"It may be a while before older women stop feeling erased"

Yeah. I am younger than her ffs. Maybe it all boils down to the capability of logical reasoning and not age, huh Gaby?

Goldenwonderwall Gaby is 47, which makes it more baffling that she dismisses "older women".

Oh no! I’m gonna have to tell my 9 year old she is passed it.

Interesting dispute online as to the meaning of hee word crone. A quick google says that it come from the word carrion. My understanding was that it means chronological. This gives it yet another meaning...

Crone, hag, and witch once were positive words for old women. Crone comes from crown, indicating wisdom emanating from the head; hag comes from hagio meaning holy; and witch comes from wit meaning wise. Crones, hags, and witches frequently were leaders, midwives and healers in their communities. The meanings of these three words, however, were distorted and eventually reversed during the 300 years of the Inquisition when the male-dominated church wanted to eliminate women holding positions of power. Women identified as witches, who were often older women, i.e. crones and hags, were tortured and burned, and the words witch, crone, and hag took on the negative connotations that continue in our language. The Crone Movement, however, is re-claiming the positive meanings of these words.

IMO it’s mainly older women protesting about this as we’re not so eager to please men, having had the experience of being fucked over by them in a number of ways. Also we can clearly perceive a MRA when we see it. Also, there are so many less fucks to be given. Older women rock!

and thanks fermat for so lucidly laying out what happened post NYE Cologne.

Gaby Hinsliff - rape apologist AND patronising as fuck.

her article in the Guardian in May:

www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/10/the-gender-recognition-act-is-controversial-can-a-path-to-common-ground-be-found

I like getting older - idgaf if men want to have sex with me, I don't want to have sex with them. I don’t think the author expects older women to read her shtick - she expects her 25-40 demographic to laugh along with her. I’m not sniggering along. Send in the crones I say.

I think her op ed piece and the cologne reporting is when I stopped reading the guardian for news and opinion.

'Older women'

Women who are past their sexual desirability peak and have outlived their usefulness and are only there to raise the children.

You never see comments like this about men. Men still have purpose and worth even if older. Thats why there's always more of them on Question Time.

Ah - get ya!

But I get called for smear tests all the time by direct post from the NHS who know I am a woman.

The service is not reliant on me seeing, understanding and then responding to an advert.

The problem with the "cervix-havers" adverts is they may assume a level of anatomical knowledge your audience doesn't have.

"If you're a woman aged between... and ..., remember to book your smear test" - simple, unambiguous.

"If you have a cervix..." - not so immediately obvious.

Maybe adverts in specific places do need to be more targeted to a niche audience - an ad in a trans health advice centre, for example, might say "remember, even if you're trans-masculine or non-binary, if you still have a cervix, you need to have it checked..." That's fine.

But as a blanket change in language - no.

There is no excuse for rape apology - ever.

But the adverts. Gender identity is a social construct but biology is an objective fact. You may not abstractly have the biological subjective knowledge of anatomy but this does not affect whether or not you have a cervix. It is a biological fact unaffected by belief. You don't need to know it or feel it, it just is.

Perhaps the adverts are asserting objective fact as overriding subjective feeling rather than pandering to the view that there is no objective fact and there is only subjective feeling? After all no man has ever had to deal with the reality of cervical cancer despite the strength of their subjective identification.

The adverts could be aimed at prostate cancer and the risk to men who identify as women but wouldn't this be pandering and viewing men's health as more important than women's?

Smear tests for trans women and prostate tests for trans men would be pandering. This is smiling and nodding and then carrying on regardless of silly fashionable notions.

Obviously Gaby is identifying as a young woke libfem, that'll explain why she's farted out that Pool article.

And yes, that Cologne article was a fucking disgrace and one of the things that made me realise just how far gone The Guardian is.

Fuck off Gaby. I can't believe you're my age, at least the 20somethings have an excuse of sorts.

We can ignore Gabby as she firmly believes in standing should to shoulder with rapists.

Also Gaby is 47 so she can hardly describe herself as a spring chicken (perhaps she self identifies?)

