What's going on with Genspect?

Yes: I did mean GI isn't Grainger tested, and I do agree about having another thread.

There now appear to be fault lines. If so then I think we need to understand them and how they impact real women and children. We need to return to a focus on safeguarding - which this board used to have loads of discussions on.

Let's think if the NSPCC James Makings incident happened now, or the dice game was discovered now, or the Girl Guides becoming mixed sex was reported now, what use would GC belief be? It's of no use whatsoever. And a relentless focus on "feminism" is also useless. We need to argue for our Sex and we need to support safeguarding for our children, and for vulnerable women.

Like it or not, feminism is a set of beliefs (even an ideology, some might say) and it's open to interpretation. We need clarity and reality, not navel gazing endless essays tweets and glossing over reality with politeness about pronouns.

I think what needs to happen is as things get corrected the ‘old guard’ of GC have to step away and let those not trapped by earlier argument become the louder voices. This may seem harsh to those who feel they were on the front line and want to feel the satisfaction of having shifted opinion to their position, but however successful we were at getting the troops off the beaches at Dunkirk, it took D-Day to win the war.

I think Rex means that GI beliefs meet the Grainger criteria and are therefore protected beliefs. Maya ‘accepted’ them as a protected belief in order to argue her own absence of belief but they have never been actually tested in court. Adam’s vs ERCC judgement made it clear that the GI beliefs exhibited there were extreme which would suggest not protected. The Grainger criteria for a belief to be protected require that the belief ”be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others” which would appear to be clearly not the case.

@ResisterRex - I consider a ‘belief’ something which someone holds to be true, irrespective of objective verification.

Some people believe in fairies and sprites, some people believe in intelligent design, some people believe life after death, some people believe in reincarnation, some people believe there is only physical reality and nothing supernatural, some people believe we all have a gender identity.

My personal take is that we should tolerate a multiplicity of beliefs and faiths in a free society, but we should not base laws on any entity which cannot be physically proven.

But of course feminists should be concerning themselves only with matters of sex and not getting wrapped up in some postmodern mind pretzel trying to establish a hierarchy of beliefs. Feminists are concerned with material reality. But ‘gender critical’ people are not necessarily coming from a feminist perspective.

The problem has been in dealing with a captured system the ‘politic’ campaigners started from a position of compromise; using false pronouns, agreeing with the idea of poor transsexuals, and GI belief (which Rex has given me food for thought on). This may seem diplomatic, small steps etc. but traps them into a position that landed us with this mess in the first place.

Those are interesting perspectives, Rex and Saffron.

I wonder if they deserve their own thread? I'm not sure I fully grasp them tbh, but my brain often takes a long time to percolate!

It worries me how many of the ‘GC’ tribunal wins the claimant stresses how tolerant they are of GI. They want to win so want to make themselves look ‘reasonable’ but each time these compromises nudge us further away from being able to speak the truth.

Seems that in the clamour to be the go-to on "GC" issues, two things have happened:

1. We've started to talk ourselves into GI as a belief. It isn't. It's never been tested and the chances of it becoming legally protected are definitely questionable. This is becoming a regular feature in GC commentary and it needs to be challenged each time we see it.

1. Safeguarding discussions have been made smaller, and swept aside. This board used to feature a lot on safeguarding and now it's much more GC-focused. We've been influenced by the loose group of feminists who collectively benefit from waving GC belief about in discussions.

The more we pin everything on GC belief, the further away from Sex we are both moved, and we move ourselves. The further away from Sex we are, the harder it is for safeguarding to be meaningful.

An example would be these awful "universal" toilets with floor to ceiling doors. We need toilets segregated by sex (born sex not bits of paper sex) for privacy and dignity.

We need gaps under the doors so people can see if anyone has collapsed inside.

We need to be able to deal with sanitary wrappings without men hearing us.

But pinning everything on GC beliefs pushes us further from arguing for our Sex. And in the case of transing minors, the further we are from this, the harder it is to maintain a focus on who should not be at the table.

To circle back to the most recent points made in this thread: men with fetishes SHOULD NOT BE AT THE TABLE. We don't need them, we don't want them, they bring us nothing. And their influence pushes children further away from being safeguarded. In fact to go even further back in this thread, it pushes vulnerable people towards men with fetishes.

Frankly I wonder not only how they afford it but what this next conference of Genspect's will be like. And whether some go-to GC people will wish they'd not focused so much on nebulous beliefs, but picked up more about safeguarding. We shall see.

