OK, OK, I will be gone by 9 for sleep hygiene purposes, but I just had an epiphany about gender critical feminism & why New Atheists were annoying. Hear me out.

OK, I will be muting any GC feminists who respond to this, btw. I am no longer interested in hearing their views although I will support their right to have & express them to people who are.

So, the problem I have been having lately is getting shat on from a great height by GC fems for just wanting to support their right to speak & to defend women's spaces & sports without wanting to take on all their positions on everything to do with sex & gender etc.

When I found myself explaining this to one of them for the 100th time and she was insisting that it was essential I spread the word that men aren't women, it caused me to recognise that this is a lot like what I did when I was New Atheisting a lot.

When I was a NA, it was very important to me to try to get people to care about the fact that large swathes of the population believed in things that did not appear to be true. However, many people found this extremely annoying.

They would say to me repeatedly, "I don't care what other people believe as long as they don't force it on anyone else" and I found this frustrating because I thought they should care because it does actually matter quite a lot what is true.

Anyway, I moved away from this combative stance quite some time ago even though I still hold the positions I held then. But I now find myself saying to GC fems 'I don't care what other people believe as long as they don't force it on anyone else."

And they find this very frustrating because they think it matters a lot what is true. But what it essentially comes down to is them insisting that I care about the same things they do when, in fact, I don't, and I don't have to. It bores me.

It's not that I don't think there are truths about what men & women are and why some people feel they are the other one from what is indicated by their reproductive systems. I know there are although the latter question is still in the early stages of being studied.

It's that I don't feel any need to go around telling people what I think these truths are & insisting they accept that & then make it a priority in their lives to convince everybody else of this.

I find it very annoying that people can't just accept this. I have different priorities. However, I now suspect that I was very annoying in exactly the same way when I was insisting that everybody prioritise god beliefs.

I have now backed off from doing this & am much more of a secularist than an anti-theist. I accept that it is valid not to care about or think it is your business what other people believe as long as they're not imposing it on anyone else.

I don't think there's a moral responsibility not to care about or think it is your business what other people believe. On the contrary, I'd like everybody to be focusing on what is true & how we know & trying to convince others of this in one area or another. It's how we advance.

However, I don't think anybody has the right to insist that other people prioritise the issue that most concerns them & I admit to being guilty of doing that during my New Atheist years. I don't think I do now even tho I myself am still quite single-minded in my focus.

So the Kendi thing where you can only be racist or anti-racist? No. You can legitimately be non-racist & focus on issues other than racism in whatever you do to make the world a better place.

You don't actually even have to anything to make the world a better place although I think you should & that thing needn't be political or activism related. You could foster abandoned dogs, for example. Your moral responsibility is not to make the world a worse place.

So, no, I don't have to focus on what people believe about sex & gender, even if this frustrates GC feminists. Nobody else had to focus on what people believe about God, even when that frustrated me. People can legitimately have other focuses without being "part of the problem."