I’ve got a question that will help me with a pitch I’m writing… Most people are familiar with #peaktrans (if you’re not, there’s a primer and a bunch of examples here). I don’t know about you, but there was the moment I realized the trans ideology was crazy bullshit (2013-2014) and
Thank you for all your work, Eliza. I've been supportive of rights (and education) for everyone as long as I've been an adult and have great sympathy for trans people who are just trying to live a quiet life in this mess. But for a long time, I've felt uncomfortable about the untruths being told by the trans extremists (that the rights of women and girls would not be affected, that drugs, hormones, binders etc. given to children are safe, that trans suicide rates are higher than any others - all untrue) and about compelled speech and the violent/ menacing shutdown of debate. The turning point for me though was more visceral. About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with severe ptsd because of a long abusive marriage and have had trauma support from a number of wonderful women. In the early stages any male company frightened me (I couldn't use public transport without panics) though slowly things have improved. My #peaktrans came when the trans MTF (no GRC or surgery) head of the Edinburgh Rape Centre in Scotland said on twitter that any woman coming to the centre for help and who said she needed to be only with female-bodied people (as I did for years), that woman should have her 'bigotry' addressed by the centre. Needing female company was central to my being safe enough to recover. Being told what to think, be and do by a male-bodied person is the core of domestic abuse and can only make previous trauma worse. I don't understand why the head of that centre is still in that job. The disregard and lack of understanding of abused women shocks me.
You might be right, for the first half of his career. Now he's the chief operating officer (COO) of a tech database management company with a worldwide reach. He does the hiring and firing. I'm sure it gives him thrills. He is the only one in the company though, looking through the bios/photos--he probably discriminates against other cross-sex ideating men. I appreciate the comment, am doing pretty well with the healing movement sequences I've developed, outlined at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com Ute Heggen
Rosie, I hope you'll visit my blog, uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com, and try out some of the easy movement routines for dealing with PTSD. I designed them to deal with mine.
The myth of the "nice" ones who just "want a quiet life" is what my arrogant, tyrannical ex-husband and his groomers constantly claimed. He did not move into this "quiet life" but rather went through an overtly sexual mode, a trans business success mode, and now, a constant victim mode. The daily need for stroking reveals the narcissism and impossibility of actually passing as the opposite sex. It is a cult, plain and simple.
I first peaked due to Lia Thomas. He was literally the impossible to ignore elephant in the room... then came the Dutch poster supposedly celebrating trans rights with an obviously mentally unwell (lots of self harm scars and a teddybear) young woman with mastectomy stars... that elicited a sick to my stomach feeling and that ice cold feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize the real world impact of this zany ideology... then came the stories of detransitioners ...
Absolutely Lia Thomas for sports. Then Eric Toppel retweeted something covid related during the pandemic I realized academics trying to communicate health risks during the pandemic were more interested in reciting the creed of their new religion than saving lives.
That was insane! I watched the woman that got beat by him later on say on TV that she had no issue with him being trans… ooff… poor woman. That interview gave me a sick sick feeling… it’s like holding a weapon to someone’s head telling them you have no choice but to like it.
And don’t forget laurel hubbard (don’t know his real name) or that cyclist in the UK. luckily the woman’s cyclists basically told the cycling federation if he cycled against them then he’d by riding alone.
For me, there were a lot of peak trans moments - I must have been slow to catch on! But the key time was about 2014-16, when smartphones and social media exploded and gender identities exploded along with them. Because I had been part of gay and lesbian communities for 15 or so years previously and had met maybe 6 trans people in all that time, and then suddenly....avalanche. So I knew this wasn't some timeless, natural occurrence. And at the same time, I attended LGBTQetc events and saw that there were basically no lesbians there. The older butches had transitioned, and the younger women were all claiming to be something, anything, other than lesbians. And there was no way I could accept that situation as "progress". The rest of my critique followed on from that.
