Typical Guardian piece by Zoe Williams: "Who do the Tory leadership candidates think they are impressing with their spiteful posturing on trans issues?"

[TheBiologyStupid]

You would think after the recent judgements in Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey's cases, the publication of the interim report of the Cass Review, and the decision to close down the NHS Tavistock clinic that the penny would have dropped that opposition to Stonewall and gender ideology isn't "spiteful posturing". But sadly, apparently not:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/01/the-tory-leadership-candidates-have-been-cynically-posturing-on-trans-issues-but-who-are-they-impressing-with-their-spite

Yes this is what enrages me about the Zoe Williams and Alice Roberts out there. I work with people far more likely to end up incarcerated than they are. Far less able to advocate for themselves, who don't understand language such as menstruator or uterus haver. Who don't have the luxury of their fancy education. And who are utterly crippled by the cost of living crisis.

Luxury beliefs sums it up. Willing to shit on their less privileged sisters so they get invited to parties by pronoun people.

Yes but she doesn't have a column any more and I can't imagine she gave it up voluntarily. I hope she's keeping a diary.

If this is anything to go by, Hadley may well have kept careful notes. Here's hoping, anyway:

mobile.twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1553651240650825730?t=NToU7MNrhsTuRbLw6tz0jQ&s=19

The sort of ignorance displayed in the column and lack of dot joining is unforgivable, given the massive publicity around the issue.

The ideology being challenged by stickers on loo doors is the exact same one that's sending children down the conveyor belt to surgery and lifelong medication.

She doesn't know what she's talking about. Thinking trans ideology is a trivial matter is an instant litmus test of ignorance.

Well it's clear GIDs were reading more Hadley Freeman than some of her Grauniad colleagues were!

I came on to say this. This constant 'misunderstanding' or conflating of unisex and mixed-sex loos is as dangerous and insidious as the use of the term 'conversion therapy' for 'not immediately agreeing with a child that they're a boy now, not a girl' IMO.
I can't bear ZW these days.

Reading her Twitter she really thinks she's a wit and a cut above the rest. It's hilarious.

I hate toilets on trains. I particularly hate them when blokes use them without closing the door.

Last thing I tried to read by her was some fluff piece about her husband being younger and prettier than Zoe. Oh what comic capers this causes ! Ps - eat yer hearts out girls....

It's all too cosy at the Graun isn't it.

Yes, I never understand this. Single person loos are effectively single sex - there is only one person of one sex in them at a given time. And they are perfectly reasonable in places where there aren't the numbers for cubicles.

It's another variation on the stupidest argument on social media "I bet you have a gender neutral toilet at home"

Indeed. Here's a tweet from ZW when she got in a row with Janice Turner.

Well, for one, i think it's absolute horseshit to imagine some class of "vulnerable" women who won't attend their smear test unless they're specifically invited as women. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1362006560118083588?t=epqgSILN1kvGywNASmdrpw&s=19

All women know they have a cervix and what the local language's term for it is, do they? Well, in Zoe's circles, maybe they do. However, as a lefty and working-class woman with a chip on my shoulder the size of Kent, I believe that women without the educational advantages of Zoe and her friends should have access to health information that meets our needs. I went to a school where most kids left without 5 GCSEs. Like fuck did the other girls know what a cervix was. In fact, at the time we left, I had no idea either.

Our health outcomes matter too.

It’s rubbish anyway. I can’t remember the name of the cervical cancer charity that did the survey, but a frighteningly high proportion of women surveyed didn’t know what a cervix was.

The argument that 'everyone knows if they have a cervix or not' only works because those people (and everyone else) knows they are women.

You can't have an argument that says the concept of 'woman' is not dependent upon her biology, while simultaneously claiming that you only know you've got that biology if you understand the concept of woman.

Take a different bit of biology that no one knows, let's call it the Kraken gland.

Of course you know whether or not you've got a Kraken gland. Everyone who's got one knows whether they have one.

Well what's it dependent on? How would they know?

It's dependent on what sex they are!

Well what's it dependent on? How would they know?

It's dependent on what sex they are!

Precisely. The levels of dishonesty of these people never cease to amaze me.

It’s rubbish anyway. I can’t remember the name of the cervical cancer charity that did the survey, but a frighteningly high proportion of women surveyed didn’t know what a cervix was.

I couldn't find the original survey, but I found this:

twitter.com/lnmackenzie1/status/1447467589983158273/photo/1

43% didn't know what the cervix is.

Her problem is that not only is she not that bright she's also extremely lazy. So she's never developed any skills beyond the spark that originally got her into writing or bothers to do proper research so that she can defend her articles credibly. I've noticed she gets massively aggressive when challenged - I suppose that's all she's got.

Madame Everyone With A Cervix Knows they Have One has, so far, written an article about:

i) not realising she was pregnant with her second child until after she was 20 weeks pregnant

ii) not realising that hay fever really existed, and

iii) not realising that people used reading glasses because they genuinely found it disconcerting not to know what something said. She claims to have thought people got their reading glasses out in public in order to seek attention.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/i-used-to-tut-at-people-who-need-glasses-to-read-a-menu-then-i-joined-them-

If we are feeling charitable, this may be Madame Williams' columnist persona, designed to irk the reader and reap the clicks. Perhaps it's all feigned. If it is, it's certainly effective. Her articles have stuck in my mind for over ten years in some cases! Kudos to Zoe!

But if it's not, she's the last person who has any right to make sweeping statements about women universally having enough health literacy to know and readily recognise the noun for the internal part of anatomy that connects uterus and vagina (cervix) and the adjectival form (cervical).

Tish's excellent research that never dates:

twitter.com/stilltish/status/1138020606228815872?s=21&t=jKIQXQrtX38n1jXvY_4Wag

A good synopsis of why the Guardian isn't actually very independent at all.

Well, for one, i think it's absolute horseshit to imagine some class of "vulnerable" women who won't attend their smear test unless they're specifically invited as women. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

I can't believe she wrote that. I can't believe anyone who lives in London, which is full of people who don't speak English as a first language, or who have mental health problems or drug addiction, or who live in extreme poverty, or who have low literacy skills, could think that all women are familiar with their anatomy and the correct terminology to describe their reproductive organs. How can you be so divorced from ordinary people?

She's completely out of touch and/or lies. She tried to claim there was no such thing as female only fitness classes/gyms when she herself wrote an article about them.

twitter.com/JustMisogyny/status/1512527320246013956/photo/1

That's not surprising, somehow.

Zoe Williams is one of the reasons that I don't read the Graun.

Maybe it's part of only going to restaurants that sell chicken liver pate as a starter.

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.

Shocking.

But London can be a bit ghetto-ised. If she lives where I think she lives (I saw her in a playground once when I was visiting a friend) then it's the kind of area where rich people purchase specific houses in order to avoid sending their kids to the school the immigrant and working class kids go to. Between that and the Guardian and her general contempt for research, she need never speak to people unlike her.

But fact checking would be work, wouldn’t it. I remember ZW being appalled that the Tories won the 1992 general election, but admitting she hadn’t actually voted because she couldn’t be arsed.

(I say ‘admitting’, but she didn’t sound sorry or embarrassed. More as if she thought it was funny. I wasn’t that amused by another five years of Tory government, including the shambolic privatisation of the railways.)

And yes, I have held a grudge that long.