Ash Sarkar on the News Agents - the backpedaling continues...

Maybe the CPS could employ Ash to see whether assault allegations 'pass the smell test'.

So having heard two accounts of an incident, Ash decides to believe one and disregard the other.

I wonder what makes Ash believe the male, over the woman alleging sexual assault?

Next few paragraphs, on women's safety, media representation, and the EHRC:

I can imagine that some people reading this book might think that I'm not taking threats to women's safety seriously enough. Whether it's in prisons or toilet cubicles, women are physically vulnerable to those who might abuse that proximity to harm them. Those who describe themselves as "gender critical" feminists would argue that if the threshold for accessing women's spaces is dropped to simply identifying as a woman, predatory men will do exactly that in order to target their victims. They point to examples of trans women who've committed sexual assault, such as Karen White and Isla Bryson, as evidence that cisgender women are at risk from violence perpetrated by trans people, particularly in prison settings. But would imposing a blanket rule that trans women should be incarcerated in men's prisons really make people safer? The first thing to point out is that we're talking about small numbers of people. According to the latest available data, between 2021 and 2022, only six trans women were housed in female prisons. Between 2020 and 2022, there were no reported sexual assaults carried out by transgender women in women's prisons. The same can't be said for trans victims of sexual assault in men's prisons - in 2019 alone, there were eleven such cases. Though gender critical campaigners, politicians and the media all focus on the risk posed by trans women in female prisons, the fact is that they're far more likely to be victims of sexual assault in men's facilities. Surely that matters as much as the safety of cisgender women inmates?

I don't want to dwell too long on the "who goes in which prison" question - we incarcerate far too many people for non-violent offences anyway, many of whom could have been prevented from committing crimes if we had a functioning social safety net. Ultimately I think the case-by-case assessment of offenders, where prison officials and psychologists determine where trans offenders should be placed, taking into account both their safety needs and any potential safeguarding risk to others, is probably the best and fairest system. What I think is important here is that a narrow policy discussion about prisons takes up a disproportionate amount of space when we're talking about trans people in general. By virtue of its overrepresentation, we end up with a misleading and distorted image of trans people. It's like only talking about Muslims in relation to terrorism, black people to knife crime, or women to false rape allegations - it demonises and obscures the reality of that entire demographic. Sure, some individuals from these community groups do these things, but they're in a tiny minority. Giving any group greater rights and freedoms involves some degree of risk, because you can't guarantee that nobody will abuse them. Even the most hardline conservative would probably agree that it's bad to punish a whole group of people, to curtail or restrict their rights, based on the actions of a tiny few. But that's exactly the logic of trans-hostile feminists when it comes to transgender people.

For a cause which purports to be sticking up for all women, transphobia is something of an elite enterprise. Kemi Badenoch - a former Equalities minister under the Conservatives - shed light on the strategy behind the rolling back of trans rights in the UK. Key to the project was having "gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the postions that mattered most in Equalities and Health": i.e. stacking decision-making bodies not with independent, evidence-led experts, but with those who were ideologically opposed to transgender inclusion. In 2023, Vice News reported that seven senior officials quit the Equality and Human Rights Commision due to the organisation shifting in a more "transphobic direction"; rather than standing up for trans rights, they'd been providing the government with advice on how to exclude most trans people from using the toilets of their choice. Trans-hostile voices are well represented in the mainstream media, from supposedly left-of-centre outlets like the Guardian and Observer to the right-wing Spectator. Meanwhile, transgender newspaper columnists are basically unheard of.

Next couple of pages:

I don't think most politicians who get bounced into taking these positions are themselves committed ideological transphobes. But they're pushed, through media and other forms of lobbying, by those who are. As Shon Faye points out in her groundbreaking book, The Transgender Issue, The Times and the Sunday Times between them ran more than 300 articles -almost all of them hostile - about transgender people in one year alone. And the impression you'd get from this media coverage was that we were subject to something like an invasion from within. Whether in hospitals, schools, refuges sports, prisons or even just the census, trans people were apparently popping up like dandelions and disrupting the day-to-day functioning of institutions through their mere existence. Even just recognising that some people might be trans was enough to invite criticism: "Census trans question under scrutiny for 'confusion'" went one headline in The Times, while another signalled "Anger at transgender handbook for children in care". These pieces are fairly typical of the news offering - I'm not even looking at the comment pages. This steady drumbeat of reporting builds up a foreboding sense that trans = bad, and there's just too damn much of it. It's crude, but it's effective at closing down space for politicians to argue for more trans-inclusive policies.

