Guilty Feminist on Triggernometry

As an adopted person their false equivalence makes me particularly furious.

The adoption argument is one that can only really be made by people who don't have adoption in their families. Being Irish, I have quite a lot in my family.

I could go on and on about this, but if DFW thinks that birth parent and adoptive parent are the same thing, and therefore there should be no distinction between biological sex and certificated sex... she might like to ask herself why so many adoptees seek out their birth parents.

These are not distinctions without a difference.

Total arrogance. I would not expect her to have deigned to descend to Mumsnet however it’s still a bold claim to be the first one making any argument.

Thread about adoption - this is just one from five years ago.

The argument around adoption seems to be -

There are both biological and legal parents ergo there are biological and legal women.

I don't agree the same logic applies to being a woman/female but even if I did mainstream trans activism won't admit that men with an identity are male.

They won't even admit that women and 'legal' women are different so why the fuck are they even making this argument?

We accept anyone can take on a parent identity and be thought of as one. No-one questions it you call your Aunt who raised you 'Mum'. Therefore any man can take on a woman identity and we should just accept that without question.

Again the first issue with this is nobody is expected to pretend Lucy's aunt is literally the woman who birthed her. I doubt any social workers would be hounded out of their profession if the aunt was referred to as an aunt by them, despite Lucy choosing to call her mum.

The second issue is that 'parent' is both a noun and a verb. To parent someone or something is an action as well as the word for the two people who created you. This is commonly understood english language.

If we apply the same reasoning as to why adoptive parents are parents (they also parent in the verb sense) to trans then the argument being made is that there is such a thing as 'womaning'.

That it is also a verb, an action that can be done by anyone. It moves it from being the name, the noun, for adult human females into something that can be achieved by any man who just tries hard enough at 'womaning' or follows a prescriptive list of 'womaning' actions.

The notion of something, an action, called 'womaning' can only lead to very sexist, misogynistic stereotypes of all women because those are the only things a man could hope to emulate.

He can't do the physiological stuff like puberty, periods, pregnancy, menopause. He can't just be a woman as women just are. All he can do is paint his nails, wear a skirt, insist he now cries at romcoms and demand that everyone lies to his face.

The adoption argument is one that was discussed years ago on here and dispensed with. It hasn't cropped up recently (so far as I have seen) presumably because it is so bad. The arrogance of her, saying at 38 minutes into the interview: "the adoption argument, I'm the first one making it", as a reason why KK wouldn't have heard it before

I've watched the whole thing so I claim my medal too! I literally had my head in my hands towards the end. The last 20 minutes -the 'Couples Therapy's bit - was seriously weird, along with arrogant, stupid, misguided, manipulative and highly inappropriate. It was really horrifying. I'm not always the biggest fan of KK but I think he deserved a sainthood for staying so calm and polite for nearly 2.5 hours

I need to watch some Helen Joyce interviews to bring myself back down to earth

I don’t think the bit on adoption was supposed to have a direct relation to trans. Was it not just to show that different cultures can see things differently? And so by acknowledging that, you then go on to see gender as not just women and men? Bit of a leap but that’s what I thought she was trying to do with it.

Also being a stereotype from the left it’s also to show that certain cultures are better than ours? Of course the stereotype of Victorian orphans had some truth but she also ignored the fact that lots of children would have been raised well by people who weren’t their biological parents.

I did too!
The bit about adoption made zero sense

I thought I’d try and listen to it as an experiment in tolerance to see if I could listen without shouting. I didn’t last very long!

I wish the boys had asked her how open the indigenous groups she was talking about were about homosexuality. (I don’t actually know the answer but I’m guessing that they found cross-dressing more acceptable than being openly gay and would be interested to find out)

It made me laugh when she was trying to insist that all the word waffle about trans stuff covered new ideas that they’d never heard before. “Well, maybe the bit about adoption” said Konstantin. “That’s because it doesn’t make any sense” I shouted!

I started listening to this, thinking I could have it in the background while I work, but omg it is enfuriating. For someone who allegedly wants to discuss 'ideas' she does not really like it when someone else does not buy her 'ideas' as gospel, does she?

In one of the Jeeves stories, Bertie has a friend who has to be persuaded to knock off the alcohol because it's bad for his health.

He then tells Bertie, "I'm fine now, I've discovered this great new health drink called absinthe."

I have no idea why I just thought of that.

She said several times that she knows cults, she was raised in a cult, she's super wary of cults - and yet she has no understanding that the whole genderbollocks is 100% a cult.

I do feel bad for her when she realises ....

I watched all 2 hours + of it today. <polishes medal>

I can't think of any salient point she made - there just weren't any. Many many many words, but no points of any interest or sense.

She's very keen on advocating for mens rights though - good on her. Is this why she is "guilty"?

I've said this before (in connection with Rory Stewart) but it applies here.

There's a certain sort of bloke, it's always a bloke, who pops up occasionally in Question Time audiences. He interjects with a question like "why don't we just have a united Ireland?" and sits back with a smug smile as if he's the first person to think of it.

DFW strikes me as someone who rarely ventures outside her echo chamber, and seems to think the reason we disagree with her is that we've just never heard her really basic takes.

She seemed to think the reason people don’t agree with her is because they don’t understand.

It reminds me of when transactivists pop over to MN and drop what they seem to think is a really insightful point that we simply haven’t thought of before, as if the problem was the analogy that was used or the way it had been explained to us previously, and if they could only find the right way to convey it, we would finally understand the obvious truth that men are women.

She was embarrassingly awful - six conversations we will find even more difficult to have if we mimic her approach.

Oh dear god - I'm 12 minutes in and she's talking about a bus driver dressed as a clown and Oscar Wilde's hair🤦🏻‍♂️ Konstantin has his 'WTF but I'm being polite' face on. She's so out of her depth and talking total bollocks

On a totally superficial note, she's a gorgeous woman but is wearing a hideous pair of glasses that are very distracting

I used to love the guilty feminist. It became more nuanced, intersectional, but I was quite disappointed by her book. I unsubscribed when they put out a statement on socials about not tolerating hate when they had the trans woman from Edinburgh refuge or whatever it was. So I can't bring myself to listen to this!

"She had this very idealised view of these groups."

yes. She doesn't have any depth of knowledge but went there anyway.

'I found it frustrating as there were a few moments I thought Konstantin could have handled better'

He and Francis are not quite as clued up about gender ideology as they could be. It was only a few years ago that they had their minds opened by Kellie Jay Keen on their podcast. Before that, they were fully signed up to the 'born in the wrong body' nonsense

I've listened to nearly 2/3 now, not heard her before. She's using arguments from 2018! She's so sure she's sooo clever. Honestly the level of argument is poor and rambling.
I'm infuriated she doesn't seem to understand the issues but would rather talk about random shit. Fiddling whilst Rome burns! No wonder my "feminist" friends are so confused about what's actually happening - they've been led astray by her.

If Deborah is sincere about creating bridges with the right, the piece of advice I’d give her is that when someone disagrees with you it doesn’t mean that they don’t understand your viewpoint. She has this irritating way of being very condescending and explaining the most basic things. She took forever to explain that other countries have different cultures and explaining what a spectrum is. Most people understand this. She seemed to think the reason people don’t agree with her is because they don’t understand.

I watched the majority of it. I found it frustrating as there were a few moments I thought Konstantin could have handled better. For example, when talking about indigenous groups having multiple categories, why not challenge the fact that some indigenous groups don’t accept gay men as men and put them in another category. She had this very idealised view of these groups. Also there was a confusion between categories in a specific society and understanding there are two sexes.

As I mentioned on the other thread about her book (which has also segued into discussing this interview overnight), I don’t think she would compare transwomen to clowns if she were being paid or pressured by them - it’s not exactly their dream narrative, is it?

TBF, Deborah isn’t stupid. She wouldn’t be where she is if she was.

Therefore, she’s either:

1. Being paid to promote the ideology (common for influencers)
2. Too scared to speak out/ doesn’t want to be cancelled

It’s not often you come across someone who uses so many words to say so little. I kept drifting off.