I'm disappointed - Zoe Williams on language

[Pinkfairylights]

An infuriating article smearing women for not wanting the word mother to be excised from discussions around childbirth. We're apparently right wingers who don't believe trans people exist.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/14/language-society-trans-people-tolerance-debate-words

Usually the logic is "it's only real if it's happened to me".

If anyone could believe that other people thought animals/people with gender dysphoria didn't exist, it would be Zoe Williams. It's not so dissimilar from her own position of assuming people were making it up about having hay fever.

[quote PurgatoryOfPotholes]Also Zoe:

I always thought people were attention-seeking when they went through that performance of getting their glasses out at the table. Come on, it’s going to be garlic bread, soup and chicken liver pate. Surely you could have guessed that? I didn’t realise how it would feel when the text was swimming about indistinguishably or how rare it is these days that the first sentence is “garlic bread”. Now I realise it’s just as likely to be bread with a medjool date whipped butter, or garlic bread with a cheesy crust. In my pride, I have spent ages ordering things that weren’t there.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/i-used-to-tut-at-people-who-need-glasses-to-read-a-menu-then-i-joined-them-[/quote]
TBF she's not saying people don't need reading glasses because of their eyesight per se, but that people don't need reading glasses because menus are (or were) so predictable.

TBF she's not saying people don't need reading glasses because of their eyesight per se, but that people don't need reading glasses because menus are (or were) so predictable.

Well in that case the woman is utterly thick.

Do you think all menus are the same?!

I too hate being called “mum” in medical appointments

Being called 'mum' in this way in appointments is a completely different issue to the erasure of the word 'mother', but Zoe seems to mix the two up.

The first is a lazy if no patronising way to refer to patients. Maybe not always meant to be so, but this use of 'mum' instead of the woman's name frequently belongs in the same basket as medical professionals who would use infantalised language such as 'tummy' or 'tummy-tum', or call their patients 'good girl'.

The erasure of the word mother is the erasure of biological language, very much tied to an ideology shared by a minority of people. Not the same thing at all.

When my daughter was in hospital, I was called “mum”

I literally did not give a flying fu@k

I wanted their brains to be totally focussed on curing my daughter. If I’m in front of a medical person and it is about my children, they could call me “thing” and I wouldn’t care.

I've met her. I was with a load of 'deprived' teenagers who she was desperate to impress. They all thought she was an arsehole

I find it ironic that the piece ends with "The important thing, always, is to operate in good faith" given that certain arguments lobbed into the piece really don't seem to be.

I feel like ZW used to be a better and more incisive writer than she is now - like going back 20 years or something - but I might just be reflecting that I was younger with less refined judgment then?

I went off her the day she said she said she felt resentful after the Tories unexpectedly won the 1992 general election — though she hadn’t actually bothered to vote herself. Thanks a bunch, Zoe, we got all the miseries of John Major and a shambolically privatised national rail system.

She is also missing the main reason for disagreement about changing the meaning of the word 'woman'.
Half the humans on the planet share their female reproductive biology, and the body type that goes with that reproductive role..
Having a word for us as a group is useful.
Trans activists do not want us to have ANY word to describe ourselves as a group. If we let them change the meaning of 'women' and 'females' to include transwomen, but and said we would call ourselves 'zopples' they would start claiming 'transwomen are zopples.'
We may as well fight for the word that is already ours.

@Reallyimeanreally2022

I honestly can’t make head nor tail of it

I agree completely. Read it twice and still not 100% sure what the intended point was, never mind if it was made...it was far too rambling and not nearly concise enough for what I'm assuming she meant as a serious piece?

@UpshittsCreek

Mixed view on it. In some ways I think the concern about language as been amplified by those who deny genuine trans people exist. I also think that some people are falling over themselves to appear woke and are making changes when nobody asked them to. Reminds me of when the local community centre proposed no more Halloween or Christmas decorations out of respect for other religions. Parents up in arms and it fed into racist tensions in the area. The Muslim families in the area thought that was ridiculous and didn't ask, let alone demand changes to be made and now they were the target of abuse for something they never wanted. I think the average trans person would be just as concerned at men pulling out the trans card to get into a female prison and may find the term chestfeeding unnecessary. It's the people on both extremes of the left and right stirring up tensions and making it very difficult to have a proper civil conversation. It is extremely frustrating to not be able to discuss concerns about changes to language and women's rights without being immediately labelled a far right bigot.

Totally agree with you @UpshittsCreek

@Reallyimeanreally2022

*TBF she's not saying people don't need reading glasses because of their eyesight per se, but that people don't need reading glasses because menus are (or were) so predictable.*

Well in that case the woman is utterly thick.

Do you think all menus are the same?!

No. It was a light-hearted piece though and part of the joke was about predictable menus.

She doesn’t do anything light hearted
It’s always charged with criticism of others

It's people who want to pretend that trans women are women who think that trans women don't exist.

@Reallyimeanreally2022

She doesn’t do anything light hearted It’s always charged with criticism of others

OK fine, you win if that makes you happy.

It does, cheers

🙄

Does she get paid for this j**K?

This is a good riposte to Zoe. I hope she reads it. Though I don't imagine she will.

grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-queering-of-motherhood

Well, so far she's told Suzanne Moore to fuck herself, so I don't see her taking anything from Glinner on board.

'How dare you say that I live in Clapham'?

What a dick.

Ouff. Williams had deleted that tweet before I could read it. I can see why.

She seems to be saying that tweet was a joke! Ooh yes I can see how witty and lighthearted that was...

The Clapham bit possibly an (unfunny) joke. The rest just nasty playground kneejerk slagging off because she can't engage with the debate.

always women that have to be "tolerant"
aleays women that have to compromise