One of my favourite content creators on youtube just released a video specifically to bash JK Rowling, so I came here to vent.

I think I am the sort of "transphobe" that trans activists just love. I was never an ally. I went directly from a clueless straight woman to a full-scale raging "terf". My initial dislike of trans people came from ignorance and disgust, and I am not proud of it. I hope it doesn't cloud my judgement now.

I never had any openly lgbt people in my social circle (partly because in my country they keep a low profile). Among the few gay people I knew online, there was nobody I liked. Now I see that their unpleasantness had nothing to do with their sexuality (except from one gay man who, as I now realize, was severely dysphoric and hateful towards women), and being nice to strangers all the time is a privilege that many don't have. I accepted that lgbt people exist and must be treated fairly. But I wasn't sure that I could be comfortable around an openly gay person and was ashamed of that.

Trans people were an extreme case: I couldn't help thinking that even if there is nothing wrong with people attracted to their own sex, there must be something wrong with those wishing to change their body to look like the opposite sex. The fact that they were under the same four-letter umbrella was confusing to me. Transgenderism sounded like a mental illness, but we were taught by propaganda that homosexuality is a mental illness, too, so both must be untrue, right? On Tumblr, I saw photos of happy, passing trans people. I empathized with trans characters in comics and movies. I believed that denying such a small, harmless minority access to bathrooms was a strange hill to die on. Yet, I would never say that transwomen were women, or even that they were normal healthy people. Still, specifically calling them out seemed... petty?

And then I peaked. I am not proud of it, when I read other (sometimes scary) peak stories. There was a really talented female artist I was following on Tumblr, who came out as non-binary and started making some really disturbing fan art of my favourite characters. She drew everyone as trans (except from the one character she hated and left alone, lol). But what peaked me was putting really graphic mastectomy scars on men. Now, I know that women sometimes undergo mastectomy for medical reasons, and we should not stigmatize it. But ffs, she wasn't reimagining a woman as a cancer survivor, she was clearly fixating on mutilation of female bodies as a result of dysphoria. I used to love this artist because she drew female characters realistically - with body hair, prominent facial features and muscles - and not as same-face, beautified anime girls. But I wouldn't call celebrating cutting a body part off, because you would rather kill yourself than live with it, "body positivity".

So yes, I peaked because of cartoon characters. But after that, I couldn't unsee it. So much of what I saw in “woke” spaces screamed “self-hate” to me. Everyone was denying their femaleness like it was leprosy, everybody claimed to be a feminist, but nobody wanted to be a woman. The only people who were okay with being women were transwomen and they had to be celebrated and protected from “terfs” at all cost.

I googled “terf” and ended up on the GC sub, learned about autogynephilia, child transition, language censoring, etc. The reason why I peaked originally seems dumb now. I had no way of knowing that trans movement was so harmful, and I really disliked trans people just for celebrating “gross stuff” (not unlike celebration of periods by feminists). Sometimes it feels like I am just a bigot who “lucked out”: the thing that seemed ugly on the outside turned out to be ugly on the inside, too.

As a biologist, I am peaking hard right now because of the whole “sex is a spectrum” thing. I am feeling really down because people I used to respect are spewing nonsense. They ridicule antivaxxers and call out the dangers of covid skepticism but then turn around to repeat “twaw” a hundred times. I am scared because no pseudoscience that I know about has ever been so omnipresent and powerful in the non-totalitarian world.

I feel bad talking about this stuff irl, because so much of what they say about trans activism sounds too much like the stuff gay people were accused of: that they are degenerate, perverted, crazy, that they recruit children, etc. I don't want to trivialize it, because I don’t belong to the lgbt community, but then, this stuff has stopped being simply a lgbt or feminist issue, once they began silencing academics over it. I really wish I could just travel 10 years forward and see that this craze is over and JK Rowling didn’t come down in history as a literal nazi.