Helen Lewis - Ubisoft

[MondayYogurt]

Gaming related, therefore naturally leaning towards anti-women (Gamergaters are misogynists and generally TRAs in my experience - any opportunity to subjugate women is gleefully enjoyed).

Yet another twitter led cancellation: games company Ubisoft (home of apparently endemic sexual harassment www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-21/ubisoft-sexual-misconduct-scandal-harassment-sexism-and-abuse ) has removed Helen Lewis from some podcasts because of her previously expressed feminist views.

Next cancellation target is Ian Dunt, for defending her right to free speech.

Influential website Kotaku (trans editor Riley Macleod) is as ever at the heart of these storms.

Gaming baseline hates women, particularly any stepping out of line. They then become 'Nazis', 'fascists', and are allowed to be publicly destroyed.
The only acceptable women are camgirls, sexy cosplayers, handmaidens and transwomen.

Oh. I’d been willing to get in on publicising and shaming these companies. I would love to see something on like Ch4 Dispatches with a honey trap involved.

Ian's tweet twitter.com/iandunt/status/1325030492681494528?s=21

As ever it’s so depressing to see so many women piling in too

Was it Helen Lewis who had that nasty run in with that furry gamer guy?

I might be completely confused but there was a lot of vitriol and some of the language and memes were stomach turning. all completely acceptable to Twitter obviously but it's something that always stood out to me.

The TRAs on Twitter are all claiming she said trans people don't have a right to exist... do they know they're lying? It's like a cult, blocking out material reality.

This reply to Ian Dunt has hacked me off to hell and back.

How on earth is arguing for a robust process for obtaining a GRC "debating the existence" of trans people? How? Just how??

It's absolute piffle. Total and complete garbage. And it has more than a thousand likes.

I thought, given that he had linked to some evidence of her transgressions that there would be something egregious. But no. Just the completely reasonable opinion that it might not be the greatest idea to be able to change your legal gender (effectively your legal sex) just by filling in a form.

FFS, I am so annoyed.

That’s the problem though invisible

Most ppl still have no idea that that’s what TRA are pushing for. Most ppl still think it’s all about being nice to men who present as women & using female pronouns and you know BEKIND!

Most ppl still don’t understand how far this has gone & how much further you s being pushed for

And they don’t stop to think that once you redefine women to include men then everything reserved for women is erased at a stroke

When people spend significant portions of their waking lives playing pretend (yes, gaming is playing pretend), writing about playing pretend, getting angry or aroused or otherwise deeply emotionally engaged with playing pretend and the pretend characters and the pretend story makers and the pretend voices and pretend flags in the pretend worlds - then yes I can understand why their critical thinking skills may be on a par with a 5 year old's.

Her husband who is the guardian digital editor (didn’t realise that) is calling out Ubisoft on twitter & Sean ingle also from the guardian offering solidarity. No doubt they’ll both be cancelled too right??

DrDavidBanner yes that was her. A high follower count gamer person, a huge pile one, lots of violent imagery. Has forgotten and I can't remember what started it.

I always find it interesting when men get a taste of this sort of thing (as Ian Dunt is now). Interestingly I spotted a woke acquaintance of mine on another social media site protesting the cancellation, but not seen him speak up at all on any gender / free speech issues in the past.

The latest yarn being spread - the books burned by Nazis were all about trans people.

I've studied this part of history at university and I can tell you that 'trans' was never mentioned. 'Decadent art' covered many things, but transgenderism was barely known.

Yes, there was a sexology clinic that had its records destroyed. Among those records were studies of cross-dressers.

But in the scheme of things this was a tiny event. The Nazis targeted Jewish people, the disabled, the Roma, gays, and political dissidents... they didn't specifically target trans people because there was no concept of trans people.

In fact cross-dressing was common in the Wehrmacht.

NotTerfNorCis There is nothing that won't be appropriated.

Manderleyagain I thought so, I was just amazed at how people will make any excuse for the abuse of women online, sickening really. I'm not on Twitter anymore and I feel like this is one of the only online spaces that women can share.

I'd be interested to know who started the pile-on that got her removed. Was the real reason to try and silence the game itself? I see they're also going for Ian Dunt now.

Bought her book in solidarity. The gaming community is toxic to the core.

I was watching a documentary about the Pepe the Frog meme, it came from a pretty innocuous cartoon strip a American college kid had made about him and his room mates and then got twisted into the nasty creation it is now by gamers and users of 4Chan. It was really interesting actually, but it just showed these grown men living in their mum's basements and have such a tenuous link to the real world they are quite self hating and project that onto each other and then the outside world. Very scary.

