Sandi Toksvig "doesn't get it", poor love....

'white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life'

Erm...surely that's a description of the average trans woman?

It's article is really interesting in terms of Sandy's lifestyle and life experience.

It says:
“I’m very interested in the logical, not the biological, family,” Toksvig says. “I have the most fabulous friends, but no matter how busy they are … if I phoned and said, ‘I’m in nowhereland, please come,’ they would, as indeed I would for them. So I wanted to write about people who create their own family and love each other and how it’s multigenerational.”

And it then goes on to talk about how she has children and grandchildren. Her children were carried by her ex-partner with the help of a friend who was a sperm donor.

This to me says a lot. She has never had a lot of the biological connections and issues over sex because of the life she's lead. Even as a lesbian, it was her partner who did the biological related things.

She is ultimately exceptionally privileged because she's had no use for biology and she doesn't see any issues over biology. She just thinks its about toilets.

She's had a very positive life experience in terms of building 'a glitter family'.

The thing that isn't on her radar is safeguarding. But again look at her privilege and how she's had such a cosseted life.

She can't understand things because she hasn't had any life experience which would give her the ability to.

In a lot of ways her life has been more similar to that of a gay man who has used women as a commodity in order to have children. Several members of her family were already in broadcasting. She went to private school. She was present at mission control for the moon landing as her Dad was covering the story. She went to Cambridge and was a Cambridge Footlight and was a contemporary of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson which certainly wouldn't have hindered her.

There literally isn't any way to be more privileged. She probably actually benefitted from being a woman at the right time in history too, in terms of her career - she hit it at the sweet point of when female talent was starting to be looked for and valued, rather than being a trailblazer.

And she's the one who talks about radical feminists 'punching down' because she has this 'oppressed identity' as a lesbian.

Frankly she's the example that demonstrates the power politics explicitly.

Is it surprising she doesn't get it? Not really.

ST is the perfect example of a woman not getting something when her career (and no doubt her social circle) depends on her not getting something

'white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life'
she thinks women have never been marginalised?? There aren’t enough lols in the world for that bit of stupidity

I’m a pensioner and I don’t want to be dismissed. I think feisty old ladies are the backbone of society.”

well it’s a shame then isn’t it Sandi that you stand 100% with one of the most ageist movements currently around. one of the first TRA fall back positions is “urgh you’re all old abd you’ll be dead”. I assume she remembers the councillor in Liverpool and his saggy breasted comment when women were having the temerity to challenge his trans yay/fuck off women narrative

I can't stand her, never could. I was delighted when she left Bake Off. Absolute definition of a smug, up herself luvvie.

Yes, indeed, she is railing against women for being privileged and telling us to 'shut up' from her position as a comfortable, educated, and well-known celebrity.

'white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life'

If radfems have 'never been marginalised' what's her rationale for feminism?

Leaving aside the rather glaring ignorance of all the lesbian and bisexual and black and Asian radfems.

“I’m a pensioner and I don’t want to be dismissed. I think feisty old ladies are the backbone of society.”

I think this might contain some clue to her lack of proper inquiry into this issue. She doesn't want to be dismissed by the people that matter to her which I assume are fellow media folks and so she just sprouts what she thinks everyone around her thinks.

It's almost as if her rich, middle class, first-class Cambridge brain can't cope with the enormous amount of fact, reality, detail, personal experience, clarity, and nuance that most of us privileged, phobic, thicko types have absorbed over the years, as these issues have developed.

I mean, she has no time for baking cakes! She's so dismissive of cake bakers! What a shocker 🙄

I don't think she's reading anything tbh. High on her own farts.

Urgh...it's like she's actively tried not to look into this at all. Sandi- if by some miracle you're reading this, please give a thought to the young women who are being harmed. It's really not about motorway service station toilets.

'She is especially angry by how many “radical feminists” attack trans people. “How could you be so white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life yet you decide to punch down on people?”'

'I say they fear — for example — that trans women will occupy safe spaces meant for women, such as public lavatories. “I don’t get this. I’m in my 45th year in showbusiness, travelling the country touring. I’ve been to every service-station toilet in the country. Every one has a sign up saying male cleaners in attendance. I don’t recall anybody saying, ‘We need to group up against these male cleaners.’

Why would someone dress as a woman when they could just pick up a cleaning cloth? If it really bothers you there’s a toilet some place else. Go there. Shut up. Let’s join together and fight stuff that actually needs fighting. Why are they talking about this when women in Afghanistan are not allowed to sing or to look a man in the face?'

