A worldwide survey of attitudes to “LGBT” issues published in June shows that most people oppose discrimination against gay, bisexual and trans-identifying people, but oppose trans-identifying men in women’s sport.
People didn't know what trans meant. Because of wording like, “Where we continue to find diverging views is on transgender access to single-sex facilities, healthcare provision and participation in sport.” Those euphemisms aren't working any more.
Now that people understand "single sex" means men in women's spaces, "healthcare provision" means fake breasts for men paid for by health insurance or tax dollars, cutting off teen, or pre teen, girls' breasts, drugging children with puberty blockers and giving minors cross sex hormones, and "participation in sport" means men and boys on women and girls teams and in their locker rooms", support for the T has shrunk.
It'll continue to shrink as more people learn what gender ideology and trans activism really is. Despite legacy media continuing to use these cowardly terms to hide what's really happening, people are finding out. Trans visibility has had the opposite affect they expected.
Just found that you can buy a Kill the TERF T shirt. Oddly, enough, nowhere can I find a Kill the Tranny t shirt. So gender-critical women and men are subjected to death threats by gender ideology but don't respond in kind. That's because misogynistic men identifying as women are behaving like what they are: men.
A couple of years ago I did a Google search for "KILL TERFS" / "DECAPITATE TERFS" teeshirts--and found at least ten different online sellers: all in large, Men's sizes, surprise surprise. Minimum $20 apiece.
Is it worth reporting them? Yes, we can complain to the company headquarters but can we take it up with a government entity? And if so, which ones? Does anyone know? Also did you find any Kill the Trannies t-shirts?
I didn't think of reporting them--to whom? would be the question indeed. I had just wondered where some transactivist demonstrators in a Pride photo had got their teeshirts from--and found a horrifying number of sellers.
I wouldn't put it past them to make a few "Kill the Tranny" teeshirts just to bolster the myth of "trans genocide", but why bother when there's no demand, and you can fake it with AI.
And "Tranny" is quite an affectionate term: unlike TERF--though it's been proudly appropriated by TERF Islanders like me.
Yes, I see your point. But it's maddening. If GC people were to wear t shirts that promoting killing any of their people, just imagine the public outcry.
Women need to speak up more. I’ve been consistently disappointed by female judges, MPs, and many others who support the eradication of their own rights. I totally understand those who worry about repercussions from the activists and employers etc, but so many women just don’t care. When I raise these issues with female friends, the apathy astonishes me. They betray the suffragettes and the other work done by their brave predecessors.
People who are legitimately trans and want to be left alone, face a unique problem
Unlike other minority group who’s activists end up going down the crazy train, trans people are still the minority, there are so few trans people that trans activists had to remove the necessity of having gender dysphoria just to try to bump up the numbers
If trans rights were to be completely removed it would negatively affect so few people that most wouldn’t even notice
I think it is also helpful to have LGB distance them selves from the Q&T and be clear they are not the same community. So much of this has been parasitic as a way to feed off the gains make by LGB and pass itself off as an extension of that movement. There was never any attempt to win hearts and minds , but rather to force it on people through legal means andattacks on anyone who questioned what was going on. They quickly became the transtapo who wielded fear as a weapon.
Not in Iran, and other similar shitholes, where they murder you if you are a homosexual male, but are more than happy to finance your transformation if that's something you want.
Also the support for this socially normalised psychiatric disorder was never universal or even significant in the West. This was and remains a manufactured consensus achived via parasitism.
Homosexual males and lesbian females worked to be accepted, achived the same over decades, mostly via simple coming out to their family and friends, not via activism, and then, these parasites came in, funded by leftist donors, hr departments, state organisations and agencies, etc and took over that momentum and claimed it as their own under the genderqueer banner and endless Acronym stamp.
Also, this invasion of single-sex spaces is not unique to females by far. Males are forced into tolerating them in their own spaces as well, and this is especially true of what used to be homosexual male only spaces and platforms.
Their war is not against women, it's against all of us.
Jennifer Bilek has investigated and established that the Trans-Gender Ideology Lobby was financed primarily by sociopathic Capitalists ie. Big Pharma needed a new growing marketplace of lifetime dependent customers once opioids were beyond the pale plus other equally cynical bad actors.
It’s the Epstein class billionaires get to fund scientific / social / legal research institutions at top universities and control the agenda.
Writing from Australia I see the institutional capture has been effective here. I was at Sal Grover's three day trial, and as a former lawyer, I knew she would lose, as she did with her appeal. I doubt whether her High Court appeal will be successful. Our idiotic federal statute that the Julia Gillard government amended to remove the definitions of man and woman and replace them with one nebulous term "gender identity" is transworld's success story here. It will take political will to overturn that and revert to reality and few politicians from the major parties have backbones. PS the One Nation party, who has vowed to overturn the amendment is fighting the good fight but has as much chance as the UK's Reform of achieving government. LGB is natural, trans is nothing but fantasy.
Thank you Dusty for your good natured tolerance of my language gripes. I hope the ladies at Sex Matters appreciate your carefully considered form of address!
And meanwhile have a great time with Mr Menno at Brighton Dyke Pride--I hope someone puts it on video so more of us can see
For as long as I can remember I have used the unisex meaning of 'guys' and nobody has objected to it yet. I think they might be more likely to not want to be called 'gals' since they are all grown women 😊
Prompt: When did it become normal to address mixed groups of men and women as "guys"?
Reply: Probably in U.S. English by the mid-20th century, with it feeling broadly normal in many regions by the 1960s–1980s.
A concise timeline:
Originally: guy meant a man/boy, from Guy Fawkes.
Early 20th century: "you guys" was already developing as a second-person plural in American speech.
Mid- to late 20th century: it became widely used for mixed-gender groups, especially as a casual vocative like “Hey, guys.”
By the late 20th century: many speakers treated it as practically gender-neutral in address, though not always in other uses. For example, “you guys” often reads more neutral than “those guys” or “a guy.”
So if you mean “when did it become normal?”, the best short answer is:
It was established in vernacular U.S. English by at least the 1970s, and likely became common earlier, around the mid-1900s.
One important caveat: it has never become fully uncontroversial. Many speakers hear “you guys” as neutral; others still hear it as male-coded, especially outside the U.S. or in more formal/inclusive settings
--I agree with the final caveat: "it has never become fully uncontroversial". As a 1970s second wave feminist (I worked in the Spare Rib magazine collective) I hear "you guys" as "male-coded"
Good research. At least I am not being ungrammatical 😀
I know a lot of other people who use it in the unisex sense: a pub landlady I know: gay campaigner Jack David who always signs off the podcast 'The Dumb Ages' with 'Have a good weekend, guys.'
I think all or at least most of the people who use it in this sense are not being sexist.
You have made me recall a party I was at many moons ago ( before I had peaked) when I got on the outskirts of a conversation where a woman was holding forth about how appalling it was that a speaker at a conference she was at had referred to everyone as 'ladies and gentlemen'. I thought 'oh, this is interesting. maybe she thinks that the terms 'lady' and 'gentleman' are too posh.' But what I thought are the alternatives: 'Hello, women and men', 'Hello, human beings'? And then I realised she thought that the 'non-binary' people in the audience might be upset. I detached myself from the group.
I am retired now but if I have to give a speech I will make sure to say 'ladies and gentlemen' 😂
Yes, I think it's pretty common now for people to regard "Hi guys" as an all-purpose, informal, friendly greeting--or to intend it that way, though it might not be so often accepted that way: but difficult to object to when it's obviously not intended offensively.
And I think the real problem is that, with "Ladies and gentlemen" being generally too formal, there are few or no good informal alternatives.
"Hi folks" is friendly but a bit folksy... And "Hi people" is somehow evasive, as though itself an acknowledgement of trying to fill a linguistic gap?
"Brothers and sisters" sounds evangelical... And "Comrades" as solidarity-speak tends to be restricted to trades unions and leftwing politics: where it always has a bloke-y resonance anyway.
So an ironic use of "Ladies and gentlemen" --acknowledging the problems of finding a decent alternative--might not be such a bad fallback.
Aversion to class-based forms of address, plus awkwardness in finding alternatives, probably accounts for a degree of generalised acceptance of "guys" as an intended "intersex" form of address to mixed groups--though women who accept it without complaint don't necessarily like being made invisible and addressed as men.
