Cueing this up again, because it gets me every time:
I'm just going to copy and paste whatever catches my eye and add it to this post for a while. You'll note one well in particular I keep going back to.
On self-identifyingThis is all a bit like insisting a feather doesn't respond to gravity by coercing everyone to stand underneath it and blow on it—even to the point of trying to legislate a sustaining breeze. Quite aside from the petty authoritarianism self-id imposes on other people, what’s actually freeing gets lost in the scramble: being yourself, not caring too much what other people think, not depending on external validation to prop up your sense of self.
I have a problem with chosen pronouns because forced pretending is deeply humiliating and proves all the power lies with the gender ideologists, but even worse is being forced to be sexist (and sometimes homophobic) by colluding with idea that gender is what makes us a man or a woman. A man standing in front of me and making me pretend he's a woman, because he is mimicking a sexist conception of womanhood, is degrading me. It's not about politeness, it's about power.
Tickle vs. Gigglecould be the title of a tween pillow fight, but it is the culmination of years of the legal erasure in Australia of the link between Australian women as recognised legally and the vulnerabilities of the female body…
The trans lobby will base their case on the faith belief that ‘trans women are women’ and are no danger to ‘cis women’. The new binary of ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ places ‘cis’ as an oppressor class over trans. ‘Cis’ privilege is an imaginary power that obliges women to give way to our ‘trans’ sisters in every single building, space, law, or platform that our mothers have fought for to protect our bodies.
‘Trans women’ we are told must be trusted without question by women, mothers, lesbians, and children in exactly that same way as biological women are, not because, as in days of old, that these males are physically or chemically castrated, but just because they have a special female essence or morality. Like it or not, women don’t always trust men who claim to have mystical powers that make them innocuous.
The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count(or, Old Gray Lady Finally Wakes Up)The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.
Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.
Spaces of our ownFemale rape and abuse survivors are not broken or damaged. They have experiences that demand recognition, and needs which other people ought to be sufficiently humane to accommodate.
If one thing does strike me as broken, maladaptive, a response desperately in need of external correction, it’s the behaviour of those currently attacking a woman who is making one small, simple request for a space in which to heal. These people’s attitudes are obscene.
One woman’s
trauma should not make so many people so angry and heartless. If you’re one of them, then I’ll tell you this: this woman deserves love and support. You, on the other hand, need fixing.
Why Trans Women Belong In Women’s SpacesI like to imagine the way conversations would go if a female-only group were forced to be available.
Brainwashed counselor: We have a couple of groups available. I’m legally obligated to tell you about both, but really, one is a much better option. I recommend our Tuesday night group. It’s a wonderful group, inclusive of all women, and we all work really hard to provide a supportive and non-judgmental space for women of all appearances and identities, no matter how they present. It’s such an important experience for survivors to get the opportunity to really learn and challenge themselves in this space. Shall I go ahead and sign you up for it?
Woman: Sure…I guess…um, just, what are the other groups? You said there were a couple.
BC: oh, no I HIGHLY recommend the Tuesday group. It really pushes cis women to think about their assumptions of womanhood and I think it’s so helpful for healing, don’t you agree? We don’t want our clients to get stuck in their trauma or to learn to weaponize it.
Woman: Ok, I don’t know what any of that means, but what’s the other group? Is there something wrong with it?
BC: Well, there’s this little group…first of all it’s at a very inaccessible time, it’s at 10pm on a Friday night. And we weren’t able to find a room for it, so the meeting space is quite uncomfortable. And the counsellor who volunteered to run it has some…suspect views. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Woman: why not?
BC: It’s not very kind, you know. We were ordered to provide it but we really try to steer our clients away from it. I don’t think gatekeeping womanhood is a productive part of healing, do you? The vast majority of women as studies show, fully support human rights for all women.
Woman: I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Why can’t I go to this group? What’s the problem?
BC: Well, it’s a group of exclusionary mostly white cis women who really refuse to heal from their trauma without inciting moral panics against a very vulnerable population who actually suffers more violence. The group inclusive of all women is much better. You’re not transphobic are you? We believe Trans women are women, no arguments.
Woman: so the Friday night group is women only?
BC: TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!
Woman: I think I’d feel more comfortable in the Friday group, actually. Thank you.
BC (to self): that’s the 50th woman to sign up to the Friday group, and only 3 are in the Tuesday group. Why can’t victims educate themselves?
Trying to erase the biological definition of sex isn’t just misguided – it’s dangerousI wish people would think harder about why this anti-materialist movement, which campaigns for subjectively determined human identities to take precedence over biology, has gained so much strength at the precise moment in history when it is most essential that we should be materialists, prepared to confront the limits of nature.
JKR and more bomb threatsObviously this is wrong but shouldn't she have at least censored the account she is accusing of doing this before broadcasting them to 13.9M followers? There are now abusive comments advocating violence towards the person she has accused.
JK Rowling should have gone straight to the police with this, not straight to Social Media.
Your post can basically be summed up as - 'obviously this is wrong....but here is a bullshit excuse why I'm going to blame JKR anyway'.
