Posted by: sam
« on: May 02, 2022 »Once more into the breach:
(Let's ask Bob The Builder)
A break from the mental gymnastics.
More links?
Women's lunch causes mass death
I feel like women who can not only afford to eat lunch, but who also have the privilege of smiling from time to time, demonstrate that indeed the women’s movement has gone too far. Feminism is not about lunch. It certainly isn’t about smiling or enjoying the company of other women. It is about crying and tweeting. I hope you enjoyed your death lunch, “women” (whatever that is).
A question of bravery
We’ve roughly enough men and women already. Swapping them back and forth is at the very least inefficient.
Five rules for fighting transactivism
Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.
Quote from: tabbycatstripy
‘Children are the front and validation for adults...’
I think this is the most significant motivation. For ‘transgender’ to be an innate characteristic rather than a psychological state (an identity that is formed over time and in response to conditions), there have to be ‘trans children’.
Solidarity across difference is out. Allyship and blank checks are in.
The entire campaign to enshrine gender ideology in our societies defies the possibility of understanding and celebrates the abdication of independent judgment: "They know better than you" about sums it up.
Compliance is what's being pursued here, enforced by social, economic, and legal sanctions, if necessary. Gender ideology seeks to destroy the very possibility of good-faith disagreement and public dialogue. The message to the public boils down to: "Don't look too closely. You're not capable of understanding what you see. Just trust us. Or don’t trust us—why should we care?—but do shut up.”
Quote from: OwnLyingEyes
Being forced to bear false witness against reality is never harmless, it's an imposition that's damaging to us as individuals and to society.
Quote from: nepeta
Quote from: HelleofaboreAllowing someone to fully believe in something that doesn’t reflect material reality and therefore depends on others being obligated to agree with your version of the world is harmful. The belief also in that the collective society needs to redefine itself, and the very words already very well established (and not derogatory words) used to define the world, to suit you is also harmful.
It's now difficult to write about many feminist topics when the words which once just sat there, clearly defined and simple, waiting to be slotted into the sentences in their proper places, are now lurking in the shadows, slipping through my fingers, and morphing into other words with a completely different meanings. We need agreement about what commonly used words mean if we are to communicate with others.
That the new definitions are almost always also deeply sexist makes this much worse. But the annoying extra effort needed and the clumsy sentences which still cannot be avoided are in themselves a cost forced upon us by a small minority with astonishing power.
Question Not
Question not the pleasures of the rainbow haired overlords. Not their penchant for posing with weaponry impotently threatening violence. Not their commodity fetishism for identities not their own. Not their vampiric consumption of words, draining them of meaning, leaving them lying flaccid like a clock in a Dali picture draped over a tree. Question not the prisoners of unreason who cast confusion on the young. Not their love of childish cartoons and codes of speech. Question not why so many are lost in computer games or comics or TV shows about dragons and robots. Question not their dark perversions made bright, like illustrations in books for children. Question not because we live in an age of adults speaking like children who force children to speak like adults.
What JK Rowling actually said
Quote from: Deliriumoftheendless
Ah yes, but if you take the first letter of each word, move them along by three letters, take out all the vowels, jumble them around, replace every other E O and I, translate into Latin, run through google translate you get what she really meant.
Read about it on the internet.
Quote from: AngelinaFibres
I guess it must be very hard when you have dressed up and taken hormones and done some surgery stuff, that women, who don't fit your idea of what it is to be feminine, are still the thing you desperately want to be. Those women are happy in their own skin. They can dress as they do because they are women. They don't have to perform 'being a woman' because it is what they are. Whether clothed or naked, fancied by straight men or not they are women. It must be stressful to see them having a ball because they don't give a damn whether they 'pass' as women. They are women and they don't need to give a moments thought to a man in a dress trying to be prettier than them.
The week the trans spell was broken
So I always knew it would start with sport. The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.
You go girl!
That guy is difficult to watch. My wife laughed so hard at this that she was in pain, and we had to hit pause a few times.
Quote from: CaveMum on Mumsnet
Sharron Davies interview part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Quote from: mrsmeyers
Sports.
Not lesbians being harassed. Not rape victims being forced to humor the delusions of mentally ill men and "unlearn their trauma" or lesbians "unlearn their genital preference." Not imprisoned women being housed with male serial killers and rapists. Not children being put on fucking LUPRON as some crazy, spiritual Peter Pan shit and having their breasts lopped off by dead eyed surgeons before they can even vote. Not the rampant grooming of children by teachers, the government, the media. Not TIMs of note regularly being outed as pedophiles and sex offenders.
Sports.
What is a man?
"You're looking at one."
Quote from: Signalbox
Grace Lavery on Women's Hour
This is my favourite bit. I think perhaps us feminists do have quite a lot to learn from Gracie after all.
