Zoe Williams -

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision - that's an interesting point. Going slightly off topic but I do feel that part of the problem with school is that pupils are always lumped in with other pupils of the same age. DC1 was the pastoral prefect in a mixed boarding school and said that pupils tended to complain about bullying/bad behaviour within their year rather than within their (mixed age but single sex) houses. So the girl who was basically ostracized and ignored by her whole year was happy in her house where older girls would stop and chat if she was on her own and younger girls would like it when she gave them attention.

Sadly, I've noticed a bit of a link between women who went to single-sex private secondary schools and trans activism. I believe it's because they unthinkingly compare their single-sex secondary school (the age where we are, male and female alike, at our worst!) to their mixed-sex uni cohort, and then conclude that the presence of males was the most important civilising factor, rather than all the students' increased age. (Another civilising factor on university students is that they're at an institution they've chosen to attend, studying subjects they've chosen...)

Honestly, if you compared the 14-15 year old female bullies I knew to any of the 18-year-old lads I would later share A-levels with, then the boys were much kinder and more considerate. They weren't born like that; they just grew up! Some of them would have been complete arseholes as little as four years earlier. The relevant comparator (if I'm using that word correctly) of a 14-15 year old female bully is a male bully of the same age!

So, on the whole, I’d have preferred to spend my teenage years in a female environment - I don’t think I would have been much happier but I would have been safer.

Exactly. My experience of being in mixed schools is of being constantly harassed and bullied sexually - even in primary school.

Of course, this is why we have single-sex spaces in the first place. It's why in the nineteenth century, for example, it was mandated that we have separate prisons for men and women, a practice that is adopted all over the world.

I agree with Zoe that female spaces are not always kinder: I was bullied all the way through my time at an all-girls Primary School. And girls can be vicious in messing with someone’s mental health and self-esteem.

However, I disagree wholeheartedly with Zoe that this fact means we should abandon single-sex spaces because even though I was still bullied in a mixed-sex Secondary School by girls, the boys who bullied me also sexually assaulted me. Those boys used that extra ability to damage someone that the girls didn’t. So, on the whole, I’d have preferred to spend my teenage years in a female environment - I don’t think I would have been much happier but I would have been safer.

I have no respect for women like Zoe who are happy to place other women and girls in danger just to uphold their own cool, liberal credentials.

Along with the halo polishing, I suspect there may be a more commercial element at play here - ZW can position herself as the Katie Hopkins of the GI Left and take some of the market Peter Tatchell currently gets to himself. Hence the “why doesn’t woman’s hour speak to some pro trans speakers? (Hint: Meeeee!)

Don't worry, Margot would never dream of being so déclassée.

There’s another thread going about the film ‘Poor Things’ on this board. Interesting to see ZW’s review compared to the others. It’s everything you’d expect. Contrast it to Ann Lee’s review (who actually read the book the film was based on and so spots the major flaw in the film) and Viv Groskop’s review.
Unfortunately for me, I have no respect for zw, but I agree with her review.

Well you see the same instinct here, women will defend men to the hilt. There was a thread yesterday evening about men's entitlement to claim space in public regardless of the effect on other people, and so many posters were straight out of the gate saying that women are as bad or worse. It's so interesting to see.

This reminds me of a conversation I had right back when DD was a toddler, with a Mum whose DD was born days apart from mine.

She had been having the usual toddler tantrums issues with her DD, but I was shocked when she pronounced "All girls are bitches and anyone who believes differently is just deluding themselves."

The internalised misogyny was shocking and seems to be what is at play here with Zoe. We're all nasty and those menz are just lovely!

I used to be a teacher, and you do find that there are many good, competent teachers but they are just not very intellectual. To my mind if you have super bright A-level students, for example, you need to be intellectual in order to challenge them. Some teachers work best with lower ability ( or even naughty) groups and get good things from them, but are frightened of really bright kids.

Yes, intelligence is about being able to make connections between one type of thing and another; be adaptable with information, and fluent in expression - but that is not the same as being " intellectual".

There seems a necessary element of detachment involved with the intellect; with a degree of objectivity and with an ability to explore the untrodden and the unknown; to speculate; to formulate and to create. Also to be able to evaluate, discriminate and judge.