KJK isn't my personal cup of tea but I have never, under any posting name, dissed her because I recognise that she reaches women that WPUK and Julie Bindel will never reach and we need every woman (and man) we can get.

But thinking about it KJK and Uhler have similar styles. They just let it flow, often not in a hugely joined up or thought-through way, and they end up saying things that perhaps they didn't intend to, or things that can be interpreted very differently depending on the way you read them.

It's a crying shame that Uhler, in particular, with his very specialised knowledge, can't cut all the surrounding verbiage and chest-beating and personal stuff and just present the clinical evidence. He'd be very effective. A three-hour interview? Really? Sometimes style undercuts substance.

I read it as someone using speech to text. I could be wrong though.

Except when it comes to KJK.

I wasn't talking about DH. I'm talking about the women (and probably some men) active in the GC movement from the top down to local level who button their lips and behave like professional adults because they know the cause is more important than their personal feelings.

I could never understand why they were all over him. I wouldn't go near him with a barge pole.

Listen to Uhler and his link between psychopathy and cross-dressing/ fetishes. JB, WPUK, Graham Linehan et al were taken in by DH in the same way that the boards of banks and major corporations are taken in by people like 'corporate psychopath' Fred the Shred. These people know exactly how to play others.

DH isn't and never was in the 'GC' movement!

Lots of people in the GC movement don't like each other on a personal basis. They take an adult, professional approach though, and don't make a thing of it.

JB knew that DH had written the guidance that removed the rights of female teachers and girls to single sex spaces in schools.

We knew this years ago.

I could never understand why they were all over him. I wouldn't go near him with a barge pole.

But Julie Bindel really fucked up with her DH support and she knows it.

And she's said so, if you read her Substack. Although I think "fucked up" is too strong a judgement.

I think there is a big difference between the low stakes of writing on an anonymous message board, or under a pseudonym on Twitter, or in private conversations, and doing what Ms Bindel does: she earns her living as an investigative journalist and as a real-world activist. There was a moment, back in 2018, when the TRA stuff really kicked off, that public commentators such as Ms Bindel needed to show that they were not "transphobic" towards individuals - that it is the philosophy & push to change legal structures which have a major impact on women's rights, which they opposed. So I can see why there was an acceptance of an apparently sympathetic person like DH (or Miranda Yardley).

Politics in the real world (as opposed to online) is about pragmatism, driven by clear aims & ideals, of course, but it's about small steps towards getting things done.

He is clear he respects and values her work, but doesn’t like her as a person and also felt it was inappropriate and dangerous for her to be photographed with DH.

Too long to watch and a shame he’s not over his rejection from JB as the material on deviance and prey/predator split for TW was beginning to be interesting. I’ll go back and listen more later. Thinking is allowed to evolve though and even JB is allowed to make mistakes in thinking this TW is the ‘right’ kind before time and experience and reflection changes her mind.

AI fail?

The mix of personalities is bound to be combustible, because each one has been brave enough to speak out. And if you are brave enough to speak out over the TRA bullying and harassment, then you can butt shoulders with other people whose views do not completely 'align', to use a common phrase here, with your own.

But Julie Bindel really fucked up with her DH support and she knows it.

Benjamin Boyce is a man who I find very confusing in his attitudes to women and feminism: he'll interview feminists and women's rights advocates for content for his YouTube channel but also pose daft sexist questions to them during the interview, or publish sexist MRA-type bilge on Twitter (as well as supporting James Lindsay who frequently publicly attacks feminists of every stripe).

I think Uhler takes a very strict approach when it comes to protecting women and children from sexual assault and predation; he makes no exceptions for men claiming any special exemptions.

I agree he could be much more effective if he were less personal in his critiques of certain people and their approaches/advocacy positions in this area of discussion, but I try to bear in mind that he's American and Americans are often more direct in their speech; that he's spent a long career dealing with sex offenders and thus has no patience for proposals (from those he sees as insufficiently experienced) that allow predators any potential to cause harm; and that he would need a strong sense of self and a strong sense of certainty to be able to survive the career he chose. I also try to bear in mind that his YouTube channel is his personal channel and that in a professional setting he might well express himself differently.

I think what I'm trying to say is that, for me, he doesn't have to be someone I like personally for me to agree with some of the points he makes. There are quite a few people espousing GC arguments that I find irritating and sometimes obnoxious but, in the end, it's all hands to the pump in trying to improve safeguarding, but I also wish the mix of strong personalities was less combustible.