And I do find it somewhat absurd to see "guys" addressed to women only: especially feminist women running an outfit like Sex Matters!
I am 84: and remember the days when it was normal for letters to be addressed to eg "Mrs John Smith". Married women did not only give up their own paternal surname to take their husband's father's father's father's etc name. Women also lost their own first name--disappearing entirely.
And I remember the long struggle for women to identify ourselves on official forms as anything other than "Miss" or "Mrs": signifying available for marriage, or taken. But no man was similarly required to divulge his marital status.
With the recent death of Gloria Steinem, has been the reminder that her "Ms." magazine in the US--and "Spare Rib" magazine in the UK--were both launched in 1970. "Ms" was revolutionary in being the exact equivalent of "Mr". Yet even with the slow and grudging normalisation of "Ms" on official forms, women in the UK 56 years later still have to choose between "Miss" "Mrs" and "Ms" to fill in identity details on most forms.
Not to mention the even more absurd identity games now added on forms, around sex itself... "M" "F" or "other". I often feel inclined to tick "other" just for the hell of it.
But ticking "F" has come to feel even more rebellious! Necessary to preserve a threatened species, fast disappearing again under all the linguistic idiocies of gender identity ideology--like "birthing people".
The advent of all these new words to make women disappear makes "guys" just one of them, but still potent for me and other women like me. Even if they don't complain.
As a gal myself (despite the spelling of my name) I've always hated being addressed as "guys"... another case of "invisible women", as I've never regarded it a "unisex" form of address.
But as it's true that not all women mind being addressed as men, I wondered if that included the feminist doyennes of Sex Matters.
I certainly wasn't suggesting that any of us would prefer the female equivalent from a 1950s Broadway show with guys & gals.
We might even prefer to be addressed as "Ladies"--as we're Brits!
This is really interesting and encouraging - especially the place of "TERF Island" as the country most opposed to trans activists' demands. The whole report needs detailed reading, especially so one can cite the numbers, methodology, etc. to anyone who challenges or disagrees. It is also essential reference and contra-evidence for all the biased reports used by the government to justify its Conversion Practices draft Bill (see the notes for the Bill). Anyway, it's whatever the future uses, it's good to get some good news for today!
It isn't over until women are not punished by organizations for voicing their concerns a man is in their private spaces. This is clearly an erosion of woman's rights and a movement to marginalize women's voices. Time to complain and post the response on social media. Time to sue.
Yes, generally the claimants whose cases have been dismissed were found to have made unreasonable demands and/ or to have engaged in inappropriate behaviour
Very sad, the message to women is women's voices don't matter, our no no longer means no. As a woman in the Biden years I braced myself every time I entered into a public bathroom. I supported Harris. What is chilling to me is how quickly our voices were dismissed by the leadership of organizations. Same troupes I heard in the 70's.
I suggest we stop referring to the ambitions or claims of the trans lobby as trans demands or transgender demands.
The term “demand” denotes the assertion of a right.
DEMANDS ➡ RIGHT
In contrast, “claim” denotes the desire, request, or intention to obtain or claim a right that one believes one possesses.
CLAIM ➡ SUPPOSED RIGHT
For its part, “ambition” is an intense or fervent desire to achieve, obtain, or possess something, especially power, wealth, fame, or very high personal goals.
CLAIM ➡ PRIVILEGE
I believe “CLAIM” would be a more accurate description.
People didn't know what trans meant. Because of wording like, “Where we continue to find diverging views is on transgender access to single-sex facilities, healthcare provision and participation in sport.” Those euphemisms aren't working any more.
Now that people understand "single sex" means men in women's spaces, "healthcare provision" means fake breasts for men paid for by health insurance or tax dollars, cutting off teen, or pre teen, girls' breasts, drugging children with puberty blockers and giving minors cross sex hormones, and "participation in sport" means men and boys on women and girls teams and in their locker rooms", support for the T has shrunk.
It'll continue to shrink as more people learn what gender ideology and trans activism really is. Despite legacy media continuing to use these cowardly terms to hide what's really happening, people are finding out. Trans visibility has had the opposite affect they expected.
