Is this an about-face from The Guardian?

[NopeNi]

Well fuck me I wouldn't have expected to read this in the Guardian.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it still focuses on rights for transwomen and calls both sides of the debate "toxic" (of course) but it also says:

..."But misogyny too must be challenged. Gender identity does not cancel out sex. Women’s oppression by men has a physical basis, and to deny the relevance of biology when considering sexual inequality is a mistake. The struggle for women’s empowerment is ongoing. Reproductive freedoms are under threat and the #MeToo campaign faces a backlash. Women’s concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with “male-bodied” people must be taken seriously. These are not just questions of safety but of dignity and fairness."

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/17/the-guardian-view-on-the-gender-recognition-act-where-rights-collide

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3328210-Follow-the-money-who-is-funding-the-US-transborg

For those of you relatively new to the discussion and wanting to explore the Big Pharma angle, this may be helpful.

Yet more fascinating posts.

Going into schools was about finding human shields for this BS. It’s easy to see through Jacinta Brooks but a sad teenage girl who is in distress about her body? Much harder to say no to

This is my greatest fear and what I'd love us to really tackle. I don't want to divert this thread but this is such a serious issue as this is where the harm is happening now

Heresy I saw this yesterday and found it thought provoking

It's very difficult to be part of a large organisation and fit this box of 'the troublemaker'.

You end up with an institutionalised culture of compliance however unwittingly, against which people feel free to talk without consequence.

It's much much harder to encourage and foster a culture in which people work together but also have this diversity of opinion and this freedom of conscious.

Its a facet of hierarchical power. You are taught to respect the authority of your superior.

When this fear becomes pervasive across society and across institutions you start to get problems. Power is about checks and balanced. Counter weights form the stability and freedom of democracy.

Stonewall has power over various key organisations. Yet no one is balancing the power of Stonewall. Normally it would be the press that fulfilled this role as a check.

No one can challenge the institutional power of Stonewall from within either. The culture is dominated by a like minded group and those faces that don't fit, have been driven out.

Equally the BBC has particular problems in this area.

And there is a problem which has developed across the entire media, which has led to this term 'liberal elite'. The fragility of the balance across classes has fractured.

That's why we've had the referendum vote in no small part. The counter weight.

Theres now something of a power vacuum going on, so we are getting this resonance effect across issues that fall along certain social fractures. Which threatens democracy completely.

Vote Leave's Dominic Cummings and his one time close political ally talk about how you can't bring widespread change about from within.

You gave to burn the house down and start over to completely restructure society and institutions.

In our history, this has been done following the consequences of war. After a long period of peace, you've got this massive institutionalisation going on. And huge political instability.

There's also a huge generational clash / class divide forming in that context that is interesting.

Don't get me wrong. I hate Cummings and Gove. But I worry about the point they make and whether they gave a point.

If they do, then we are perhaps overdue 'a burning down phase' whatever that may entail and whatever can grow out of that.

The problems over sexism and racism etc have been identified as institutionalised issues. But we've got these competing notions of what comes next and how those institionalised issues are dealt with. Hence the culture war and lots of prattling about 'progressiveness' which means fuck all but the next new fashionable ideology. Its not necessarily liberal.

Again. I'm rambling. So I'll shut up.

Great post heresy. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

From way back on the first page: *LostinEdinburgh: Too late for me. Once I'm scunnered, that's it."

Me too (but I have to ask are you channeling the thoughts of my late DM? She was an Edinburgh woman and would have said just this!)

But - "trans women and other women"? Seriously? Fuck right off with that one. And no, I haven't forgotten Cologne. And will not forget Cologne.

Having said that, at this point I'm not their target audience. If this editorial gives just a handful of their readers "permission" to think again about the "transwomen are women" mantra, it will have done something.

But like others on this thread I'm terrified that this is the last minute sop to a pretence of even-handedness on what's actually a done deal. (And I also want to know which member of the Cabinet it is - please James Kirkup, let us know...)

Stonewall has power over various key organisations. Yet no one is balancing the power of Stonewall.

I've been thinking this a lot today. I really do think they're the lynchpin in all of this.

I wonder if every human institution always heads towards corruption?

Also how many of these organisations have hired digital PR people to run their social media. So handing over a key channel to very young, inexperienced people. This is what did for Ocado.

Looking at the list of Stonewall supporters, I doubt the Cabinet Secretary has any idea what GCHQ have signed up to. I doubt GCHQ do either. But they've got a cool dude in diversity and another cool dude doing their Twitter and those two are causing all kinds of problems for a very serious, dusty organisation.

To see this in action, check out the fact that the Committee for Standards in Public Life have retweeted something from Aimee Challoner . Now the tweet itself is unexceptional. But the Committee clearly has no effing idea who Aimee Challoner is, what massive damage they've done to standards in public life or how ludicrous it makes them look to retweet anything from this facile idiot. The clerk to the committee probably won't know this has even happened. They'll be an old school functionary. But they'll have someone else running the social media and in the gap, mayhem happens.

Sometimes I do wonder if the "hierarchy of intersectionality," as I interpret it now, has meant that those from more privileged backgrounds find a way to make themselves part of a marginalized group by engaging in trans ideology and declaring themselves to be non-binary

Of course they are. Oppression is the only thing money and nepotism can't buy. So they've manufactured some and are busy doing what the bourgeois classes always are busy with - capturing resources for themselves.

Yes, and once they've convinced themselves they are the most oppressed of all the oppressed, they won't need to spend any time worrying about real oppression. Plus ca change ...

So they've manufactured some and are busy doing what the bourgeois classes always are busy with - capturing resources for themselves.

This.

Thank you MNers. This thread is a perfect example of why I joined mumsnet despite being a childless millennial type. The level and depth of discussion here is brilliant. The fact we can even discuss it all is amazing.