in my late teens, very left-leaning. I was a trans ally originally. I was pretty apathetic - I didn't see what was wrong with them existing.

But, then, I found r/genderCritical. Just lurked there. I began to see the horrors of the trans cult! I'm glad that I'm on this side now.

This place saved me.

MissDemeanor · 2020-07-27T20:42:31+00:00

I am in my late 30s very much on the left politically. I was very much a trans allie, starting in the 90s when the average trans person was a gay man. I felt empathy for them as, being female, I could understand feeling frustration with the sex I was born and discomfort with my body. I assumed their feelings must be similar but greatly intensified. After all they wanted to go as far as to cut their genitalia off, right? However my mum brought me up to challenge gender norms. It always bothered me that, while feminism was saying that gender was socially constructed and that gender norms were a product of society, the trans concept of having an inate, internal sense of gender, undermined that. Women were kept out of public life because we were thought to be predisposed to being overly emotional, unable to be logical etc. Feminists fought to dispel the idea of a female brain, the idea that our sex dictated our capacity and temperament . Gender identity theory would seemingly lend truth to those notions?

I couldn't reconcile these different schools of thought. So I just pushed the problem to the back of my mind. Who was I to tell anyone they couldn't live a certain way, because it undermined my views of the world? At the time trans people were very much the underdogs and I was sympathetic. Being bisexual and in relationships with women I was very much supportive of gay rights and many trans people were gay(I don't mean straight men who say they are lesbians).When the bathroom issue was first discussed I was still thinking trans women were gay men who had actually altered their bodies to look like women. I thought they were all disphoric and that the majority wanted to have their dicks turned into vaginas. Thus the term pre op. I also thought they were a tiny %of the population. With this misinformation in mind I didn't really understand why people were so concerned. Who would get surgeries etc to use the ladies? I thought it was only conservatives that were concerned . Then I found out anyone could self ID as a woman. Anyone could pop on a dress and use the ladies and other womens spaces. This got me thinking.

Then one day I saw a video of Riley Dennis. It was the Infamous " your genital preferences are transphobic video" . I couldn't believe what he was saying, it was just so regressive, twisted and ridiculous. We don't have preferences, unless we are bi, we have an orientation. To deny orientation reminded me of the kind of language straight men used about gay people yet this was coming from within the LGBTQIA community. To imply that people's "preferences" are shaped by social conditioning is ludicrous , particularly in the context of gay women, as they are rejecting social conditioning . Societal norms preference heterosexuality, so it is unlikely a straight women is rejecting Riley due to social conditioning either. Horrifically, Riley then implies that it is only acceptable to reject dick if you have been sexualy assaulted (and even then it would only buys you a grace period). The video was disgustingly coercive and provides ammunition for predatory individuals to use to gaslight young Lesbians . It also feeds the delusions of Trans youth, setting them up for disappointment. The video left me f. ing enraged.

I was really shocked that the gender identity ideology had mutated into the type of thinking Riley was displaying and wanted to know if he was an aboration. How did the concept of being born in the wrong body morph into an ideology that essentially sort to position homosexuality or heterosexuality as bigitory?

Unfortunately I couldn't just write Riley off as an outlier and what I discovered was peaking to say the least. It seemed that rather than medically alter their bodies, young trans people wanted to simply attempt to redefine their bodies. Rather than use surgery to change their genitalia, they would rather use linguistics to change the biological sex of their genitalia. Dick magically became lady dick or, worse still "big clitty" (shudder). Transgender, as a term, no longer referred to disphoric individuals wanting to change the look of their primary and secondary sex charictaristics. Instead it was an umbrella term for everyone from transsexuals to gender fluid people, feminine men and cross dressers. The fact masculine women and feminine men fell under the umbrella really disturbed me, it suggested that anyone who did not conform to rigid gender norms was trans. This made me see the term cis in a new light as I realised it was implying that I identified with femininity and its associated stereotypes.

But that was just the start, next I discovered the horrific messages from TRAs to women on TERF is a slur. I saw the vicious messages sent to lesbians, because they weren't interested in penis, on drop the L. In one particularly disturbing msg a 14 year old said she had tried to get over her disgust of cock but couldn't, did it mean she was a TERF? The response was shockingly harsh, condemning her for being a bigot due to her orientation. This sent to a child. I read the stories of Trans widows, and saw the same themes of manipulation and narcissism, repeated over and over again. I saw the constant policing of women's language. I saw a woman, on an online female health board, beg for compassion for women in pain and a break from language policing. I saw the vicious and manipulative rejection of that request by a T. W. who had no business being in a female health sub.

I read about the experience of a rape survivor who attended group therapy, along with two transwomen. The women in that group realised that the Tw were imitating their body language and facial expressions, the pitch an pace of their speach. They watched as their pain was appropriated, and a caricature mirrored back. Watched as they were revictimised in the very place they sort solice. I saw the treatment of FGM survivors as they were gaslit. As they were told their vaginas were cut, not because they were female, but due to cultural practices unrelated to their biology. I saw the harrasment to make everything, even the terms for this, brutal and female specific suffering, 'inclusive'. What kind of mind reads the experience of an FGM survivor and harangues them to stop using the term female? Why deny that this was done because of the sex of the victim? God I'm angry.

The stories of the kids are the worst. The gender non conforming kids, being told they are actually the other gender, make me angry. The stories of the gay kids whose parents use transition as conversion therapy, make me enraged. In their minds it's better to have a straight presenting trans kid than a gay one. Young people with deep unresolved pain, who think transition will cure them, make me want to scream. All these kids, caught inside this monstrous machine, turning healthy people into patients for life. Generating massive profits for the already obscenely wealthy. Kids being sterelised, before they can understand what they are giving up, irepairably damaging their bodies in innumerable ways. Detransitioners expose the lie that gender identity is innate. Yet their voices are ignored.

Meanwhile women are faced with constant demands to sacrifice ourselves on the alter of gender identity. We must give up our dignity and privacy, our spaces and our rights. We must give up the very definition of who we are. We must redefine ourselves to fit man within the definition of woman. We must treat these people as women we are told. Yet we must also acommadate their trans ness, centre their needs and use inclusive language. We are not to keep anything for us alone. Yet they want everything we have and trans specific benefits on top of that. They are women when it suits them and trans when it suits them. This is by no means all trans people. However there is a vocal contingent that behave horrifically and peak me on a regular basis. I am sick of watching allegedly progressive men pontificate and argue with women about what the term woman means. I am disgusted that they thing they have the right to redefine us and give other men our spaces, scholarships, sport, all in the name of inclusion. I am sick of them using TA as an excuse to vent their pent up hatred for women. They call us bigot and TERF, chastice and lecture us to be kind to this marginalised group. Yet it is their sex that is causing the violence, but on this they are silent. Our words are the real violence according to them.

The more I dug into this the more horrified I became. Tracing the money and the network of LGBTQIA groups, that push the gender identity agenda, was particularly troubling. The intersection of moneyed white men, lobby groups, corporations and the medical industrial complex, backing trans gender ideology makes a farce of the claim that this is a marginalised group.

This is a regressive, anti woman, anti gay, anti safeguarding movement, that poses a variety of threats to children. It is the bleakest form of capitalism dressed up as a civil rights movement. This is the comodification and monetisation of our bodies and reduces us to for profit products. Body hatred is celebrated as a form of self actualisation. Nothing about this is liberating.

DefNotASandwich · 2020-07-27T16:09:56+00:00

I peaked a few years ago (not sure if I ever really accepted the movement to begin with, to be honest). The first time I peaked was hearing about transwomen participating in women's sports and receiving scholarships designated for women. Before that, I just kind of accepted it as "well, if they want to suffer as we do, why not?" I didn't realize there could actually be consequences to this train of thought.

I've peaked many more times since then, including hearing about children being trans and parents assisting them with transition, watching I am Jazz to try and understand (didn't work and honestly made it seem even more like abuse), hearing about people suggesting to children that liking "feminine" or "masculine" things may actually mean they're trans, reading about women being removed from rape shelters because they were made uncomfortable by someone who was born male (male was prioritized in a female rape shelter), witnessing the blind acceptance of this movement that's supposed to be about love and acceptance, but then finding that they're more hateful than a lot of actual transphobes I've met.

I'm tired of hearing how transwomen's lives are harder than my own as someone who was born a woman. I'm tired of children learning to consider that they may be a different gender rather than just having preferences that were traditionally assigned to another gender. I'm tired of every single feminist topic being co-opted by the trans movement. I'm tired of them making EVERYTHING about trans rights (i.e. those BLM profile pics that say Black TRANS Lives Matter and any other instances where it wasn't about them or they were assumed to be included, but felt the need to bring attention to themselves).

I would literally describe myself as a "more liberal" person, but I'm finding it harder and harder to do that knowing that so many far left liberals are censoring "wrongthink". I can't believe we got to this point where even Reddit wasn't a place to discuss purely feminist issues. Pay no mind to the subreddits that glamorize and fetish the rape and abuse of women and children, but if you say a negative thing about a man in a dress who claims to be more oppressed and expects you to agree with every delusion, YOU are the bigot here. Why can't women have a subreddit that doesn't include people born with penises? That's one of the least feminist things I've ever fucking heard. Why is that bigotry, but fetishizing the oppression and abuse of women is not?

FUCK the trans movement, and not in the way they want us to.

yishengqingwa666 · 2020-07-26T18:52:54+00:00

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angrygreycloud · 2020-07-25T20:55:57+00:00

It all started in r/actuallesbians. I'd lurked for a while and was increasingly fed up and confused by the 'trans/girl dick' content. I visited less and less and didn't really think too much about it, downvoted and moved on. Out of the blue the sub went private. Siting the brigading by 'TERFs'. So down the rabbit hole I went to learn about these 'TERFs'. I agreed with everything. All the things that upset me and I hated and downvoted were things that 'TERF's disagreed with, it was like finally sesing the light. I don't think that the sub never got brigaded, the silent majority just got fed up. In the end it led me to r/truelesbians and r/gendercritical and all the thoughts I had were there in much more articulate words than ever washed around in my head. I finally felt at home. Though I learned the uncomfortable true about the things going on in my country (the UK) I think my eyes were finally opened and for that I am grateful.

TurkishCoffee · 2020-07-25T19:54:48+00:00

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Fraeulein · 2020-07-25T14:42:17+00:00

In the summer between my middle school and high school year, a long-time long-distance friend of mine introduced me to one of her friends. This friend of hers identified as a transgirl, though, when we first met, I was not actually aware that she wasn't biologically female. We didn't talk too much at first, and all she really knew about me was that I was three years younger than her, a lesbian, and a huge Sonic fan. In the group chat with me, her, our mutual friend, and their other friends, she wrote her coming out story, which I believe was the first time I found out she was trans. I sent a very short and generic response, probably something along the lines of, "Rad! You're valid!" Didn't think much of it after that until a bit later, she sent me a direct message about how sweet I was. From there, we started DM'ing each other, mostly talking about our favorite video games and nerding out over Sonic and the Elder Scrolls. I also showed her some of my art, and she was very supportive of it, which made me feel really happy. Just a couple weeks later, though, out of the damn blue, she asked me out. At this point, I didn't have any feelings for her that were not purely platonic, but I was worried about saying no for several reasons. I didn't want to lose my new friend who shared so many of my interests, and I was worried about creating a divide among our mutual friends and being seen as transphobic among them. This was around the time where "if a lesbian rejects a trans lady just for being trans then she is a dirty transphobe and should be burned at the stake" started becoming a big thing among the inclusive LGBT spaces. So, I accepted, and figured we would probably drift away in just a month or so. Unfortunately, that was not at all the case. After a bit into dating her, I started seeing all new sides of her. She was very manipulative, and I quickly became very emotionally attached to her. The longer our relationship lasted, the less she started caring as being perceived as a woman, and about a couple years into it, "she" completely dropped the trans shtick and was identifying as a man again. I did ask him about it, and he basically admitted that he mostly decided to identify as a trans lesbian to make our mutual friend, who is a lesbian, like him more. I hadn't put two-and-two together at the time, but I now realize that this was just a sick man with a weird lesbian fetish (supported by all the lesbian porn he would always randomly send me unprovoked). It completely changed my belief that the idea of a person pretending to be trans for predatory purposes was unrealistic. And even though I was a victim in this, I am still very reluctant to talk about it in most LGBT spaces because I know they will consider me a TERF sent from the bowels of bigot hell. There's no room for a nuanced discussion when it comes to this sorta thing among most LGBT spaces now. Hell, I don't even consider myself gender critical, but this is one of the few places I know of that doesn't just hate LGBT people in general where I could safely discuss this.

itsnotaboutewe · 2020-07-25T07:36:23+00:00

I peaked years ago but today was the first time trans lunacy has come to my front door and invaded my home.

I live in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and because of our small population we have to all get along and co-operate or our community falls apart. Newcomers move here because of this special relationship we all have and new residents are immediately welcomed and made to feel they are an important addition to the community. Before covid forced us into lockdown we had a man from the city come down here doing odd jobs for people. He seemed nice and plenty of people hired him to do small jobs so he got to meet most people in the village. He loved it here so much he was arranging to move here when covid hit so he went back to the city with plans to move here before September. Everything was fine and dandy until I found out through a city friend that this guy is a cross-dresser but has now decided he is transgender and has been taking hormones and arranging 'gender affirming care' while in lockdown. He expects our small rural village to accept this new version of him and use female pronouns and treat him as a woman in every way without anyone objecting.

I am the only person in the community who has even heard of the term 'transgender' so I'm actually expecting most people to treat his fetish as they would treat someone with a quirky new religion. I don't know how individual villagers will react to his man now asking to be called 'she' but I do know this man in a dress will tear our community apart because anyone who is not onboard with his delusion (so far only me because I can't speak for anyone else) may be ostracised for dissenting. How can we welcome someone in and then turn around and disapprove of his lifestyle? People in our lovely village will have to pick a side and I have this terrible feeling I will be the only person refusing to validate his new identity.

