Another incredibly annoying Guardian article

"pretend to be repairmen or emergency workers to get into our homes, and actually have, and we haven’t banned repairmen and emergency workers yet"

It is abso-fucking-lutely illegal for people to lie about who they are in order to deceptively get something they want and would not get without the lie, it's called fraud.

There’s also a hullabaloo about young people choosing to be trans who may change their minds. I’m sure they exist. Also, we all know they’re rare, and that people are not trying on genders like they were Halloween costumes, because this is not easy for them.

Where have you been for the last 5 (10?) years, Rebecca? Children are now presented with atrocities like the genderbread person or the gender unicorn or the Mermaids jelly baby scale (Barbie to GI Joe) and told to choose their gender. This is happening in schools. Yes they are 'trying on genders', because they are being taught that they should.

And the young people who change their minds are growing in number all the time. They are not 'rare'. Most of them are female. How can someone who purports to be a 'feminist' care so little about these young women who are being given drugs and having irreversible surgery because they have been taken in by gender ideology, and by the time they realise it hasn't solved their problems they have made irreversible changes to their bodies?

She is so condescending and about as sincere as Ellen. She mentions the British whatever but it is obvious she has not taken any of those views on board and just talks down to any unenlightened souls who dare to have a different opinion to her.

Liberals like these make me realise why people voted for Trump.

I thought the whole article could be summed up as 'I grew up with lots of gay
men and men in drag who were really nice to me, so we just need to be nice to trans people'

Did I miss anything else of substance ?

'Finally there are about 4 billion women and girls on Earth, and we are not in danger of being erased''.

Ahahahahahahahahaha. Ha.

That would be a very funny statement if it weren't utterly ignorant and callous towards the many women who live worldwide and are denied basic human rights because of their sex, women whose identities and needs are literally erased in order to oppress them, like the article that was recently shared on here about women in Afghanistan not even being allowed to use their own names.

And this from Rebecca Solnit too. Sad to see someone whose writing I otherwise admire being used to erase the oppression of women in the name of the usual 'wHy cAn"T yOU LaDiES jUSt bE nICe' mantra.

I have been using public restrooms in this exceptionally gender-diverse city for the past 40-something years, and also reading the local and national papers, plus I know a lot of schoolteachers and parents of schoolchildren, and in all that time I have never actually heard of, or read of, let alone seen, an incident in which a trans woman or girl somehow caused unpleasantness in a women’s room, and it does not appear to be something anyone worries about here.

You haven't been paying attention then, have you, Rebecca? Here is one example for you. There are many others.

Transgender Woman Is Charged With Voyeurism at Target in Idaho

In the Year of Our Lady 2020 there’s still a fuss in the UK about the bathroom business.

Perhaps that's because of incidents like this:

Transgender woman, 18, sexually assaulted girl, 10, in Morrisons' female toilets

When there is so much real violence against women, it’s a sad waste of time to focus on imaginary maybe presumably it-could-theoretically-happen violence. Trans women pose no threat to cis-women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts and pariahs (and insisting they use men’s bathrooms endangered them horribly).

In addition to the fact that not all transwomen are harmless, there are also men who pretend to be trans, like this one.

Sexual predator jailed after claiming to be ‘transgender’ to assault women in shelter

Why don't you try acquainting yourself with some facts before writing your next article, Rebecca?

feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights

Really dont want to click on the article, but not only is this quote a total logic fail about subcategories as ThePonderer points out, but nobody is denying trans people human rights.... she clearly has no idea what human rights are.

I'm a huge fan of hers and I've been trying to do my best to ignore her TRA leanings for some years now, but now she's gone and written in the bloody Guardian!

It's not about flipping bathrooms - why do these opinion pieces keep picking on this? I am slightly disappointed there is very little of substance in there, I was hoping she might have a good argument but it's the same old same old isn't it.

I’m sorry, but I only read half and had to shut it down. What a load of c&*p. Boring reading and incorrect throughout. Well done those of you who managed to read it all.

Not again...
the old; 'women who have had mastectomies and hysterectomies' crap again
the old; 'it'll never happen' er it has
what relevance is it to talk about workmen/tradesmen?
and the bloody 'cis'!!!!!!!!!
Bog off with all of this- we've had enough now

And thanks OP- i hope your jaw is getting better

feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights

Just trying to reproduce the logic here: so veganism is a subcategory of animal rights advocacy, which means you can't be a vegan if you don't also campaign against zoos. Or something?