Ideological transphobes seem to live in an alternate dimension, where genitals are central to every social interaction - and trans people want nothing more than to focus your attention on which ones they might have. In February 2023, a Tory councillor named Ruby Sampson alleged that a trans woman in a pub toilet turned around to her and said: "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis." Weird, right? (Not least because I've never heard of an absorbent penis.) "The close proximity [of the stalls] made it much scarier still," Sampson wrote in an article for the Daily Mail. "What if she turned violent?" And look, if someone said that to me in a ladies' loo, I too would be a bit perturbed. "I felt like I had been flashed," she said, "as the penis image was put in my mind by her announcement. It was said to intimidate."

But just stop and think for a minute. How likely do you think it is that a random person in a bathroom would say, "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis," to an absolute stranger? Much like the average pub toilet, this story didn't pass the smell test for me when it was published. Then, a couple of days later, a transgender woman posted a thread on Twitter. She suspected it had been her in the loos with Ruby Sampson. She'd been attending a vigil for murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, and nipped into a nearby pub for a drink with friends afterwards. There was no toilet paper or hand towels in the toilets - and what she said to Ruby Sampson was that she was going to wipe her hands, after washing them on her jeans. Jeans, penis, potato, potahto.

I get that people make honest mistakes. But it seems this one was made precisely because someone saw a trans woman enter a public bathroom and was fixated on what their body might be like under their clothes. Indeed, Sampson wrote at length about how she perceived this stranger's appearance: "She wore a skimpy top which made her shoulders seem bigger. And she spoke with a strikingly deep voice." It sounded like she was trapped in her own personal version of Kath Day-Knight's lesbian panic - when you're thinking about something obsesively, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere. Nightmares and fantasies are but a hair's breadth apart, and you'll warp your perceptions to fit what you've primed yourself to encounter.

Ash doesn't believe that a penis person in a women's toilet is likely to show her his penis?

Has Ash met any men?

Here's what's tricky about gender: every time we look for a physical characteristic to pin it to, it wriggles and squirms out of our grasp. We find exceptions to every rule, hard facts which turn out to be assumptions. What makes a woman - or more precisely, what makes us willing to treat someone as a woman - isn't fixed.

"...And that's why it's essential that we use it as a determining factor for any situation where physical sex is highly important."

Yeah why not

Usual set of arguments. My bingo card is getting fuller with each page!

Next bit from that chapter:

The panellists were literally surrounded, like it was a theatre-in-the-round, by the studio audience. And somehow, anti-trans activists had managed to infiltrate the crowd. Any time that Munroe or Caitlyn (both of them trans women) opened their mouths to speak, they were met by a barrage of vulgar abuse. Trans-hostile feminists screamed the word penis at the top of their lungs - Venice Allan amongst them - even when cisgender women like me were talking. It was later alleged that the audience had been actively encouraged to heckle by producers. Hundreds of complaints were made to OFCOM, the broadcast regulator. But ultimately, the hecklers had the final word - their slogan that "women can't have penises" was adopted by the mainstream press.

Though many feminist and LGBTQ rights groups condemned the sticker campaign, the slogan became prevalent within a section of the feminist movement who believe that trans people shouldn't be accepted as their chosen gender. "CAN A WOMAN HAVE A PENIS?" became the standard interrogation for a particular kind of online transphobe, who would inevitably scoff and harrumph if the reply was yes. The only acceptable answer in these online contexts was one which excluded trans people. Journalists like Kay Burley, whether due to ideological affinity or social media osmosis, ended up being mainstream mouthpieces for the talking points of online extremists.

