Women's rights general conversations - Thread 4

So, Susie Green was fired from Mermaids!

In the video below Jackie whilst doing a reaction video to an old KJK dissection of THAT Ted talk at 30.50 ish minutes in. Jackie says "she's not at mermaids any more they fired her"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKv-U9S1Gc&t=35s&pp=ygUQamFja2llIHBpZWNydXN0cw%3D%3D

Forgive me for this long quote from a very interesting article on the Free Press Substack I just read, but I think it's relevant to our topic even though it's about postmodern literary theory discussed in the context of a childhood friend's descent into paranoid schizophrenia.

"“Part of the playful pleasure of postmodern theory was pretending that a flaw in a poem was evidence of a crack in society, and that verbal constructs held true for three-dimensional life like a pin stuck in a voodoo doll that made a real person scream. What would happen if such fanciful borrowings from the realm of magic and mental illness began seeping into law, public policy, or political culture? Turning everything into a text that meant only what the interpreter believed it meant.”
BW: The reason I so loved that passage is because you write in the book about dream worlds. Here in this passage you talk about it as fanciful borrowings from the realm of magic; a world where sort of the unreal is being mistaken for the real. How did that culture factor into Michael’s development and story?
JR: I think it had a huge impact. It helped shape the world that was there when he became ill. A world that was so ill-equipped to care for someone like him. If you believe that all mental illness is a social construct, even severe mental illness, and that the only reason why asylums were built in the eighteenth century, as Foucault says, is as a place to put your enemies who you’ve othered by calling mad simply because they swim against the rational stream, then there really isn’t any illness. There’s only power. And the people who have power can call the people they hate ill. Now, there’s plenty of abuse of power. But if illness is real, then that formula deprives people of any form of care, and the only response to a hospital, a mental hospital, or a psychiatric hospital, is to treat it like the Bastille and tear it down. In fact, one of the most devastating passages in Madness and Civilizationon^_ is about Philippe Pinel, who was the eighteenth-century reformist psychiatrist. He was really the father of humane psychiatry and he’s often depicted in paintings striking the chains from his patients because they were chained even inside the hospitals. And for Foucault, he is the villain. It takes a minute to realize that the reason he’s the villain is precisely because he improved the lot of people in those hospitals. The reforming impulse, the liberal impulse, is dangerous because the only response is the absolute destruction of that system and that world. The system of state hospitals that might have been reformed were instead effectively torn down and they were not replaced by anything equipped to care for the people who had once been in those hospitals.
Things like that—formulations like that—took place all the time. It’s Harold Bloom that says that “schizophrenia is bad poetry.” His whole theory was that you intentionally misread your predecessors so that you can insert yourself and make yourself primary by ignoring or misunderstanding what it is that makes them great. But that’s only possible if you do know that they are great. And if you really are in contention with something powerful, poetry has to mean something in order for you to contend with it. The reason why he said schizophrenia is bad poetry is because the misreading that it involves is not an intentional or constructive or creative misreading. It’s simply misperception. It was only much later that I learned that he had someone in his family who suffered from severe mental illness, and so for him, that was not an abstraction. These elaborate theories that erased meaning paled in front of his own experience of the world and of true illness. "
This all chimes so much to me with the gender ideological notion that identity is literal and outweighs biology.

Thanks very much for this - have linked her to your post.

A male colleague of hers who she confides in, and shares similar views (I think he's gay, so understands the issues very well), has apparently emailed management with some polite questions about the new policy and its rationale. I think it's a lot easier for men to push back, but it's still heartening that people are doing so.

I subscribe to a newsletter which had an interesting article in it, it's more background reading on pyschology research:
Language as a tool to shape how we think of gender | BPS

I couldn't think who else might find it interesting except perhaps the people here.

Rosie Duffield and Miriam Cates have spoken about the erosion of WR:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11992261/Female-Tory-Labour-MPs-warn-extremist-activists-not-allowed-erode-womens-rights.html

The pair told the Daily Express: 'Women's rights must be protected at all costs and we have united across the political divide to make sure they are not wiped out by stealth because people are too afraid to speak out. 'This is not a party political issue, it's about protecting the dignity of women and girls by maintaining single-sex spaces, women's sport and female-only services, such as refuges and rape crisis centres.

Was that a recent thing from D M? There's no sign of any girlifying facial surgery - big bony male face.

