Judith Butler interview

No, that isn’t their job.

The Guardian employs editors who should be on top of this.

I agree, just pointing out the disparity.

And they think that "transphobes" want to silence Judith Butler.

Because we're terrified people will hear her incredibly coherent arguments?

No, please, let her talk as much as possible. Preferably in a proper debate.

If you look on twitter the ire being directed at The Guardian seems to be coming mostly from trans activists because The Guardian has committed the worst sin in the world: cancelling the words of our Blessed Lady of Gender St Judith.

Oh Guardian, what have you done?

America is a fundamentally very different country that by a quirk of history happens to have English as its main language. If the Guardian business wants to make money in the US by competing with Vice, they should create a different publication and not confuse the two.

"Counter-productive" is a euphemism for "false" or "incorrect", I guess?

Does show the mind-set. He knows beforehand what he wants to produce, and examples are either are "productive" in that they support it or "counter-productive" in that they don't.

This isn't journalism...

Gobsmacked at the Vice stuff. Gleeson's suggestion of keeping the answer yet changing the question is actually hilarious if it wasn't so depressing. Particularly so given that Gleeson specifically says bigots respond to things without reading them - clearly trying to paint Butler as a bigot.

.“However with all this said, I can see why the new developments took Wi Spa from a weak example to a counter-productive one,” Gleeson said.

What's that rule of misogyny? The worst thing about male violence is that it makes a weak example counter-productive.

The Guardian employs editors who should be on top of this.

Do we think Hadley Freeman and Sonia Sodha should ask for editorial input into US Politics editorials? Arguably the California offfice should have consulted the U.K. journalists before they wrote spiteful, defamatory bollocks about the Wi Spa complainant?

And this was their astonishingly arrogant take on a piece about our law, which had nothing to do with them.

The Guardian in the US is committed to covering this important civil rights fight, but when the time came for us to report on Trump’s attacks, we encountered problems. Some trans people wouldn’t talk to us.
That’s because, days earlier, the Guardian published an editoriall^ that we believe promoted transphobic viewpoints, including some of the same assertions about gender that US politicians are citing in their push to eliminate trans rights. Guardian journalists in the US had no input in the editorial, which we felt was misplaced and misguided, and nearly all reporters and editors from our New York, Washington DC and California offices wrote to UK editors with our concerns.
The editorial was an attempt to make sense of a growing debate about trans rights in the UK. While focused on the Gender Recognition Act, the editorial and resulting conversations have exposed some of the fundamental divides between American and British feminism and progressive politics – and highlighted for us an alarming intolerance of trans viewpoints in mainstream UK discourse.
The editorial used a UK legal debate about IDs to argue that trans rights “collide” with cis women’s rights; that equality for trans women “could adversely affect other women”; and that allowing trans women to access public spaces threatens cis women’s “safety”. These arguments were met with particular dismay in the US as they echo the position of anti-trans legislators who have pushed overtly transphobic bathroom billss^.

We even have a quote from Sam Levin, who did all the Wi Spa reports, and summed up the US Guardian's priorities thus in the article mentioned in the Vice piece:

The spirit of the Guardian is something we deeply believe in – it’s about fairness and equality. We should work to hire trans people on staff. And our journalism should be grounded in the principle that trans women are women, and that trans people should have the right to feel safe to live as themselves.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/02/guardian-editorial-response-transgender-rights-uk

And if the journalist involved thinks that it’s acceptable practice to retrospectively change the interview question which the interviewee is purported to have answered then I would not have much faith in the accuracy or reliability of the rest of the material they hand in for publication, if I was their editor.

Gleeson is so far from being a proper journalist that they don't even understand why it's not acceptable practice to change the question afterwards. Gleeson even seems to feel that they are the wronged party in all this. It speaks volumes that the Guardian would hire such a person to do an interview with Judith Butler. But again, this seems to be the US Guardian (even though it appeared in the life and style section, which is normally UK stuff) and, as their two reports on Wi Spa show, the US Guardian doesn't seem to have any interest in employing people who understand basic journalistic practice. (Odd, too, because we're constantly told that US publications have an obsession with factual accuracy.)

Gleason is not a journalist. She's an academic who is a massive fangirl of Butler

www.patreon.com/posts/23689989

Look at the mess The Guardian is in. Then imagine that chaos being spread everywhere.

And the mess the BBC got into during the Olympics on some topics. Plus, every time one of their news reports is in line with ideology rather than the facts of the news this will cement that they're willing to misinform or disinform us in greater service of an ideology that not everyone accepts.

This is one tiny real world example of a conflict between the gender identity ideology and reality and how one of the stalwarts of the MSM has damaged itself to a remarkable degree by adhering to the ideology.

