Hilarious article

She probably felt she didn't need to do any research here, mums are very easily defined. If you've met one, you've met them all. They're those beige women who wear M&S slacks, wipe your nose, do your laundry and always pander to your feelings. They don't have the intellect to have genuine, well-considered opinions about anything because everyone knows their brains die the moment they give birth.

India Willoughby expressed the same bigotry and ignorance earlier this year in a Pink News opinion piece.
I.W concluded:
"I would really like some of my women friends in the media to do the same. Whether it’s an article or a broadcast.

A prominent statement of the facts needs to be made, in a cool and rational manner, so someone gets heard. Because frustrations are boiling over. What started as angry words online is now manifesting itself on the street.

Last week, one of these hate groups held an event in Bristol. Trans allies turned out to support the trans community, and there was a confrontation of sorts.

We also have an ongoing court case involving a trans women accused of assaulting someone at a demo. The trans woman claims she was acting in self-defence.

I don’t want to see anyone – from either side of the argument – get hurt. Which is why the government and the likes of The Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Mumsnet need to show some responsibility.

The current attack on trans people is unprecedented. Any show of support would be greatly appreciated.

Last week was my first ever visit to Mumsnet. Honestly, I thought it was going to be lots of stuff about prams, or family-related matters. A sort of online This Morning minus Phil and Holly. The reality is more like a Nuremberg Rally. It’s very scary.

And unless the government sorts out it’s act with the Gender Recognition Act, we may find ourselves with a modern-day version of the Stonewall riots."
www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/04/24/india-willoughby-transphobia-opinion-worried-for-my-life-mumsnet/

maybe Edie is one of the 'woman-friends' responding to IW's request?

Yeah Mums - where brains go to die and all that.

She probably felt she didn't need to do any research here, mums are very easily defined. If you've met one, you've met them all. They're those beige women who wear M&S slacks, wipe your nose, do your laundry and always pander to your feelings. They don't have the intellect to have genuine, well-considered opinions about anything because everyone knows their brains die the moment they give birth. If they do express an opinion it's obviously wrong, because ... mums.

She clearly didn't spend any time here researching MN. We must be too high brow for her🤪

Oh she's not at all funny - though some of her followers think "mums" are a joke just for giving birth. 💩💩💩

proud author

Can't find Edie on Twitter. Shame as I fancy more of a laugh.

Love that excelpope review, it's brilliantly scathing! Great Spectator article too. He sounds quite bemused by her thoughts about MN 😁

threewheeler1 - dribbleshite, yes, it rolls off the tongue.

Spectator article in response:
'Mumsnet and the British media aren’t ‘transphobic’
by Robert Jackman
concludes
"When you look closer, though, you realise that the Trump proposal is essentially the mirror-image of what the self-ID lobby is calling for. And the differences don’t stop there: for a start, both are deeply ideological positions which rely on a religious or political belief and then apply this to all cases. Crucially, neither system is able to apply discretion or accept that – in some circumstances – one metric (biological sex or gender identity) makes more sense than the other.

This is why many British newspapers have expressed concerns about the GRA reform: not because of any underlying bigotry but because it seeks to apply a fringe ideological conviction to an immensely complicated question.

Oddly, the Outline lays the blame for this supposed media bigotry at an unlikely door: Mumsnet. The article claims that some of Mumsnet’s 14 million users have developed an “obsession” with transgender issues. It’s true that transgender issues are frequently discussed on Mumsnet – but why assume this is down to bigotry, rather than the fact that many of these concerns (the housing of male sex offenders in women’s prisons, for example) resonate deeply with the women of Middle England?

The writer isn’t wrong that Mumsnet holds deep influence – just not necessarily with the media. When I spoke to someone who knows the consultation well, they mentioned the “Mumsnet effect” – the fact that the Government had received cautious responses from women all over the UK, representing all ages and backgrounds. The responses calling for the more ideological system, however, tended to be concentrated in smaller clusters, usually from London and university cities – places which typically vote Labour.

Ultimately it will be this kind of political pragmatism which will probably persuade ministers against uprooting the GRA system. Blaming it on the Times and the Guardian might seem tempting – but it’s ultimately untrue."

thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3416273-The-Spectator-Mumsnet-and-the-British-media-aren-t-transphobic

I'm not giving that confused youngster the page views.

Since when has someone not agreeing with someone else's opinion make them a hater?

It's their way of changing the subject so they don't have to address the actual criticism. Instead of attempting to refute the criticism, they dismiss the person who put a lot of thought into their objections to transgenderism. It's like when trans chant, "you're a bigot so I can ignore everything you say".

I do think it's interesting that it's only very recently that they've attempted a simi-refutation of our criticisms. Unfortunately, it's more like a pr campaign, spin control, still trying to reframe the issue to anything other than what it is.

So they say things like, "In debates over trans rights, the burden of proof is always on trans people to come up with sufficient evidence for the way we experience the world." Well no. How they experience the world isn't the problem, (though they would prefer we center their needs above our own). The "debate" is that we object to dicks in women's prisons etc and that in losing the definition of women as a class, we lose all the sex-based discrimination laws, which opens us up to every bit of misogyny without any legal recourse which patriarchy wants to shove down our throats.

Review by excelpope:

'The beauty of bad:
How bad can a written article be?'
(extract)

But how bad can a written article be and still have people praise it?

One contender for that must be Edie Miller’s take on why British media is so transphobic.

It’s being praised because it takes a particular stance on the current trans debate, for what it’s trying to say, rather than the confused mess of what it actually communicates." (continues)

"The article can’t even really decide who it wants to shake a stick at. Ostensibly, it’s about transphobia in the British media but, as noted, sceptics are to blame, as are the left (although the right aren’t excused either), Graham Linehan, and biologists (who skirt dangerously close eugenics, argues the author, who presumably couldn’t spare the time to Google the definition of ‘eugenics’), and in-quotes “feminists”, with their in-quotes “women’s spaces”, who turn their back on these women who should be allies.

Eventually, it decides to mainly blame Mumsnet, which is, “to British transphobia more like what 4Chan is to American fascism”, a phrase so awkward in its grammatical construction and so wildly cockeyed in its analysis that, to use the debunking brand of science, it should have formed a black hole of infinity density and consumed the rest of the in-quotes argument.

Mostly, though, this piece drips with the sense of entitlement that so completely poisons the trans-rights movement. It never occurs to the author that the problem isn’t that their case has been distorted, but that it’s never been presented. Men should be allowed to identify as women and be automatically accepted, support from feminists should be a given, access to women’s spaces, both physical locations and roles such as being a Labour Women’s Officer, should be an automatic right, questioning any of this on grounds of risk or of science should be forbidden.

As the author herself tweeted…

arguments are bad

Ultimately, it lays the blame in the wrong place. Mumsnet is a temperature gauge for the nation. It is a huge and diverse audience, some left, some right, some sceptics, some daily readers of their horoscope, some in the media, some who never even turn on the news. If you haven’t convinced them then you haven’t convinced the general public and, until there’s acceptance that there’s an argument to be won, rather than demands to be made, you never will.

Still, look on the bright side, at least it’s given us a new benchmark for how badly written something can be and still deemed praise-worthy."
excelpope.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/the-beauty-of-bad/

MrsNathanDrake and I made Twitter! Screenshot of our remarks put up by some youth who seems baffled that anybody could be sceptical about homeopathy. Makes me wonder even more about the standard of science education in the UK.

In case anyone doesn’t want to wade through this, I summarise:

Women! Know your place!

Conversation is to be restricted to nappies, cafes and change area recommendations. All other conversation is banned.

Burn the witch!

What was the homeopathy haters thing btw? My eyes kept sliding off the rather mediocre prose.

George

Wait...that must be imaginary stress incontinence. Because you know, biology isn't actually real or relevant.

I'm pretty sure homeopathy could help you with that - maybe if you wave an orange at a glass of water, then drink the water, you'll be right as rain.

If your feminism requires you to sneer at Mumsnet specifically because it's dominated by women, many of whom have children and who talk about what having children requires of them, it's a pretty fucking weird kind of feminism

Agree, annandale! I don't imagine she can even see what she's done there. Deary me.

Not a good article. If she thinks mumsnet is like 4chan, then she has clearly spent time on neither.

I got as far as ‘Mumsnet is to British transphobia what 4chan is to American fascism’ and then I had to stop reading and get on here to get my fill of transphobic fascist ranting before I could continue.

I mean, really?? Mumsnet is a den of hate mongers equivalent to white power fascists just because women on here dare to think critically about the current trends on gender identity? The thought policing here in the US has become impossible.

Kat

"Women don't have willies..."

Laughed so hard, I may have had to change my underwear, (knickers?), thank you to the three children my vagina has pushed out.

Wait...that must be imaginary stress incontinence. Because you know, biology isn't actually real or relevant.

If homeopathy works, why fill kids with hormones?

I still can't get past the fact that being a 'homeopathy hater' is an insult.

Yes, i think she did mean it as an insult but I found it quite flattering.

To sum up the article. If you know how babies are made, and/or you're the sort of person who is generally a bit sceptical towards highly implausible pseduo-science such as homeopathy. The chances are you're probably not be the sort of person who falls for genderist BS hook line and sinker.

Yeah but annandale she saw something on Twitter and it got likes and everything. Goodness she's practically an expert.

I'm sure that's how research works now.

Oh, and I'm going to pay a cause I don't agree with the compliment of borrowing one of their slogans.

If your feminism requires you to sneer at Mumsnet specifically because it's dominated by women, many of whom have children and who talk about what having children requires of them, it's a pretty fucking weird kind of feminism.

I'm getting very tired of the straight mistakes published about the spousal consent element of the GRA. The spouse has no role in consenting to transition, but has the ability to say whether or not their own marriage to the transitioning person should end or not. THEIR MARRIAGE. I actually don't know much about US federal/state divorce law; presumably it is/they are different in some way from UK law; is this author perhaps not aware that a legal divorce can only be granted on specific grounds in the UK, and that in order for a person to be able to end a marriage to a person who has changed legal sex (which in 2004 could render it unlike any other legal marriage around them), they needed an actual legal ground to do this? That the alternative was to divorce the transitioned person on unreasonable behaviour grounds? Would she actually prefer all transitioned divorced people to have been divorced on the grounds that their behaviour in transitioning would have been unreasonable? How is that less transphobic than the spousal consent element?

It makes me cross that someone who is so pro-humanities (which apparently are very different from 'science' and the scientific method - who told her that?) doesn't have any regard for the following BASIC components of work in the humanities:

1. Read the original sources and work from them.
2. Read in the original language if you can.
3. If they don't seem to make sense, consider whether there are language and culture barriers that might explain that. This might require quite a lot of other reading, and talking to people from different cultures and who speak different languages.
4. When you read secondary sources, which are also important, consider where they came from and who wrote them. It may be possible to agree with parts of them, and not others.