The superior tone combined with a lack of anything remotely resembling a fact is A+++ Rebecca, keep up the good work.

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You.

You don't get to define me. Stop calling me 'cis'.

Back then we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff,

Do you mean sex or gender? You seem a little confused. A dictionary might help.

some of which is in the brain, not the pants,

Never though the person who wrote 'Men explain things to me' would believe in ladybrains. Did a man write that book for you? Obviously your weak and feeble ladybrain couldn't have come up with anything as complex as writing a book.

and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway.

Everyone is either male or female, including intersex people. Why not order a biology textbook along with that dictionary?

Cultures from Native America to India have long recognized that there are other ways to be gendered.

Indeed. Homophobic and patriarchal cultures have often found a way for gay men to exist within their societies whilst being excluded from the category of men, which is reserved for manly, heterosexual men only.

@xxyzz that's a bit scary

Couldn't stay the course, thought it was me being a bit of a lightweight.

Was that a little on the verbose side

Thankfully my life has improved immensely since I stopped reading The Guardian - I won't even sign in to read the wonderful Hadley or Marina anymore (BTW, how on earth do they still work in that environment?).

It is no wonder people have decided to desert the MSM en masse (not that I believe people should get their news from Facebook) when this is the level of intellectual argument they throw out.

I was listening to a radio in the car to-day and I had to switch back to a music only channel as the main interviewer took an obvious lie as a fact (did not have the intellectual capacity to question the interviewee as to whether or not this was a fact or a made-up piece of fiction) and I realised to my horror that the level of debate on the airwaves has stooped to a level unheard in my lifetime and broadcasters seem to get the job based on their Instagram likes as opposed to their ability to coherently challenge an interviewee.

Some hippy dippy west coast american the Guardian has as an employee writes an article about their own experience

This is Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the book 'Men explain things to me', which (I think) is where the term 'mansplaining' comes from. Of course men explain things to you, Rebecca, because you have an inferior 'ladybrain', and they have superior manly brains (according to this guardian article).

Scientists knew about sex chromosomes in the 1970s. In fact, they knew about the X and Y chromosome, and their role in sexual differentiation, since 1905. Does she honestly think that in the 1970s we didn't know about hormones and chromosomes?

I don't think even needs to be as technical as that. Surely, by the time humans were domesticating animals, they had a pretty clear idea that reproduction was only possible when you involved one each of the two sexes, and that applied to humans too. Sperm-makers and egg-makers need to reliably find each other, otherwise we would have long died out as a species. It's so fundamental, that our language follows it with words like man and woman!

oh ffs I read seven words of the headline and noped back out again. I hope that doesn't count for the Guardian's metrics.

I remember Rebecca Solnit as being good, didn't she write Men Explain Things to Me?

Doesn't matter how fucking good she usually is, what the fuck is the point in an article that simply asserts Trans Women Pose No Threat to C*s Women when at this stage it is abundantly obvious that a sizeable minority fucking do. Unless she means they don't threaten our woman essence or something? But physical safety is rather more important.

I seriously don't understand the cognitive dissonance these American feminists have. Have they not seen the pink and blue baseball bat brigade threatening women? Have they never seen the stats on trans sex offenders in prison? Have they never read the Reddit trans subs? Shouldn't they do some research on a subject before writing newspaper columns about it?

Rebecca Solnit Explains Things To Me and she can fuck off.

Just a load of nonsense. I'm usually good at reading even badly written but interesting texts to the end and diligent about finishing well written ones presenting an opposing view to my own. I gave up after her ignorant bathroom paragraph:

in all that time I have never actually heard of, or read of, let alone seen, an incident in which a trans woman or girl somehow caused unpleasantness in a women’s room, and it does not appear to be something anyone worries about here. In the Year of Our Lady 2020 there’s still a fuss in the UK about the bathroom business.

When there is so much real violence against women, it’s a sad waste of time to focus on imaginary maybe presumably it-could-theoretically-happen violence.

It happened. Right in a supermarket where I 've been shopping. Not just once, but twice did a male who identifies as trans cause unpleasantness in a public toilet in two towns local to me. Real violence.

Duly charged, tried and found guilty said male was then sent to a hostel for vulnerable women. And only after a public outcry that a violent sexual offender was housed with women who had themselves suffered male violence, was a different arrangement made.

Said male subsequently violated the terms of the sentence, but let's pretend none of it ever happened.

Self-congratulatory tripe, ignorant as well as badly misinformed (which takes some doing) and honestly far longer than even a well written opinion piece has any right to be.