Solid hard-left article against genderwoo

[BlackForestCake]

This has just come out from the Communist Party of Great Britain (not the Communist Party):

weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1363/orthodoxy-and-its-discontents/

“Unlike traditional conservatism, trans orthodoxy does support and celebrate gender nonconformity in a small minority. But for the majority of us the story is unchanged - women are told that we are an innately submissive class, born to service men. If you are promoting trans rights orthodoxy - arguing that most female people are ‘cis’, and that being a woman is about having feminine feelings of submissiveness - you are buying liberty for only a few, while slapping chains on the rest of us.”

The CPGB only has about 30 members I think, nonetheless it is good ammunition to fire back when the "Christian right" and "fascist" smears come out.

Lies?

You want to label the thoughts and feelings, lived experiences and beliefs of any woman who writes clearly about how the hard edge of trans activism affects our lives as lies?

So no feelings but trans feelings?

No truths but trans truths?

That's ridiculous. Common sense and the common majority knows the truth, human beings cannot change sex.

Most women and transwomen know that for decades they operated on a basis of trust and that the current demands for what was once given freely has all but destroyed the every day lives of so many transwomen.

Five years ago I was a firm believer in TWAW, socially but not biologically. Two years ago I still believe there was an opportunity to find a compromise that would work for women and transwomen alike.

But people denouncing well written articles as lies, well educated women as witches, issuing threats to the families of said women, parading their aggression across social media has utterly altered my perspective.

Are you proud of any of that?

Do you think you are doing any transwomen a favour with your denunciations?

Do you ever consider transmen?

Maybe go and have a lie down and contemplate the damage your posts cause. You only serve to further reinforce the idea that gender ideology is utterly bereft of honesty.

Who does that damage?

With friends like you....

@KittenKong

I really want someone to show me or explain how this happens - science not emotion/feelings.

How what happens?

That is a fucking brilliant article - she's managed to communicate so eloquently and clearly what I have been trying to for eons.

How humans change sex.

This has just come out from the Communist Party of Great Britain (not the Communist Party)

Sorry, just reminded me of this:

@KittenKong

How humans change sex.

Sorry Kitten. I'm on my phone and posts seem to take forever to appear, I posted that about 2 minutes after your quoted post and I don't think I saw the post above - which makes it perfectly clear what you meant!

I'm back off to Site Stuff to complain about the App again!

I never use the app because it looks weird!

Gosh that was a good read. I love how you don't need to share the writer's politics to nod vigorously along to her crystal-clear arguments (I feel the same way when I read stuff from Conservatives for Women, for example)

I may be about to delete it and sod the battery saving 🙂

I for one am relieved that the Gulags will not be unisex.

Next: guard, can you assure me that this cabbage soup is organic?

I agree with everything she wrote in that article.

This really stood out to me, "Some people might see a definition of women that centres on traditional norms - on passivity and submission - as positive. Personally, I think it is an insult - possibly a deliberate one - to very many women, both alive and dead."

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

Identity politics in general overlook the importance of class - arguably they are a deliberate distraction. I'm not suggesting a carefully planned conspiracy, but it does suit governments if people are too busy with generational/racial/gender ID conflict to focus on economic inequality

I think that you're right to not suggest that it was a carefully planned conspiracy... but equally you would be naive to assume that it's not a badly planned conspiracy, or that the right aren't loving this.

you would be naive to assume that it's not a badly planned conspiracy, or that the right aren't loving this

I'm prepared to believe that much of life is a badly planned conspiracy 😀

I definitely don't think that the TRA movement was cooked up by the Right in the UK, because they were just as on board with gender woo until they clocked how unpopular it is - remember Maria Miller? And there are still plenty of Tory MPs and peers who go along with it. However, I agree that the Right in the US was much faster to utilise the divisive potential of identity politics.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

you would be naive to assume that it's not a badly planned conspiracy, or that the right aren't loving this

I'm prepared to believe that much of life is a badly planned conspiracy 😀

I definitely don't think that the TRA movement was cooked up by the Right in the UK, because they were just as on board with gender woo until they clocked how unpopular it is - remember Maria Miller? And there are still plenty of Tory MPs and peers who go along with it. However, I agree that the Right in the US was much faster to utilise the divisive potential of identity politics.

If you were a powerful agenda setter who leaned right you could start the whole thing off and know that some on the right would buy into it, which would encourage the left to feel that en-mass it had to buy in 100% in order to stay ahead, leaving them even further down the woo-rabbit-hole when the public started getting to grips and the idiots on the right started actually engaging their brains on the issue.

I am a firm believer that conspiracy theorists are dangerous... but that right-minded people should be constantly aware that there might be a bit of truth in some of them.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

Identity politics in general overlook the importance of class - arguably they are a deliberate distraction. I'm not suggesting a carefully planned conspiracy, but it does suit governments if people are too busy with generational/racial/gender ID conflict to focus on economic inequality

Identity politics in general overlook the importance of class Well they have to overlook it. Otherwise all those university educated middle class people would have to stare down the fact that they are totally doing over marginalised women in prisons and refuges, homeless accommodation and addiction centres. Or women with LD or english as a second language, or poor literacy/ education levels for whom health communications/ campaigns are no longer clearly written.