I find that if you have debating skills then you are able to argue both sides of an issue. I know I'm a bit of a contrarian myself - and I often find that people seem to think that if you argue convincingly for one position then it must mean that yourself hold that position. But this is not necessarily true.

That last paragraph is particularly interesting, because if you look at her twitter feed ( I think it is called a " pinned tweet?" ( I'm not a twitter user) it is a quote about " Why are rich people are obsessed about poor people eating potatoes".

Are they?

Education (and to a great extent the idea of intelligence) has become very much a performative process. So, you get taught in school how to perform English Literature, or History, or whatever, and then go on to university to perform as an undergraduate, and so on. It's a skill in itself, but people who are good at performing intellect do not necessarily have the intellectual agility to formulate and assimilate new ideas, or look outside of their performed space.

People who are good at performing intelligence normally have some intellectual skills, but they don't always go together, and some remarkably stupid people can get far in life whilst persuading others that they are intellectually gifted.

I know plenty of seemingly very intelligent people (including Oxbridge educated, heck, even current Oxbridge faculty!) who are fully signed up to gender ideology. It is deeply baffling to me.

Having said that, ZW has never struck me as a very deep thinker and I’m surprised to hear she has a History degree from Oxford. I used to skip her pontifications in the Graun 15 years ago as they never seemed very well considered. Lots of weird logical leaps, overstated claims and non sequiturs.

Maybe so, but I thought the rigorous admissions interview and tutorial system at Oxford was designed to ensure only genuinely intellectual people would earn an Oxford degree? ZW has a degree in history from Oxford. I will concede that decades ago a private education made it far more likely you'd get in.

If Oxford was only admitting in genuinely intellectual people, they wouldn't accept such a high proportion of people from Eton and other major public schools. Those students turn up at the Oxford interview having been prepared for years how to answer those kinds of questions and exuding the superficial polish that seems to appeal to Oxford admissions tutors.

It seems to me that if Oxford academics applied their own much-touted critical thinking skills to the problem, they'd realise it was statistically impossible that so many of the country's brightest people had ended up at Eton.

Furthermore, I think some left-wing people from very privileged backgrounds also have an unconscious saviour complex. Many have always been divided from the working and lower-middle classes in some way. They haven't had to work long hours in smelly factories or scrub poo off a floor for minimum wage. They might see what life is like for the common oiks, but they don't fully get it. Nor do they truly understand why those common oiks might reject policies and ideologies that, from the privileged outside perspective, would improve their lives and make them better people. Maybe they're just uneducated. And so education becomes the focus, the mission, the passion.

YY.

Most people have a natural inclination towards fairness and inclusion, even if it manifests differently in the political approaches we take. It's easy for a neutral party to take the TRA position, because the overall message is simple and positive. Let these poor suffering people be treated well.

And if you take that viewpoint, it's difficult to understand why anyone wouldn't go along with this. Do those TERF-y feminists want to make this minority's lives difficult? Can't they just compromise, just a little? Surely there's a simple way to keep everyone happy, if only those opposed cooperated. But the TERF-y feminists continue to oppose, so they're obviously doing this because they lack compassion.

But if you try and dig deeper, the TRA position falls apart. And on some level the TRAs know this. They believe trans people's well being and even their very lives depend on them winning the argument, but they can't win it. And so they panic under this pressure, and their panic becomes emotional outbursts and personal attacks. They don't quite understand why they seem to be losing the argument, because it's always a good thing to want people not to suffer. Surely anyone who opposes alleviating suffering is a bad person? Maybe if the "anti trans" people have a point, it means those who seemingly lack empathy for e.g. refugees, the homeless, benefits claimants, have legitimate counter-arguments that aren't predicated on being horrible human beings. Or maybe humanity is really that cold and evil. Neither realisation is particularly appealing for hopeful progressive types who dream of a unified Star Trek future.

For more middle class people like Zoe Williams, I think there's an additional resentment of privilege. If you're white or straight, you have majority privilege. There are others on your team who are like you and have your back, and you have a certain social influence over the minority who aren't like you because they need the rest of you for allies. But if you're posh, you have minority privilege, and you can't reconcile your politics with your background. Worse still, your parents couldn't help being straight or white. But they could help sending you to private school. Note how resentful the linked article sounds; she would never make such a terrible choice, it doesn't really matter that she was privately educated because she had such an awful time. It's implicitly her parents' fault.