Why even ask whether a woman can have a penis? On the face of it, the "answer" seems obvious. You cast your mind back to the first thing you learned about men-bits and lady-bits at primary school and manage to splutter out a "no". But maybe, just maybe, the intricate tapestry of our world has more to it than what we teach to six-year-olds. Biological sex is complicated. Chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs, sexual organs and other physical characteristics don't always coalesce neatly around either end of the binary. According to Human Rights Watch, approximately 1.7 per cent of the world's population is intersex, that is, born with some combination of male and female biological traits. For some of these people, their external genitalia might not match up with their other bodily characteristics. It would take an especially cruel and unempathetic person to say that the shape of their genitals defines them more than how they live in the world. So, stopping to consider it, we'd accept that women with intersex conditions - some of whom may have male sexual or reproductive organs - are women. We certainly wouldn't think it's right to dictate what toilets they should use, or which changing rooms to access.

"Sure," I hear you say, "but that's a tiny minority of individuals. Most of the time, for most people, whether they have a penis determines which spaces they can access." But think about it a little more deeply. There are some contexts in which my sexual and reproductive organs really impact how I'm being treated as a cisgender woman. It matters for women who can't get the right treatment for endometriosis, because doctors are dismissive of their pain. It matters for women and girls who can't afford period products. It matters for black and Asian women, who are more likely than their white counterparts to be diagnosed with late-stage breast and ovarian cancers. It matters in contexts of sexual violence, strip searches and other forms of physical violation and degradation.

But most of the time, people aren't treating me as a woman because they've seen what's in my jeans. It's because I outwardly conform to what people think a woman is, through my clothes, build, hair, behaviour and voice. None of these things define a woman. There are cisgender women with short hair, muscular builds, deep voices, butch presentation - you wouldn't want them kicked out of the loos for failure to conform. In practice, my gender is being reflected back to me by others on the basis of how present myself, rather than any intimate knowledge of my body (and thank the Lord for that). The fact is, when I'm in the women's loos, I don't know if the person in the next cubicle over has a penis or not. I'm not peeking under the door, and they're not especially likely to show me. Other people's genitals are generally not something you see in the ladies' toilets. Gender segregation in bathrooms and changing rooms function on the basis of adherence to social norms, rather than biological ones. If someone looks like a woman, and in the words of Nick Ferrari, walks through the door "with a woman on it", that's usually all there is to it. You're not going to look down their pants to copper-bottom your first impression.

Here's what's tricky about gender: every time we look for a physical characteristic to pin it to, it wriggles and squirms out of our grasp. We find exceptions to every rule, hard facts which turn out to be assumptions. What makes a woman - or more precisely, what makes us willing to treat someone as a woman - isn't fixed. We're talking about clusters of characteristics, rather than a definitive list. You might not accept the idea that trans women are women, or that trans men are men, but the fact is that you've probably shared single-gender spaces with them without even thinking about it. Our ability to accept complexity and nuance in the real world is much better than it is when we're debating issues out of context. But questions like "can a woman have a penis" box politicians in. Unless they give a stupid and reductive response, they're pilloried as being clueless by a media class who were only ever willing to accept "no" for an answer. Keir Starmer was excoriated for even hinting at the idea that there might be exceptions to the rule that women don't have penises, which prompted relentlessly negative coverage in the Telegraph, the Spectator and The Times, and drew the ire of J.K. Rowling. Since then, the Prime Minister has rolled back on trans rights, promising to exclude trans women from female hospital wards and saying that trans women don't have the right to use female toilets. Politicians may get bullied, but it's minorities who pay the price.

I suspect that she and others like her are blinded because of incorrect premises.

One being the minority hierarchy of power. But the other the whole idea that there is a coherent meaningful social group of people who have a "trans identity".

She is incapable of other lenses.

It's an interesting phenomena, it used to be that going to university taught people how to see things from differernt points of view, now it seems to do the opposite.

So where was she during the ' Trans women are women No debate era?' Was she saying that then? What about the 'When people say they are women, they are' pre Isla Bryson era after which suddenly a person who said they were a woman really wasn't?

