Another incredibly annoying Guardian article

[xxyzz]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/10/trans-rights-feminist-letter-rebecca-solnit

Apologies if already posted here - couldn't see it.

Apologies also to anyone else as irked by it as me. I just want to hear some other people also express that it is like nails on a blackboard in its utter tone-deaf wrongness throughout.

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You

The fucking irony...

That is one of the Guardian's worst articles on this subject, and that's really saying something.

And yes, men who want to harm women could dress up as women, but they could also pretend to be repairmen or emergency workers to get into our homes, and actually have, and we haven’t banned repairmen and emergency workers yet

No but we have safeguards in place. An appointment to come to your house. Online reviews. ID cards. You can ask for someone else to be in. That man in the changing rooms with the penis and the camera? You're not allowed to say anything without him yelling transphobe at you.

The whole article is just 'be nice, be kind, shut up, it'll never happen'

Churchofwoke you completely beat me to it! I just read that article as I saw a friend had posted it on Facebook (and she was applauding it) and I was so tempted to comment in particular pointing out the irony of that sentence. In the end I thought I'm tired it's been a long day and I'm not sure I'm up for some Facebook spat and potentially being hounded on Facebook as a Terf so I came on FWR to read some sense and be reminded that not everyone in the world has gone mad....

Thank you as ever MN for being a forum in which I feel safe to express my views on this which I certainly don't on other forms of social media, and for so many intelligent posters speaking sense. It is comforting to be reminded you're not alone in some mad emperor's new woke clothes world....

Brilliant article, thanks so much for sharing 😊

I think my favourite part is how she frames the existence of two biological sexes like it's some ye olde crazy belief from the deep past, before science and Enlightenment. Yes, biological sex is just like witches, and miasmas, and a flat earth!

Back then, back in the mists of time, way back in er, 1970... " we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff, some of which is in the brain, not the pants, and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway."

Aaaaah! She just conflates sex and gender all over the place! No, in the 1970s they thought that SEX was binary. They were correct about that, because it's a fact. (There are just two kinds of gametes, and just two kinds of sex chromosomes.) Sex is not 'defined' by genitals (you can still be male with no penis.) Rather, genitals are an incredibly reliable way of telling what sex someone is.

Scientists knew about sex chromosomes in the 1970s. In fact, they knew about the X and Y chromosome, and their role in sexual differentiation, since 1905. Does she honestly think that in the 1970s we didn't know about hormones and chromosomes?

"Some of which are in the brain, not in the pants." Is she arguing for sexed brains? So she thinks there's lady brains and man brains? The sexist trope that has been used to oppress women since the 17th century? And if she's talking about gender, it's not much better. Gender is a social construct. It's not innate. It's certainly not 'in the brain'. Babies aren't born desiring glitter and pink.

It's like she's just taken all the weird gender memes from Twitter and just spewed them out. I'm surprised clown fish didn't get a mention.

Its just another Guardian distraction article.

Some hippy dippy west coast american the Guardian has as an employee writes an article about their own experience. And in doing so totally fails to engage with the actual politcal issues.

And better stil the guardian gives it a title to make it show that trans activists are really, really, worried about silly old gender critical terfs not being made outcasts.

somehow totally reversing the reality that TRAs have been campaigning to make gender critical feminists outcasts.

Am beginning to think the Guardian editorial board are now so young they haven't started secondary school!

I’ve just read it on Twitter.
I’ve been reading the feminism board for a while & following many GC twitter accounts.
I’ve peaked & finding it really hard to put into words how distressing & dehumanising I find it all.

Just a load of nonsense. I'm usually good at reading even badly written but interesting texts to the end and diligent about finishing well written ones presenting an opposing view to my own. I gave up after her ignorant bathroom paragraph:

in all that time I have never actually heard of, or read of, let alone seen, an incident in which a trans woman or girl somehow caused unpleasantness in a women’s room, and it does not appear to be something anyone worries about here. In the Year of Our Lady 2020 there’s still a fuss in the UK about the bathroom business.

When there is so much real violence against women, it’s a sad waste of time to focus on imaginary maybe presumably it-could-theoretically-happen violence.

It happened. Right in a supermarket where I 've been shopping. Not just once, but twice did a male who identifies as trans cause unpleasantness in a public toilet in two towns local to me. Real violence.

Duly charged, tried and found guilty said male was then sent to a hostel for vulnerable women. And only after a public outcry that a violent sexual offender was housed with women who had themselves suffered male violence, was a different arrangement made.

Said male subsequently violated the terms of the sentence, but let's pretend none of it ever happened.

Self-congratulatory tripe, ignorant as well as badly misinformed (which takes some doing) and honestly far longer than even a well written opinion piece has any right to be.

@ChurchOfWokeApostate

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You

The fucking irony...

My thoughts exactly.

Thank you all, your outrage is helping me unclench my jaw.

