TRAs deface Millicent Fawcett statue

[Peony1897]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/19/transgender-activists-deface-millicent-fawcett-statue/

How dare they.

That's an excellent article.

Britain is almost through the looking-glass. On the other side lies a landscape of bureaucratic overreach, official neglect, persecution of dissidents, of black-is-white nightmares. The Supreme Court judgment is our wake-up call.

Trevor gets it.

It's not just about women's rights or trans rights.

It's about abuse of power without proper accountability. It's about misuse of public funds. It's about poor management and failures to deal with difficult people and problems because it's too much like hard work.

That's what's fuelling Reform.

Welcome to the dark knowledge of feminism @OctopusFriend

Germaine Greer once said something like: "women can't afford to recognise how much men hate them."

I teach this stuff to undergrads - they get good old fashioned second wave analysis of patriarchal structures. There are always one or two of them who come to see me, and say "I see the world differently now." It's hard, but that's the basic consciousness raising that's really significant for many women.

I tend to think that every feminist has a moment of incandescent rage ("peaking") regarding patriarchal oppression. It's a tough moment because it's also the moment when we each realise that no matter how individually in control we feel over our ives, there are these other structures which constrain us (sex & class, mostly, and race for some). Because of my age, I had several of these moments in early high school - it was the early 70s - way before sex discrimination legislation.

It's worth remembering why we needed laws to help women negotiate oppressive sexist social structures. The TRA/MRA protests are probably such a moment.

Wow. This article is hugely important, as it also goes some way to examining conflations with racism. We need more of these articles from men.

I said this on another thread,

It's worth stressing that Philips has previously talked about racism and how drives to be more inclusive have actively been classist and particularly adversely affected white working class boys. His comment was that this was particularly true of the media and has been a contributing factor in a lack of understanding of the Brexit vote and a rising mistrust in the media and various public institutions. It's an observation that is also reflected in the grooming gangs debate (another subject that just won't die and is fuelling Reform).

Philips intervention is a significant one from this respect too. Hes labour. He's respected. (I've heard comment that Starmer needs Blair to do a speech before he can commit to a position - Phillips is probably the next best thing).

He is likely to be listened to by many moderates within Labour.

Don't underestimate this article.

They really haven't thought it through, which isn't surprising because the ideology rejects material analysis.

I think some of the younger people just lack experience.

To be honest, becoming an adult in the nineties, I also thought/clung to the belief that 'sexism' was just a few old people having outdated views. I believed it was my feminist duty to ignore my mother's concerns that I was more at risk than my brother, and I was lucky enough to never find out that she might be right.

Many of my female friends were earning more than our male peers

And then it turned out that only one kind of person can have children and it wasn't the men, and I started to realise that my ability to travel through the world on equal terms with men, wasn't due to my attitude, but a scaffold of rights that can be taken away.

Again, I am going to answer this in good faith.

You are all missing the point because you are gender critical. To you it is obvious that trans women are male people who are cosplaying/pretending/kidding themselves that they are women.

The obvious thing you are missing is that for a great many trans people they have a "sincerely held belief" that at some level or another they ARE the other; they ARE a woman in their brain and in their heart for example. This has been reinforced online and in teaching and in mantras such as "trans women are women". A trans person doesn't begin to upend their life by thinking "You know what, I think I might like to pretend to be a woman". They think "You know what, I think I AM a woman".

As a non trans person looking in you might think that is ridiculous but if you can appreciate that this is many people's sincere belief then it instantly becomes more obvious why this ruling feels like it is a denial of trans people's experience of their own lives. This ruling says "You can go through life acting as if you are a woman if you want, but you are in fact and in law a man". This is no surprise to gender critical women - in fact it's completely obvious - but to a trans person it upends their belief system which is in many many cases sincerely held. And that feels threatening and it feels scary.

If you are a non political or non gender critical parent who knows very little about gender ideology you are likely, after a period of your own confusion and distress, to conclude that your young person must have a deeply held belief about their internal state that only they can access and they have probably been born in the wrong body or whatever. At the end of the day, most parents want to support their child and see them happy.

And fwiw this ability to understand the pov of the other side is what I meant by low IC thinking and "shades of grey". You don't have to agree with it. But surely you can see by thought experiment that IF you truly believe that your internal essence is female and that makes you a woman - not enables you to pretend to be a woman - which is essentially gender ideology - , then this ruling feels like the whole way you understand and make sense of who you are has been taken away.

Before the inevitable pile on, this is not what I believe. But I can see why holding that belief would mean many trans people feel completely sideswiped.