Just found that you can buy a Kill the TERF T shirt. Oddly, enough, nowhere can I find a Kill the Tranny t shirt. So gender-critical women and men are subjected to death threats by gender ideology but don't respond in kind. That's because misogynistic men identifying as women are behaving like what they are: men.
A couple of years ago I did a Google search for "KILL TERFS" / "DECAPITATE TERFS" teeshirts--and found at least ten different online sellers: all in large, Men's sizes, surprise surprise. Minimum $20 apiece.
Is it worth reporting them? Yes, we can complain to the company headquarters but can we take it up with a government entity? And if so, which ones? Does anyone know? Also did you find any Kill the Trannies t-shirts?
I didn't think of reporting them--to whom? would be the question indeed. I had just wondered where some transactivist demonstrators in a Pride photo had got their teeshirts from--and found a horrifying number of sellers.
I wouldn't put it past them to make a few "Kill the Tranny" teeshirts just to bolster the myth of "trans genocide", but why bother when there's no demand, and you can fake it with AI.
And "Tranny" is quite an affectionate term: unlike TERF--though it's been proudly appropriated by TERF Islanders like me.
Yes, I see your point. But it's maddening. If GC people were to wear t shirts that promoting killing any of their people, just imagine the public outcry.
Exactly
Women need to speak up more. I’ve been consistently disappointed by female judges, MPs, and many others who support the eradication of their own rights. I totally understand those who worry about repercussions from the activists and employers etc, but so many women just don’t care. When I raise these issues with female friends, the apathy astonishes me. They betray the suffragettes and the other work done by their brave predecessors.
Yes, they betray all the women and the male allies who came before them.
People who are legitimately trans and want to be left alone, face a unique problem
Unlike other minority group who’s activists end up going down the crazy train, trans people are still the minority, there are so few trans people that trans activists had to remove the necessity of having gender dysphoria just to try to bump up the numbers
If trans rights were to be completely removed it would negatively affect so few people that most wouldn’t even notice
What does "legitimately trans" mean?
Well, it is starting to erode, but alas not over yet…
Trans is a religious ideology of nominalism
I think it is also helpful to have LGB distance them selves from the Q&T and be clear they are not the same community. So much of this has been parasitic as a way to feed off the gains make by LGB and pass itself off as an extension of that movement. There was never any attempt to win hearts and minds , but rather to force it on people through legal means andattacks on anyone who questioned what was going on. They quickly became the transtapo who wielded fear as a weapon.
Not in Iran, and other similar shitholes, where they murder you if you are a homosexual male, but are more than happy to finance your transformation if that's something you want.
Also the support for this socially normalised psychiatric disorder was never universal or even significant in the West. This was and remains a manufactured consensus achived via parasitism.
Homosexual males and lesbian females worked to be accepted, achived the same over decades, mostly via simple coming out to their family and friends, not via activism, and then, these parasites came in, funded by leftist donors, hr departments, state organisations and agencies, etc and took over that momentum and claimed it as their own under the genderqueer banner and endless Acronym stamp.
Also, this invasion of single-sex spaces is not unique to females by far. Males are forced into tolerating them in their own spaces as well, and this is especially true of what used to be homosexual male only spaces and platforms.
Their war is not against women, it's against all of us.
Jennifer Bilek has investigated and established that the Trans-Gender Ideology Lobby was financed primarily by sociopathic Capitalists ie. Big Pharma needed a new growing marketplace of lifetime dependent customers once opioids were beyond the pale plus other equally cynical bad actors.
It’s the Epstein class billionaires get to fund scientific / social / legal research institutions at top universities and control the agenda.
Writing from Australia I see the institutional capture has been effective here. I was at Sal Grover's three day trial, and as a former lawyer, I knew she would lose, as she did with her appeal. I doubt whether her High Court appeal will be successful. Our idiotic federal statute that the Julia Gillard government amended to remove the definitions of man and woman and replace them with one nebulous term "gender identity" is transworld's success story here. It will take political will to overturn that and revert to reality and few politicians from the major parties have backbones. PS the One Nation party, who has vowed to overturn the amendment is fighting the good fight but has as much chance as the UK's Reform of achieving government. LGB is natural, trans is nothing but fantasy.