He is a lovely man and I really like him. He is supposed to be doing some work for me when he moves here but I think the shit will hit the fan regarding his fetish before he starts. His selfishness at not thinking about how his autogynephillia may divide our village just makes me so angry. I have been sworn to secrecy by my informant so I can't even talk to anyone about this, not even my husband.

The man is in his 60's, bisexual, divorced, and has children and grandchildren. He only decided he is trans this year when he had nothing better to do in lockdown than concentrate of his sexual fetish via the internet. Christ only knows what other paraphillias he may have.

TurkishCoffee · 2020-07-25T03:15:32+00:00

I've long lurked in GC subs and other places on Reddit before the ban. I have to keep my mouth shut in most places on most accounts, I live in a very liberal city and work in an industry full of TiMs (it's quite strange). But the other day was ..a new peak for me and enough to get me to post here. I tend to get into unrelated arguments with TiMs because they act aggressive and have to be right (honestly worse than most cis men I know. by a LOT), but then play the victim card and I won't bend to that and tend to ram logic down people's throats. I'm stubborn. It's why I've succeeded in a field where I am often the only woman in the department. Anyhow, there are still a few of the saner/less entitled TiMs in my social circle and I will play nice, and tend not to have any reason to make a fuss. Don't start none, wont be none. Well, turns out one of them isn't so sane. Apparently now the language has changed again and sex is a forbidden word entirely. It's not biological sex. It's "assigned gender". Didn't we just go through like 3-4 years of "Gender is a social construct and a spectrum and does not equal sex"? But it's pretty handy if gender=sex but sex isn't real and gender isn't either so do anything you want! It's fucking absurd and i'm tired of it. I'm critical of gender. and believe in biological sex. But other than that I'm very of the "you do you, just leave me alone" variety. Wanna wear a dress? You do you. Wanna be called a female name? Yeah okay. Dont care. I'll call you any name you have. Doesn't bother me. Have surgery? If you're over 18 you're a grown adult and it's your body. Do whatever you want to it, just don't come crying to me about the consequences. And that just really isn't enough these days. No no, we have to constantly change language, deny the existence of biological sex, pretend that transwomen are not only women but identical to cis women because everything else is offensive! I'm just fucking done and tired of it. I'm not here to play handmaid to whatever weird ass reality they think exists and affirm everything they say when I know it's wrong. Of course, the number of "cis" women who don't identify as nonbinary of some format is rapidly dwindling in my area to the point you'd almost think it's a socially motivated trend to be anything but a woman. I'm one of the only last remaining "bisexual women" standing who doesn't say "I'm totally pansexual and nonbinary" because frankly there are two sexes, and I am attracted to both, but not all of them! I'm not actually attracted to that many people to start with anyhow! But that's hate speech these days. I'm just exhausted. And i'm tired of every single thing and space being SUPER ABOUT THE TRANSWOMEN.

moody_ape · 2020-07-24T20:51:43+00:00

i was part of an intersectional feminist collective at college and one day someone posted a polemic thread about a trans woman causing disagreements in a feminist event that took place at another university. the issue was that said TW was placed in the same dormitory (the event lasted 2-3 days) as many of the women and some of them were not comfortable with that. the beef was between radical feminists and intersec/lib feminists who took sides with the TW.

a lot of insults were thrown around, apparently, but what grabbed my attention was the real reason why the radical feminists were wary of the TW's presence in the dormitory: earlier that day, the TW had participated in a group discussion during the event and introduced himself as "a black lesbian tranwoman". however, if you looked at his facebook profile, you would see a white bearded male, dressed as a "cis" man. so basically, this person wasn't a black lesbian transwoman outside that feminist event.

inside the facebook group of the feminist collective i was a part of, some women accused the TIM of flat out lying to gain access to that female space. he wasn't a transitioned individual, he was f*cking WHITE and calling himself black and some of them even said they had screenshots of conversations where he harrassed lesbians and called them transphobic for not being interested in him. other women in the group defended him saying he was probably just a TW who hadn't fully transitioned yet, maybe she was in the closet - after all it's not easy to come out as trans. they said she could be herself in that feminist event but not in her facebook, etc. and the evil radfems were being terrile etc.

after that i was really confused. it seemd like the guy was a troll trying to be (or show that he could identify as) someone who is oppressed in every way possible. but maybe it was a real closeted TW, i didn't really know what to think. so i researched about radical feminism and their beef with the trans community, talked to some friends of mine from the collective (who concealed the fact that they wre aligned with radfem ideas but at that point felt safe to share it with me) and they explained that "you can't say you are a radical feminist because people will call you transphobic" and i asked why and they explained things to me. and here i am hahahaha

mrh2 · 2020-07-21T11:02:45+00:00

Not really a peak trans moment, but I just wanted to post what I sent to the Reddit administrators:

I am profoundly disappointed in how this - the mass banning of subs - was handled. Reddit leadership displayed stunning levels of cowardice and cravenness. I'm thinking in particular of how /r/gendercritical was banned suddenly with no warning, when the moderators were bending over backwards to resolve any complaint from Reddit about their sub. Yes, in the past 6 months the subreddit was swinging towards being more anti-trans and less about feminism, but there were 6 years of feminist posts and articles before that. It was a 60,000 strong community of women who needed a place to talk openly and feel safe - and you destroyed it completely without a warning. It's not just that the subreddit disappeared, all of the articles that were bookmarked from the past 6 years were gone too - no warning. It is a naked act of violence against women that was perpetrated here, akin to an attempted mind-wipe. A reasonable action would have been to give a weeks warning and lock the subreddit, so people could save the many resources and valuable discussions on feminist issues. What you did is beyond description. It's disgusting.

Some people here have pointed out the problems in your hate-based policy rule, in that it is vague enough and flexible that it can be used against whatever the popular scapegoat is at the time, even if that subreddit is not a hate-based subreddit. You also have not considered what happens when one oppressed group victimizes another oppressed group. It's not always the majority (white, male, middle class, WASP) who persecutes marginalized minorities, one persecuted group can attack and harass another persecuted group. This is what happened with the trans groups victimizing the women's group. And you took the easy route, the path of least resistance.

Blank-out · 2020-07-21T07:12:25+00:00

I have always been a gender abolishing feminist, pretty much a stereotypical tomboy who grew less afraid of feminine things as I got older.

My true peaking moment was when I noticed the articles from everyday feminism made absolutely no sense when discussing the female sex.

I think feminine and masculine as concepts should only be applied to objects if not gotten rid of altogether.

These concept have no place when discussing personality and of course personality doesn't determine your sex. You can be a dainty flower loving man or a muscled car loving woman. Continue destroying gender/sex stereotypes sisters! Loving whatever and whomever you wish.

SanityIsGC · 2020-07-21T02:28:45+00:00

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Ambrose · 2020-07-20T23:13:38+00:00

I started reading GC views on Reddit after the JK tweets. I belong to a few FB groups (rhymes with Funz for those in Toronto) which were very pro trans and very SJW (I don't love this word as I think there are valid conversations to be had but these people take it to an extreme sometimes). In any case, a few years ago a trans woman with a penis wanted to go into a Toronto spa and was denied. At the time, I felt she was a woman and should be allowed in (not thinking of what a woman really is as I had been indoctrinated into this way of thinking, if I thought otherwise I would be a Terf, transphobe, terrible person etc).

Anyway, I peaked after reading JKs tweets and researching GC on reddit, reading some actual trans peoples reticle and thoughts on these types of ideas and realizing that it is OK and even healthy to question the status quo. I realized that trans women will never truly be women and that gender has been willfully made to be a confusing thing so that you don't even need to medically transistion in order to be a "woman" or a "man". You can just identify as a different gender.

The lines have totally been blurred and I can't even define a woman at this point since apparently biology means nothing and all you need to do is wear womens clothes grow your hair long and put on some makeup. That, as someone who was born female, is something I cannot get behind.

oofreesouloo · 2020-07-20T14:55:00+00:00

I'm so happy to be here again! I'm pretty new on Reddit and peaked pretty quickly. In my country, things aren't this bad... YET. I hope they won't get worse, but I'm scared. I am a lesbian, as in an actual real homossexual female, and when I joined Reddit, I joined naively actuallesbians because it seemed like a huge lesbian sub. I guess the rest you already know... LESBIANS DO NOT LIKE DICK! I was so angry that day, I thought everyone was crazy lmao. And then, all the offensive terms I heard there for the first time, such as genital preference, the redefinition of homossexuality, the JK Rowling tweets, etc etc. But what made me peak instantly was definitely being in actuallesbians and the claim that lesbians like d*ck. Before, I was pro Trans. Honestly, I've only met irl a few trans people and barely had any contact with them. I didn't even think about Trans people. "Live and let live" was basically how I thought. As long as they respect me and are decent human beings, who cares what they do to their bodies? But you know this isn't what is happening. I instantly peaked in actuallesbians, kept researching and ended up in GC in reddit, and now here! First time in feminist spaces lmao! It's good being here :)

PostmodernJukebox · 2020-07-20T04:28:12+00:00

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Sineadsiobhan · 2020-07-18T20:46:51+00:00

I only peak trans last year. First, when Martina made the comment that she believed that TW had no place in women’s sport, it made me stop and think. I was ambivalent, “Why not, let them be in sports, let them be in women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, etc.” I wasn’t outrageously TRA, I was like, why not and thought nothing of it. Martina put that seed of change in my head.

I forgot about it because although I do admire Martina, she’s not really part of my interests (I do like tennis but I don’t really collect anything relating to it). So I forgot about the issue for a bit (my husband and I agreed with her that TW shouldn’t be in women’s sports and that was that on the issue).

Along came JK Rowling. I love love Harry Potter. I collect Harry Potter (mainly the books). I enjoyed reading The Casual Vacancy and I was getting started on reading Galbraith. My sister-in-law made a post on Facebook that JK Rowling was a transphobe. I was like, “WHAT?”

I was absolutely appalled that Rowling, my literary hero, was transphobic. I sincerely got very upset. I was thinking a million things, then I said, “Wait a second, Rowling is somewhat left of centre. She must have had a reason to have controversial statements. I better check on Twitter.”

“Dress however you please.”

I totally agree with that. How is that transphobic?

“Call yourself whatever you like.”

I agree, how is that transphobic?

And then on. I was like where is the transphobia? I then saw the TORRENT of abuse, rape threats, death threats, misogynist abuse, all sorts of abuse under the sun.

I decided then and there I’m siding with Rowling. Each time she tweeted her later tweets, the TRAs make their case worse and worse.

That was my peak trans. I peaked again with Susie Green’s story. And then I slowly realised what is happening to Desmond is Amazing isn’t good. I started seeing stories in a new light. Everything hit me all at once.

I could say the site that shall not be named added to my peaking experience.

2020GenderCritical · 2020-07-17T19:27:49+00:00

That TRAs weren't just content enough to get GC banned, they are now stalking us here. Creepy behaviour.

Realwoman · 2020-07-17T12:30:36+00:00

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voi_che_sapete · 2020-07-17T00:06:40+00:00

There really is no Peakening story.

I've been interested in feminism for a long time now, since I was an adolescent. Back then, they accepted a meaningful distinction between sex and gender, and trans people generally fully understood a distinction. The process of "transition" was a process of socially integrating into the opposite sex class. And I was fully supportive of good people who felt they must do that. Generally, they seemed to understand that their experience was different from mine, and mine was different from theirs, and that it was OK. We met in the middle ground of current lived experience, battling sexism (if they passed) and homophobia (if they didn't).

Then things started to change. I got dogpiled in a queer forum for not using the word cis correctly. I was astonished that cis suddenly seemed to mean gender identity - instead of "not transitioning." Ironically enough - it was a trans friend of mine who told me what was going on. "You got trans brigaded," she said, and told me she'd observed a shift going on for years.

I was never on board with the word cis, because it never described me. I was never on board, when I discussed gender dysphoria, with people calling me trans. My history of socialization and the perceived sex of my body and the reproductive realities of that body matter. I am just a woman who (like most women) sits uncomfortably with where society has placed me.

I support trans women who are good human beings, and this whole time, I've had trans women who were dear to me, whose perspectives differed from the norm, ostracized from their communities by how virulent that "trans brigade" is. Something went very, very wrong in about 2011, something far beyond a generational changing of the guard. I want to go back to sanity.

No_ · 2020-07-14T09:29:18+00:00

My peaking happened many years ago. More than half my lifetime Ago.

Before the age of 12, trans was just whispers of men who dressed like women, that’s really all i knew about trans stuff. Until an acquaintance came out as trans.

At 12: We were sitting as a group of friends in the hallway of my middle school. A Girl in the group said she was trans, then said that she was now a gay. I was confused since gay meant male x male and female x female. Deep down I knew she had meant gay as in male x male, which I found very homophobic. A male would never date you, I thought. But we weren’t close at all, in fact I can’t remember speaking to her past that one time. So I forgot about it kinda. Trans was just beginning to become a topic spoken about on Facebook, I never forgot that I felt her remark was homophobic. My intro to the trans culture was that it was dilution all young people.

Onto age 14: I was catfished by a male of unknown age who claimed to a 15 year old girl. I had a serious crush on said girl, but was heartbroken to find out it was just a man, someone I’m not actually sexually attracted to.

Age 16: it happened again, catfished. I thought I found a girl with the same interests as me that wasn’t all makeup and pink. I thought I had found a friend I could confide in, but I had found a 13 year old boy pretending to be a 18 year old.

At 18 I spoke up in a lesbian Facebook group about how I wouldn’t want to date a transwoman. I was harassed, called transphobic, called a fetishist, called all sorts of horrible things. Then one of the men said “yeah we know you wouldn’t want to date us but it makes us sad when you say that” I think that moment was when I actually peaked.