I looked like Munch's Scream reading this.

oh ffs I read seven words of the headline and noped back out again. I hope that doesn't count for the Guardian's metrics.

I remember Rebecca Solnit as being good, didn't she write Men Explain Things to Me?

Doesn't matter how fucking good she usually is, what the fuck is the point in an article that simply asserts Trans Women Pose No Threat to C*s Women when at this stage it is abundantly obvious that a sizeable minority fucking do. Unless she means they don't threaten our woman essence or something? But physical safety is rather more important.

I seriously don't understand the cognitive dissonance these American feminists have. Have they not seen the pink and blue baseball bat brigade threatening women? Have they never seen the stats on trans sex offenders in prison? Have they never read the Reddit trans subs? Shouldn't they do some research on a subject before writing newspaper columns about it?

Rebecca Solnit Explains Things To Me and she can fuck off.

Scientists knew about sex chromosomes in the 1970s. In fact, they knew about the X and Y chromosome, and their role in sexual differentiation, since 1905. Does she honestly think that in the 1970s we didn't know about hormones and chromosomes?

I don't think even needs to be as technical as that. Surely, by the time humans were domesticating animals, they had a pretty clear idea that reproduction was only possible when you involved one each of the two sexes, and that applied to humans too. Sperm-makers and egg-makers need to reliably find each other, otherwise we would have long died out as a species. It's so fundamental, that our language follows it with words like man and woman!

Some hippy dippy west coast american the Guardian has as an employee writes an article about their own experience

This is Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the book 'Men explain things to me', which (I think) is where the term 'mansplaining' comes from. Of course men explain things to you, Rebecca, because you have an inferior 'ladybrain', and they have superior manly brains (according to this guardian article).

Thankfully my life has improved immensely since I stopped reading The Guardian - I won't even sign in to read the wonderful Hadley or Marina anymore (BTW, how on earth do they still work in that environment?).

It is no wonder people have decided to desert the MSM en masse (not that I believe people should get their news from Facebook) when this is the level of intellectual argument they throw out.

I was listening to a radio in the car to-day and I had to switch back to a music only channel as the main interviewer took an obvious lie as a fact (did not have the intellectual capacity to question the interviewee as to whether or not this was a fact or a made-up piece of fiction) and I realised to my horror that the level of debate on the airwaves has stooped to a level unheard in my lifetime and broadcasters seem to get the job based on their Instagram likes as opposed to their ability to coherently challenge an interviewee.

Couldn't stay the course, thought it was me being a bit of a lightweight.

Was that a little on the verbose side

What's this bit about?

"in 2015, at the last night at the Lexington Club, San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, I did gradually realize that the many nice young men in the crowd were trans men."

Hang on - firstly, does she ever wonder why all the lesbian bars have closed down? Secondly, could it have anything to do with the fact that they were full of 'nice young men' who were transmen? Thirdly, if she is a stickler for TWAW and TMAM, how does she know and why does she identify the men as transmen? Fourthly, does she not wonder why the 'men' are hanging out in a lesbian bar? So very many dots she never joins up...

@xxyzz that's a bit scary

Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You.

You don't get to define me. Stop calling me 'cis'.

Back then we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff,

Do you mean sex or gender? You seem a little confused. A dictionary might help.

some of which is in the brain, not the pants,

Never though the person who wrote 'Men explain things to me' would believe in ladybrains. Did a man write that book for you? Obviously your weak and feeble ladybrain couldn't have come up with anything as complex as writing a book.

and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway.

Everyone is either male or female, including intersex people. Why not order a biology textbook along with that dictionary?

Cultures from Native America to India have long recognized that there are other ways to be gendered.

Indeed. Homophobic and patriarchal cultures have often found a way for gay men to exist within their societies whilst being excluded from the category of men, which is reserved for manly, heterosexual men only.

feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights

Just trying to reproduce the logic here: so veganism is a subcategory of animal rights advocacy, which means you can't be a vegan if you don't also campaign against zoos. Or something?

The superior tone combined with a lack of anything remotely resembling a fact is A+++ Rebecca, keep up the good work.

Is there a name for this kind of pro-trans smorgasbord bingo? It's like she took every single Twitter meme, every cliché, every thought-ending slogan and every dodgy statistic and mushed them all into one soup of an article.

Maybe she was doing it for a dare? How many clichés and dodgy 'facts' could she get into a single article without anyone spotting it was actually all a joke - and getting paid for it?

Or maybe she's been kidnapped and this is her way of getting the message out, without her attackers realising?

Not again...
the old; 'women who have had mastectomies and hysterectomies' crap again
the old; 'it'll never happen' er it has
what relevance is it to talk about workmen/tradesmen?
and the bloody 'cis'!!!!!!!!!
Bog off with all of this- we've had enough now

And thanks OP- i hope your jaw is getting better

I’m sorry, but I only read half and had to shut it down. What a load of c&*p. Boring reading and incorrect throughout. Well done those of you who managed to read it all.