I honestly do not care about how sincere the man is who wants his right to intimately handle a non consenting woman for a strip search or a medical procedure to trump hers. Or the sincerity of the man who is pressing his right to be present while I take my clothes off in a changing room. It makes no difference to my humiliation and fear by what might or might not be going on inside his head at the time. How much disrespect must you have for women to think their reality should be predicated on the possible thoughts inside a man's head?

It is not all and only about him. And he has no right to compel others to participate in his self expression however 'sincere' it might be .

Other people have rights too.

No one is asking you to FFS.

Someone asked why people are protesting. Assuming they actually wanted to know, I am trying to explain. No one requires you to agree or be converted.

My lecturer said to me explicitly in the 90s that 'you are probably all very lefty and see me as a chain smoking old fashioned conservative but remember one day you might need the Daily Mail'.

He was actually a true liberal and I've come to recognise how much my lecturer and to recognise he was right and see in myself how in my 20s just how much I scolded one of my best friends for his politically incorrect comments and jokes (he was from a north African background).

I am not far right. I haven't moved right. I can see how righteousness leads to deafness to important concerns. And how sometimes things phrased poorly or in a way that aren't politically correct still remain valid, very important issues and concerns that can't be just dismissed because they aren't expressed using the right language or being they are 'off message'.

I'm definitely more open minded.

Despite this, I also am aware there are certain truisms you can't pretend don't exist. This is about how authoritarianism and abuses of power. Rights are always abused when authoritarian methods and thinking rises. Sex as a concept is a realism that can't be erased. It always exists. The difference is about visibility of issues or invisibility of issues.

This makes perfect sense.

The trouble is, how do we get these people from where they are today, to where they need to be?

Where they are today is angry and scared because they have been lied to for years by the likes of Stonewall and left wing politicians. They have been encouraged to believe that in the eyes of the law, trans women are women, trans men are men, some people are neither women nor men, and everyone who disagrees is an evil bigot who is on the wrong side of history.

Where they need to be is in a mindset where they accept that the Supreme Court judgment is actually the correct interpretation of the law, that women's rights are not subordinate to trans people's rights, and that they should direct their anger to the LGBTQ+ lobby and the politicians who have misled them for years.

How do we get them from A to B?

Because I have a horrible feeling that many people will double down and not accept the judgment.

I am a bit confused by your logic.

This is only one of many examples, but until very recently court policy was that a victim of rape must refer to their rapist as a woman if that is how he identifies.

What is that if not compelling somebody to agree that they are a woman?

Are you arguing that nobody is compelled to say this following the judgement?

Firstly I'm sure you are aware that you are only talking about a subset of transpeople. Many have been very clear that they do not have gender dysphoria, that they do not believe their body is wrong, that this is about things very other than what you describe. For a long time aggressive men with fetishes have been able to hide behind emotional manipulations about distressed children 'born in the wrong body'. That's not at all the totality of 'trans' and I'm sure you know that.

Secondly, how is the sincerely held belief you describe any different to the sincerely held belief of the anorexic that she is fat? Both are demonstably untrue. We don't affirm anorexics in their faulty cognitions and we don't think it's kind or helpful to to do so. I really don't see how the faulty cognition that you are really the opposite sex is any different.

Thirdly, I know that confused, unwell, ND people who believe they are the opposite sex have been conned, used, and lied to by people with other motivations. I'm sorry that happened but I didn't cause it and it's not for me to make it better. Women aren't the world's mum, here to fix everything and sacrificen ourselves to make eveyone else happy.

Fourthly, being a woman is a biological reality. It's not a feeling. You cannot feel like a woman, any more than you can feel like a person with blue eyes. It's just stereotypes and mens ideas about what being a woman is. There's no way to feel like something that isn't a feeling. So IF you truly believe that your internal essence is female and that makes you a woman - not enables you to pretend to be a woman is a nonsense, it's a belief in regressive stereotypes that liking X or doing Y defines you as a woman. What defines you as a woman is being born a girl and making it to adulthood, nothing else.

Transpeople will always be talking at cross purposes with feminists (and now also with the law) because they think woman is a feeling, it's not it a biological reality.

As with any other protected characteristic, I think they need the support of people who will campaign for their rights based on material class analysis.

But in fact yes. That's exactly what the protest is about. The refusal of others to be converted and to enable this self identity. The legal right to say no. That's what the anger is about. That 'no' is the trigger.

