"You're Wrong About" podcast/Sarah Marshall

So which are the points you’ve considered and decided aren’t compelling? Is it women, young and younger girls being told they can’t object to the penis in the changing room? Numerous incidents of this. Is it the women’s prisons gradually taking on more male people with (in the west coast us anyway) a growing list of male people applying? Including violent male offenders, pedophiles, rapists? Is it Sarah in Brighton entering into legal action because she’s been told that single sex rape support groups are not permitted, but trans people can and do have multiple specific support groups, because one is special and important and one is just women who don’t count? Is it women losing in competitive sports because the male women are allowed to enter now? I gather you’ve looked at all these and decided yep, cool with that.
I won’t even start with the health issues the medical pathway for children causes.

I've always found You're Wrong About rather self congratulatory. It does that thing the left does of going 'Hahaha listen to this silly bigot' without any actual attempt to say whats wrong. Its all coming from the point of 'You and I have the correct opinions'. Now we all do this, it's normal social bonding for me to go 'Isn't Boris Johnson dreadful' and my friend to concur when we're down the pub. But this is supposed to be a podcast that digs into history and educates people. But it doesn't really do it. I want to hear about the social forces that caused history to go a certain way. I want to understand the motivations of all the people involved, not just the goodies. But YWA manages to take positions I broadly agree with and have me mentally defending the people I disagree with because so much of what they do is bad faith.

I should add I have learned some interesting stuff, but they could be much better at how they tell their stories. NB I mostly listed to Hobbes era episodes.

I agree with all your points above @MissLucyEyelesbarrow . We seem to be talking at cross purposes. I agree most leftwingers are not church goers - Latinos possibly excepted? Insofar as anyone in the USA is leftwing as we know it.

But American attempts to diagnose gender skepticism in Europe founder on this issue. They flail around , talking about the Pope or the Monarchy as if it was 1523.

Whereas tras themselves hold beliefs at odds with materialism - as in ' dialectical materialism ' - not that they don't love shopping!
So lots of Americans are not remotely leftwing and have no secular tradition. Although doubtless there are plenty of atheists and agnostics. Lukewarm Christians and Jews. It seems to me the default setting of many Democrats is unconditional support for anything the Evangelicals and far right dislike.

Therefore if we critique the TRA position it follows that we are either very conservative or under the sway of religion. OK people here are not immune to this sort of thinking either. But it's usually Americans who can't reconcile socialism with being GC. Or feminism for that matter.

I don't really buy the religion argument, for three reasons:

Firstly, the number of Left-leaning people who identify as religious is plummeting .

Secondly, Republicans are significantly more religious than Dems as a group so, if anyone had been primed by religion to accept transgenderism, it would be the Right.

Thirdly churchgoing - probably everywhere but definitely in the US - should not be taken to indicate a deep identification with Christian theology. There are lots of Americans who attend church for social reasons, with a dash of vaguely Christian spirituality. Churches, in turn, tend to be quite relaxed about what you have to believe (some exceptions, obviously). Even more than in Europe, the church you attend tends to be determined by your family background, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, not by your exact beliefs. So I am unconvinced that there are significant differences in the general approach to belief amongst Americans who identify as religious vs those who don't.

I am in the US and this is a very accurate description of how the left has abandoned women and the right have cynically seized an opportunity. Trump himself said it recently at a rally. He said something like "and I'll ban gender affirming care for trans children - by the way where did that come from, 4 years ago we weren't even talking about this". Also it is a relief to the republicans to be able to turn the conversation to trans kids instead of their disgraceful and deeply unpopular bans on abortion.

I am a left-leaning feminist woman and have been completely abandoned by the Democrats. The reality is a lot of people don't agree with "gender affirming" care for children but there is no way to say this without being vilified.

The major difference between Europe and North America is the salience of religion in the latter. That and the absence of what we call the Left.

Transgenderism is quite a mystical belief system complete with ' gendered souls' and dogmas of its own. And the lack of a socialist or social democrat left with its own Party and media outlets , its tradition and community roots , leaves people with no defence against the far right regressives - except ' nice cuddly liberal fascists' as a friend calls them.

A generation of people bought its political beliefs as a job lot , unexamined. I was brought up a Catholic. Reject one tenet of the Faith and you must reject them all. You can't be an a la carte Catholic. There are definite similarities. With one glaring difference : there doesn't seem to be much room for redemption or forgiveness in the Gender ideology.

Same. Really liked those podcasts to begin with, then Hobbes starts coming out with the most knee-jerk misogynist stuff in the name of glittery rainbow “liberalism” and I find I’m suddenly listening much more critically to his other content. I’m finding it’s (mostly) all hollow, self-congratulatory, thoughtless nonsense, knocking obvious targets to get the left-wing applause.

I also recommend Blocked & Reported (just so refreshing to hear critical thinkers willing to critique their “own side” as well as “the opposition”, using facts, history, wide-reading, comparisons, and empathy).

I’m pretty sure that they peddled the ‘Marsha P Johnson was a trans woman who started the Stonewall riots’ bullshit, at which point I stopped listening because well, they were wrong about that.

https://nypost.com/2021/09/17/wi-spa-suspect-still-at-large-has-history-of-indecent-exposure-and-masturbation/

What do you think about the "spitting hatred" directed at the woman who reported indecent exposure in a female spa area in this case?