2019 when 13yo daughter asked "What do you think about JKR saying horrible things about people that dont identify with the sex assigned at birth". The anime, the false accusations of "transphobia" and the now claim of adherence to "transhumanism". Still walking a cliff edge of fear for her future choices.
Internal communications at work, where the “Woman of the Year” was a man in fishnets and a wig. Seeing the blind adulation accorded to him and realising how alienated it made me feel as an employee and parent, my confusion and hesitancy at how best to support my child gave way first to irritation and then rage. This is not an episode of Rupaul.
My daughter’s friend told her mom she felt like a boy in 2016. She was nine. It sounded wrong to me. This little girl came to our house all the time to play with my daughter--dress-up, monster high dolls, drawing... she even lived with us for a week, when her alcoholic dad called the cops on her mom, who was holding a knife and threatening to kill herself. The cops took the mom to an inpatient facility. The dad brought his schizophrenic mother home to watch the children. I suggested they come to my house for the week. This is all to say, it was spectacularly obvious that trans was a coping mechanism for a little girl in tremendous pain. Her mom deals with her own pain via Munchausens by proxy. Ten years later, this 16 year old is on puberty blockers and testosterone. Her face is covered in acne and her voice is ruined. She still cuts herself, and my daughter, who went from pansexual in sixth grade to lesbian in eighth to now as a high school junior a gay transmasc, thinks it’s wonderful. It was only when my daughter mused over possibly taking “just hormones and stuff” that I went deep into research and consumption of all the gender critical media to discover how it’s wrecking everyone else’s safety and rights. I thank this family for sounding the alarm in time for me to fight for my daughter’s life, even if she thinks I’m an evil bigot.
For me, it's just been one peak after another. I keep thinking this one's it, but then something even darker promptly looms up behind it.
I guess the one that really lodged a barb in my heart was an aside, Dr. Az mentioned in a wider round-table session at LGB Alliance's excellent conference last year. It was a recollection from his time at GIDs, chatting to the then lead clinician about how weird parents would have to be to prefer a trans kid to the gay kid they've got, and the clinician responding "any weirder than being gay?" ...
Surviving ROGD was the first time I peaked (which is a story in and of itself), but the final nail in the coffin for me was having someone I knew online suddenly come out as NB, even though he was a heterosexual man in his 30s. It just felt so strange that he would only "realise" his "gender identity" this late in life, when by all accounts he seemed comfortable as a heterosexual man previously. I just remember feeling so disturbed by this piece of news, yet I knew that if I raised concerns, I would be labelled as an evil TERF (he was a big TERF hunter even before this situation). The fact that he was one of the few people who knew about my previous situation just made me even more uncomfortable.
After that happened, I chose to completely cut off ties with my previous fandom circles because I realised that I couldn't bear nodding my head and going along with everything. If I'm not allowed to be honestly concerned about someone's mental state, then it's not worth for me to stay.
I’d been in the VAWG sector and activism/policy for many years when this came along and knew and recognised the problems from day 1. For example, the new ‘TERF’ was the old ‘SWERF’ rebranded. It is a particular ‘something’ that all the women experts in the field of VAWG policy and practice, who could advise others competently and usefully on navigating the various issues from the beginning, professional and respected women working in the sector and working academics/government advisors, were swiftly categorised, aided by the new social infosphere, with centuries old misogyny of damning categories of witch/evil/hag/difficult woman/prude/liar/manipulative. With impunity like never before.
My "oh fuck" moment was when my 13yo daughter ID'd as trans during the first Covid lockdown, after never ever showing one single sign of being interested in anything boy-related, and so we thought, being good lefties, that the doctors would know what's going on. Reader, they didn't. Our local gender clinic in Australia just affirmed affirmed affirmed. No questioning, no talking of risks or co-morbidities, no interest when she was later diagnosed with autism. Just hey, your kid is trans and here's the path we're going to take to medicalise her. It's like they don't read any of the science, they just rely on chinese whispers. We slowly got her out (sort of, we're still worried she'll go back when she gets more social influences).
The Australian situation is so disturbing. Total takeover of basically all our institutions by stealth. Zero public debate. Most regular people have no idea it's happening.
