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 an art form really. Like free form jazz. A bit wanky.

This!

All her writing sounds like something which would be submitted to Real Peer Review for a puerile laugh like the ones about "trans-hippos" etc.

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

PMSL here

It’s like Private Eye’s ‘pseuds corner’ has expanded into reality.

Another good take-down of Sophie the Twit’s NYT piece, this one by Madeleine Kearns:

www.freezepage.com/1549590951FBIVWCYBES

I think there is truth about it being like free-form jazz or beat poetry. There seems to be a school of thought that weaving words around, sprinkling images and pleasingly mashing ideas together contains a version of 'truth' that is in some way comparible to logic, evidence, deduction, testing, rigour and reasoning.

Can't people see this belongs in the arts and not in science? It's embarrassing.

It's not meant to be understood. The more incomprehensible the better. So long as it dazzles the unthinking while giving them a sense of a progressive message. They can then approve of the article and feel intelligent. This might not understand what it's actually on about but their feelings are right so they were intelligent enough to understand at some level.

It has things in common with propaganda speeches of the past hundred years or so. If you read them rather than listen to them they usually make little sense. But man, the feels for the receptive audience!

nauticant has it. The reason we feel like we've read it before is because it's just combination of random slogans and jargon that has been repeated ad infinitum.

That's how cults use language - it designates who is in and who is out based on their acceptance of the cult jargon. If you don't understand the deliberately impenetrable waffle, and you say it doesn't make sense, you have signalled that you are outside the group.
If you don't understand it and keep quiet, you can be part of the group by virtue of not rocking the boat, often due to the fear of being put out of the group, a powerful tactic used on a number of high-profile questioners in recent times.

Of course, the way to ensure you are not a target is to vocally support the jargon. You don't have to be especially erudite, you just have to intone "Trans women are women" and you will deflect the Eye of Sauron.

I start reading Sophie's words, but my eyes glaze over and brain shuts down before the end of the first sentence.

I'm in awe of those of you actually trying to understand and analyse what she's saying.

Is Sophie lurking on here? She tweeted this earlier

1/ please do keep your great jokes about Picts & Celts coming. But when I say "indigenous" in my piece, I mean the colonised people from places Britain colonised (colonises).

twitter.com/reproutopia/status/1093929843685814272

She Probably lurks or posts, it's an extremely mainstream site after all.

Oh, OK. Hello Soph. Hang around, you might learn something. You certainly need to.

Of course she lurks. She's the type who retweets all the fawning adulation for her bag of crap propaganda piece, she's so going to be the type to vanity search.

Plus, you know, powerful radicalization portal. She'll get a wee trill up her spine just scrolling through among the dangerous women.

But when I say "indigenous" in my piece, I mean the colonised people from places Britain colonised (colonises).

That’s not quite what the article said though was it?

Anthropological validation of a single group even being Celts aside (wink wink) , I do wonder of Sophie is aware of the ‘forriner’ content of Roman city/large town cemeteries? Almost twenty percent not from these sceptered isles. Many of whom would have stood a chance of adding to the gene pool.
But I’m sure she knows that, and can define precisely the genetic makeup of an ‘indigenous’ Brit. We are, and probably always have been, mongels.

It is cult like waffle, and I’ll repeat what I’ve said on here before (and what others in various professions have.) Which is that jargon should be a tool to express clearly what you mean. It should be accurate AND precise. You should also be able to explain your work clearly, and simply, for any audience. From schoolkids, to students, to the woman on the Clapham omnibus to experts in your field.

If you can’t, the suspicion lingers that you’re either not understanding it yourself, or you’re deliberately muddying the waters.

Tl:dr.

POMO bollocks.

I did wonder whether she'd actually read anything on here, because I assumed she'd be better informed if she had. But that would be assuming that she had written her article from a position of ignorance, rather than simply lying.

Pleased to see Amanda Foreman calling it out too:
Every aspect of this one-sided opinion piece is a slur against British feminists
twitter.com/dramandaforeman/status/1093533382343094274?s=21
Odin the Wolf also asks if Sophie wants some cheese to go with her "I cant handle the truth" whine. I think I might adopt that phrase! . Sobs slightly at lack of cheese emoji.

that would be assuming that she had written her article from a position of ignorance, rather than simply lying.

It's always a bit depressing to me to realize, as I do more and more frequently, how willing people are to lie, especially women who absolutely must have come across the truth. I'm still quite naive in that part of me believes that once someone honestly examines the situation, they will see what our points are and how we are not at all bigoted or unreasonable, and every single day that is being knocked out of me by people who must have addressed these things and are willing to bare faced lie to shore up their own position in the cult of Genderism.

Och no floral. They just idiots. Being educated doesn’t mean you can’t be an idiot

I did wonder whether she'd actually read anything on here, because I assumed she'd be better informed if she had.

Too scary I imagine.

Might have face up to the horrifying reality of biological sex.

of course she's got a patreon account which she pushes in her tweets

of bloody course

Proper academic language is the opposite of poetry: You use a lot of words to define clearly, very precisely and completely unambiguously what exactly it is you are describing.

Chucking a word like 'colonialism' around without showing the first clue that you know a thing about the complex processes of British imperialism, its co-option, indirect rule and varying motivations, has all the precision of a chimpanzee with a Kalashnikov.

There were protectorates, mandates, dominions, Trucial and princely states, captured territories taken from other European powers, private ventures by the likes of Rhodes and the East India Co, the emancipation sanctuary of Sierra Leone, and so much more.

Whatever else the British Empire did, it put down slavery, abolished Sutti, drove the Boers north because it said Africans had comparable if not equal rights under the law, and treated the indiginous peoples in Canada a damn sight better than they got south of the 49th Parallel.

Never perfect, but we take no lectures, least of all from those who fail to do their reading.

...And if you need a primer, you could do worse than James/Jan Morris and her Pax Britannia Trilogy.

Hawkeye I'm totally with you.
It would be less painful just to stick needles in my eyes

people who must have addressed these things and are willing to bare faced lie to shore up their own position in the cult of Genderism.

She appears to have spent a great deal of time thinking about these things, but has come to the conclusion that you can just delegate all the bits of being female you don't like so we can pretend sex doesn't exist. To be fair you can delegate most of the business of having children, but only with huge amounts of money.

I think in her communist utopia people (who absolutely aren't all women because that would of course be sexist) are just having other people's babies and looking after their children because they are nice and probably nobody needs to work and there is. no poverty. Basically it's like living in 'Imagine'.

In the meantime, while we are waiting for the world to be lovely, we can make a start by getting rid of all the rights that women won't need once we are living in Lala land.