Who's afraid of the big bad truth

[Virginia Woolf]

Sophists in training

If you decide to talk about gender online, you’re going to run into a lot of bad arguments...

An Open Letter To the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real

Imagine it’s you on the train tracks.

Jenny Poyer Ackerman is also a good read.

I am desperate to understand precisely what words, delivered by whom in what setting, formed the insanely effective covert campaign to re-educate teachers, school staff, private therapists, journalists, politicians, many medical professionals, and even some parents; and convince them that either 1) biological sex is a lie cooked up by the patriarchy, or the colonizer, as a tool of oppression; or 2) biological sex is real but meaningless as a legal or social concept, so get over it.

Screechview

[Lewis Carroll]

The times they are a-changin'

Latest sapping tribunal victory is a further sign the tide is turning against gender totalitarianism in the workplace

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

The most jaw-dropping tribunal yet is current: the case of Roz Adams, a counsellor who claims constructive dismissal by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). This puts a spotlight on a service led by trans woman Mridul Wadhwa, who believes that female victims objecting to being counselled by males must “reframe their trauma” and who laments that her [sic] clientele are overwhelmingly white women. (Scotland is 96 per cent white.) The tribunal heard that when a 60-year-old rape victim asked if the ERCC was female-only she was told it was trans-inclusive and later received an email saying she was unsuitable to use its services. When another client asked Adams if a person who identifies as non-binary was a woman, she asked permission to reassure her that this person was female at birth. Merely for acknowledging biological sex Adams was disciplined for transphobia.

Jo Phoenix

[Clark Gable]

Entitlement:

Let me tell you a story of entitlement, that makes me very cautious about loopholes in policies, that are written around the assumption that everyone will be reasonable. This is, in my opinion, one of the major factors in our current position: policies, guidelines and legislation written on the premise that people wouldn't make unreasonable demands. To coin a phrase, that people would act in the spirit of the law! Then they do make unreasonable demands, and it turns out that the letter of the law is inadequate to block them.

Last year, there was a twitter thread by a woman whose female rape survivor support group met on a regular basis in the private room of a pub. A male transitioner started attending. The women objected. Then the pub management told the women that they wouldn't be permitted hire the room any more if they were going to exclude males.

So, no support group any more.

So the woman on twitter decided to set up an informal group with the women she'd met there held at her house.

The male transitioner turned up there. When she wouldn't let him in, he called the police, who turned up. The police officer heard both sides, and told the male transitioner that there was no law that meant officers could force her to admit people into her house, and then made the male transitioner leave.

Reportedly, the police officers were great. But if there had been a way for that male to force admission to someone else's home, he would have demanded they use it.

[Miss Peach]

Maya Forstater:
This morning I gave a talk to the sixth form at Verulam School in St Albans. This is the second talk I have given at a school (the first one was to South Hampstead High School in London).

Honestly, these are some of the most nerve-wracking things that I have done. Where do you start telling a story about employment tribunals to children for whom this is all part of the alien world of work? And how many think I am a bigot before I even walk in?

I tell them the story of how a mum from St Albans ended up setting a legal precedent that protects everybody’s rights, about why freedom of speech and pluralism matter, and why the concept of “worthy of respect in a democratic society” is so important. Democracy is about the ability to disagree and to talk about it.

I start with JK Rowling, because they all have opinions about what she wrote on this topic, even if they haven’t read her words. Some cross their arms at my obvious wrong-think and others perk up on hearing someone saying the unsayable.

I tell them how there may well be a boy in this school, and there definitely is one in this county, who can run faster than Florence Griffith Joyner, whose 1988 women’s 100m sprint record still stands. I show them a photo of William / Lia Thomas and ask them to think about how the young women standing next to him on the podium feel at being beaten by a man after they have trained their hardest.

At both schools we had time for some lively questions. The kids asked them using language like “gender assigned at birth” and I answered about sex. They set me dilemmas about toilets and changing-rooms, prisons and sports, and looked surprised that I had answers. Adults have given them the impression that the topic is so mysterious, difficult and frightening that we cannot think through these issues, or answer in any way but with regard to gender identity.

I hope they took away the message that everything should be talked about, even if they disagreed with me. I really enjoyed talking to them.

It’s not for children to resolve these dilemmas about rules and risks. They are too young and they think in black-and-white terms of goodies and baddies, in-groups and out-groups, while already falling into the habit of discounting women’s interests.

Sex Matters has published our draft response to the DfE guidance for schools in England this week, and Stonewall has published its own. If you are a parent, teacher or school leader who is writing a response, we hope ours is helpful for you. If you talk to teachers, please share our response with them. It is the job of adults to sort this problem.

Miss Peach was a syndicated comic strip created by American cartoonist Mell Lazarus. It ran for 45 years, from February 4, 1957, to September 8, 2002... The strip was set in Kelly School, named after Pogo cartoonist Walt ["We have met the enemy and he is us"] Kelly.

One more? One more.

[Walt Whitman]

Post title comes from Brass Eye.

A teacher’s perspective on why the Cass Review offers hope, not hate – Anonymous
I have taught in secondary schools for over 25 years. I was at school when Section 28 was introduced, and taught while it was still in place for the first seven years of my career. Until recently, I ran a school club for LGBTQ+ students and their allies. In speaking out about the dangers of trans activism, I have not been radicalised by things I have read or seen online. I am not afraid of people who identify as transgender. I feel compelled to share what I have witnessed because I care above all about the safeguarding of young people.

If you have not been immersed in a school in recent years, you may not yet have a sense of the nature and scale of the change that has taken place, and how the sudden surge in transgender identification is utterly unlike anything that has gone before. My story may help to illustrate this.



Walt worked for a time as a librarian, so...

All Is Not Quiet In the Library Catalogs – Anonymous
I am a cataloger in a large library in a North American city, and I was happy with my quiet and stress-free job. I don’t have to choose the books the library purchases, I don’t deal with irate patrons, I work at my own pace and I get first dibs on the books that come across my desk—what’s not to love? Except that, recently, the controversies of the rest of the library world have finally reached the cataloging corner.

Traditional cataloging practice requires the cataloger to describe the book as objectively as possible; there are even specific guidelines reminding catalogers not to select subject headings based on their own values and beliefs. [You may see where this is headed. And don't you love how this subject brings out the anonymous in people?]