From reading the Times review posted, it sounds like she had a fine old time sneering and abusing people she didn't know who didn't agree with her, then she found that actually when it all got turned on her a tiny bit ( she married a White man and they joked she'd been colonised between the sheets) she decided it actually wasn't that nice and she didn't like it. She will do exactly what The progressive Left in the form of Stonewall etc do, and walk away whistling ' not me guv' and take no responsibility for their sneering superiority, their turning a blind eye once they've sent their social media attack dogs after people who disagree with them ( Owen Jones style) and their confused and hectoring luxury beliefs rhetoric.

This from the Spiked article on her:
Sarkar encounters a working-class kid – just 17 – in a West Ham top. He’s nervous and inarticulate. He fluffs his lines. He says there are too many people coming here and ‘taking our jobs’ but he also says ‘they’re not working’. Sarkar looks right into the camera, at Novara’s audience of well-heeled faux-radicals, and arches an eyebrow. And there it was, the look that would come to define what passes for leftism today: the cocked eyebrow of bourgeois derision

This. This reaction after Brexit (she does the interview after Brexit to ask working class white people why they voted for it),. this attitude that laid bare the utter contempt for working class people that so many lefties who previously had claimed to champion the working classes, is one of the key things that turned me off the Left. So many of my friends espoused similar attitudes.

She has long been a total idiot.

To understand would be to concede they had misunderstood before and these people are far too clever to ever be wrong (unless and to the extent they can get a book deal out of it).

Reading the excerpt posted from eatfigs, it's obvious she hasn't understood the gender-critical arguments at all. I don't know whether that's because she genuinely hasn't grasped what her opponents are saying, or whether she is wilfully misrepresenting them. It does feel as if debate with someone like that is completely futile.

Exactly - we hear this so much from politicians - "we need to be able to have open and respectful conversations about this topic"

Yes agree - go on then, let's have the conversation! But in real practical terms not vague waffle

It's important to talk openly about where we, as society, establish the threshold for being legally and socially recognised as your chosen gender.

Go for it, Ash. Where's your threshold?

She can have any number of penis's if she chops them fast enough

I wanted to speak from the perspective of being a woman of colour, who didn't always feel welcome or understood in feminist spaces, and who could draw on that experience to empathise with transgender women.

Tsk. cis woman of colour, showcasing your innate cis privilege by arrogantly assuming your so called oppression in the absolute nazi hell hole of white privileged feminist spaces is in any way like the utterly horrific active encouragement of Literal Genocide by Trans Hostile forces of Late capitalist euro centric cis heteronormativity
#DoBetter

@eatfigs
Okay Ash thank you for that. So ... Can a woman have a penis or not?

Some extracts of her book have been posted on Twitter:

Can a woman have a penis? Once upon a time, this was the kind of thing you'd expect to find scrawled on a toilet wall. Then, all of a sudden, in the spring of 2022, it was all over political media. We'd graduated from asking "what is a woman?" to peering quizzically down people's trousers. Any time a front-bench politician went on LBC, or Sky News, or Talk TV, they could expect to be asked whether they think a woman can have a penis. Troupes of MPs - including Ed Davey, Rishi Sunak and PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer - were marched into studios and pressed on what precise constellation of genitalia a woman can have. Just in case that was too classy, some journalists combined their knob-preoccupation with toilet talk. "The trans woman with a penis would use which lavatory?" barked LBC's Nick Ferrari at then-Shadow Education Minister Bridget Phillipson during the 2024 general election campaign. "She's got a door with a woman on it, she's got a door with a bloke on it, which one does she go in?" It was like the keeper of the Bridge of Death had taken a particularly lewd turn.

