I think that's a great initial topic. When my (straight) female best friend was feeling out where I am on trans issues after she was noticing some things, but didn't have the vantage point to understand, the three things she raised open-endedly with me were (1) trans males in women's sports, (2) the JK Rowling/Maya Forstater fiasco, and (3) erasure of women's language with regard to things like pregnancy and menstruation. At the time, I had already seen a piece written by an academic I know personally that was about keeping sports based on biological sex and talking about the advantages of the male body over the female body. I perked up at that because the author was an athlete herself and I trusted her perspective and knew she wasn't hateful. So that seed was planted. When my friend engaged me on this topic, I was still inclined toward as a default being pro-trans and so I said that I think you would have to look at each sport on a case by case basis and how biological sex differences were implicated. I said something like "I don't think we should say categorically yes or no" but I recognized that there were going to be some sports where male biology gave too much of an advantage and that "trans women" should therefore not be permitted to compete among female athletes but could compete with their fellow biological males. I think my friend brought up Rachel McKinnon and at the time I didn't know what a POS that narc is. Also, my friend does or at least used to do boxing. I don't think she brought up Fallon Fox. She might not have even known about Fallon Fox. That would have peaked me right away.

On the subject of Maya and JK. I saw JK's tweets and they didn't seem problematic to me, but I think I thought they were kind of a straw man. Like my perspective was "no one is saying biological sex is real." So I figured I was missing something. With the actual legal situation with Maya, well I'm a lawyer but not UK based, so I was only looking at whether she had a good legal argument and she didn't, so I figured it was some political stunt. I didn't actually see her tweets though. I tried looking up "gender critical" and all I could find was propaganda about terves being female incels who want to enforce gender stereotypes and who are "in bed with the alt right." Later when I started peaking for real I went back and read Maya's tweets that were evidence in the case, suddenly everything made sense. Her legal case was a political stunt, but I suddenly understood why.

As far as the erasure of women's language, I had not yet seen these examples for myself. So when my friend was saying that she saw people using this language, I thought it was very fringe, and I said that that's nuts and that of course women's language should be preserved. Why would it have to be inclusive of people who every knows aren't women? I still thought TWAW was just about being nice. I still think most liberals are thinking this. I also didn't know that trans people were trying to deny their biological sex and I didn't get why they would. Isn't that what makes them trans? I didn't know that women's health organizations were basically removing references to "female" sex in an effort to be "inclusive." Once I saw this in action, it was more peaking for me.

If you include everyone in a protected class, the practical effect is that you exclude the people who were originally meant to be protected by that category.

So all of the seeds were planted for me, but it wasn't until I started spending more time in the "LGBTQ+ community" that I saw that people actually did think all of these things I thought were fringe. This is why we who have the closest knowledge need to bring the real world examples to those who will otherwise not be face to face with it, but will still be subject to all of the changes to law and expectations in their behavior and speech.

There was actually SO much I noticed before and just figured I didn't understand and that there had to be more to it. I tried understanding non-binary and it seemed like gender stereotypes so I figured I didn't understand. Eventually i came to realize that I understood perfectly and that we just need to be able to talk openly about this kind of stuff to wake people up and get them to stop outsourcing their thinking to people they think are their allies and have their best interests at heart.

Anyway, my friend has a lot of friends in the "LGBTQ+ community" because she used to work at a bar in our local gay community. She noticed a lot of infighting and hostility happening on facebook and some extreme ideology coming from people she knew personally, particularly a girl she knew from elementary school who she always figured was autistic, who eventually came out as lesbian then non-binary then as a trans men and was posting really extreme deranged and aggressive shit on Facebook. My friend wouldn't have peaked if she hadn't seen that stuff coming from someone she knew, didn't later engage me in discussion, and then didn't later have me share my insight from my own integration into the "LGBTQ+ community" as a late bloomer lesbian. My friend also knows me really well and knows that I'm more interested in getting things right than being right, and that I can change my mind and admit to being wrong, so thankfully we were able to have that dialogue.