Suzanne Moore- The Guardian on Selina Todd

[Ontheblackhill]

Presumably you have all seen this......

www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced

I knew someone would have picked.up on Jess's tweet here. Total drama. I'm glad to see a good proportion of the responses talking sense though. The irony of not feeling safe to go to work because someone wrote some words you don't agree with. It shows they have not one tiny bit of understanding of what being a female is.

Yes, 7Days, the potential backlash is worrying.

The irony of not feeling safe to go to work because someone wrote some words you don't agree with.It shows they have not one tiny bit of understanding of what being a female is.

Exactly. How does Jess think that female staff working at the Guardian have felt for the last few years as they've churned out their relentless woman-erasing shit and even blamed women for their own sexual assaults (Cologne)? One of my colleagues recently made an absolutely disgusting sexist remark in a meeting, which genuinely left me speechless (and I am pretty good at fighting back against this kind of thing). Women have to put up with this kind of shit all the time.

But are there good reasons for retaining a system in which people are gendered in ways that carry formal legal status?

No, but there's plenty of point in knowing what sex someone is.

Assuming Jess is telling the truth that they work at the guardian, their bio says they are ex-Google. So highly likely to be an engineer/IT person.

Can't help wondering if the culture war is between the editorial team and the engineering team, rather than within the editorial team itself (notable exceptions LOJ et al).

I thought it was a brilliant, brave and sharp piece.

Brave in the sense that she uses the term woman and that can get you all sorts of abuse nowadays

Can't help wondering if the culture war is between the editorial team and the engineering team, rather than within the editorial team itself (notable exceptions LOJ et al).

No, I think there is a war going on amongst members of the editorial team itself. And I think Kath Viner has been prepared to go along with the line peddled by LOJ and others that there is "no debate", and that amongst right-thinking people, it's all done and dusted. But Viner isn't stupid, and she'll have noticed the huge support feminist views are getting in other publications like the Times, the Telegraph, the Spectator etc. She'll have noticed that WPUK had more than 900 women attend their conference. She'll have seen the outrage on Twitter at Lisa Nandy's comments about putting rapists in women's prisons. At some point it will have clicked that the Guardian is alienating its own readers by continuing to peddle the TRA line and silencing women's voices.

Yes Royalcorgi, I imagine that's the case - what I meant to say is now they are sticking their head above the parapet, they've discovered another layer within the business who is anti-GC. Also, if they come from an IT background they don't understand editorial issues, freedom of speech, journalism etc, so the arguments are likely to be even more toxic.

I wonder if this is an early sign that the Guardian may be catching up. Perhaps that's a bit too optimistic

It's going to be a long term project to turn around the tanker.....and bring the focus back onto women's rights/services/sports.

'The third space' argument needs to be pushed - as it is entirely reasonable to the average person. As it stands, nobody is permitted to centre women and girls, even when talking about women & girls's spaces - without the conversation immediately being turned back to 'trans rights'.

The ideological capture is, currently, so thorough - it is going to take time to deconstruct.

Yes, I see what you mean Tootsweets23. Agree about IT people not necessarily understanding freedom of speech etch though it's depressingly clear that people like little OJ and Dawn Foster don't understand freedom of speech either. Their influence on the Guardian has been poisonous and the sooner they are booted out the better, in my view.

and bring the focus back onto women's rights/services/sports.

Yet other parts of the paper are singing the praises of what a lifeline the now National Women's Register had been for women. Once the National Housewives Register, such organisations were all in their own ways parts of the Women's movement in the late sixties and early seventies.

In case anybody was wondering, Jess's nominated pronouns are Me/Me

Great comment on the twitter thread. Very apt!

I'm crying and shaking right now, line them all up for the firing squad! How dare they

I'm not sure if this Twitter comment is serious or just ironic.

I have a friend in the Guardian tech team who was telling me recently that they've been given a project to increase the number of people engaging in the comments. I was asking about censorship and over-moderation and they were genuinely shocked by some of the examples I gave. I wonder whether the issue with moderation is individual moderators enforcing their own ideas about what constitutes "transphobia" as opposed to a consistent company-wide policy. In other words - I think the Guardian is a lot more messy, confused and fragmented than we might think.

