So disgusted tonight

[Mollyollydolly]

Owen Jones and Pink News tweeted about the two Helens, Joyce and Staniland and their YouTube chat .. Jones taking what they said completely out of context it's resulted in some of the most vile abuse aimed at Helen Joyce in particular on twitter tonight. So many death threats.

I wish there was something we could do, it's so utterly vile, it's time they were held to account for their lies. It's really upsetting.

Owen Jones isn't fit to lace Helen's shoes, I cant believe The Guardian still employ him. I've seen threats to murder, throw napalm in their faces from Joss Prior and many many more. It's disgusting and all down to Owen.

How can this stand up to any level of journalistic ethics or integrity.

It's time we did something, some kind of collective action.

@Nellodee "It doesn’t matter what being trans is. The clip was offensive. It’s long enough that there should have been more clarification given around it. Painting trans people as difficult to accommodate and that being the reason we need less of them, it’s a bad take and an own goal."

Taking offence at something is entirely a matter of personal choice. Perhaps it is more honest to say "I have chosen to interpret that edited portion as offensive".

Further, it certainly matters what being "trans" is. Perhaps use of the word "trans" is misleading. Perhaps we should substitute that word with "people who are dissociated from the natural sex of their bodies". That is what the word "trans" means, as far as I can work it out, anyway.

People who are dissociated from the natural sex of their bodies are difficult to accommodate because society has not yet adjusted to fund and provide the separate spaces and services needed for them in prisons, hospitals, sports and everywhere else where natural sex matters to most other people.

If you're offending people who already agree with you, you're not making any new converts. I'm clearly not alone in my interpretation.

No one says you are alone in your interpretation. It's ok to disagree, though.

Do we need that first? Or do you need to prove there’s actually no such thing as gender dysphoria?

Who has said there's no such thing as gender dysphoria, as a serious psychological issue for a tiny minority of people? Why does it have to mean some innate, sacred "transness"? That's where the ideology comes in.

We live here, now, and no one can say definitively there is no such thing as trans.

Like no one can definitively say there is no pink teapot in orbit around the moon. Or god, or alien landings etc etc.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a psychological dysmorphia where a person rejects their body. There are such dysmorphias.

Painting trans people as difficult to accommodate and that being the reason we need less of them, it’s a bad take and an own goal.

So why are you doing it?

Nowhere in the clip does Joyce say anything about "trans people", because she's too precise in her language, and knows that wouldn't mean anything. The word "trans" does not appear at all. She is very strictly talking about transition - surgical or hormonal.

You're trying to take offence by saying she said something she didn't and claiming that if she had said it she would have meant something different to what she actually did say.

It would be productive if no further use of the word "trans" occurred on this thread, as it's only purpose can be to misrepresent.

It's a form of the "motte and bailey" (which I think is a bad name for it, because no-one understands the analogy).

Normally it relies on fuzzy definitions - say X, which is not clear whether it means A or B. You can support X (meaning controversial meaning A) and when challenged you retreat to "oh, I just mean less-controversial B", until attention goes away looking, then advance back to A.

This is a kind of reverse. Someone is arguing clearly against controversial A - you then rephrase that as them arguing against X (assuming no-one notices the rephrasing), and then accuse them of arguing against uncontroversial B. But they never mentioned X or B.

In this case, "A" is "transition" - specifically hormonal or surgical procedures on children in this context, "B" is something like "transgender identity/social transition", and "X" is the incredibly fuzzy "trans" or "trans people.

As well as sex, we have gender. A woman may have a gender identity that is congruent with her sex - i.e. she "feels" she is a woman. Or, she may have the opposite gender identity, i.e. she "feels" like a man. In this second case she is a trans man.

See my trouble with this is, like many posters on here, so many women don't feel like they conform to their 'gender', which of course can only mean stereotypes or means they don't fit in, what else does it mean?

I memorably said to my husband years ago that I was a gay man trapped in a woman's body. But feeling that way doesn't 'make' me trans, or even NB, this is something self declared which as we've seen is tricky to 'prove', unlike being same-sex attracted.

Like everyone else, I don't actually know what it feels like to be the opposite sex, I only know what it feels like to be me.

Offending people can be useful. Greer used to say she made her students angry because then they would think.