My god, she is clueless.

She still doesn’t get it. It’s like Cass, Olympic sports controversy, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre just hasn’t happened in Sandiland…

Sandi Toksvig: ‘Feisty old ladies are the backbone of society’

www.thetimes.com/article/71ac1cc5-9497-4275-a228-15315613eb46?shareToken=5a3244b6120beca0be30c8cb98bf4f2c

Pithy. It does feel like that's what's happening in many cases. And so different to Porcelina's analogy, which describes something different. This bundling together such disparate types and needs and groups under one "umbrella" may be done, by many, for the best possible reasons, but feels so problematic, naive and ironic - in the name of celebrating individuality, this single concept of a definitive "identity" may liberate some - but it also risks erasing / suppressing / limiting / confusing / damaging / disguising / denying etc. a whole multitude of utterly individual identities and needs...

Yes, transwoman embrace and reinforce the harmful, overt sexuality that comes with being a woman. The stuff that holds us back.

Transmen try to escape it.

And in both sets of behaviours, they do nothing more or less than confirm their actual sex.

That's a really interesting way of looking at it.

On the side of "gender identity"...

Imagine the scenario of a woman that gets magically mind swapped into the body of a man. Their memories somehow transfer over, and we assume the reliability of memory.

In that kind of hypothetical situation, they would have a "gender identity" that is different to their body, and I believe it would be a rational and justified belief.

It would be a rational belief, because of their original sexed body; so this still depends on a sex biological basis for defining "man" and "woman".

So I tend to think that "gender identity" could make sense for a trans person, with the important difference being that they wouldn't have a rational basis for their belief. Or anyway, if it's "rational" they will need to find a different justification.

But that's it's non rational for a trans person, doesn't mean you can't hold such a belief; it just means that maybe you should be questioning it or even viewing the belief as a delusion.

However maybe a trans person can think it's their authentic self, regardless of the difficulty in proving it's a real thing, or a rational belief in their situation.

To be charitable here, it's not like there aren't other beliefs that are difficult to prove like a belief in objective morality for example.

But as I think someone mentioned, it's one thing to hold a belief like that, that your authentic self is really a "woman", and it's another to try to impose your very questionable and controversial ideas on everyone else in society.

Even with the "magical mind swap" example, yes, in one sense, they really are a woman trapped in a man's body; but in another sense they aren't a "woman" as the mind/body combination would make them something else, and it would be entirely reasonable not to view them as a woman in some contexts.

I do think there's a biological component to gendered behaviour, too - I don't outright reject that or sees it as the thin end of a slippery wedge to biological essentialism. We see it in the animal kingdom - it feels logical to think that we're not immune to some trends. But how and to what extent nature and nurture intersect? How can science answer that yet? In our gendered (externally, in the sense of social constructs) world, any controlled experiment attempting to distinguish between the two surely necessitates Money-esque abuse.

And in this context, this whole telling kids that "Everyone has a gender, choose now!" does feel a bit like playing with fire, like a massive social experiment in which we kind of artificially intervene in a dynamic we don't understand. We worry, from a GC perspective, that we're, in large part, forcefully imposing nurture on nature, while those in favour of the gender ID question presumably would (if they think about it at all) argue that it's liberating all natures to proudly proclaim their validity! Either way, it's kind of forcing a really fraught issue.

Not sure if I'm making sense. Sorry again for potentially thread-killing monologue. Just more interesting than Netflix.

YY to both of the above (does YY mean, like, YesYes? never been sure... hope so).

Agreed, and if I try to think back to childhood, I can remember being instructed by adults around me that "girls sit like this, girls don't do that, etc" and being very aware that this was what society expected me to be, because I was female. Despite that awareness, I don't think I fully understood how deeply I internalised all that gendered stuff, until I was much older and had got knocked about in life a fair bit.

I suppose, to be generous, once this stuff has been internalised, it's quite easy to mistake the external imposition for something innate.

I was a tomboy, in the 70s when no one thought that meant you weren't a girl. So I always thought of "gender" - not using that term, but what I would have called being girly, or being boyish - as something I had a choice about, I could choose not to be a stereotypically "girly" girl, even though I felt that pressure.

As I grew up I sometimes did want to be more "girly", eg wear dresses and make-up (though I agree with a PP - what counts as girly is different in different times and places - it's not fixed). I still am essentially a tomboy with a feminine side.