Clearly a fantasist who lives to portray themselves as a victim

it is clear that many people are suffering from mental health issues......which is not an uncommon phenomena these days.....Several of the young female de-transitioners at the Manchester event, earlier in the year, had suffered with anorexia prior to 'coming out as trans'.

I think there are genuine mental health issues......but now we are no longer permitted to explore mental health issues...and manifestation of them is seen as being evidence of one's essential trans'ness - and the reasons for distress or dysphoria never explored.

...and there is a totally indulged narcissism evident in much of the behaviour too.

@RoyalCorgi well exactly re LOJ and Dawn Foster. As I understand it, there is a big period of reflection shall we say going on in the Guardian post the election. Without wanting to derail this thread, they got themselves into all sorts of problems with their columnist strategy over the last few years - basically giving space to a whole host of people who simply didn't/don't have the political insight or journalistic experience to justify being published alongside their heavyweight columnists. This skewed their coverage and damaged their reputation overall, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant realignment to emphasise the writers with deep experience and political nous rather than those who happen to be part of the woke brigade (although I think OJ would escape this cull, it is the second and third tier woke writers I would imagine will be less likely to be published).

I suspect the staff delete them based on reports and then their own opinions. Perhaps a big enough thread would attract some press attention

Well, yes! A bit like on Mumsnet, whereby moderation is complaint led.

Thank you Suzanne Moore! So brilliantly put.

And thank you Guardian, for finally starting to wake up to the roll-back on females' rights - our basic democratic rights to speak about and object to the roll-back of our sex-based rights, and our right to the very definitions of 'woman', 'girl' and 'female'.

I used to comment in the guardian and there used to be all sorts of chats an stuff, but the btl now is a completely different place. Really pc wokeville, but there's no actual debate. I went for the thrashing out of ideas not a party line.

@Xiaoxiong I don't understand how you can want them to keep writing both sides of the debate. What debate - that sex is a construct - because clearly it is not and is about as intellectually valid as saying both sides of the debate that the earth is flat or that the sun orbits the earth.

We do not need to publish or hear two sides of this - there is only one reality, women are adult females with XX chromosomes. We need to ensure sex based rights are upheld and maintained in law.

Anything discussing gender really is a lot of codswallop and we can leave it to the undergrad debating societies.

Where I work I was physically assaulted twice within the space of 4 days (and there was a weekend in there so I was off).

I come to work.

If they were writing “I hate Miss” it would be easier and less time consuming.

they got themselves into all sorts of problems with their columnist strategy over the last few years - basically giving space to a whole host of people who simply didn't/don't have the political insight or journalistic experience to justify being published alongside their heavyweight columnists. This skewed their coverage and damaged their reputation overall,

This is very true. It started when they launched Comment is Free - previously the website just published columns by people who were already writing for the print edition, so established heavyweights like Polly Toynbee and Simon Jenkins, and a few people who were prominent in public life - MPs and so on. I remember very clearly a journalist friend of mind saying when CiF was launched that the Guardian would do itself enormous reputational damage, and so it proved. The site massively expanded the opinion pieces it was publishing, and anyone could pitch an idea, have it commissioned, knock it off in their lunch hour and be paid £90. (When I say "anyone", in practice so many people pitch ideas that it's not that easy but they have chosen to commission some complete nonentities without a single original thought in their tiny brains.) And this is why the Guardian comment site now features opinion pieces from people like Owl Fisher and Ash Sarkar, but not, say, people like Professor Selina Todd or Jane Clare Jones, brilliant writers who know what they're talking about.

I hope the Guardian is finally waking up to the damage this has done them and is starting to rethink.

Anna IMO when both sides are published, only one side comes off well...the GC side. If both views are published in the same paper, and one with a relatively clear ideological location to the left of the political spectrum, there can be no accusation that somehow GC views are associated solely with the right-wing, Christian fundamentalism, etc etc which comes straight out of the discourse in the US on this subject.

I would love nothing more than for the Guardian to go fully GC and for the concept of gender to be eliminated entirely in law, but I recognise we have some way to go before this happens...!

I wonder whether the issue with moderation is individual moderators enforcing their own ideas about what constitutes "transphobia" as opposed to a consistent company-wide policy.

That happens in other places too - both where the moderators enforce their own ideas on specific boards only; and also where interns get brought on board and then 'moderate' according to what they are told to do by TRAs (some also steal user databases I order to dox users).