I'm a genXer. For a long time I guess I believed that someone could be born in the wrong body and as I thought of that as a terrible affliction, I felt very sorry for people who were born that way. Growing up I was aware of drag queens - gay men playing an act of a caricature of a women for entertainment, with quite benign, often thoughtful, characters like Lily Savage as the example I saw. Transvestites, men either straight or sometimes with an interest on children, who dressed up as women for sexual gratification. I was aware of the potential interest in children as the 'local transvestite' had come out from the side of his house, naked apart from his wig and make-up, to masturbate in front of my brother(6) and me(9) when we were on our way to school. (He did it to a number of children over the space of a few days and the school had to advise all parents not to let their children walk alone on his street. I don't know if the police got involved.) I've always had a wariness of transvestites since then even though I honestly didn't truly understand what he was doing at the time.

And I also knew of transexuals. These to me, seemed to be very unfortunate people. The main example I had of this was the character of Hayley in Coronation Street, a quiet, unassuming character played by a woman, who fell in love with gentle, likely autistic Roy Cropper. The other was Willy/Milly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy/Milly who I thought was lucky to discover was happy as a girl after all. I had assumed that transexuals exhausted all avenues to help them feel content in their natural body and only transed as a last resort. I assumed that the issue of male born people in women's sports wouldn't ever come up as the male advantage was too obvious for anyone to pretend it wasn't. And I'm embarrassed to say, I thought transwomen were at a big risk in male toilets and should be welcome in women's because, I was thinking of Hayley Cropper not the man who merrily masturbated in front of me, my brother and a number of my schoolmates.

I always thought NB was utter, narcissistic teen/young adult bullshit. But I figured it was just stupid and harmless and I had my own phase of faddish reality denying of stupidity as a young adult, so I was judging it from that perspective. 2018 London Pride was when I peaked, I had niggles before that, bursts of confusion or irritation at some of the activism of my peers, but I usually just allowed myself to accept trans-activist arguments. I didn't understand what had gone on at all, the newspaper articles on the Get The L Out protest confused me and didn't explain the issue. I actually found a thread by another confused person on Mumsnet and reading from the clued in posters I started to understand a little. Then I had a real life discussion with someone who said that as a 'white-cis-straight-man' they didn't really get to have an opinion on it. And when I said that actually, I think I could see where the lesbian group was coming from and why they had concerns, he just shouted at me for my bigotry until I changed the subject. And that was the moment I peaked.