I think gender expression has its place, as it's a way to signal things - such as. "I'm a straight woman putting out signals to potential mates" or "I don't give a shit what you expect me to be like" or "I'm experimenting with twisting stereotypes in an arty way" - all of which I think are normal human behaviour, for different people or at different stages in life. But I don't see it as an inherent identity that can override your sex. It's just culture, semiotics and personality.

You can only have a "gender identity" as a man, woman or "NB", if you have a very fixed, regressively stereotyped set of ideas about what men and women should be like. And the idea that clinging to the stereotype of the opposite sex actually makes you that sex is just bizarre.

Sorry. Thinking "aloud". 😅

I remember I actually resisted make-up because I found the idea deeply demeaning - the expectation that half of us prettify ourselves for the other half. That wasn't some some innately masculine gender. It was all about being a girl in a different way - a latent angry feminist!

Exactly! It's almost too neat to be true, as it aligns so closely with what we're saying - I could imagine someone responding, "Oh, you're just saying that to make a point"... but it is true. If I think back, of the very few memories from that time that I could perhaps interpret as an evolving awareness of some kind of "gender", a striking proportion are honestly of that nature. Wariness of boys (one smashed my head into a wall at primary). The same friend and I finding a dodgy magazine frozen open in the snow.

I honestly can't place a moment I was aware of anything truly, deeply internal in the sense of a gendered self-perception. I was just me - a girl in the biological sense, in a different body to the boys, and accordingly belonging to a different category or group. I'd describe it as an almost imperceptible process of finding myself in relation to external things - people, objects, values... as opposed to... finding myself. Any innate part just felt like... me!

I'm thinking hard now about how that intersects with my best friends being girls, and the gulf between us and the boys at primary, and that kind of Venn diagram of how I overlapped, or not, with female peers' behaviour and interests.

I felt an affinity with girls that I didn't with the boys, certainly, but my instinct now is that I didn't see that as internal, so much as biological (without the remotest focus on the realities of biology, at least before discussions about periods - rather just a, this is my half of the class, I belong here) - and behavioural (the boys behaving a bit too wildly for me). But is that gender? Because I also punched a bully once (pathetically ineffectually!), and pushed another down stairs (that sounds more brutal than it was - he was vicious). And I hatedhatedhated seeing my friendship group devolve into self-conscious obsessions with make-up around 12, and their bitchiness (anti-feminist, I know, but for whatever reasons, they were - and how!) And I quite explicitly tried to set myself apart from that and refused to succumb to either.

So in some ways I "conformed", and in others I didn't. As now. I never saw it as innate. Just as who I was and how I behaved in relation to larger external groups and patterns.

It is fascinating. If it could be explored in this way, as opposed to imposed as in that survey handed out to little 11-year-olds that I mention upthread, at least. If I imagine being given that survey at that age, and asked, effectively, if I chose to be a girl or a boy... I think it would have messed with my head a bit. Cemented some of these behavioural patterns as more valid than they needed to be. Persuaded me I didn't belong as a girl. Made me really worry a lot more about what, for example, my stoical resistance to using make-up said about me, as opposed to the way I felt about this at the time, which was a (rather worried and self-conscious, yes, but mainly just) proud sense of "I'm me! To hell with that!"

I don't think such a survey would have felt, or been, a remotely positive influence. I think it could even have been quite damaging.

Edited as I think and try to work out what I mean!

That's it @Catiette . I knew what it was to be a girl not because inside of me somewhere was the inner gendered soul of a girl but because of outside influences. Part of mine, funnily enough, was kiss chase. It was neither particularly pleasant nor horribly unpleasant but to me being a girl was being "chased" by boys. If I'd known the words and of course I didn't, I'd have known that I was supposed to be passive while boys were assertive. (Un)fortunately, I wasn't very good at being passive.

And it's an outside thing imposed upon you (or that people attempt to impose, with greater or lesser degrees of success). Whereas an actual identity would be part of you.

So interesting you say that in the light of what I was just about to post in response to Mouse.

I found the decisive, "first had a sense of a gender identity at 7" really interesting, and it led me to think, "OK, so what was I aware of at 7?"

And no joke, the only thing I could think of that I could in any way align with some kind of realisation of a gender identity - the only thing I associated from that age or so with thinking "I'm a girl" as opposed to "I'm me / a human" or whatever kind of self-realisation takes place as a kid...

...Was a couple of lads chasing after me and my friend trying to lift our skirts up, and our righteous indignation that they shouldn't do that to girls.

In total honesty, that's the closest I can get to a recognition of the kind @ScremeEggs describes.

Isn't that telling? Depressing? Revealing? I don't know. It feels like one of those.