Douglas Murray in the Times

[Igneococcus]

I haven't actually read it yet but here is a share token for the article:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b3baa31a-e87c-11ea-9b25-18353d361fa2?shareToken=6ce42f446682ca2a75ff04a02df38aa8

It’s good in that he talks up the disquiet of gay men. As he would. But he completely overlooks why this has happened and understanding that is vitally important to understanding why women are so appalled.

It’s a men’s rights movement. It’s about men overruling women. He misses that because it doesn’t affect him. He doesn’t ask why there are no middle aged or elderly women suddenly coming out as trans. We know why there aren’t but cannot say. He misses all of that and views it through the lens of a gay man. Fair enough but it misses the aggression at the heart of the ideology.

Also a couple of copywriting errors. ‘A girl trapped in a boy’s body’ surely? I think the comments are as good as the article itself.

But the revolt is now on many fronts. The manner in which trans claims disrupt the rights of women is now understood thanks to some high-profile conflagrations. That is because the demands of trans are clearly so different from other rights movements. The successful branches of women’s liberation never insisted on ignoring biological reality entirely. They asked for equality, and demanded that certain realities were accepted but not ignored. And yet today when women, including very famous women, say “We’re happy for you to be trans but that doesn’t make you precisely the same thing as a woman” they find not just abuse but (as happened to Ms White this week) career destruction

This is not about equality. It's about compelled speech, thought crime and the obliteration of women as a distinct, sex segregated class. As Douglas Murray says, the trans lobby is not at the apex of other rights' movements. It is in conflict with them.

Institutions at which they worked were demanding that they said things, and pretended to believe things, they knew not to be true.

This. This is the demand. That everyone say things and pretend things they know not to be true, and in the case of females, including at the cost of their safety, dignity, privacy, and now in rugby their fractured skulls and broken necks.

I like some of Murray's work but I'm not so keen on that. Even though I'm seeing him assert a position on "my side".

He seems to want to tie gender to sex, or at the very least for gender to remain a fixed thing, or presumably fixed things for different sets of people. This can be seen in how he muddles sex and gender in the "between-the-sexes people" which is contradicted by what he writes later on.

I thought it was a good piece. It also nearly explains how that rights have been used to push a trans agenda and how they are not the same thing.

I liked the article. And evidently so do much of the readership of the Times.

It's all more light, from someone who is extremely unlikely to be coerced into recanting.

I appreciate that he's rejecting that sex= gender (an effeminate boy is not trapped in a girl's body), but I don't understand his objection to gender=a social construct.

Meant girl trapped in a boy's body.

Nearly should be neatly and that should be gay

To me, is not talking about what trans is, but objecting to the current trans ideology and why it is toxic, and not like the gay rights movement. That is enough for the moment, I think. And frankly where the push has to come from, from gay men and lesbians showing others that trans isn't just like gay was, since pretending it was is part of the reason it has got so far so fast.

He has kept it simple, said rights for trans people are important, but not like this. The current approach is not good. I particularly liked the softly-spoken statements about transing the gay away.

but I don't understand his objection to gender=a social construct.

I think he is echoing Debra Soh's argument as set out in her book, The End of Gender. There is a recent thread on here about her

I don't understand his objection to gender=a social construct.

I don't think he's objecting to that in itself per se, it's the combination of "sex is now gender" + "gender is a social construct" effectively results in biological sex being a social construct, which is nonsense.

I don't think he's objecting to that in itself per se, it's the combination of "sex is now gender" + "gender is a social construct" effectively results in biological sex being a social construct, which is nonsense.

This is what I think he means as well. I think it's a very good piece.

@teezletangler

I don't think he's objecting to that in itself per se, it's the combination of "sex is now gender" + "gender is a social construct" effectively results in biological sex being a social construct, which is nonsense.

This is what I think he means as well. I think it's a very good piece.

It could be his intention. I interpreted the quotation marks around "social construct" to symbolize sarcasm, not an actual quotation.

And to be clear, I also think it's a good piece. I just remember how much I was disappointed in his chapter on feminism in The Madness of Crowds.

I interpreted the quotation marks around "social construct" to symbolize sarcasm, not an actual quotation.

You might be right. I am trying (and failing) to remember what he said in the Madness of Crowds on this subject. There were definitely a lot of parts that I strongly disagreed with, even though I found it a really engaging read.

Personally, I'm actually a bit agnostic about gender being a purely social construct. It might be that there are some behaviour differences between the sexes although I think it's frankly impossible to tell in our society what, if anything, is driven by biology rather than pink/blue drivel and pressure on women to behave in a certain way.

But what annoys me is that even if gender were socially constructed, it does not make it legitimate to opt in to the gender trappings associated with the opposite sex. To use an analogy, there are a lot of socially constructed behaviours around race (Ie a shared ethnic culture including music, food, language/slang etc), but that doesn't mean that as a white person I can opt into them and claim to be of that race. "It's a social construct" shouldn't provide an entitlement to declare yourself to be something other than what you are.

Trans issues are one area where I agree wholeheartedly with Douglas Murray. The part of his ‘Madness of Crowds’ book that deals with it is fair, rational and clear-sighted. I appreciate also that, as a gay man, he is genuinely concerned for the welfare of young gay people who are pushed down a trans path instead of learning to love and accept their sexuality.

The greater the number of journalists critically looking at the trans debate, the better. I am just amazed it took so long, Lesbians have been badly affected for some time. I have been extremely sad about some of these women's posts on here. Good for Douglas though, he writes a good piece

The Graun wont be on board until the US does a complete flip

That's interesting butterer

Interesting also that they had all the surgeries (unlike most men who only bother with the facial bit). Do you know their ideas behind their transition?

I notice JoMarch is often prominent in the Times comments - Jo, I suspect you are a mumsnetter so if you're here, thanks for all the great comments on this topic recently!

Agree. Love Jo March. There’s another Times poster called Timelady or something who is also on it

There's always an incredible number of comments on pieces on women's rights. There must be a heck of a lot of women who have signed up because of The Times' great writing on this.

Yup. I signed up to the Times for this very reason.