Pullman’s at it again

[tabbycatstripy]

Tweets: “To ban conversion therapy, so-called, is good. To make a deliberate exception for trans people is pure, cold-eyed evil. No justification, no reason, no excuse: just to appease the transphobes. Evil.”

Arrogant, under-informed, not as smart as he thinks? Or what?

The man can read. Why won’t he?

He is reading in a bubble, I suspect.
He doesn't think he needs to understand anything, he accepts fully that sexuality and gender are the same kind of thing, an innate nature.

Im a bit concerned for him actually. But a fan but he is calling this so wrong.

I’m incredibly disappointed. You read his early work and think he might care about kids (he was a teacher).

Kitten: why concerned?

In his bio it says ‘read like a butterfly, write like a bee’. I’d hazard a suggestion that reading like a bee - in the case of childhood transition - would be a better strategy.

He's got skin in the game. He must have otherwise why is he doing this?

I hope someone sends him the Cass review and he bloody well reads it.

It could something as simple as TWAW/TMAN grandchildren. That plus we know publishing is riddled with ppl who hate GC women so he’s in an echo chamber

Or you know he’s just a massive bellend….(does he have a beard?)

I don’t think he has a beard.

It’s so sad. He’s coming across as someone who knows nothing about children but thinks he knows it all.

I think a pp is correct - he’s got skin in the game. Grandchild or something. I’ve got a friend who was dead against gender ideology, stereotypes etc, until her teenage son said ‘I’ve always been a girl, mum’. Massive backtracking ensued so as to be seen to support him. She’s also been terrified by the stats around suicidal thoughts which are so often quoted around this subject.

I think it's just intellectual conceit: "I don't need to think about this; I already know".

@KoalasNext15km

I think it's just intellectual conceit: "I don't need to think about this; I already know".

With a sprinkling of moral superiority.

The thing is, if you don’t look more closely into it, and just scan the mainstream articles then it does look bad. I would have thought the same just over a year ago. Add that to the circles he moves in.

However he’s clearly uninformed and out of his depth but arrogant enough to put his uninformed views out there.

Problem a lot of people don’t read anything beyond a headline or tweet these days. You’d expect better from an author but maybe not.

In his novels, children have a fluid, changing soul-like 'daemon' that is then forever fixed in one form at puberty and stays fixed like that for the rest of their lives. I guess he thinks that should apply in real life too.

So no engagement with any of the issues then, just a blurted out bit of hyperbolic drama?

You're left wondering, has he not bothered to inform himself, is he not capable of understanding the issues at hand, or is he just plain deluded?

Not a good look. No one ranting about this is coming out well at all. But actually that's to the good in the long term. There's going to be few illusions left before long.

‘In his novels, children have a fluid, changing soul-like 'daemon' that is then forever fixed in one form at puberty...’

This is true. I wonder if he has supported this ideology for a bit longer than he lets on.

He probably hasn't delved into the issue. I never used to think there was anything wrong with TWAW, thought Caitlyn Jenner as Woman of the Year was really sweet and affirming, and didn't understand why anyone would be against it - I saw it as a topic like gay marriage. Like, why would anyone care, just let people be happy.

It was only when I saw women being displaced in their own categories, being put in danger, and their identity as women taken from them that I saw the real issue.

But if you only view it at surface level, it seems like a group of unnecessarily cruel bigots who want to take rights away from people.

‘He probably hasn't delved into the issue. I never used to think there was anything wrong with TWAW, thought Caitlyn Jenner as Woman of the Year was really sweet and affirming, and didn't understand why anyone would be against it - I saw it as a topic like gay marriage. Like, why would anyone care, just let people be happy.’

I never had a problem with people treating TW as women. I still don’t. I agree, let people be happy. But when I saw there was a slogan, stating TWAW, that made me feel something different, because it denies people the right to speak about reality.

I also knew (generally) that there was nothing wrong with treating TW as women, socially; by all means, ask them to hen parties and baby showers and mums’ races on Parents’ Day. It’s fine.

But if you arrest a woman and you want someone to see if she has anything inside her, she has the right to ask that that act is done by a female person.

End.

Erm no. Being Woman of the Year or racing with the Mums when you have XY chromosomes isn’t cute. It’s wrong. Just fucking wrong.

@tabbycatstripy

Tweets: “To ban conversion therapy, so-called, is good. To make a deliberate exception for trans people is pure, cold-eyed evil. No justification, no reason, no excuse: just to appease the transphobes. Evil.”

Arrogant, under-informed, not as smart as he thinks? Or what?

The man can read. Why won’t he?

I would say arrogant, under-informed and perhaps not as smart as he thinks. It's not uncommon for famous men to start thinking that they know more about everything than others, including about fields they actually know nothing about. That's where the beardsplaining comes from.

Anyone thinking about this would want to find out who it is who makes the diagnosis that a child is trans (it's the child now) and how that diagnosis is scrutinised by professionals (not allowed to be scrutinised in the US, for example). And then that anyone would want to know if that child's diagnosis might not be right and what that would mean for the banning of all alternative treatment modes except affirmation and rapid medicalisation.

The reality is difficult, because some children will do better by being quickly transitioned while others will do much worse (if the diagnosis was wrong). But in either case, the activists don't want a medical process to be medical at all, but one where the patient decides on everything. Given that we are talking about young people with undeveloped brains this is really frightening to me.

Someone on Twitter has pointed out to Pullman that he is saying (or his position would imply) that sterilisation of teenagers because they feel weird is ‘a kindness’.

His reply: ‘WHAT?’

Is it possible that he doesn’t actually know anything about ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ for minors?

I would guess ‘a young friend’ is telling him these things. It’s often the case isn’t it - a mature, ‘intelligent’ person (politician, lawyer, actor, singer…) turns out to have someone on the family who is very much of this mind so they seem to go very heavily ‘on side’.

I wish I thought that, Kitten. My instinct is he’s trying to play both sides of the fence again so he can pretend he didn’t know.

Is it possible that he doesn’t actually know anything about ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ for minors?

Who knows. It doesn't stop him blurting his daft thoughts all over Twitter like a hoodwinked messiah, and it's his male arrogance that appears to be his fatal flaw.

I think he knows enough to think he knows it all.
Plus he's shown himself repeatedly to be pretty arrogant and happy to stir the pot on this issue.
I don't think he's much of a friend to women or trans people to be honest. If he was he wouldn't keep provoking such public and divisive arguments.