Every parent should read: transactivisms dangerous myth of parental rejection

[Wanderabout]

Every parent should read this:

quillette.com/2018/07/20/trans-activisms-dangerous-myth-of-parental-rejection/

"[another] problem with the belief that parental rejection is the norm is that it makes for bad policy. How can a society function efficiently if it cannot depend on parental good faith toward offspring as a bedrock assumption? This does not mean, of course, that there aren’t truly awful parents who reject and abuse. But they are the exception rather than the rule. To establish guidelines and policies based on these exceptions dangerously arrogates too much authority to the state and institutions for children’s well-being and undermines the role of the parent. This leads to policies that range from the dangerous to the absurd.

The problem in Scotland is the SNP i could just post that have already made it repeatedly clear that they do not think parents should be responsible for their children.

They continue to attempt to get Named Person into law despite it being pulled apart by the supreme court.
no2np.org/named-person/

confidential disclosures
dispensation of multi-agency working
parental alienation

How can anybody not see that this is a recipe for disaster?

And here is an example of a possible problem that may have already occurred partly due to inappropriate and sometimes dangerous advice in school packs:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3313760-Up-to-150-youngsters-treated-with-puberty-blocking-jabs-might-not-even-be-transgender

There is a massive problem with guidance being produced by experts. A governing entity delegates formulation of a policy to a group who know a lot about it (but can include lobby groups, activists etc whose views may be skewed by whatever lens they view the world). Their policy is then adopted wholesale because the entity which commissions it acknowledges it has no expertise. But then no one is applying common sense (for want of a better word) or a holistic view.

You can find parallels everywhere - in board rooms; in local and national government; in medical practice.

The ideology is based on 'collective individualism'. In collective individualism power likes with the group of individuals who are best organised and can communicate together a like minded agenda most effectively.

It is not dissimilar to the concept of being ruled by mob rule, where the state does not exist, and behaviour is controlled by pressure to conform and other beliefs or descent from the group mentality in crushed as quickly as possible.

Of course in this situation the weakest and least able voices are drowned out, often with the noisiest claiming to represent these individuals, however if you scratch the surface the interests of these people always comes second to the interests of the individuals running the mob mentality. The ideology and membership of the group is cult like.

Of course ideas and groups that form outside this and have an alternative narrative are seen as the biggest threat to collective individualism. These groups are about theories and ideas which occupy politics and are not really about real world physical threats. They are always 'literal' and it is interesting to see how they refer to literal violence and literal communism. It's a statement of how these are theoretical movements which have originated in the unreality of cyberspace.

People who can not tell the difference between the theoretical and fantasy of the unreal and the cold rather harsher and brutal real world.

Unpicking language and what people are saying about themselves and their ideology is utterly fascinating. Take it literally because the inability to differentiate between the simplicity and ideological purity contained within uptopianism and the real world mechanics of how ideology plays out in practice is a fundamental dynamic of populism and thus current politics.

The voice of minorities who are all ready pretty marginalised is lost further in this power dynamic as is the concept of state protection of those individuals with it. The tyranny of the majority.

Of course in this situation the weakest and least able voices are drowned out, often with the noisiest claiming to represent these individuals, however if you scratch the surface the interests of these people always comes second to the interests of the individuals running the mob mentality. The ideology and membership of the group is cult like.

The voice of minorities who are all ready pretty marginalised is lost further in this power dynamic as is the concept of state protection of those individuals with it.

This, this, this.

It bears repeating that our safeguarding 'rules' and society's approach to parental responsibility have evolved over decades and are a consequence of the abuse and death of many children.

When we tell adults not to keep confidences but to share information, we do this because children have died as a result of previous failures to share.

When we say work 'in partnership' with parents it is because we have learnt that children fare badly outside the love and protection of their families. When children need to be removed from abusive and dangerous parents, the courts sanction this with lots of checks and balances

That these current systems / principles are being openly undermined by transgender organisations funded by the government is a chilling example of the 'collective individualism' that RedToothBrush is talking about. These groups have not sought consent or negotiated their belief that our safeguarding rules are wrong. They simply impose their own view of the needs of children, demand that professionals follow their way and enforce it via a combination of threats, bullying, and harassment - and all with the collusion of those in power (who evidently have zero experience of working with abused children).

UpstartCrow: Male rights activism and the incel movement teaches men - among other things - that they are naturally dominant and women secretly want to be submissive, but are hampered by feminism.