At 21 I was yet again catfished by a boy pretending to be a mute girl,

At 22 I tried out identifying as a man at a party but found it weird being called “he” why was I a “he” just because I liked masculine things. I thought it was very misogynistic of me.

I found r/gendercritical that year.

At 23 I had a class with a man pretending to be a woman, he was the first one to class on the first day, I was the second. His nyan cat T-shirt and single dreadlock instantly made me think “oh no, you’re going to be trans huh”. I was right, worse I was right in my assumption he’d be one of the bad ones, but he peaked some people in that class.

I happen to have a very masculine way of dressing, I’m a bitch lesbian after all. I peak every time someone asks me my pronouns due to my androgynous look and favor of masculine clothing and aesthetics. It’s happened too many times.

Sorry if this post is a bit messy, I’m no writer.

yousaythosethings · 2020-07-14T02:13:06+00:00

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Classconsciousness · 2020-07-14T00:47:23+00:00

My bf is a black man. Hes in a city hes not from originally and they're pretty different, highly liberal and elitist. Were not.

Anyways he questioned the blm March there. It didnt look like the one in my city. It wasnt fired up black people marching for their rights or for justice, it was white lgbt people flying lgbt flags under the blm banner. I think it's fine for black and white people to march together, great even, but they were only there for the lgbt part. And he asked why it looked more like an lgbt march than a blm March.

So he gets screamed at by some woman who is non binary and says the following: Black men are notoriously homophobic Black men treat black women bad Black men are sexist He is cis so he is therefore privileged She is non binary and has been historically more oppressed than anyone(yes really)

This woman was white, rich, and highly educated. She was so consumed by the cult of gender personality that she felt it was appropriate to scream at probably the only black man in the entire vicinity of a march for black lives with criticisms all based ON HIS RACE. In her warped worldview of privilege vs oppression she essentially turned into a woke kkk member, prejudging him based on a set of qualities that make black men bad.

I snapped then. I started reading more and it was all the same. "Straight black men are the white people of black people" etc etc. White women are not oppressed. Black people are not oppressed. No one is oppressed except for non binary and trans people with advanced degrees and lovely homes on the coast. It's literally just the same structure of authority as always with pretty words.

Dildo_Swaggins · 2020-07-13T22:31:44+00:00

I was a TIF and wanted to start transitioning, so why not go meet “my community”. First started with the “cotton ceiling” which is just the same kind of whining about being friend zoned. Men get mocked for expecting women to sleep with just for being nice, but when a TIM does it it’s applauded.

Then the TIM who wrote that blog post got heat online for drinking and driving. No joke he tried to call people transphobic saying drunk driving is horrible, because as a TIM not driving drunk would put him in danger??? This is when I realized everything can be transphobic to TRAs. Even trans people who believe you need to have dysphoria to be trans get branded transphobes and are hated by their community for not believing that moon is a gender.

Tumblr and other trans people peaked me out of identifying as transgender, I did not wanted to associated with these people. I still have dysphoria but I’m doing better with dealing with it. I’ve had more peaking, such as this new trend of science denial by claiming sex isn’t real or a spectrum. TRAs have yet to identify the third gamete, there ain’t no one out here producing speggs.

Larmes-Du-Soleil · 2020-07-13T22:06:16+00:00

Charles Clymer coming out as trans. I first met him about 2012-2013 and I was a part of his Equality For Women page on facebook from the beginning. I was friends with him and the mods and had a front row seat to that shitshow. He became known as a misogynist, a creep, an abuser and it seemed like he faded away for a while. Then a couple years later he comes out as Charlotte Clymer and all is forgiven. He's welcomed back with open arms like he isn't the same man who harassed, abused, stalked and silenced women repeatedly.

c3ll0 · 2020-07-13T17:48:19+00:00

My very first peak point was 20 years ago while I was in WLW party in a club. The party was inclusive, so that anyone who identified as woman could attend. It really bothered me that there was one TIM: white, middle aged man, who leered at me. His “feminine” make up and overly revealing clothing made me shiver. I had come specifically to see other women, not guys in dresses. I was fed up with men anyway, not least because of the men that wanted to tell me how to live my life when I was growing up.

I have a very conservative religious background. Because of that I was (and still am) in closet for my parents. I lost most of my relatives and everyone I grow up with just because I wanted to use make up, wear whatever I felt like, color my hair, use contraception… The list goes on. I found a lot of comfort from feminism. It helped through the horrible, dark years being shunned and alone. To no one’s surprise that religious group was led by men. Men hardly had to limit their life, while women were constantly pregnant and taking care of home and babies. The contrast with rest of the society was clear, although back then the whole society was more or less unfriendly towards women. We had and still have it quite good, though – Nordic countries are a good place to be at compared to lot of countries in the world.

Fast forward to couple of years ago. I was trying to attend a libfem environment, thinking it had something to do with the feminism I learned about as a young girl. To my horror they had no interest whatsoever towards recognizing the fact that there are thousands of women living in these closed communities. Leaving almost everything behind is horrible, even though these Christian communities do not actively harass or threat people who leave. This was totally irrelevant from the libfems point of view. It was labelled as something that should not even be talked about. It felt horrible that I could not identify as a feminist anymore.

JKR was the final point of me peaking. I read what she wrote, and it all made sense. After that I found GC and realized just HOW bad things are elsewhere. It makes me so angry that these men think they know what it is to be a woman. It is unbelievable that libfems are praising these abusive people, make it even harder for anyone to speak up.

TRA are attempting to change the legislation here as well. I have started my own little terfing campaign telling people what I know about how it is in the US and Britain. I have “by accident” started to wonder the state of things with some of my friends. The examples have been very eye opening for all of the people I have talked with. Majority of people have no clue about what is going on. Well well, some of them will know soon.

I am overly happy to find actual feminists. Thank you all for being here. Women for women. 😊

Lemonade_Masquerade · 2020-07-13T16:52:01+00:00

I've been over the peak for a while, but since this is a new space I'll share.

The Women's March and the pussy hats.

I'll say I was never very TRAish. Discrimination in medicine and pregnancy/motherhood have always been my pet causes within feminism and it's hard to separate that from biology. But I did think that trans people were this small, niche group of mentally ill people who were just trying to get by. And even when I did see some nonsense about how "TWs are biologically female" I assumed it was some dumb Tumblr teen thing and I figured they'd grow out of it. Because it is just insane! It's so obviously not true I didn't register it as a threat. Maybe I was always "peaked" just unenlightened about the depth of the whole movement. From the first time I heard a story about a man knowing he was a woman because he played with Barbies I couldn't shake the feeling of sexism, but again, mental illness isn't rational and anyway it's not like other men aren't sexist. Anyway...

/2016. A disgusting, oafish, idiot misogynistic narcissist was elected the president over a woman (feelings about her aside, there was a lot of emotion about the first woman president at the time). It was bleak times. Women were angry. Enter the Women's March. I was a little cynical about it at first if I'm honest, but then I saw the waves of pink worldwide. For the first time, women were coming together to celebrate being women. It was pretty touching. Especially because of how depressed I was about the election. But look, here are the women of the world coming together to remind everyone we are here and we have power. "Pussy hats" because of the words of the actual elected president.

Yeah, that couldn't last though. No one wants to see women showing how powerful they are. So all of my "women-friendly" hobby groups started drawing lines in the sand. Pussy hats were transphobic. Talking about abortion or periods in regards to women was transphobic. What? WHAT? Obviously the "pussy" comment was about women? Trump wasn't talking about grabbing TIMs by the girldick? And wait, girl dick? You don't even need to medically transition or even want to transition to be trans? Lesbians are bigots for being lesbians? What is happening? You don't even need to BE DYSPHORIC? Being "cis" is a privilege. You are trying to CALL ME PRIVILEGED for being FEMALE? Kids know their GENDER AT AGE 3? PUBERTY BLOCKERS?

I finally decided to Google "TERF" because of how many people saying completely reasonable things being called out as one. I finally found where all the sane feminists went and haven't looked back.

throwawayfuckreddit · 2020-07-13T08:55:58+00:00

I find something so disgusting that there's highly liked & retweeted posts of trans people saying, "it's transphobic not to date someone because they are trans" and then they go, "no one's saying you have to date us", I do not get this logic.

It's never been explained because it's literally saying, "If you don't date someone because they are trans you are transphobic", because fuck sexualities, all that goes out the door.

They say gentials should'nt matter. WHY. They fight tooth and nail for their sexualities even if they are false ones so fuck everyone elses?

So if a man see's a rare passing transwomen, is attracted but finds out they are trans meaning they have either a dick or no dick, that means he should be like, "Well, I'm attracted if I don't talk to them it's transphobic" even if they are straight? I also don't like the, "If they have a dick, thats different but if they don't then-" No fuck that, does not matter if they are a dickless man or not, they are a MAN. There should be no discussion on rather or not you can pass up on someone when it comes to dating/sex.

The only time there IS discussion is when it's straight men, everytime this comes up in a lesbian space, 9/10 everyone is agreeing that it's transphobic, but when it comes up in a straight /gay space, I've seen them say what they feel.

People generally understand why a straight man would'nt want dick/transwomen, yet can't understand why a lesbian wouldn't? It's a way for men to attempt to shame people into their dating pools, the reason I say "men" because it's always towards transbiens/women. Whenever they do it to men it's universally shut down even if it is a tweet with a lot of likes.

I'm also sick of how racists they are towards black women...or really in general. The things they openly say about black women is vile.

And IT DOES HAPPEN. Stop saying it does not. It happens and it comes from trans people mouths and a lot of people agree with some of the things thats being said.

muomo · 2020-07-12T23:46:19+00:00

I peaked when I watched a transwoman on Youtube's talk about the time he was dating a straight man who didn't know he was trans. Surprise, surprise, when the man found out he was a transwoman with a penis, he was no longer willing to sleep with him. Apparently the guy was super nice about it, politely declined, didn't call him any names, etc. but he's still a transphobe because he wouldn't sleep with a man who has a penis. That shocked me. I mean, MAYBE you could claim transphobe if you didn't still have a penis, but come on. You expect a straight man to want to have sex with somebody who has a dick? Even if the man was bisexual so having a penis wouldn't have necessarily been a deal-breaker, I think we can all agree that being into someone who "looks" like a woman but still has a penis is a specific "preference" (kink).

That just proved to me most of their concerns are about validation. Getting a straight man to sleep with you as a transwoman must be so validating. Almost as validating as getting a lesbian who is a woman herself, to believe you're a woman too so she'll sleep with you. There's a reason they word "trap" is a thing. They literally try to trick people into thinking they're something they're not. Why not be upfront about it from the start? Oh yeah, because then everyone knows you're trans and the validation goes out the window. It's selfish and deceptive.

venecia · 2020-07-12T13:31:38+00:00

If TWAW, how come their go-to when their feelings are hurt is to be violent, threaten you with their dick, and threaten to kill themselves?

We've been taught to anticipate, prepare for, and mitigate wherever possible men's feelings. And this is everything they do when they are hurt.

EvaWumben · 2020-07-12T04:04:50+00:00

Begun as a reply to neveragain: No issues with the length, thank you for saying what I couldn't truly put into words before. When you don't realize you're peaking, then JKR shows up....Same thing here. TERFs are evil horrible people, right? Like you, I think I believed them to be basically the far right in America. I saw the uproar, after thinking her tweet about "people who menstruate" was absolutely hilarious and spot on, then what everyone called her GC manifesto. I didn't disagree. I read it aloud to others who'd previously mocked girls in stories about TIMs in locker rooms as phobes. They agreed. At a certain point, every woman has either gone through enough misogyny that we cannot stand seeing it belittled and appropriated or they're, frankly, enduring Stockholm Syndrome. The simple fact is that I had peaked a bit before, as I simply got sick of TIM friends posting about the horrors of menstrual cramps, and frankly just know these particular people to have horrendous histories of trauma and abuse. And also the obvious fact that they're appropriating suffering of actual women to bolster their delusion.

Ding ding ding. There it was, I had started to refer to myself as an "actual woman". I'd recently met a TIM and the level of trying to almost convert me was strange, actually rather strange. I was seeing more and more of my feminist friends give loads of clout online to those who used TRA language, while honestly leaving behind actual women who have long been activists and feminists, often WOC, because we refuse to put pronouns in our bios. Things went from "it's polite to put pronouns in your screen name or bio" to "What kind of person WOULDN'T?" so quickly. Slowly, even the most non gender related spaces online were invaded by small numbers of young people, usually not even trans, who started insisting on this nonsense. And it is nonsense. Cue JKR. I read. I digested. I'm not as far over as she is, I thought, but I'll check out the study she references and this YouTuber. Ding ding ding again. Really? It was the appropriation of what it means to be a woman. All of it. At first it felt terribly subversive to hear TIM aren't women. But the follow up line, "everyone knows this", yeah. We do. So I began to read about the abuses lesbians were facing. I began to lurk. Truth is, I didn't need to. I know a few people, now in their early 20s, who detransitioned. They're horrified about it. We never spoke aloud that this was socially imposed on them by parents, but we always thought it was. I'd forgotten that, as they're back to IDing as their actual gender now. The final straw and line for me, other than my rights being pushed aside for those of TIM (which has happened to me) was doing this to children. Prepubescent children. With puberty blockers. I ticked every box as a kid for what would now be called persistent gender dysphoria, but I was just a tomboy and recognized as such. I wasn't even treated that weird. Doing this to any children is abuse and horrifying. The knowledge that kids like me are now being asked in schools if they area actually trans, and subjected to medical experiments and psychological torture is too horrifying. Little girls like me are already told our bodies are shameful. Now they're being told it was all a mistake? Their entire BODY? RAGE. I just peaked 5 more times writing this.

-why is the general public not horrified over transing kids? -why are detransitioners attacked and denied media coverage? -why are women being.....never mind, that's old hat, I KNOW WHY BUT STILL -why is the mic being given re: women's issues to TIF on twitter? WHY? WHY does anyone put up with this?

