Is the tide turning? Women's rights in the news

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So this week Sarah Everard's 's police-officer murderer is sentenced to full life, the police come under the spotlight for institutionalised misogyny, joky 'rapist' nicknames, femicides by policemen and there are calls for no more male-only arrests & transportation of female prisoners.

A report states the obvious - that allowing trans women into women's sports is unfair and unsafe, but so many had felt too frightened for their jobs and their safety to speak out.

Labour politicians' ludicrous statements about what a woman is attract mass ridicule during the Brighton conference.

Is there hope?

🤞

Well you'd think, but I'm not holding my breath

And of course the scathing reactions to the Lancet calling us bodies with vaginas - how too many men see, talk about us and treat us being upheld by the medical profession's most respected publication has triggered outrage.

I think maybe the “tide turning” isn’t a helpful metaphor. Because often you start to feel like the tide is turning and then get frustrated when nothing much changes. This is a good article:

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/it-s-still-possible-cancel-gender-critical-feminists-strategy-won-t-work

Especially this line:

This is also how ideological change happens: slowly, then all at once.

I think we’re still chipping away at the edifice of genderism. I think it will continue to seem for a while as if all the chipping away we do isn’t accomplishing much, and all the damage TRAs can’t help doing to their own reputation and cause is having very little impact. But the structure is being eroded, and one day it will collapse.

I think that reality is slowly starting to reassert itself in a number of areas but I think we can also expect the vitriol to ramp up off the scale as this happens.

The problem is that there is such a way to go and having to fight a defensive battle against being erased has taken so much time and energy.

The key will be to make sure that those brought into this battle stay to fight on and get involved in the other issues at stake.

The more light is shined the better.

A full debate out in the open with the public watching will fix this. Woke academics and pressure groups have been influencing policy by pushing at levers without ever engaging the public. An instinctively sympathetic media didn’t help. It was a limited debate within a small subsection of the population. The pandemic lockdowns made this dynamic even more possible.

No.

It's a sustained onslaught on women and there's no sign that the general public understands the issues or cares about them.

Mainstream media are mostly telling partial accounts of news items and they never explain the restrictions on how they can report stories (IPSO) and few people are aware of them.

Look at the threads started in AIBU that get shifted here because other people don't want to know what's happening.

Look at the way in which women are de-platformed from Twitter for stating a biological fact. THe list is endless and the damage to women is vast.

Scotland's upcoming laws and restrictions are a dreadful warning to the rest of us in the UK.

I cannot believe that anyone thinks the tide is turning. The tide turning means that the direction of movement has reversed. Anyone who believe that has happened with trans activism is delusional, IMO:

Most eminent medical journal in the country calls women 'people with vaginas'

Every mainstream political party except (possibly) one committed to self-ID.

Every major institution in UK, USA, Canada and many other countries captured by TRA ideology

Men in women's prisons

Men in women's sport.

Indoctrination in schools.

A female MP cannot safely attend Labour Conference because she knows that only women have a cervix.

No the tide is not fucking turning. All the things listed above would have to have been undone for the tide to have turned.

There is a bit more media coverage and - at best - a glimmer of hope. That is all.

I cannot believe that women value their rights so little that they are prepared to see a bit of mainstream media coverage as the tide turning. Do you not understand the scale of what you have lost? I'm seriously beginning to wonder if all the posters wittering that the tide is turning are actually TRAs, trying to convince us not to fight on.

No the tide isn't turning, there's no going back. We have been neatly divided into different camps on multiple issues.
I don't know what the future will bring but it looks like its going to be authoritarian.

What MissLucy said. And TheInebriarti.

I don't know what the future will bring but it looks like its going to be authoritarian.

This is my dominant fear - we are so far along the road and we're facing a confluence of legal and political constrictions at a time when we're about to go into a period where people are going to be crushed by poverty and have a sustained drop in their living standards against a backdrop of inflation and the instability that brings.

MissLucyEyelesbarrow

I agree with you, just one point, it wasn’t “people with vaginas”, it was “bodies with vaginas”.

I think they are moving in the direction of openly admitting that they don’t actually see us as “people”.

I do think something has changed in that more of the mainstream media seem to be discussing and challenging these issues. I think more people are noticing the problems. I think it's starting to be allowed to be discussed.

I cannot believe that women value their rights so little that they are prepared to see a bit of mainstream media coverage as the tide turning. Do you not understand the scale of what you have lost? I'm seriously beginning to wonder if all the posters wittering that the tide is turning are actually TRAs, trying to convince us not to fight on

I understand your anger and frustration and share how appalled you are at what has happened. But if people think a cause is lost they stop fighting, if people think there is not hope they stop fighting.
People have to keep on seeing the signs and opportunities for change and influence. Its a good thing that they do.

There's a mention in this weeks Private Eye that Ben Hunte is no longer the BBC's LGBT+ correspondent and is now a senior reporter at Vice World News.

Totally agree with MissLucy. I will probably word this really badly but whenever I read optimistic comments about something on Twitter or that some GC blogger has written I just end up thinking that millions of people whose days are filled up worrying about their jobs, bills, children, feeling guilty about climate change because their personal choices have to be based on the money in their account and not the welfare of the planet either (a) won't ever even get to hear about it or (b) won't give it headspace because the way It's reported by the mainstream makes it seem totally abstract and irrelevant.