She didn't just accuse, she showed direct evidence of a bomb threat using her actual address. Why the fuck shouldn't she share that on social media? If the person is reckless enough to post bomb threats to people, they deserve to be outed.
But no, the real crime is apparently that JKR didn't just stay quiet about it. Shut the fuck up women, even when you are getting bomb threats!
And as for 'gone to the police', we know well from experience the police don't even take it seriously. She has said previously she has had dozens of death threats in the past, what has been done about those? Not much apparently. What confidence would she have that the police would do anything useful.
The Evil of BanalityLarge-scale social transformations can’t be accomplished without the vehemence of activists and the
complicity of institutions, but they also tend to require the nonchalance of the chattering class, which is often most influential not when it opines but when it yawns.
The end of No Debate in IrelandThe attempt to collapse a wide range of concerns and problems into “questioning trans people’s right to exist” is transparent by daylight. The cat is out of the bag. You can call it a bad, transphobic cat, you can intimate that Putin would love a cat like that but rational people will start to wonder what’s your problem with cats.
Um. I don't think I'm allowed to say what I think.
Which is a huge part of the problem.
Jonathan LiewWaaaay too many good replies to choose one.
https://twitter.com/somefilmstudies/status/1541754482643664901https://twitter.com/raahilah98/status/1541781574651453440https://twitter.com/raahilah98/status/1541781706017062912https://twitter.com/events_tracker/status/1541741674908590082https://twitter.com/fharris2011/status/1541766613288075271Now when you hear the word 'inclusion' you know someone is looking to breach someone else's boundaries.
Open letter: The National Lottery and LGB AllianceSome interesting signatures on there.
Laurel Hubbard and the Olympics Trans Inclusion PolicyIt’s easy to get a scientific consensus of course when you don’t invite any dissenting voices to the table. It seems that the success of women in the last few years in defending women’s sports may have a direct correlation to just exactly how irritated the medical and science director of the IOC appears to be.
Crony BeliefsFrom first principles, we should expect ordinary beliefs to be treated with level-headed pragmatism. They have only one job to do — model the world — and when they do it poorly, we suffer. This naturally leads to such attitudes as a
fear of being wrong and even an eagerness to be criticized and corrected. As Karl Popper and (more recently) David Deutsch have argued, knowledge can't exist without criticism. If we want to be right in the long run, we have to accept that we'll often be wrong in the short run, and be willing to do the needful thing, i.e., discard questionable beliefs. This may sound vaguely heroic or psychologically difficult, somehow, but it's not. A meritocracy experiences no anguish in letting go of a misbelief and adopting a better one, even its opposite.
Labour and womenStatements
Labour Party politicians have made when asked about women's rights and spaces against the backdrop of an increasing number of males who identify as women.
Keir Starmer puts his ear to the ground and hears the steady rumble of his own tumble dryer.
“Only women have a cervix.”
Keir Starmer's answer: “You can’t say that.”
What else won’t you be able to say?
I hate the fact that this has gradually turned me into a single issue voter. To me it is foundational. The material reality of women as a sex class is the fundamental underpinning of how we treat women and how we address the societal and economic issues they face. It impinges on justice (how women are treated as witnesses/victims, how women are punished), preventing VAWG (SSS, shelters, counselling etc), women’s access to politics (all women shortlists), equal pay (how you assess equal pay when males who identify as women can’t be excluded), statistical analysis of how women are affected by all sorts of societal and economic factors (census and more broadly inability or unwillingness of many organisations to collect or disaggregate data on sex), health (accurate and comprehensible healthcare information).
If a political party says it will make policy on all those issues on the basis that sex does not exist, or is not material, or should not be a protected characteristic, or should be replaced by or conflated with gender, policy decisions on all those issues go off kilter and adversely affect women.
I have seen two trans people, none in the town I live in at all. From that, I could conclude one of two things: either, trans people are a minuscule minority and therefore so vulnerable that they should have all the laws and norms of society reworked around them, OR the group is so tiny that it is ludicrous for all the laws and norms of society to be reworked around them.
Guess which.
The whole movement has gone so far beyond anything you could call logic, science, truth, evidence - it’s a deliberately obscure hotchpotch of pseudo-science, misinterpreted biology and word play which is so incomprehensible that it can be twisted to mean anything they want it to mean.
On one hand, it isn’t about biology, on the other they need ‘medical treatment’ and reconstructed genitals made from forearm.
On one hand it isn’t about chromosomes, on the other it has something to do with DSDs.
On one hand it isn’t about gender stereotypes, on the other we have the ‘gender bread’ person and transwomen dolling up and wearing OTT ‘girly’ clothing.
On one hand it isn’t about ‘reducing’ women to body parts, on the other they want us to be called ‘womb havers’ and similar.
It contradicts itself at every turn, and the only card they have to play to protect the insanity is by shutting down every attempt to query it with ‘U R such a bigot’.
Whatever the Cass report says, the movement are too far gone to accept it - it will be ‘transphobic’ and ‘discredited’ by somebody with green hair and a degree in Twitterology.
The only thing we can do is hold our small fort of (female!) truth and ride it out.
