VAWG - how does the cognitive dissonance not smack them in the face?

Thanks for all the discussion, I've learnt from your posts, I hadn't thought about it the same way as you have, and your points are the logical conclusion of thinking more broadly about it than I had done.
I realise I was isolating this one article while everybody else was contextualising it.

It makes me feel, most unusually! like a bit of a wishy-washy liberal when I say that my approach to the writer would be to praise what she said in the article and then try to point out the obvious cognitive dissonance with also being TWAW.

I realise that this thread is a FWR discussion, it's not a response directed at FR, and you are all doing the contextualisation thing as that's what the title of the thread is about. So I sort-of still agree with what I posted, but I also take on board all of your points.

Amaryllis - thank you for the epicycle analogy. I've just read it to someone who grasped it immediately.

They pay lip service to supporting measures against VAWG then put violent rapists into women's prisons.
I always imagine the men who order things like this sitting laughing their heads off.

Cant help but think, being totally cynical about the Guardian, that a bit late in the day and thinking we haven't really been in the front line on this, the Guardian thought we'll get one of our approved writers to write something. At least they asked a woman.

I am in no way saying the attacks on women and girls that the papers have chosen to highlight this year aren't horrible and depressing, but is she genuinely saying she hasn't been aware of women who have been attacked, raped, disappeared in previous years.

There's nothing the MSM likes more than finding some woman they can exploit to write something about women as though no woman has ever said or thought this before.

It serves 2 purposes, dismissed allows they to ignore those who have better informed long term knowledge, and is also devisive eg examples where Guardian and others suddenly discover an isse, eg FGM and then heavily promote an individual who may be very well intentioned but doesn't have the deeper knowledge of campaign groups for have existed and campaign for years.

I feel really sad to say this, but just allows Guardion readers to temporarily empathise with this year's "in" issue for the media.

"Yes yes to all of the above and yet FR is a committed TWAW how does she not see? Every piece of safeguarding removed to appease men’s insistence that they are in fact women is giving any and all men access to the few safe spaces women have"

It's easy once you hold that trans women are women.

A lot of activists are like FR and are fully committed to, "Liberation has to be for everyone or it's not liberation" and that "Collective liberation only happens with collective responsibility".

It's similar arguments that facilitated PIE's entryism and gave it the imprimatur of respectability for a while.

Look NSPCC's initial reaction of default support for the 'rubber suit in the workplace engaging in sexual activity' member of staff. (Apologies for not including all the necessary dashes.)

Gurwinder Bhogal again:

When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion, and to very cleverly become stupid.
9:45 pm · 9 Nov 2018

Bhogal in conversation with Chris Williamson:

Transcript for people who don't watch videos (it's a rough transcript that also includes the advertising promotions): https://www.happyscribe.com/public/modern-wisdom/742-gurwinder-bhogal-17-shocking-lessons-about-human-psychology

That is a beautiful explanation that I really enjoyed reading. Thank you!

She's thinking very hard. She's trying not to see.

It's like epicycles in astronomy. There was a notion that planets had to orbit round the sun in circles, because circles are perfect and God only does perfection. But observations said that planetary motion didn't fit a perfect circle at all. Better telescopes were being built and navigation was bringing more and more data from more and more parts of the world. And the observations didn't confirm nice perfect circles at all and circles didn't predict planetary motion reliably for navigation.

Astronomers made up increasingly complicated models of circles and mini-circles (epicycles). Even great astronomers like Copernicus used epcicyles. But epeicycle models had to become more and more complicated to fit the known and increasingly reliable observed data and to make correct and useful predictions.

Then Kepler pointed out that observed planetary motion could be beautifully and simply explained by elliptical orbits. No need for epicyles. Once you see the ellipses it's very hard to un-see them. Even if you can see the complicated epicycle models as well, a simple explanatory model that makes reliable predictions sweeps them away.

And that why she's thinking so hard. Gender Identity Theory is like epicycles. An ever-in increasingly complicated difficult model to fit simple observations of actual human behaviour and actual human needs. She's like a religious astronomer working not to see the ellipses.

@MagpiePi "they’re just collateral damage when ‘being kind’ is the most important thing."

Yeah. Another curious bit of cognitive dissonance: funny how being kind to women isn't even on the map.

I'm sure this is exactly what she does think.

