Like many here, I started off fully TWAW. I felt sympathetic to the plight of trans people and the stories of high school students being harassed in bathrooms. Making laws to forbid them from the bathrooms where they "passed" seemed needlessly intrusive and cruel. The explanation of protecting women seemed like a smokescreen for transphobia given the incredibly low rate of assault in bathrooms. It seemed like any other excuse that right wing bigots used to keep out Latinos, Muslims, or Black people. I feel absolutely awful for trans people in the prison system and have read many gutwrenching stories from them. Many of them describe lives where they must either act as sex slaves the entire time or go mad from solitary confinement.

The first crack in my ideology was when I saw transwomen competing and winning in women's sports years ago. This just seemed to fundamentally unfair and akin to steroid use that I couldn't believe it was actually allowed. Not everyone can compete in high level sports. All kinds of people for whatever reason aren't able to compete in high level sports, whether it's allergies or asthma or disability, and maybe it's best to lump trans people in with them and that's okay.

Every time I heard about a transwoman winning at sports, I would get a little flare up of unease, and then outrage when I heard about Fallon Fox fracturing a woman's skull in MMA. I don't understand how anyone can't look at that as male-on-female violence right there.

However, I wasn't passionate about this issue, so it fell off my radar for a while until I heard about the Vancouver Rape Relief Shelter being vandalized. I was so shocked at the vandalization that I wondered whether it was an actual trans person who did it or some alt-right asshole who was just trying to spread hate and further polarize these groups. That was the first time I ever heard the term "TERF," and when I googled it, I wasn't entirely clear why it was supposed to be offensive. I read the descriptions, but I didn't understand what it was about "TERF" beliefs that deserved so much vitriol.

Then, I read that the Vancouver Rape Relief Shelter was defunded due to a trans activist. I read trans people celebrating this, saying shit like "fuck all TERFs," and I realized just how toxic trans activism had become.

These thoughts were only amplified when JKR made her tweet about Maya Forstater, and I saw all the abuse she got for basically telling people to live how they wanted but don't deny biology. Like, WTF? How did trans activism get filled with extremists and science deniers? I read through all of their refutations too, the articles that they thought supported them containing the most specious arguments about clownfish and intersex people somehow supporting their cases. (Also, I saw a picture of Gregor Murray and W T F that is a full-ass man. I have some background in biology, and I've always been skeptical of "nonbinary" as a legit gender dysphoria category anyway.)

The latest tweets from JKR, the essay, and the "woke" response to them are what sealed the deal for me. When the fuck did it become okay for woke left to dismiss the concerns of women who are rape and domestic abuse survivors? What ever happened to being respectful of triggers for traumatized women? It used to only be butthurt men who frothed at the mouth at the suggestion of treating interactions with men as dealing with Schrodinger's Rapist, but now it's the left that's telling women to shut up and #NotAllMen. THIS IS NOT OKAY.

But, I was still open to the idea that maybe I was wrong. Maybe transwomen really weren't as big of a threat as cismen. So I did a deep dive into a bunch of the research.

I found out that one study found that transwomen retained a male pattern in regards to violent crime. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

I found out that 20% of the trans population in male prisons in CA are incarcerated for sex offenses. This is actually higher than the cismale rate of ~15%. http://ucicorrections.seweb.uci.edu/files/2013/06/A-Demographic-Assessment-of-Transgender-Inmates-in-Mens-Prisons.pdf

I found out the 40% of the trans population in UK prisons are there for sex offenses. (Though this "only includes people who have had a prison case conference. It won't include transgender people who haven't identified themselves to the prison service or who already have a gender recognition certificate." Although the actual percentage is probably lower, it's still an alarming number) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629

I found out that since the UK's new laws allowing trans people to be housed with their identified gender, the number of trans-identifying people skyrocketed 10x. If all of these are actual trans people and not just opportunistic cismales, then they are overrepresented in prison populations by a factor of 4. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/09/one-50-prisoners-identify-transsexual-first-figures-show-amid/

From there, I've just been reading more and more outrageous things. Like crunching the numbers on the "epidemic" of trans people murdered reveals that overall they are statistically safer from homicide than the general population. This suggests that the high murder rate for transwomen of color has more to do with race, poverty, and sex work than anything else. And on that note, Black women are over twice as likely to be murdered compared to trans people--where is the outrage?

All that said, I still feel that most trans people are fine in the same way that I feel most men are fine. I don't hate men, I'm just wary of them and I won't stand for my legitimate concerns being dismissed. They're just trying to live their lives and they face a lot of discrimination and harassment. They deserve support and safe spaces, but those safe places shouldn't come at the expense of women's safety.