Bizarre Snopes article about JK Rowling

Difference between transgenderism and movements to support other minority groups is they were based on addressing unfair discrimination. Transgenderism is trying to force you to believe that people can change sex. I can't see how it feels the same to treat people equally as to be complicit in the falsehood that humans can change sex. Unless (and this is not aimed at anyone on this thread) as a straight white Male you have had the message from society that you are superior to other groups so having to treat people equally feels a little reality-bending. The old adage about if you have always experienced privilege then equally feels like oppression.
I understand that there are noisy SJW with other minority groups and Twitter pile ons sound scary but there is nothing to match the TRAs as their rules are too easy to break. Just by observing that people can't change sex can threaten your livelihood. Look how women are being silenced for not wanting males in their spaces or for not wanting children told dangerous falsehoods about the 'wrong' toy choice meaning a future with untested drugs and harmful surgery which they may one day regret.
No other minority group has the money, power, regulatory capture of the TRAs. No other minority group has the prime minister or leader of the opposition spouting full blooded nonsense about TWAW.
This to me feels like a full scale assault on minority groups and a perfect way of putting them 'back in their boxes' when the public finally get sick of all the reality-bending TRA nonsense and say 'a plague on all your houses'.

A search of Rowling’s Twitter feed showed that she had never once used any of the following terms: “trans,” “transgender,” “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” “transphobia,” “transphobe,” “transphobic,” “TERF,” “inclusion,” or “exclusion.”

PMSL!!!!

addendum for Snopes:

"preening narcissists", "cry bullies", "cotton ceiling", "bepenised Divas", "goady fuckers", "Real Lady Lawyers", "Kiwi Farms", "glitter tits", "limerick lovers", "die in a grease fire", "cis-privilege", "Tamponella", "Pronouns are Rohypnol"

We just need to stop lying to those we love. Transwomen are not women and transmen are not men, they never will be. Those people with vested interests or trying to be kind who are selling them the lie that they are/can be and insisting everyone else do the same are the ones who are harming them not people pointing out basic fucking reality. We all have people we care about but in no other arena do we feel the need to be tip-toeing around the fantasists, ideologists, opportunists and people with actual mental illnesses in our lives and thus encourage them in harmful behaviours and beliefs so their feelings don’t get hurt

My parents had a choice to either go along with the lie 'to be nice' to my brother or to speak the truth and 'be cruel' to my brother.

How can speaking the truth be cruel though when you hurt the interests and well being of your other child in the process though? 'Being nice' isn't being nice if it hurts someone else to lie. The lie is a toxin to society, that will have fall out.

I've never understood making that choice to lie about basic reality to this degree. I don't think I ever will. I now regard it as a simple choice of choosing your male child over your female child as a matter of sexism because a female's interests are worth less than a male's.

This is all the whole TRA movement is about. Male dominance

It's a way not to deal with female mental health issues as teens. It's a way to ignore female patterns of behaviour from being a victim of sexual abuse. Its a way to ignore victims of abuse and violence by labelling them bigots for merely giving a natural trauma based reaction. It's a way to sexualise women. It's a way to force them into gender roles. Its a way to exercise coercive control and emotional abuse over wives. It's away to remove informed consent from women in a health care setting. It's a way to marginalise ethnic and religious minority women. Its a way to abuse and taken advantage of lesbians. It's a way to remove women's privacy and dignity. It's a way to disadvantage women in the work place and in elected positions. It's a way to ignore issues relating to child birth. It's a way not to recognise poor diagnosis in health conditions where women present differently.

In no way is it 'being nice'. It is shitting all over women.

Nothing about it is 'nice' for women.

Dervel

That's interesting, it's not quite how I've thought about it, but I think you are right that the balance is all off, and maybe sometimes that can pull in two directions at once. I'd have said that the problem was really about an excess of individualism.

I totally understand what you mean about not wanting to talk about certain things because people consider them attacks on their person. I think it is important to talk about such things anyway but it is sometimes difficult to know how.

@Goosefoot I think what’s in the process of being lost is the concept of the individual. We simultaneously allow ourselves to let our identity disappear into the groups we happen to find ourselves in. Either the groups we choose or that are foisted upon us. We also compound that by forming value judgements about whole other groups.

When I said I tiptoe upthread the issue is in relation to that. If there is an aspect of feminist theory or racial politics or whatever it happens to be and I find myself either in disagreement with or critical in anyway or even simply that I have questions then people who have their very identity tied to that group that whole discussion can leave people feeling drained, attacked or invalidated, and I’m not in the business of making people feel crap.