Furthermore, I think some left-wing people from very privileged backgrounds also have an unconscious saviour complex. Many have always been divided from the working and lower-middle classes in some way. They haven't had to work long hours in smelly factories or scrub poo off a floor for minimum wage. They might see what life is like for the common oiks, but they don't fully get it. Nor do they truly understand why those common oiks might reject policies and ideologies that, from the privileged outside perspective, would improve their lives and make them better people. Maybe they're just uneducated. And so education becomes the focus, the mission, the passion.

There’s another thread going about the film ‘Poor Things’ on this board. Interesting to see ZW’s review compared to the others. It’s everything you’d expect. Contrast it to Ann Lee’s review (who actually read the book the film was based on and so spots the major flaw in the film) and Viv Groskop’s review.

What is astounding is how ferociously people such as Zoe Williams respond when anyone persists in critiquing genderism.

I think that's her general modus operandi. I read someone criticise the detail of one of her columns on Twitter, and she just came back with, basically, I presume you're too stupid to understand what I wrote. It seems as if her thing is 'hot takes' on issues without any substance, and then she uses aggression to discourage people from actually examining what she says.

I mean the “the women beat the men at sport and that’s why women’s sports were separated/closed down” argument is so flabbergastingly specious, but lots of people spout it. My trans relative goes on about it on social media and they all sit there agreeing with this simply made-up bollocks.

it’s like creationism - despite it being belief-based, they pretend it’s supported by evidence, then make up or twist “facts’ to support it. If you have to pretend women in general have better sporting results than men to support your position, it should be time to rethink your position but people like this need to cling to their beliefs so they’ll do anything to block reality creeping in.

I think they’re defending their self-image as a good person

I suspect it's something akin to this discussion about why judges facilitate so much of the nonsense we see in courts. E.g., when men transition just before sentencing for (mostly) sex-involved crimes or the strictures of the Equal Treatment Bend Book.

I used to be at the bar and have spoken to a number of judges about this. It’s a unmitigated fucking disaster.

The vast majority of judges are decent men. They want to do the right thing. They also tend to be MC, white and privileged with little to no understanding of the trans issues raging.

It’s a dangerous combination. They don’t want to say or do the wrong thing so they lap up the training given by lobby groups, legitimately believing in what they’re told and genuinely fearing that they might actually be bigots when they find this stuff doesn’t make sense.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4379444-Maya-back-in-court-tomorrow-20th-Oct?msgid=111785546

https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/why-smart-people-hold-stupid-beliefs

From this linked article. Seems pertinent to this discussion:

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

And I remember a very old, and old-school, tutor very unprofessionally bemoaning another student’s stupidity to me! And calling him an “intellectual jellyfish” and wondering how he got in! Not in front of the other student, but still he’d probably be sacked these days. But the guy he was talking about definitely was thick as mince and I don’t know how he got in either. It’s not true that Oxford students are all bright and it wasn’t then either.

What is it that captures people in this way and makes them behave like that? What is it they are defending?

I think they’re defending their self-image as a good person, which unfortunately has been bolstered by believing gender ideology is real, and accepting the false equivalence with homosexuality. No one modern, fair-minded and liberal wants to be homophobic and these middle class, often female genderism pushers have been convinced that the TQ+ really is just like being gay. Then it’s too late for the obvious dangers of self-ID, the harms of affirming confused young people etc to be allowed to be entertained. They must be lies spouted by mean transphobic terfs who just want an excuse to hate on trans people.

Looking too closely at the facts would threaten this edifice that gives people like Zoe a sense of their own moral rectitude and a degree of protection from their guilt about being white, middle class, privately educated etc. It’s ultimately a selfish motive IMO but people like this probably don’t see it that way. It’s about being a Nice Person and batting away anything that threatens that, even verifiable reality.

i went to Oxford around the same time as Zoe - bit earlier. I didn’t know her, though I did know Kath Viner who absolutely suffers from the same thing IMO. It certainly seemed very rigorous and demanding of clear thought processes in the application process, but I definitely met a lot of hard-of-thinking people there! (Among some very brilliant people too)

I know people who went to Oxford who are shockingly ignorant, and who were accepted via the usual channels ie not some aristocrat who bought their way in.

They just don't engage their brain outside of academic settings perhaps. And why would they, if everything in their life is going well for them ? Some people are just too selfish to give brain space to empathy or the greater good.