An excellent article in Sunday Times re SNP trans row

I would think, as with Labour, there will be a death throes period of voters going "Well I hate what they're doing but they're the only independence/non UK Tory option so I'll hold my nose and vote for them." As with Labour, the SNP are probably relying on this: that they can do this and get away with it because there's not enough of an alternative regardless of how angry they make their electorate.

As Labour have seen however, you can't rely on that working forever. They do eventually get pissed off enough to move their vote elsewhere.

"From time to time Nicola Sturgeon notes she has answered more questions from journalists these past 12 months than any other UK politician. This is true, though not every question has been asked. Among these: “Can someone with a penis and testicles be a woman? And if so, in precisely what sense?

...trans women are women, but they aren’t women in quite the same way your mother is a woman."

I'm sure he means well, but isn't this precisely how women ended up being referred to as cervix-havers, uterus-havers and people who bleed?

"Words must have meanings, for without meaning there is no truth. And without truth, anything goes."

Indeed, Alex.

The latest twist in the SNP wars makes them look like a party in its death throes, and yet they lead in the polls. Strange times.

Certainly there is reams of evidence, (and reams, and reams) that gynephobia involves actual violence, threatened rape, threatened murder, as opposed to the literal kind. Kind of thing absolutely not tolerated in other forms of phobia.

If that's the bandwagon female people have to get on in these bizarre times then so be it.

@MichelleofzeResistance If everything is transphobic, then everything is abuse. It's all about the framing.

Love the idea of promoting gynephobia as a term.

That is an interesting read by Lachlan Stuart OvaHere. There does seem to be a habit (three examples I can think of Peto, Brown, Challenors) of pushing through undemocratic/ harmful or self interested policies by these people.

Cambridge City had to reverse their policy partly because it was pushed through with no impact assessment on service users. Mighty Male Entitlement in all its glory!

Thanks for that OvaHere, interesting reading.

It's quite long. The relevant bit I mentioned is at the very end of the essay.

Thank you!

[quote Tootsweets23]@OvaHere I'd be interested in reading what Lachlan S had to say on this - you wouldn't have a link to it would you? Many thanks [/quote]
No prob. Here it is

medium.com/@lachlanstuart/the-confessions-of-a-transphobe-b4942c06e6e4

@OvaHere I'd be interested in reading what Lachlan S had to say on this - you wouldn't have a link to it would you? Many thanks

Also noticed the comment about in the past 5 years trans people have faced a significant increase in online abuse (have they? Where's the evidence this is based on and where is the abuse coming from? Are we certain it isn't things like women stating biology is a real thing and important for the meeting of women's rights?) without any balance that female people have faced a significant increase in online abuse from activists in the name of the trans agenda, which has included very frequent death and rape threats, doxxing and links between stated intent online followed up by active violence (fuck up some t*s for example.) I know where the evidence for that is - a two second google search turns out oceans of it, everywhere, daily, completely unacknowledged or challenged.

I'd like to know if this is something trans people are also encountering, and if so why isn't it all over the papers? Otherwise it looks like virtue signalling/sympathy bias without being true to the facts.

I think the Holyrood article misses some of the bigger picture. Labour for example in their 2019 election manifesto went to great effort to map out an extensively funded plan for trans healthcare.

As Lachlan Stewart, who was involved in writing this, pointed out in his later essay the transactivists weren't the slightest bit interested in this, their only interest was in the removal of women's rights.

So the SNP, as Labour did, could have addressed those things and still been in a no better position because this isn't and has never been about better care for people who identify as trans.

No matter what any political party does with regards to the medical care and treatment of trans people the activists will remain angry and disappointed until women are decimated legally, politically and culturally.

Jo March

Yes, @Abitofalark, I did think that it might have been better for her to refer to 'pupils who say that they are "trans"'.

Agreed, Jiminy. She is very critical of the SNP and Sturgeon, listing numerous things they could have done and failed to do. I don't know who Mandy Rhodes is but obviously close to the action. As well as the sympathetic noises over long waits for gender clinics, I notice that she refers to teachers not having guidance for how to help 'trans pupils'. Hm, maybe they're just pupils who are confused, unhappy or have had a certain degree of influence or even just a lot of talk swirling around them.

But Mandy Rhodes doesn't suggest that these services might significantly include CAMHS, or other mental health services, or ASD support services for young people, or therapies otherwise.

And indeed, a few lines later the waiting lists for 'gender identity clinics' are mentioned ... So it's not really sunlight after all. More of a faint and transient glow.

The first article is by Alex Massie, a well-known Scottish political journalist columnist and editor. He writes columns for the Times and Sunday Times and the Spectator. He's Scottish based so he sees the politics within the SNP from close quarters.

Like so many commentators, he sees what's wrong with the fiction of the male bodied claims to be women but feels obliged not to be cruel to transgender people; hence the strange attempt to say that male transgender people are women but not quite women in the way that women are women.

www.holyrood.com/editors-column/view,taking-a-lead

Can I just add this article to the list?

www.holyrood.com/editors-column/view,taking-a-lead

But it is precisely because of the lack of leadership on this issue that now natural allies are tearing strips off each other, young people no longer feel safe within a party that has put equality at its heart, and some women – feminists to their core – have felt abandoned while exposed to abject misogyny, rooted in erroneous slurs, for simply raising questions emanating from this wider debate.

Disgusted of Manchester has to be a parody, surely? Every comment is pretty much 'A female did a bad thing once' as some kind of slam-dunk ontological position.

Good article and some excellent comments. Disgusted of Manchester just supplies the comedy relief in the comment section at this point.

The first article says "So, sure, “trans women are women”, but they aren’t women in quite the same way your mother is a woman."

Isn't there a line in The Hitch-hiker's Guide about something "flying, in just the way that a brick doesn't"? A 'transwoman' is a woman in just exactly the sense that anything'anyone else, not a woman, is a woman. That is; not at all.

If women's rights are transphobic then by extension, mentioning trans rights must be gynephobic.

Yep

And I think you're right. We need to start using gynephobia a lot, in context. If women's rights are transphobic then by extension, mentioning trans rights must be gynephobic.

Logic.

If calling politicians silly names makes them run around like headless chickens then when in Rome....