Jane Clare Jones, her friends and their impact

I follow Helen Joyce because she says interesting and important things. I don't have some parasocial thing going on where I think I'm Helen's friend and I have to share all her personal beefs (I'm sure she has some, though I can't remember her mentioning them - which should be a lesson to others)

The advantage of being a journalist is that you understand how to communicate things to people who might not already know about them and can identify the lede.

That's exactly it - "side order of drama". Just can't be doing with it. There's enough drama in having to fight for our right to exist as a sex class and campaign to prevent women and children being harmed by a dangerous, unevidenced ideology.

I could tell Glinner this, but I don't think he can help himself. And I sort of understand why, given all the friends who have betrayed him, but it often gets in the way of the point he wants to make.

I have never seen JCJ on a news programme, but I can easily imagine her taking up the whole interview with denunciations of those women who she doesn't want to be associated with. Except in her case it's not friends who stabbed her in the back, it's the plebs who fail to recognise her as the thought leader who gets to speak on their behalf.

I saw Glinner speaking on a news programme once and he spent the entire interview detailing his spats with various people, all of which might well have been justified but would have been completely incomprehensible to anyone watching.

I think we can recognise people who communicate well even if we disagree with them.

I'll be honest, the main problem I have with JCJ is similar to the main problem I have with Glinner, and that's got relatively little to do with how Glinner sometimes misjudges a tweet or his last joke fell flat. It's because with Glinner there's always a side order of drama based around some person who he feels has disrespected him, like when he decided that the real enemies of the people were Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, and he went on and on and on about it for months, maybe years.

I even had some sympathy for his original complaint about them, but come on man, life's too short. I'm convinced this is why JKR kept her distance from him for so long, because Glinner always comes with that side order of personal drama, and he will insist on lugging you into his latest feud.

JCJ is similar, except that it's not just her, it's her clique, and while Glinner didn't go to university, the JCJ lot never tire of reminding you about how many degrees in "studies" they have. It's all very teenage.

I follow Helen Joyce because she says interesting and important things. I don't have some parasocial thing going on where I think I'm Helen's friend and I have to share all her personal beefs (I'm sure she has some, though I can't remember her mentioning them - which should be a lesson to others)

I used to follow her and noticed a while ago that she can be quite aggressive / prickly / falls out with people. That's not a crime but I unfollowed because I don't like being involved in spats and side-taking and am not interested in being seen as someone's "friend" who therefore agrees with them. I follow GC accounts but prefer the calm, wise, funny and relatively detached.

But because of that I never really have a clue who's fallen out with who this week. I have no time for arguments about mean girls, head girls or whatever. I have a view on the pronoun issue but I am happy to put my view without having a row about it.

I was here for the Moldies hoo-ha and to me it's the same old same old playground clique-forming behaviour that I just don't do because I can't be arsed, never could (and to be fair, would be utterly crap at). People who do it, I politely side-step.

Agree with PPs JCJ is to be admired in some ways, she is very intelligent and brave too.

So it's just a random person on twitter then criticising?

I think FWS know they have the respect of most women, and most sex-realists (or in fact just realists). I don't think we should be too bothered if random individuals on twitter criticise their approach. They've clearly been staggeringly successful by any metric and I'm sure feel fairly confident - at this point - that the 3 of them know what they're doing!

I think the same is true of KJK she's a deeds as well as words sort of woman and fairly single minded in her focus.

Compared to the threats they get from angry men, random people criticising their approach must seem like a fairly minor thing? People are free to go ahead and try and do something about repealing the GRA themselves if they want?

I know who you mean and she has been saying similar things but I think the "unknown" in this case was someone different.

It's obviously OK for people to think the GRA should be repealed but both FWS and Akua Reindorf had very good explanations for why they're not prioritising it.

And I'm absolutely gobsmacked at some of the rhetoric aimed towards Sex Matters and For Women Scotland in the last few days, because they're focusing on what they think is achievable rather than what some other people want them to focus on.

Same here, and I'm normally from the handwavey 'feminists have always disagreed' school of thought. The criticism of FWS who, as far as I'm aware, still consist of three unpaid women blew my head.

Anyway JCJ: I retain a small soft spot for her because she stuck her head over the parapet when it was far from safe to do so, and I'll always respect that. However that spot just got a bit smaller after reading that 'shouting in parks' jibe in the op's link (not JCJ's own words to be fair but she clearly found it amusing). I couldn't even get through Annals of the Terf-Wars, and I did try.