Yes, there was a sexology clinic that had its records destroyed. Among those records were studies of cross-dressers.

The Hirschfeld Institute provided trans healthcare, had trans staff members and was perhaps the only library of research into trans people. Whilst it was being attacked Goering gave a speech to over 40,000 people and an estimated 20,000 books and countless more research papers and personal health records were burnt. The Nazis also seized the clinic's list of names and addresses which would have included their trans patients. Hirschfeld, who Hitler himself had reportedly called the most dangerous Jew in Germany, was forced into exile, and the Institute director was sent to a concentration camp. It is not known but suspected by the details gathered in this raid were used to round up gay men and trans people.

Whilst there may well have been crossdressing and drag shows in the military, as was common in many countries at the time, crossdressing was forbidden under Paragraph 183 of Nazi rules. There have been 175 records uncovered in which crossdressing was used as part of a prosecution.

Trans women were not considered by the Nazis to be seperate from gay men, and in fact their theories of sexual inversion really depended on the idea that to be gay was to be feminine, that essentially homosexuality was a feminine corruption of the male body. It is beyond credible doubt that trans people were prosected amongst the estimated 50,000 LGBT people imprisoned or sent to camps.

I thoroughly enjoyed Helen Lewis's 'Difficult Women' - she's a good writer and speaker.
It's notable that no matter what field it is, men take every possible opportunity to not only slur and criticise women for having the temerity to speak out, but to deliberately misrepresent what we say.

Ok so they asked for evidence that she was transphobic and they’ve posted this link from her article against self Id. Just for once I wish someone would ask them to further EXPLAIN what is actually transphobic about her statement. Helen says something like “this gender id law makes a woman into a feeling in someone’s mind.” Right well ... isn’t that true? Isn’t this what we’ve been told? That’s it’s all about feelings and self validation? I’m just getting very fed up of mere disagreement being castigated as bigotry.

According to magnus-hirschfeld.de/ :

For Berlin residents, it became known as an institution providing counselling and treatment for “physical and psychological sexual disorders” as well as, in particular, for “sexual transitions”, Hirschfeld’s term for homosexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites.

'Trans people' weren't in focus at the time and were barely a concept. Certainly the Nazis hated what they saw as 'degenerates' but that covered a whole range of lifestyles. The Hirschfeld Institute was a footnote at best in Nazi history. TRAs really need to stop centering their cause in everything.

Lewis is a very careful communicator and moderate in her views on this issue. It's beyond ridiculous she's been removed.

@NotTerfNorCis

According to magnus-hirschfeld.de/ :

For Berlin residents, it became known as an institution providing counselling and treatment for “physical and psychological sexual disorders” as well as, in particular, for “sexual transitions”, Hirschfeld’s term for homosexuals, transvestites and hermaphrodites.

'Trans people' weren't in focus at the time and were barely a concept. Certainly the Nazis hated what they saw as 'degenerates' but that covered a whole range of lifestyles. The Hirschfeld Institute was a footnote at best in Nazi history. TRAs really need to stop centering their cause in everything.

Hirschfeld is credited with coining the term transsexual and the institute carried out the first formal hormonal treatments and gender reassignment surgeries. Hs institute carried out almost all of the wrld's research into trans healthcare which was subsequently destroyed when it was attacked.

No-one is centering anyone, trans people simply don't want their history and the persecution that took place in Nazi Germany to be denied. The attack on the Hirschfeld Institute marked the beginning of the Nazi campaign against LGBT people and as such is significant. As were the attempts to wipe out any scientific record of trans people's existence. To try and pretend atrocities against those accused of sexual inversion didn't really happen, or were just a footnote in Nazi history, or only happened to gender conforming gay men, reveals elements of the GC movement to be deeply sinister. Why would you want to deny this? What's in it for you, unless you want to see it happen again? Because that's the motivation behind most of those who deny aspects of the holocaust.

Oh, that's a new one - accusing feminists of being Holocaust deniers.

Can we return to the topic of the thread please ?

No one is denying that the Nazis persecuted gay people. They certainly did. However 'trans' wasn't much of a concept at the time. The Hirschfield Institute's remit was far broader than sexual reassignment. The fact that Hirschfield himself invented the term 'transsexual' (which to him encompassed intersex people and transvestites) shows how new it was.

I only mentioned this because I've seen certain activists co-opting the monstrous tragedy of the Holocaust for their cause, on Ian Dunt's thread.

I won't say any more because this is obviously a sensitive subject.