12 Comments

This is why Mumsnet is actually radical (or was and still would be if Woke interns hadn't captured the mods).

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I really have to thank you for putting into words what I haven't been able to. I'm an autistic man who, due to a confluence of many significant mental health issues, developed gender dysphoria as a teenager and began taking estradiol two years ago. I was told by many that it was the only treatment for what I was experiencing. A year into it, it didn't do what it was supposed to do. Now it's a year after realizing that and I'm still on the hormones, and I don't know how to get off of them. I feel like I've had my personality, my personhood, my connection to my body stolen from me over several years of intensive online grooming. Trying to get off of hormones at a time when everyone around me is so vigorously pro-trans is a total mindfuck; I feel like I'm on my own. These issues are mostly psychosomatic, but the primary reinforcement I'm receiving from others is "it's okay to be trans," not "it's all in your head." It's shameful for me to leave the Matrix, not stay in it. The people reinforcing this aren't even trans. I don't know how to act like a man anymore, how to dress like a man, style myself as a man; I'll have to train my voice again, go through a third puberty, shed rituals and objects I've incorporated into my sense of being. I'm expecting emotional, bodily, and sexual changes I was totally unprepared for to begin with, now with an uncanny feminized body on top of it all. This phenomenon you're describing is not just gaslighting the people witnessing it, but the younger people living it (I get the sense that the older ones, even the delusional ones, know they're not really what they say they are; but we zillennials and younger, who were fed this ideology at impressionable stages of life, we really believed we could be what we are not). Despite not having gone through it, you've described it perfectly. I have to thank you for that, because knowing that it exists, that other people are able to articulate it, that other people are strongly opposed to it in a way that doesn't paint those caught up in it as vile monsters to be exterminated, means that this struggle of mine to regain reality really is worthwhile. Thank you.

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Would it not be possible to rewrite "set itself against" as "redefine"? To make a distinction between the liberation of women on the one hand and liberation from being women on the other? Does this have to be a reactionary, conservative aim?

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After reading this, it seems now I've been sleeping. I thought I was awake, but was only dreaming shallow versions of the far more insidious way double speak has been employed.

Naively, I thought Orwell's vision would be more stark and recognizable. Your words have brought his nightmare more in focus. Thank you, seriously.

Better eyes wide open than continuing in a deluded reality.

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This is a truly fabulous essay! I am so grateful I stumbled across it.

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I read this article today, and as a guy I came out of it just about as confused as I was going into it. I had a tenuous grasp on it right up until the last sentence. “The No. 1 way we can reduce maternal mortality is birth control. The pill is safer than giving birth.” There is so much built into so few words there that I feel like you could construct any argument you like from it. I put this link here because it seems to fit, but then again, so much of what I read on the topic could in turn be applicable to most of what you write. Anywho, great writing as per usual on your part. https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/21/small-rise-breast-cancer-risk-hormonal-birth-control-study/

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Ms. Harrington, you always give me so much to think about! And, for that, I am so grateful... :-)

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Superb, I very much envy your skill

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