"If you see a terf ... " Sarah Jane Baker thread 2

I take a more sympathetic view because I work in the corporate world. Until about 15 years ago, companies weren't required to do anything more than maximise profits for shareholders. This was in the Combined Code. But more recently it's become more nuanced, and more demanding. Companies are now expected to think about all stakeholders, and their effect on society as a whole, not just profits.

Obviously this is a good thing in some circumstances. For example the CEO of a big housebuilding firm should absolutely be required to think about and make provisions for the effect on the biodiversity of the land that he's just required for a new affordable housing development. And now he has to. (It obviously sometimes ends up being the case that legal wranglings about the biodiversity result in the affordable housing development being delayed by 10+ years, adding to the housing crisis, but that's another subject.)

However, the same CEO is now expected to also think about trans welfare of his customers, suppliers and employees. That's a problem because the CEO of the housebuilding firm doesn't know anything about trans issues. In the housebuilding sector, he's statistically likely to be a 50+ white man of middle / lower middle class extraction who came up through the ranks of surveying / development and climbed the corporate ladder. He's terrified of getting things wrong and being exposed on Twitter as being a cis white upholder of toxic masculinity. He also wants to keep his employees happy especially the younger generation of talent.

So he outsources the problem to a Diversity Committee, which is often made up of very young employees on the fast track graduate programme, fresh out of Russell Group Unis, highly active on social media, who want to change the world. They in turn bring in Stonewall and maybe nominate Mermaids as the company official corporate charity.

The CEO doesn't really understand what they're doing but sees that they're young and passionate and Very Online, so agrees and gives them a budget. He doesn't understand, not because he's stupid (he's very good at running the housebuilding company) but because it's not his area of expertise, and the social fear of being labelled a bigot prevents him from applying the critical questioning that he routinely does in every other aspect of his business.

So that's how it happens, ime.

That's why trans-ness ended up being institutionalised so quickly without having any basis in fact, reality, science or public support. That's my theory anyway.

Also "defunding the police" was lacking in evidence or public support.

It was just some vague idea that if you moved money into other services then you would be improving things.

Loud mouthed activists don't necessarily speak for the majority, or have sensible ideas.

Herd mentality can be pretty messy amongst the hoi polloi. I've been at a few football matches and pro Brexit demos.

But there's something uniquely disquieting when the high IQ and high social capital individuals and corporations indulge.

Just watched a girl who works at McDonalds report how her complaints on sexual assault were waved away by management. At the same time they daubed their advertising in the Pride colours and publicly swore fealty to MeToo.

And the slavish blind adherence to Stonewall edicts is all that's needed to know that TRA is as far removed from a genuine grass roots liberation movement as one could get.

I was consulting for a number of large companies during lock down - FTSE 100s, well known brands, you get the idea. They all already had some really good initiatives in place to encourage the career progression of BAME employees to the highest levels, but BLM still made them noticeable panic. I think because BLM was accompanied by quite a vicious online call out culture, haranguing individuals and companies who were seen rightly or wrongly to not be doing enough. So these companies wanted to ensure that their work was properly publicised and I helped them with that.

However a number of them then pivoted to trans rights in the workplace and unquestioningly wanting to institute gender neutral loos, new loo policies (loo of your choice), mandating pronouns in emails etc. When I questioned these desires many executives responded that they didn;t want to risk getting publicly called out or caught out not doing enough, as a number of companies had re BLM.

So I think the two were very much wrongly linked in the instittional imagination.

My clients were genuine in wanting to do the right thing for their employees and stakeholders, and to be seen to be doing the right thing. But they accepted the TRA spiel without any critical thinking or exploration of the basis on which TRA claims are made, because it followed hot on the heels of BLM and the social media storm that accompanied that.

That's why trans-ness ended up being institutionalised so quickly without having any basis in fact, reality, science or public support. That's my theory anyway.

Wholly agree.

I went to the Evening With Douglas Murray And Lionel Schriver near Parliament in 2019, to promote his Madness Of Crowds book launch, those halcyon days twelve months before lockdown.

It's quaint to look back, just over four years ago, how different it was. Cultural appropriation, the burgeoning of BLM and Stonewall/trans. No feeling of the powder keg yet to come, some anxiety of the pressures on free speech.

The most notorious trans figure then was Yanniv, little did we guess that would be a taste of things to come.

My pivot point was the Oberlin College debacle, things felt ominous on the free speech/racialised politics front in 2018/19 as my chain began to get yanked.

Of course Brexit was also taking up severe amounts of bandwidth.

Then BANG!, Covid and lockdowns struck, all of us stuck at home unless we were lucky enough to attend Tory parties with unlimited cake. And the online world mutated and became reality for so many, impressionable and insecure teens, and the professional classes who saw social justice activism morph to a level unseen prior to 2020.

George Floyd, BLM, Defund The Police, Take The Knee...industrial ramping up of #MeToo...and the rotten cherry on the unappetising cake, Stonewallification of society to unprecedented levels, the deification of the likes of Mermaids, and the slanderous defamatory attacks on JKR primarily, and all who stood alongside her.

And a two year period of the formal attempts to railroad society to accept, actually more to swallow, escalating teen medicalisation, toxic male supremacist rights in sports and sex segregated spaces.

But that two year period ended a year ago. Now the proles are snapping back. We won't accept Adam Bryson in a female jail. We won't accept Austin Killips in female sports. We won't accept Mika Minio breastfeeding.

And we certainly won't fucking accept a violent kidnapping and assaulting castrator gaslight us they're a woman, and instructing naysayers to be punched in the fucking face.

Whatever shark has been nurtured up until 2020, then monstrously mutated in lockdown to 2022, TRA has jumped it well and truly.

We're witnessing that crash landing the other side of the shark, and it's a frightful mess.

Really interesting post.

Don't tell me Laura Pidcock's peaked??

Little OJ will be apoplectic! He was one of her biggest cheerleaders!

I don't even think it was the last decade, the trans thing peaked in 2021 and I think it's relevant that that was when many western European countries and the US were in lockdown. It was also after the George Floyd tragedy and the mass uprising of Black people in response. It was a febrile time and people felt (rightly) that it was important to listen to traditional suppressed voices.

TRAs took advantage of that to hammer home their more egregious and outre ideas, such as never assuming anyone's gender until they tell you, neopronouns, unfettered access to female spaces and the medicating of children.

Of course all these ideas existed before but it's in the febrile years of 2020 - 2022, when many people were spending more time than usual on social media and also questioning many traditional assumptions, that these ideas briefly made their way into the mainstream and were adopted by institutions such as the NHS.

Transgenderism has now peaked in the general public mind because of recent court cases that have shown this nihilistic cult belief for what it is. Unfortunately many institutions are still captured but that's because they adopted too fast and are now slow in unrolling those adoptions (as institutions tend to be). But it's happening, slowly.

In years to come there will be an interesting doctoral thesis or two to be written about the correlations and causations linking lockdown, BLM and the advantage taken of both these phenomena by TRAs.

What was so refreshing is that there wasn't any equivocation. Straight up condemnation and inherent call to others to support.

Leftists sunk costs all vary. Some are so deep that any repentance or even basic acknowledgement of doubts will be impossible.

Some can be scaled out of, as Laura is showing.

The test will be if she tacks back or capitulates in face of the incoming firestorm.
I suspect she won't.

She's reading the room. Can she influence the wider Labour movement to align back to reality?

The tweet from Laura Pidcock is very good and I applaud her for it. It is important as it shows that concerns can't just be dismissed as coming from the far right.

Yep.

The way I see it, is that their power and influence is now inn direct inverse proportion to their sound and fury.

Thru never had any moral high ground or any slam dunk arguments, and science.

All they had was volume and momentum.

That "worked" over the last decade.

But their shouting and putting their foot hard down on the gas pedal is now heading the clown car to the cliff edge.

Who knew so many elites and those on the left were such loud and bad drivers?

The Pidcock thread is prime peaking material. Her tweet is getting shared by Labour Women's Declaration etc.

Think the fallout from Baker could run and run. Grim it took this long, but that is the way of things.

The only thing that brightens up these grim threads for me is the usual reliablke trolls popping in to cape for their violent heroes.

Theire talking points are't as good as they used to be. But they still make me laugh.

I totally respect anyone who starts with one view (Laura was pretty TWAW back in the day), but goes on to read the room more accurately, and adjusts their views accordingly.

For the Labour Party, that means hundreds of MPs and activists, and thousands of radicalised supporters.

Jess Phillips a few weeks ago. Now Laura Pidcock.

