David Aaronovitch Review of Helen Joyce's Book

www.thejc.com/landing/Author/David%20Aaronovitch

I’m confident that Aaronovitch is perfectly capable of spotting anti-semitism where it exists.

Just had another look at the replies to David's tweet. It's grim reading. One TRA appears to be inciting violence towards Helen. I've reported it to Twitter, but I'll be shocked if they remove it.

twitter.com/MikkiHereEgo/status/1416002699636756480?s=19

There is no possible book that Joyce, or anyone else for the matter, could have written which would have chipped away at the faith of the faithful. The book will be most successful with those who are still "trying to keep an open mind" on the issue. Those who still can't bring themselves to believe that it is all just a Dorito, that the emperor must surely be wearing something. I'm halfway through it, and I am really enjoying it. Wow, but she can write!

the group that dropped Martina Navratilova as an ambassador when she opposed trans inclusion in female sports is inaccurate, though. She opposed inclusion of male trans people in female sports.

When 'Barnsey' is correctly told in the comments 'That answer has no intellectual content' he accuses the writer of insulting him. That's the level of their ability to argue, I fear. How did they get this far? (Rhetorical - funders with vital connections and deep pockets).

@FightingtheFoo do you mean Empire of Pain?

Helen discusses billionaire funding in her chapter Behind the Scenes - Transactivism's long march through the institutions.

This is an excerpt.

A movement that focuses on the levers of power rather than building grassroots support is one in which a few wealthy people can have considerable sway. They have shaped the global agenda by funding briefing documents, campaign groups, research and legal actions; endowing university chairs; and influencing health-care protocols. One is an American transwoman billionaire, Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a retired soldier and one of the heirs to a vast family fortune. Pritzker’s personal foundation, Tawani, makes grants to universities, the ACLU, GLAAD, HRC and smaller activist groups. To cite a couple of examples, in 2016 it gave the University of Victoria $2 million to endow a chair of trans-gender studies, and throughout the ‘bathroom wars’ it supported Equality Illinois Education Project, which is linked to a group campaigning for gender self-ID in the state.

Two other billionaires, neither transgender, also spend lavishly on transactivism. One is Jon Stryker, another heir to a fortune. His foundation, Arcus, supports LGBT campaign group ILGA, and Transgender Europe, which channels funding to national self-ID campaigns. Arcus funds the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which tracks gender-identity advocacy in dozens of countries (and partners with President Biden’s personal foundation on the Advancing Acceptance Initiative, which promotes early childhood transition). In 2015 Arcus announced that it would give $15 million in the next five years to American trans-rights groups. Among the recipients were the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, the Trans Justice Funding Project and the Freedom Center for Social Justice, which campaigned against North Carolina’s bathroom law. In 2019, it gave $2 million to found a queer-studies programme at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and it funds Athlete Ally, the group that dropped Martina Navratilova as an ambassador when she opposed trans inclusion in female sports. In March 2021 he gave a further $15m to the ACLU, to be spent in part on pressing for legal change.

The third billionaire funder of transactivism is George Soros, via his Open Society Foundations (OSF), a network of independently managed philanthropic institutions. OSF has made multi-million-dollar donations to both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, and in 2010 gave $100 million to the HRC, the largest donation the campaign group had ever received. OSF pays for the production of model laws and ‘best-practice’ documents on trans-related issues. To highlight just one example, in 2014 it supported ‘License to be Yourself’, a guide to campaigning for national gender self-ID laws. This argued, among other things, that children of any age should be able to change their legal sex at will. This pattern of funding helps explain the gap between trans campaign groups’ rhetoric and the policies they pursue. The talk is about the world’s downtrodden: poor, homeless trans people forced into survival sex work, lacking health care and harassed by the police. But the money comes in large part from the world’s most powerful people: rich, white American males. The two groups’ needs and desires barely overlap at all.

I'm Jewish. Criticizing TRAs and specifically pharma companies, even ones owned by Jews, is absolutely not anti-Semitic.

If you want to see anti-semitism when criticising big pharma read the currently lauded book - by a New Yorker writer no less - about the family behind the Oxy crisis. He literally cannot get in enough references to their being Jewish. He is obsessed.

I've not seen one person call this out anywhere.

I will tell you next week (mines arriving tomorrow).

I haven't read the book yet, so don't know if Helen Joyce has even mentioned the funding aspect.

If there's more to it, it's nothing I've seen so far.

thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/

Seriously, talk me through it, how is the book antisemitic? Or is it because of the straw clutching nonsense that Harry Potter books are antisemitic and therefore QEWTF

Half way though the book and so far very interesting.

Am now looking at the leading trans voices with different eyes to see who fits into which category.

Guess I am not allowed to list them though?

Good article.

Has " hateful transphobic screed" been mentioned anywhere yet? That's one of the usual stock phrases.

So, an update on the 'angry woman' comment in the article -

One of the comments, from Orie, was

About time mate. Good review.

(Love the fact, though, that in a review defending women you called the female author “too angry”. How many male authors get called “too angry”?)

David has responded with

I take your point, though I think I’d have written that whatever the sex of the writer.

I do like John!

Mind you, it still doesn't beat my favourite review, which appeared on Twitter yesterday ...

I've read the book (preorder arrived early). I didn't get 'angry' or even 'polemical' from it. But otherwise, it's a good review. Re: it's the people who disagree who need to read it more. Well, ideally, yes. But even if the people who are on the fence or unaware read it and see what's happening, that's enough.

It is a brilliant book. And far from being angry (which would be, frankly, justified), HJ has spoken about keeping emotions out of it and using basic thinking and reasoning to call it out. I think that came up in the interview she did with Jo Bartosch on The Critic podcast.

There are already loads of tweets saying it's anti-semitic. Strange how none of these people realise it's anti-semitic in itself to see criticism of a millionaire's actions as anti-semitic. They are the one's amplifying a trope. It's garbage but the lie will go around the world and be the standard criticism of the book from TRAs. Seen it a thousand times before.

Fragrant headtilt Montgomerie likes to think they have the authority to speak on literally everything. I might suggest that comes from their socialization. Let the reader understand what this means.

So, presumably Aaronovitch will face the right wing bigot response, given that LOJ disagrees with him (Everyone who disagrees with Jones is automatically linked to the far right, I believe). It's usually that or the 'I am very disappointed in you' response that Cleese got. Obviously, if they think they can get away with shrieking about the man being involved in genocide if he agrees with the witches, they'll do that, which is what made Stephen King capitulate, iirc.

Funnily enough, it's only the women that tend to get the rape and death threats. Almost like they know what a woman is after all.

If Katy Montgomerie told me the sky was blue, I'd still want to check for myself. One of the most disingenuous, hyperbolic TRAs out there, IMO.

[quote Mollyollydolly]It was this thread .. I could only see half of it (blocked by Jones) but he really pissed David off.
twitter.com/DAaronovitch/status/1396472947947327492[/quote]
Ah thanks. I think that looks familiar. I'm not on twitter any more, so can see Owen's tweets (he had me blocked too). Here is the context.

Just had a look on Twitter. David tweeted his article and now he's being accused of promoting anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

This appears to be fuelled by some Katy Montgomerie tweets:

twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1415946905482321921?s=19

As usual, no one has read the book and no one intends to.

My book just arrived, so I'm off to find out exactly what Helen said.