It is important to remember the extent to which Hinscliffe chose to shit on women from a great height over Cologne.

I first found out about Cologne probably round about the 3rd or 4th of January, on Mumsnet, because there was a near complete news-blackout on the BBC and in the Guardian. Now, in one sense I have some sympathy - "they" (unspecificed other set up to be demonised) are raping "our" women is one of the oldest tropes in propaganda. So the allegations did need to be fact checked, corrorborated and double-checked. And the German police (who were doing their best to hide the evidence) and German legal system (which at the time defined rape as only having occurred if there was physical forensic evidence to show the woman had fought back) made this very difficult for the press. (And there was undoubtedly disinformation going the rounds - someone on MN linked to a video clip claiming it was the Cologne attacks - it was in fact footage of an American woman journalist being attacked in Tahrir Square during the "Arab Spring.")

So I had to turn to American news sources (the New York Times and Washington Post were reporting it) and German sources (Frankfurter Allegemeine, for example, with a lot of help from google translate). I also tried to put it in context - for instance, reading Egyptian commentaries on the problem of Taharrush Gamea within Arab-speaking societies, and its role in the oppression of women during and after the uprising in Tahrir square.

But it still took the BBC and Graun the best part of a week to admit anything had happened, and the Graun was downplaying the number of attacks by a factor of ten relative to other news sources.

Enter Hinscliffe, who wrote an op-ed piece. Now, the whole situation was crying out for a decent op-ed piece (if for no other reason than that the silence from the left-wing press was creating an information vacuum which the likes of Breitbart were gleefully filling with racist shite). Such a piece would have referenced concepts like Taharrush Gamea as a form of what anthropologists call "corrective rape", tied it up with oppression of women in Muslim communities as well as this attack on a predominantly white group, made the point maybe that although this was a new form of "corrective rape" in the west, we had plenty of forms of corrective rape of our own, from myths about "contributory negligence" in judge's summing-up in rape cases through to the fact that Hamburg had a "red light district" with "no women beyond this point" signs on lamp-posts round its boundaries. Finally, such a piece could have shone a light on the total inadequacy of the German penal code's definition of "rape" which meant that most of the rapes and assaults did not even count, legally, as crimes in Germany at the time. So what did Hinscliffe write?

Basically, it was all the fault of the victims for being well off and having fancy smart-phones. Of course those poor young men were going to feel jealous, who wouldn't?

I will never forgive her for that.

Oh, and Hinscliffe, if you stumble on this thread - you're a fucking middle aged old gimmer just like me, you deluded fool.

I am bloody sick of the assumption that we are all semi-demented dinosaurs.

From now on I shall identify as a psychotic velociraptor. Erase that, kids.

I've heard it said that as menopause kicks in, you give less of a fuck about virtually everything, particularly men and their feels. I haven't GAF since I was in my twenties, so I rather look forward to seeing just how barren that particular field can get! I've always wanted to wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go, and drag my walking stick across the railings.

This whole article is off from start to finish.
As a Generation Xer (and therefore an “older woman”) i must point out that I don’t feel diminished by transmen having periods.

I do feel diminished by transwomen claiming to have a menstrual cycle.

And depressed that being trans seems to be trump card to get onto women’s short lists- and into women only posts- which in turn diminishes the actual experience that biological women have.

Trans women in women’s sports dimishes the efforts of biological women.

I could go on but I sense Gaby isn’t listening. What I feel most finished by is her dismissive attitude that my concerns are just “old people not understanding how the modern world works” when it’s my mum’s generation and mine that won so much for women.

Worded to exclude is better but still recognises the importance of natal biological sex over feelings - at least where health is concerned. This is a world away from trans women claiming to have menstrual symptoms and wanting to colonise all things female. I am so used to TAs being male to female identified that this real issue had passed me by (almost erased). So I may have been blinded by rage but this prevented me immediately identifying with natal biological women (thanks to the mind fuck arguments of natal biological men). Perhaps we need a trans men are women campaign.