Thanks for this, guys. Very useful stats.
Have cross posted
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/my-life-as-a-dog-in-fact-ive-been
Dusty
Thank you Dusty for your good natured tolerance of my language gripes. I hope the ladies at Sex Matters appreciate your carefully considered form of address!
And meanwhile have a great time with Mr Menno at Brighton Dyke Pride--I hope someone puts it on video so more of us can see
All the best, Gabriel
It's been a pleasure discussing things with you, Gabriel. Thanks
Dusty
I'll probably have it on my substack tomorrow night BTW
Great!
Just watched it. Totally crazy
Check it out tomorrow night or whenever you can 👍
I will, thanks for letting me know
You too Dusty, thanks
I believe Sex Matters is run by gals. I wonder if they mind being called "guys"?
Hi Gabriel
For as long as I can remember I have used the unisex meaning of 'guys' and nobody has objected to it yet. I think they might be more likely to not want to be called 'gals' since they are all grown women 😊
The alternative versions of guys goes way back before the Gender Borg took over
Just tried asking duck.ai (GPT-5.4):
Prompt: When did it become normal to address mixed groups of men and women as "guys"?
Reply: Probably in U.S. English by the mid-20th century, with it feeling broadly normal in many regions by the 1960s–1980s.
A concise timeline:
Originally: guy meant a man/boy, from Guy Fawkes.
Early 20th century: "you guys" was already developing as a second-person plural in American speech.
Mid- to late 20th century: it became widely used for mixed-gender groups, especially as a casual vocative like “Hey, guys.”
By the late 20th century: many speakers treated it as practically gender-neutral in address, though not always in other uses. For example, “you guys” often reads more neutral than “those guys” or “a guy.”
So if you mean “when did it become normal?”, the best short answer is:
It was established in vernacular U.S. English by at least the 1970s, and likely became common earlier, around the mid-1900s.
One important caveat: it has never become fully uncontroversial. Many speakers hear “you guys” as neutral; others still hear it as male-coded, especially outside the U.S. or in more formal/inclusive settings
--I agree with the final caveat: "it has never become fully uncontroversial". As a 1970s second wave feminist (I worked in the Spare Rib magazine collective) I hear "you guys" as "male-coded"
Hi Gabriel
Good research. At least I am not being ungrammatical 😀
I know a lot of other people who use it in the unisex sense: a pub landlady I know: gay campaigner Jack David who always signs off the podcast 'The Dumb Ages' with 'Have a good weekend, guys.'
I think all or at least most of the people who use it in this sense are not being sexist.
You have made me recall a party I was at many moons ago ( before I had peaked) when I got on the outskirts of a conversation where a woman was holding forth about how appalling it was that a speaker at a conference she was at had referred to everyone as 'ladies and gentlemen'. I thought 'oh, this is interesting. maybe she thinks that the terms 'lady' and 'gentleman' are too posh.' But what I thought are the alternatives: 'Hello, women and men', 'Hello, human beings'? And then I realised she thought that the 'non-binary' people in the audience might be upset. I detached myself from the group.
I am retired now but if I have to give a speech I will make sure to say 'ladies and gentlemen' 😂
Dusty
Hi Dusty
Yes, I think it's pretty common now for people to regard "Hi guys" as an all-purpose, informal, friendly greeting--or to intend it that way, though it might not be so often accepted that way: but difficult to object to when it's obviously not intended offensively.
And I think the real problem is that, with "Ladies and gentlemen" being generally too formal, there are few or no good informal alternatives.
"Hi folks" is friendly but a bit folksy... And "Hi people" is somehow evasive, as though itself an acknowledgement of trying to fill a linguistic gap?
"Brothers and sisters" sounds evangelical... And "Comrades" as solidarity-speak tends to be restricted to trades unions and leftwing politics: where it always has a bloke-y resonance anyway.
So an ironic use of "Ladies and gentlemen" --acknowledging the problems of finding a decent alternative--might not be such a bad fallback.
Aversion to class-based forms of address, plus awkwardness in finding alternatives, probably accounts for a degree of generalised acceptance of "guys" as an intended "intersex" form of address to mixed groups--though women who accept it without complaint don't necessarily like being made invisible and addressed as men.
