Kathleen Stock: women's organisations have decentred biological females

[arranfan]

A superb, thought-provoking, all-time classic thread by Dr Kathleen Stock: Incisive analysis of women's organisations who have decentred biological females

Too many quotable quotes to attempt to pick out individual ones. Worth reading the thread in its entirety.

Sweary Godmother has added the Women's Institute to the Rollcall of Shame. I shudder to ask as I have few instinctive affections left to me but what has the WI done?

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for saying it loudly and clearly and in joined-up thinking, Kathleen Stock.

The contortions WA has gone through to be nice to transwomen, partly to get funding but also, it seems to me, because some of the younger workers have drunk the kool-aid, have felt like an insult to the women they are supposed to serve.

What we really need to do is start again with GC women running GC organisations that go back to feminist basics and say a firm no to any transwoman who turns up demanding his rights as a woman.

Yes! Relating to your point about a need to return to fundamentals.

Stock wrote:

Presumably most of you were weaned on serious thinkers like De Beauvoir and Dworkin and McKinnon, or counterparts. How can you keep a straight face as your PR interns churn out, on yr behalf, tweets from the Stonewall Big Book of Nonsensical Aphorisms plus a bunch of emojis?

...But better yet, stop with the craven capitulation, stop with the patronising doublespeak, and do the right thing. (Also, give the youngsters running yr social media some 2nd wave feminist books

Omg YESSSS! Now this is what brave & stunning actually means.

Thanks will have a read.

Great, great thread. She brought up something that really concerns me. That is that all the young people going to colleges and being spoon fed a bunch of gender nonsense. How many of them have read 2nd wave feminists texts? They don't seem to know their history. They think gender critical feminists are simply old-fashioned. They think they are doing next level feminism when they aren't doing feminism at all. They're lost in sea of queer academia without absolutely no footing in material reality. Women cannot fight against their material oppression if they aren't allowed to acknowledge their biological reality and how it has been exploited, abused, and differs from mens. I just don't know what to think about the future. I say this as a young person in college who is baffled by what I see and hear around me on campus every day... I just hope GC feminists are able to build up spaces again :(.

www.cteg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/a-womans-place-summary-report-1-2-DT.pdf

Chwarae Teg (Welsh for Fair Play). - I don’t know how they can simultaneously believe that women face structural and personal barriers in the workplace and Transwomen are Women.

www.cteg.org.uk/chwarae-teg-chief-executive-cerys-furlong-has-spoken-out-in-support-of-trans-equality/

Oh yes, the WI is all about attracting younger members, having a visible presence at Pride marches, and “all self-identifying women welcome!”

That’s a direct quote from a WI I know of.

Well, when the WI has lost its distinctive characteristics and decides that it would be woke to have an imbalance of Fabulous, Brave & Stunning people as senior officers, I wonder how much more campaigning we'll see on sex workers, domestic violence, child abuse etc.? The WI at 100 (lists some of their campaigns) pdf

The WI? I'm more upset about them in many ways than the Fawcett Society (whom I always felt to be over-privileged and purblind to their privilege) and others on that lengthy list.

This thread is excellent. Thanks Prof Stock !
Always in awe of the feminists on Twitter. I wouldn't be able to handle the format, but they're amazing .

Prof Stock is amazing and tells it like it is again.

I've been thinking.

For centuries women have been banging on the door with regards to legal rights, votes, marriage, jobs, financial rights, rights over their own bodies, clothes, even the right to get served at the bar of a certain bar on fleet Street. Load of things. Tonnes of things.

All of a sudden a very vocal subsection of a subsection of men had launched an aggressive campaign to have what women have (apart from menopause from what I can see). And they are getting it! Men handing it over on a plate and some women (hoodwinked, bullied, brainwashed or with their own kinks) are aiding and abetting.

Arggggggggg

AAPF - I so strongly agree.

And, beyond that, there is a discernible influence on the scientific process (after decades of women scholars' work on the consequences to science of ignoring the majority of the population). However, not quite the influence on science that, you know, scientists might wish:

Haley, seen in the video here, is one of the people PLOSONE and Brown university took as an expert (over the peer review process) in criticising the Littman study. This is now who and what dictates acceptable academic thinking from: twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1035938499520806914

Never mind Select Committees and their ilk, it seems now that even journals prefer unevidenced anecdote because it is authentic, lived experience or a simulacrum of it rather than boring old academic endeavour or clinical experience.

I think one of the most painful aspects of this, personally, is how over the last 10 or so years my relationships with many younger feminists have become extremely uncomfortable. We used to be friends and we used to be able to work (voluntarily) and socialise together without much friction. Now that I'm approaching 60 they seem to regard me as a dinosaur. The respect for those classic feminist texts is gone: when I cited Dworkin on pornography to one graduate of Mount Holyoke (US liberal and traditionally feminist women's college) she told me that 'these days' Dworkin is seen as just embarrassing. And when these younger women have tried to explain why feminists should welcome transwomen in women's and lesbian private space my inability to accept the TWAW argument (because it denies biology, it denies history, it denies reality) and my insistence on asking how they define 'woman' has been met with responses that indicate they think a) I'm old and entrenched in outdated thought and b) I'm stupid because I can't 'get' it.

Wonderful thread, helpful to me in explain to people why TWAW is a problem.

It’s noticeable not a single trans has questioned the use of the word ‘men’ on war memorials. Could it be because they know the difference between men and women and relate to men!

Bloody good point. It would be nice if transmen could get on board with all of this and start making some demands themselves. It would be all done and dusted in weeks.

Transmen actually men with vaginas weren't allowed to fight, therefore this wording is transphobic and should be amended to say "people with penises who died"

*and yes, I do know that actual women died in every war but never quite made it on to any plaques and funny enough no one ever cared.

The modification of science point is nicely made in Dr Stock's point 7.

Stop telling us you've reached your position via 'consultation' when in fact you mean Gender Studies academics or trans activists, both of whom assume (ludicrously) there's no such thing as biological sex and so no such thing as sex-based oppression. You know that's nonsense.

As above, the experience of an activist is to be preferred over the experience of those who have lived the relevant biological sex.

That is that all the young people going to colleges and being spoon fed a bunch of gender nonsense. How many of them have read 2nd wave feminists texts? They don't seem to know their history. They think gender critical feminists are simply old-fashioned.

This is exactly what’s happening and was my experience at Warwick University. 2nd wave feminist articles were carefully selected and all given out with a lengthy warning on the literal violence some of the ideas from within the text could cause now. The discussions were then stifled as it was made clear most of the ideology was out of bounds for debate.

In fact there was no debate - just plenty of warnings and reminders of the privilege held by white middle aged mothers (me - I must remember to self flagellate today) and how intersectionality must centre the most disadvantaged at the expense of all others. The most disadvantaged appeared to be trans women, which was not a surprise....although I still don’t know who decided this.

I worry the younger women studying there will grow up to put men’s needs ahead of their own, as has been happening forever - but now with a side of guilt, it’s almost religious.

As an add-on to Stock's excellent thread, I've been revisiting Levitin's Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

A few years ago, Ben Goldacre advised people who'd read a spectacularly bad article replete with pseudoscience to follow it up with a sanity-restoring Feynman chaser.

I propose Stock's points as the equivalent Stock Chaser after reading about organisations that want to de-gender the language around FGM or similar blackholes of dense stupidity.

What a brilliant thread. Thank you for highlighting. Kathleen Stock is a total hero.

I was struck by how much Prof Stock's observations that women's organisations have decentred biological females is the more formal version of some of Posie Parker's video.

I heartily commend Prof. Stock's remarkable thread .

Thank god for Kathleen Stock and others like you all who are so much better at articulating these things than me.
IMO trans-mania shows that feminism must have achieved SOMETHING if the menz are now suddenly so keen to grab it.

And as for war memorials etc -ofc trans men are not vocally demanding the erasure of biological men as a category because (1) safety for them (2) they aren't socialised to think they can arrogantly demand access to single sex spaces (3) men aren't socialised to let them in cf ManFriday

Exactly, if women still didn't have the vote and could not get degrees, where unwelcome in the workplace and didn't have their own sport, would there be so many transitions.

Yet another superb thread from Kathleen Stock.

twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1040646305805201409

In the midst of all this pomo posturing Stock is the unexpected oasis in a desert.

I'm updating this with the news that Sophie Walker, leader of WEP, wants to establish a compromise whereby members won't need to come down on one side or another - one side being centring the rights of biological females as Stock might phrase it.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3373819-WEP-Sophie-Walker-statement-on-trans?msgid=81248211#81248211