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.”

Wait, she's pro-trafficking?

Wtf?

All this talk or sex-worker exclusion and rights and the same for surrogates is hot air, and never seems to address the simple fact that legalising something based on having given the most vulnerable party "rights" which are vague, unenforceable, easily circumvented and not in any way even advertised is not protecting those women or their interests.
Those aren't rights. They are get-out clauses for the powerful parties involved in screwing over the vulnerable ones.

Reading about the reality of German brothels recently reinforced my feelings on this. Out of hundreds of thousands of prostituted women a tiny handful, single figures, are known to have registered as tax-paying "sex workers". Police now have no control over trafficking, rape, etc in brothels which they can't enter anyway. The police admit this. Women get shipped from city to city, living in their "work" room, are trafficked from poorer countries, all the usual crap that comes with being a prostituted woman and no additional protections, just loads more competition!

Surrogates in poor countries suffer the same risks to their health, there have been rejected babies the surrogates can't afford to feed (and who aren't related to them genetically either).

It's just making excuses to enable men to do as they please. Rent a hole to fuck, buy a designer baby, reject it if it isn't perfect, it's the same to them as hiring a cleaner, no doubt.

Sophie Lewis is just some self-hating English woman who is desperate to be seen as a "cool girl" and who is educated enough to be able to construct reams of word salad. Her impassioned arguments for the rights of men to buy or rent women's bodies for sex or reproduction don't have any extra weight to them because she can get published in the NYT.

Oxbridge have a lot to answer for. Our Ruthie was an Oxford grad, she hates women too. Do they put something in the water there?

“Surrogate-Exclusionary Radical Feminist”

That is just childish.

Why bother arguing your point when you can just make up offensive acronyms?

I wonder whether she was going for a SERF and TERF combo.

PainInTheEar

SERF ‘n’ TERF: Notes on Some Bad Materialisms by Sophie Lewis

salvage.zone/in-print/serf-n-terf-notes-on-some-bad-materialisms/

I am becoming a very big opponent of acronyms and squished together words. Useful on a chat forum they may be, but in academic discourse they just seem to be an excuse for the petty minded to graffiti abuse like teenagers on a bus shelter or lamp post. Absolutely mindless.

Looking at her essays on surrogacy and cyborgs, she seems to be both aware of all the risks of child bearing, but also desperate to show that they can be avoided if only you can get somebody else to be pregnant for you, somebody else to do childcare.

You don’t have to make any kind of sacrifice, because ‘the village’ will look after your children and somebody will pay a surrogate. It’s not clear how it’s possible to value surrogacy or who pays - Perhaps the state? Perhaps the surrogates could wear special red cloaks?...

If only everyone would play along with her all the bad stuff would go away.

The people who disagree with her can’t possibly just be other women. They must be evil Imperialist British feminists from Greenham Common.

Oxbridge have a lot to answer for.

Twas ever thus. Elite social closure with the unending privilege to do thought experiments that will never adversely affect them.

Oh no, somebody somewhere on a website has opinions that go against orthodox lefty views! Quick, alert The NY Times!

It’s not as if TERFs on here are screaming for trans-women and -men to be punched and erased with violence, is it? Unlike what is being said about feminists on TRA websites and Twitter. Amazing how threatening it is to the mainstream left when women refuse to toe the line on something. Patriarchy reigns supreme across all ideologies.

Has anyone seen the fragrant Sophie's website?

lasophielle.org/about/

It's enough to make one want to join UKIP, quite frankly, the thought that there are vast sections of academia where this shite passes for rational thought.

"Sophie is a rootless cosmopolitan in exodus from academia; a translator; a geographer; and a writer."

