Brilliant encapsulation 👏👏👏

While they’ve been in their online safe spaces, protected by a whole generation of uber authoritarian woke bro mods and trans janitors, we’ve fortified ourselves with gin, clutched our pearls and ventured off to the internet’s isolated islands of Free Speech.

Trans janitors 😁

@NicolaSturgeonsSOGIbottom I proper lol’d at so much of your post and liked the fact I actually know all the people referenced, as they will themselves but there’s sweet fa that can do about it, and the chefs kiss - “ask Posie”

Salut!

Okay. But I was asking for specific examples of what he has said or done that was transphobic...

(Although the devouring mother is really one of Jung’s archetypes, so maybe the comments I heard re: the podcast were inaccurate!)

knowyourarchetypes.com/devouring-mother-archetype/

I haven’t watched it yet but apparently Jordan Peterson made some remarkably clear comments on autogynephila and it’s associated behaviours on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’z podcast (average audience 11 million viewers per episode).

He also used Freud’s idea of the Devouring Mother’ when talking about the phenomenon the of the prepubescent ‘transgender child.

@NicolaSturgeonsSOGIbottom you'll need a drink after that epic post

🍸

prruk.org/when-fascism-arrives-as-your-friend-by-michael-rosen/

I agree, that was a superb post, @NicolaSturgeonsSOGIbottom

Absolute barnstormer of a post!

It's going to come as a massive, massive shock to most TRAs who live in a media bubble and are largely unaware of how the majority feel and the level of anger that will hit the mainstream before too long. TRAs don't know it yet but they are accelerating into a wall.

Yep.

I remember 2015 GE - so many people were baffled by David Cameron’s win because according to their social media feeds, EVERYONE was voting Labour.

Us normies didn’t really know anything about algorithmically created echochambers back then.

Now that we do, lots of us have taken deliberate action to look beyond what the internet serves up to us.
We’ve stopped relying on The Guardian and now look at a single story across several titles (including some we once wouldn’t have touched with Trump’s solid gold bargepole) and we often do our own digging, sometimes we’re so thorough we get ahead of the print media, who definitely use us a research tool.
We no longer consider Twitter opinion to be anything like real world opinion, because we know that there are vast swathes of people who read but don’t post.
We’ve learned to talk face to face with our friends and family, our kid’s teachers, our posties and hairdressers (although perhaps not our colleagues). Many of us are middle aged mums, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean we live in a Gen X bubble - we are the carers for the elderly AND the guardians of the young, we lurk and we listen and collectively, we know far, far more than our opponents expect.
We READ the books authored by the other side, they try to get ours pulped, way too angry to look beyond the first paragraph.

We never get over excited, never rest on our laurels, we know it will take lots and lots of little leaks before the dam finally bursts.

The TRAs have spent the last 5 years hiding behind blocklists with their fingers in their ears chanting ‘Transwomen are women’ and ‘No debate’. While they’ve been in their online safe spaces, protected by a whole generation of uber authoritarian woke bro mods and trans janitors, we’ve fortified ourselves with gin, clutched our pearls and ventured off to the internet’s isolated islands of Free Speech.
And wow did we learn a LOT about all sorts of things they would’ve preferred to keep quiet, including, but not limited to, sissy porn, eunuch castration cults, paedo-apologist academia, black market HRT, cat ‘girls’, human snakes & munchiemoms.

We also learned about scores and scores of convicted sex offenders, including that fat scouser with the golf club and Baloo the Local Elections agent for the Green Party.
We even found a rubber gimp in the loos at the NSPCC.

We’ve ferreted through ONS crime
statistics, made hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, we’ve read reams and reams of medical research (that doesn’t really say what it claims to say) became amateur court reporters, founded loads of womens orgs, safeguarding orgs and orgs to represent the LG&B people who’ve been thoroughly shafted by the TQ folx.

We’ve dressed up as dinosaurs, hosted lectures that turned into dance parties, gotten banned from pretty much everywhere and learned what a VPN is.

Owen Jones, you are on the wrong side of history, not us.
We aren’t going to lose. You are.

And if you don’t believe me, just go and ask Posie.

