Women's rights general conversations - Thread 6

What Bint said. If Bragg thinks he's being 'left-wing' about this, he might care to sit himself down and look at it from first principles. What's socialism all about, Billy? The many, not the few? Ring a bell? The rights of the community as whole versus a few noisy individuals?

I think you're partly right about Billy fucking Bragg seeing it as purely a left-wing right-wing battle. But every time he says anything about it it becomes increasingly clear to me that he is also a raging misogynist (or, as a minimum, deeply sexist). And not very bright. Both common themes on that particular RSOH.

So he sees it as simple Left-Right question. But reacts the way he does because of underlying factors.

Oh, and “Katie Neeves” in the article was reminding me very much of Ginny, the star/subject of a couple of threads back along - a new trans employee in a small company, whose constant innuendo and general lasciviousness made everyone uncomfortable, the constant threat of transphobia accusations and resulting disciplinary process trapping them all.

Great article, although I wish she hadn’t used the word “pervert”.

I radicalised my sister by giving her Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think, and my Dad’s kinda girlfriend has radicalised him by giving him Helen Joyce’s Trans. Looking forward to the next time we all see my 28-year old niece, who works in a university and was very bristly when I told her I was a TERF last time we met. Maybe she believes good left-wingers - which we all are - have to be trans allies to be proper lefties. I think that’s behind Billy fucking Bragg’s stubbornness on the issue - it’s purely a left-wing right-wing battle to him.

Little by little, convert by convert, the tide is turning.

That is exactly the kind of piece I'd like to send to friends. But don't. Sadly.

Got the link to this article from the Glinner email. I've got another one about a Stonewall Workshop but I haven't read it yet so won't share yet.

This one is about Katie Neeves who "came out" as transgender when he was 49. He likes to tell people about how he wore his sister's knickers when he was a child and he knew it was wrong but it felt so right and then the shame and ...classic agp. Anyway, here's the article.

What a load of pants

Oh yes, I totally agree. Even as a student on mixed-sex wards there were male bays and female bays, male loos and female loos. Critical care (ICU, CCU, A&E) and theatre recovery areas were obviously mixed sex, if you were awake enough to tell the sex of the person in the next bed/trolley, it was time to go back to the general wards.

That said, I was an inpatient at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital (Stanmore) on a mixed nightingale ward (one long ward with 12 or so beds along each side). We were ALL young adults, with peripheral nerve injuries mainly, and it was hilarious to see how the women all put makeup on the moment they came round from the GA, and the men were all bravely busting a gut trying to be the first one to recover/be discharged home. In that instance it was a positive thing. I never worried I was in any danger from the men, but on a nightingale ward there’s nowhere for them to hide anyway.

Christ on a bike. I can't believe that single sex wards were ever in question. I hope Mavis agrees that this is an issue of dignity in hospitals. Took ages to get single sex wards and now ...

Pillocks.

The headline is kind of maddening, though, because it will lead to a rash of cries of exclusion. They could say single-sex wards to be enforced.

Arf, @MavisMcMinty - and so clean! At our local hospital only the newly-refurbished A&E and out-of-hours GP area are really functioning as they should. It's amazing what decent working conditions do for staff morale and efficiency and how that feeds in to patient behaviour.

Unfortunately the rest of the hospital is a shithole.

Gosh, all those staff in one bay! I wanna go to THAT hospital, the one in the photo. No problems with recruitment or retention there.

I saw this article on the BBC earlier - note the "may" in the headline - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66994133 and was startled (not startled) by this, which just made me think they're going to be "prioritising" again:

And the move would have to meet the legal threshold set by the Equality Act.
That allows trans people to be excluded from single-sex spaces if there is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, such as privacy or safety.
Mr Barclay said he wanted to make sure the "dignity, safety and privacy" of all patients was respected, while the rights of women are protected.

Lots do. My friends too. This is not the battles of the 60s and 70s being re-fought.

Yes, I think the clever addition of the T to the LGB led to non-homophobic people extending their support/tolerance to the rest of the TQ+ without question - “Stonewall are the good guys, they must be right on this”.

And if someone doesn’t know about the whole sports/single-sex spaces thing, or the experimental medical transitioning of vulnerable, troubled children and teenagers, that’s because it’s rarely discussed on mainstream media.

