Zoe Williams -

I hadn’t really been aware of her before she got involved in gender stuff but she was on the For The Many podcast recently with Iain Dale and she was unbelievably annoying. It sounded like very mixed feedback from listeners, whereas often guest presenters are well-received. Also ID asked her about that piece by a Jewish employee of the Guardian who was experiencing an awful time in the Guardian offices after the Hamas attack and she denied all knowledge of the Guardian being like that. Although in other pieces she says she always works from home so how she’d know what’s it like in the office I don’t know. But going from others opinions of her I suppose not knowing about a subject has never stopped her before!

Zoe Williams has always been an idiot.

That's an unbelievable statement royalcorgi. Especially in a left wing newspaper

What a blinkered, sheltered life she must have led. What use to humanity is the Oxbridge degree if you come out of it knowing so little about the humans you live alongside?

I'm sure Zoe's on a posh street, but most of London is still very mixed. Does she not realise what a high proportion of the people she lives amongst speak English as a second language? Is she completely unaware of the kids in special education or not in education at all? Some of the people whom Zoe relies upon daily to keep her city and life running will not know what or where a fucking cervix is.

Reading back through the thread, I find this statement from Zoe astonishing:

"I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one."

Has she really never met anyone outside her own bubble? Just a reminder of this finding from Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust:

"Almost half of women (44.2%) are unaware of what the cervix is, unable to correctly identify it as the neck of the womb (uterus). One in six could also not name a single function of the cervix with less than half (41.40%) aware that it connects the womb to the vagina and only one in three knowing that it provides a seal to hold the baby in when pregnant."

I'm also thinking of something I read by Joan Smith recently, where she said that in London, domestic abuse shelters are so overwhelmed by demand that they can only offer spaces to the worst-affected women, ie those who have complex PTSD from years of violent abuse. These women literally shake with terror if they have to be in the same room as a man.

I just can't understand why someone like Zoe Williams, who has spent years as a journalist, and whose very job it is to go out and listen to other people's stories and to take an interest in the outside world, is so ignorant of what's going on outside her immediate social circle.

No wonder people hate the Guardian. She reminds me of one of those do-gooders in Dickens who think the only thing wrong with poor people is that they're not sufficiently like the middle-class.

That would put Zoe in the "do it Julia" category then BackToLurk.

Anyone going along with this for fashion is doing it because they don't want a backlash. Anyone dong it because they actually believe it, is extremely gullible.

Well said. ZW gives no fucks at all about women's human rights, that much is clear. How awful she was a trustee of a prison charity - as if the prisoners don't have enough problems.

To misquote Dickens: the worst you can wish these women is that their eyes be opened by (personal) experience.

ZW is one of those women who I hope comes face to face with the reality of supporting TRA policies in all our public places one day.

Those women literally all went to another school, so she never met them.

It's clearly just Zoe taking up a fashionable position. Her book was called Bring It On, Baby: How to have a dudelike pregnancy (my emphasis). Republished as What Not to Expect When You're Expecting. Can't imagine why the change in title

Zoe Williams is very intellectually challenged as none of her arguments make any logical sense ever, in my experience, though I don't bother reading these days.

I'm assuming she has connections and this is why she is paid to churn out drivel which is considerable less entertaining and informative than most mumsnet posts (including AIBU).

Margot Leadbetter snobbery for the 21st Century.

Too far! I won’t hear a word said against Margot.

And sooner or later you get the mention of the inevitable 'lovely trans friend' who appears to be a kind of badge of glittery social brownie points, and is used as a signal of superior status in their social circle.

There never is a lovely friend for example who has experienced severe DV and cannot now cope in a room with an unknown male and certainly cannot participate in support and counselling with a man listening and smirking in the group. Or a lovely friend who comes from an Orthodox faith who would quite like to be able to use a loo and go swimming please, or a lovely friend who is disabled and needs a same sex carer or cannot enter a mixed sex space or adapt their language and enact pretense on demand for someone else's benefit. Those kind of women hold no social status, no coolness or glitteriness that would boost social standing and are very clearly 'other'.

Margot Leadbetter snobbery for the 21st Century.

Zoe Williams is reliably dreadful. Just one of the many Guardian commentators stealing a living.

“she's not a great advert for an expensive education.”

On the contrary, it demonstrates that the hot-housing and connections which her parents purchased via her school fees landed someone with no critical thinking ability both a place at Oxbridge and a plum job in the mainstream media.

Whenever someone self proclaims as a trans ally, I automatically think they are either extremely gullible or a "do it to Julia" type.

In which Zoe highlights some of the specific problems female prisoners face. None of which are to do with their ‘gender identity’. She’s clearly not the brightest. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/30/new-hall-womens-prison-inmates-equals

The stupidity of Zoe Williams on this issue is so illuminating to me, as it shows up how faux-intelligent some people with a supposedly good education really are. They know all the big words, but inside their brains there is nothing but a clown on a unicycle doing endless loops.

As a pp said, she worked with a prison and she can't see the issue there?! Wonder if she ever opined on Isla Bryson?

@irishfeminist This is what I was also thinking, people here have suggested she ought to be intelligent and you would think so given she is writing for a major UK broadsheet. The reality is that she is just an yet another extremely privileged person from the right kind of background. Exactly the sort of person who is is in almost every media job where they have a voice.

In the UK having that kind of background is considered better than intelligence, after all people like that are our "betters", its a rather grim aspect of British culture that is quite frankly holding us back at this point.

No you are right OP it doesn't make any sense and is shoehorned in to I assume appease or please a certain readership. Its quite honestly bad journalism and one of the reasons I no longer subscribe to The Guardian.

Argh these wretched over privileged women who don't seem to have the capacity to think things through or move off their own little hobby horse frame works.

While she's wanking on about the 'immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life' - and it is faux intellectual wanking with a dose of facebook meme sentiment complete with a picture of Piglet looking wistful - she is not talking about women with disabilities, women of different faiths and cultures, women who have been abused. She is not seeing them as 'precious' and she does not care about their capacity to have a public life at all, never mind a 'meaningful and truthful one'. That kind of privileged wankery is only for men in her mind.

I think yes, she is displaying an attitude from many naive and privileged women in their own little bubble, that her ableism and misogyny and religious intolerance and racism is all unconscious beneath a powerful belief of her own righteous enlightenment, she does not like other privileged women much, and her brownie points in her own mind all rest in being lovely to/mummying what is in her mind, 'vulnerable' men. Which is another massive aspect of her naivety. Bit of the Lady Bountifuls/Florence Nightingales going on there.

That pregnancy story is extraordinary. I mean, I know some women don’t know they are pregnant but at 35 and in a sexual relationship you’d think a pregnancy test would be the first thought rather than early menopause!

You’d think as the trustee of a prison charity she would have access to the numbers of female inmates compared to male inmates, and the number of female inmates convicted of violent offences.

Spoiler Zoe: men are more violent and more likely to offend

She is immensely privileged and ignorant of the wider world, I can't take her seriously at all. Smartarse sophistry is not intelligence. Her alma mater charges almost £27,000 a year these days, she's not a great advert for an expensive education.

https://www.godolphinandlatymer.com/admissions/fees/

Glad to see someone else remembered that article! Zoe Williams also didn't realise that poor eyesight was genuinely debilitating and inconvenient until she needed reading-glasses. Or that hayfever existed until her son developed it.

She seems to be someone who needs to experience something for herself to understand it exists. All her friends know what a cervix is, therefore she reasons all women do. Doubtless she'd have been the first one to ridicule women for not noticing pregnancy symptoms, if it hadn't happened to her!