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?'

I wish I could go back to that golden age of being 20 when one knew it all and was right about everything. You know, before my PhD, expertise in my career, the thousands of books I’ve read and conversations I’ve had, relationships, experience of life, the world and my own body all conspired to make me more stupid than I was back then

💫 Found it!

Gay rights and gay pride was started by a gay trans man so go wild there

Something similar was said on Jeremy Vine on Friday by Helena Wadia.

If Stormé DeLarverie was trans (as far as I'm aware she wasn't), why wasn't the T front and centre at the start of the movement? Why such a new addition?

Storme was a woman.

It’s Marsha who the trans lobby like to wheel out - even though he (for he called himself he) said he wasn’t there at the start of the stonewall riots.

Guess who gets a statue in NY to commemorate the stonewall riots? Clue: it’s not Storme.

💫 I haven't got a twirly star 🌠

Fk.

💫 iPhone?

Oh. Turns out I have! 💫💫

💫 yay

I need coffee. The woke one kept me awake too late and now I’ve had to get up. 😑

Here's what I really don't understand. Our visitor from last night is adamant, quite rightly, that gender is a social construct. That means that it's temporally and culturally contingent, and rooted in sets of stereotypes (or discourses, to be Foucauldian about it) which tell us about how people conceptualise what it is to be a man or woman socially. Discourses of femininity have been used to oppress women, and to naturalise the idea that we're inferior to men.

How on earth can you recognise the socially constructed nature of gender and then claim that it's more important than biological sex? What is the argument for gender-segregated spaces instead of sex-segregated ones? How can you say that gender is a social construct and not realise how harmful and limiting it is?

The closest guess I have is the 'I'm not like other women' phenomenon - I used to think I was an exceptional woman because I didn't like high heels and shopping and frivolity and all the other things I was implicitly told that 'being a woman' entailed as I was growing up. To hold that view, I had to believe that most other women did embody the stereotype and were happy to do so. Of course the real problem is gender stereotypes, not other women. (But a young woman falling into that trap today would probably be calling herself non-binary, I suppose...)

A woman recognising gender as a social construct and yet calling herself 'cis' seems contradictory to me, unless she's some kind of surrendered Stepford wife and thinks most other women are too. Bizarre.

so many zombie threads recently!

I wonder how many books on pregnancy and child raising they have for women? I’m going to guess none

Whilst the owner comes across as monumentally pretentious and narcissistic to be fair it's a specialist bookshop selling literary and philosophical first editions.

💫

Has anyone mentioned they are donating to mermaids for every Harry Potter book sold?

Monumental f-wits.

How on earth can you recognise the socially constructed nature of gender and then claim that it's more important than biological sex?

But that requires critical thinking and working through an argument. And I have the overwhelming impression that anything like that just isn’t woke.

This was bloody hilarious. Nice to start the day with a good laugh. It's easy to forget sometimes that there are people who really believe this stuff. I too miss being 20 and knowing everything (also thinking that 20 still isn't a "proper grownup"). Very good OP, 10/10.

I suggest you extend your research by checking out the website "your logical fallacy", learning about some of the common ones, and then reevelauting your beliefs (hint: they're mostly based on logical fallacies). Or you could just do what we all did - age a decade or 2, have some kids, and wait for that "aha" moment. In the mean time we'll all keep doing our best to make sure you still have some rights left when you get there.

It’s completely illogical to call Marsha P Johnson trans in hindsight, for the following reasons:

He called himself gay.
He had sex and relationships with men, not women.

If he was a trans woman, but had sex with men, that would make him straight (by modern day logic ) so why would he call himself gay?

So Stonewallists can either say he was trans and gay, with gay meaning same-sex attracted, which undoes their ideology, or he wasn’t trans, which means they don’t have their trans hero.

But we all know logic isn’t their strong point.

Also go to laugh that a 20yo thinks they have to disguise their swearing in front of either MNHQ or us oldies - not sure which - when most of us many of us swear all the fucking time.

I read an article by Marshas niece (who knew him well). She said that he never said he was female and never said he was there at the start of the riots.

Has anyone mentioned they are donating to mermaids for every Harry Potter book sold?

Really? 500million were sold in 2018, so their bookshop must be raking it in!

And a donation to Mermaids is a donation to conversion therapy for LGB kids. I hope this is done out of ignorance rather than homophobia but even then it’s bad enough.

This was bloody hilarious. Nice to start the day with a good laugh.

Well I know I had fun. 😁 It’s so cute when the young wokes try to ‘educate’ all us mums. I was waiting to be asked why I wasn’t discussing important mum stuff, like the price of prams. 🤣

As far as I can see the story is a little less complicated than demanding certain opinions from customers.

It seems that a customer was in the store and raised the issue that they were selling books or a book written by a trans woman. The customer asked the store or person working there did they believe trans women were women. Possibly a bit intrusive a question in my opinion but, each to their own. The person appears to have said they did and the customer declined to buy on that basis and said they could not recommend the store.

Another customer then came in and bought a book clearly not having an issue with selling books by trans women in a book store that sells books written by women. Individual opinions rule i suppose. Mass group think never goes down well in the wider populous.

If this is a true reflection and it seems to be one repeated about the initial encounter of the initial I am not sure there is a problem. If you feel you can't buy a book from a store because of what the owner believes then surely, that is your choice?

Mass group think never goes down well in the wider populous.

Someone needs to point that out to the MRAs/TRAs!

TOtallyfuckedupfamily

I agree wholeheartedly. We were blessed with brains this size so it would be a shame for any one on any side of the debate to blindly follow a few very loud leaders without question.

Even if it did start over that conversation with a customer, stats, it was the bookshop that tried to shame their customer, by turning it into a huge issue. They also put it out on Twitter and went on to insult anyone, in particular feminists, that recognise reality. They could have dealt with both customers, put it down to a difference of belief and left it. The6 decided to go full woke, so I hope they’re getting enough wokies to replace the many actual female customers they’ve alienated.