I suppose maybe because I've been in the same side as progressives until now on most issues I've ever been on the receiving end of disagreement> I've seen plenty of impassioned defences of different causes - including from me - but not this level of aggression from people before.

A friend of mine basically sees "trans rights" as akin to gay rights and GC attitudes as akin to support for section 28.

I think one theory is that they see women as weak and any man who wants to be a woman must be very weak indeed and therefore vulnerable and in need of protection. Unlike real women who are merely weak. Or something like that. Subconsciously.

I do struggle to understand how people who don't necessarily have any skin in the game get so angry and invested about it. You could say the same for GC people, of course, but women in particular are drawn in by default as it's our services at stake. It's easy to understand how people with friends, family, kids who are trans would want to defend their take and actions, but others? I've never had someone not want to speak to me because of my stance on the best way to reduce income inequality or because they disagreed with me on the climate. I don't get why people's attitudes are so different in relation to this group as opposed to other disadvantaged groups (if that's how they choose to define them).

@Kucinghitam - thanks very much. Yes, I'm a little nervous as to repercussions. Of the two friends closest to me that night, one was GC-adjacent, with safeguarding concerns mostly, and the other's daughter has just completed a PhD in something close to gender studies, so I'm expecting some sort of blowback. But they're both old friends, so "I mentioned the war once but I think I got away with it", a la Basil Fawlty.

I'm hoping they'll remember my blistering guitar playing instead (we were doing a party gig, dunno if I mentioned that)!

Great piece. This sums it up:

Perhaps my favourite example can be found in US Rowing’s Gender Identity Policy, which states that women’s events are “exclusively for athletes who identify as a woman at the start of the rowing season and/or those who are assigned as female at birth”, whilst men’s events are “exclusively for athletes who identify as a men at the start of the rowing season and/or those who are assigned as male at birth”. In practice, this gives male people opportunities in both categories, with only female rowers potentially losing out.

What about mixed categories, though? There is always the risk that under self-ID, a team of mixed male and female rowers could lose to a team of mixed-gender, all-male rowers. Wouldn’t that be unfair to the males in the first team? Hence we find that “boat entries in this category must consist of 50 per cent athletes of any gender and 50 per cent athletes assigned as female at birth”. Biological sex matters after all, but only in instances where male people might otherwise suffer. Now you see male sporting advantage, now you don’t.

These might seem niche examples, but what shocks me is how blatant they are. In many ways, the fact that they are trivial makes the hypocrisy even worse. A rape victim who wants a female-only support group will be told she is selfish for thinking sex matters, but a male person who wants to keep his peerage or not lose out in a rowing competition? Well, he will be told, of course it matters! Let’s not be silly about this! The people who create these policies know exactly who the men are, regardless of what they call them. They’re the people whose needs matter.

I had a distressing encounter with a young man last night about gender ideology. We were playing (an acoustic foursome, americana and stuff) at a friend's 60th party to a very mixed bunch, including lots of her son's friends in their early 20s. One chap was really engaging and came and talked to a couple of us in the kitchen for some time.

After a while - we had been talking about echo chambers - I asked him what his echo chamber (by which I meant his pals, really) was telling him about gender. I think by then he might have been slightly pissed, actually, but he spoke about the difference betwen sex and gender but mostly about how people should be able to live the gender they wanted to. A woman interjected with the "what about women and childrens safety, and women's sports" question and his answer, rambling a bit, was that transwomen are women. It was at this point that it went pear-shaped.

Of course, I said that they were not. He's a big chap and I suddenly found him right in my space, toe to toe, and had to look up to see his face, which was about a foot higher than mine! I don't know what he was saying at this point because one of the women there was telling him to back off. But I was then able to say that transwomen were men and that that was the heart of the debate - I also said that this is a debate we need to have, no matter the Stonewall slogan. It all got a bit aggressive again, right in my face, and he said something like "I'm just not going to talk to you at all if that's what you think". That sounds mild as I read it back; it wasn't mild at all, though.

I tried a bit more without success. The thing that interested me was the point at which the thinking and the discussion shuts down. It's at that point where a faith-based position is exposed. It's a damned shame because until then it was a sharp discussion, true, but not aggressive. And then it wasn't and I was painfully conscious of my age, build and height, and his.

I've just been called 'dude' on that forum! 😅