Zoe Williams -

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

LOL Zoe Williams didn’t even know she was 20 weeks pregnant https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/13/anti-natal-zoe-williams

Williams is bullheaded but consistent in her refusal to acknowledge her own educational privilege.

She had a row on twitter with Janice Turner, and during the course of it, she tweeted the following. Bolding mine.

Well, for one, i think it's absolute horseshit to imagine some class of "vulnerable" women who won't attend their smear test unless they're specifically invited as women. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

thing again, where you ventriloquise your view onto some imagined "weak" woman who needs the ferocity of your protection. And I just think it's in really bad faith.

https://twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1362006560118083588

This is the crux of it. Why not just have mixed-sex spaces for everything? Prisons, changing rooms, toilets, domestic violence refuges etc.

Has she ever given any consideration to why the UN states it is a human right for women prisoners to be housed in a single-sex prison?

I just can't get my head around how it is possible for someone supposedly so intelligent to be so stupid.

Have any posters had any success in getting a response to this kind of drivel printed in the Graun letters page?

She seems to make assumptions based on very little and then to thinks everyone MUST agree with her. I’ve seen her doing this recently on the Newspaper review on Sky News. She leaves me quite perplexed as to how any sane person could come to some of the conclusions she comes to.

So she thinks that the thing that made the kids she went to school with obnoxious was the fact they were girls? Not the fact that they were from a family background which made a fee-paying private school in London affordable for them?

😂It's all a bit Kent 'and I for one welcome our new insect overlords' Brockman, isn't it?!

Is there any topic ZW can't crowbar "I'm such a great trans ally" into?

No connection so tenuous she can't rope her transactivism into. She reminds me of those parodies of Thought For The Day where some archbishop describes something totally unrelated and shoehorns "and that got me thinking, isn't cauliflower cheese* a little like Jesus..."

*homework, a pushbike, sunscreen, woodlice, poppadoms, whatever spurious topic he's opined upon

bullied and left out and failed to thrive academically

Would accurately describe my experience of a mixed school. Some schools are bad, some schools are single sex; there is an overlap between the 2 but not necessarily a correlation.

😂😂😂

Zoe is equating the mean words which some women do with the violence and rape that some men do. Other misogynists make similar comparisons.

I have just deleted the next sentence I wrote which was probably "not in the spirit" and definitely sarcastic and probably mentioned an arse. The jist of it was to do with wishing that journalists with such privileges as an Oxbridge education and platform at the Guardian felt a moral obligation to back up their opinions with research, facts and listening to all stakeholders.

I wasn’t bullied at my all girls school (although I was uncool), but mixed sixth form was wretched unless you were cool and pretty. Maybe Zoe was, but IMO, escaping judgment from the boys based on your looks and top trumps rating is a good thing.

I have to say, I didn't fare very well in an all girl's school. I was bullied and left out and failed to thrive academically. In hindsight it was probably the worst 4 years of my life. BUT I still don't want to share intimate spaces with men or be compelled to pretend they are women or have to compete against them in sports. I don't really understand how A is related to B.

In the 80s she used to write for the London Evening Standard about shagging her way around the party scene in London. Never been able to take her seriously after that, and judging by this those articles were about her level.

Prided herself? Yes.

Got? Not so much.

This.
She may believe it when she writes drivel like this? Who knows. But were she to suggest that penis people should not be in women's prisons she's have OJ & his little band of toxic merry men slating her for months.

So true...🤣

Has she ever prided herself on having more than basic critical thinking ability?

Mind you, it does sound to be the usual level of those who declare women should ‘be kind’ and allow males to run roughshod over female only provisions. And those who use the ridiculous ‘but women do it too!’ And ‘bet you have a gender neutral toilet at home’. And all those fucking stupid things they believe are the ultimate gotchas.

How enormously insensitive to the female victims of male violence that she would have responsibility for as a prison trustee.

Basically girls are all total bitches so we might as well let the men in.

What a fuckwit and no kind of feminist.

If you follow her argument, prisons would be improved by completely merging the sexes. Why not have unisex prisons, what could possibly go wrong?

I never know whether she's genuinely stupid or just pretends to be. And yes, the trans allyship bragging is extra ridiculous in this article

'Inherently less violent?'
Eh, well, YES 🤦🏻‍♂️

Teenage girls (and indeed female offenders) can be bitches and get into fights. That does not stop them being vulnerable in the presence of men.

I'm puzzled by the logic she has employed to shoehorn in her trans allyship.

Is it this?
>I had a bad experience in a single sex school therefore all single sex spaces/groups involve the members being nasty to each other.
But, mixed gender (I think she means mixed sex) groups tend to be nicer to their members, therfore allowing men into women's prisons/DV shelters/lesbian bars etc stops the women being nasty to each other.

In conclusion: Women need men who pretend to be women in their groups to stop them being mean to each other?

Have I got it right?