There is no clearer example of an issue where minority rights are presented as being in conflict with, or threatening to, majority rights than the "transgender issue". Even that phrase, reducing an entire community to a political problem, is inherently dehumanising. It's misleading to try and boil the entire terrain of the conflict to a single issue, like self-identification, puberty blockers, gender recognition certificates or pronouns. All of these issues are various fronts in the same war - one where the very existence of trans people, being able to live as themselves, is at stake. Transgender people are consistenty presented as a dangerous minority, seeking to impose their ideology - and their bodies - on others. Whether it's the NHS using trans-inclusive language or young people socially transitioning, the story is always framed in the same way - trans people are amalign influence and want to corrupt otherwise "normal" people and institutions. Once more, we're seeing a minority community - in this instance, 0.5 per cent of the population in England and Wales - being turned into hyper-visible hate figures. And yet again, real, material vulnerabilities are rendered invisible. Trans people experience greater rates of homelessness than the rest of the population, with a quarter of transgender Britons having experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. One in eight trans people report having been attacked while at work, and half of all trans and non-binary people report having to hide their identity from employers because they're afraid of being discriminated against. Transgender people are at the sharp edge of material dispossession, while at the same time being used by the press and politicians as a means of distracting people away from economic issues. It's a classic minority rule strategy of division.

It's not my intention to close down good-faith conversations. It's important to talk openly about where we, as society, establish the threshold for being legally and socially recognised as your chosen gender. But that discussion has been hijacked by a highly motivated ideological network to clamp down on the rights of transgender people. They don't want to consider the idea that trans people, and transgender women in particular, are just as deserving of respect as they are. And they've managed to conveyor-belt themselves into mainstream media and politicsin order to radicalise others and create a hostile policy environment when it comes to trans rights.

Fear and hatred exist in feedback loop. What this chapter is about is how those primal impulses are nurtured to fuel a sense of panic around demographics, i.e. the composition of the population. In examining the moral panic around transgender people, and racist conspiracy theories around the Great Replacement, I want to show how an obsessive fixation with identity minorities fills the space where class consciousness should be. Though I'll be talking about first one, and then the other, both transphobia and the Great Replacement open up onto the same moral panic - that the "right" people, i.e. white people, aren't having enough children, and that unless authoritarian measures are taken, a multi-racial nation will emerge in which the dominant group no longer enjoy numerical supremacy. This is a key component of identity formation - defining who you are by creating hate figures out of who you're not.

So back to whether women can have penises. This phrase has its origins in trans-hostile political activism. Stickers in the shape of - well, you can imagine - started popping up around the country in 2018, bearing the words "Women can't have penises" (an activist called Venice Allan took credit for the design). That same year, I took part in a Channel 4 discussion as part of a show called Genderquake alongside Caitlyn Jenner, Munroe Bergdorf and Germaine Greer. Over the phone, producers had assured me that it would be a respectful, collegial debate where all sides of the issue could hear each other out and put their own case across. I wanted to speak from the perspective of being a woman of colour, who didn't always feel welcome or understood in feminist spaces, and who could draw on that experience to empathise with transgender women. I know how it feels not to fit the mould of idealised femininity. But what actually ended up happening was, to use the technical term, an absolute shitshow.

Interesting review in the Times

Ash Sarkar’s misadventures in the culture war
In her leaden book, Minority Rule, the Corbyn fangirl and ‘viral outrage generator’ looks back at her years on the political front line — it is a tale of recriminations and stark failure

https://archive.is/79o4S

Of the three mains on Novara Ash was always the most dogmatic. Bastini has been drifting towards being anti identity stuff for a long time though he steers away from trans stuff as far as i can see, Michael Walker made some mild criticisms of trans stuff a few years ago and there was a storm where he was targeted. Ash is still friends with him.

Galloway and Hitchens both accept biology they have been on Novara. Notably they haven't had any of the many lefty women who thinks genderism is capitalist sexist nonsense on the programme.

So you can platform a male right wing Mail columnist, but not women who appear in the Morning Star.

The thing is though for all Ash says if the bakesale had been to raise money for families of the people who were kidnapped on October 7th then I have no doubt that she would still support people who said they felt "unsafe" because of a bakesale.

Shes the epitome of a cool girl calling the rest of us squares for having boundaries when her status and wealth innoculates her from the dangers of her luxury communism.