The simple fact is that in the US, the debate has centered around the religious right, and usually people you really just don't want to much associate with in person, who don't value women any more than what is discussed here. A LOT of Americans simply chose the side that wasn't literally the same side of people who protest our rights in almost every other area. I think that was all anyone needed to set this debate in the US, frankly. Yet I meet younger folks who think it's nonsense and are done with it as well. It's a different scene for the Brits I've spoken to, and I'm glad we can sort it out online, love hearing your perspective.

Apologies for pouring that out beginning as a reply, then an mishmash of disjointed gushing, I've just felt very alone without anyone to discuss this with. Hitting full peak during shutdown with only an obviously hostile internet has been....interesting. Till I found this place, and thanks again.

Thanks to whoever put this entire sub up, I saw the link on reddit.

Jksmiddlefinger · 2020-07-12T00:21:20+00:00

Ok so I’m new here but used to lurk on GC frequently on reddit before the ban. My peak trans journey started around 4-5 months ago when I happened to see a post on the AITA? Subreddit where a woman in a domestic violence shelter was asking if she was an AH for feeling triggered and unsafe by having to shower in the same space as pre op TiMs. The overwhelming majority of replies stated she was an AH. I was shocked at the lack of compassion shown to her in their responses. I thought I must be out of touch. Then a few months later I was chatting to a friend who brought up jk Rowling’s tweets, I had no idea what it was about So she explained briefly that JK Rowling was a raging transphobe for mocking the use of Trans inclusive language and then stated that biological sex was a thing. I couldn’t understand what the problem was, surely everyone including the trans community knew this right? But no I wasn’t aware of the radical trans ideology. My friend then started lecturing me on the new inclusive lingo training course she’d been on as part of her work. Cis woman?? Er ok. When pointed out that they couldn’t literally be women she parroted the “what about intersex people?”, What about them? when I pointed out that they had chromosomal or hormonal abnormalities rather than being a third sex she was non plussed as though she hadn’t thought about it beyond a slogan. She then said that she believed in trans rights and that they should be allowed in to ladies bathrooms and we should just get over it.

After that conversation I felt angry as though I’d been attacked and I didn’t know why because we hadn’t argued and she is a well meaning person. I decided to look into things more to try and understand but the more I did the more I fell down the GC rabbit hole. When I mentioned my concerns about transing kids, women’s protections in rape shelters, changing rooms, women’s representation in politics etc to my friend she simply said “do you think you are like this because you’ve had a baby? And because hormones?” Like WTF?? My concerns were just dismissed as hysterics by ... a woman! Now I understood why I was angry; my basic identity and rights as a woman are under attack, worse still from well meaning but slightly ignorant women who think they are feminists doing the right thing! I seriously hit peak trans from then on and have never looked back.

0BCB9A795AE259 · 2020-07-11T21:05:27+00:00

I peaked in an absolute rage just about recently, the bans solidified my rage

I was brought up in a conservative European country, no chances of secularity in any sphere of life. After tomboy childhood, I realised that I am a lesbian once I was about 12. Everything until I was 18yo and moved out was an absolute mess. Dysphoria? How not to feel dysphoric when literally everyone is allowed and entitled to objectify my body and the government holds tight onto convictions like "the skirt was to short, so the rape is excused". Fast forward, I was about 20 and started to participate in women's rights and LGBT organisations. 10 years later, my country of birth is avidly homophobic and misogynistic, no gay rights, abortion is banned and penalised.

I finally managed to get away to a Western country couple of years later. I wasn't politically active as all of my energy was consumed by providing for myself. I would casually browse AL. At first, around 2017, I would notice some sporadic trans lesbians posts and not think much of it, just take it as a technical possibility that this combination might happen. I was rather sympathetic towards their plight, thinking that it must suck to be them. Here I am, in a nice country with LGB rights recognized, rainbow flags everywhere, surely those people have it much worse then I do.

In 2018 I joined a dating app. That was my first experience of LGBT space in over 5 years. I noticed that barely anybody uses the term lesbian, even though I tried my best to match the criteria. I noticed disproportionate amount of trans women, but I thought that's just me being not up to date with current discourse. I operated on an assumption that it must be the next stage of the movement, and that everybody is just smashing the gender shackles. I didn't click on yet. I was incredibly lucky to find a great woman and fall in love happily.

Come the end of 2019, I started to realise that the transbian posts are not an outlier and a part of a bigger debate. I started reading up both sides. Imagine my disappointment, when I realised that instead of smashing gender stereotypes, the libfem movement worked tirelessly to reinstantiate every vile gender stereotype that ever existed. I had been oblivious as fuck. The rage grew ever since. I learned that lesbian "is an umbrella term", that I have a female brain, that I should accept and love dick. Half of this shit is exactly the stuff that I have heard before from extremely homophobic women hating catholic church. I realised there is a clear cut clash or rights. Up to the moment when I emigrated, I would hear that my orientation is a preference. Yet here I am, hearing that again 10 years later. I recognise that I am quite privileged in many spheres, but for fucks sakes how come that in 2020 mentioning women's rights on a lesbian online community is a bannable offence!? Then it was JKR tweets, reddit banwave and now I am catching up with years of obliviety. I lurked on GC, lgbdropthet, TL and was overjoyed that there's a current opposing to this shit. Now it's deplatform. Thanks to the mods for creating this back up. Everything is political, I am reeducating myself on radfem and won't let my guard down again.

loona · 2020-07-11T17:22:26+00:00

Got catfished by a "girl" from the LesbianGamers Discord. They were super flirty, clingy, went for dirty talk only after a few days... Kept asking me for a pic or to hear my voice, but I'm super paranoid when it comes to my physical privacy online. He kept bringing up subtle trans topics that had me questioning him, but I wasn't sure at the time and still thought they were a girl. Finally came out to me after 2 months of talking and I was so pissed they lied to me for that long. I felt so pressured and guilty into accepting them, into starting an online relationship with them (LOL), I kept giving hints that I wasn't really comfortable with all of this and wanted some space but they were so pushy telling me how much they liked me, how we had so much in common etc. I ended up distancing and blocking that person only for them to find a new girl shortly after lmao. Before blocking him, he sent me a really bad picture of himself, his hand covering most of his face and the only thing you can see is an eye and his long hair. Wasn't even taking hormones and had the audacity to tell me he 'passes' which honestly he didnt. I showed my little brother his picture and his first reaction was "That's a guy..."

At the time, I was afraid to be called a TERF because of the negative connotation and I was all for trans rights and equality. I realize now, as nice as he was, this was manipulative as hell. Now they recycle all the lesbian stereotypes like a cosplay for karma and stalk my socials/gaming profiles with the username I associate with; I'm kind of glad my Reddit handle that used the same username was banned so thats one less place he could find me...

After all of that, I started to realize just how many trans woman were actually in all of the lesbian communities I was in. Made me wonder how many other lesbians out there have gone through what I did and feel the same way. I'm not interested in dick. Not interested in neo vaginas. Not interested in male-presenting females or female-presenting males. Never will be. The term cis sounds actually stupid, and the fact that actual women need to be put into a subcategory as 'cis women' is even more stupid. All of the receipts I kept seeing on TerfIsASlur of pushy TRAs trying to guilt lesbians and woman into sleeping with them and the middle-aged anime weirdos at ItsAFetish was what started to peak me.

Dravidian · 2020-07-11T13:39:18+00:00

So I'm new both to GC subs and this one in particular. I read the former reddit sub, along with r/itsafetish etc. For like half a year now. But I'm in very trans positive friend groups and I didn't dare come out in public with any of my doubts, so I shut up until now.

Peak trans was when I was dating a trans woman for the first time. I've dated in the past women who came out as trans men, which had bothered me, because I like women, not men, and I was pissed with the fact I now had to say my first love was a man and not a woman. But beyond that I didn't think much about it, and I had my little spot in the TWAW chorus. Going as far as saying cringe things like "I like everybody except TERFS" as a sexual orientation. Ugh. So I was dating this trans woman, who was, honestly, very sweet and very respectful. It's not at all their character that made me peak, more or less the opposite. As I was dating a trans woman and I didn't want to say bad things or trigger her I went deep into trans culture, trans subreddits, and stuff, to be the wokest I can.

Well let me tell you I really didn't like the fetishist side of it and the sissification and the threats of violence. I'm asexual and I hated how sexualized their attempts at looking like a woman were. I couldn't stand all those bulges in dainty little lingerie and those cute bras and those knee high socks. Gross. And such sterotypes. That's when I realized this was not right. That and the "transbian" fade. Makes my skin crawl. I hate that as lesbians we have to surrender more and more and more space for males in dresses to take it and demand they get in our panties. So that's what made me peak : trying to be more inclusive to my trans gf. It backfired. She dumped me because we were LDR and she wanted to see me constantly and I wasn't interested in that. So no great thing was lost here.

I now finally made an account here after the second wave of reddit bans. If there's a new itsafetish sub on saidit I'd love to have the link.

We have to stay strong.

InattentiveGiraffe · 2020-07-11T13:24:07+00:00

I thought I'd reached my peak trans way back in 2017, when my orientation was called "a genital preference." However, with the recent banning of women-only subs on Reddit, the sh&tstorm on Twitter, and especially the hate JK Rowling gets, it doesn't even feel like peaking anymore - I'm just soaring in the stratosphere perpetually, wondering if this madness ever ends. Thank you people who suggested me to use my resources to warn women in my local Ukrainian/Russian community a year ago; I've done everything I could. Luckily, most have been reasonable, although some had already made up their minds. But now, I just feel tired. I don't care about doxxing, or legal repercussions, or whatever else I may face. I wonder if this TRA bullsh&t is ever accepted where I live, a mostly Christian Russian-speaking community where gays and lesbians are usually demonized. If it is, I guess we'll have the ultimate confirmation that it's only about men's rights, and nothing else. But for now, I'm done. Done with hiding, done with fearing of voicing my opinion. I don't care if I get fired from my office job and have to work as a dishwasher for the rest of my life. We are women, and we have a voice.

terfy_delight · 2020-07-11T13:09:33+00:00

I've already peaked (learning about the cotton cieling did it), but this Reddit banning created a whole new level for me. Blackladies will now ban anyone who posts on Blackgirldiaries. BGD is NOT a GC or anti-trans sub at all, they just won't force users to kiss the trans ring. They've had like two threads criticizing, legitimate criticism at that, a terrible trans person and the trans censoring going on. And that's enough to ban anyone who even posts there. WTF is wrong w/ these people.

cucumber-cat · 2020-07-11T12:33:37+00:00

Working sales in an adult store is what peaked me. I ran into a wide variety of customers, and inevitably some would start trying to push me to respond sexually to them while I was just trying to do my damn job. After a particularly uncomfortable encounter, I realized the TIM I had been trying to help was behaving EXACTLY THE SAME as all the other men who had gone out of their way to make me uncomfortable at work, with the added bonus of “but I’m a woman” when they insisted on prying my irrelevant sexuality out of me. Tons of previous encounters all clicked into place in my head right then, and I peaked.

astro_terf · 2020-07-11T05:33:04+00:00

My peak trans story: I was on Reddit defending the right of a head scarf wearing Muslim woman to request a female instructor after being matched with a trans woman instructor for swimming lessons. When I said that the Muslim woman student needed a same sex instructor because she was going to be in a relative state of undress I was told I was a bigot and a transphobe.

I tried to explain that from the student's perspective a trans woman is like a third gender or hijra, and that her views should be respected even if they don't match up to binary views of gender in the USA. To which one person asked if I would have supported her right to refuse a butch lesbian as an instructor.

I said I would support her on the grounds that this was all about bodily autonomy, cause you get to exclude a personal instructor for any reason, but that it was homophobic as well, since this instructor is female and her presentation and sexual orientation doesn't undermine her clear femaleness, after which I was labelled a TERF ( I wasn't sure what that term meant at the time) and that began my rapid ascent to peak trans.

Also now that I think about it, who knows if the trans women there were making the assumption that I was homophobic and were using the butch lesbian example as a 'gotcha'

EvaWumben · 2020-07-11T04:41:57+00:00

I peaked. I peaked so hard it was like a wave of tightly repressed rage poured out simultaneously with my severe happiness and pride at being a woman. I'm not on forums or much, but thanks for having me. Too shy to share, hope that's ok.

worried19 · 2020-07-11T04:24:09+00:00

I feel like I've finally peaked. I've been GC-leaning for years, but fuck it. I may as well identify as full GC considering everyone in the world has lost their damn mind and any form of moderation is now considered evil.

What initially inspired me to lurk GC about 4 years ago was that I was fed up with pro-BDSM rhetoric on Reddit. GC was the only sub I could find that called out sexual dehumanization and degradation of women. I thought you guys were wrong and hateful about trans issues at first, but I continued lurking for posts about BDSM and other radical feminist topics and was essentially "converted." At the same time, I started to lurk 4thwavenow and learned about all the worrying cases of toddlers and preschoolers being transitioned, and the dramatic rise in young girls disavowing their biological sex.