I agree that some trans women feel their very essence is that of a woman. Sometimes the development of a human goes awry and that baby’s physical genitalia may not align with their inner sense of self. This happens to a very small minority; fewer people than those that present as female. We know this is true because a woman could not and would not rape a woman with their penis. Again, we know this has happened and it’s probably reasonable to assume that not all of those rapes have been reported.
These men may be an even smaller minority but that does not mean that they don’t represent a danger to women or that they and trans women don’t instil fear in women.
As a woman who suffered csa and physical abuse I am very uncomfortable with unknown men even in my own home if alone. I look very confident but inside I feel very panicked. I’m sure I’m not alone feeling this.
Therefore my stance is that trans people should be campaigning for their own spaces. I’ll back them as would most women.

You can have a sincerely held belief of many things.

You can sincerely believe that it's ok to murder thousands because they are the wrong religion.

This doesn't make it a belief worthy of respect in a democratic society.

The whole point is whether that belief is a) coherent and consistent b) doesn't harm others.

Someone saying that sex isn't important when genderism itself relies on the identification of sex so you can trans, makes the sincerely held belief collapse because in law it's utterly incoherent and impossible to legislate for.

You can not legislate for fuzzy feelings that are unique to individuals. You can only legislate for ideas and concepts which have agreed, widespread consensus and can be defined clearly in a way that's reasonably understandable to all.

Legislating gender instead of sex fails in the reasonableness test for a number of reasons because of this.

It might be a sincerely held belief to some, but this doesn't make it a workable belief which recognises that society has to balance rights. The rights of transgender people to privacy, dignity and place in society have to be appropriate in a way that still observes sex - for the best interests of transpeople themselves even if they fail to recognise why it remains important.

I've used the example of doctors on more than one occasion in the last week. Doctors need to be able to talk about sex instead of gender when treating trans people. If legally you can not see sex or talk about sex only the gender of a patient, then a doctor places themselves at risk when treating a transperson if they do their job of treating the body and asking questions on the basis of sex. However if the law insists on the doctor only talking about sex and sex being replaced by gender, the patient is at considerable risk and doesn't have equal standards of health care because it's impossible to treat a patient properly without reference to sex.

Legally you can't have a half in/half out position as the Equality Act is written. You'd have to explicitly rewrite the law on equality to allow exemptions where sex was recognised in certain scenarios. That's not how the law is written. It's written with exceptions that recognise single sex needs.

The lack of ability of transpeople to understand how the law works and how human rights have to be balanced, frankly isn't my problem. It's ignorance that doesn't change no matter how sincerely their beliefs are.

Having a sincerely held belief ISN'T enough on its own. That's the problem. It also has to have the consideration of how it's workable within wider society and the impact on wider society. This isn't to say that protections are removed. They are not. It's saying that protections have to be applied in a different way - and that's where transactivists are having a meltdown because they aren't getting exactly what they want in exactly the way they want.

That's not ok. No matter how sincere they believe.

Belief doesn't change reality.

MSM seems to have gone overboard with getting TRAs on to broadcast lies and disinformation without any questioning or pushback. Just the usual sycophancy.
Peter Tatchell and Jane Fae, for example, yesterday and today.
I would like to see as much footage of the protests as possible being broadcast so people can see the banners and the behaviour, but I doubt that will happen.

Just remembered this cartoon - seems particularly pertinent after the events over the weekend.

Also, having a sincerely held belief, doesn't address certain valid and legitimate concerns which the law (and society more generally) have a need to recognise and not ignore because it proves to be a bit inconvenient to that sincerely held belief....

But what rights will they campaign for? Rights they thought they had until Wednesday but in fact didn't, which trample over women's rights?

Thank you for answering, but it doesn't answer my questions.

What do they believe they were protesting by being there?

All I can gather from your post is that they turned up to a protest because of generalised fear. Is that what you believe they turned up to support?

Completely agree. This is why I personally think the ruling is helpful. It is not mentally healthy imo for a trans person to be able to erase their bio sex-based history.

To me the obvious solution is to enable trans people to move confidently through life as trans people. For it not to be desperately important to 'pass', to get a new birth certificate etc, but for society to respect those who just quietly live life in a third space without investing time and energy on pretending like mad that they actually are indistinguishable from those born in their acquired sex. I think that is the way forward and I hope that's where I am guiding my DC.

A sincerely held belief in something doesn't make it objectively true. I work in mental health - I come across lots of ‘sincerely held beliefs’ every day. I understand completely that it’s true abd real to the person experiencing it - but it’s still not actually true.

trans women may ‘feel’ like women all they wish, but they aren’t