And I do find it somewhat absurd to see "guys" addressed to women only: especially feminist women running an outfit like Sex Matters!
I am 84: and remember the days when it was normal for letters to be addressed to eg "Mrs John Smith". Married women did not only give up their own paternal surname to take their husband's father's father's father's etc name. Women also lost their own first name--disappearing entirely.
And I remember the long struggle for women to identify ourselves on official forms as anything other than "Miss" or "Mrs": signifying available for marriage, or taken. But no man was similarly required to divulge his marital status.
With the recent death of Gloria Steinem, has been the reminder that her "Ms." magazine in the US--and "Spare Rib" magazine in the UK--were both launched in 1970. "Ms" was revolutionary in being the exact equivalent of "Mr". Yet even with the slow and grudging normalisation of "Ms" on official forms, women in the UK 56 years later still have to choose between "Miss" "Mrs" and "Ms" to fill in identity details on most forms.
Not to mention the even more absurd identity games now added on forms, around sex itself... "M" "F" or "other". I often feel inclined to tick "other" just for the hell of it.
But ticking "F" has come to feel even more rebellious! Necessary to preserve a threatened species, fast disappearing again under all the linguistic idiocies of gender identity ideology--like "birthing people".
The advent of all these new words to make women disappear makes "guys" just one of them, but still potent for me and other women like me. Even if they don't complain.
Hi Dusty
As a gal myself (despite the spelling of my name) I've always hated being addressed as "guys"... another case of "invisible women", as I've never regarded it a "unisex" form of address.
But as it's true that not all women mind being addressed as men, I wondered if that included the feminist doyennes of Sex Matters.
I certainly wasn't suggesting that any of us would prefer the female equivalent from a 1950s Broadway show with guys & gals.
We might even prefer to be addressed as "Ladies"--as we're Brits!
I live in the Scottish Borders and while Pride is diminishing elsewhere, we are having our inaugural Pride here. I’ll be avoiding it
This is really interesting and encouraging - especially the place of "TERF Island" as the country most opposed to trans activists' demands. The whole report needs detailed reading, especially so one can cite the numbers, methodology, etc. to anyone who challenges or disagrees. It is also essential reference and contra-evidence for all the biased reports used by the government to justify its Conversion Practices draft Bill (see the notes for the Bill). Anyway, it's whatever the future uses, it's good to get some good news for today!
It isn't over until women are not punished by organizations for voicing their concerns a man is in their private spaces. This is clearly an erosion of woman's rights and a movement to marginalize women's voices. Time to complain and post the response on social media. Time to sue.
Quite a lot of the lawsuits have been dismissed…
That doesn't mean we give up. It took several rounds for Maya Forstater, For Women Scotland, and LGB Alliance to win in court.
Thank you.
Is there a common reason?
Yes, generally the claimants whose cases have been dismissed were found to have made unreasonable demands and/ or to have engaged in inappropriate behaviour
Very sad, the message to women is women's voices don't matter, our no no longer means no. As a woman in the Biden years I braced myself every time I entered into a public bathroom. I supported Harris. What is chilling to me is how quickly our voices were dismissed by the leadership of organizations. Same troupes I heard in the 70's.
I suggest we stop referring to the ambitions or claims of the trans lobby as trans demands or transgender demands.
The term “demand” denotes the assertion of a right.
DEMANDS ➡ RIGHT
In contrast, “claim” denotes the desire, request, or intention to obtain or claim a right that one believes one possesses.
CLAIM ➡ SUPPOSED RIGHT
For its part, “ambition” is an intense or fervent desire to achieve, obtain, or possess something, especially power, wealth, fame, or very high personal goals.
CLAIM ➡ PRIVILEGE
I believe “CLAIM” would be a more accurate description.
But in behavioural rather than legalistic terms, transactivists who claim "trans rights" do indeed assume and DEMAND those "rights".
Playing this down with a neutral term "claim" for restricted purposes is not likely to change their actual behaviour.
You make a good point, but “claim” lacks the narcissism and vitriol that so often characterize their “demands.”
Tell that to the Darlington Nurses
all the way to zero. hope you had fun; it’s over go home and stay home