My best friend has been a liberal feminist and trans-cult advocate for years. We've been in a number of verbal wars due to her support of the cult and my terfness. Talking to her about Bruce Jenner though I could feel it was different. She was hesitating to call him 'Caitlyn' or use feminine pronouns, and was quite uncomfortable talking about him. I decided to read to her a few of the articles that have been linked here on Gender_Critical. There was lightbulb moment after I read the following part of the Elinor Burkett article:

'After all, the trans movement isn’t simply echoing African-Americans, Chicanos, gays or women by demanding an end to the violence and discrimination, and to be treated with a full measure of respect. It’s demanding that women reconceptualize ourselves. In January 2014, the actress Martha Plimpton, an abortion-rights advocate, sent out a tweet about a benefit for Texas abortion funding called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.” Suddenly, she was swamped by criticism for using the word “vagina.” “Given the constant genital policing, you can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital,” responded @DrJaneChi.'

After I finished reading that part and started to continue she suddenly interrupted me with

"That's something that's really been bothering me lately about the trans community."

She continued into a long response that I couldn't begin to quote verbatim but the highlights are that she's pissed off about the cult derailing or attempting to derail our fight for reproductive rights, forcing people who aren't trans to define themselves a certain way, and she is apparently very pissed off by Bruce Jenner in particular because she hates his name, hates his Vanity Fair cover, and hates that he flashed his son after getting his fake breasts installed. The flashing his son thing was "something a dude would do if he woke up with boobs. He'd just start flashing all the other dudes in his life like 'hey dude, check out my tits!' Her words. Her words are almost exactly my words on that subject.

She hasn't fully come around. She believes there are 'real transsexuals' who are 'actually cross-sexed' in their brains, but she has confessed that she feels that most of the trans cult are male fetishists who have taken things way too far and she even told me she can see the 'cult-like structure' of the trans 'community'. She even compared them to Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs when Dr. Lecter says "Billy is not a real transsexual. But he thinks he is. He tries to be."

For years she has blindly accepted the trans cult's shared narrative as fact. She has advocated for their inclusion in female-only spaces and has helped enforce the idea that 'trans women' are 'real women'. It seems that Bruce Jenner has helped to open her eyes but that she's been holding back some things for quite some time. My guess is she's been holding back because deep down she's been scared of what would happen if she opened her mouth. The relief in her voice when she was talking to me was something that's still making me smile. Hopefully this will make you smile too. She's not completely on board the gender critical ship yet, but what has happened so far is a big step in the right direction.