Simon Jenkins - reliably wrong

Oi! I was at university soon after 1987 and I’m 25 years younger than Simon Jenkins. Try 1963 [misses point]

I don’t think I can always tell. In fact, I'm
pretty certain I can’t. There are always credible accounts on these threads of people who’ve had work colleagues for a long time and didn’t know. What nobody has explained is why that makes such an enormous difference. Sounds like the idea that if your wife doesn’t find out, there’s nothing wrong with shagging other people.

According to Simon, none of the old school ever campaigned or worked to achieve legal recognition of transition. It all happened by magic. If you believe that mate, I have a bridge to sell you.

Anybody fancy writing a reply to Guardian letters?

"It's ok to decide whether to be sexist and discriminate against women or not being sexist and respect women."

Is basically the argument here.

I mean who is going to win here, every time?

All transwomen are nice and ago doesn't exist is a conversation from several years ago now.

Jenkins is one of what I thought was a dying breed; pundits who were presented as wise men who knew plenty about anything. He doesn't seem to have shown much intellectual curiousity at all, so I think his no-doubt expensive education might have been wasted.

I mean, FFS, there's a café I used to love going to that I now tend to avoid because the toilets are mixed-sex. There's a transwoman who works there, one that I think (despite the 6 foot stature) Simon would see as "the real deal", and no, Simon, I wouldn't feel safe sharing with them. And my discomfort would be no more or less than with any other male who may walk in. The sticking point being, Simon, that oh-so-insignificant issue of any male being able to overpower or kill me with his bare hands should he so choose - and, the stats show, a far greater likelihood of trying whatever he calls himself.

(Take note, Mr. "no evidence of risk, and btw the world is flat and aliens built the pyramids" Employment Judge Kemp).

Well that, or they are good at 'knowing while not knowing' (cf religious belief). I'd like to see more research, and on the correlation with belief in transgenderism. I've noticed that people don't change their minds much about this: they just go, like me, from vaguely apprehending the issue, to educating themselves, to going WTAF? Or, in the alternative, they believe the whole package and won't be talked out of it. Is it about personality type, timing of exposure, or what?

Jenkins obviously knows nothing about it, to an embarrassing extent, and I suspect he would be in the WTAF? category if he wasn't too lazy to do the reading.

Maybe this aversion to Maths is the issue? If you don't "get" proportions, I can see how quotients for jobs could be a problem. Ditto...

• statistics (98% of sexual assaults, Simon!)

• ratios (the proportion of transwomen jailed for sexual offences?)

• surface area (does he know how much is taken up by male v. female children at play? can he extrapolate this to Girlguiding?)

• probability theory (just open one door to one of your transwoman friends, and watch 1) how many female victims of sexual assault lower their eyes in fear... & 2) the kind of male who soon after follows them...)

• set theory (this one's a particular challenge, I imagine)

• algebra (also likely a problem - all those xx s and xy s, who knows what they really signify? 🤔)

Maybe he could start with some...

• Triggernometry (episodes)?

Too much? OK, here's A Kindergarten-level exercise in ratios, to explain quotients.

All you have to do is count, Simon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33rd_G8_summit (link pasted in place of recalcitrant picture - most posters will know the one!)

(I found the article genuinely offensive - offensively stupid, as others have pointed out, but also, as a woman who used to have a word and protections to call her own, just straightforwardly, deeply offensive).

Simon, mate..... no bloke gets to tell women who we do and don't let into our spaces and prizes.

Fuck right off, you utter prick.

Are men really that bad do we think? Or do they play pretend to be kind?

I’m only musing, as DH has just as good a perception as me I think.

This only comes to mind as we were driving the other day and there was a ‘woman’ crossing the road ahead of us, holding an umbrella that obscured the face. I immediately clocked it was a man.

DH said ‘Is that a bloke?’ Then 2 seconds later said ‘That’s definitely a bloke, look at the walk’

It makes sense to me though that women are better at telling immediately, but sometimes I do wonder if the men lie to ‘be kind’ and notice more than they would admit.

Crikey. Such strategic ambiguity....

😂👏👍 very clever 😂

That looks interesting, and I feel that I ought to watch it.

But bloody hell, it's not Friday night viewing! 😁

I wonder if Jenkins is from the same world as this corker of a programme from BBC2 in 1973:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06c83f4

about the Transex Liberation Group? As you watch it, do count (A) how many women appear and (B) how often the participants consider how women might be affected as opposed to (C) men being affected.

Answers: A - 0; B - never; C - yes, worries about deception

The whole point about the Guides/WI is that their charitable purposes are girls and women. They are not there for boys and men unless they rewrite those articles.
As I always say, do write a letter or several.

I met him once. He was a Cnut.

He's also opposed to any housebuilding while owning at least two houses himself.

And yet we keep being told that "it isn't about stereotypes".

Bloody hell. So he’s an innumerate who doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know? I wonder what other depths of ignorance he plumbs? That suggests he’s never read a scientific paper or anything involving statistics with any understanding.

Nora called it. In 1974.
Us "terfs" have always been here.

“…and I find myself thinking, it would be a man …”

Jenkins' penultimate sentence, "This is a real mess", links to an article by Jess O'Thomson, which is indeed a mess, though that might not be what Jenkins meant. But Jenkins own piece is even worse. He doesn't seem to know what a GRC is for, or what the issues are with the WI. He uses "common sense", "clearly" and "plainly" to avoid having to justify his assertions. While he complains about "fudge" and calls for "nuance", he doesn't say what the difference is. He says "change comes about fastest when the least fuss is made", but surely making a fuss can accelerate change as easily as it can put the brakes on? He really doesn't seem to have given any of this much thought at all, and doesn't seem to have even wondered why women might want or need single-sex spaces.

I could forgive it more if it was Amanda Lear. Then they would be old men leaning into the counterculture of their youth.

Of course, Amanda has blotted her copybook by vehemently denying being trans.

But citing Jan Morris as your example is just so bloody public school.

Hadley Freeman on X has quoted Nora Ephron on Jan Morris and what JM thought a woman was.

https://x.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1999516641160200304/photo/1

"And I wonder about all this, wonder how anyone in this day and age can think that this is what being a woman is about" (Nora Ephron, 1974)

And theres also a chance he's being manipulated by the men around him.

It makes sense to be charming around journalist, media types and politicians. In a way they wouldn't bother with women without any contacts.

It's always Jan bloody Morris isn't it?

William Dalrymple on the Empire Podcast has revelled in how trans-friendly he is due to his friendship with Jan Morris.

None of them wonder why Jan Morris was hanging out purely with other ex-public schoolboys and not in the kitchen making tea or doing the laundry with the other women.