Personally I think we need all sorts of people with different skillsets to get female only spaces and services properly protected again, so I find the bitching about the "head girls" tedious and counterproductive. And I'm absolutely gobsmacked at some of the rhetoric aimed towards Sex Matters and For Women Scotland in the last few days, because they're focusing on what they think is achievable rather than what some other people want them to focus on.

I also enjoyed Annals of the TERF Wars.

JCJ is welcome to disagree with/dislike KJK/whoever & vice versa, & if they/anyone else want to bicker on X…well, that’s pretty much how X is set up to harvest engagement.

Men are not going to become just slightly, just a tiny tiny twidge, more women because a) JCJ gets up people’s noses by being wordy b) Glinner gets pissed c) JKR is politely accustomed to using social lie pronouns when in conversation with a longstanding friend.

The planet goes on being round, men go on being men whatever they wear & whatever cosmetic surgery they have, & JCJ goes on doing her touchy & verbose thing, & good for her.

I read Annals of the Terfs Wars. I find her writing excellent and funny when she's speaking naturally and just utterly turgid when it's the 'academic' style. As though she feels academic writing needs to be complicated to be sufficiently important.
It's a shame she doesn't just keep writing funny columns about how it's all going and why it's still infuriating because I think she'd be good at that

I enjoyed that, thank you.

Ah yes. She was angry for a long while because she said ‘some things’ that were dismissed but when JCJ and the crew said the ‘same some things’ they were accepted and Alessandra said they had cancelled her. Gosh the drama.

I actually got sick of it all 3 weeks ago and left Twitter. My mental load has significantly improved.

I respect JCJ for her academic accomplishments and her research. But I also think she has arguments she should rise above because she often is intellectually superior and enjoys putting people back in their boxes - but progress doesn’t work that way.

I’m pretty sure the other person is that Italian woman who was very active for a long time - and had a lot of interesting things to say, but she fell out with lots of people and finally went off in a huff. Alessandra something??

She said today (the new persona) that she’s a human rights lawyer in China but her Twitter account is based in Italy.

(As I recall, I had a lot of sympathy for her positions, but I’m not interested in purity spirals, and she was somewhat extreme in that respect.)

Anyway! The point of my post is to get a gauge of womens thoughts about JCJ and her friends / colleagues / "comrades" on the current discourse after the JKR fallout. How many women actually pay attention to JCJ? She contributed to one thing in parliment once (?) - what else has she done that has reached the culture at large (in the way that KJK has)?

My thoughts are that all of this absurd playground drama reminds me of the Moldies fallout on MN. It's got everything to do with being too much online and not much to do with anything in the real world.

Fair warning, mentioning JCJ is like saying Beetlejuice three times, and she will write a million word long blog post about how we're being mean for saying she's wordy.

I never knew that GC feminism needed its own Richard Seymour, but we got one anyway.

No, but there are credible reports of abusive sexual behaviour towards women. But it's ok in his case, because 'jouissance'.

I love jcj. She’s been very badly treated on Twitter imo.
on another subject, was Prince autogynephile?

JCJ and KJK both have their flaws tbh. Can’t be arsed with the superiority from Jones and less willing to support Keen now she’s speaking at a Stephen Yaxley-Lennon event. But there’s not a woman alive who I agree with 100% and I’m grateful to them both for how they’ve helped the gender-critical cause.

I get why she's upset and some of the stuff on Twitter is insane at the moment.

There's a "conversation" going on between FWS, Akua Reindorf and some unknown where FWS and AR are being berated for not getting the GRA repealed.

Just what the unknown has done in campaigning other than shout insults from behind a keyboard is not obvious.

Since you asked, I greatly appreciate JCJ's contributions on Twitter and the like. Her criticisms of KJK are very reasonable if you're concerned about the rise of the far right.

I do find the regular ganging up on her for being wordy/academic and the like tedious and all the personal attacks extremely unpleasant, although wish she could just ignore it instead of getting so involved.

Yep, pretty much this. Also her over-the-top defensive fighty reaction to people pointing out that she is - er - wordy. You don't have to be wordy to be intellectually rigorous. Some might even say conciseness is a virtue that leads to clarity.

My only experience of JCJ is me being a complete newbie on Twitter and naively pointing out her Prince obsession was maybe just slightly not in keeping with her principals if O'Connor was to believed....Oh my God! How naive of me! She argued with many dizzying wordy tweets that she already knew it was problematic, but that she had come to some sort of academic conclusion that this was surmountable. Due to theory. Or something. No idea.

I got such a tirade from her and her followers, and I sheepishly left Twitter very quickly.

Sorry that this was off topic. But I've steered clear ever since. When I first came across her I thought she was fantastic, but....nah.