Book Review: Shon Faye & Helen Joyce

[MiladyBerserko]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fb7ea1ac-0585-11ec-9bf4-46b41c0cb5c4?shareToken=092b4ac490d84a875beca16b17049e99

Don't think Shon is going to be happy.

Wasn't abolishing gender completely trialed in maoist China? Everyone had to wear the same grey outfit and have the same haircut, no differences in expression between male and female at all?

..... and funnily enough, it was still clear which was which?

Communism is a very popular concept amongst children at the moment, who are all dead keen on the idea of sharing the wealth and pooling assets one minute, then the next want to buy £200 Kenzo jumpers and be famous play rights. I smile. I try to point out what would really happen under a communist regime, and why it didn't work in Russia. I also tell them bluntly that they won't be the ones making the decisions or policies should the government and the monarchy fall, rather, they will be immediately put to work in the fields and factories as the young and fit.

... But when faced with 16yr olds with a passion, what do I know?

"Wasn't abolishing gender completely trialed in maoist China? Everyone had to wear the same grey outfit..."

Not everyone. Mrs Mao and her chums had their undies made in Paris and shipped in the diplomatic bag.

There you go. I should imagine shon sees themselves as Mrs Mao, whilst the rest of us work ourselves to death.

@Jaysmith71

"Wasn't abolishing gender completely trialed in maoist China? Everyone had to wear the same grey outfit..."

Not everyone. Mrs Mao and her chums had their undies made in Paris and shipped in the diplomatic bag.

Sometimes the nickname muse moves me. This one was too good to pass up.

Good piece. Thank you so much for the share token, saw this mentioned on Twitter and was hoping I’d be able to read it. Much obliged

MrsMaosfrillyFrenchundies

😂

MrsMao 😂😂😂

Twirls

On "third genders" Helen Joyce talks interestingly about these in the latest Radical Notion, in an interview with Jane Clare Jones. She says it's often a way for rigid patriarchal societies to accommodate feminine gay men, or with women it can be a way to manage property relations, so daughters can inherit, or allow women to break off marriages without sparking a blood feud.

My Finnish colleague told me that Finnish has always been gender neutral and the Trans community have made up special pronouns just for themselves that you have to comply with.

I would be delighted to learn about both parts of this (the gender neutral pronouns in Finnish and the newly created special pronouns).

The standard gender-neutral pronoun in Finnish is "hän" = "he/she", plural "he" = "they".

This really doesn't have that much effect, as far as I can tell. A language with non-sexed pronouns doesn't seem to change culture much. There are still lots of male/female words, including the female suffix "-tar", roughly English "-ess", and compound words like "palomies" (fireman), with the same debates about changing to gender-neutral forms. The rest of the language apart from the pronouns is as sexed as any other. Finns do know what a woman is!

The Finnish word for sex is "sukupuoli" - literally "family half", which I like. They don't have a word for gender exactly - a translation would be "sosiaalinen sukupuoli" - "social sex".

What I find amusing though is that Finns can't actually be bothered with the person/object distinction and actually use "se/ne", which are formally "it/they" for objects, instead of "hän/he" in most spoken dialects. So people are usually called "it".

(You can observe Finns speaking English fairly often will stumble over getting he/she right, but usually spot the error and correct themselves).

I've not actually heard about the neopronouns - sounds hilarious.

I had heard trans people complaining about "misgendering". If people don't hear other people calling you "she", how are they supposed to know you're a woman? Lack of sexed pronouns makes it harder to tell someone is supposed to be trans.

Review of Shon Faye's book by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked:
www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/03/the-transgender-delusion/

Quite the skewering. I disagree with Brendan O'Neill more than I agree with him, but he's absolutely hit the nail on the head here.

That's a good article.

@Rubidium

Review of Shon Faye's book by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked: www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/03/the-transgender-delusion/

Quite the skewering. I disagree with Brendan O'Neill more than I agree with him, but he's absolutely hit the nail on the head here.

