I'm disappointed - Zoe Williams on language

She doesn’t do anything light hearted
It’s always charged with criticism of others

She is also missing the main reason for disagreement about changing the meaning of the word 'woman'.
Half the humans on the planet share their female reproductive biology, and the body type that goes with that reproductive role..
Having a word for us as a group is useful.
Trans activists do not want us to have ANY word to describe ourselves as a group. If we let them change the meaning of 'women' and 'females' to include transwomen, but and said we would call ourselves 'zopples' they would start claiming 'transwomen are zopples.'
We may as well fight for the word that is already ours.

I feel like ZW used to be a better and more incisive writer than she is now - like going back 20 years or something - but I might just be reflecting that I was younger with less refined judgment then?

I went off her the day she said she said she felt resentful after the Tories unexpectedly won the 1992 general election — though she hadn’t actually bothered to vote herself. Thanks a bunch, Zoe, we got all the miseries of John Major and a shambolically privatised national rail system.

I find it ironic that the piece ends with "The important thing, always, is to operate in good faith" given that certain arguments lobbed into the piece really don't seem to be.

I've met her. I was with a load of 'deprived' teenagers who she was desperate to impress. They all thought she was an arsehole

When my daughter was in hospital, I was called “mum”

I literally did not give a flying fu@k

I wanted their brains to be totally focussed on curing my daughter. If I’m in front of a medical person and it is about my children, they could call me “thing” and I wouldn’t care.

I too hate being called “mum” in medical appointments

Being called 'mum' in this way in appointments is a completely different issue to the erasure of the word 'mother', but Zoe seems to mix the two up.

The first is a lazy if no patronising way to refer to patients. Maybe not always meant to be so, but this use of 'mum' instead of the woman's name frequently belongs in the same basket as medical professionals who would use infantalised language such as 'tummy' or 'tummy-tum', or call their patients 'good girl'.

The erasure of the word mother is the erasure of biological language, very much tied to an ideology shared by a minority of people. Not the same thing at all.

TBF she's not saying people don't need reading glasses because of their eyesight per se, but that people don't need reading glasses because menus are (or were) so predictable.

Well in that case the woman is utterly thick.

Do you think all menus are the same?!

[quote PurgatoryOfPotholes]Also Zoe:

I always thought people were attention-seeking when they went through that performance of getting their glasses out at the table. Come on, it’s going to be garlic bread, soup and chicken liver pate. Surely you could have guessed that? I didn’t realise how it would feel when the text was swimming about indistinguishably or how rare it is these days that the first sentence is “garlic bread”. Now I realise it’s just as likely to be bread with a medjool date whipped butter, or garlic bread with a cheesy crust. In my pride, I have spent ages ordering things that weren’t there.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/i-used-to-tut-at-people-who-need-glasses-to-read-a-menu-then-i-joined-them-[/quote]
TBF she's not saying people don't need reading glasses because of their eyesight per se, but that people don't need reading glasses because menus are (or were) so predictable.

Usually the logic is "it's only real if it's happened to me".

If anyone could believe that other people thought animals/people with gender dysphoria didn't exist, it would be Zoe Williams. It's not so dissimilar from her own position of assuming people were making it up about having hay fever.

I really tried to follow her logic. But there isn't any.

Luxury beliefs distract from her privilege.

She's so incoherent.

I actually thought that piece may have been written after a few glasses of wine had been consumed, but after the comments on this thread about so many other incoherent articles, I am probably mistaken.

Also Zoe:

I always thought people were attention-seeking when they went through that performance of getting their glasses out at the table. Come on, it’s going to be garlic bread, soup and chicken liver pate. Surely you could have guessed that? I didn’t realise how it would feel when the text was swimming about indistinguishably or how rare it is these days that the first sentence is “garlic bread”. Now I realise it’s just as likely to be bread with a medjool date whipped butter, or garlic bread with a cheesy crust. In my pride, I have spent ages ordering things that weren’t there.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/i-used-to-tut-at-people-who-need-glasses-to-read-a-menu-then-i-joined-them-

Who "doesn't believe" in hay fever?

One side of the debate doesn’t think trans people are real; they might feel what they feel, but the rest of us don’t have to join them in that reality.

No one is saying trans people are not real! Why does protecting the rights of women & girls have to equate with thinking trans people are not real ffs?! They are certainly real. They are trans women. Not biologically women. What is so hard Zoe?!?!

Williams has nothing to say of any interest or note.

This is all, and has been the case for many years.

Re hay fever she wrote

* It was years before I really believed in it. I thought it was like when people say they have an allergy when really they are on a diet*

She is one of those fools that don’t have views or perspective. Instead they regard what they say as “fact”

Can you imagine how horrifying she would be at a dinner party?

Well, for one, i think it's absolute horseshit to imagine some class of "vulnerable" women who won't attend their smear test unless they're specifically invited as women.

Bloody hell! She can't imagine women recently arrived (or even not so recently arrived) as migrants, some from disastrously stressful situations, who might not yet have learned enough English to know "cervix", a word many native speakers don't even know? Or a woman who dropped science subjects early and never heard of a cervix? Let alone women with learning difficulties who might struggle with basic reading etc?

Oh how very "inclusive", not. "I can't imagine someone who's not as British, fortunate and educated as me, so they don't exist and can't be excluded or discriminated against."

Basically sheer elitist snobbery. Even OJ should have something to say about that! (Though I agree she's not a twitter bully like him)