There is a strong class element to all this. The poorest and most vulnerable women are being really hard hit by this. But that doesn't bother Keir's labour party or momentum members. Cos its only women, innit?

Yeah, you can’t really be any kind of Marxist and genuinely believe TWAW.

Because gender roles are an ideology, and in Marxist thought ideology is always there to obscure and mystify the operations of class oppression and the material ‘base’ of reality.

Social conditioning and ideology operate to give us a “false consciousness” which pretties up and covers over the real economic conditions of exploitation. The only way to having genuine thought, in Marxism, is to try to free yourself from ideology in order to see the material realities beneath.

Anyone who calls themselves a Marxist but goes along with the entirely ideological ideas of gender politics simply hasn’t understood Marxism.

Why do you all tell so many lies? Do you truly feel that any victory built on lies truly counts?

@PumpkinSpiceWoman

I'm genuinely interested to know what you think are lies and why? So many people who support this gender ideology just shout slurs like ' Terf' 'transphobe' or in this case, 'lies' and then hop off again. Please don't be like them and engage in debate instead. Otherwise it looks like you don't really have a defensable position so just shout rude names and run away.

Why do you all tell so many lies? Do you truly feel that any victory built on lies truly counts?

I can’t think of many bigger lies than saying a man really is a woman, just because he says he has a feeling in his head. Can you?

That's a very good article. Just shared it on twitter. So I'm turning Communist. This debate ..

For example, the Deptford Project was colonised and taken over by middle class university students, determined to impose gender identity politics onto working class women. For anyone who hasn't heard the details before, there's a really interesting account in this article - www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/

@irresistibleoverwhelm

Why do you all tell so many lies? Do you truly feel that any victory built on lies truly counts?

I can’t think of many bigger lies than saying a man really is a woman, just because he says he has a feeling in his head. Can you?

It's not a lie if you redefine woman to mean "someone who feels they should be called woman" and nothing else.

However, what is a massive, huge, red-lights-blinking lie is that qualifying as a woman under this new definition means a person must have access to everything set up by and for women using the old definition.

I have never yet heard a coherent explanation of why all the things (sports, protections, spaces etc) set up for "women" using a definition of "woman" that trans ideology utterly rejects, are still by some amazing coincidence still exactly what people who qualify as women under the new definition happen to need.

To go back to basics, what is it about that feeling in the head that would cause us to set up gender segregation if it didn't already exist?

Once you ask that, the whole thing falls apart.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow

you would be naive to assume that it's not a badly planned conspiracy, or that the right aren't loving this

I'm prepared to believe that much of life is a badly planned conspiracy 😀

I definitely don't think that the TRA movement was cooked up by the Right in the UK, because they were just as on board with gender woo until they clocked how unpopular it is - remember Maria Miller? And there are still plenty of Tory MPs and peers who go along with it. However, I agree that the Right in the US was much faster to utilise the divisive potential of identity politics.

I just don't think there is any real evidence that the thinking around gender, or idpol, came out of the more right wing parties. Yes, they picked it up in some cases, but all the bits and pieces come out of a very particular part of the supposed left.

What I would say though is that supposed left hasn't been left in any meaningful way in a long time. They are overall as much about capitalism and individualism as any right-wing political group or individual. They use identity politics in order to be able to claim the moral high ground without challenging the basis of the economic landscape.

@irresistibleoverwhelm

It still is a lie though, because gender ideologists have gone much further than redefining woman as a feeling. They claim that feelings redefine material reality. That’s why we have the “female penis” / “ladydick” - the idea that a male body literally becomes female just because of a feeling.

This is now seemingly the default position of gender ideologues, and a key way to distinguish a quasi-theological belief from a theory about the world. It’s unprovable; un falsifiable (in Popperian terms), and therefore entirely unscientific.

We know what to call all sorts of other beliefs that claim they can redefine material reality on the basis of no evidence and with no provability. We call them, variously, religions, fantasies, delusions, stories. That isn’t to denigrate religion - freedom of religion and belief is central to a free society. But to demand everyone else around you believe in the same unverifiable belief that you do, is fundamentalism, not progressivism.

Feelings or ideas in anyone’s head being allowed to redefine reality is a form of either mass delusion, mass oppression or cultural mythology. We know this when it applies to mandated religion, political ideology, nationalism, believing in Father Christmas or Pagan witchcraft or the Norse gods or whatever. All can be okay in its place, but not when it overtakes our secular human rights and starts redefining all our shared reality.

I agree with all of this.

I have been astounded that by my friend, who laughs and mocks at belief in religion, supernatural beliefs and alternative medicine, who has always promoted rationalism, science and being evidence based, yet is a whole hearted proponent of this gender ideology (which she can't defend).

I think I have concluded that humans are evolutionarily wired to believe unbelievable things. Religion dying did not get rid of supernatural beliefs, they just continued in alternative medicine and alternative spiritual beliefs and such like. And now gender ideology. People love unifying as a group around a belief, and the more you need to believe (as evidence is weak or non-existent) the stronger those social connections seem to be.

I sometimes wonder if some TRA’s have echolalia.

They see or hear the comments that, for example, Ash Sarkar is telling lies and just throw the comment back without any real understanding at all.