Writing an account of a WPUK meeting now makes you a hateful T**F

[InionEile]

Helen Lewis wrote an article in the New Statesman that summarises the WPUK meeting that took place in London recently. I read it. It's fine. Summarises key points, notes the main speakers, ends with this phenomenal rallying cry for the kind of feminism I can get behind:

'The packed hall felt like the birth, or rebirth, of something. A feminism unafraid to talk about the female body. A rejection of the extremes of identity politics. And – just as radically – a movement that happens in the real world rather than purely online.'
New Statesman link

But no: apparently it's a 'bad faith, hateful' article by a T**F that is very upsetting and should never have been published, according to the woke beards on Twitter They're all frantically virtue signaling to show how awful it is to allow gender critical views the light of day. It seems it's now it's !!literal violence!! to write an account of a meeting of people who think differently to others
Twitter outrage

There's absolutely no point wasting energy worrying about people who just use insults.

At some point they'll have to make a substantive argument and that's when they'll get stuck.

the more people Twitter ban, the more irrelevant it becomes, and the less advertising revenue they will receive.

Helen Lewis is my go-to example for the complete lack of compromise on the part of most TRAs. She opposed self id only in the centext of the right to access women only spaces and expressed concern about the number of children given puberty blockers. Yet she is treated like she is the ultimate transphobe. She and Hadley Freeman must be in a total minority where they work and I admire them both for sticking to their principles.

The ratio is pretty good on there.

It's nice to see them not getting away with just hurling insults.

The worrying thing is that this isn’t a random on twitter, it’s another journalist.

Of course he doesn’t explain why he has a problem with the piece, he just tweets out that it’s written in ‘bad faith’.

All those heterosexual men who pretend they think transwomen are women, would never actually sleep with a transwoman, because when the chips are down, they know what a woman is.

There was a rather nasty vibe in Helen's piece about how any feminists who think sex is immutable, and who stubbornly refuse to pretend even for the nice ones/the transexuals/ the chosen ones, are equally as 'extreme' as the TRAs who deny sex exists at all.
With a dig about how they're probably the real transphobes, unlike the nice, reasonable feminists who, look! are completely willing to lie for a select few men which proves how they're the reasonable ones.

Frankly, I find that unpleasant, unfair and distasteful. I'm heartily tired of being characterised as the nasty woman by women eager to make my eleven year old share space with whichever men they've handpicked as their look-how-fair-I-am-trophies.

And whilst I take no pleasure in her being drubbed a transphobe despite her valiant attempts to point at other women 'not me, I'm nice, do it to them, they're the real transphobes' I'm not the least bit surprised.

But then, it seems I'm one of those extreme transphobes that Helen thinks are beyond the pale. I'm afflicted with such an extremism that I think that no man becomes a woman, and that lying to him, to others, to children and to society is wrong.
I think compelling a lie is wrong. I think condemning those who won't lie is wrong. I think the truth is a million times more important than preserving a man's feelings by propping up a lie. I measure my daughter's right to a female only space higher than a grown man's right to access her in it. Even if Helen has decided he passes whatever test she thinks fitting.
So I'm one of those nasty women that Helen thinks we should probably disregard.
It's given me a knack for seeing the world exactly as it is.
It's also left my integrity intact.

Bravo!

Barracker
Not sure how you interpreted this as "nasty" I presume you're referring to this para, I mean what else is she meant to say? It's true. Not meant as an insult surely.

The extreme radical feminists believe that no amount of surgery, hormones or pronoun changes means a man should be treated by the law or society as a woman, or vice versa. Their mirror on the transgender side deny the existence of biological sex differences at all: to them, there’s no such thing as “male” and “female”

I thought the article was good, as a sort of introducing people to WPUK job, she's not stupid and isn't going to warmly applaud gender critical speakers, she knows journalists always come in for a ton of abuse if they do.

Mind you it looks like she hadn't dodged the tons of abuse even after simply writing a fact-based pretty non-sided report of an event held by feminists. The AWA are a fucking disgrace.

But at least some more people know about WPUK now which is good. A lot of people read The New Statesman.