Likewise, this was a good summary:

Trans activists like Faye present themselves as warriors for liberation – they genuinely think of themselves as such – but the consequences of their agitation are almost entirely authoritarian. The Transgender Issue captures this well. To use contemporary parlance, it identifies as a treatise for liberation; it bristles against the goals of ‘trans rights’ and ‘trans equality’ and calls instead for ‘trans liberation’. Such liberation would ‘improve the lives of everyone in our society’, Faye says. And yet Faye’s book feels more disciplinarian than libertine, more chastising than free-wheeling, and more concerned with correcting wrongthink than improving everyone’s lives through the expansion of autonomy.

That was an excellent read. I wonder if it’s worth its own thread Rubidium?

So much good stuff in there. The concluding line - "Lies are a strange foundation on which to build a movement for freedom" - is perfect.

I also loved:

"What strikes Faye and other woke types as normal, even positive expressions of a experimentative gender ideology look to the rest of us like top-down forms of newspeak designed to police our understanding of sex and to erase the foundational biological and social truths of sexual experience."

Much like the Times asked the same reviewer, Christina Patterson, to review both ‘Trans’ by Helen Joyce and ‘The Transgender Issue’ by Shon Faye, the Evening Standard have asked Stella O’Malley to review Faye’s book following her earlier reviews of 'Trans' and also Kathleen Stock's 'Material Girls'.

I love how politely Stella O’Malley is highlighting the paucity of supporting evidence and general batshittery contained within Faye’s book. Very much an air of ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed.’

Compare and contrast:
Review of ‘The Transgender Issue’
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/the-transgender-issue-by-shon-faye-review-b954336.html
Review of ‘Trans’:
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-helen-joyce-review-b944183.html
Review of ‘Material Girls’
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-kathleen-stock-trans-gender-activism-b931417.html

Lol @rubidium 😆 Shon faye: could do better

It's difficult for reviewers to take the space to illustrate how threadbare the evidence base for such books as Faye's are. Very few people ever check the references that do exist to check that they're used appropriately.

However, every time the suicide attempts statistics are brought up and they're not corrected, I wonder about the damage being done to any discussion in the public space.

In conclusion, although the statistics for suicide attempts have been exaggerated, this is a psychologically highly vulnerable population. A young person with mental health problems needs psychotherapeutic support and a young person who is feeling suicidal needs urgent psychiatric care. Much more research is needed into different care pathways for young people with gender dysphoria.

In this clinical area it is especially important to understand the possible underlying causative factors in suicidal ideation and provide appropriate therapeutic treatment, as the alternative (puberty blockers) carries a risk of exacerbating depressive symptoms. Depression is listed as a common or very common adverse effect for the drug Triptorelin (the form of blocker used by the Tavistock).30

Every suicide is a terrible tragedy and we must be extremely careful in any message we send to young people on this subject. The Samaritans guidance 31 states that we should avoid speculation about any one ‘trigger’ for suicide and that we need to exercise caution in repeating suicide statistics. Transgender Trend would like to see this advice followed more carefully in the case of young people struggling with gender identity issues.

www.transgendertrend.com/the-suicide-myth/

Thank you Rubidom.

That was a good read.

So many clear points in this review.

Starting with the assertions about mental health care, to the lack of credible evidence behind many of the ‘facts’ presented (which we see here from time to time and are easily shown to be highly biased and unreliable), and to the minimising and dismissal of detransitioners, child transitioners and ‘the prison debate’.

I haven’t read the book but if Faye indeed states that trans people should not be told and reminded of the consequences of their medication because, bodily autonomy, they must truly believe they are a special class of humans. Of course Doctors should be warning those on medication that they should not smoke or should lose weight as needed.

But it does show that Faye has some extreme concepts to push, that of biased mental health care (ie not allowing therapy for issues that might be causing distress that are not affirming), the non-carceral agenda, and now the push to not have to ever hear doctors warnings about the affects of the medication. And this includes the fertility issue.

Thank you Stella. Another good review.

Thanks rub, will read later.

For a cracking Joyce interview, this is worth a watch: