Does anyone ever have a "are we the baddies"* moment?

[Menstrualcycledisplayteam]

• it's a Mitchell & Webb sketch, probably on Youtube.

I'm a bit disheartened this week, if I'm honest. I sometimes feel like this is a fight that we're just not going to win. Two main things recently, one personal, one geo-political I suppose.

On the geo-political level, I look across the Pond to the US, where the only people who are saying the same things as us are frigging Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene, neither of which are people that I associate my politics as being anywhere close to. There is just no bloody way that the Left, my home, will align with us now, given who our "allies" are in the States. They just can't, even those that agree with us will never position themselves as having the same concerns as Marjorie Q-Anon Parkland Taylor Bloody Greene.

The second is personal. I work for a large global organisation in a senior role. We had our Global Leadership "Away Day" a few weeks ago (on Teams, of course) and there was a presentation from some US colleagues on LGBTQ+, being able to bring your whole self to work, that kind of thing, from two gay colleagues, one lesbian one gay. So far, so good - absolutely the right thing for my organisation to be doing. Then they got onto pronouns and how everyone should start every meeting asking what pronouns attendees want to have used and encouraging everyone to put them in our email sign-offs. I'm never going to do that, but I can already see it happening around the organisation (particularly the US, but some of the easily led/want to be noticed over here will soon follow suit).

My husband won't listen to me talk about this sort of stuff anymore - he agrees with me, but says that it is basically like someone saying they "don't agree with all that Black Lives Matter stuff". My best friend works with young people and whilst I've tried to approach it with her very gently, including all of the stats about single sex spaces and how women and children's safety is negatively affected as a result, her reaction is that she gets all of that but she works with children every day who are tortured by their own bodies.

I know that our concerns are justified, I know that women's safety/opportunities are going to be negatively affected but - if I'm completely honest with myself - I just can't see how we're going to stop it. Julie Bindel has a tweet pinned to her feed which is basically that the misogyny at the moment is like a tidal wave and that's how it feels.

I'm not sure why I'm writing this really - certainly not to bring anyone down but there's no-one I can speak to about this in real life. How do you even go about discussing these things when, in my work at least, it would probably get me fired and everyone around me in my personal life has either bought into the nonsense hook line and sinker, or just doesn't want to hear it?

@CardinalLolzy

Yeah it's a reference to the Mitchell & Webb sketch in the first line of the OP. I assume everyone's watched it?!

Nope

Surely that can't be right, Rufus. No one could possibly be sufficiently naiive and crass to compare women refusing to hand over their rights without resistance to ghettos. The clearances of the ghettos. The absolute horror upon horror of transportation. The camps.

Not unless they knew absolutely nothing about. And had no idea of the absolute insult it offers to the voices and lives of millions of people who experienced things that most of us thankfully can't imagine in our worst nightmares.

Surely not Rufus?

Wouldn't that just be passe, really old trope and hyperbole? Surely our poster meant that we were pirates? I did have a really lovely ruffled shirt and waistcoat in the 90s. It was fab... the waistcoat I made my shelf.

I'd be disappointed that they merely resorted to that old vile fall back.

I haven't seen Germaine Greer around for a while, has anyone checked if she's been invading Poland?

I've got a pair of pirate style boots somewhere....

You are right Artichoke. No one could in reality accuse women of such a vile and horrific act if they actually thought about the reality. To make light of such a thing in such a way, to throw around such a label, would make some people absolutely on the wrong side of history.

Yes. Cheez thinks if you oppose women being housed with rapists, locked in a cell all night with them, if you don’t approve of barbed wire baseball bats, bomb threats, rape threats, smoke bombs or women being left to die because they can’t enter refuges anymore then according to Cheez you’re a nazi.

If your form of protest is a ribbon, or a sticker or a nuanced argument on a parenting website Cheez thinks you’re a nazi.

If you don’t want young women to lose sporting scholarships that raise them out of poverty Cheez thinks you’re the same as people who attempted genocide.

And every one of these posts will be ignored- just like the threads that evidence all those things because in the head of Cheez being a woman is basically the same as the most evil people in living memory.

Cheezecake
The title of this thread is
Does anyone ever have a "are we the baddies" moment?*
It's about self reflection so how about you try it. Do you ever wonder if you're the baddie? Serious question - in the dark hours before the dawn, any doubts about sterilising children, putting sex offenders in women's jails, bullying anyone who disagrees with you, calling for them to be sacked. No qualms at all?

Your friends and family likely think you're obsessed and bonkers

More and more comment every day - it's reaching the mainstream now - men at work, men in the pub and they're horrified.

We've always known it but, unfortunately, it's the men saying no that will kill the TRA agenda.

Who was broadcasting fantasies about holding knives to women's throats, terrorising them and making them scream for mercy?

It wasn't us.

Who was posting pictures on Twitter of guns and knives and threats?

It wasn't us.

Who has used bomb threats, attacked women, supported rapists being put in women's prisons, supported young people being sterilised, supported death threats for JK Rowling and women MPs, hung effigies of women in trees, worn T-shirts calling for death to women, carried signs calling for death to women, carried baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, mocked women who died tragically young, wished death and torture on women on this site?

It wasn't us.

Check your own hat, mate.

It's about self reflection so how about you try it - I dont think self reflection is cheezecakes style somehow.

I've checked my hat - Ooh and indeed Arrrgh!

But you are a little early. World Speak Like a Pirate Day is in September.

Cos you couldn't have had a Godwin moment there, could you?

Who was broadcasting fantasies about holding knives to women's throats, terrorising them and making them scream for mercy? Be fair, he asked if they were turned on or scared - he was catering for all kinds of response!

Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared? I sure fucking hope so.”

Apparently that is an acceptable thing to publish in a respectable university under the banner of Gender Studies.

And yet we are the baddies... and the pirates!

No. Never. If I met you in real life, I would happily tell you all the experiences I have had since waking up to the political implications of the doctrine of gender identity. I don't think you'd be left in any doubt about who the baddies are in this debate.

I do understand why you feel uncomfortable that people you disagree with on other issues agree with you on this one. So, take any other issue that's dear to your heart Menstrualcycledisplayteam and play this through.

Let's imagine people who you know have lost everything in the latest flooding disaster. Others in your friends' neighbourhood have died. The only school nursery in town is filled with mud and debris. Without massive help from a veritable volunteer army, the town's little ones (who have already suffered a delay in their social development because of Covid) won't have a nursery until next year.

You are asked to coordinate the volunteers and liase with the deputy head responsible for the nursery department. The deputy head happens to be a vocal trans rights campaigner.

Will either of you have abandoned your principles by putting aside your differences and working together for the sake of the children? Should the deputy head be vilified for working alongside you? Will you be cast out of the women's rights movement for finding a common cause with a trans rights campaigner?

I think if it's perfectly acceptable to share an opinion on one issue with someone whose opinion you oppose on another, on anything from disaster relief to animal protection to literacy to renewables to palliative care, the same holds true here.

No matter how right wing or socially conservative a woman might be, she too is subject to the misogyny and discrimination a left-wing woman experiences on the basis of her sex. I don't have to agree with either woman on absolutely everything before I can stand alongside them in this fight. We just have to agree to campaign for or against the same thing. And once we've done that, we can go back to disagreeing about everything else.

But maybe we do so with a little more understanding.

It’s normal to question your views when people are lining up on Twitter to call gender critical feminists evil, prejudiced, hate-filled Nazis.

But recently, I’ve started to tentatively share my views with family and friends. What I’ve found is that most of them had no idea that males are competing in women’s professional sports, or that convicted rapists are occasionally being placed in women’s prisons, or that Stonewall is trying to remove sex-based exemptions from the Equality Act.

So far, not one person has disagreed with me, even the male friend who used to work for a gay rights charity, and who has also worked as a support worker for a trans service user.

The first my parents had heard of the issue was only a few weeks ago, during the Jeremy Vine radio show. They were shocked by the stance of the trans activists they listened to, and strongly disagreed with many of their views.

There's a skull inside my hat.

Alas i fear its true…😩

Aggghhhh and hoist the mainbrace and wheres the rum….why is it always the rum?

I quite like my hat

Just remembered my favourite pirate joke.

Why are pirates called pirates?
They just arrrrrr!

I do urge everyone to watch the sketch referenced in the OP

OK, I watched it.

The important distinction is that GC women are not choosing a skull as their battle symbol.

It is being IMPOSED , like the word cis and all of the fake shot that comes with it. By the true baddies.

Shiver me timbers!

Women matter, and need their rights to participate in all spheres of society, from mundane things like toilets and access to healthcare, to the opportunity to enjoy sport on a fair playing field, and safety if they are in prison! Children should protected from irreversible medical and surgical intervention based on sexist stereotypes and adolescent insecurities. LGB people shouldn't be harrassed and bullied.

Cast me as the baddie if ye will, but my conscience is cleaarrrrr!

(Yes, the goading was calling us Nazis, but given that the rest of the post was nasty lies too, I think some feminist pirates will be a much more wholesome response that redundant 'I'm not a Nazi' defenses. I'm a feminist. Again - my conscience is clear against the accusations of those who make threats a mark of righteousness. Avast ye!)

www.google.com/amp/s/historynavigator.org/2019/01/27/aethelflaed-the-heroine-of-mercia/amp/

Pirates are not always the baddies.

Nor do we need to accept nonsense labels from moral reprobates

The pipe bomb, rape threats etc etc are the equivalent of choosing skulls as your uniform, in my opinion. In case that wasn't clear!
Or literally choosing blue and pink for a flag then claiming the other side want to keep people boxed in gender stereotypes...