Women's Hour features interviews with Professor Alex Sharpe and Professor Rosa Freedman as part of 'Sex & Gender' series **Thread title edited at OP's request**

apologies, I was grinning at bowl's post.
Poor Alex.

I bloody love you, Bowl

Mark Fisher: Exiting the Vampire Castle

The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humour....Where there is confidence, introduce scepticism. Say: don’t be hasty, we have to think more deeply about this. Remember: having convictions is oppressive, and might lead to gulags.

The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things. It’s OK to be class-privileged if you feel guilty about privilege and make others in a subordinate class position to you feel guilty too...

The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluraity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip

www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle

To be fair, even Mark Fisher didn't anticipate the bubonic plague aspect of this demonisation of (in this case) GC feminists but the above feels on point both for that and the Scots Govt. depiction of GC as fully equivalent to transphobia.

Bubonic plague isn’t transmitted by any soil based vector, Alex

#biologyfail

Retired I agree, the language is nonsensical and complexly meaningless and if you try to explain why, your head hurts. So it works because you think there must be something you are not getting.

Although it is simple really - there are men and women and men should not be in women’s spaces. There are a small number of people who are clinically distressed by their bodies and need support to deal with this. And another small number of people who are intersex and should be accepted as they are.

And the men who just like to wear dresses or be Freya on Wednesdays are still men. And the world has long been toxic for young women and they need our support, not binders and hormones.

There, sorted. And people who want to dye their hair green and cut it assymetrically can do so.

Peace all around.

Alex - FFS
Rosa - more well dones! :)

Do we know who is on tomorrow ? And when are they covering sport ?

Rosa was terrific! Thank goodness we've got the clever ones!

I listened but I was driving and must have looked a bit nuts because I shouted at Sharpe

Well done Rosa! (and thanks to Pencils for the transcript - must admit I couldn't listen all the way through because AS made me so angry in just the first minute)

All this 'cis' stuff makes my head hurt. If we, women, can now be cisgender or not cisgender, and cissexual or not cissexual, wtf are they going to call us now? Is a 'cis woman' someone who is both cisgender and cissexual? In which case, there probably won't be too many of us under than banner....

While on the one hand I think they're tying themselves up in linguistic knots (and it's funny to watch), on the other I worry that the more layers of apparent complexity they put on things, the more it will deter those who have not yet truly realised what is happening. I've been astounded these past few days by the number of people who are almost totally oblivious to what is going on.

PencilsInSpace - again, thank you for the remainder of the transcript. I'd have no idea what had happened and just how worrying these linguistic infiltration > domination tactics were without your time and effort.

In the same way that Julia Penelope and other feminist linguistics researchers highlighted how language around domestic violence makes women disappear and introduces victim-blaming (e.g., see Jackson Katz's TED talk, link at end) we are seeing similar tactics here.

Invaders change language to suit their needs and assert it because of their place in the power structure. The standard example of this is the denigration of the native language of an invaded country and making the invaders' language the one of law, education, and the upper classes.

www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue/transcript?language=en#t-182049

Could not resist a name change

Rosa you were amazing

Julia Serano has defined cissexual as "people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their mental and physical sexes as being aligned", while cisgender is a slightly narrower term for those who do not identify as transgender (a larger cultural category than the more clinical transsexual).

But this is still bollocks, even if it acknowledges that the issues are around bodily sex and not gender. Because what on earth is one's 'mental sex'? You only know what sex you are because well, of your body. Even if we followed that line of argument, it means sex identity - which is where the whole concept started in the 1960s in psychoanalysis. Mental sex - in your mind = but when it does not align (and who judges this?), it is not a mental health issue?

Sex identity is different from gender identity as there are no characteristics attributed to it - except we know that gender and sex are linked and society does put sex role (gender) norms on people. So, sex identity takes away the language to talk about those - it still suggests that my sex identity is female therefore I am fine with all the reproductive baggage that comes with it. It doesn't matter really what my reproductive organs are, it matters what boundaries society puts around them.

