Typical Guardian piece by Zoe Williams: "Who do the Tory leadership candidates think they are impressing with their spiteful posturing on trans issues?"

I don't expect she goes anywhere where she would encounter anyone from any working class background.

@PurgatoryOfPotholes yep, absolutely — I once referred to my “introitus” during a pelvic exam and the GP’s eyes nearly popped out — she refused to believe I wasn’t a medical student. Yet every “vagina owner” has one…

I just really wanted to tell the GP precisely where I was having problems so I looked it up; but they really don’t expect that most patients will know the medical terminology for much of their bodies.

And just start a thread on here about what to call your girl toddler’s genitals, and you’ll still get half the thread shocked out of their minds that you might actually teach your daughter the word “vulva”, instead of calling it a “tuppence” or a “floofie” or whatever bit of nice euphemistic nonsense!

If it was a man writing for a rightwing paper, who'd gone to Eton or Harrow, claiming that everyone understood quotes from Horace in the original Latin (e.g. Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. - those who hurry across the sea change their sky, not their souls.), the entirety of the male online left would fall upon him for overprivileged elitism, while citing the number of adults in this country who have a reading age of nine years old. They would namedrop the Adult Literacy Trust like they were damn founders of it.

They would go on to raise the subject of immigrants and refugees who speak English as an additional language. They would mention the educational outcomes in adulthood for children in poverty who attended school hungry and who could barely pay attention to what was taught, never mind absorb subjects that weren't on the curriculum.

But Zoe can be just as elitist but in the cause of "trans rights" and we hear nothing but silence from leftwing men.

If you're not following the analogy with Horace, Roman writer and satirist, cervix is a Latin loan word for neck (and if we were typing in Latin, it would be properly pluralised cervices) for a part of the anatomy you can't see on your own body. Inaccessibility to the hoi polloi is baked in to the vocabulary about women's anatomy. You have to be bilingual in Latin to know, or specifically educated on the matter of a cervix's existence and the terminology related to it.

For comparison, the German equivalent is a compound noun which translates as something like Neck-Of-The-Womb in German so if you are a German woman reading about it for the first time without accompanying context, you're up to speed on what it is immediately.

Of course nearly half of women in this country aren't sure what or where the cervix is. Almost everyone (some have had them removed) in this country has got Islets of Langerhans, but that doesn't mean we know what they are, or where they are, does it?

Luxury beliefs sums it up. Willing to shit on their less privileged sisters so they get invited to parties by pronoun people.

This. It screams privilege.

The Guardian column is often really annoying tbh, I like the Guardian for many things, but the ‘oh look at us we have an edge and are so savvy’ when it’s just the same old boring drivel anti-Tory, anti-anything too traditional it’s just not big, or clever.

It really shows itself up as being quite an entitled paper, smug and employing a quite small circle of pretty white privileged London elite.

But fact checking would be work, wouldn’t it. I remember ZW being appalled that the Tories won the 1992 general election, but admitting she hadn’t actually voted because she couldn’t be arsed.

(I say ‘admitting’, but she didn’t sound sorry or embarrassed. More as if she thought it was funny. I wasn’t that amused by another five years of Tory government, including the shambolic privatisation of the railways.)

And yes, I have held a grudge that long.

Shocking.

But London can be a bit ghetto-ised. If she lives where I think she lives (I saw her in a playground once when I was visiting a friend) then it's the kind of area where rich people purchase specific houses in order to avoid sending their kids to the school the immigrant and working class kids go to. Between that and the Guardian and her general contempt for research, she need never speak to people unlike her.

Maybe it's part of only going to restaurants that sell chicken liver pate as a starter.

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.

That's not surprising, somehow.

Zoe Williams is one of the reasons that I don't read the Graun.