And that's where there's yet another huge (and worrying) overlap. If you look at some of the twitter tags devoted to transitioning, you'll see a recurring theme (minority, I think, but sizeable minority*) of transitioners who see female sexuality as equivalent to sexual submissiveness. Oh, and of course Heather Peto in Heather's own words. Not to mention Paris Lees waxing lyrical about how sexy it is to watch Paris' reflection in the mirror, tears streaming down face, while being spit-roasted by two men (that's a matter of public record - the original article was somewhere pretty mainstream like HuffPo).

This of course overlaps with the misogynist trope of most mainstream porn - that women are there to be abused, oppressed and physically assaulted in the course of sex. And another overlap with "sex pozzie feminism" (though quite what's sexy or positive about being strangled during sex, or forced through poverty to engage in prostitution, has always escaped me), whose advocates always strike me as suffering from too much exposure to male porn/bad relationships, which has left them suffering from a form of Stockholm syndrome.

*Incidentally, that's why I'm not going to link to the twitter tag often mentioned in these discussions, because it seems to me that the majority of people on there are trying to engage in a mutual support network, with only a minority posting sexualised images.

April 2018 Catherine Bennett wrote in The Observer after 10 people were murdered, and many more injured deliberately in Canada:

'Violent misogyny is unfortunately not confined to the internet’s ‘incels’ ;Killers are rare; more commonplace are terrible fantasies of abuse against women'

(extract)
"In the days since the Canadian man murdered 10 people, a good deal of attention, including glossaries of special terms, has focused on the peculiarities of “incel” online behaviour. Here, the standard misogynistic repertoire – “you deserve to be raped”, etc – is ornamented, a bit, with coinages such as femoids. But actually, so what? To many social media users, neither the language nor the sentiments expressed in posts such as the one above, however far along the woman-hating continuum, are likely to look radically out of the ordinary.

Apart from anything, Jack the Ripper, who would now be the toast of angry celibates, had the disembowelling idea 130 years ago. And further demonstrating that misogynistic tropes are by no means the monopoly of resentful male virgins, curators at San Francisco library are currently staging an exhibition featuring a display of dissident-silencing weaponry (axes and bats) and other hate-advertising artefacts.

Photographs of one vitrine, featuring a red bespattered T-shirt reading: “I punch terfs!” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists/women who disagree with me), may have struck a chord with anyone following the current UK debate about the government’s self-ID proposals. To date, threats, from one side, which echo, inescapably, some of those in the pro-Rodger playbook (“die in a fire terf scum”) have yet to generate comparably widespread concern, even after a woman was punched. Her assailant had earlier expressed the wish to “fuck up some terfs”.

For many prominent women, the violence threatened by Rodger fans must sound especially familiar. Caroline Criado-Perez, to whom we owe the new statue of Millicent Fawcett, is just one brilliant woman to have been rewarded, on Twitter, with sexualised menaces (”choke you with my dick” etc), which attracted nowhere near the appalled interest that now surrounds “incels”, as we should surely agree not to call these men, and not only because it implies that involuntary celibacy represents a special condition. It’s often called, for instance, “being single” and is what dating websites were invented for.

To agree to use the lads’ pet terminology, is, moreover, to suggest that something distinguishes them from legions of other threatening men expressing a similar wish to control, punish or just silence women and, critically, in similar language. Such as, to non-compliant sexual targets, “choke on my dick”. A glance at Twitter confirms how generously such abuse has been accommodated, even as the repetitive insults and threats indicate gendered hostility to women in general.

If sexism does not explain how rapidly the language employed against dissenting women (including some trans women) in the UK self-ID debate, degenerated, in some quarters, into generic-sounding obscenities (eg, to unco-operative lesbians, “choke on my ladydick”), perhaps it’s because social media has for so long facilitated the delusion that hate speech, as applied to women, is simply part of the landscape.

The very odiousness of the misogynist language that has become, according (pre-Rodger) to one academic, Emma Alice Jane, “a lingua franca in many sectors of the cybersphere”, may help explain, she argues, why the “ethical and material implications” of this form of hate speech have been so under-studied. Hate speech that persists unchallenged, by both – for their different reasons – reactionaries and progressives, is unlikely, anyway, to be corrected." (continues)

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/29/violent-misogyny-not-confined-to-internet-incels

The number of girls requesting to transition has risen so sharply lately, and they're often autistic.

The thing is if you're autistic, you often take rules seriously, it can be pretty black and white. Either you're on-side or you're not. I'm autistic and battle this myself.

If you're a teenage girl and your online internet communities, authorities like the NHS, and your school teachers all tell you something (along with the normal feeling that your parents don't understand or appreciate you), then yes the parents can easily now be The Enemy.