I'm finding it hard to listen to what he's saying because my brain is just unable to stop thinking "Whoa, five o'clock shadow!"

Re. Lucy Worsley. She is very arch and I get that a lot of people would find her too annoying but with the dressing up. On the one hand, yes, annoying. On the other hand, I would totally do the same if I got her job. I'd probably dress up more.

This is absolutely glorious, from thread fave Dylan M: https://twitter.com/wokesocieties/status/1648391417784303618

And we thought Americans don't do satire!

A non-malicious correct-sexing might result in a complaint letter from a service user and a subsequent lecture from management but ‘illegal’ is a bit of an overstatement!

Firstly EQ10 is civil law (employment and services) so no one is getting arrested and secondly both ‘gender reassignment’ and ‘gender critical beliefs’ are protected so as long as your friend isn’t wilfully being a dick to transgender person she should be fine (and I’m sure she is always professional at work).

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/employment-tribunal-rulings-on-gender-critical-beliefs-in-the-workplace/#:~:text=Gender%2Dcritical%20beliefs%20include%20the,is%20distinct%20from%20gender%2Didentity.

I expect your friend’s new work document has come from one of the trans lobby group orgs or is an American EDI (Equality Diversity Inclusion) import and isn’t actually compliant with UK equalities law.

Perhaps she could send a copy of the document to Sex Matters or Legal Feminist?

And get her to join the Free Speech Union - it’s not particularly expensive and I’ve heard they are very responsive!

Does it say where it came from on the doc? Is it official-official or a solo run by an overzealous person in one setting?

Hi all,

Don't want to create a whole thread about this... a friend of mine who works in a HC setting (genuinely not me!) has received a truly insane new trans patient maternity/pregnant person guidance document. Includes claim that misgendering someone could be illegal under the equality act and that other staff should report any colleague behaving in such a disgusing way, etc. etc.

She's scared that she's now at risk of losing her job, as someone who believes in biological sex. I know that there's some protection in law now, but still very worrying for her.

Bit out of the loop with GC stuff - is there anyone discrete who'd be interested in seeing this doc? I'd refer her to SEEN but I don't think they cover NHS workers.

That's superb.

"Western governments are running an experiment to see what happens if we take protections away from women’s bodies and give them to women’s clothes."

Edie Wyatt on the twitters today

Kirstie Allsop is so charming, isn't she?

In terms of the reimagining and reframing - I've always found alternative history really interesting. It's the whole 'trouser leg of time' thing from the Discworld and it's fascinating to think how things could have been so different now if historical wars had gone a different way or people were not or hadn't died at a certain time.

But that doesn't seem to be the intent with quite a lot of these plays and articles. Instead of it being 'wouldn't it have been interesting if .... had been .....', it gets turned into 'they must have been this and if you disagree, then you're a pearl clutching bigot'

Kirstie Allsopp currently making an arse out of herself on Twitter

Reimagining and reframing is fine as a general principle. It can bring out some very interesting points if done well - what if Richard the Lionheart had been a queen instead of a king, what if Florence Nightingale was a time traveller, what if Ada Lovelace had been born in late 20th century California? Changing the person can change the motivations, how their actions are viewed, and make people ask questions. (I can't remember who it was, but I saw an interview recently by someone who was going to do a sex-swapped production but realised that it suddenly made no sense at all and everything would have to be completely re-written to be plausible.)

But it's the context and the way it is done - which involves very little imagination: anyone who did anything for gay rights is trans, anyone who did anything for civil rights is trans, any woman who did anything at all is trans... That's indoctrination rather than art.

I find her incredible archness too annoying to listen to, even when I like some of her points.

In a different context, I wouldn't mind all the Joan of Arc is trans stuff. Reimagining stories and art for a production is a venerable artistic tradition which has a much longer history than the TQ+ focus and often brings insights at the same time as winding people up. It seems legitimate - in comparison with rewriting/'correcting' Dahl, which doesn't. It's just that in the current climate, it feels like part of a continual assault on the nature of womanhood and the idea that women might be intrinsically capable of difference and strength.

I like her, and I really admire her passion for making history accessible, but I also find her INCREDIBLY annoying. All the dressing up really gets on my tits.

She used to have a v entertaining blog. Wonder if it's still there?

I am inclined to forgive her because she's not an arsehole about 90% of the time. Currently.

Disappointing, but sadly not surprising.