Second Shelf London

[lionheart]

Anyone been watching this drama played out on the Twitter?

jaded millennial
@MillennialJaded

'A women’s bookshop I was interested in visiting is now openly ‘anti terf’ & they publically shamed someone they were following for tweeting an article on sport & trans. FFS this climate is chilling',

A little snippet from the shop itself (one of many on the issue):

'The Second Shelf
@secondshelfbks
·
19h

'We want to be clear, we are uninterested in the transexclusionary feminist position! We understand there is discomfort w/ the acronym TERF. But this seems to be because the negative connotations don’t sit well with the position holder? Maybe it’s evidence of a terrible stance?'

The Second Shelf
@secondshelfbks
·
11 Oct

'There is no space that heals a rape.'

I saw they were in Soho and thought it possible that it might be possible for them to flourish, even if they did alienate lots of women.

But the whole “we” thing. So grandiose. So reminiscent of Brown on the LGTBLibDems Twitter.

Not sure what this is in response to, if anything, but it’s so childish for a supposed adult running a shop.

”If you think that trans girls are not girls you are not, in fact, a "hashtag feminist until you die." Your feminism is a lie.”

It's a surprise a bookshop anywhere goes out of it's way to piss off people who are supposed to the their target demographic, bookshops are really struggling in the market these days. It's really hard to compete with Amazon, who as far as I am aware have a section for feminism and haven't call their customers stupid names they're only tax dodging bastards.

I followed them on Twitter until yesterday when I saw that Terf post. Tragic - feminists who don’t understand feminism.

”If you think that trans girls are not girls you are not, in fact, a "hashtag feminist until you die." Your feminism is a lie.”

Trans girls - it's extremely rare, in my experience, to find women calling transwomen "girls". I'm very suspicious.

”If you think that trans girls are not girls you are not, in fact, a "hashtag feminist until you die." Your feminism is a lie.”

These people are so laughable. As if most GC or radical feminists give a shit what a badly misguided woke child with a "feminist" bookshop tweets about them on her Twitter. Had to face worse in life than your inane nonsense. We're not going to indulge it. We're not your mum. Hashtag that.

A feminist bookshop? Hmm..

Will they have books written by Germaine Greer I wonder or will they not stock them because they think she is a massive T word*?

What do you think? Anyone who thinks trans "girls" aren't girls is not a feminist, according to this great authority on feminism.

Check out the Twitter hashtag, #transgirls

Lots of girls just doing their girl thing.

They stock Greer, it says so on their Twitter feed.

So is there a special exemption for her?

So no books, then, by Germaine Greer, or Julie Bindel, or Janice Raymond, or Caroline Criado Perez, I guess. Probably not by Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Shulamith Firestone or Kate Millett either. No wonder it's such a small shop.

The TRAs who attacked the Vancouver women's bookshop a few years ago wrote a demand insisting on them getting rid of texts by feminists who didn't support trans ideology.

"If you think trans girls aren't girls" is quite funny. I know trans girls are not girls because if they were they would just be girls. The whole point of using the term trans before girls is to signify that they are actually talking about boys.

Indeed.

They stock Greer, it says so on their Twitter feed.

Perhaps they should be called The Cognitive Dissonance Bookshop then?

Of course trans 'girls' are not girls, they're boys.

I don't imagine many boys frequent allegedly 'feminist' bookshops irrespective of their views on trans ideology though. Are they not aimed pretty squarely at the adult market?

"it's extremely rare, in my experience, to find women calling transwomen "girls"

Come now Vicky, it's just "us girls", y'know!
There is a(nother) report of trans gone wrong in the Times today, where the author was fully expecting girlie lunches as a result of transitioning. I mean, they had PINK SPONGES! What more is needed, right?

How can you say they weren't a girl, eh? I bet you have less pink ladythings than they ever did and you go round calling yourself a woman...

well they are a niche market and I guess they just got even more so

I hadn't heard of them till yesterday when I saw someone tweet about them. So I went to look at their Twitter feed. Like you do. Turns out I'm blocked by them. Which is sort of flattering really. They know who I am but I haven't a clue who they are. FAME!

The constant use of "we" on the Twitter feed is bizarre.

It's a very familiar trope in science fiction and horror. Andrei Tchaikovsky uses it Children of Ruin where what is essentially a unicellular piece of sludge bands together as a hive mind. It's a very common trope.

In horror fiction it's where a character has been taken over by something evil but incorporeal and the host and the parasite become "we". Stephen King's The Outsider is a recent example.

A real life example of using "we" is Mrs Thatcher's famous we have become a grandmother for which she was roundly mocked. Hindsight has put a kinder and sadder interpretation on that as possibly the first indication the Iron Lady's mental health was more fragile than anyone thought.

Is it "we" because more than one person runs the shop? Not so odd then.

I feel that these two tweets say everything you need to know about second shelf.

I also feel that if you were aiming to run a “feminist” bookshop stocking books by men you should have called your shop PRO NOUNS. It’s a missed opportunity...

Is it "we" because more than one person runs the shop? Not so odd then.

If so, both of them were raped and had identical experiences of recovery from it, proving that women who are raped do not need spaces free of males..

Ah, almost as if they haven't realised not everyone has the same experiences.