It is still labelling me (as some one whose physical and mental sex align), rather than allowing me to define who I am. Actually, my physical and mental sex do not align - I would rather have bigger breasts and not flood or get spots every month. My secondary sex characteristics do not align with my mental ideal.

This is so bollocks it is not worth the energy of typing.

All I heard was a man's voice stating that some women could be likened to the bubonic plague

cross

That is exactly how I read those voices - implicit threat. And I say that as someone NOT attuned via having had a violent partner. To me that voice was dripping with ‘one more thing and I’ll...’

As I said the other day - radio is the perfect medium for this. On the radio you cannot disguise your voice. nor can you distract from it with a visual presentation. The listener has no visuals to distract them and so the nuance of how something is said comes to the fore.

And when the knitting and the clothing and the hair and the coquettishness isn’t visible, and when there’s no visual dissonance to distract... well.

Thank you pencils. And Rosa.

floundering, sorry. Maybe that is a third explanation of the gasping.

Oh goodness, Alex was foundering and Rosa was superb. Very rare poster here (job anxiety), but been around MN for a while, honest.

On the throat-clearing and sniffs: maybe Alex has a cold - it's that time of year.

Alternatively: I have lived with two abusers, occasionally physically but almost constantly verbally violent, in my immediate family. I learned to recognise throat/face spasms as a threat to shut up or go away. Especially the big sniff. In the case of my abusive relatives, it signalled that they were doing all they could to gulp down visceral rage. They wanted to call me vile names, or they wanted to hit me.

Obviously, that's my traumatic memory and ongoing experience, but that is what Alex sounded like to me when Alex was posed a perfectly normal interview question.

"What do you mean by X?"
"hrrhrrrhhrghrnph! I've already explained it"

Well done Rosa - you were very clear and easy to follow.

Its all very well Alex Sharpe denigrating GC feminists, but the vast majority of women resent the time, money and energy that we are expected to expend to satisfy bullshit societal expectations for feminine presentation and are well aware of the penalty if we fail (too fat, too thin, too old, too mumsy, too tarty etc). Many of us play along enough not to scupper our professional progression (there’s research showing that women who wear make-up to work do better), but we still resent it. Gendered stereotypes hold women back. So, do I “conform”? A lot of the time, yes. Am I happy about it? Hell, no!

RosaFreedman1983 - you are a star! I look forward to the podcast

RF: The aim I think is that they want to take away sex as a characteristic. Stonewall said this very clearly a few years ago, it's on A Woman's Place website, they want to remove sex as a characteristic. They don't like that there is a definition of sex in law that says it's your chromosomes, because that goes against the narrative that sex is something fluid, that sex isn't a fact or a material reality.

I think there are two separate things here. The evidence on WPUK is for the trans lobby's aim to remove the single sex exceptions from the Equality Act. Alex also expressed this view in this article.

There is also evidence that some of them want to eradicate sex as a legal category altogether and/or replace it with gender, e.g. that huge research project at Kings - Future of Legal Gender that had that terrible survey (please do it if you haven't yet. It's terrible but I think quite important).

And oh look who's on the advisory board for that project

Bubonic plague= women who don’t centre males in their feminism

I kind of wish JG had ended with Alex on the bubonic plague comment and not gone back to cis at the end. It would have been brilliant to just leave that with the listeners as Alex's final statement.

"AS: Well, I don't know what their exact numbers are, I would say they're a relatively small but highly vocal and very well organised group of people, who have a very s -

JG: This sounds so petty but they'd say the same about you I expect

AS: Well perhaps, perhaps they would, but I think the vast majority of feminists support us. This isn't really a battle between transwomen and cis women as the media like to frame it and as gender crits like to frame it. This is a battle between intersectional feminism, those who are truly inclusive, those that I would describe as real feminists, and exclusionary feminism. Exclusionary feminism has always been a part of feminism, it's always - it's like - it's like bubonic plague, it's always been in the soil and it always rears its ugly head from time to time and we're seeing that happen right now"