It was reading about Vancouver Rape Relief Centre being sued by a trans-identified male who insisted he should be a rape crisis counselor. He targeted a rape crisis centre like a missile to force the women there to validate his fantasy, his fetish, whatever. Fighting them for a long time. Read about that in Feminist Current.
Meghan Murphey of Feminist Current has been asking "But what is a woman?" for more than a decade.
It had passed me by until J K Rowling's essay in 2020, followed by Suzanne Moore being bullied out of the Guardian, and two women friends abandoning a gym and swimming pool respectively because of men in the changing rooms. So I started following people on Twitter and reading you.
I grew up thinking being trans was something incredibly rare but worth supporting and didn't give it much thought. Why be a transphobe, just live and let live etc.
I was surprised about 3-4 years ago when two older women I know announced on facebook how proud they were their teens were transitioning - one a 16 year old boy (desisted within 2 yrs) the other a butch presenting, out lesbian daughter. It seemed odd and performative the way the mothers announced it on their kids' behalf. Felt off, but forgot about it.
About 2 years ago, a guy on IG I followed mentioned about upcoming top surgery and long standing dysphoria, despite being small breasted. I hadn't realised he was trans (dressed in an 80s androgynous aesthetic so hard to tell), but though cool, good for him.
That post went viral. The next post was gushing about all the love and support, and from that point on he was a "trans influencer", always used the hashtags and talked about it a lot. The surgery was shortly afterwards and for the next 18 months every fourth photo was topless or in mesh to show the scar. Follower number exploded to 50K.
Soon I was getting trans and top surgery photos in my explore page. I've noticed a lot of them make a massive deal about it (as well as concurrent mental health related diagnoses) in their bios, hashtags and comments. They are out to be trans (and often neurodiverse) influencers and advisors. Its the shy awkward misfit finding 15 minutes of fame - lots of fawning "can't wait for my top surgery" in the comments. More recently, a couple of other thrifting fashion accounts I followed went increasingly androgynous in their clothing/ haircuts and then announced they were non-binary or trans. Something felt off about all of it.
It piqued my curiosity and I looked up trans on youtube, found Helena Kirschner's detrans story about the Tumblr socially awkward we-are-trans-men contagion, and it all made sense. What she had described happening to her a few years ago on Tumblr was exactly what I witnessed in real time on IG.
As for TIM - the incursion of bio males into female sports or so has been impossible to miss.
More recently on IG - last few months- I have noticed an increasing number of creepy middle aged men dressed as young girls or in women's lingerie posting suggestive selfies. Some claim to be models and many make weird and sexual comments. And trying to bait women into calling them out so they can create drama posts about transphobia. It's clearly attention seeking and a sexual fetish, not dysphoria. I found some of Jon Uhler's youtube about sissy porn and sexual offenders - he nailed it.
Sometime around 2017 I read an article about a very young boy(I think he was three) being affirmed as a girl in the US. The journalist portrayed the whole story as one of bravery and worth celebrating. As a mother of three boys who have claimed all sorts of identities when very young (cat, princess, warrior, table!) I was absolutely shocked by the article, but dismissed it as a one of a kind and didn’t think much about it (I was lucky that in my day to day life I hadn’t yet encountered clear signs of TRA, although of course the pronouns and other stuff were there but I hadn’t really understood their true meaning). I truly peaked when JKR wrote that tweet about the use of the word woman. The reaction to that tweet truly opened my eyes to what was going on.
The J.K. Rowling affair. Really couldn't believe how she was treated as if she was the worst, including by former HP cast members.
It went snowballing from there. Kathleen Stock, and then L. Thomas, all the way to the drag queen story hour.
I still can't understand how institutes and media can quickly allow attack and harrassment on women, including on lesbians, working class women, and children.