As for converts; I'm not interested in proseltysing. People are free to think or believe what they want - what we need is evidence, data, clarity and information. Discussion. Then everyone can make up their own minds.

We need to find workable solutions to protect women's rights and children and young people.

Children are currently being harmed. We can tread gently around 17 yo girls having mastectomies of healthy breasts, and perhaps if there was robust and solid evidence of benefit one could argue that point.

But there isn't.

It has to stop - this is pretty much the NHS position and the Cass Report so far. We have to stop and look more closely at what's going on before creating more patients with lifelong medical conditions on the basis of some vague socio political theories.

I am so sorry that happened to you. It really resonates. My first memory of being sexually harrassed was at the hands of a british soldier. I was 11, an early developer. He leaned down from his jeep and said "nice tits, shame about the face". That left its mark.

to you both. Gender as a social construct and framework of oppression isn't a walk in the park for women and girls, it's tiresome for people to assume that everyone is happy being female all the time unless they say they are "trans".

Shit like this from Jones, Pink News et al are fuck all use to the real trans people being shafted by their fuckwitted politicking.

Joyce and Staniland speak out of compassion for the individuals. Jones, Pink News, Stonewall speak out of self interested political egotism.

100%. Samphire puts it in a nutshell perfectly.

Greer used to say she made her students angry because then they would think.

And I think that's worked here. I've seen some deeper more meaningful philosophical discussion on this thread than I've seen for a while.

I think Joyce has been doing the same thing. She's always been blunt about this, and she's trying to shake people out of a sort of stupor where they use phrases like "trans kids" to avoid looking at the material reality of what's happening.

In her first interview with Benjamin Boyce she spelled out her motivation in similar terms.

I like doing transcripts, so:

I went to the Detransition Network launch in Manchester in I think it was late October. I just wrote about it for Standpoint magazine, and it had a big impact on me.

You know, you're sitting there in a room, there's eight young women, all of them lesbians, you know, some of them are sterile, had their uteruses removed when they were 20, 21, and now they're sitting there, 23, and their broken voices, and they were lied to, lied to, lied to. Huge medical scandal.

And I had a voice echoing through my head for weeks after, where it's just saying, "they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids."

And I don't know how many kids that is, but it's thousands for sure. And it might be tens of thousands. I don't know how many kids this is going to happen to. And I decided that the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is I can't stop this, but I can hopefully play a part in shortening it.

So there will be some number fewer of gay kids who are sterilised because of what I'm doing and writing. And that gives me a moral clarity and purpose in what I'm doing, and if I ever think, "could I have done something else? Could I have just dropped this?"

Because people have said "would you not just drop this? I mean why..." Somebody said to me, "do you want this to be the issue that defines you?" Like, well, fine, yeah! They're sterilising gay kids. Why would I not?

I would love this to go to court, and see someone argue that we should not be sterilising fewer children.

I don't disagree with most of what you say there. I want everyone to live their best lives free from harrassment and prejudice. If someone, for whatever underlying reason say they feel like a woman and want to dress like one and be referred to as one, crack on.

Where my resistance kicks in is in two areas.

Thinking you are a woman does not make you one. My lived experience, so dominated by my biology in a way that is just not true for men, coupled with how society has shaped me cannot be replicated even with all the hormones and surgery in the world. The issue here isn't that trans people exist and have a right to exist, the issue here is the notion that thoughts and feelings over-ride reality. Predicating the acceptance of trans people on my ability to over ride biological reality is just not going to work and inevitably creates tension.

My second point of objection brings us back to the Helens. I cannot see how the removal of healthy body parts and sterilisation of young women could ever be seen as a good outcome. Surely we need to prioritise helping our young people to live as happily as they can in the bodies they have. The upsurge in young transitioners and the hideous medics who are driving it and profiting off it (see yeet the teets woman and the Webberleys) are horrendous. Transitioning of young people needs the strongest of gate keeping.

Yes it has to stop. That's the long and the short of it.

While there remains a danger, as there definitely is at present, that a grandson of mine will be persuaded to have his dick cut off because he likes dolls and dressing up, or a granddaughter have a mastectomy and sterilisation because she likes meccano and dislikes periods, I will fight the crazy ideology that leads to such danger to those I love.