I still consider myself a moderate person and have no problem at all with adult old-school transsexuals. I'm happy to use their preferred pronouns, but I'm fucking upset and scared by how extreme activists have apparently taken over the entire world and squashed dissent, both inside and outside of the trans community. It's like something out of a George Orwell nightmare. I worry for the future of highly GNC children and teenagers, especially girls. I can only hope the bubble will burst soon. At the moment, you can't even say you are against minors being given hormones and surgeries without being labeled "the enemy."

dancindrudge · 2020-07-11T04:19:22+00:00

When this happened in 2015 I started questioning the T movement - "Caitlyn Jenner at Women of the Year Awards: I Never in a Million Years Thought I’d Be Here." I am a Lesbian who was supportive to the Trans but 90's trans are not today's trans at. all. It was about a year ago on /gendercritical where a Lesbian had told a story of how a T got her into the bedroom(mutual) and didn't disclose having a penis. The T then guilted her in to sucking him off because it was a "Ladydick". I was done, no more support. I just keep on re-peaking. ugh

Jurrymaker · 2020-07-11T02:15:53+00:00

One of my most recent peaks was a few months ago on a mainstream lesbian forum on reddit. A very young looking tim posted a selfie of himself in extremely revealing lingerie. I scrolled down to the comments and saw a comment from a new user saying she's new to reddit but has been an out proud lesbian over 40 years. She asked if the post was a joke or has "lesbian" come to mean something completely different. Tim replied to her saying, she's disgusting and to gtfo of that lesbian sub because she's obviously not a real lesbian and doesn't belong there.... Yup, a nearly naked teenaged boy told a 60 something y.o. actual lesbian that she's not a real lesbian. He got over a thousand upvotes. She got downvoted into negative numbers and permanently banned.

bella_rosa · 2020-07-11T00:48:16+00:00

I'm new to saidit! I hit peak trans years ago, when Laverne Cox started agitating for a mtf named Synthia Blast to be released from jail because he was MTF.. but the dude had raped and killed a little girl. I jumped off the gender train and said hell no. Even though I do not consider myself a feminist, I'm proud to be a terf.

2020GenderCritical · 2020-07-10T23:06:23+00:00

I don't think I can peak more, but I always do.

My peak this time is reflecting on the way TIMs are behaving. They are behaving the way that men have always behaved towards women (their attitude towards women isn't original), they silence women, try and define us, try and erase us - erase our biology, words and existence. These are all things men have always done towards women. Despite TIMs insisting they always are women, they are acting in a way that men have typically always acted towards women.

houndoom · 2020-07-10T22:08:23+00:00

So I peaked even more this past week. Apparently some TRAs attacked a black woman in her apartment by some TIMs on Twitter. Person attacked was @givingsapphire. TRAs are declaring that black women are beasts, couldn't possibly be women, etc., so I don't give a shit about it anymore. Black men are saying she deserved that shit. The people that attacked her made their Twitter's private, but the names are somewhere on Sapphire's profile. I'm a black lesbian and I'm tired of this shit.

neveragain · 2020-07-10T14:30:22+00:00

In retrospect, I've been peaking slowly over the course of the past few years. But this time I've broken the tree line on this mountain of ridiculousness and I can actually see the horizon. Oh my god. I'm writing this more for myself to think over everything, and I apologise for the length. (In fact I'm really, really sorry about how long this is, I don't expect anyone to read through it all.)

My observations on the TRA/gender ID movement have been piecemeal through the years. I was 100% on board with trans rights over a decade ago, when the narrative as I understood it was something like, "biological sex is real, but gender is a social construct, we should break down these constructs and support trans people who are at the forefront challenging restrictive social norms." It made sense; trans people had dysphoria, which sounded horrible, and they deserved support.

Then after a few years when Tumblr really took off I started hearing about the (in)famous list of genders that one could now supposedly be. I skimmed through the list and thought it was pretty silly, but the people participating in this seemed to mostly be teenagers, and I remembered very well my own teenage years struggling with identity and latching on to words and labels that I thought could clarify my sense of self. We all go through it, I thought. Let the teens have their galaxy-genders or whatever. In a few years they'd grow out of it; I didn't think this would really leave Tumblr.

But they didn't grow out of it, and it grew far beyond Tumblr.

To be fair, you don't really see many galaxy-genders nowadays. Instead it's coalesced into enbies, and genderqueer, who all fell under the trans umbrella. Everyone else was now to be labelled "cis". I was made to understand at first that this simply meant "not trans", but then later learnt that it actually denoted someone whose gender identity conformed with what they were "assigned" at birth. This made me a bit confused, because I honestly couldn't see how this new wave of trans folk could feel so comfortable labelling everyone else as gender conforming. I didn't really see how my own lived experience as a woman was so different from a nonbinary person's -- everything seemed to be based on aesthetics and feelings, like your gender was determined by how you felt about what sort of clothes you should wear that day. This was so confusing. I've never dressed in the stereotypical feminine way, and I didn't understand why it mattered so much. At this point some of my friends online also started questioning their gender identity, with a few adopting "they/them" pronouns. Their reasoning seemed to be that they were not comfortable with being treated like women, and that they didn't feel like one. Again, confusion for me. What on earth did 'feeling like a woman' mean?? I must be missing something, I thought. I should educate myself.

Later, while looking into drama about neo-pronouns, I became aware of division in the trans community. Some trans people were saying you needed dysphoria to be trans, and some were saying that you didn't. Wait, what? You didn't? Oh. Apparently now all that was needed was self-identification. If you felt more "comfy" as another gender, then you were that gender. Right, okay. I was trying to come to terms with this when I started seeing stories of parents pushing children to transition because the kid liked playing with dolls more than trucks, or something. This was alarming to me, and when I tried to educate myself further on the topic I found again this division of truscums vs tucutes. The tucute narrative was entirely against gatekeeping, and their enthusiasm for children to be put on hormone blockers and eventually HRT seemed to be based on the argument that these children were being given the opportunity to be better looking, 'passing' adults. This did not seem to be good reasoning to me, but the TRA movement was very, very vocal about female brains stuck in male bodies (but what? wasn't dysphoria now unnecessary?) and insistent that even small children would be aware of this.

And then along came the JKR saga. There were whispers that she was a TERF. To be honest I didn't pay it a lot of mind to begin with, when it was just something about her liking the wrong tweet. Later, she made a tweet that supposedly fully outed her TERFy ways. I read the tweet and thought the line about sleeping with anyone who'll have you was a little condescending in tone, but the way social media reacted, you'd think she'd commited the most heinous of crimes.

I started getting real curious, because I knew (knew!) that TERFs were bad people, but what were the TERFs saying? I found the subreddit and had a read. And I'm sorry to say that I didn't get it. The sidebar had something about breaking the chains of gender, but to my understanding that was what the trans movement was trying to do. Right? All these new gender identities and self-ID into whatever people felt like was about everyone breaking free from their chains, supposedly, so what on earth was GC talking about?

JKR came back to tweet some more, which I was alerted to by some friends, who filled my feed with screencaps and derisive captions. I went to read JKR's tweets, and here's the thing: I knew enough about TRA ideology at this point that I could see exactly where JKR was offending them, but I also didn't disagree with what JKR was saying. A lot of impossible mental gymnastics would be necessary for me to believe that biology is some sort of mystical thing that doesn't really exist and/or something that we humans having no understanding of. I'd come across the whole "intersex people exist so therefore trans! fluidity!" argument before and hadn't ever found it very convincing, and didn't think trans people needed it as an argument in the first place.

I went back to the GC subreddit, and it just so happened that at this point there was a highly upvoted post with a lengthy explanation about biological essentialism, how GC thinkers viewed it, and how other people thought GC thinkers viewed it. I really want to thank the author of that post, which is now sadly gone in the purge, because it explained things clearly for me. I guess you could say that JKR peaked me, but really I think it was this post in particular. It set off a bit of an avalanche.

I've been reading as much as I can ever since. More than I ever have on this topic. What trans people are saying. What GC thinkers are saying. What LGB people are saying. And I discovered a lot of things that I had previously not been aware of or had not fully understood:

TRAs will say they are not denying the reality of biological sex when directly confronted about this, despite huge evidence to the contrary. Different TRAs will have different talking points, but what it essentially boils down to is that biological reality is inconvenient and incompatible with the TWAW assertion, and so therefore must be eradicated through pseudo-science or just thoroughly ignored if one is to have a politically correct conversation.
AGP. I'd heard about AGP through a Youtube video before. The youtube video in question presented AGP as a bad theory without basis, which I took at face value at the time. Now I have been reading accounts by AGP males, who definitely exist in considerable numbers, and this has been eye-opening.
The whole girldick narrative. Trans people when confronted by how rapey this is would always backtrack and say that of course they would never violate consent boundaries, and that if you didn't want to sleep with a specific trans person you were well within your rights! Except if you look deeper into this (which I finally did), lesbians who did not want girldick were transphobic, were all sorts of things. Good god, the rape threats on social media by trans women, written using reference to their dicks which they're supposedly so sensitive and dysphoric about.
Bisexuality and homosexuality now being transphobic. I've tended to think of myself as bi (though I've only to date had relationships with other women, but that's another story), and at this I was truly astounded. I've never been that involved in LGBT communities ... when did this bizarre shift even happen.
Intrusion into women's spaces, physically and linguistically. For some reason this narrative is usually centred on the bathroom debate. But bathrooms are only a tiny part of what is going on. TRAs will scoff at the idea that TWAW and the relentless validation of trans women has real costs for bio women. "We're just updating the language to be more inclusive, no one is saying cis women can't talk about their experiences!" Except this is a blatant lie. See what is going on over at Reddit, for one. See what is going on in DV shelters. See what is happening to lesbians. Everything that reminds AGP trans women about their biological reality as males must be colonised.

As far as I can see anyone on social media who does not want to be dogpiled must stay silent. TRAs when confronted with evidence of their own terrible behaviour will first gaslight you by saying that's not what's happening (i.e. no one is saying biological sex isn't real! no one is sending rape threats to women!) and then when that fails they will call you transphobic, at which point it is acceptable to burn you at the stake.

Again I'm sorry for the length. I'm just really -- I don't even know. Seriously. What the fuck. What the fuck.

100_percent_truth · 2020-07-10T12:24:11+00:00

This is an amazing pek trans thread for a handy list of 25 reasons. https://twitter.com/Athers1977/status/1281180230338719745?s=19

lairacunda · 2020-07-10T06:59:02+00:00

This is not my PeakTrans story:

https://genderheretics.org/index.php/2020/07/01/i-hit-peaktrans-by-treating-transgender-sex-offenders/

reddit_migrant_69 · 2020-07-09T18:09:45+00:00

I thought I had fully peaked when the endometriosis support subs and groups began to use gender neutral language in an effort to be more inclusive. 99% of endo sufferers are female and fine with being addressed as such, so I thought this rule was unneeded and shifted the focus to dysphorians rather than endometriosis.

Then reddit decided it's totally fine for trans people to say things like "cishet are such scum" and "punch TERFs" while receiving a baby shield (trans peeps are soooo vulnerable, shhh don't get mad at them, let them say whatever they want and don't say anything back). It's like they're children, we have to play along with everything they say, and always forgive their hatred because they don't know any better.

What the hell? How far will we have to regress before more people wake up?

lepus_alleni · 2020-07-09T17:44:13+00:00

For me, the beginning was two years ago, with male athletes competing in women's sports. I went down the rabbit hole to GC land and realized the extent to which males were taking over female spaces, and silencing women's voices. Horrified during my journey, I kept reaching new and higher mountains in the Peak Trans Range. I don't think the process is ever finished. It doesn't matter how much you hit peak trans, there will always be something more misogynistic around the corner. Right now I'm primarily concerned with how much they control political and social discourse. The Purge is a great example of that, as is the Twitter outrage to the Harpers letter. I thought idpol would go away with COVID-19, but now it's just gotten worse. It really is looney that people think males can be females. Absolutely ridiculous.

Syphii · 2020-07-09T15:18:15+00:00

I peaked trans in high school (early 2010s) when multiple friends of mine started identifying as transmen after becoming obsessed with yaoi from tumblr. I've never been comfortable with porn of any type so I didn't get into it. They all were able to get onto hormones within a few months of socially transitioning at school, and last I checked one had a double mastectomy at 18. Most are now 'non-binary' or de-transitioned now.

My most memorable experience with a TIM was during college and I posted on r/GC about it years ago. I was taking a Women and Gender studies class, and my professor only focused on trans theory because her pre-teen son was a TIM. So she had her friend (also a TIM) come into class one day to 'educate' us on what being trans is like. Overall description: He was in his 50s, wearing a mini skirt and heels (over 6ft tall), blue eye shadow and bright lipstick, bald (wearing a wig), with a slight beard. Classic Autogynephile.

He talked about how he was secretly a lesbian with his wife at home and he was a stereotypical macho man at his job as a manager in construction work. He never planned to come out at work because he enjoyed doing this in his private life only (he said this himself). I was already radfem at the time, so I was constantly sharing the 'wrong' thoughts the entire course (mentioning how puberty blockers would sterilize children, the negative effects of SRS, social contagion for being trans). Of course, my prof said none of what I said was true so hopefully the other students looked it up for themselves. This same prof asked me how I was born since I mentioned that my mother is lesbian and married to a woman. It was hilarious since a bunch of other students jumped in to explain how lesbians can have kids and were shocked she didn't know considering the course she was teaching... We learned zero things about women's rights or anything about women in that class.

LoganBlade · 2020-07-09T04:47:44+00:00

Reading these stories on the old r/GC snapped me out of the trans mindset and I got a non-transgender therapist and recovered. 10x happier now. Thanks GC.

b_butler1991 · 2020-07-09T02:56:07+00:00

I peaked a while back but missed my chance to post on the old sub.

Honestly, I’ve grown up in a very conservative (read: racist, sexist, homophobic) area and when I went to college, naturally, all those prejudices I grew up with were called into question. I became much more liberal and a lot of the changes to my thinking were overall positive. However, in my rush to pull away from my right-wing roots I sort of missed the exit. I became a big fan of tumblr (first mistake) and started seeing a lot of LGBTQ+ and it all looked great.

(As a side note I found the term Asexual and got really excited about that because, “Hey, I’m not the only one!” So, that sucked me in more. LGBdroptheT has since humbled me a lot, but I still like having a label for how I felt so I was sympathetic to the ‘alphabet soup’)

I admit TWAW and TMAM never really rang true to me and GNC sounded a little silly, but I attributed it to ingrained homophobia and intolerance and didn’t listen to that little voice. Fast forward a few years and I’m back in the real world. Now this part is not entirely my story, more my friend’s, so I’ll keep it vague. My friend gets married, she and her husband are my Sunday School teachers. I was one of her bridesmaids. It was all rainbows and butterflies. Then, three years later, they get divorced.