"One of the things that I’ve been working on in my scholarly work for the last few years and is really important to me is thinking about little techniques that seem newly necessary when one transitions but never seemed necessary before and so for example I had never worn make up to work and now I don’t wear make up at all really, I mean very very rarely, I’m not wearing make-up now and if you don’t wear make-up when you are doing an interview with Woman’s Hour you don’t wear make-up very often but I mean I but back in the early days I used to wear make-up to work a little more and Danny would occasionally give me help, but I was terrible at it I really was you know it’s just not something I done but you know and this is another thing that I sometimes think about tensions around trans people in the UK is umm so many of the problems that seem to be generated by, you know, what we might call the kind of trans liberalism of the present moment, so many of those problems seem have to do specifically with the moment of transition and much less to do with the question of how trans people exist in the world on a longer term basis, you know it has to do with moments where people don’t really know what pronouns to use or don’t really know how to talk or think about things or, you know, people feel disorientated in the wake of a transition. When one is first beginning to transition socially there are all kinds of complicated consequences, which of course affect trans people far more than they do those around us but which affect those around us too and sometimes in ways that are unpredictable and sometimes even intense so… all by way of saying I think it’s not an uncommon story for people to sort of start wearing make-up when they first transition as a way of flagging look something really different is happening in my life now, and then at a certain point to sort of start thinking well you know really I don’t need to do that I don’t really want to do that it’s not really who I am."
Quote from: vivariumvivaiumsvivaria
Quote from: mumsnut'Word salad' is too kind a description. Word porridge, maybe?
“word jizz”
Daily Kos Equity Council presents a panel on trans rights
Wall of text or screen of cringe: pick your poison. And remember: "people change pronouns, so what's right today might be incorrect the next day." The fun never ends.
Quote from: Absurdle
It’s tempting to speculate that if you’re immersed in a fantasy where “I am a woman” is true by virtue of simply saying it, then it’s a small step to add “the law is whatever I say it is” to the rules of the fantasy world you’re living in. Unfortunately all fantasies have to collide with reality eventually.
Sympathy for the she-devil
Funny but not ha ha funny.
Deep Dive on the Dentons document
Not even a little funny.
Actually he said "I don't think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events," sport. Notice the constant push by most mainstream media to shift the language and thereby alter perception.
Quote from: MangyInseam
I don't particularly care about the personal foibles of political figures, they seem largely irrelevant to their political effectiveness. Some quite nasty people can be excellent in public life, not that I would put BJ at that level. Though I do often wonder how many people have actually read or listened to the things those quotes are pulled from.
Quote from: GAHgamel
I’m more inclined to wrench the thread back on topic with some more favourite Billy Bragg lyrics:
"Some day boy you'll reap what you've sown
you'll catch a cold and you'll be on your own
and you will see
that what's wrong with me
is wrong with everyone
that you want to play your little games on”
Penny's pointless battle
Some things add to the gaiety of the nation — and Laurie Penny’s self-absorption is one of them.
The Cotton Ceiling? Really?
So much post-modernism, so little time.
Surreal debate
The tortured logic of trans activism leads to some very silly places. It leads to apparently sensible people arguing that male puberty confers no irreversible physical advantages and that sports were only ever sex-segregated to stop the women embarrassing the men — which suggests that female athletes have been crimping their performance to spare male egos.
It leads to people claiming that no man would ever pretend to be trans just to get an advantage, as though people aren’t constantly busted pretending to be something they’re not (poorer, blacker, more dyslexic) to edge their way into a prize, a scholarship or some extra time in an exam. It even leads to Boris Johnson sounding the most grown-up person in the room.
Trans activists call last week evidence of a culture war, but it really isn’t. No one in power seems keen to appear spiteful or cruel towards trans people: the government is simply, finally, taking seriously the fact that there is a problem when groups such as Stonewall are allowed to dictate not only the law as they would like it to be, but also reality as they would like it to be.
Know your enemy
Some commentators have questioned whether people who judge this sort of material appropriate for children could possibly have kids of their own. I would question, more fundamentally, whether they have ever had sex. There seems to be a strange disconnect here, possibly borne of too much thinking and talking and emoting and workshopping and not enough doing. The material of theirs that is publicly available tends to mix up basic bodily functions, sexual practices, and social justice concepts as if each had exactly the same emotional and moral weight - sometimes to a near sociopathic-sounding degree. (So for instance, one baffling couplet from the song “Questions” excerpted earlier goes: “What's it like to give birth? What’s it like to have a fist in your ass?”) Had there been a smoother connection between loins and brains here, surely this sort of material would have given its creators pause.
Tweets from 2003: The Gender Recognition Bill
Prepare your hollow laughs….now