Am furious with NUS Women's Campaign

I can't even begin to work out the sisters thing. I'm still stuck on Anne Bonny.

I've just got to the bit in that article, almond, where they discourage using 'sisters' because it's binary.

Ok. How does a group of students - some of whom presumably did GCSE English and know what metaphor is - conclude that 'sisters' in this context is being used literally?

My 'sisters' in a feminist context are not the daughters of my mum and dad.

I look forward to everyone using 'comrade!' instead. It'll sound inclusive and not at all Stalinist.

It's like watching hedgehogs crossing a motorway and discussing how many minutes of silence to accord to each fallen comrade.

I can't copy the rules, but they are half way down the article:

www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2015/03/nus-bans-drag-fancy-dress-except-it-doesnt

It's ridiculous.

"Shall we organise a demonstration against the cuts in funding to women's refuges?"

"Hang on, before we get to that, we need to go through the wardrobe rules..."

What a load of rubbish.

Sorry, I misread the rules, you are not allowed to dress as Oliver Cromwell. You are allowed to cross play Oliver Cromwell and turn up as Olivia Cromwell if you are a woman.

Oh, good. I was worried for a moment there that we might be shutting down one of the few ways to represent really important men from history.

You are allowed to engage in cross play - dressing as an individual man like Oliver Cromwell. You are not allowed to dress up as a random Male Roundhead unless you do it in a way that demonstrably has no humour to it.

Seemingly so.

Because women don't need humour, do they? That is a luxury. Satire has no place here.

God, this is depressing. Jazz hands? Tabloid view of that = women are so fragile they can't stand any noise.

I particularly like the NUS saying that if a fancy dress costume is demonstrably not being worn for humour, it will be deemed acceptable
So if I dress like a bloke for practical reasons e.g. digging allotment, that's okay, but if I dress like a bloke e.g. done up as Oliver Cromwell for fancy dress, that's not okay?

This sort of discourse also takes the debate so far from most people's daily concerns as to make it irrelevant to 90% of the population.

Yes, my favourite cross dressing for women is Dickensian petty criminal in a stove pipe hat. But I do also like the spiv/ black marketeer look and a kind of Edwardian suit with drawn on moustache look.

I dont find loud noise 'triggering' i find competing noise triggering.

Clapping - fine. Ambulance siren on a busy street while someone is talking to me
PMQs on right now is also making me antsy, its all the different voices and sounds

Lets ban ambulance sirens and pmqs!

Jesus.

That'll be a fun set of fancy dress parties, eh?

My mate had a birthday party at university where we did Victorian-style cross dressing. It was awesome.

Mostly issues around toilets.

Should we have female and male and safe space toilets? But what if a trans man wants to use the female toilets why should he use the safe space ones instead of the female? But what if a woman is triggered by a penis and she uses the female toilets? Should we just have non-gendered safe space toilets and do away with single sex toilets? But what about the Muslim women who don't want to share a toilet with a teams woman (no Muslim women actually consulted).....and on and on and on tying themselves up in knots.

The disabled lifts. Issues with non disabled students using them. Staff inforce use for disabled students only, but what about students with hidden disabilities? Should they carry a card/badge? But what about their right to not advertise their disabilities? What about students who are self diagnosed? What about we just do away with the disabled lifts and have open access lifts?

And on and on and on

The cross dressing thing is reported in the New Statesman.

I particularly like the NUS saying that if a fancy dress costume is demonstrably not being worn for humour, it will be deemed acceptable. That is particularly absurd.

I just imagine all these women turning up at fancy dress parties dressed as spivs or something and insisting that humour is not part of a fancy dress party so it is acceptable.

Given how far down the postmodern rabbit hole lib fems have gone recently ridiculous stunts like this don't surprise me.

this is part of a fragmentation of political movements into identity politics, where we are all so busy accommodating everybody else's individual circumstances that there will eventually be no cohesive movement of any kind which can effectively challenge ANYTHING more substantial.

Yes. This.

archery - yes, me too.

It is an extremely conservative response, which is reifying binary gender roles. I'm stunned that they can't see that.

Ok, I get that men parading around in fake boobs, comedy wigs and lipstick during freshers week are parodying women in a nasty way. But you know what? You ban that (and, with it, all the other rather more important instances of 'crossdressing), and those same men will find other ways to be casually misogynistic. They won't understand why crossdressing has been banned, because they are (mostly) not consciously aware that what they're doing is misogynistic.

How far do you go with that logic logic, Hakluyt? Would you expect nobody to laugh at a comedy night because somebody found it "triggering"?

I agree that this is part of a fragmentation of political movements into identity politics, where we are all so busy accommodating everybody else's individual circumstances that there will eventually be no cohesive movement of any kind which can effectively challenge ANYTHING more substantial.

The NUS have always been nuts, which is why it's good that no one listens to them. When I was a student they were pushing on-demand abortion up to nine months of gestation.

It also reinforces a hierarchy where the only person who is allowed to make noise is the speaker.

hak, there's nothing inherently wrong with it, except (as I said upthread), that you then exclude blind people.

The concern is that this is represented as being to do with avoiding 'triggering' people, which is really problematic. For one thing, it doesn't appear to be about triggering in the usual sense of the word, and for another, this is part of a bigger situation in which increasingly, feminism seems to be able women talking about how to make accommodations and silence themselves, rather than talking about how to combat oppression.