The plan is for the gender identity ideology to spread out from its strongholds and be applied right across society, to all areas, and for there to be no possibility of any challenge.

Look at the mess The Guardian is in. Then imagine that chaos being spread everywhere.

I think what they think is that Wi Spa is an embarrassing inconvenience but gender critical feminists are the baddies, defo so why can't they just change the question? Everyone hates us, who cares?

This issue is, at some point, going to accelerate the public's confidence in the alleged impartiality and basic news reporting function of MSM.

The complaints about partial or partisan media from MSM sound hollow when egregious actions like this occur.

And if the journalist involved thinks that it’s acceptable practice to retrospectively change the interview question which the interviewee is purported to have answered then I would not have much faith in the accuracy or reliability of the rest of the material they hand in for publication, if I was their editor.

Seriously! That interview is appalling. So hard of thinking that they can’t think through the consequences if journalists are allowed to retroactively change the questions in a Q&A, or understand why the editors of a newspaper might balk at that. Slagging off their colleagues for having professional standards! Actually making a point that they didn’t charge any money for the lie. We can take it then that charging editors money for lies they made up is their usual practice. How is it even possible that they think they’re in the right? Other than being dumb as a box of blue and pink hammers.

I like the suggestion that a judge in a trial can give one of the verdicts:

1. this person is not guilty and is a transwoman; or
2. this person is guilty and is therefore a man.

Maybe the verdict could incorporate a process to immediately award a GRC in the event of "not guilty".

Presumably publications like Vice haven’t specified the gender identity of the person charged in the WiSpa incident because they haven’t yet decided whether they are genuinely-trans or never-was-real-trans.

Either way they are in a bind that sets off massive alarm bells. In a sane world the jig would be up.

If the perp is what they say they are it becomes undeniable there's a conflict of rights, and a big issue here they have been refusing to truthfully acknowledge.

And if they judgement call that this trans woman isn't a 'real' trans woman, again their editorial line falls like a house of cards and they face the wrath of TRAs and death by social media.

All they can do is double down and keep denying the facts. We can only hope that can't stand in the long term?

Presumably publications like Vice haven’t specified the gender identity of the person charged in the WiSpa incident because they haven’t yet decided whether they are genuinely-trans or never-was-real-trans. I’m guessing the outcome will be judged on the result of the court case; it is a Schrodinger’s Cat type situation in which the true gender identity can only be known after the verdict.

And if the journalist involved thinks that it’s acceptable practice to retrospectively change the interview question which the interviewee is purported to have answered then I would not have much faith in the accuracy or reliability of the rest of the material they hand in for publication, if I was their editor.

lanadelgrey

Thank you for posting that. It's a great piece, so clear. I'm not sure how anyone could argue that she doesn't have the right to say it.

Imagine a Muslim woman in the UK who escapes a violent marriage and threats of honor killing. She goes to a shelter where she feels safe because it is a female-only space. Not just because she is away from the realm of immediate male violence, but because as a Muslim woman she does not feel comfortable sharing intimate quarters with a person with a male body. This allows her to reconcile her awful situation as well as her need to feel she is acting in congruence with her identity and principles of modesty as a Muslim woman.
But if a trans woman with a penis is in the same space, then the Muslim woman will be in a terrible conflict about her actions in leaving her home. Suddenly, she is not able to remove her hijab or undress because she cannot do those things in front of a person with a male body who is not a family member. This not a hypothetical, there are Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu women who are now excluded from single sex-only spaces because the definition of woman has changed to include women with penises. To call that Muslim woman a TERF because she expresses discomfort is yet another abuse for her.
All this to say that we have yet to negotiate safety and freedom for women with female bodies and not ignore or override minority women in the West or women from my part of the world out of these negotiations. Afghan girls and women have in fact had to disguise themselves as boys and men in order to move outside the home, earn a living or perform vital chores during the rule of the Taliban. Would this be called “performing gender” as Judith Butler calls it, or a resourceful survival strategy that Afghan women adopted in order to be able to live?

Has Owen Jones commented on this yet?

thefeministani.wordpress.com/2021/09/09/judith-butler-and-afghan-women/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

I wonder if word of this is getting round the actual journalists at The Guardian?

The remaining journalists still clinging on? Got to be getting harder for them to ignore it.

[[https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1435523992417406977
Suzanne Moore the other day:]]

Perhaps now you can see why I left a perfectly good job at a once respected newspaper. I was not silenced or cancelled or ever claimed to be. I was angry, hurt and appalled at what passed there for critical thinking/feminism/solidarity/basic journalistic standards. Its now a joke

In case it's not been link to already, here's some background:

grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-butler-did-it-the-mysterious