I think she's implying 'extreme' = bad.

2+2=4 is horribly mean and equally as extreme as 2+2=6
All the nicest people have agreed to compromise at 2+2=5.36, or possibly 2+2=4.67, we're still open to debate and listening to opinion (not you, you're unreasonable), and frankly, those who can't even agree some middle ground are all as bad as each other.

I think she's implying equivalence between the two positions: sex is immutable/sex doesn't exist as if they are both equally unreasonable.
I think she does this by using the word 'mirror', as if the ludicrous position that sex doesn't exist is mirrored by the (implied equally ludicrous) position that it does, and is always immutable.

Even the phrase "extreme radical feminist" is designed to inflame. As if the only way one could possibly believe in immutable sex is not to be a normal, rational, kind and reasonable person with a working knowledge of biology, no, to believe such a thing you must obviously be radical, extreme, a mirror of the most unreasonable factions of biology deniers. Two sides of the same awful coin.

There was some sentence drawing parallels with anti-Semitism, and guarding against transphobia.

Yes, I think she's deliberately demonising anyone who won't pretend, even a little bit.

I read it that way, too, Barracker.

I agree with Baracker. And I have a problem with using the word 'extreme' in conjunction with the belief that humans cannot change sex, and that women only spaces and services are for women.

Would Helen call a man who refuses sex with a post op transsexual extreme?

Would Helen call a man who refuses sex with a post op transsexual extreme?

Exactly. It's not logical. And appears, yet again, to be an appeal to socialisation. Surely, if they've done all this, you should be nice.

Helen Lewis is not normally an idiot, but her ‘do it to Julia’ stance on trans issues does piss me right off, for the reasons eloquently laid out by Barracker

Still pleased to see a write up in the New Statesman though

I'm with Barracker on this as well. Being "nice" and making allowances is what got us into this fucking mess.

Just goes to show that elite women will try to police other women to consolidate their position, even smart ones with feminist views

Another hearty handclap for Barracker who has saved me the trouble of criticising HL's piece.

It may be a rhetorical move to monster the 'not-nice' feminists who won't accept that a male can be, under any circumstances, a woman, but if so it's one calculated to leave the option open to her to sic the baying mob on the terrible witches over there.

I wish she would just own it, the way Janice and Hadley and Sarah and Victoria have managed to do. Everyone is a 't**f' nowadays. It's becoming the new normal. She'd only be joining the schoolgirls pissed off about their male peers stealing their sports medals and scholarships, mothers concerned about the transing of their kids, you know - females with a healthy awareness of where their interests lie.

Anyway, it's easy to snipe from the sidelines, so I'll stop. Every woman has to negotiate a path through the patriarchal thicket.

Aside from the intellectual incoherence of stating men can't become women but let's pretend for these ones and not for those.

Aside from that.

I wonder at the absolute naiveté of thinking that the solution to this is to reset the clock back to 2004.
Not pre 2004, when woman and female were synonymous in law, and we had the right to distinguish ourselves from men and invoke protections as females. Back when the law recognised the existence of the class of people born female on accurate terms.
No, post 2004.
The point at which the protections and recognition of females was already dissolved to accommodate men. (But only a few special ones).
You know, recreating the original problem, but possibly crossing our fingers harder this time that the problem we've just recreated won't mutate again from these-special-men into all-the-men. The fact that the last 15 years have shown us that one little white lie dissolved an entire class and mutated into a gigantic lie with horrifying consequences, let's ignore that. It will be different this time.

Let's do it all over again, with the template of how this ends up staring us in the face, and the precedent set for history to repeat itself, only faster, with structures already in place.

What we'll do though, is WISH HARDER.

Great plan.

It's like groundhog Day.

Also with Barracker on this.

HL has been on the receiving end of pile ons for wrong think before, but still appears not to see that employing the take her not me strategy will not ultimately stop you from being eaten - as others have said you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

Agree about Helen Lewis. Let's take an analogy: suppose a white person wanted to identify as black. Would we make a distinction between white people who just listened to a bit of reggae and adopted some street slang, and those who really went all out and took skin-darkening drugs and surgery to alter their voice? After all, that second group have made much more effort, right?

