Another incredibly annoying Guardian article

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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.

But this is Solnit - hugely respected. Has someone hijacked her computer? I can only hope so. 😟

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

They do, Rebecca. You don't have to believe them.

hippy dippy

I just used that phrase because that's what I got from the article.

Her arguement was that she is immensely informed because she grew up in San Francisco and had this really cool experience.

That's not a rational response to gender critical feminism.

It doesn't matter who she is or might have been, or previously said.

This is just terrible 6th Form self engrossment.

But as if any of us need it does confirm that the Guardian has about as much relationship to a "news" paper as the Daily Star does!

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

Ms Sonit would have found a string of criminal convictions for this very offence if she had done 5 minutes research, very easily, online. But that would involve looking up facts, which is obviously too much to expect.

Solnit

I don't think she is a great critical thinker. She certainly is NOT a great researcher. She is, however. a very good writer, and she has that odd talent of sometimes intuitively catching one important thing and pointing it out.

But this one is just more of the same be kind and bend over I have heard women told for the last decade on this issue. So their rights will be gouged out of yours? But they are so miserable! Be nice.

An in interesting take on Solnit from The Walrus.

thewalrus.ca/why-i-dont-read-rebecca-solnit/?gclid=CjwKCAjw4MP5BRBtEiwASfwAL3o9X2s9MHRVy9a_2Zrdke-TjggA1V2d7_Psf8YdjEvtW5AZFV3NkxoCaNwQAvD_BwE

It reads like an essay by a 12 year old.

Yes, nepeta: that’s the biggest disappointment of the article. Solnit has enough critical faculties to engage seriously with this topic and think deeply about it. But she hasn’t. She just wrote the usual bunch of straw-penis-haver arguments and wrapped it up with a pretty bow saying, ‘just be nice! You’re causing harm to male-born people with all this feminist BS!!’

It’s truly sad to see so many good feminists who are unable to think outside of leftist doctrine on this.

@HeirloomTomato

Yes, nepeta: that’s the biggest disappointment of the article. Solnit has enough critical faculties to engage seriously with this topic and think deeply about it. But she hasn’t. She just wrote the usual bunch of straw-penis-haver arguments and wrapped it up with a pretty bow saying, ‘just be nice! You’re causing harm to male-born people with all this feminist BS!!’

It’s truly sad to see so many good feminists who are unable to think outside of leftist doctrine on this.

I am going to steal straw-penis-haver if I may? That is such a perfect description of the whole piece.

@TBHno

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

It's also "one of the worst" just from point of view of grammar, sentence construction, punctuation , non sequiturs and the complete failure to construct a logical argument. It was painful to read I gave up reading it for these reasons rather than the content.

Does anyone remember a sketch show called Absolutely and Morwenna Bank's Little Girl character? It read as if had been written by Little Girl

@DocOfTheBay

It reads like an essay by a 12 year old.

To quote myself Absolutely

"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"

Yet we haven’t decided to let anyone who calls himself a workman in at any time, whether they are or not?

“
"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"

I think she’s missed the point here. It is not at all uncommon for men to pretend to be repairmen or emergency service workers, (or all sorts of other occupations), in order to gain access to women and children.

It’s not uncommon for men with actual professions to prey on women and children.

It’s not even uncommon for men to pretend to be young girls or teenage boys or wise councillors or lovers onlinr, to prey on women and children.

So why would this one category of men be exempt from suspicion? Why would we not try and construct safeguards to protect women from them, as we do with other kinds of potential threat?

Also, no-one is saying to women: ‘don’t ever question the credentials or ID of a workman who comes to your house. Doing so causes profound harm and may cause the workman to commit suicide & you’ll be the one to blame. Men who claim to be workmen are who they say they are. #believeworkmen’ and so on.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Women are generally encouraged to question people who want access to our spaces - unless they claim to identify as female and then they are sacrosanct and can never be questioned and anyone who does so is a hateful ignorant transphobe.

How can you live in San Francisco, not notice what went on with Yaniv just a thousand miles north in Vancouver, and not stop to think “hang on a minute...”

Do they actually get news like this from the rest of the world in San Francisco or is it filtered out? I’m only half joking, because I can’t fathom how someone could be so ignorant.

Surely, if "feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy," then one of the key words is subcategory.

If I, for example, campaign for better maths teaching in schools, I might be described as being an activist for "a subcategory of educational improvement". It would not be hypocritical of me not to campaign for better English teaching. (And it would certainly not be surprising if, for example, I were to be strongly against a campaign for more teaching of astrology.)

So even if her premise is true (which I'm not willing to take as given) the conclusion does not follow.

Thought a twenty year old student had written this article!! Its nomsensical, transwomen arent a threat to women because they are what ? Women? But in what way are they women though? But straight men are a threat, how are they are threat if its not to do with male physical size and strength and those pesky male genitals that can rape, all of which the majority of transwomen still have, especially those ones that are attracted to women. Oh unless being a woman is about being born with a feminised brain but then i think but what about all those women who dont do feminine, but they still have female genitals and have the organs required to birth a baby, what are they ? Transwomen are transwomen otherwise they can be a sub category of men but they are not women/female as that word means something.

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).

Exactly. Something tells me Rebecca would be happy (or forced to pretend to be) with MTF trans people explaining things to her.

Talk of bathrooms and feelings; no mention of prisons, sports, refuges, women's awards, intimate care. It's like a marketing campaign for a shit product.

Why? Why did she disengage her brain?

It's not a persuasive piece, on any level. When you read enough of these 'rebuttal' articles, and there have been a steady stream of them from the Guardian and on Medium etc, you realize that the exact same talking points are wheeled out every time. It becomes very apparent that, while I may be doing them the courtesy of reading my opponents views (even sometimes with a vague hope that I might hit upon a new and good reason to believe that way), they just do not return the favour.

Every single one of these arguments has been repeatedly debunked, and it's been put in articles, podcasts, forum and facebook posts and even tweets that these arguments completely misunderstand and misrepresent what feminists are saying.

But still they churn them out. Which leads me to believe that they are not designed to be persuasive. They are sermons for the convinced congregation, meant to reassure the true believers they are in the right religion moral place. It's just soothing noises for those who prefer to read prose rather than pink and blue striped slogan pictures to confirm their own righteousness.

And also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex.

Quite a "significant" number huh? And there was me thinking DSDs are extremely rare. Not that it matters anyway, since those people are still male or female.

But still they churn them out. Which leads me to believe that they are not designed to be persuasive. They are sermons for the convinced congregation, meant to reassure the true believers they are in the right religion moral place.

I totally agree, Floral. I think they are also designed to just flood the public square with so much bullshit that people don't question any of it.

Eresh, yes, I do think there may well be a sort of strategy somewhere to blanket lots of this kind of thing, probably because it provides handy links for people to mindlessly share as some sort of empty appeal to authority by virtue of the amount of it, and clearly, lots of people don't read content with any attention.