If anyone’s not read the playbook EmbarrassingHadrosaurus mentions, it is here & is worth reading, enraging as it is. It is mind-boggling that a group who produce a document that bangs on endlessly about people being “assigned a legal gender [at birth]” could not just be taken seriously by a government institution but managed to inveigle their way into umpteen of them - effectively TRA’s have worked as a combination of all the worst weeds combined, invading & overtaking what was once a beautiful garden. There are now more people aware that Those Flowers There are in fact not flowers at all & left unchecked the garden is going to suffer irreparable damage - but fixing it? As any gardener knows, weeding is exhausting & seems to take forever. Accidentally sharing the “here is how to deliberately manipulate people to get what we want” document wasn’t a great move by Team Weed though, really.*
Some of it is about TRAs IDing not simply as women but as women who are oppressed, marginalised & hold the least privilege. It’s not enough to be women, they need to manipulate things so that “cis” women are the powerful oppressors.
It all works on a model of American [socio-]cultural imperialism, too: it’s really quite embarrassing when people try to use segregation as a gotcha with reference to the UK. Lazily trotting out “no dogs no blacks no Irish” as a direct parallel of that is embarrassing with strands of Dunning-Kruger woven all through whatever’s been said 🤦🏻♀️
Co-opting the incredible suffering black people in America endured & trying to ride the tailcoats of the black civil rights movement is utterly reprehensible. Somehow, however, it goes unchallenged - presumably because of carefully constructed fiction that TWA[not just]W, they are they most vulnerable/fragile/marginalised (etc), so challenging the narrative would somehow be “punching down”
Women are just props, don’t forget - we’re not like The Real People (who we exist to validate & don’t you forget it & supply with self-worth, selfie tricks & style tips). Black women, in addition to that, occupy a particular space that tends to include dragging in nonsense arguments about black male athletes with VSDs - invariably referred to as “cis” - & claims that GC feminism is “white” feminism. It’s like a selection box of racism & racist tropes, really - despite all the #BLM in social media profiles & thoroughly performative displays of “anti-racism” & allyship.
- For clarity - & in hopes of preventing any reports - this is merely a metaphor; “weeding” (etc) refers purely to removing TRAs & their policies from places where they have undue & improper influence (we’ve seen how popular redressing the balance at the EHRC is of course); & shoring up protection of women’s single SEX spaces. So Girlguiding will have to kiss that single gender nonsense goodbye, yes. Please don’t try to pretend [you believe] I am threatening to poison trans rights activists with weedkiller &/or to assault them with gardening tools; nor to incite others to said/similar/other horticultural hate crimes.