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.”

It's like someone sat down with Academic Writing for Dummies and produced identity politics bingo:

people like Ms. Parker are part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace

Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.

As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus, their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain

I wonder if you could ever get Sophie to discuss, critically, what's been done to Jazz Jennings or how welcoming she would be of a certain fan of ball-waxing in her spaces.

We're not feckin' "anti-trans", we're PRO-women's RIGHTS.

Like most others here, I'm definitely anti the following, however:

predatory men
predatory men being enabled to go into women's spaces
paedophiles
paedophiles being enabled to access children.

Linda Bellos used to be on Lambeth Council - is she the politician whose feminism is supposed to be influenced by British Imperialist homophobia?

Sarah Ditum
@sarahditum
Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about? The Celts? Anglo-Saxons? Do Americans not know that "indigenous British" has a tiny bit of ukip baggage as a term?

Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about?

Everyone knows that TERF is Cornish for witch

Nasty old British Colonialists enforcing their binary genderism on the free-spirited Irish.

In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force

I LOLed

just off to a meeting of the Bilberberg group with a load of shadowy billionaires

Oh no, sorry, it's actually WI tonight. I always get them mixed up

Haha pain, I was about to make the same point! The writer is extremely American-centric. There's something ironic about an American lecturing others on imperialism, too.

Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist and geographer, is the author of the forthcoming “Full Surrogacy Now.”

In case you can't wait to get your hands on the book, her's a flavour:

www.versobooks.com/blogs/3654-gestators-of-all-genders-unite

All very transhumanist. Since it's teatime then if you've eaten or are about to, you might want to save reading it till later.

Quick question, but when an American writer says British feminists need to learn from "indigenous feminists", who the fuck is she talking about?

Angles? Picts? Roaming tribes of Silures?

Clearly it's the green skinned Silurian tribes who slumber in their cities beneath us, they were here well before humans and the female folk among them are really quite forthright.

From the article,
"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.” Many prominent figures in British journalism and politics have been TERFs; British TV has made a sport of endlessly hosting their lurid rudeness and styling it as courage; British newspapers seemingly never tire of broadsides against the menace of “gender ideology.” (With time, the term TERF has become a catchall for all anti-trans feminists, radical or not.)"

My great-granny (who was Irish) used to often say, "why spoil a good story with the truth?"

She says

In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

Is she British? She's a graduate of Oxford and Manchester.

hcommons.org/members/reproutopia/

And she has blue hair.

While acknowledgement that not all women are mothers is fairly commonplace, the fact that not all pregnant or potentially pregnant persons are mothers or women^ has yet to transform our language and conceptual frames substantively^.” Heel-dragging on the part of ‘skeptics’ is doing us all harm.

(My bold). I predict you'll be waiting a while for that to happen in the minds of the majority, Sophie.

That from nauticant's link, btw.

I'm liking that it's slowly dawned that in the UK, it's not some small right wing group.

How great is that progress really?

"Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary"

I can't work out if she doesn't understand what the 'critical' in 'gender critical' means (or has perhaps only heard the expression 'terf') or if she doesn't understand the difference between gender and sex and genuinely thinks the British came up with the idea of sex.

"Sophie Lewis is a writer and feminist geographer interested in leakiness, communisation, anti-work and anthrogenesis. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019). Her published cultural criticism includes a recent intervention in Viewpoint on Donna Haraway’s oeuvre and various essays at The New Inquiry, Salvage, Jacobin and (especially) Blind Field journal, where she is an editor (completing the Blind Field edited volume End/And: Feminization in Unending Times). Sophie has published research articles on surrogacy politics in Signs, Frontiers, Dialogues in Human Geography and Feminist Review. Her ESRC-funded PhD on gestational surrogacy, ‘Cyborg Labour’, was defended at the University of Manchester (UK) – supervised by Noel Castree and Erik Swyngedouw and examined by Cindi Katz."

Angles? Picts? Roaming tribes of Silures?

Would many Americans know of the Silurians?
I thought UNIT put a stop on that sort of information getting out?

ESRC-funded PhD on gestational surrogacy, ‘Cyborg Labour’
link to abstract:
www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/cyborg-labour-exploring-surrogacy-as-gestational-work(2a3f4b10-8a41-4ba9-a193-0a9067babf4a).html

see Nauticant's suggestion above,
"Since it's teatime then if you've eaten or are about to, you might want to save reading it till later"

Heel-dragging on the part of ‘skeptics’ is doing us all harm

Can anyone explain this? Is a skeptic the opposite of a Pomo? Is part of being Pomo believing in homeopathy and being anti science?

I thought UNIT put a stop on that sort of information getting out?

I will state for the record that I am happy to accept that Time Lords can change sex.

I will state for the record that I am happy to accept that Time Lords can change sex.

I'll admit it. But I ain't happy.

And YY to this bizarre idea (not the first time I've seen it) that the Gender Critical position is about enforcing gender. Have words stopped meaning anything at all now?

Gosh I feel proud at how powerful we all are. Thanks Sophie, that's really bolstered me. And it's bound to drive American GC people here.

Soph probably lives in a little NY bubble, and all the people she knows are so woke they are 24/7, so she won't come across any different views, but I bet there are loads of people like us in USA.