Orwell Prize Winner Janice Turner’s latest article deserves its own thread

[NotBadConsidering]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/59a66a62-c2e8-11ea-ac82-8308736f5ec7?shareToken=ec44efc7f098f76d0a75ed74f472a978

The section about what happened in 2017 is shocking. But the whole article is Janice at her brilliant best.

I would also add that I read the Billy Bragg article in The Guardian, and not only was it a load of rubbish, but the comments were overwhelmingly in support of what Janice is saying here, showing the Guardian is way out of touch with its readership.

[BatShite]

I didn't mean new to the topic as a bad thing btw. I have been where you are, atleast with the questioning if its anything like section 28 stuff and that. I came to the cnclusion that no, its not as its entirely different circumstances and that this trans ideology is infact homophobic in itself, and child transition is modern day conversion therapy. But yeah, you do think about it all a lot. I never did go through the 'sex segregation is like racial segregation' stuff though. As that seems just..bonkers to me.

[BatShite]

Thinking again historically about a time when people have been morally outraged at the thought of sharing spaces with a minority we can look at the moral panic and outrage in parts of the US when de-segregation measures began. Those white people genuinely felt black children in the same school as their own children was a threat, unacceptable, immoral even.

Sex segregation is hardly like apartheid though. I really hate when this comparison comes up, there are bloody good reasons for keeping males out of female spaces.

I know you are only basically typing as thinking, and seem new to the topic. But this one really winds me up as we have had so so many TRA types with the 'sex segregation is exactly like making black people sit at the back of the bus!' and such.

[Binterested]

Thank you Janice.

In my younger days I fantasised about meeting George Michael - you know, on the bus or something - and obviously he would be entranced by my wit and beauty (We didn’t know - it was the 80s ). Now I just want to meet Janice Turner and maybe she would laugh at one of my jokes

[PhoebeSnow]

Brilliant article, congratulations to Janice and thanks to NotBadConsidering for posting it.

[DianasLasso]

Janice Turner's response to Lil OJ is EPIC!

[Vargas]

She is so fabulous, worth every penny of my Times subscription. And extra bonus points for taking down OJ.

[NotBadConsidering]

@RoyalCorgi

"Get back to your full-time job of snitching on your colleagues" is brilliant. OJ would have been so at home in Stalinist Russia or postwar East Germany, shopping his own parents to the Stasi.

I actually think it’s very revealing and chilling. Janice writes about how Guardian journalists views “can result in vicious censure from colleagues, even demands that they are sacked”. We know who’s leading the mob.

[ThinEndoftheWedge]

I am not convinced that people on here are really pro free speech, just pro free speech when it agrees with them.

Most posters here are pro free speech and anti doublespeak.

Orwell is the prophet of our day.

[Siablue]

He hasn’t denied he bullies his colleagues yet.

[Ereshkigalangcleg]

Owen Jones doing his normal thing of taking what someone has said, pretending they said something else, and then arguing against that. He's either extremely thick, disingenuous, or both.

I don't think he's thick. I think he's blinkered, and absolutely disingenuous.

[Ereshkigalangcleg]

She is magnificent

She is! wonderfully putting LOJ in his place.

[aliasundercover]

The little shit is doing his usual whining. You can see that he’s seething with envy - no doubt he believes that he deserves that award.

He so daft he cancels himself when people don’t let him have his way:

[borntobequiet]

say something similar

[borntobequiet]

This^
I was going to same something similar but can’t do better.

[insideandout3]

Homosexuality is real because anyone can engage in same-sex sex.

Transgender is not real because no one can change their sex.

[Siablue]

Get back to your full time job snitching on your colleagues. That has made my day. Has he asked her to retract that defamatory statement yet?

She has also retweeted Hadley Freeman and Jess Carter Morley we can guess who he has bullying.

What fantastic charities Janice has chosen to support.

[RoyalCorgi]

"Get back to your full-time job of snitching on your colleagues" is brilliant. OJ would have been so at home in Stalinist Russia or postwar East Germany, shopping his own parents to the Stasi.

[Collidascope]

Owen Jones doing his normal thing of taking what someone has said, pretending they said something else, and then arguing against that. He's either extremely thick, disingenuous, or both.

[FantaOra]

I don't think it's so hard to imagine that people at that time could have expressed dismay when society became more accepting of gay people, perhaps expressing horror or alarm that gay people would be sharing their changing spaces/toilets etc

Oh the irony. I suppose it you have swallowed this fictional tra talking point completely it's not worth bothering to understand actual gay culture pre and post legalisation which absolutely includes toilets as meeting places for anonymous and group sex.

www.vice.com/en_uk/article/av9zjg/gay-britain-uk-cottaging-sex-in-public-toilets-696

If guess a lot of people live very sheltered lives which is why these ridiculous tra myth's (written by straight men) take hold.

