How British feminism became anti-trans - according to the New York Times

Would many Americans know of the Silurians?
I thought UNIT put a stop on that sort of information getting out?

Angles? Picts? Roaming tribes of Silures?

"Sophie Lewis is a writer and feminist geographer interested in leakiness, communisation, anti-work and anthrogenesis. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019). Her published cultural criticism includes a recent intervention in Viewpoint on Donna Haraway’s oeuvre and various essays at The New Inquiry, Salvage, Jacobin and (especially) Blind Field journal, where she is an editor (completing the Blind Field edited volume End/And: Feminization in Unending Times). Sophie has published research articles on surrogacy politics in Signs, Frontiers, Dialogues in Human Geography and Feminist Review. Her ESRC-funded PhD on gestational surrogacy, ‘Cyborg Labour’, was defended at the University of Manchester (UK) – supervised by Noel Castree and Erik Swyngedouw and examined by Cindi Katz."

"Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary"

I can't work out if she doesn't understand what the 'critical' in 'gender critical' means (or has perhaps only heard the expression 'terf') or if she doesn't understand the difference between gender and sex and genuinely thinks the British came up with the idea of sex.

I'm liking that it's slowly dawned that in the UK, it's not some small right wing group.

How great is that progress really?

That from nauticant's link, btw.

While acknowledgement that not all women are mothers is fairly commonplace, the fact that not all pregnant or potentially pregnant persons are mothers or women^ has yet to transform our language and conceptual frames substantively^.” Heel-dragging on the part of ‘skeptics’ is doing us all harm.

(My bold). I predict you'll be waiting a while for that to happen in the minds of the majority, Sophie.

She says

In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

Is she British? She's a graduate of Oxford and Manchester.

hcommons.org/members/reproutopia/

And she has blue hair.

From the article,
"If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear “both sides” on the question of trans people’s right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to “female erasure.” Many prominent figures in British journalism and politics have been TERFs; British TV has made a sport of endlessly hosting their lurid rudeness and styling it as courage; British newspapers seemingly never tire of broadsides against the menace of “gender ideology.” (With time, the term TERF has become a catchall for all anti-trans feminists, radical or not.)"

My great-granny (who was Irish) used to often say, "why spoil a good story with the truth?"

Clearly it's the green skinned Silurian tribes who slumber in their cities beneath us, they were here well before humans and the female folk among them are really quite forthright.

Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about?

Angles? Picts? Roaming tribes of Silures?

Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist and geographer, is the author of the forthcoming “Full Surrogacy Now.”

In case you can't wait to get your hands on the book, her's a flavour:

www.versobooks.com/blogs/3654-gestators-of-all-genders-unite

All very transhumanist. Since it's teatime then if you've eaten or are about to, you might want to save reading it till later.

In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force

I LOLed

just off to a meeting of the Bilberberg group with a load of shadowy billionaires

Oh no, sorry, it's actually WI tonight. I always get them mixed up

Nasty old British Colonialists enforcing their binary genderism on the free-spirited Irish.

Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about?

Everyone knows that TERF is Cornish for witch

Sarah Ditum
@sarahditum
Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about? The Celts? Anglo-Saxons? Do Americans not know that "indigenous British" has a tiny bit of ukip baggage as a term?

Linda Bellos used to be on Lambeth Council - is she the politician whose feminism is supposed to be influenced by British Imperialist homophobia?

We're not feckin' "anti-trans", we're PRO-women's RIGHTS.

Like most others here, I'm definitely anti the following, however:

predatory men
predatory men being enabled to go into women's spaces
paedophiles
paedophiles being enabled to access children.

It's like someone sat down with Academic Writing for Dummies and produced identity politics bingo:

people like Ms. Parker are part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace

Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.

As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus, their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain

I wonder if you could ever get Sophie to discuss, critically, what's been done to Jazz Jennings or how welcoming she would be of a certain fan of ball-waxing in her spaces.

The 'spot on' thread about 'TERFS' by Roz Kaveney linked by pp:

"We need to consider the extent to which a lot of the current wave of transphobic discourse is only in part about trans people at all.

A lot of it comes from people who normally wouldn't care about us much one way or the other, but for various reasons see us as a symptom.

When the Pope goes on about 'gender theory'...when Lobsterman goes on about 'cultural marxism'...when Spiked or the NS or Sceptics or Tankiez go on about 'post-modernism' ... it's all the same thing.

Ways of looking at the world which admit nuance and complexity.

Ways of talking about the world which subvert authoritative simple discourses.

A few years ago, when Peter Wilby was NS editor, I was given a book about feral children to review. A book which looked at how across time close observation of them has been radically affected by whatever set of ideas were fashionable at the time.

Note, it wasn't arguing simplistically that science is socially constructed. It was arguing that science is not done in a vacuum, that scientists end up being nudged by ideology and we need to understand that.

I was asked by the then literary editor to rework the piece to be less positive because, apparently, the NS 'didn't do po-mo'.

I refused, and threatened to go public if they didn't publish my piece as written.

I ceased, in general, to work further for one of my main markets.

I don't rule out the possibility that the on-line stroppiness of some young trans people may have offended NS staff members.

Primarily though trans people are being regularly denounced by NS writers as a surrogate for intellectual trends.

This is why, in the name of science but neglecting the sheer complexity of what actual science says about us, we get yelled at by so-called sceptics.

It's also why a particular kind of 'Marxist' who wants crude workerism and a simplistic biologism back has decided we are part of globalism and neo-liberalism and need to be put a stop to.

These groups are not going to convert to political lesbianism. They just find 40 years of anti-trans rhetoric a convenient weapon just as they do the Hyacinth Bucket mean populism of Mumsnet.

We're a small talented minority. Some people really do hate us but more see us as an area in which the clock can be turned back.

That's one of the reasons why they claim trans people were hardly heard of before 2003 or so.

There are other factors involved and a lot of them are generational and to do with old elites that feel threatened by blue-haired millennials and post-millennials who aren't prepared to put up with their shit.

For example, if you've spent your career as part of a Left chumocracy who run things by moving the chairs around and turning a blind eye to a toxic blend of sexual abuse and nepotism, you might see the young as asking too many questions.

Saying 'oh but trans' is a good way of diverting attention just as it was in 1971 when Robin Morgan needed the cultural kudos of lesbian identifiation while still married.

And decided to destroy Beth Elliott on a whim."
twitter.com/reproutopia/status/1093198695225585664

see: revolution.berkeley.edu/robin-morgan-slanders-beth-elliot/

I love Oliver’s column in the Graun. Some of them stayed with me and changed the way I do things now.

Oliver Burkeman
‏*@oliverburkeman*
Replying to @jessesingal
My favourite thing about that piece is that the sentence beginning "many prominent figures", where the author attempts to provide backup for her (false) claim that bigotry is rampant, hinges on two links, which are to the same Economist piece, by a trans writer.

It's the radicalization portal paradox again. We're simultaneously irrelevant harpies/stupid mummies and we're an incredibly powerful nefarious network hypnotizing the ENTIRE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

You'll notice now we are a 'mainstream' 'movement', rather than a hundred radicals....

Or 80% of the population....