She's completely out of touch and/or lies. She tried to claim there was no such thing as female only fitness classes/gyms when she herself wrote an article about them.

twitter.com/JustMisogyny/status/1512527320246013956/photo/1

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. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

I can't believe she wrote that. I can't believe anyone who lives in London, which is full of people who don't speak English as a first language, or who have mental health problems or drug addiction, or who live in extreme poverty, or who have low literacy skills, could think that all women are familiar with their anatomy and the correct terminology to describe their reproductive organs. How can you be so divorced from ordinary people?

Tish's excellent research that never dates:

twitter.com/stilltish/status/1138020606228815872?s=21&t=jKIQXQrtX38n1jXvY_4Wag

A good synopsis of why the Guardian isn't actually very independent at all.

Madame Everyone With A Cervix Knows they Have One has, so far, written an article about:

i) not realising she was pregnant with her second child until after she was 20 weeks pregnant

ii) not realising that hay fever really existed, and

iii) not realising that people used reading glasses because they genuinely found it disconcerting not to know what something said. She claims to have thought people got their reading glasses out in public in order to seek attention.

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

If we are feeling charitable, this may be Madame Williams' columnist persona, designed to irk the reader and reap the clicks. Perhaps it's all feigned. If it is, it's certainly effective. Her articles have stuck in my mind for over ten years in some cases! Kudos to Zoe!

But if it's not, she's the last person who has any right to make sweeping statements about women universally having enough health literacy to know and readily recognise the noun for the internal part of anatomy that connects uterus and vagina (cervix) and the adjectival form (cervical).

Her problem is that not only is she not that bright she's also extremely lazy. So she's never developed any skills beyond the spark that originally got her into writing or bothers to do proper research so that she can defend her articles credibly. I've noticed she gets massively aggressive when challenged - I suppose that's all she's got.

It’s rubbish anyway. I can’t remember the name of the cervical cancer charity that did the survey, but a frighteningly high proportion of women surveyed didn’t know what a cervix was.

I couldn't find the original survey, but I found this:

twitter.com/lnmackenzie1/status/1447467589983158273/photo/1

43% didn't know what the cervix is.

Well what's it dependent on? How would they know?

It's dependent on what sex they are!

Precisely. The levels of dishonesty of these people never cease to amaze me.

The argument that 'everyone knows if they have a cervix or not' only works because those people (and everyone else) knows they are women.

You can't have an argument that says the concept of 'woman' is not dependent upon her biology, while simultaneously claiming that you only know you've got that biology if you understand the concept of woman.

Take a different bit of biology that no one knows, let's call it the Kraken gland.

Of course you know whether or not you've got a Kraken gland. Everyone who's got one knows whether they have one.

Well what's it dependent on? How would they know?

It's dependent on what sex they are!

It’s rubbish anyway. I can’t remember the name of the cervical cancer charity that did the survey, but a frighteningly high proportion of women surveyed didn’t know what a cervix was.

Indeed. Here's a tweet from ZW when she got in a row with Janice Turner.

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. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1362006560118083588?t=epqgSILN1kvGywNASmdrpw&s=19

All women know they have a cervix and what the local language's term for it is, do they? Well, in Zoe's circles, maybe they do. However, as a lefty and working-class woman with a chip on my shoulder the size of Kent, I believe that women without the educational advantages of Zoe and her friends should have access to health information that meets our needs. I went to a school where most kids left without 5 GCSEs. Like fuck did the other girls know what a cervix was. In fact, at the time we left, I had no idea either.

Our health outcomes matter too.

It's another variation on the stupidest argument on social media "I bet you have a gender neutral toilet at home"

Yes, I never understand this. Single person loos are effectively single sex - there is only one person of one sex in them at a given time. And they are perfectly reasonable in places where there aren't the numbers for cubicles.

Last thing I tried to read by her was some fluff piece about her husband being younger and prettier than Zoe. Oh what comic capers this causes ! Ps - eat yer hearts out girls....

It's all too cosy at the Graun isn't it.

I hate toilets on trains. I particularly hate them when blokes use them without closing the door.

Reading her Twitter she really thinks she's a wit and a cut above the rest. It's hilarious.