Some people who are gender critical nevertheless use gender identity based pronouns for trans people.

I think it's a complicated question & everyone has to decide it as best they can.

I don't use preferred pronouns. I used to, but changed my mind. It wasn't out of spite./ / I'd use female pronouns for a male person if it was understood to mean "I know you want to be seen as female & I'm going along with that because I don't want to hurt you, with the understanding that we both know you are really male & you won't disregard women's boundaries."/

This is the Trunchbull problem.
Transactivism is so outrageous that when you talk about it you sound like you're making things up or misrepresenting things./

https://twitter.com/TrilliansStar/status/1653026220500475904

/But it also means that once you have realised what's going on, you can't understand why there isn't more of a public outcry about it. The danger then is that in your desperation to get people to pay attention you refer to exactly the most outrageous aspects, those aspects/

Language like "menstruators" is often defended as being more accurate than women - after all, some women don't menstruate.
As some have pointed out, language like this tends to confuse or mislead women who are disadvantaged - women whose first language isn't English, for example/

https://twitter.com/scifri/status/1649478102916141056

/But it's also unscientific & inaccurate, I think, & interrupts the way in which we understand & navigate the world, impeding our ability to do so.
Human beings live in a dynamic world. We know that living things change throughout time. When trees lose their leaves in the winter/

I haven't read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in years but we have a Christmas tradition of watching the TV series. It has several great lines (some definitely straight from the book, not sure about others) in defence of free & robust debate & continued diversity of views./ /This is the prime minister's response to Norrell when he wants to set up a Magical Court which would effectively give him control over anything written about magic, on the grounds that contrary views are dangerous./

I have an avalanche of notifications from the thread I wrote yesterday and, like some sort of a thing that gets anxious with too many Twitter notifications, have muted the thread. I mute threads a lot. The reason being that I think discussion and disagreement works best if we can draw a line under them. If you have a robust argument with a friend in a pub, you go home from the pub & that's the end of it. If you get in an argument on Twitter, it can be like

Unsurprised to see people angry that women met yesterday in Dublin to talk about the problems of gender identity ideology. Irish women have been told repeatedly and forcefully that none of us are gender critical, that that heresy is a sin confined to the Brits (or occasionally
1/ 2/ the Yanks, when the denouncers aren't at that moment cosying up to the various Americans who happen to be fellow denouncers). When you've settled on xenophobia for your counterargument, no doubt it stings when your own countrywomen ruin it all by organising a blasphemous talk.

Would you donate eggs or sperm? (Not to me personally, thanks, just to an IVF clinic) How does being a parent affect people's willingness to donate eggs or sperm?

There's barely a politician in Ireland I have a shred of respect for, after the last four years. I've seen Labour politicians lay the blame of homophobic murders carried out by men, on women who defend female sport. I've seen the SocDems select a candidate who at the time had
1/ 2/ "Terfs Out" in her Twitter bio. They pushed an extreme dismissal of women's rights & medical caution at their recent convention. Fine Gael's Regina Doherty's surreal performance for the Scottish committee on gender, where she laughed about the lack of records and claimed

Watching people who I believe have good intentions and want to be kind, who have somehow arrived at a place where they are telling women that we are "the worst" for wanting single-sex spaces and resources, necessary things that women before us fought for and won.
1/ 2/ For a time I was pro Self ID. I hadn't thought about it really, I had simply seen it was the position of Amnesty & the ICCL, I conflated Self ID with gay marriage, etc. What led to my changing my mind was seeing the abuse GC women were getting, and deciding that as nobody

Weirdly, watching society fail massively at error correction has given me a much deeper appreciation of how well we work in this sense most of the time.
For me the very core of genderism has been its denial of reality, and I've spent about five years now trying to figure out 1/ 2/ why so many people are going along with it.

People believe all kinds of things that aren't true. I grew up in a religion that said bread turned to flesh. Homeopaths say water is potent medicine. People pay good money to clairvoyants. In my lifetime, though, and my part of

I'm reading about Daniel Kahneman's idea of System 1 and System 2 thinking.