Thank you for all your work, Eliza. I've been supportive of rights (and education) for everyone as long as I've been an adult and have great sympathy for trans people who are just trying to live a quiet life in this mess. But for a long time, I've felt uncomfortable about the untruths being told by the trans extremists (that the rights of women and girls would not be affected, that drugs, hormones, binders etc. given to children are safe, that trans suicide rates are higher than any others - all untrue) and about compelled speech and the violent/ menacing shutdown of debate. The turning point for me though was more visceral. About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with severe ptsd because of a long abusive marriage and have had trauma support from a number of wonderful women. In the early stages any male company frightened me (I couldn't use public transport without panics) though slowly things have improved. My #peaktrans came when the trans MTF (no GRC or surgery) head of the Edinburgh Rape Centre in Scotland said on twitter that any woman coming to the centre for help and who said she needed to be only with female-bodied people (as I did for years), that woman should have her 'bigotry' addressed by the centre. Needing female company was central to my being safe enough to recover. Being told what to think, be and do by a male-bodied person is the core of domestic abuse and can only make previous trauma worse. I don't understand why the head of that centre is still in that job. The disregard and lack of understanding of abused women shocks me.
I'm sorry that happened to you, and it is amazing that that man is able to remain in his job. I'm sure it's because people are terrified to fire him.
You might be right, for the first half of his career. Now he's the chief operating officer (COO) of a tech database management company with a worldwide reach. He does the hiring and firing. I'm sure it gives him thrills. He is the only one in the company though, looking through the bios/photos--he probably discriminates against other cross-sex ideating men. I appreciate the comment, am doing pretty well with the healing movement sequences I've developed, outlined at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com Ute Heggen
Rosie, I hope you'll visit my blog, uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com, and try out some of the easy movement routines for dealing with PTSD. I designed them to deal with mine.
The myth of the "nice" ones who just "want a quiet life" is what my arrogant, tyrannical ex-husband and his groomers constantly claimed. He did not move into this "quiet life" but rather went through an overtly sexual mode, a trans business success mode, and now, a constant victim mode. The daily need for stroking reveals the narcissism and impossibility of actually passing as the opposite sex. It is a cult, plain and simple.
I wish you peace and healing. Ute Heggen
I first peaked due to Lia Thomas. He was literally the impossible to ignore elephant in the room... then came the Dutch poster supposedly celebrating trans rights with an obviously mentally unwell (lots of self harm scars and a teddybear) young woman with mastectomy stars... that elicited a sick to my stomach feeling and that ice cold feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize the real world impact of this zany ideology... then came the stories of detransitioners ...
Absolutely Lia Thomas for sports. Then Eric Toppel retweeted something covid related during the pandemic I realized academics trying to communicate health risks during the pandemic were more interested in reciting the creed of their new religion than saving lives.
It was fallon Fox for me. Even Joe rogan said that was wrong.
That was insane! I watched the woman that got beat by him later on say on TV that she had no issue with him being trans… ooff… poor woman. That interview gave me a sick sick feeling… it’s like holding a weapon to someone’s head telling them you have no choice but to like it.
And don’t forget laurel hubbard (don’t know his real name) or that cyclist in the UK. luckily the woman’s cyclists basically told the cycling federation if he cycled against them then he’d by riding alone.
Gavin.
For me, there were a lot of peak trans moments - I must have been slow to catch on! But the key time was about 2014-16, when smartphones and social media exploded and gender identities exploded along with them. Because I had been part of gay and lesbian communities for 15 or so years previously and had met maybe 6 trans people in all that time, and then suddenly....avalanche. So I knew this wasn't some timeless, natural occurrence. And at the same time, I attended LGBTQetc events and saw that there were basically no lesbians there. The older butches had transitioned, and the younger women were all claiming to be something, anything, other than lesbians. And there was no way I could accept that situation as "progress". The rest of my critique followed on from that.
2019 when 13yo daughter asked "What do you think about JKR saying horrible things about people that dont identify with the sex assigned at birth". The anime, the false accusations of "transphobia" and the now claim of adherence to "transhumanism". Still walking a cliff edge of fear for her future choices.