Acorns and oaks etc.

Former Labour MP Laura Pidcock has spoken out in a sensible way on Baker and is getting a lot of views and retweets, one of the few on the "left" to do so.

"Violence against women is wrong, full stop. Encouraging people to punch “terfs” in the face, esp when cheered by hundreds (as happened at Trans Pride) should worry us all. That many on the left look away is indicative of a fearful culture,silencing many basic feminist principles."

https://twitter.com/LauraPidcock/status/1681197395890130944

Look at the replies. Lots of support but also the usual both sides show violence stuff. Pidcock has long been the target of claims she is a secret terf because she shows signs of knowing women are biologically real.

But we don’t know he’s recalled permanently do we? It might be just a month.
Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to see this as a warning to him and gave him another chance. After all he just incited violence this time, he didn’t commit it. (Obviously I think he should be locked up for life but you can see them making the argument.)

Agree with others Baker actions are amongst other elements which really have derailed TRA cause in 2023. Their big rally was overshadowed by the fact they platformed a violent torturer. Countless more people peaked.

All the outrage helped get Baker put away.

All because at the end of the day they will never do safeguarding. They won't get rid of dangerous people and always demand the most absurd things. The days of TRA working in the shadows are over and when that ended it ensured the most extreme amongst them would become the face of the movement.

I'm guessing it will just be a slap on the wrist for the actual crime, but at least they got recalled and are facing some actual consequences.

They know the game is up. This story really fills me with confidence that the shoe is now on the other foot.

Interesting disinformation campaign re Baker being in a women's prison. Obviously designed by someone to provoke terf outrage.

Despite all the gloom I see regarding this shitty individual, I actually really detect shafts of light.

Yes, SJB was cheered by what I'd assume to be law abiding individuals at a public event.

Yes, the police had to be pushed to detain this individual.

Yes, there is the depressingly typical lack of correct response from the Left.

Yes, women everywhere had to stop what they were doing and transmit a joint WTF???!!! on social media to highlight this individual.

My optimism, guarded but real nonetheless, is that this whole episode proves that TRA has jumped the shark.

The individual is beyond the pale, not the beardy blokes who were misogynistically ruling the roost just a couple of years back. But a castrating psycho who had no nuance other than screaming for VAW.

The individuals are more and more violent, SJW, and more and more kink, Mika Minio breastfeeder.

The message is more and more OTT...call to strike women, call to normalise male breastfeeding.

The support is more and more marginalised, leftist trans allies only, sad misled transmaidens looking to bask in the Twitter glow.

The response from women worldwide, and even some men lol, is swift, uncompromising and unrepentant, and you would not let this stand.

And the individual is back in jail. And the TRA movement is discredited. And the cat is out of the bag, and won't be put back in.

Call me a naive idealist, but 2023 is a watershed year as the likes of Adam Bryson, Austin Killips, Dylan Mulvaney, Mika Minio and now Sarah Jane Baker, are not tolerated, and will not be tolerated.

Right now, the lobbyists and trans allies are looking at all this, realising their mission creep has resulted in irrevocable over stretch.

The battle will be long and brutal, but 2023 goes down as the year that rational people everywhere said No! No further!

There's no going back, the trans allies know this. However their whole movement is predicated on thought terminating clichés as expressed by Helen Joyce, and railroading these thru society.

It's coming off the rails. Another Joyce zinger, the trans rubber is hitting the real world road.

Glad to see he is actually back in prison and a male one at that.

I met SJB once, in about 2018, when he was in Lewes prison.
He was held with the 'special' prisoners, otherwise known as sex offenders. About 5 minutes in he told me he'd castrated himself in his cell and I was obviously supposed to be impressed at the lengths to which he'd go to 'be a woman'. He was absolutely full of his own importance but clear he was allowed to use the Internet, so no doubt he'll be able to Google this thread.

I had to come home and scrub myself clean. An afternoon of being in his, and the other prisoners' presence was more than enough for me. Horrific.

So why is SJB going to a magistrates court. Is he being charged with a new offence, eg inciting violence?

The Mail article you linked to above said:

Sarah Jane Baker, 53, was charged with a public order offence following an incident at the Trans Pride event in Westminster, London, on July 8.

She was arrested following the alleged incident and has been recalled to prison for breaching her licence conditions, the Met Police said.

So yes, it's both an arrest and a recall.