I also recognise that just looking at life in terms of the individual can erase commonalities some groups experience that can leave people disadvantaged if left unexamined. I just feel somehow we have got the balance wrong. We have to treat people as individuals first then maybe look at the class based stuff from that platform.

Transexelianos

Well that's Snopes intent on throwing its impartiality away with both hands.

A partial Snopes is - what- a random website? Fools.

Snopes was never impartial, it always had a clear political lean; it's just some people are arrogant enough to think they're the font of truth and impartial reality, and that anyone who disagrees with their worldview must be a liar.

The other thing that constantly strikes me is the degree to which I recognise ideas and slogans that have been borrowed right from other kinds of political advocacy.

One of the defining elements of postmodernism is collage. Trans ideology is made up of fragments of earlier movements: feminism, anti-racism, disability advocacy. It’s like a Tarantino movie.

Is there going to be an accepted Woke reading list now? Only non terfy books allowed. So nothing intellectual by women pre 2014 because up to that point GC was the accepted feminist perspective and obviously no white straight or gay male writers who do not center trans rights. No current authors who don't extensively tweet about transrights even if it's nothing to do with them. No Lesbian writers if the lesbians are all female born. A nice short list.

Magdalen Berns videos are quite good. Thank you for letting me know about her.

I’m not coming at this from an anti-trans or even and anti-feminist perspective necessarily, and I’m still not 100% clear what I am on about yet but I am beginning to formulate a view that the way we have entertained certain subjects whilst maybe coming from a well meaning place has led us into some very dark places and times.

Yes, I agree with this entirely. It's not like the trans stuff came out of the woodwrk, and its not all down to a conspiracy for us to embrace any and everything. It's all very much related to the way we've been taught to think as progressives, about all kinds of issues. The faulty logic in the trans lobby is at work in many other perspectives as well.

It is difficult to put your finger on. I've been reading a lot of Adolph Reed about race in the US lately, and I am finding that helpful. I still haven't totally put my finger on it but I feel like I'm circling in on it a litle more.

The other thing that constantly strikes me is the degree to which I recognise ideas and slogans that have been borrowed right from other kinds of political advocacy. Sometimes they've been twisted, but in many cases they were always bad ideas, and its just that much more obvious now how dangerous it was to allow people to believe they were ideas to be accepted.

I thought this tweet was quite astute.

We just need to stop lying to those we love. Transwomen are not women and transmen are not men, they never will be. Those people with vested interests or trying to be kind who are selling them the lie that they are/can be and insisting everyone else do the same are the ones who are harming them not people pointing out basic fucking reality. We all have people we care about but in no other arena do we feel the need to be tip-toeing around the fantasists, ideologists, opportunists and people with actual mental illnesses in our lives and thus encourage them in harmful behaviours and beliefs so their feelings don’t get hurt.

Absolutely. It is usually part of loving or caring for someone to encourage them to get professional help when they need it, not to humour them if they are confused about reality or so distressed they can’t see it, nor to facilitate their self harming.

Well, that's just a wee bit chilling, isn't it? How often are we required to chant the slogans?

The first person to stop clapping gets the gulag!

LassOfFyvie not that it’s any of your business how much time I spend on the internet or what I search for, I’ll answer in this instance: it took me all of 30 seconds after logging into mumsnet to find two active threads with JKR referenced in the titles. From there I didn’t have to spend very much time at all looking for ridiculous comments from nebulous twitter extremists targetting her on the Internet along with the pages on Snopes and the Mary Sue - I just clicked on some of the links on those threads.

I already answered your question about what I think they can do and it’s immaterial to me whether you agree. Now go find someone else to snark at.

Glad I'm not the only one that was annoying, beans!

Rowling follows less than 700 accounts on Twitter, and she recently added the aggressively anti-trans YouTuber Magdalen Berns to that list.

It’s “fewer than”. They can’t even do NewSpeak grammatically.

They” are TRAs, which I would have assumed was clear to all but the most obtuse or argumentative, you know, given the context of the thread. I think “they” can and will make public life very unpleasant for her

You mean a nebulous bunch of twitterers on the internet? What exactly are "they" going to do to JK Rowling?

How much time do some of you spend on the internet looking for ridiculous comments by extremists?.

Privilege checking, lack of understanding of other people’s lived experience and a desire to avoid putting my foot in my
mouth and offending people.

Actually as a straight white male I’m very used to tiptoeing around feminists, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc adding trans people to the list doesn’t actually make it grow all that much!

"How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."