Women's rights general conversations - Thread 3

In response to Billy Bragg gormlessly promoting Labour Rights for Strippers Julie Bindel posted this article from 2017 on unionising the sex trade

juliebindel.substack.com/p/billy-bragg-is-a-massive-misogynist

The tactic of co-opting the language of human rights to persuade gullible liberals to support policies which are hostile to women’s interests is remarkably familiar.

I'll give that a watch later/tomorrow/v soon.

Brilliant. Pity she had to go through all that crap though.

Link to TMWI episode (was a live on YT 9 days ago - I can’t get lives to embed on MN!)

m.youtube.com/live/ddggRU7HBWk

Tonje was on a recent episode of The Mess We’re In - IIRC she wanted her day in court on this and is a bit annoyed that the charges were dropped (the same law covers her rights as a lesbian as a man’s right to claim
a female identity, and she wanted to test out what happens when they clash).

She’s an artist and seems to me to be a formidable and fascinating woman!

(soz if this was a repeat, only read the most recent page of this thread)

I love "Trash Pandas."

I'm quite dull on the whole though I do serve up a good line in retweeted "cats and dogs do the funniest things" type videos. Racoons too, or trash pandas if we're to use their scientific name.

Really interesting paper, @BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn , cheers.

*NotDrowningJustCrowing · Today 21:46

That is great news. I wonder why the media haven't picked up on it yet.

Meh. They're always behind the MN curve; there's a thread about it, from last week.

I wish I had known you on Twitter, Crows.

That is great news. I wonder why the media haven't picked up on it yet.

I saw one of his shows at the Edinburgh festival in 1984. It was brilliant.

I currently have 16 notifications on Twitter and my guess is that the majority are from the person I responded to, as noted up thread. I was out most of Friday because it was the second anniversary of my friend's husband's death (he was also my friend in a brother from another mother way) and she had lots of us around during the day and then some of us went to the pub, so by the time I got home on Friday I was shattered. Didn't look at Twitter last night because I don't have it open all the time. This morning I had about eight responses from him. Among other things I'm transphobic, obviously, a fascist, responsible for the murder of Ghey, and on and on and on. One of the worst things was being called "hun" a word that really boils my piss. I remained mostly polite and not combative or sarcastic but I failed slightly when I said something along the lines of 'To quote the inimitable Inigo Montoya "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"'.

I only have myself to blame but I'm so tired of being quiet and this last week has been an absolute shitstorm on Twitter. It's a shame that every knife crime doesn't get so much press exposure because whatever the reason for her murder, transphobic hate crime or run-of-the-mill hate crime it's all about kids having knives and using them. The number of murders from March 2021 to March 2022 was 282. That's the real issue here. We already know that despite the TRAs insistence that Trans women are the most vulnerable, etc that there have only been, I think the number is 9 murders since 2012, some of which had nothing to do with the victim being trans.

Anyway! I'll read the responses at some point but right now I'm not in the mood to be told what a far-right fascist piece of shit I am.

Oh and apparently "Come the revolution I'll woman the barricades!" is transphobic. It's been part of my bio since forever and has fuck all to do with trans rights but everything to do with women being secondary to men. I guess the very act of calling myself a woman is transphobic now. Maybe I should change my bio to "I will cis woman the barricades!"

I found this from a few days ago stating that charges were dropped against one of the women:

twitter.com/anyabike/status/1625190757211508740

Yeah, Dario Fo would have had a whale of a time with it. 😛

I had a look and can't find anything past December when she was still facing up to three years in prison. I heard her on the Feminist Current podcast. The whole situation would be hilarious if it wasn't so fucking outrageously wrong.

Well, good to hear. But the fact that it was mooted says something about the climate that is spreading in Europe.

This is a long read, and mostly I suspect rather dull if you don't have a particular interest in the topic, but it is an example of Really Good medical research and has cheered me right up (despite their persistent use of gender instead of sex).

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5746020/

Not only do they look at sex difference in prevalence, but they also look at loads of other things disaggregated by sex. Possible reasons for the differences. Differences in how patients present and the importance of adapting consulting styles. How both symptoms and treatment ate affected by menstrual cycle, hormonal contraceptives and HRT - and the importance of not only taking this into account when running tests amd prescribing but also the need to explain it to patients.

It's brilliant.

I'm refraining from reading much there apart from food and drink threads because the idea of not being able to respond to idiocy makes me cross - but I do sometimes wonder, in the current fast moving news background, whether the mass of them still as heavily committed to the New Totalitarianism as they were six weeks ago.

Presumably next month there will be some rules, and I can make an informed decision about being more active there.

I forgot to says thank you all for the good advice. I suppose we do what we can. I was able to take a small stand against the exclusive language I detest ( the sort that excludes women) in some recent work, but the way everyone trod solemnly around the issue felt like fear to me. Nothing but fear.

It kind of triggered a "memory" of the old place, where many of us had tried to explain precisely that this was our position, but this in itself was incontrovertible evidence of our Bad Peopleness.

I very rarely refer to There but my eyes rolled a full 360 degrees this weekend watching one of the chief scolds announcing that men need to notice that men can be Bad People. Without joining any of the dots, obviously.

I think I saw something about that case being dropped.

Well said, elderberry!

If any of them have the impertinence to try that on me I will tell them all about the privilege and comfort of being female, the constant harassment and steady incidents of minor assault since puberty, the discrimination at work, the condescention of mediocre men, the world where everything from seat belts to lawn mower starters to museum labels is designed around default male size and if after all that they don't show some awareness of my self I have plenty more where that came from. That's before starting on the female body.

I'm an adult human female and my right to be called a woman is hard earned. I will not share it with male fantasists, and I will seek to protect women who have been robbed of it by this pernicious fantasy.

And I will not play the gender game.

Just read the review of Time to Think in the Observer. If you wish you can support the Guardian by buying a copy through their bookshop. I think I'd rather get a copy from absolutely anywhere else!