Turns out, he likes to cross-dress in secret, which my friend could have lived with (she was hoping he’d get counseling and he would stop, idk) but the cross-dressing started escalating instead of deescalating like she hoped. Apparently, he would switch between “I just like dressing this way” and “I want to be a woman.” At first I thought he was just a closeted transgender and my Christian friend just didn’t understand that. I respected that she couldn’t live with it, though, and that she wasn’t attracted to him anymore. But I was still sympathetic toward him even though I didn’t really speak to him after that.

Then, my friend started talking more about how he acted when he would do his cross-dressing and long story short, that’s when I did some research and found out about autogynephilia and the old GC sub. That cracked the surface to me realizing not everything trans people said about ‘gender’ was gospel. To try and make this story even shorter, that’s when Rachel Dolezal happened (I actually watched that documentary with the same friend) and I recognized A LOT of what she said matched what TRAs claimed.

But she was a crazy person to think she could just switch race because of a feeling.

I swear, the moment I snapped was when I was desperately looking for some explanation of why trans people were different from Dolezal and I watched a video of an MtF saying almost verbatim what Dolezal preached and then the words, “I am living my truth. Rachel Dolezal is lying.” HOW??? Please, make it make sense???

You can’t, because it doesn’t.

So, that’s my story. It’s not that exciting but it was weirdly therapeutic to write it out. I’m so glad this space exists (and that the old space was there when I needed it) or I’d have thought I was going nuts.

stitchedlamb · 2020-07-08T18:44:23+00:00

Same background as a lot of you-initially a TRA just because I believe in bodily autonomy for everyone (still do, but not to the detriment of natal women). I mean, if someone genuinely believes they were born in the wrong body and were shamed by their genitals and wanted to change that to the best of their ability, why not help ease their pain?

And THEN I found out the shocking revelation that not only was dysmorphia no longer a thing in trans ideology, but that there was a group of people calling old school/original trans folks "truscum". Really? Scum for...believing in the literal definition of transsexual? Ok then. Of course then there was the sly move from transsexual to transgender, and I realized a lot of these transwomen pushed gender stereotypes to the nauseating extreme: "teehee, I love wearing summer dresses and putting on nail polish, I'm such a woman, aren't I?" Most of it was coming from dudes who were obsessed with anal sex/their dick, and I just could not reconcile the trans ideology I sympathized with to these weird guys that just wanted to show the world their dicks in the name of social justice.

Fuck. That.

Of course, the forcing women out of sports and positions of authority while policing our language is just icing on the shit cake. Oh, don't forget the rapey rhetoric, the transitioning of children, and the homophobia! We've worked long and hard for our rights, our spaces, and our dignity, and I'll be damned if a bunch of obese dudes with stringy hair and their handmaidens on Twitter take us back a century.

endless_assfluff · 2020-07-08T18:39:34+00:00

So I've always been a little gender non-conforming, respect the struggles people go through, and used to think referring to someone by their preferred pronouns was a no-brainer if it made them happy. I work in STEM and have seen at least a dozen people transition; never thought worse of them for it. I can still empathize with their pain.

The first exposure I had to transgenderism was when I was in college. I'm a bisexual woman and was only looking to date women at the time. When I learned about trans people, I changed my dating pool to be more inclusive, and said I was looking to date women and trans men. It didn't even take a week before someone shamed me for being discriminatory. I very reluctantly told people I would be open to dating trans women. On top of that, I also shied away from dating trans men because I admitted to myself that I saw them as the sex they were born as, which I felt was unfair to them.

That's when I should have peaked. Instead, I continued to buy into the TRA claims for ten years, and, because I have so much experience dealing with hardship, emotionally supported multiple people who struggled with gender dysphoria. I should say at this point that most of the trans or nonbinary people I knew were women. And I did go through a phase like that in college in response to sexual abuse: I bound my breasts, cut my hair short and dressed in more masculine clothes because I didn't want men to find me attractive, so I got where they were coming from. That being said, I don't approve of threatening violence against people who don't share your beliefs and I recognize that labeling ideas as TERF-y is ad hominem, so I was never in the crowd of people telling lesbians to choke on girl dick, thank heavens.

Halfway into those ten years, I met a very awkward man from my graduate program. It seemed like this person needed a friend; I have a high tolerance for awkward because I used to have trouble socializing myself (see 'abuse,' above) and do have many of those stereotypically nerdy hobbies (not everyone had patience for that. Mathematicians are generally less dorky than people think). At some point I suspected this person was developing feelings for me. I'm not attracted to this person at all, so at some point I let it slip that while I was in an open relationship, I was only interested in dating women.

His eyes lit up.

From then on, he made a beeline for me at every department event. Outside of work and research, his conversations with me were restricted to anime, video games, and lesbian relationships. I never liked anime because the infantilizing portrayal of women rubbed me the wrong way, so I asked him at one point to not say the words "cute anime girls" in my presence. And to stop making every conversation about lesbians, because what the hell, dude. (It's worth noting that if I mentioned a straight or gay male couple, this person would flat-out not respond and steer the conversation to be about lesbians again.)

About two years ago, he took me aside and asked me, "Do you think I would look cute as a girl?"

So you can guess what happened next: I supported him unconditionally, listened to everything he had to say about his transition, even when it rubbed me the wrong way and I didn't want to admit it. Skipping ahead, they started pushing more and more boundaries, including grabbing their breasts and genitals in front of me and asking repeatedly about my porn habits. I took this person aside and asked them to please not talk about anything sexual in front of me, that it was making me uncomfortable. He was very upset about this, and not for my sake. Not because one of his closest work friends felt alienated and tense around him.

Then my spouse made a comment that would set me down the GC path: "I'm skeptical when one of these introverted tech guys decides they're a woman. I always wonder what their understanding of femininity is based on."

I'm quite into epistemology, so this spoke to me. How can someone who wasn't born as a woman know what being a woman feels like? It's impossible. It struck me that when people choose to transition, their impression of femininity cannot possibly come from experience (even if you buy into TWAW, they spent their whole life before that living as a man). It has to come from some external source. And for this person, that source was very obviously anime, video games, and lesbian porn. That's when I learned about autogynephilia. And then the floodgates opened.

This all happened months before JKR spoke up. By that time, I was a hardened radfem, lurking on GC and LGBdroptheT every day. Lurkers, it's not that I have no compassion for GNC people. I was GNC myself. My best friend had top surgery. Heck, I have TIM colleagues who I still think are perfectly lovely people and never gave me crap about anime lesbians. It's not that I haven't heard the TRA arguments. I spent ten years buying into the TRA arguments. It's that a negative experience pushed me to examine my own beliefs, and once the they-aren't-hurting-anyone veil was lifted, it became strikingly obvious how contradictory the transgender movement is. It's not that I'm a stupid idiot woman who doesn't understand Logic™ and Reason™; I'm a professional logic-and-reason user to the point where I have a fancy gender-neutral title for it and gladly put the search for truth above my own ego, which is why I'm here. I'm not filled with hate, I'm filled with pain. The only time I've felt discriminated against or targeted as a same-sex-attracted woman was in the context of transgender people ordering me to prioritize their self-identification over my own sexual preferences. (But I also get that I'm bisexual, not a lesbian, and will not invade lesbian spaces. Not going to whine about it either.)

I didn't act until the gun was pointed at me, and I'm sorry.

braincollected · 2020-07-08T17:16:01+00:00

Hi! My peaking was a long time ago but I had never sought out a community before discovering r/GenderCritical about two or three months ago. In my early twenties (28 now) I had a Tumblr account and I spent a lot of time digging in there, I had just accepted that I was bisexual and was looking to feel like part of a community, tbh I mostly reblogged memes, nothing too serious, but of course most if not all of the people I followed were TRAs. At first it all seemed pretty reasonable for me, "trans people just want to pee" etc, but the more time I spent there and looked at some arguments the less they made sense to me. I first noticed the trend of TiMs saying that they knew they were trans because when they were children they liked pink/dresses/other "girly" things. This didn't sit right with me as I grew up being bullied for having "boyish"/nerdy interests (obviously this was the 90s and being a nerd wasn't anywhere near cool) and also for being non-conforming to some degree (think long hair and does some basic make-up sometimes but doesn't own any high-heels or dresses/skirts type) and I really struggled with my self-steem during that time, I even had a pretty cringy "not like other girls" phase until I actually met and spent time with other girls who were like me and other girls who weren't like me but were cool either way and I dealt with all the internalized misoginy that made me think that "girly" things were inferior anyway. It took me so long to finally say and believe "I am a woman and I can be, dress, and do whatever I want" that the fact that now people going back to enforcing gender stereotypes was gross to me. Although I didn't partake in Tumblr discourse I would often read the replies and just like that started visiting radfem blogs, "just to see what the other side thinks" I would say lol. It felt almost illegal reading these but they made so much sense! Eventually I left Tumblr but the cognitive dissonance followed me, and only kept getting bigger until I couldn't stand it anymore. Trans in sports, "you don't have to have dysphoria to be trans", kids being transed (esp. the whole Jazz Jennings stuff), Caitlyn Jenner, all of these just kept confirming what I already knew but didn't want to accept. Honestly I always considered myself a feminist but in a kind of vague "of course we are being opressed and of course I want that to change" way which I now realize was pretty useless and may have contributed to the state of affairs we have now. Finding this community was vital in my desire and possibility to achieve a more educated state through radical feminist theory. I thank you and I hope to continue to visit this sub frequently, keep informed and take action.

Yellowlamp · 2020-07-08T12:02:08+00:00

My Peak Trans story is similar to other people who peaked after JKR tweets. I've always heard she was a TERF and hated trans people and of course I was dissapointed with her for that. Fuck TERFS, right? When the now famous " I'm sure there used to be a word for those people" tweet appeared on my timeline I rolled my eyes. Then I wanted to read all the non-sense she had to say... and it made sense. All the information I had about how hateful she was came from TRAs and when I actually read and analysed what she wanted to say it clicked with me. Like someone who discovers that one of their friends is actually a bad person, I started to see red flags in the past that I was trying to ignore and the dissonance in my mind dissapeard.

My "truth": "Kids should be allowed to transition if they say they want to be the opposite gender". Dissonance: The fact that when I was 5, if someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply "a boy". I believed that for a while, but I grew out of that. What if my parents decided that I was trans because of that?
My "truth": "If a lesbian only wants to have sex with vaginas she's a transphobe". Dissonance: I am a lesbian. I don't like penis. The only way to be able reject penis in the TRA world I was living in was saying you have a trauma (eg being raped). So I pretended I had a trauma (without details, just said I had a past trauma with penises so that's why I wouldn't be comfortable with having sex with it) to be able to be left alone about this issue. Then I realised I don't have any trauma, I just DON'T LIKE PENISES. What if I had to justify I don't like men with a trauma? I'm just not into them and that doesn't make a androphobe.
My "truth": as long as you feel like a woman, you are a woman. Dissonance: But as biologist, I know sex and gender identity are completely different. That "if you are a trans woman then your body is a females body" thing didn't make sense. You can change, defy, deny or ignore gender, but you can't change sex. I thought that was obvious, but some TRA are sending people to learn basic biology. And here I am, with a degree in biology and a career in a medical field not able to speak because I can be cancelled for that. Also, the fact that a trans woman has been socialized as a male so they will never understand what it is being born and educated a woman. Like that lady who pretended to be black and was rejected by the black community. I hundred per cent agreed with the black community on that matter but then somehow I felt that the same argument for trans people would made me a transphobe so I had to hide it deep down in my brain.
My "truth": saying this or this is transphobe. Dissonance: I have to be really careful with what I say now. If you accidentally say something that is considered transphobe, instead of being corrected, they bully you and even send you death threats. I still believe in treating people with the pronouns they prefer, but having to be careful with language ALL THE TIME or otherwise you risk everything is exhausting.
My "truth": trans women should compete in women sports. Dissonance: I agree with this if is recreational, I play a team sport where we have a trans woman and a nonbinary person (born male) and I couldn't give a fuck cause where just having fun. But in professional sports, especially those where going through male puberty changes the body permanently, it's not fair. I don't belive that hundreds of men will transition to win in women competitions, but there are enough trans women in sports to make this a concern.

This is too long so I'll stop here, but I feel FREE now. Not having to constantly fight with what I'm supposed to believe and what I actually believe is liberating. My friends are all in the LGBT community or allies so right now I can't "come out" as GC, but I hope there will be a day where this doesn't make you lose your friends and maybe your job.

emissch · 2020-07-08T02:44:24+00:00

Before peaking (B.P.) - I was neutral to mildly supportive of TRA. A couple view points I had:

I thought trans was about the same thing as a sexual orientation where the movement had similar goals and objectives to LGB and should be considered as the same
I thought conservatives were all up in arms over nothing due to bigotry/homophobia regarding that bathroom bill in North Carolina a few years ago. I thought what's the big deal with bathrooms if they just want to pee and leave?
I thought all transwomen were essentially gay men, just like in Orange is the New black, right?! What's wrong with transwomen in women's prisons if they are just like Laverne Cox!
I had a live and let live libertarian approach to trans. "I don't really give a shit what you do" etc

After Peaking (A.P.) - these were my following realizations:

Autogynephilia, "transbians" and the cotton ceiling. Learning about these things (I think it was cotton ceiling first) truly threw me for a loop and made me rethink the whole thing. I think I went from viewing TIMs as nonthreatening gay guys to horny straight dudes who want to invade women's spaces for sexual gratification. If only more female TRAs realized this. they would start viewing these men as the threats they inherently are.
TIMs in women's sports, Joe Rogan and the Fallon Fox fiasco. Joe Rogan actually caused me to peak when he went on a well reasoned rant about Fallon Fox breaking the skull of a woman during a fight and not disclosing he was a male.
the fact that trans "feelings" of being a woman is born from the most shallow and offensive stereotypes of women.
Stories of parents medically transing kids or "influencing" gay kids into being trans. The obvious homophobia of that caused me to peak once again.
the over the top language policing, death threats, authoritarian behavior and hyperbolic drama "misgendering is literal violence!!1"

I'm sure there are more but these are just off the top of my head.

