I don't know if this merits its own thread, but could you or any other Bri'ish (@Otterly?) explain how the GC/TERF movement got as strong as it is in the UK?
There is a strong ‘don’t tell me what to think’ streak in native Brits. You may laugh at that and with the current degree of pozz I wouldn’t blame you, but there is a bit of the national psyche that simply
will not do what it’s told to. We do not like it. It’s slowly being bashed out of us via the suffocating woke stuff. But a little of it survives. Queen Liz 1 famously settled the fact she wasn’t carrying on with a lot of religious persecution by saying she ‘would not make windows into men’s souls.’ That spirit isn’t quite dead yet, and we are still wellington’s scum/salt of the earth.
So there’s that, and there’s also mumsnet. Mn is a parenting site, it allows men no problem, men are parents too, but it’s very female oriented. That and it’s somewhat skewed towards a more middle class demographic (there’s also netmums, which is more working class and yes it’s very much a people’s front of Judea situation but whatever.)
Women started expressing very mild concern on MN. Stuff like ‘there was a man in our local swimming pool women’s change with an erection, staring at my female child as she changes and I complained and was kicked out and I’m rather cross.’ People started asking wtf is this stuff it’s gross
The troons attacked hard. They do not like being told no. They swatted the founder, Justine and they took legal action to try to get her to dox people. The site has to work within the ridiculous bounds of British lack of free speech so they rather cleverly put in restrictions on speech that were very specific and very within the law but allowed the general tone of mockery to continue. This was a master stroke because it took away the ability of the troons to use the hate speech laws. The boards were respectfully moderated for all the right buzzwords but still allowed us to take the piss and expose wrongdoing, the troons attacked again but they were taking a big L.
Now there’s a LOT of women in MN who troons would consider silly little women but who in reality have a considerable amount of money, power or access to those who do. They started organising offline. This is key, you can’t do a lot of this stuff online. You have to go down the pub or meet in living rooms. It has to be in real life. And all those women started doing stuff and talking to people.
Like I said, the demographic of MN is professional and connected. And contrary to what a lot of men who hate women think, women are very, very capable of efficient execution of project planning.
Some of us do it for a living.
There’s clearly a divide in the civil service as well, and clearly some of them are very connected and pushing against it.
We also have a national health service and part of that is a body called NICE who decide what treatments are worth the money. When money is limited, they have power. The cass report I suspect was the culmination of a lot of wrangling behind the scenes becasue as soon as it came out action was taken with it as justification.
So it’s a lot of things. But a huge amount of it has been very ordinary women standing up and saying no. They have been very courageous to do so, and many of them have faced life damaging actions from the police and state for doing so.
When I’m queen, I shall put a statue up to them on the fourth plinth,
