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.

@stumbledin

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!

Rebecca Solnit has been around for a really really long time and has written some great feminist stuff - men explain things to me is a classic.

I'm a huge fan of hers and I've been trying to do my best to ignore her TRA leanings for some years now, but now she's gone and written in the bloody Guardian!

It's not about flipping bathrooms - why do these opinion pieces keep picking on this? I am slightly disappointed there is very little of substance in there, I was hoping she might have a good argument but it's the same old same old isn't it.

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

Really dont want to click on the article, but not only is this quote a total logic fail about subcategories as ThePonderer points out, but nobody is denying trans people human rights.... she clearly has no idea what human rights are.

I have been using public restrooms in this exceptionally gender-diverse city for the past 40-something years, and also reading the local and national papers, plus I know a lot of schoolteachers and parents of schoolchildren, and 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.

You haven't been paying attention then, have you, Rebecca? Here is one example for you. There are many others.

Transgender Woman Is Charged With Voyeurism at Target in Idaho

In the Year of Our Lady 2020 there’s still a fuss in the UK about the bathroom business.

Perhaps that's because of incidents like this:

Transgender woman, 18, sexually assaulted girl, 10, in Morrisons' female toilets

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. Trans women pose no threat to cis-women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts and pariahs (and insisting they use men’s bathrooms endangered them horribly).

In addition to the fact that not all transwomen are harmless, there are also men who pretend to be trans, like this one.

Sexual predator jailed after claiming to be ‘transgender’ to assault women in shelter

Why don't you try acquainting yourself with some facts before writing your next article, Rebecca?

'Finally there are about 4 billion women and girls on Earth, and we are not in danger of being erased''.

Ahahahahahahahahaha. Ha.

That would be a very funny statement if it weren't utterly ignorant and callous towards the many women who live worldwide and are denied basic human rights because of their sex, women whose identities and needs are literally erased in order to oppress them, like the article that was recently shared on here about women in Afghanistan not even being allowed to use their own names.

And this from Rebecca Solnit too. Sad to see someone whose writing I otherwise admire being used to erase the oppression of women in the name of the usual 'wHy cAn"T yOU LaDiES jUSt bE nICe' mantra.

I thought the whole article could be summed up as 'I grew up with lots of gay
men and men in drag who were really nice to me, so we just need to be nice to trans people'

Did I miss anything else of substance ?

She is so condescending and about as sincere as Ellen. She mentions the British whatever but it is obvious she has not taken any of those views on board and just talks down to any unenlightened souls who dare to have a different opinion to her.

Liberals like these make me realise why people voted for Trump.

There’s also a hullabaloo about young people choosing to be trans who may change their minds. I’m sure they exist. Also, we all know they’re rare, and that people are not trying on genders like they were Halloween costumes, because this is not easy for them.

Where have you been for the last 5 (10?) years, Rebecca? Children are now presented with atrocities like the genderbread person or the gender unicorn or the Mermaids jelly baby scale (Barbie to GI Joe) and told to choose their gender. This is happening in schools. Yes they are 'trying on genders', because they are being taught that they should.

And the young people who change their minds are growing in number all the time. They are not 'rare'. Most of them are female. How can someone who purports to be a 'feminist' care so little about these young women who are being given drugs and having irreversible surgery because they have been taken in by gender ideology, and by the time they realise it hasn't solved their problems they have made irreversible changes to their bodies?

"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"

It is abso-fucking-lutely illegal for people to lie about who they are in order to deceptively get something they want and would not get without the lie, it's called fraud.

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 'other women's rights'? because you say so? "sorry" (not sorry) Ms womansplainer, I disagree. I am and I can be a feminist, and actual women's rights - and safety - are what I'm all about right now.

It’s great that people can transition earlier, and in those early cases parents and medical experts tend to be exceedingly careful about how those decisions are made, and a few of those parents are my friends and family, and in their kids’ cases it’s worked out really well.

So she is close to some people who have 'trans kids'. It's important for her to convince herself that they have done the right thing, because the alternative is too grim to think about.

sorry I can’t stop boasting about my city: the first man to give birth was in San Francisco

No man has ever given birth.

“ 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.“

The three wise monkeys come to mind.

She must have also deliberately avoided all the actual and misogynistic threats ‘posed’ on Twitter and at numerous feminist meetings.

More strawmen than a fucking scarecrow convention.

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

Sounds a bit All Lives Matter to me

Transphobes are always warning us that if trans people live in peace and legal recognition and even have rights, there will be terrible consequences

Garbage.

I have been using public restrooms in this exceptionally gender-diverse city for the past 40-something years, and also reading the local and national papers, plus I know a lot of schoolteachers and parents of schoolchildren, and 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

No, I suppose if you have your fingers stuffed in your ears, while yelling 'la, la la' as loudly as possible, you won(t have seen or heard anything.

I don't think I have the stomach to keep going.

@StrangeLookingParasite

More strawmen than a fucking scarecrow convention.

She reveals herself to be someone who doesn’t appreciate other people want boundaries and has buried her head in the sand concrete of the streets of San Francisco and has literally stated “this never happens”.

I went to my first gay bar here when I was about 14, with a gay man who was the kindest person in my adolescence

I mean no wonder. As a child, she was taught it was ok for kids to hang out in bars. Well it may be lovely in the old days of San Francisco but a 14 year old girl being taken to bars by a man anywhere else would be a huge red flag.

There are so many other parts where she puts all the dots there but doesn’t join them, but I don’t have time to go through them right now, but the worst is the insistence that “it will never happen” when there are examples of it happening and a whole thread here collating it is either pure gaslighting or she doesn’t ever read anything outside of her little woke bubble.

It's no wonder this toilet rag of a newspaper doesn't allow comments. The sooner they go bust the better (and that's from a former reader).

The kindest explanation is that in the US where Trump is using attacks on trans rights as a vote-winner, the woke left feels duty bound to stand up for trans rights even when it means running roughshod over women's rights.

Of course, if they stopped to think about it, they might realise that Trump isn't exactly hot on women's rights either, and that your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend.

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

I think she’s now requesting that men explain things to her.

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,

So genitalia has nothing to do with it? Can she then explain all the male bodied people who identify as trans who now claim to be lesbians. Note, for people who tell us that what is in a person pants, isn’t important, they don’t claim to be bisexual, but lesbian. Very strange. You’d nearly think that they were actually attracted to female genitalia, but surely not! 🤔

I love Rebecca Solnit. A profoundly critical thinker - usually. Bitterly disappointed by this. If anyone could make a case that TWAW it should be her.

Oh dear. Won't some nice young man explain this whole situation to Rebecca? It won't count as Mansplaining. Really.

This is so disappointing. I loved her essay collection. I have also recently been disappointed by Jessica Valenti. It's so crushing when brilliant, thoughtful and insightful women basically burn the body of their work in favour of wokeness and centering men.

“men should stop explaining things to women”

“Oh, But I’m a woman not a man”

“Oh, in that case, Explain away!!!”

@FWRLurker

“men should stop explaining things to women”

“Oh, But I’m a woman not a man”

“Oh, in that case, Explain away!!!”

🤣