I'm in Ireland rather than the US but we're both behind the UK in terms of standing up to TRAs. A few weeks ago I bumped into a relative who I would describe as nearly apolitical. We got talking about secondary school choices and within a couple of minutes, it was clear she was extremely concerned about trans ideology in schools. She made a comment about it, then held back, I suspect because she knows me as being very liberal/progressive. I asked what she meant and the the floodgates opened up. She had a lot of concerns and very strong opinions.

And she's clearly not terminally online like I am because when I used the word terf, she thought I said turf. She hasn't gotten her opinions from reading mumsnet, Abigal Shrier, Kathleen Stock, lurking on Kiwifarms, listening to Triggernometry or Blocked and Reported. Enough of this is leaking into the mainstream that people who aren't looking for it, like most of us here, are getting increasingly concerned and angry.

I've felt for a while that sentiment on this would bubble away quietly, that the majority would wake up in seeming isolation and gradually would become suddenly in what would seem like an instant. And I think we're very close to that now. It's going to come as a massive, massive shock to most TRAs who live in a media bubble and are largely unaware of how the majority feel and the level of anger that will hit the mainstream before too long. TRAs don't know it yet but they are accelerating into a wall.

It's monumentally stupid to say it's not happening because you've got no examples, when you know there are examples. Loads.

From the second link:
Gothard said: “We are fighting so that Ron DeSantis’s authoritarianism, his disdain for the protections of the constitution and his flippant way of stepping on the citizens that he is supposed to be representing doesn’t move to a national scale.” He added: “Simply put, ‘indoctrination’ is not occurring in college and university classrooms and if it were, someone — anyone — would have been able to provide at least one example.

‘Disdain’ and ‘authoritarianism’ is shown to female swimmers having to compete against Lia, to female prisoners, to parents of children being transed.

‘Simply put’ indoctrination is happening
in schools.

No wonder people can’t but help listen to Trump and de Santis.

Those are two really interesting articles, thank you Rex.

DeSantis does sound more rational, and well thought out, but the bluntness of Trump will be appealing.

DeSantis has identified schools and colleges as the place to reverse the ideology.

One of his detractors has said:

He added: “Simply put, ‘indoctrination’ is not occurring in college and university classrooms and if it were, someone — anyone — would have been able to provide at least one example.”

And this is exactly what I mean. Because all the examples are going to come thick and fast now. Starting with the Loudoun county rape denial.

Perhaps there would be less focus on “culture war” issues if the Dems offered anything material to ordinary people such as jobs, homes, or health care. They are determined not to do that. So hell mend them.

Those left-leaning people are bound to have an immediate reaction like that. I'd worry more if they didn't. Right now they'll be polishing their halos and feeling all righteous and smug.

In the meantime, right-leaning Americans will be emboldened to start asking questions at their children's schools. Things will start to be challenged.

Trump's speech explicitly called it child abuse. That's a phrase that will get through to most people, whichever way they lean. And he linked it to "taxpayer's dollars", a dog-whistle for many. The medical industry will also have sat up and taken notice of his threat to bar them from making money from those taxpayer's dollars.

Coming hot on the heels of the opiod epidemic, with the Sackler family making billions from creating OxyContin addicts and covering up that they knew it would happen, the salvo at Big Pharma (and hospital networks) covering up long-term effects and getting rich from vulnerable patients - that part of the speech was very well-crafted. Regardless of your politics, I think that part will seep through. It doesn't blame trans people, it points the finger at big business doing down the Ordinary Joe. Hand in hand with the notion of suing the industry who did this to people - it's a litigious country.

You've observed the knee-jerk reaction to this speech. Doubts will creep in and the conversation will shift in all but the most devout genderists. The medical industry will be considering their position too. That may be more important in the end, since they seem to be the back-seat drivers in all this. Them being dragged into the light - that will definitely happen

Times coverage of Trump and DeSantis:

Donald Trump puts gender ‘madness’ on front line of right-wing culture war

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f43cc942-a24a-11ed-befb-a61c39e55892?shareToken=523b77cc3e373a818fdccbc12b14dc8d

Ron DeSantis takes on colleges to end ‘trendy’ diversity programmes

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9b478dea-a218-11ed-befb-a61c39e55892?shareToken=f9aba2e7cd0325d7a2c87fbfbeeed34c

Just saw this myself - dammit I agree with Trump.

But he's right, and for once his usually blunt language might actually resonate. Chemically and surgically mutilating children is quite the statement.

Sterilising people, saying there are no such thing as women only birthing people, then telling the sterilised they can use surrogacy to get a baby is very Gilead too.