However, thinking this requires a really determined effort not to notice the substantial number of incidents in which trans women have engaged in sexual, and sometimes violent, assaults on women; the even larger number of extreme threats of sexual violence made by trans women against women on social media; and, finally, the amount of aggression and hostility displayed by trans activists (chanting, surrounding building, smoke bombs, water throwing, bomb threats to the venue etc) directed at women who choose to gather to discuss women's rights.

She must be trying really hard not to think.

The Graun is doing what the Labour party is doing. "We are very angry about VAWG and this shows we care about women".

While not in fact giving a fig about women's rights and prioritising gender ideology.

Smoke and mirrors.

I wonder how she squares her article with these charmers who rock up everywhere in some shape or form wherever woman want to speak?

Yes, that was the fragrant Sophie Grace Chappell, in an interview, saying with a little laugh that it wouldn't matter if there was a 'slight spike' in the murder statistics.

Yes, all of that is true. I guess I just find it quite depressing that her conviction here is so utterly undermined by her position on 'TW'. It makes this piece less authentic for me.

Just taking the article as it is, it is very strong and it's good to see it in the Guardian. There is a force and clarity about MVAWG in this article that is welcome. I think her point about the continuum between everyday misogyny and violence is a valid and well-established one.

I know nothing about the writer, and would disagree vehemently with her if, as you say, she is TWAW; I also agree about the cognitive dissonance between being TWAW, and this article.

But this article is clear and strong and angry and it's in the Guardian. It's a pity that such a forceful article is being seen only as evidence of the writer's cognitive dissonance rather than being welcomed as a powerful article about MVAWG.

I'm not disagreeing at all with other posters, I just think that whoever she is and whatever else she believes - and maybe she has expressed awful opinions elsewhere that I know nothing about - the writer has done a good job here in this specific article, and fair play to her for that.

Yes. The most depressing thing is, as you say, we're supposed to not draw attention to it. The notion of caring for women's safety is entirely a facade.

The reason that the spate of killings this summer has resonated with many of us is that it feels at once shocking and deeply familiar. Women can join the dots between the day-to-day indignities and stresses we face – the wolf whistles, the park flashers, the public transport gropes – and the stuff of nightmares. This is not hysterical or an overreaction.

As a side point, I think this is complete bollocks. If police are failing to protect women in domestic abuse situations then that is completely unrelated to wolf whistles etc. It’s like taking down all the traffic lights and then writing an article blaming increasing car accidents on an inexplicable rise in road rage. I wonder how long it will be til we have a functioning news media again.

But whenever we ask how we're supposed to tell the difference ... crickets.

I think we're meant to silently accept that some women will just have to be collateral damage. In fact, I remember one well-known tw saying as much.

The constant, and it seems unevidenced, insistence about the high level of trans suicide rates may be part of this. It sets up the idea of vulnerability and exposure to harm for trans people, to offset and balance the vulnerability and exposure to harm for women. It’s both sides are in the same boat – only we’re really not.

She acknowledges in that quote that women learn to fear men.
This does not exclude men who mentally identify as not men. Sigh.

Yeah, echoing some other points: they think transwomen really are "psychologically women" and are no more likely to engage in these kinds of male-type behaviour than any other women. Probably any transwomen they know personally are not obviously violent or oppressive (but most men aren't anyway!).

(I personally have never encountered any transwoman who didn't behave in a very male-type way. But none of them gave off particular abuser vibes either. But can you detect these things, in someone you don't know very well?)

They also massively downplay the idea that some man might pretend to be a woman just to be abusive. This often seems in part to hinge on the not quite explicitly stated idea that being a woman is such a shameful and inferior thing to be that no true man (one of the rightful masters of the universe) could ever stoop to even present himself as one.

FR iirc has a disability. I wonder if she'd be okay if her health authority dispatched some random bloke nurse to provide intimate care? Hopefully she'll never be in that position. I hope she has the cushion of enough wealth so that she can insulate herself from those types of indignity.

There was a good example on here a few months ago. A poster was at a party and a trans identifying man said some extremely inappropriate (referencing his genitalia) to her young daughter.

The poster was horrified, didn't know how to deal with it, but did admit that her reaction would have been quite different if it had been a regular man not wearing a dress.

She was appalled at the TIM, but somehow didn't see it as the same as a non trans man doing the same thing. She was self aware enough to work that out.

Of course, the usual suspects were lining up to say that this man had every right to talk about his genitals to little girls as he got so much grief in his life. 🙄

Sorry, that was @Lovelyview - I failed to quote.