Literallyawoman · 2020-07-07T22:06:08+00:00

I began skimming r/gendercritical only a few weeks before it was banned. Reddit is where I first learned to hide that I was a woman online because it attracted harassment. I was all for “trans women are women” before JKR. I felt like I had woken up in an alternate reality and truly couldn’t identify with friends who I’d always shared common ideology with. I couldn’t for the life of me see what was transphobic about her tweets. But I recognized what was happening when people I formally respected were calling for her to be erased from history.

I realized I’d been tired of the virtue signaling for a few years now. I’m not straight but I’ve never come out as bi because I detest people who fetishized bisexuals or used their own sexuality as a platform for attention seeking. I don’t give a shit what your pronouns are I’ll gladly use them, I still got yelled at by a stranger for calling them “dude”. The PC policing of language is out of control.

I’ve lost a family member to the trans cult- they have severe mental health issues and think becoming a man will solve them. They regularly give the only people in our family reaching out to them shit because we won’t finance them 100% because they’re trans. The victim mentality is unreal and attracts toxic and controlling people into their life but I can’t interfere because everything I say or do is as a privileged cis white woman to them.

It reminds me of having impoverished friends who only sought to bring me down when I started a new job, and stopped drinking so much with them. They spewed absolute vitriol at me for breaking the cycle of self pity and failure they chose to wallow in.

That’s how I truly feel about gender politics on the whole, a bunch of people realizing it’s not only easier but you get a chemical high off of screaming and policing others and crying to yourself and your echo chamber about how hard you have it instead of working on what you can actually change in your life to better yourself and your circumstance. I think a lot of people are going to wake up to the fact that “transgender rights” is being used to silence women, females, and males, men’s rights, and fucking anyone who is comfortable with who they are and doesn’t feel it’s right to demand other humans find them attractive or want to fuck them.

radstagdoe · 2020-07-07T19:51:48+00:00

Hi, I’m very new here. Like, JKR’s tweet-new here. I am still familiarizing myself with all the preferred terminology (gee, I seem so nervous to say the wrong word…wonder where that came from?!), so please excuse me if I make an errors. I’m still learning, still developing my feelings and knowledge on the subject.

I’ve always considered myself a trans ally. I know that I must’ve uttered the phrase, “trans women are women” (though, strangely, never felt pressured to assert that “trans men are men”, which seems to be the norm). I didn’t really have a problem with the idea of a trans woman using the same changing space or bathroom as myself. I didn’t think too deeply about it. When J.K. Rowling first tweeted re: “People who menstruate? Wasn’t there a name for that?” I sort of laughed it off. I thought, what’s the harm in making the distinction? What’s the harm in using this ‘inclusive’ language?

Then the shit hit the fan… legions of TRAs attacking her online. The Harry Potter subreddit was overtaken by dramatic trans individuals vowing the throw away their books, burn their HP paraphernalia, and to get their Deathly Hallows tattoos covered. Calling JKR “Voldemort”. Wishing violence on her. Allies in the HP sub said things like, “if your head cannon includes Hermione and Ginny being MtF, I SEE YOU. YOU ARE VALID.” Hmph, I thought. Why can’t Hermione and Ginny just be badass women? Biological women. NATAL women (I quite like that term).

Then JKR doubled down with her essay on the subject. I started reading it with the expectation that I’d come to realize she actually is ‘transphobic’, and perhaps off her rocker. Out of her depth. However, as I read…it made sense. It put into words some nagging feelings I’d started to have myself, feelings inspired by the behavior of TRAs in many online forums. She was putting into words the feelings of being pushed out of my own space, space in which there was already scarcely enough room for myself and my young daughter in. Space in which “woman” and “women” became replaced with “CISwoman” and “womxn”. When did my biological sex become a dirty word? Or, rather, why has it never stopped being a dirty word?

I started doing a bit of research. I found the GC subreddit. I spent a few days reading and learning. Identifying with feelings and experiences. I started speaking to my sister on the subject, and found that she was already a radfem. She’s spent years developing her knowledge on the subject and became a great sounding board for my thoughts and questions.

Then GC was banned. What??! How?? Why!?? More and more research and I was starting to see a pattern. Women’s voices and safety and spaces don’t matter as much as a trans woman’s. The disgusting subreddits promoting violence against women still stand. The incel echo chambers still stand. THEN… The r/PCOS subreddit fiasco. A medical condition that can only affect WOMEN… and we can’t even say that. Because it might trigger someone. Are you f$cking kidding me? If you are a trans man and you are affected by PCOS and you go onto a PCOS support forum, it should be common sense that there will be ‘triggering’ language such as “women” in that forum. But, since 99.99% of the sufferers of PCOS identify as women, I think that’s a risk you have to take when reading through posts. Not conducting a witch hunt because your feelings got hurt at ‘exclusionary wording’. Now I’m rambling.

Anyway, happy to be here. Happy to learn.

Elysian · 2020-07-07T19:38:57+00:00

I'm just a little bit older than most people here. I've never thought that men could be women. I've seen and interacted with a few trans individuals and they were all the TIM type, and definitely not passing. I'll never forget the one behind the bar at the pub near the train station in Manchester. Full makeup, beard, dress... he was amazing.

I never thought they wanted to pass. I just assumed that they liked wearing women's clothing. No big deal. They can wear what they like. I knew a few teenage boys who would wear skirts as a statement that they were making, not sure what kind of statement, but if they wanted to wear skirts, that is no problem at all. Skirts for everyone.

But then they started taking hormones and getting gender reassignment surgery and I was uneasy with that. Of course they could mutilate their bodies if they really, really want to, but who were the people doing this to them? Being okay with cutting off healthy body parts? Why was this starting to become more acceptable?

I was told in an internet forum some time ago that some people were born with the wrong brain. I may be knowledgeable in my field, but I definitely do not know enough about biology to prove them wrong. I thought, hell it may be possible, certain brain deformities do exist - but I didn't like the idea that it meant I, as a woman, had a different brain than a man. Structurally. Because that would bolster clear sexist beliefs. Wouldn't it?

Eventually I researched this and found that it was a lie. About the same time, a friend of a friend decided he was trans. That man was in his 30s, tall, ugly, and weird. But he wants us to call him Lucy now, and pretend he's a woman. Noooooo. No thank you. I'm not going to participate in your delusions. You need psychological assistance. Not pandering.

I think I knew it was autogynaephilia even before that was reported widely. It was clear he didn't really believe he was a woman. He wanted to have sex with women but they wouldn't go near him, so this was the next best thing.

It was sad. And I'm here now, and the more I read the more horrified I get.

Capitan · 2020-07-07T19:21:03+00:00

I was part of the original subreddit 2-3 (?) months before it was banned. JK Rowlings comments about women being called menstruators made me look into what was going on, specifically because of the hate she was getting.

In some ways I consider myself to be your average, normal everyday person with a life and a job who does not frequent twitter or tumblr obsessively and who as a result isn’t up-to-date on all the Orwellian lingo. And there’s SO much lingo! They/them? What? Girl dick? Huh? It’s confusing to someone who is not part of that box. But like most people, I ignored what was going on because I thought trans activists were fighting for basic human rights, like the LGB people had done before them. What I didn’t know was included in those rights was that MtF could have access to ALL women spaces, including shelters and that you could APPARENTLY now identify yourself as a woman without even transitioning, which means that dudes can simply say that they identify as women and gain access anywhere and no one can say anything out of fear of being ostracised or worse, losing their job. Then of course there’s the denial of biological sex and complete policing of language. The odd thing is that I’m not wholly unfamiliar with this kind of policing of language, thoughts and silencing methods, because I’ve seen cults use it repeatedly. Yet I missed it with TRA. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe it, but with what happened with JK Rowling and then the banning of Gendercritical on Reddit and leaving a bunch of other misogynistic subreddits up...I guess I “peaked.”

It’s been an interesting few months. I went from your average normal person with no particular awareness of what was going on to suddenly realising that a small group had managed to gain the upper hand in a way that can genuinely harm women, not to mention those within the LGB group themselves. No longer being allowed to date someone with your preferred genitalia because of transphobia? Yikes.

azuretsuki · 2020-07-07T14:35:58+00:00

My peak as really only happened recently, but looking back, has been building for the past two years. It’s mostly centred around one person, S, so for the longest time I thought I just had issues with S personally, not the trans community as a whole. But after reading other people’s stories on here about trans individuals who have used their trans identity to intimidate and insert themselves into women’s lives unwanted, I’ve realised that my issues with S are part of a much wider, alarming issue.

tl;dr: GNC man doesn’t like that I won’t date him, proceeds to insert himself into every aspect of my life including claiming to be a TIM to get assigned to my female-only dorm 6000 miles from home (It didn’t work). I’ve rewritten this so many times and every time it got too long, so here is a list of all the things I can think of that happened with S that contributed to my peak:

S came to my country (in Europe) to study at my university. Asked us to use they/them pronouns as he was GNC.
S then refused to use she/her pronouns for me and my female friends, claiming that they/them was more polite for everyone. Only stopped once another of my friends angrily confronted him.
S told me he was interested in me, and when I turned him down, he harassed the guy I was tentatively seeing so much that it scared the other guy off. S then attempted to be my “shoulder to cry on”
When I didn’t immediately fall into his arms, he started dating one of my friends. However, he would always invite me to hang out, and not wanted to hurt my friend who he was dating, I agreed. Turned out he was inviting me to all their dates and I third wheeled almost all of them.
We all had to study abroad in Japan for a year as part of our degree. I opted for a quiet, rural university, and S’s girlfriend opted for Tokyo. S chose the exact same university as me from a list of 15 options, and over 600km from his girlfriend.
Before leaving for Japan, S came out as TIM and tried to get assigned to the female only Japanese dorms. He also told me that he had specifically asked to live with me, without asking me if I was okay with it first.
When the Japanese university said no, they placed him in a separate building of single-occupancy dorms instead. He complained about how unfair this was they entire time we were in Japan.
S never told anyone their preferred name or pronouns (now she/her) and did nothing to live “as a female” (whatever that means), yet would get incredibly angry when he was misgendered/misnamed. We were all somehow meant to magically know.
After returning from Japan, S has gone back to identifying as GNC and using they/them pronouns.

To put it simply, I have a really uneasy feeling that S has been using the excuse of being transgender in order to insert himself into my life, and into female only spaces. The fact that I turned him down romantically and he then thought it was appropriate to request to live with me in a single-sex dorm still creeps me out to this day – I’m so so glad that it didn’t happen.

No woman has ever made me feel this unsafe; this pursued. I thought that at first, my problem was with S and that surely he was just a bad example and the community as a whole was valid, but the more I think about it, the more I realise that I’ve noticed similar behaviours from other trans people that I know. (For example, another TIM that insists on hugging me every opportunity, even though I have told them I’m not a hugger. I don’t even hug my female friends, but this guy is really insistent that it’s “what girls do”).

I’ve never been good with words. I can’t eloquently argue my point. That’s why I’m so grateful I found this community, because it has helped to really realise why these behaviours have made me feel so uncomfortable.

Every TIM I’ve ever met has used the excuse of “being a woman” to violate my personal space and to feel entitled to a position in my life. I feel like I have been forced to accept it or be labelled a transphobe. This silencing of women with fear tactics and complete distain for our boundaries is exactly what I thought feminism was fighting against, so to see it so widely accepted in libfem circles is honestly so alarming.

Susiesmum · 2020-07-07T13:26:04+00:00

https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/52vm/peak_trans_tell_your_story_here/?ref=search_posts

We had a lot of Peak Trans posts on this thread.

venecia · 2020-07-07T12:27:20+00:00

[deleted]

chiiwa · 2020-07-07T00:33:52+00:00

One of my favourite content creators on youtube just released a video specifically to bash JK Rowling, so I came here to vent.

I think I am the sort of "transphobe" that trans activists just love. I was never an ally. I went directly from a clueless straight woman to a full-scale raging "terf". My initial dislike of trans people came from ignorance and disgust, and I am not proud of it. I hope it doesn't cloud my judgement now.

I never had any openly lgbt people in my social circle (partly because in my country they keep a low profile). Among the few gay people I knew online, there was nobody I liked. Now I see that their unpleasantness had nothing to do with their sexuality (except from one gay man who, as I now realize, was severely dysphoric and hateful towards women), and being nice to strangers all the time is a privilege that many don't have. I accepted that lgbt people exist and must be treated fairly. But I wasn't sure that I could be comfortable around an openly gay person and was ashamed of that.

Trans people were an extreme case: I couldn't help thinking that even if there is nothing wrong with people attracted to their own sex, there must be something wrong with those wishing to change their body to look like the opposite sex. The fact that they were under the same four-letter umbrella was confusing to me. Transgenderism sounded like a mental illness, but we were taught by propaganda that homosexuality is a mental illness, too, so both must be untrue, right? On Tumblr, I saw photos of happy, passing trans people. I empathized with trans characters in comics and movies. I believed that denying such a small, harmless minority access to bathrooms was a strange hill to die on. Yet, I would never say that transwomen were women, or even that they were normal healthy people. Still, specifically calling them out seemed... petty?

And then I peaked. I am not proud of it, when I read other (sometimes scary) peak stories. There was a really talented female artist I was following on Tumblr, who came out as non-binary and started making some really disturbing fan art of my favourite characters. She drew everyone as trans (except from the one character she hated and left alone, lol). But what peaked me was putting really graphic mastectomy scars on men. Now, I know that women sometimes undergo mastectomy for medical reasons, and we should not stigmatize it. But ffs, she wasn't reimagining a woman as a cancer survivor, she was clearly fixating on mutilation of female bodies as a result of dysphoria. I used to love this artist because she drew female characters realistically - with body hair, prominent facial features and muscles - and not as same-face, beautified anime girls. But I wouldn't call celebrating cutting a body part off, because you would rather kill yourself than live with it, "body positivity".