Internal communications at work, where the “Woman of the Year” was a man in fishnets and a wig. Seeing the blind adulation accorded to him and realising how alienated it made me feel as an employee and parent, my confusion and hesitancy at how best to support my child gave way first to irritation and then rage. This is not an episode of Rupaul.
My daughter’s friend told her mom she felt like a boy in 2016. She was nine. It sounded wrong to me. This little girl came to our house all the time to play with my daughter--dress-up, monster high dolls, drawing... she even lived with us for a week, when her alcoholic dad called the cops on her mom, who was holding a knife and threatening to kill herself. The cops took the mom to an inpatient facility. The dad brought his schizophrenic mother home to watch the children. I suggested they come to my house for the week. This is all to say, it was spectacularly obvious that trans was a coping mechanism for a little girl in tremendous pain. Her mom deals with her own pain via Munchausens by proxy. Ten years later, this 16 year old is on puberty blockers and testosterone. Her face is covered in acne and her voice is ruined. She still cuts herself, and my daughter, who went from pansexual in sixth grade to lesbian in eighth to now as a high school junior a gay transmasc, thinks it’s wonderful. It was only when my daughter mused over possibly taking “just hormones and stuff” that I went deep into research and consumption of all the gender critical media to discover how it’s wrecking everyone else’s safety and rights. I thank this family for sounding the alarm in time for me to fight for my daughter’s life, even if she thinks I’m an evil bigot.
For me, it's just been one peak after another. I keep thinking this one's it, but then something even darker promptly looms up behind it.
I guess the one that really lodged a barb in my heart was an aside, Dr. Az mentioned in a wider round-table session at LGB Alliance's excellent conference last year. It was a recollection from his time at GIDs, chatting to the then lead clinician about how weird parents would have to be to prefer a trans kid to the gay kid they've got, and the clinician responding "any weirder than being gay?" ...
A BIG penny dropped for me, there ...
Surviving ROGD was the first time I peaked (which is a story in and of itself), but the final nail in the coffin for me was having someone I knew online suddenly come out as NB, even though he was a heterosexual man in his 30s. It just felt so strange that he would only "realise" his "gender identity" this late in life, when by all accounts he seemed comfortable as a heterosexual man previously. I just remember feeling so disturbed by this piece of news, yet I knew that if I raised concerns, I would be labelled as an evil TERF (he was a big TERF hunter even before this situation). The fact that he was one of the few people who knew about my previous situation just made me even more uncomfortable.
After that happened, I chose to completely cut off ties with my previous fandom circles because I realised that I couldn't bear nodding my head and going along with everything. If I'm not allowed to be honestly concerned about someone's mental state, then it's not worth for me to stay.
I’d been in the VAWG sector and activism/policy for many years when this came along and knew and recognised the problems from day 1. For example, the new ‘TERF’ was the old ‘SWERF’ rebranded. It is a particular ‘something’ that all the women experts in the field of VAWG policy and practice, who could advise others competently and usefully on navigating the various issues from the beginning, professional and respected women working in the sector and working academics/government advisors, were swiftly categorised, aided by the new social infosphere, with centuries old misogyny of damning categories of witch/evil/hag/difficult woman/prude/liar/manipulative. With impunity like never before.
…if of interest, you can find an early article about idea of SWERFs by Jindi Mehat in 2015 on Meghan Murphy’s website Feminist Current.
My "oh fuck" moment was when my 13yo daughter ID'd as trans during the first Covid lockdown, after never ever showing one single sign of being interested in anything boy-related, and so we thought, being good lefties, that the doctors would know what's going on. Reader, they didn't. Our local gender clinic in Australia just affirmed affirmed affirmed. No questioning, no talking of risks or co-morbidities, no interest when she was later diagnosed with autism. Just hey, your kid is trans and here's the path we're going to take to medicalise her. It's like they don't read any of the science, they just rely on chinese whispers. We slowly got her out (sort of, we're still worried she'll go back when she gets more social influences).
The Australian situation is so disturbing. Total takeover of basically all our institutions by stealth. Zero public debate. Most regular people have no idea it's happening.