Whatever you think of Trump, this statement is important. What he believes is unfathomable and probably changes second to second, BUT - the team around him must believe that this is a vote winner and have persuaded him to take this public stance.

For them to believe it is a vote winner is what matters. They won't have taken this stance without evidence to back them up. I don't know what that evidence would be (focus groups, newspaper articles, social media, reading sacrificed chicken guts thrown on the ground, whatever) but they must be basing it on SOMETHING. He's a populist who believes in telling people what they want to hear, and his team have concluded that the electorate want to hear a rejection of identity politics and queer theory.

Yes he has mouthed the TWAW mantra in the past. I doubt he believed it then (I sincerely doubt he believes anything) but that was how the wind blew and he wanted to ride that wind. I'm sure he doesn't believe a word he said in that video, but his team think that's the way the wind is blowing NOW.

We can only hope that the Democrats cop on to this and tack course to the new direction. Until now they've been in a purity spiral competing to be the most pious (remember, the US is still religious compared to the UK), if Trump succeeds in dragging the narrative away from that then the stranglehold transactivists have will be loosened.

This is total hyperbole. That is not something that is going to happen in America. Trump is a selfish asshole, who will do whatever it takes for his own aggrandisement but he is far, far from the bogeyman. While he certainly bears some responsibility for the over-turning of Roe V Wade. Lets not forget that the Democrats never enshrined a right to abortion in federal law when they had the repeated opportunity to do so. As keeping it in the hands of the supreme court meant it was something they could use as an election tactic. And that Ruth Bader Ginsberg refused to retire when asked under Obama's term, so that she could be replaced by a Democratic nominee. Her own ambition for her place in history mattered more to her than securing the rights of other women.

The simple fact is that the whole situation is far more nuanced than the current, extremely polarised, discourse allows people to understand. And right now, the Democrats are doing more to damage the rights of women than Republicans. Abortion bans are awful. I'm Irish, Ive spent most of my life living under one of the most restrictive western regimes, that equated the life of a pregnant woman with that of the foetus. But giving male rapists access to women in prison is worse. It just is. Women restricted by abortion bans can move. Women trapped in a fucking cell with a rapist, which has happened, have no options whatsoever. If anything is Gilead, that is.

Exactly. Given that most people know humans can’t change sex, and just pretend twaw to be polite, it’s an open goal for any politician to simply agree.

I don’t doubt that Stalin knew the Earth goes round the Sun, and Thatcher knew humans can’t breathe under water. That doesn’t mean I’d agree with them on other issues. It’s ludicrous to pretend that recognising biological reality inclines anyone towards a particular political outlook.

If he gets in (a strong possibility I'm told), then this could be huge. It came from America, it ends in America?

If it happens through Trump, then it could end with Gilead. No middle ground.

Meanwhile, in the U. K., let us do what we can by signing this petition to Parliament to update the Equality Act to make clear the characteristic ‘sex ‘ is biological sex. (Scotland has just ruled that it isn’t.)

It is an official Parliamentary petition and anonymous.

If there are 100,000 signatures Parliament will consider a debate.

To sign and share,
⬇️

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/623243

Does it really matter if he is saying something because he believes it or if he just thinks voters will like it?

There is something to be said for a political figure who has some basic coherent system of seeing reality, just because it seems more likely such a person will make reasonable decisions. With someone like Trump you always wonder of he ill just change direction with the wind.

But in the more immediate pragmatic sense, part of the job of political leaders is to see what people want and care about, and to offer policies related to those things. Sometimes even if they personally aren't so attached to the issue. Or to put it another way, a political leader who says, fuck what the people think, I am just going to do what I think is right, doesn't know his job. Yes, it would be nice to see someone do that because they believe in democracy, but wanting to be elected also works.

Nor is stealing a rival's policy ideas a new thing, every political leader does this.

That being said, DeSantis really does have an advantage, or many advantages, in part because he seems more authentic.

I have come to think that the kind of people who just think if Trump says it, it must be bad, are kind of hopeless. When you dig down, may of Trumps political policies were barely different from Obama's, including ones progressives freaked out about. And Biden has also continued with a good number of them. If people won't actually look at things apart from partisan associations, I don't really think there is any hope for them to think about the issues. Which is depressing in terms of what will happen in the US I guess.