System 1 thinking is intuitive; often relies on rules of thumb or stereotypes, and while it is efficient & low effort it can lead us to make errors.
1/ 2/ System 2 thinking is focused & effortful; it's what what we do when we deliberately set out to solve a problem.

But System 2 can become overwhelmed if the problem is too complex or requires information we don't have. In that situation, System 2 can give up & System 1 instead

I annoy my husband by telling him stories at night and this was one that I scribbled into a blank book for him.

The trans debate is horrible. When I first realised that I did not agree with the Stonewall side of things, and in actual fact (to my horror) agreed with the dreaded t*rfs, I set up an anonymous account to try & explore the issue further. I was already terrified of men I knew 1/

https://twitter.com/ayeshahazarika/status/1405157946837831680

2/ on the TRA side - men I had been friends with, and who I saw bullying gender critical women on here. But once I started to get involved with gender critical conversations, I also found myself blocked or accused of being a sock puppet by GC accounts, for asking questions,

My husband made a good observation today - the TRA side is playing poker. They don't 'show their cards' - that is, they won't discuss evidence or reasoning - they just make the stakes ever higher. "I'll ostracise you; I'll get you fired; I'll have you arrested".

https://twitter.com/dignitydh/status/1377355352442765315

The cards themselves are nothing. There's just nothing there. There's not even a coherent definition of gender identity. Some people have gender dysphoria, yes. And seasoned clinicians like Susan Bradley & Stephen B Levine still are unsure as to its nature or the best care.

From Ian Leslie's book 'Conflicted' - really interesting idea that we are intelligent (in the sense of discovering what is true) collaboratively, not individually.
1. 2.

I'm so fucking bored with the zombie-brained misogyny. I hate thinking about this one stupid issue day in day out. I'm not interested in it. It makes me angry and depressed and I know that we have to do what we can to salvage vital rights but I resent every fucking second 1/ 2/ I spend meticulously researching, referencing and editing arguments to prove that yes, biologically female people exist LIKE YOU ALL FUCKING KNOW WE DO and male violence is *male* violence not 'wears trousers & has short hair' violence. The ICCL and Amnesty and the NWCI should

1/ A bit about WPATH. #IStandWithKeiraBell From an affidavit by Dr Stephen B Levine, who has worked with dysphoric ppl since 1974, chaired the 5th Standards of Care of WPATH, then known as HBIGDA.

It's become 'dominated by politics & ideology' 2/ It's open to non-professionals (despite being called 'World Professional...')
It takes a decided view on issues as to which there is a wide range of opinion among professionals.

The reason I am now gender critical (or, as many of my fellow Irish lefties would have it, a monster) is that I started listening carefully to what was being claimed by the trans side.
Before I did that, I was trotting along with the crowd, blissfully woke.
1/ 2/ I saw women on Twitter being threatened and bullied. I knew the first time I read the word 'terf' (aimed at a woman by a man I knew, or thought I knew) that it was a threat, not just an objective term. And even though I thought that woman was not only wrong but unkind,

1/ I think about the gender debate more than I'd like. But I know why I keep coming back to it.
I grew up surrounded by a religion. Almost everyone I knew was supposed to believe in it. It affected our laws. It led people to make bad decisions. The bulk of the harm this religion 2/ did, was to women and children. Symphisiotomies, the Magdalen laundries, the Eighth amendment.
I didn't know about them when I started questioning it.
But I remember being made to say things I didn't believe, and I remember how people didn't like it if you asked questions.

1/ For people who've known me a while, before I crossed over to The Dark Side & became gender critical, and who are possibly shocked & think that I now hate trans people, here is a hopefully short thread summing up what I think. 2/ I believe some people have gender dysphoria. I care about access to well-evidenced treatment for people with dysphoria. For those dysphoric ppl who decide to transition, I care that they have the means to thrive in our society.