If, in this fight, other victims of this nonsensical shite of 'gender identity' and soi-disant 'trans', such as sad individuals with varied dysmorphias, get upset or come to harm, well, sorry and all, but put the blame where it belongs for that: on the nonsense of the ideology such people have been sold by unscrupulous halfwit shits like Owen Jones and other Stonewallers. Not me. Not my fault.

Helen Joyce is right. And she is right to be blunt. It is past time for being nice. It has to stop.

And I had a voice echoing through my head for weeks after, where it's just saying, "they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids."

And I don't know how many kids that is, but it's thousands for sure. And it might be tens of thousands. I don't know how many kids this is going to happen to. And I decided that the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is I can't stop this, but I can hopefully play a part in shortening it.

So there will be some number fewer of gay kids who are sterilised because of what I'm doing and writing. And that gives me a moral clarity and purpose in what I'm doing, and if I ever think, "could I have done something else? Could I have just dropped this?"

I wonder why (not really) all those who are keen to say Helen Joyce is transphobic haven't been so keen to discuss the next part of the video where she talks about homophobia at the Tavistock. This applies both to their treatment of gay employees and their attitude to children who they think might grow up to be gay (better to trans them).

I think this part of the discussion has been highlighted to deflect attention from the rest of the discussion where it becomes clear that the people who are pushing the idea of gender identity on to children are driven by homophobia.

I for one am not trying to say helen Joyce is transphobic. I am saying that what she said comes across very very badly and does the movement no benefit. It lends fuel to those who would hound anyone who speaks up out of jobs, doxx them, stalk their homes, all those behaviours that frighten people who disagree with TRAs into staying silent.

These were going to be my answers as well.

Do I relate to other females in a different way to males? Ah… no? Should I? I do have discussions about their sexed bodies that is a commonality we share. But no… I don’t ‘relate’ to them differently.

Am I supposed to?

Yes. This.

It lends fuel to those who would hound anyone who speaks up out of jobs, doxx them, stalk their homes

These behaviours are not justifiable in any way. We can't have a situation where we are walking on eggshells because of terrorists.

Thank you Necessary. I think that transcript puts the other truncated transcript into perspective.

You're familiar with the saying typically attributed to Cardinal Richelieu?

Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.

It would happen to any of us if you apply your implied standards. We might all be edited to seem to say something completely different if it's stripped of its context. The logical outcome would be that there is no acceptable form of communication that could not be stripped of context in this way. I could construe your comments to mean that Helen Joyce and others should never speak or write spontaneously again. I don't think that would be an accurate summary of your advice on this matter.

I am surprised however by this:

It lends fuel to those who would hound anyone who speaks up out of jobs, doxx them, stalk their homes, all those behaviours that frighten people who disagree with TRAs into staying silent.

Up until now, a ribbon has been sufficient to have women doxed, harassed, and even investigated by Police to the point of ending up in court. There are people who don't need fuel beyond their own animosity and motivated reasoning to behave in such ways.

An astonishing number of people are too frightened to speak up in the view of what's happened to such women, Kathleen Stock, Rosa Freedman, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, JK Rowling, and a list that is far too long.

I'd wonder how good a grasp of the history and wider context of gender ideology some people have if they don't understand what Helen Joyce was saying and are willing to post about it without viewing the video and understanding the context.

Up until now, a ribbon has been sufficient to have women doxed, harassed, and even investigated by Police to the point of ending up in court. There are people who don't need fuel beyond their own animosity and motivated reasoning to behave in such ways.

This. Talk about dancing to their tune. This thread was started to talk about the extremely irresponsible behaviour of commentators on Twitter. I don't see much evidence of people tone policing them, frankly.

It would happen to any of us if you apply your implied standards. We might all be edited to seem to say something completely different if it's stripped of its context. The logical outcome would be that there is no acceptable form of communication that could not be stripped of context in this way. I could construe your comments to mean that Helen Joyce and others should never speak or write spontaneously again. I don't think that would be an accurate summary of your advice on this matter.

Exactly.

Someone on Twitter giving the game away again: ‘friendly reminder that you don’t need to understand the nuances of gender identity to know that trans people know themselves better than you ever will.’

This is the crux. It’s incomprehensible, they know that, and the plan is to make people either too afraid or too confused or too polite to point it out.

That’s the sort of thing that works for a while but not forever.

'friendly reminder that you don’t need to understand the nuances of sex to know that female people know themselves better than you ever will.’