It was reading about Vancouver Rape Relief Centre being sued by a trans-identified male who insisted he should be a rape crisis counselor. He targeted a rape crisis centre like a missile to force the women there to validate his fantasy, his fetish, whatever. Fighting them for a long time. Read about that in Feminist Current.
Meghan Murphey of Feminist Current has been asking "But what is a woman?" for more than a decade.
It had passed me by until J K Rowling's essay in 2020, followed by Suzanne Moore being bullied out of the Guardian, and two women friends abandoning a gym and swimming pool respectively because of men in the changing rooms. So I started following people on Twitter and reading you.
Jonathan Yaniv, and the Challenors in the UK made me realise that trans rights activism was a god send for predators and pornsick men.
I don’t think it was consciously and deliberately designed to be, but y’know, neither was The Patriarchy
I grew up thinking being trans was something incredibly rare but worth supporting and didn't give it much thought. Why be a transphobe, just live and let live etc.
I was surprised about 3-4 years ago when two older women I know announced on facebook how proud they were their teens were transitioning - one a 16 year old boy (desisted within 2 yrs) the other a butch presenting, out lesbian daughter. It seemed odd and performative the way the mothers announced it on their kids' behalf. Felt off, but forgot about it.
About 2 years ago, a guy on IG I followed mentioned about upcoming top surgery and long standing dysphoria, despite being small breasted. I hadn't realised he was trans (dressed in an 80s androgynous aesthetic so hard to tell), but though cool, good for him.
That post went viral. The next post was gushing about all the love and support, and from that point on he was a "trans influencer", always used the hashtags and talked about it a lot. The surgery was shortly afterwards and for the next 18 months every fourth photo was topless or in mesh to show the scar. Follower number exploded to 50K.
Soon I was getting trans and top surgery photos in my explore page. I've noticed a lot of them make a massive deal about it (as well as concurrent mental health related diagnoses) in their bios, hashtags and comments. They are out to be trans (and often neurodiverse) influencers and advisors. Its the shy awkward misfit finding 15 minutes of fame - lots of fawning "can't wait for my top surgery" in the comments. More recently, a couple of other thrifting fashion accounts I followed went increasingly androgynous in their clothing/ haircuts and then announced they were non-binary or trans. Something felt off about all of it.
It piqued my curiosity and I looked up trans on youtube, found Helena Kirschner's detrans story about the Tumblr socially awkward we-are-trans-men contagion, and it all made sense. What she had described happening to her a few years ago on Tumblr was exactly what I witnessed in real time on IG.
As for TIM - the incursion of bio males into female sports or so has been impossible to miss.
More recently on IG - last few months- I have noticed an increasing number of creepy middle aged men dressed as young girls or in women's lingerie posting suggestive selfies. Some claim to be models and many make weird and sexual comments. And trying to bait women into calling them out so they can create drama posts about transphobia. It's clearly attention seeking and a sexual fetish, not dysphoria. I found some of Jon Uhler's youtube about sissy porn and sexual offenders - he nailed it.
Sometime around 2017 I read an article about a very young boy(I think he was three) being affirmed as a girl in the US. The journalist portrayed the whole story as one of bravery and worth celebrating. As a mother of three boys who have claimed all sorts of identities when very young (cat, princess, warrior, table!) I was absolutely shocked by the article, but dismissed it as a one of a kind and didn’t think much about it (I was lucky that in my day to day life I hadn’t yet encountered clear signs of TRA, although of course the pronouns and other stuff were there but I hadn’t really understood their true meaning). I truly peaked when JKR wrote that tweet about the use of the word woman. The reaction to that tweet truly opened my eyes to what was going on.
The J.K. Rowling affair. Really couldn't believe how she was treated as if she was the worst, including by former HP cast members.
It went snowballing from there. Kathleen Stock, and then L. Thomas, all the way to the drag queen story hour.
I still can't understand how institutes and media can quickly allow attack and harrassment on women, including on lesbians, working class women, and children.