Review of HP reunion in The Guardian…they just can’t help themselves

[OhDear2200]

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/01/harry-potter-20th-anniversary-return-to-hogwarts-review-perilously-close-to-emetic

I guess they at least note her absence. But can’t help say ‘widely considered as transphobic’. Just why? Why say anything.

@Floisme

I actually think we've made quite a bit of progress since we stopped being so polite and accommodating and pretending we hadn't noticed what was happening in front of our own eyes.

I agree.

I remember when they were violently intimidating anyone trying to attend Women's Rights meetings and claiming they had no right to speak.
I remember the bomb threats and pressure so great that even Millwall FC cancelled a meeting in fear of them (Millwall!).
I remember physical attacks and violent verbal abuse that left women shaking in fear. I remember them blocking exits, smoke-bombing, hammering on windows. They set the police to arrest women for wearing t-shirts and giving out leaflets.

At least they seem to have realised the damage they were doing to their own cause.

Publicity of their tactics and actually pointing out the lies has done so much. How many were earnestly repeating the suicide lies until someone thought to say "Hang on a minute...!"?

@Blackbird1234

Ok so you don't like my opinion and you're perfectly entitled to that, no hard feelings whatsoever. But then I'm genuinely curious (not in a snippy way, but genuinely) as to how you think progress can be made if you don't want to engage with them? 100% genuine question.

Boris Johnson won a landslide at the last general election because the country is not actually full of Guardian-reading lefties posting earnestly about misgendering and Palestine on Twitter. It turned out that a large proportion of the nation thought differently, and by some sort of admin error these awful plebs were allowed the vote!

We don't need to "engage with" the people who want to remove our rights. Now the mainstream press have picked up on the aggression, hypocricy and safeguarding red flags of the TWAW choir, the ordinary people of the UK can see for themselves. The Daily Mail just needs to keep publishing stories of "women" rapists with the revealing photo.

They don't call the UK TERF Island for nothing.

I mean it took a while for the world to catch themselves on but we got there in the end.

I remember physical attacks and violent verbal abuse that left women shaking in fear. I remember them blocking exits, smoke-bombing, hammering on windows. They set the police to arrest women for wearing t-shirts and giving out leaflets.

I remember sitting in the Speakers' Corner event listening to the transactivists shouting 'BURN IT DOWN' outside. Plus Stonewall calling the police on me, twice, for taking part in pro-lesbian demos outside their conferences. And compared to many others I've got off extremely lightly.

Still can't believe they thought it reasonable to let off smoke bombs near Grenfell.

@Blackbird1234

Ok so you don't like my opinion and you're perfectly entitled to that, no hard feelings whatsoever. But then I'm genuinely curious (not in a snippy way, but genuinely) as to how you think progress can be made if you don't want to engage with them? 100% genuine question.

What is this progress you are envisaging?

Women are stating clearly and unequivocally that they want their hard won rights enforced and respected and progress is being made in this direction.

Please state clearly and unequivocally what you are wanting women to do in this debate and how that will achieve the stated aims of protecting the rights of women.

Maya Forstater - gc beliefs 'worthy of respect' and protected (employment tribunal)
Sonya Appleby -safeguarding at GIDS - upheld
FairCop - non-crime hate incidents may not be recorded
NHS - puberty blockers no longer listed as 'reversible'
NHS - puberty blockers no longer given to children
Scottish parliament - women have the right to request a 'female' examiner after rape and female means female (biological sex)
Stonewall - BBC and many others withdraw from support
Govt asserts the right of women to have single sex toilets.

There are a lot of things to change and a long way to go. But we are getting stronger all the time. And we will get there. Not by pandering to idiots on Twitter, but by the patient, laborious, brave and tenacious work done by individual women and tiny, unfunded grassroots organisations, even if we have to meet in secret, even if meetings are picketed, women attacked, threatened, doxxed, sacked and smeared.

Every article, every Judicial review, every case brought has been because of the work of fearsome, incredible, intelligent and courageous women.

Floisme - Fair enough
I think that's a rather curious way of viewing all the progress women have have made - as outlined by other posters. But, as you say, fair enough.
but how do you see that continuing?
By women holding the line.
If you keep the same strategy you have now, do you see that as enabling you to continue progress?
Yes.

Floisme - Thanks for answering 😊

@Blackbird1234

Floisme - Fair enough, but how do you see that continuing? If you keep the same strategy you have now, do you see that as enabling you to continue progress?

I'd settle for staying in the place we had reached in 2000, to be honest. Actual progress may have to wait for a few more years before it can be restarted. (But I was around in the 1950s when women were only allowed to get a bank account if a male co-signed the application, rape in marriage was legal but never mentioned, a woman was unable to apply for a mortgage, employers could sack a woman for getting pregnant, and there was no suggestion of equal pay for equal work for the two sexes; things have improved somewhat.)

The fashion for inventing a whole new gender for yourself which at present is popular among adolescents will give way to something new, the way that hippydom and punk and all the rest (which did less physical harm to the adolescents involved than drugs too powerful to be prescribed to adults for years at a time, with lifelong and life-changing side-effects, but that frankly is the adolescents' problem not mine) faded, and these days you get the occasional defiant ex-hippy and a few people in silly boots and crew-cuts at special events.

Women have been around for about twenty million years; trans for rather less than a century, and TRAs in any sort of number for about ten at the most. Women can probably wait out a fad.

Before the trans fashion there was the PIE, which has fortunately faded, though some members of it are active advocates of the right of anyone saying they are female to have access to any space where children may be naked.... Oh, oops, nobody is meant to have noticed that.

That is a really significant list:

Maya Forstater: people lied about what she had said, truth vindicated in court.

Sonia Appleby: people lied about what she said about Jimmy Savile, claimed she was linking a paedophile to the GIDS service, truth vindicated in court.

Fair Cop: people lied that he had committed a hate crime, truth vindicated in court.

NHS: perpetuated the lie that puberty blockers are reversed, ended up in court with Keira Bell and Mrs A, truth vindicated in court.

When lies are allowed to flourish, good people end up in court. Even if they’re ultimately vindicated, it’s still a manifestation of what happens when it’s allowed.

No more.

Buck Angel had a letter published in the LA Times, sticking up for JK Rowling.

@ScreamingMeMe

Buck Angel had a letter published in the LA Times, sticking up for JK Rowling.

That’s really good to see, I hadn’t seen this so will hopefully bump with my post.