There does seem to be a bit more questioning going on at the moment but the only way most people are going to sit up and take notice is if journalists make the implications of it all really clear.

Banging on about whether only women have a cervix might make someone think "wow he's bonkers" but that's probably not going to make the listener think "hmm well that will mean women can't insist on a female HCP or my 12 year old daughter might end up at Guide camp sleeping in the same room as a man."

Until everyone (and not just people who are already interested in the issue and know various names to follow/publications to read) understands what is happening and realises the implications for their own lives then I don't feel optimistic about the tide turning.

We're talking about institutions like the NHS, the police, judicial service, education having to lose face by overturning what they have embraced. Jesus, even my employer took 6 months to get rid of a bullying manager because they didn't want to admit that their decision to bring the person in was a total fuck up until an entire team went off sick for a week to force action.

@DaisiesandButtercups

MissLucyEyelesbarrow

I agree with you, just one point, it wasn’t “people with vaginas”, it was “bodies with vaginas”.

I think they are moving in the direction of openly admitting that they don’t actually see us as “people”.

You are quite right in all respects.

Coincidentally, I've just looked through some clinical guidelines.

Women weren't there although the words pregnancy, breastfeeding and childbearing were in company with people .

Women are being erased and dehumanised. Where language leads how long do you think it's going to take laws, regulations, social conventions etc. to follow?

I don't believe anything will change in the light of the Sarah Everard case.

I also don't believe people who are very ardent in their pro trans rights and therefore anti women's rights views will change their minds whatever happens. They won't let go. It will rumble on and rumble and never get fully resolved one way or the other with 'wins' and 'losses' on each side which continually get challenged.

^ This is also how ideological change happens: slowly, then all at once.

I think we’re still chipping away at the edifice of genderism. I think it will continue to seem for a while as if all the chipping away we do isn’t accomplishing much, and all the damage TRAs can’t help doing to their own reputation and cause is having very little impact. But the structure is being eroded, and one day it will collapse.^

I can’t help feeling that is exactly what has happened with TRA ideology. Started slowly 20 odd years with the the foundations that have lead to the more recent eroding of women’s rights and safe spaces. The structures that protected our spaces are starting to collapse.

@deadleaves

I cannot believe that women value their rights so little that they are prepared to see a bit of mainstream media coverage as the tide turning. Do you not understand the scale of what you have lost? I'm seriously beginning to wonder if all the posters wittering that the tide is turning are actually TRAs, trying to convince us not to fight on

I understand your anger and frustration and share how appalled you are at what has happened. But if people think a cause is lost they stop fighting, if people think there is not hope they stop fighting.
People have to keep on seeing the signs and opportunities for change and influence. Its a good thing that they do.

I'm not saying there is no hope, though. I agree that that would be a counter-productive message. But complacency is even more dangerous. Most people are only just waking up to what is happening, and they struggle to believe it. They find it literally incredible, and that is the TRA movement's greatest weapon. If the public get the message from those of us who are GC that, "It's fine, we've got this; all the craziness is being reversed", they aren't going to stick their necks out and protest.

To win back what we have lost, we need every woman, and every man who cares about women's rights (and the rights of gay people and gender dysphoric children), to understand the existential threat we face.

In WW2 terms, we have just started to evacuate Dunkirk. This is not the time to decide that victory is in the bag.

It has been reassuring to kee hearing the words women and girls today on radio, so often it’s “pregnant people” etc feels a rarity to just say the word. Small steps

To win back what we have lost, we need every woman, and every man who cares about women's rights (and the rights of gay people and gender dysphoric children), to understand the existential threat we face.

Completely this. We are living in the growing framework that facilitates authoritarianism. In the difficulties that lie ahead, some people will willingly sacrifice their freedom for the theatre of safety and not care about the consequences for others nor themselves in the future.

And it does all sound insane - people don't want to admit how oblivious they've been. And there's a huge advantage in that fighting against this is nearly always from the back foot. It's like having to demonstrate gravity all over again - meanwhile, the abuse of science, false narratives and zombie claims have taken hold and there's no official support for dislodging them.

We need a Women's FullFact as the actual FullFact seems pusillanimous in the face of this.

To win back what we have lost, we need every woman, and every man who cares about women's rights (and the rights of gay people and gender dysphoric children), to understand the existential threat we face

I do agree with this. I was talking to a friend who said some of her friends with children who are fully signed up to gender ideology were talking and saying, ' my son asked what makes a boy a boy and previously I would have said because he has a penis, but now that isn't true and I didn't know what to say to him.'
My GC friend said she stayed silent and hoped that the fact they couldn't define 'boy' would make them have a wake up call. But I told her she needed to start speaking there. We need to speak up. Yes, it did expose the utter vacuity of gender ideology that the sex-based definitions of ' boy' and 'girl' have been thrown out with nothing to replace them, but you need to have conversations with people about this to get them thinking about it.

Don’t feel too disheartened by the Lancet’s ridiculous headline of “bodies with vaginas”.
Look instead at the over 7,000 complaints on their Twitter feed, and the fact that their editor’s inbox was so swamped with outraged emails they had to temporarily close it down.
Just a couple of years ago there would have been nowhere near this level of pushback.