Barracker I agree with you.

Waves from beyond the pale.

Creating the legal fiction of sex change was the first - and crucial - mistake. With appalling consequences. I can't prioritise transexuals' rights as women over women's rights - men did that for us by deciding that the female sex would become an opt-in category untethered to biological reality. A particular type of mental illness, caused by patriarchal excess, cannot be the concern - let alone focus - of women's political movement to save our legal protections, resources and services.

Why can't those ostensibly paid to think this stuff through just...think?? We can't erect any kind of stable edifice of interconnected rights on the wonky foundation of the legal fiction of sex change. I know Rosa Freedman and Rosemary Auchmuty have been trying to protect transexuals' rights as women, while also protecting women's rights. I don't know that this niceness and self-abnegation and prostration before a legal fiction benefits women.

It leads me to wonder about the limits of law as regards women's rights, duties and freedoms. And, yes, it's frustrating to watch them running in circles.

BUT I have to remind myself that there's a wider historical lens through which to view the current chaos: not so long ago, women were men's chattel, and couldn't own property, and men could rape us in marriage with impunity, and have our kids taken from us with no recourse. We are, for the purpose of the law of England and Wales, just about human in some respects, albeit still a sex class exploited for our sexual and reproductive characteristics...How's that for a paradox?

It's true that, if sex loses it's legal meaning here, we are royally screwed. We aren't going to let that happen on our watch. And the circular motion will - I hope - resolve, leaving in place a woman-centred law.

Sarah Ditum here. Surprised and disappointed that this thread has turned into criticising Helen for not being robust enough. She's my editor. I would never have been able to write anything gender critical without her willingness to support journalism on this. She has personally taken huge flak - under her own name, not a pseudonym - for addressing the problems with gender identity doctrine and GRA reform. And I agree with her that gender critical feminism needs to absolutely exile the tiny minority that is hostile to trans people. It's cruel, it's ungracious to transwomen like Debbie Hayton who've stuck their necks out for women and GNC young people, and it allows people to instantly dismiss our arguments. Besides which, if you're going to snipe at Helen for being too nice, good luck convincing other women to go over the trenches on this publicly. It's nasty enough dealing with lost work, social ostracism and the threat of milkshaking without being shot in the back by anonymous feminists.

You think I should be exiled but it's mean of me to protest?

Because although I'm not hostile I know that is what you need to determine me to be, because I don't believe in any exceptions.

Apparently my believing that Debbie Hayton should not have the right to force their presence in a public female changing room on my eleven year old daughter is... ungracious?

Why are you so keen to characterise women and girls with objections as the aggressors here?

Can you not allow even a chink of possibility that this is not about what we owe Debbie - but about what Debbie owes us?

Our rights, my rights, my child's rights to be recognised as a sex are not compatible with Debbie's desired rights to overrule our recognition as such in the circumstances Debbie has determined matter to Debbie.

Would you think me hostile if I shook Debbie's hand, wished a long and happy life, but declared myself an entirely different sex class from Debbie and immovable in my defence of my right to assert that in every circumstance that sex is relevant?

Debbie does not accept my right to differentiate myself and define my boundaries, nor my daughter's rights either.

I am not the aggressor. I am simply unwilling to sacrifice my own and my daughter's sex based boundaries to appease anyone.

I agree with Baracker.

I agree with her that gender critical feminism needs to absolutely exile the tiny minority that is hostile to trans people.

Who? How does "hostility" to trans people manifest itself?

Is knowing that mammals cannot change sex, hostile to trans people?

Sarah Ditum
Thanks for coming on to this thread.

I agree that posters like Barracker and co are doing themselves no favours.

I think she's implying 'extreme' = bad
I think you need to come to terms with the environment we're in, which is very favourable to gender ideology. Flat out stating TWAM is "extreme". It just is. Sorry.
Not saying I agree with that but being referred to as "extreme" isn't an insult or mean it's just an acknowledgement.

HL is doing good work.