I never was a believer in "gender identity" or in "true trans". To me it was (and still is) very simple: men are not women. It's has never been a judgment, but a matter of fact, just like the Earth is round and the sky is blue. To claim that some men are actually women or can become women was always absurd to me. Also, I never felt particularly "feminine", so I found offensive that some men said they are women or like women because they were "effeminate". If they were women, then what was I?

Nevertheless, this was not a subject that I cared or payed attention that much. Despite that I thought certain annoying comments by some men who thought they were more "women-like" than actual women, I didn't think this could affect me in anyway. I mean, at the end of the day everyone knew that transvestites (*) were just very effeminate gay men, right?

Yeah, I eventually learned that was not the case and there were at least a few people who thought men can be women, but I ignored them. It was a fringed minority, I thought, and "trans issues" was still not a topic I was particularly interested in. However, I keep hearing more about this, and people were deadly serious when discussing this stuff. Soon it hard to ignore, especially in fandom spaces, that there was an increasing number of people defending this concept. The argument around if trans identified males should use women's bathrooms was so absurd that I'd thought it was a joke (obviously, if any man can enter, then predators are going to take full advantage of it) if not were because people were being deadly serious about this. Things like "non-binaries" seemed a joke, except people were not treating it as such. The arguments about how trans identified people didn't need to disclose their sex to potential partners sounded outright disturbing to me. Also, I started hearing about "cis" and immediately reject the concept. Like, c’mon, I’m not “cis”, I’m not feel “feminine” or whatever.

I'm prone to overthink things, and hearing all this stuff made me start analyzing the issue seriously (still wasn't researching this, mind you). In the end, I could only conclude that all of this "gender identity" was very regressive. People were claiming they were fighting against sex stereotypes, however, all evidence told me they were actually enforcing stereotypes. After all, if you cannot define what a woman and man are based on biology, how else can you define them? If things kept going this way, I could imagine a faraway future where I would be called "non-binary" or another made-up "gender" because I was neither “masculine” nor "feminine". And this lead me to the most maddening question: why were I only hearing socially conservative people speaking out against this stuff? I could not be the only person who saw how regressive all of this was, yet I barely saw anyone who share my concerns.

March 2020 came and the world was upside-down: there was a pandemic, the virus has arrived in my country and soon the lockdown would start soon just a few months after the government changed, the economy was already shit like usual, and here there was also an epidemic of dengue and measles. Everyone was freaking out, but I had an additional reason to think the world had gone mad as now "trans identified males" were celebrated on International Women’s Day and I was seeing graffiti saying there were girls with penises and boys with vulvas. Admittedly, I was getting angry every time I heard about trans issues by then. I’ve grew up reading the Harry Potter books and I’d heard about how JKR was recently deemed "transphobic" over a tweet saying sex was real or something like, but I didn't read further into it (I'm not on Twitter).

By this time, however, I did an internet search looking for criticism of sex positivism that didn't came from a religious point of view. And so I found a radical feminist website and there in the sidebar there was some recommended articles about transgenderism. I decided to check this too. Maybe these women could see the same than I was seeing? I wasn't planning to read more than that, however, once I started reading I could not leave the subject and started looking on another sites too. I spent the following days doing a crash-course on transgenderism. Soon enough, I'd learned about things like the cotton ceiling (WTF?!), the threats by transactivists (well, they certainly don’t look vulnerable wielding those bats), AGP (this is a fetish?!), de-transitioners (wait, this is a thing?), chest-binders (how is this legal?) minors being "transed" (WTF?!) and more. While everyone was more worried by COVID, but I was getting more and more alarmed about what I was reading. It seemed the "far future" that I feared it was coming already and it was much worse than I could have ever imagined.

On June 2020, of course I saw people were crying about how "transphobic" JKR were and how she should shut up, and how what she wrote was so "hateful" that it should not be read. So, without wasting any second, I did exactly the opposite. After reading her tweets and her essay, I was filled with awe by every single word she said and the way she had kept her position in spite of all the abuse. However, seeing all those death and rape threats being so easily condoned was infuriating. What have happened to all those who spoked out during #MeToo? Was it all for show?

Finding articles that weren't condemning JKR for the crime of saying that sex does matter was proving to be a hard task. Because I'd read that Google’s search results may be biased, I decided to do an experiment. I opened several search engines alongside Google and I did the same searches about this issue in all of them. Every single one of them gave me more balanced results than Google. I switched to DuckDuckGo that day.

Seeing more and more people who were done with this stuff was encouraging, though. I started lurking the GC sub on Reddit, and I saw how the subscribers were quickly increasing... until they got banned. Fortunately, the night before the banning someone mentioned saidit, so it was easy to find this place. Some weeks after, I stopped lurking and started commenting in the new GC sub because I needed to talk about this stuff. Finally, I started participating in this sub, too.

I had done a lot of reading on trans issues since March last year and I can say I’m very firm in the GC side. I found QT arguments unconvincing and incongruous, their tactics deplorable, and their goals are not something I'd approve of.

(*) Transvestite was the word used back then where I live. In fact, it is still in used around here. And, yes, I thought they were all effeminate gay men because that was what I associated transvestites with.

Sorry for the novel, I swear this comment was going to be much shorter!