Of course there's an unironic 'communism' tag, of course there fucking is

lasophielle.org/category/communism/

"My article, “Cyborg uterine geography: complicating ‘care’ and social reproduction” is now published in Volume 8, Issue 3 of the the journal Dialogues in Human Geography"

"Abstract

Most geographers have sided with ‘cyborgs’ (technonatural subjects) against ‘goddesses’ (e.g. Mother Earth) on questions of embodiment.
n itself this provides no justification for the relative dearth (in geography) of theorizing ‘with’ the uterus as a site of doing and undoing; what I propose to call uterine geography. ‘Uterine’ relations are fundamentally cyborg, animatedly labouring and not only spatial but spatializing: they make and unmake places, borders, kin. This includes not only abortion, miscarriage, menstruation and pregnancy (whose transcorporeal and chimeric character is well documented in medical anthropology) but also other life-enabling forms of holding and letting go that do not involve anatomical uteri (such as trans-mothering and other alter-familial practices). "

As I say, reading this shit I'd be fully in favour of defunding all the relevant university departments and other parasitical forms of life that fund this crap.

As I say, reading this shit I'd be fully in favour of defunding all the relevant university departments and other parasitical forms of life that fund this crap.

It's an art form really. Like free form jazz. A bit wanky.

Here she is equating writing opinion pieces for the Guardian with being raped by men & having your womb rented out by the ultra-rich

www.versobooks.com/blogs/3845-not-a-workplace-julie-bindel-and-the-school-of-wrong-abolitionism

"Julie Bindel has not heard of ‘circlusion’. In her fevered imagination, mouth and throat cavities, vulvas, groins, anuses, rectums and the like can only ever be put to use economically by bodies other than those of which they are part. Unlike the voice-boxes of call-centre workers, the muscles of athletes, or the eyeballs of those on the smartphone-assembly line, these elements cannot work: they can only be defiled, exposed and ceded – either via direct physical contact, or visually, via web-cam. An ‘orifice’, here, stands for the inside of a person, a curiously feminised zone. This inside cannot fuck, it can only be fucked; indeed, for some reason, it can only be fucked by a man (here defined, problematically, as someone with a dick) resulting in total loss of dignity. "

"Like me, like everyone, Julie Bindel uses her body to do her work. But like many people, she views certain types of applications of the body as qualitatively and not just quantitatively different from what we call (or should call) work. "

"I’ve written elsewhere - in a wider-ranging etiology of the technophobic, oddly misogynist, anti-queer thought of SWERFs (sex-worker exclusionary radical-feminists) and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical-feminists) – that, when people like Julie Bindel “promote body acceptance, they have in mind bodies that perform certain genders, not others. They have in mind the bodies cavorting around a fire at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, or bodies stacking shelves and changing nappies, but not bodies selling sexual services.”"

It would be difficult, surely to find a less sympathetic female advocate for the TRA cause.

DoctoressPlague She was going for Serf n Terf! I'm tickled, if a bit put out that I'm not as original as I'd hoped

Do we think Sophie may actually be a work of performance art?

There's more of Sophie's shite here: hcommons.org/members/reproutopia/

Pain I had read that particular piece of guff a while ago and thought I'd link it here just for a laugh - was unsurprised when I realised it was the same author!

Some of her Tweets (@LaSophus) are fantastic:

" I was having an emotional day dealing with failures of support for my partner's needs as a queer trans bride, "
"Who made (or makes) the woman under socialism erotically happy?"

Titania McGrath eat your front hole out.

"Like me, like everyone, Julie Bindel uses her body to do her work. But like many people, she views certain types of applications of the body as qualitatively and not just quantitatively different from what we call (or should call) work. "

Unfortunately for the communist utopia, I suspect prospective sex workers and surrogates also view the work as being qualitatively different to being a call centre worker, and all things being equal, might really rather prefer to work in a call centre.

oh bum it's locked down

If she hadn't had an opinion piece in the NYT, I really would have trouble believing she actually existed outside parody.

Good grief. What a load of crap Lewis's work is.

a man (here defined, problematically, as someone with a dick)

If working in a call centre and fucking are completely interchangeable, how come no one does a shift at British Gas for fun?

is it possible that the two activities are not completely analogous Sophie?

'How was your weekend Ella?'

'Fan-bloody-tastic. The Vodafone call centre at Newbury were letting people go on the phones. It was a bit of a trek from Manchester, but so worth it'