Leaf Arbuthnot in the Times

Santa makes really good points here:
It's very unfortunate because it's been an effort to create tolerance and acceptance, but the message students get now is that the principle that controls all is kindness. Kindness, and tolerance which means accepting others views - which is to say, there is no truth. We accept the truth of those who have experienced intolerance, even if those truths are contradictory.

That this results in terrible intolerance seems ironic but it's really inevitable.

So many of these young people have no tools to even begin to see what the systemic effects of various beliefs, if instantiated in policy and society, would be. Even their courses on history are oriented toward understanding a kind of neomarxist movement from intolerance to tolerance, rather than seeing how what people believed about reality affected how they lived and what they did.

I think this explains alot about how the disagreements and discussions on this topic (and otgers) play out. I need to think more about this but just wanted to say this is getting to the heart of something.

Thanks for sharing those, interesting to see how it’s trickling through to people.

That first letter makes a good point about celebrating difference.

Follow-up: the first section of letters in the Sunday Times today are in response to the Arbuthnot article.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-women-are-different-thats-something-to-celebrate-8whh7wx70?shareToken=74b3f3079494a26952bdb560b557efd4

It made me think - for me, I read the books as a clear allegory about fascism and the fight against it - which, thinking about it, mirrors my family's experience fleeing fascism.

I am sure that this is a correct interpretation of the books and what JKR intended. For me there were shades of South Africa under apartheid there too.

What Leaf tells us is that when you bin a class-based analysis and instead favour of a hierarchy of prioritised feelings, then it becomes very easy to throw anyone under the bus from outside your circle.

As far as Leaf is concerned that works brilliantly for Leaf and other Leaf-like people so what more is needed?

The statement about no problem showing up in statistics is a bit disingenuous given the multiple different attacks on accurate record keeping of sex that we are now living with and in some cases attempting to unpick.

“JK Rowling’s left the story, at least as many of us fans see it,” he says. “Hogwarts — the love and magic of the original stories — is still there to welcome anyone home who wants it, but it’s in our hands now.”

I've seen this sort of sentiment before but am always blown away by the utter, breathtaking arrogance and staggering entitlement it displays.

I truly believe that people who utter these kinds of words are of the same type as those who pointed the witch finger at successful women in their village in order (subconsciously or otherwise) to appropriate any wealth or power that woman may have clawed to her.

Long live copyright.

Yes it is interesting xxyzz. I remember watching the 5th film in particular in the cinema as a teenager and thinking of the authoritarian parallels. I had no experience of any of those kinds of things but we did learn about some in school, so maybe that was why. I do find it ironic that for my generation (I am a similar age to LA) who claim to be such fans, they really don’t seem to understand any deeper meaning to Harry Potter. Or have any self-awareness, to realise they are behaving like certain characters, though probably not the ones they think of themselves as.

I certainly never saw the Harry Potter books as being about tolerance and love, and celebrating difference (although these are themes in the books). That seems quite a generic teen take on it.

Likewise, Maya's summary of the books representing an authoritarian capture of institutions and the fightback of the truth pretty much exactly mirrors Maya's own personal experience, so it's unsurprising she would see that as its essence.

It made me think - for me, I read the books as a clear allegory about fascism and the fight against it - which, thinking about it, mirrors my family's experience fleeing fascism.

It makes me wonder how much we all read the books through our own lenses, and how much modern teens or twenty-somethings, who know nothing of authoritarian states, much less fascism, simply cannot understand what it is we fear, where things can lead if left unchecked, and so favour a bland 'Be kind' reading of the books and of life.

They lack the knowledge of history and the personal understanding of its impacts and so risk making us all relive it.

And this, kids, is why Education Matters.

It makes me wonder how we explain to young generations quite how shit things can get without boring them away or terrifying them witless. It's difficult. 'It could get worse' is not a message anyone wants to hear.

Plus ça change....

once you implement a system of self ID - which is already in operation in our law courts, our hospitals and elsewhere - then every dangerous man can identify as female.

This.

And further more every man, with any agenda of any kind, can walk into any female only space at will and expect not to be challenged or asked to leave. They don't have to self - ID - self ID means that any male must be assumed to have identified.

Female spaces are now freely available for male use and male viewing, this knowledge will be widely disseminated among men, and females can either accept this is now their lot in life or they can go without the space or resource at all.

If you were unlucky enough to be born with the burden of being biologically female, you're now a second class citizen.

It's not at all a bad article, I think it's written in good faith which comes through.

As far as not quite getting it, my sense is that for many people, they struggle to look at these questions systematically, and they struggle with the question, what is true. Nor do they understand that what is true is fundamental, that when as a society we don't start there, outcomes, even when things are done in good faith, will be poor.