[wellbehavedwomen]

*What they are allowed to see creates what world they inhabit.

[wellbehavedwomen]

Janice Turner telling Owen Jones to slither back to his slimy little place.

@Bluepolkadots42, there's evidence on desistance rates here.

Evidence on how many girls are now affected here.

The politicisation is a huge issue. It's becoming impossible to conduct research that might in any way raise questions around transition - academics don't want to touch it, because the risks to career and reputation are too great - and it's also worrying that questions around the standard of care at GIDS - which is a completely different question to whether young people should transition: it's solely about the care standards available - are also seen as an attack. Their own safeguarding lead is suing them, which is nothing - nothing to do with whether kids should be transitioned. Yet the rage at the Newsnight piece on those care standards has been huge. Any views that aren't wholly positive are seen as transphobic. That's a toxic environment, for any discussion around care for a very vulnerable cohort.

I have children with ASD dx, by the way. Many women here do. And you don't need me to tell you, given your career path, how exceptionally challenging adolescence is for that group of girls. Exponentially more so than it is for neurotypical peers. The sensory side alone must make breast development and periods pretty horrendous for many. And the male attention side, for girls struggling to manage and parse social interactions to begin with, must be really alarming, too. You also don't need me to point out how common anxiety disorders, OCD, etc are amongst people navigating adolescence while autistic. GIDS themselves say that 48% of the kids they see meet criteria, or are already diagnosed. How do we know the dysphoria is a separate and genuine condition, or a symptomatic rejection of the horrors of puberty, given the other elements at play?

Given the extreme nature of the medical pathway, that's an enormous issue.

I also question why kids are now told not that gender shouldn't define them, and that they can express any gender identity or role they like within their healthy sexed body, but that if they have a gender expression and identity that doesn't match their body, their body is wrong. What the hell sort of message is that to send young people? Or, indeed, anyone? Why can't someone dress and express as they please, and still be welcomed as a peer by their sex? Nobody's body is wrong. If someone is so dysphoric that they feel intensely that it is, then yes absolutely we need to consider how best to help them. If the evidence is that hormones and surgery is that best way - a cosmetic facsimile - then I agree, we need to do that. But it's a way to alleviate distress. It's not really going to change anyone's sex. Why are we now being told to accept, and repeat, what is fundamentally a lie? And why is it seen as "conversion therapy" to suggest that no, actually, we need to try to support people to feel that both their bodies and their gender expression are completely fine, for someone of their sex?

A children's book called, "My body is me!" which shows boys and girls dressed in all manner of clothes, including disabled kids, and has a refrain, "I am my body, my body is me. It's a wonderful thing, I'm sure you'll agree!" and talks about how diverse we are, and how everyone matters and is fine just as they are, is banned from Amazon. For transphobia. Amazon, who will sell the most hideously misogynist tomes, books that claim being gay is sinful and can be cured, and Mein fucking Kampf. Won't sell a book on body positivity for kids, because it's transphobic. It'll sell books that tell you boys who like fluffy pink unicorns are really girls, though. And all kids are affected by their environment - all adults, come to that. What they are allowed to see creates what world their inhabit.

Some people are transphobic in the true sense. Will discriminate in employment or housing, will harass in the street, will feel distaste. The problem with the comparison is that there are genuine issues around transition - in health terms for young people, and in feminist terms if male people try to insist that they can access women's spaces on their subjective and personal identity, with no regard for the emotional costs to women, let alone the reality that transition doesn't alter offending risk. There are no such issues with sexuality.

Sorry that this is so long - obviously it's an issue also close to my heart! Would love to talk more about it, really. Fortunately I know other women with kids on the spectrum who are also interested in it.

[RuffleCrow]

Being gay is not something that's happened as a result of sudden social contagion. There is a demonstrable history of gay people existing and facing pèrsecution. Transgenderism is about 10 years old. Before that there were transsexuals, agps, cross dressers but nothing that really matches the 'male soul in a female body' lie we're expected to believe today.

[SophocIestheFox]

Just when you thought you couldn’t love here more, she takes a swipe at the cleverest boy in the sixth form

[EweSurname]

She is magnificent

[OvaHere]

Personally I don't view a trans woman in my changing space as any more a threat to me than a straight woman or a gay woman because I don't believe in that context someone's gender is what is the threat, but their personality is (e.g. murderous psycho could be of any gender). But I appreciate we all have a right to feel differently on these matters.

Yes they could be of any gender but I think it's very important to be clear that in all official crime statistics 'murderous psycho's' are overwhelmingly of the male sex regardless of any self described identities.

I feel like you need to go back to the basics and ask the question why we segregate by sex in the first place? What purpose does it serve?