If you only read the guardian you will have read the perspective that she was a bigot causing violence against innocent trans women.

Andy Ngo has a more honest perspective and reports on the trans woman liberal America rushed to defend.

@20yearsinUS

Love this podcast.

I used to be a massive fan of You're Wrong About but stopped listening when the gender woo and the virtue signaling got too much for me.

Also a couple of their episodes have been widely debunked as being, well, wrong. The Matthew Shepherd one was the worst I think.

However, the thing that got me so riled is Sarah Marshall's complete lack of appreciation of her own privilege.

It's obvious she comes from a very comfortable background. The chances are she won't have to deal with males in a homeless or DV shelter or prison. And she dares to criticize JKR for saying that perhaps victims of violent sexual crimes should not be used to validate the feelings of males who want to wear frocks.

I don't think she has any kids so she has no idea the visceral fear you have for your daughters when people are telling your six year old girl not to be traumatized by the bloke undressing in front of her. To misquote Ricky Gervaise... "Don't look at her penis, honey".

And she's not into sports, so she's not having to watch men with ponytails beat her.

She has a complete lack of empathy for anyone who is not a middle class woman.

But far, far worse... she laughs at her own jokes.

I second giving Blocked and Reported a listen. I don't agree with all they say; they are massively misguided on Drag Queen story hour. (Yes, I don't want my kid to be read a story by someone called Flo Job, who pastes photos of my child on the internet alongside sexually explicit content. And I not a bigot for thinking that.)
But they are pretty nuanced about a lot of things.

Loved the interview with Helen Lewis,

Jesse Singal's ongoing dislike of Michael Hobbes is justified and pretty funny.

And Maintenance Phase is so, so hypocritical. They wang on about how we should follow the science, and not believe in wide assertions from snake oil salesmen, but will fight to to the death to give untested and long lasting medical treatments to minors.
Still quite like it though. But it is telling that they have absolutely no idea on child safeguarding.

Is it, aye?

I wish I'd written that! 😀No, really, exactly that.

@20yearsinUS

Thanks for coming back.

WRT patriarchal stereotypes, long before I was born, my mother and women like her were arguing against the view that there are things that men/boys do and things that women/girls do. These are sexual stereotypes that only benefit men and reinforce a male dominated patriarchy. Through my lifetime until about 10 years ago, these artificial constructs were being broken down. We seemed to have escaped from boy/girl toys, boy/girl clothes and boy/girl interests. Today, if any child steps outside his or her stereotypical swim-lane, instead of being encouraged to explore a wider world, they are told that they are the that stereotype and must conform to it. It is an early, systematic reinforcement of a patriarchal architecture that I thought we had escaped 10 years ago.

I am sorry that you have lost those things that you value. I don’t understand the part about the right for our children to grow up free from outmoded patriarchal sexual stereotypes.
and would be interested to hear more about what that means.

Re your first and second points, 1) lol agreed the grauniad is pretty crap 2) that’s why I was making the point about USA and UK being different, and liberals from each country having potentially different views on safeguarding trans people because of that. Which I thought was relevant and contributed something to this thread.

Thanks, I am having a look at some of the articles on the sub stack mentioned, since I am interested to understand more about the debate. Have not so far found an article that has made a compelling argument to me, but it’s enlightening to understand a bit about the different positions and where people are coming from.

*HEAR

🤦‍♀️

Thanks for the recommendation. I've just started listening to the Dylan mulvaney episode and it's refreshing to here Americans question trans ideology.

Worth signing up to this substack from the American liberal journalist Lisa Selin Davis https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/
She’s trying to really hard to get the Democrats and liberals to see the other side, and understand it’s not a left / right issue

Three things:

First thing. Try reading UK MSM other than the Guardian. It isn't the newspaper that it was 20 years ago.

Second thing. Back home in the UK we don't spend a lot of time killing 'others'. We have plenty of domestic murders (the victim is usually female) and a depressing number of young man on young man murders but not much else

Third thing. We have lost, without any legislation, single sex toilets and changing rooms; single sex refuges for victims of VAWG; single sex rape councilling; single sex prison facilities; single sex hospital wards; the right to receive intimate care from people of our sex and, finally, the right for our children to grow up free from outmoded patriarchal sexual stereotypes.

Do you think we might be a tad upset?

Quite. Listen to Blocked and Reported instead.

If it's American, then a lot of the issue is that those arguing against trans rights or trans activism in the US can often be coming from a very right wing position (very socially conservative), or an unpalatably religious position, or a position that is basically homophobia. Or any combination of that. So it's not centre or left leaning feminists who are pushing back against transactivism because of the impact on women. So I can see how it's possible to see the kinds of people who are arguing against trans activism and ideology and be very worried about the consequences of that.

That is letting the American Left off way too lightly. Conservatives only started opposing gender ideology as a wedge issue against the Dems - as you note, most of them don't actually give a flying fuck about women.

And gender ideology is only an effective wedge issue because the Left/Centre Left have totally abandoned women. The Left aren't supporting trans rights because they are worried about the conservatives' other views on women. It's the other way round: the Right are pretending to care about women's rights because the Left/Centre have given up on them, as regards gender ideology.

🤔

We're in countries where women historically and currently are targeted and killed for being female.

'Gender' has been invented to further facilitate that, and many of us are resisting that being imposed on us.