How British feminism became anti-trans - according to the New York Times

[NotTerfNorCis]

www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/terf-trans-women-britain.html

A surprisingly mainstream movement of feminists known as TERFs oppose transgender rights as a symptom of “female erasure.”

Beginning to suspect the writer has a bias...

There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, “feminist” ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity. Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast “Feminist Current” that she’d changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: “Mumsnet is to British transphobia,” she wrote “what 4Chan is to American fascism.”

The term coined to identify women like Ms. Parker and Ms. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force. If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear “both sides” on the question of trans people’s right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to “female erasure.”

Sorry ‘millytant’, not trying to pick on you, but class doesn’t protect women from abuse either.

The laws are better now but it’s an issue that we are still grappling with - hence refuges.

Buy you're one of those all-powerful British feminists! Surely if you said the name you could then use your total control of the UK media and the Establishment to swat away those flying monkeys?

I'm Irish, nauticant. But clearly as a gender critical radical feminist, I am "not real" according to Irish Official Feminism! I literally don't exist because no-one Irish could possibly espouse such views as mine.

I don't think I've ever mis-nationality'd someone before. I cannot begin to imagine what penance that's going to require of me.

I think that women are particularly vulnerable to abuse from a male partner because they can be physically overpowered by a man and are less likely to be financially independent because of the impact of child bearing.

Those things are based in biology and cross class and culture.

Thanks Lang Cleg. I've been taking a break from this madness, but seeing this hit piece by the incredibly creepy Sophie 'full surrogacy now' Lewis in the NYT has got my blood up. This is what both the mainstream media and the left are presenting as 'feminism' in the 21st century. Ghoulish transhumanists who fantasise about abolishing mothers and turning women into 'cyborg gestators'. It's looking glass stuff.

The solutions to those problems: get into a relationship with one of these new-fangled women with a penis, use surrogacy/reprotech (boak) and outsourcing to maintain independence.

You know it makes sense.

use surrogacy/reprotech (boak) and outsourcing to maintain independence

Can’t think of anything more privileged than discussing these things as practical options when so many don’t have access to basic healthcare.

The thing is Lewis acknowledges maternal death in her writing, but can’t quite make the leap to understanding that people with the resources to use a surrogate don’t tend to be in the group that dies in child birth because of lack of medical care.

It’s all just theory.

Ghoulish transhumanists who fantasise about abolishing mothers and turning women into 'cyborg gestators'. It's looking glass stuff.

It really, really is.

(I have missed you. Big time! But self care comes first.)

I have missed you. Big time! But self care comes first.

Seconded.

Aw, thanks, Lang Cleg and WeRiseUp

That phrase about "black and indigenous" is nonsensical, is it not? Woman's Place UK has had black women on its platform (Linda Bellos, Lucy Masoud and others), so you can't paint gender critical feminism as the preserve of white women let alone, to use that dread phrase, white and middle-class. On the other hand, you could very easily paint UK-based transactivism as being almost exclusively white and middle-class.

As for indigenous women, well, Sophie Lewis is welcome to show me the Indian and Pakistani feminists who have trans rights at the top of their wishlist. I won't be holding my breath.

I think she might be trying to say that more overt segregation and racism in America led to the civil rights movement and British feminists aren’t intersectional because they didn’t have so much opportunity to exclude people who aren’t white.

It’s the old racist sexist batshit crazy ‘intersectional’ argument that because some people are non-white and female, it’s also possible to be non-female and female.

It's the same sort of ethnocentric bull that had certain migrant groups classified as low-IQ because they did not know the names of baseball and basketball teams.

More scholarly, US geogrpahy textbooks used to state that suburban ribbon development was a product of road-building. (Only in North America. It was railways in Europe.)

It's the same sort of ethnocentric bull that had certain migrant groups classified as low-IQ because they did not know the names of baseball and basketball teams.

I saw that on a recent PBS documentary about progressive American eugenics that aired on Sky! Being unable to name people on collectable baseball cards!

The dig at British colonial arrogance was obviously a lazy throwaway, but t still wrankles.

I am reminded of Superintendant Walsh of the Royal Seskatchewan Mounted Police, who met with the exiled Sitting Bull after the Little Big Horn and assured him that in Canada all were equal before the law and all would have the equal protection of the police. If any of his braves stole local cattle, he would personally come down and arrest them.

It Beats Wounded Knee.

It's bizarre how they associate refusing to recognise the 'female penis' with an imperialist-colonialist mindset. Surely it's the opposite - defending an established identity (female) against aggressive cultural colonialism?

Sophie accuses her opponents of being white feminists.
When an impoverished, illiterate, infertile villager from Pakistan (etc) can employ a white woman from the UK to carry her baby then perhaps Sophie's claim to "Communism" will be legitimate.

Ergo, it's actually Sophie's feminism which encapsulates Western capitalist bourgeois decadence.

Trans handmaidens and activists are often at pains to use white feminist as an insult, with carefully hashed out explanations as to why they're not white feminists themselves despite being white and thinking of themselves as feminist. See also, Paris Lees.

Ms. Parker, who live-streamed footage of the harassment on Facebook, contended that she had come to Washington because “this ideology” — by which she presumably meant simply being trans

Why do they do this..they know fine well that its not 'simply being trans' when people discuss the dangerous ideology behind the movement. Its the 'denying trans people the right to exist' nonsense just over and over again.

Remember when Tatchell did the same to Mugabe? Put through this filter it'd end up looking like racist abuse instead.
No way was that harassment.

See also, Paris Lees.

Haven't read the full thread, but Paris has written a series of tweets about this article referring to 'Waitrose Feminists'.

I also love the way that 'Irish feminists' are apparently one homogenous group and none of them are gender critical! 😂

And I am surprised to learn that apparently, I am part of the 'London establishment'!

I almost feel sorry for Sophie...

When she was in her 20s the glittering prizes must have seemed within her grasp. First from Oxford, Fulbright, offer to study for a PhD.

And now. Well real life is more messy. A partner who, according to her twitter, needs support, the uncertainty of a freelancers life, a sense that others have arrived but you did not.

Getting into the NYT is an achievement, but really she would do better by taking a step back and, rather than criticise others, work out how to start upon a sensible career path that she can build on. Opinion pieces with "on-trend" impenetrable gobble-gook will get her nowhere.