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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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

81 replies

TheBiologyStupid · 01/08/2022 21:14

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

OP posts:
CherryBlossomAutumn · 04/08/2022 01:48

The Guardian column is often really annoying tbh, I like the Guardian for many things, but the ‘oh look at us we have an edge and are so savvy’ when it’s just the same old boring drivel anti-Tory, anti-anything too traditional it’s just not big, or clever.

It really shows itself up as being quite an entitled paper, smug and employing a quite small circle of pretty white privileged London elite.

CherryBlossomAutumn · 04/08/2022 01:50

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

This. It screams privilege.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 04/08/2022 11:46

If it was a man writing for a rightwing paper, who'd gone to Eton or Harrow, claiming that everyone understood quotes from Horace in the original Latin (e.g. Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. - those who hurry across the sea change their sky, not their souls.), the entirety of the male online left would fall upon him for overprivileged elitism, while citing the number of adults in this country who have a reading age of nine years old. They would namedrop the Adult Literacy Trust like they were damn founders of it.

They would go on to raise the subject of immigrants and refugees who speak English as an additional language. They would mention the educational outcomes in adulthood for children in poverty who attended school hungry and who could barely pay attention to what was taught, never mind absorb subjects that weren't on the curriculum.

But Zoe can be just as elitist but in the cause of "trans rights" and we hear nothing but silence from leftwing men.

If you're not following the analogy with Horace, Roman writer and satirist, cervix is a Latin loan word for neck (and if we were typing in Latin, it would be properly pluralised cervices) for a part of the anatomy you can't see on your own body. Inaccessibility to the hoi polloi is baked in to the vocabulary about women's anatomy. You have to be bilingual in Latin to know, or specifically educated on the matter of a cervix's existence and the terminology related to it.

For comparison, the German equivalent is a compound noun which translates as something like Neck-Of-The-Womb in German so if you are a German woman reading about it for the first time without accompanying context, you're up to speed on what it is immediately.

Of course nearly half of women in this country aren't sure what or where the cervix is. Almost everyone (some have had them removed) in this country has got Islets of Langerhans, but that doesn't mean we know what they are, or where they are, does it?

theclangersarecoming · 04/08/2022 13:25

@PurgatoryOfPotholes yep, absolutely — I once referred to my “introitus” during a pelvic exam and the GP’s eyes nearly popped out — she refused to believe I wasn’t a medical student. Yet every “vagina owner” has one…

I just really wanted to tell the GP precisely where I was having problems so I looked it up; but they really don’t expect that most patients will know the medical terminology for much of their bodies.

And just start a thread on here about what to call your girl toddler’s genitals, and you’ll still get half the thread shocked out of their minds that you might actually teach your daughter the word “vulva”, instead of calling it a “tuppence” or a “floofie” or whatever bit of nice euphemistic nonsense!

TheBiologyStupid · 04/08/2022 19:08

Zoe's at it again, this time claiming that there is no such thing as the "white working class". ("The phrase ‘white working class’ is a fiction – so why are the Tories obsessed with it? www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/04/white-working-class-fiction-tories-obsessed )

She doesn't define her terms - and even she accepts that no one is expecting any social class in the UK to be 100% white - but according to the 2011 census, white people (86.0% of the population) are overrepresented in the following socio-economic groups (there isn't one for "working class" in the official figures, but then Zoe doesn't do detail):

Lower supervisory and technical 91.5%
Semi-routine occupations 89.4%
Routine occupations 90.9%

www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/socioeconomic-status/latest

Ah well, it aligns with the Guardian's world view and gets Zoe clicks, I suppose.

OP posts:
PurgatoryOfPotholes · 04/08/2022 21:15

I don't expect she goes anywhere where she would encounter anyone from any working class background. Grin

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