So yes, I peaked because of cartoon characters. But after that, I couldn't unsee it. So much of what I saw in “woke” spaces screamed “self-hate” to me. Everyone was denying their femaleness like it was leprosy, everybody claimed to be a feminist, but nobody wanted to be a woman. The only people who were okay with being women were transwomen and they had to be celebrated and protected from “terfs” at all cost.

I googled “terf” and ended up on the GC sub, learned about autogynephilia, child transition, language censoring, etc. The reason why I peaked originally seems dumb now. I had no way of knowing that trans movement was so harmful, and I really disliked trans people just for celebrating “gross stuff” (not unlike celebration of periods by feminists). Sometimes it feels like I am just a bigot who “lucked out”: the thing that seemed ugly on the outside turned out to be ugly on the inside, too.

As a biologist, I am peaking hard right now because of the whole “sex is a spectrum” thing. I am feeling really down because people I used to respect are spewing nonsense. They ridicule antivaxxers and call out the dangers of covid skepticism but then turn around to repeat “twaw” a hundred times. I am scared because no pseudoscience that I know about has ever been so omnipresent and powerful in the non-totalitarian world.

I feel bad talking about this stuff irl, because so much of what they say about trans activism sounds too much like the stuff gay people were accused of: that they are degenerate, perverted, crazy, that they recruit children, etc. I don't want to trivialize it, because I don’t belong to the lgbt community, but then, this stuff has stopped being simply a lgbt or feminist issue, once they began silencing academics over it. I really wish I could just travel 10 years forward and see that this craze is over and JK Rowling didn’t come down in history as a literal nazi.

Irascible-harpy · 2020-07-06T22:56:59+00:00

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mulherzinha · 2020-07-06T22:38:38+00:00

Had this friend when I was in my FtM phase, he was the typical male feminist, teaching me the ways of feminism, at the same time having so little grasp of what we go through. He was just obsessed with women and that weirded me a little but I ignored, I mean, he was just a nice guy, right? Don't see many of that where I'm from, feminism was basically an insult back then (not too long ago, just before capitalism found its way through it) so I thought "cool".

Time pass, we're good but I'm feeling exhausted of the trans community. Science is transphobic and there were a few questionable phd in (insert here whatever sound sciency and credible) saying how sex is fluid and that is a fact, cause, you see my diploma right?

He agrees with me on these instances that sex is important and not fluid and that shit, no males in female sports cause unfair, and "genital preference" is no biggie, him being a gay man himself not attracted at all by female bodies. It's nice talking to someone that won't lash out and accuse me of terveness.

But then he meets these group of TIMs on tumblr, I have zero interest engaging with them cause at this point I knew how they were even if I never changed a word with them. Men will be men. But I said nothing, just a "go ahead, make friends" Not long after engaging with them he asked me to call him 'she'. Ok, fine, I was still drinking the koolaid.. then he started correcting the terminology accepted for trans people, suddenly 'ftm' and 'mtf' wasn't accepted anymore, and I wondered, being in the trans community for so long, what did I miss? Well turns out TWAW as in being females! I was a bit surprised by his instance, since we already talked about it before and he used to agree with me, even criticize me when I went "this guy likes dressing like a girl, I bet he is trans" Him: "maybe he is just a gay guy or gnc whatever sexuality? Not everyone is trans", but then, why he was suddenly spouting that bullshit when he clearly believed sex is innate? So female lost its meaning.

He goes telling me how amazing surgeries for TIMs are, "did you knew that they self lubricate?" No, dude, I did not, because they don't. I knew a lot about this, and not a lot but enough about my own female body to know that is effing impossible for a male to self lubricate his inverted penis. But I said nothing but "eh.. interesting." I was walking on eggs.

Then he comes to me, day after day, disappointed that once more, a TIM in his group was outed as a paedophile and/or serial rapist. "Not surprising, you saw them? they look like it" I thought, but didn't voice it. I knew what he would say: "oh, so theres a 'rapist look' now?" He wouldnt understand where I'm coming from, the many cues I've learned to interpret while growing up as a female, for he was not one. Saying anything would only set me up to be accused of being a terf (I hardly knew what that meant, but they were as bad as the nazi, right?)

I don't remember what I told him exactly, but it was something along the lines "I bet they're a minority, you just got unlucky, I'm sure the others aren't like that"

After this we talked less and less. And as I grew more skeptical of gender, I distanced myself of anything related to with. A little too late though, every inch of the internet has something about it, from TWAW virtue signaling to weird sexualities related to fictional identities, and these days I even had the displeasure to read someone complaining about non binary representation.. and how ceterosexuality needs more representation and how 'the gays' have a lot more than (insert here pronoun) even if its shitty representation. Like, girl, you're a straight woman lecturing others about how 'cishets' don't belong the LGBT. I feel like my head might explode just thinking about it.

Also a thing I just recalled: my male friend (yeah, the feminist) who was very into humiliation and incest porn once said to me when I asked him if he had interest in transitioning: "I wouldn't like to be a straight woman, I would rather be a lesbian"

I would post more stuff but I guess this was too long.

kangaujack · 2020-07-06T18:07:58+00:00

Was part of an online group themed around something nerdy, I really loved the group and the content they produced. I joined and soon noticed that more and more of them were coming out as transwomen. I saw the social contagion happen in real time over the course of a couple of months. I had originally supported trans people, but I started being irked when I saw these men, who seemed to never have spoken with a real female, claim that they were now 'women.'

I was once at a public event with them and there was a Q&A where they were asked whether there were any women in the group, and a TiM perked up and was like 'OH ME' and then they pointed to 2 or 3 other TiMs in the group. I was the only real woman there, and I wasn't pointed out.

Soon I started experiencing blatant misogyny from the members of the group, and when I pointed out the mental illnesses and sexism prominent among the TiMs and the fact that I was the only biological woman in the group, they attacked me and tried to destroy my reputation and called me a 'TERF.' I had never heard of that term before, but I left there and discovered GenderCritical :)

I don't trust TiMs anymore, and I don't trust autistic men either. The internet is filled with a lot of sick people who love to bully others. I've moved onto better things in my life now.

female_solidarity · 2020-07-06T17:13:32+00:00

Dug up my PT post from years ago. I still stand by it now:

I grew up in a very conservative Christian subculture. I was homeschooled and fortunately my parents were on the more liberal side of a very conservative community, but for context: of the girls involved in our community's activities, I was the only one who went to college. The rest remained home to develop their homemaking skills for a future husband.

I used to read the literature of these Christian patriarchy movements in high school and pray so hard it wasn't true. On the other hand I would also read feminist blogs and find hope. I also deeply loved math and computers and wanted to study them in college, so I was also haunted by the various corners of the web that talked about women's "innate inferiorities," (whether they were talking about Murray's Bell Curve style IQ arguments, or the testosterone junk, or even the SAT making claims along the lines of "some men rob banks at the same age that other men make their most brilliant contributions to mathematics; women aren't robbing banks at that age so they probably can't do math either right?").

Anyway, I studied math and "hard science" in college with these ideas still haunting me, but feminist discourse helped me so much during that time. To see the representation problem of women as being due to social conditioning arguments rather than hard-wiring arguments (which were espoused by both religious fundamentalists and MRAs), was so freeing. Maybe I wasn't a member of an inferior class of being after all, and I was going to fight and prove it. I also came to see how LGB orientations fought against patriarchal norms as well. I mean, your relationship/marriage just has to subvert the oppressive gender roles of a traditional marriage since the two people are both women or both men. (I'm het but I have a lot of admittedly selfish appreciation for what gay marriage has done for straight marriage.)

There wasn't as much written online about trans identities at the time, but what was written seemed to imply that trans was about being trans-sexual rather than trans-gender. It made total sense to me that a person could have a dysphoria when it came to their physical bodies, and altering their physical body has nothing to do with imposing specific gender performances on themselves. (I myself had a lot of dysphoria in puberty, and I later unpacked it as hatred for women's bodies at the time because turning into a women meant I had to be a stay-at-home mother with no career prospects of my own. Puberty for me meant I was turning into an object...one that could be raped into pregnancy.) Anyway, my dysphoria existed for terrible reasons related to societally-imposed gender roles, but I could easily imagine that some people could have bodily dysphoria for other "that's just the way it is" reasons, and I supported them getting treatment for it.

At some point though, we moved from a trans discourse that focused on a sex change to instead one that involved a gender identity affirmation. But wait...I don't have a gender identity? I thought those were societally imposed roles and I'm allowed to take them or leave them? Now I'm told if I don't have a gender identity I'm nonbinary and no longer a woman...I have to claim a gender identity to be a woman. Now there's this claim that I have to have an innately "female brain" to be a woman, and as a woman in STEM that's a serious "NOPE! NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!" That's the way of religious fundamentalism and red pill nonsense and evo-psych and all of my childhood bullies.

So suffice it to I was pretty hostile to the concept of gender identity from the start, but I figure I'll just go and spit out all the things that drive me crazy about it since this is a rant and like five years of pent-up frustration.

There is a lot of discrimination that is solely sex-based, not gender identity-based. I grew up in a culture that subjugated women and girls because of their sex, and it's like that still in much of the world.

By removing sex as a meaningful category, we can no longer name and speak about this oppression. You see even in the context of phrases like "pregnant people and people-with-vaginas" that there still a tacit admission that there exists a meaningful category of people oppressed for their specific anatomies, but the word "woman" has been taken away as a term to describe this category, leaving us with no word for it.

Despite the fact that I had to deal with being socialized as a woman my whole life (and still do), and viewed as subversive for doing STEM (and other minor things like failing to shave my legs), I can't be a woman anymore apparently because I have no concept of a "gender identity." Therefore apparently I wasn't oppressed by patriarchy at all! Apparently I have no idea what it means to be a woman.

Saying girls around the world who experience FGM and are denied educations are oppressed due to "gender identity" is offensive. Changing their sense of internal "maleness" or "femaleness" would do nothing to change how they were treated. Sex is the relevant category here.

Seeing historical badass women (like women soldiers in the 18-19th century) being called transmen because they defied gender roles makes me feel hopeless. Apparently "woman" now means pink-and-floofy-only when the whole point of feminism was to allow freedom from that gender role.

I guess the new paradigm is to invent infinity genders in hopes that you find one that encompasses all your behaviors and presentations? Genders come with performances and roles, as we see in practice, so I say no to any of that. I don't need a gender identity with prescribed expressions and roles, and the only way I can identify myself as a woman that makes me comfortable is by my body (NOT by any innate brain structure), and by the socialization I received growing up. Unfortunately these are exactly the things trans theory now pegs as "oppressive" ways to define a woman.

In short, feminism has been great, life-changing, and has done so much for me, but it's been letting me down more and more and that's been a major disappointment.

Radfem_the_Hun · 2020-07-06T17:12:22+00:00

Like many of us, I was originally a trans-rights supporter, mostly because of my long background and history with LGB activism. However, back then transwomen were all thought to be gender non-conforming gay men who had transitioned. I had always felt a certain level of comfort around gay men, and was empathetic to transwomen and their experience, so I was totally okay with them being in women's restrooms. The vast majority of transwomen back then were also very much of the belief that they needed to do certain things and look a certain way in order to use women's spaces, and they respected the comfort levels of women. (These are the trans people that TRAs call "truscum" or "transmed.") They asked to be allowed in our spaces and respected us, instead of this new culture of demanding to be let in.

And then came the great reveal of autogynephilia. It was around 2015-2016 that I started to question things here and there. Caitlyn Jenner won "Woman of the Year" after killing someone with his car, and I couldn't help but wonder how a woman would be treated. I thought of Brandy and her automobile accident that essentially ended her career. Then Jenner said that "the hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear." And then I knew that these transwomen were not women in the slightest. They don't understand what it's like to grow up in a female body, being treated like you are less-than simply because of what's between your legs, being treated as stupid, hysterical, weak, being sexualized by gross men as soon as you start developing at around 10-12, periods, pregnancy, the list goes on and on. But figuring out what to wear is what's so hard?!

It was around the same time I learned about "trans lesbians," and that was the real turning point. I didn't really believe it at all, even when I was still play-acting as a trans supporter. How many decades had I seen lesbians be joked about by straight men, saying "I'm a lesbian, too, hur hur"? How was this any different? This was the kind of critical thinking that pushed me away from the trans movement, and eventually I found gender critical feminism about a year or so later... I had found my tribe! I thought for so long that I was the only "liberal" who felt this way, and that the world was going mad, so it was really a breath of fresh air to find all of you wonderful women and other allies.

I truly believe that one of the main problems with trans activism is autogynephilia and straight men who have co-opted the movement. It's made me question the entire ideology of transgenderism, and I now think the entire thing is sexist nonsense because it is. It's based on patriarchal gender roles and expectations of behavior and presentation, and, thinking back to the gay male transwomen I used to be okay with, I now realize it's deeply rooted in internalized homophobia. Even thinking back to the movie "Boys Don't Cry," I realize that I empathized with Teena/Brandon because I could see the struggle she was facing being a butch lesbian in a rural area, so it made sense that she'd "hide" herself as a man. I think it's perfectly okay for anyone to dress or act however they like, but that doesn't mean they are trans-anything.

It's going to be really difficult to win me back over to their side in any capacity at this point, after how women have been treated for the past few years. It will take a lot of apologies, groveling, and public admissions of fault for women to forgive this, if we ever will.

strawberryfields4evr · 2020-07-06T16:59:15+00:00

When I was sixteen, I was groomed by a TiM who was twenty. He took clothes from me, told me he loved me, and assaulted me multiple times. He tried to convince me I was trans as well - he said he wanted to look like me as a woman and it would be easier for him this way. I've always been sceptical of trans right activism but I only came upon radical feminist literature in college. I can honestly say it saved my life and made everything make sense.

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