Education is responsible for a lot of this. The majority of people do not naturally think systematically, and a godo education makes a significant differene to that ability, but it simply doesn't happen. And similarly, the idea that truth, not just scientific truth but truth at the level of ideology and meaning, is important, is not only not taught, it's taught against.

It's very unfortunate because it's been an effort to create tolerance and acceptance, but the message students get now is that the principle that controls all is kindness. Kindness, and tolerance which means accepting others views - which is to say, there is no truth. We accept the truth of those who have experienced intolerance, even if those truths are contradictory.

That this results in terrible intolerance seems ironic but it's really inevitable.

So many of these young people have no tools to even begin to see what the systemic effects of various beliefs, if instantiated in policy and society, would be. Even their courses on history are oriented toward understanding a kind of neomarxist movement from intolerance to tolerance, rather than seeing how what people believed about reality affected how they lived and what they did.

But there's something more than that, isn't there? At a fundamental level, she hasn't understood what the problem is. She thinks it's about the tiny proportion of people who are trans, and the tiny (in her imagination) proportion of those who might be dangerous. She hasn't grasped that once you implement a system of self ID - which is already in operation in our law courts, our hospitals and elsewhere - then every dangerous man can identify as female.

I was wrong about her dad. He's not a journalist he's a Baron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JamesArbuthnot#Personallife

*same

Ah, little Leaf Arbuthnot whose brother and daddy also work for the dame newspaper and who basically was parachuted into a cushy job at the Sunday Times about 7 years ago out of university.

Who gives a fuck what she thinks about anything? Little Leafy doesn't ever have to worry about sharing a cell with a male rapist who says he's a woman

Woman with massive social capital in "can't imagine what life is like for vulnerable women without social capital" shocker

They see her Rowling, they hating.

Borrowed from Twitter.

Threats are always unacceptable. I think this just reminds us that many people can tolerate their own cognitive dissonance and lack of integrity quite well if the personal benefits of doing that are high enough. Others will stand up for principle despite serious personal costs. Sheep and goats. If reality and facts are inconvenient they can be ignored by the sheep until the sheep feel they’re really personally impacted. Goats speak up including for others.

Also minus points to anyone including journalists who over-characterise the differences between generations. That’s all just marketing. Always has been. It’s really unhelpful that young people are always being told they are kind and progressive (or that they should/must be!). Today’s youngsters, are tomorrow’s oldsters, and just as fallible and vulnerable as any other generation has been or will be.

All people of all ages can be kind and principled, and aggressive, and selfish, and lazy and gullible. But unless very privileged and lucky, it’s safe to say that older people will have had more life experiences to draw on than younger people do. Will be ever thus.

I hate this lazy unrealistic pressures on young people to solve the climate emergency or huge social problems because they care a lot about it. That is just an easy way for most other people to kick it all down the road themselves and not do anything themselves to tackle it collectively. Let the kids worry about all that. A dangerously selfish position to take in late stage capitalism which ignores the economic and other power disparities that are growing and entrenching all the time.

A genuine key difference between generations is that social media now exists which can’t be underestimated as a driver for human behaviour. Social media makes our ephemeral or undeveloped thinking permanent. That has a divisive and anxiety provoking effect for as long as it remains such an important part of so many peoples’ lives. Although social media can also help to inform and unite us while our lives get busier, which can be really positive. Trade offs.

In the UK only the mid thirties and older can remember before social media really took off here in our own lives with the uptake of mobile phones. So that’s a massive genuine generational difference that we do all need to navigate together. Social media is helping to go shape all of our opinions whenever we began using it. But real life still has to be lived. I think if we went back to many of these outraged Harry Potter fans in ten years’ time, due their own IRL experience accruing they’d say something different.

The older people who bring up JKR (in my small sample of people who have said anything to me about it) have all said she’s just been standing up for women’s rights as a survivor of DV and there’s nothing wrong with doing that. From one, the perspicacious 90s saying, ‘they need to get a life’ was also used about the people who feel the need to object to JKR standing up for women and children.

I'm beginning to worry about this tendency for everything to be labelled "abusive".
Challenge someone in a changing room == abuse.
Parent checking up on child == abuse
Have an honest difficult conversation == abuse

In which countries could I self Id as a man and ( without needing harmful treatment) be seen as a man? Like no pay and promotion penalty, reduced probability of rape? He has data to prove this ?

In which countries could I self ID as a man and find sanitary bins in all toilet facilities?

Is he being truthful?

Yes, Leaf makes her own views clear but I commend her for representing a range of voices.

The main thing that struck me - and not for the first time - is how emotionally invested these 30+ year-olds are in a piece of children's fantasy fiction. It's a testament to JKR's skill as a writer for sure but also kind of troubling I think.