Brilliant article on The Tavistock by Lionel Shriver

[Appalonia]

In her typical razor sharp, excoriating style, she blasts both The Tavistock and gender ID. I always thought she was a T**F! Really worth a read

www.spectator.co.uk/article/good-riddance-to-the-tavistock

I always enjoy listening to her views and reading her stuff. Thanks for sharing

"The notion that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’ belongs right up there with belief in phrenology (the Victorians), ‘wandering wombs’ (ancient Greece) or the vital medical balancing of ‘the four humours’, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (Hippocrates). We’ve come a long way, you say? Maybe not. Having embraced wrong-body folklore, ideologues are pumping children full of puberty blockers with no clue about the long-term consequences of this experimental off-label medication for their patients. No one really knows the results of cross-sex hormones over a lifetime delivered at scale. The drugs are distributed like Smarties anyway."

Thanks Appalonia. That's a great article.
So much to read these days. I'm always surprised that our snarky visitors spend so much time moaning on here given how much there is to silence everywhere else.

We’re on perilous ground when we mainstream bald-faced lies. We’re being asked to lie to ourselves and to each other, as well as to deny our shared perceptions of the material world.

I rather liked: We’re fiddling with our genitals while Rome burns.

That’s really good. People are messing with their bodies, not choosing customisation options on a new car. Asking whether people are willing to give up fertility to transition is almost a red herring. Our reproductive systems have functions beyond just reproducing and the questions need to be are you willing to suffer brittle bones, personality changes, stroke, incontinence and all the rest.

Great, acerbic article. Thanks for sharing.

Also, I know this isn't the point of the thread but there is so much wrong with this banner.

the whole thing does demonstrate that as a species, we aren’t any smarter than we were in 1600, she’s right about that. Some of us are clever, and have advanced our technical capacities hugely. But what are the rest of us doing with that? Still burning witches …

There's a different mood in that article to anything I've read before, even from her.

No beating about the bush, gentle or attempt at conciliatory.

Fantastic.

"We’re fiddling with our genitals while Rome burns."
Just brilliant 😁

Quite. We have seen enough to know that being polite and pussyfooting around gets you nowhere. These nutters need telling that they are, er, nutters.

Its not subjective to say the West is structurally racist. I'd phrase it better- capitalism is structurally racist. And sexist.
I find that sentence in the article deeply problematic. The rest of the article is absolutely spot on, and needs to be said.

I had a problem with that sentence too.

Excellent. Thanks for sharing.

Quite!

I'm on Tattle and is massively GC/TERFy. The TRAs don't seem to have cottoned on. I've heard it's the same at Kiwi Farms.

I ventured on to Tattle for the first time recently (drawn by a certain very very poor chef who’s very poor) and was pleasantly surprised by how GC it is.

So many parallels in history. Matt Haigs How To Stop Time draws this together well. Each few generations face similar issues but in different guises. The trans activists are the modern day witch finder generals/Spanish inquisition. Repeat our lies or you will suffer the consequences. We’ve been here before.

Me too. And blaming teachers for the current situation.

A reminder that not everyone who is GC is coming at this from the same point of view.

"The NHS having just rechristened ‘gender dysphoric’ children as ‘early adopters’ is a bad sign; renaming is a flag of deceit."

This is news to many - does anyone know more about this or the context in which this terminology would be used?

It sounds very hip and modern, like surgeons who pioneered an improved surgical technique or people who were far ahead of me discovering the uses of the internet. Instead of a complete denial of the reality that they are talking about confused children.

*news to me I meant.

Though it's probably also news to many.

I think many teachers and teaching institutions have like many medics and medical institutions been overly keen to go along with teaching gender woo nonsense, affirming and ignoring reality and science and truth

Brilliant article - every sentence was quotable.

'We’re on perilous ground when we mainstream bald-faced lies. We’re being asked to lie to ourselves and to each other, as well as to deny our shared perceptions of the material world.'

This is a really good response to the smug and lazy 'what does it matter to you what someone else's pronouns are?'

I think this is true of any position. There will be people coming to it from all sorts of angles and holding all sorts of other positions alongside it. You aren’t ever going to agree with them on everything. And sometimes you will find that your views on one thing align with the views of people whose other views you find abhorrent.

I actually find the expectation that people should holistically hold the same views really troubling. You often see this used to dismiss a perfectly well made, reasonable point: oh but we can’t listen to that because that person also votes Tory/supports abortion/once said something racist/whatever else you’ve decided is unacceptable. If you see it in threads asking what ‘our’ position/argument is about X.

It’s always going to be a diverse coalition of people whose views align on particular topics. And that needs to be OK. The fact that people from across a broad range of spectra (on all sorts of issues) coalesce around an idea doesn’t invalidate that idea. It is actually pretty compelling evidence that the idea has wide support across society.

It’s likely that many white supremacists’s views on chocolate will align with mine, for example. That doesn’t make likening chocolate a bad or shameful thing. The chocolate isn’t tainted because people whose other views I find dreadful also like it. Being gender critical is a much less trivial example, but it is the case that my views on it are going to align the views of individuals or groups with a range of other views.

critical thinking about the peculiarities of specific issues is really important. Throwing the baby out with the bath water is not generally conducive to critical thinking.

being able to find some common ground and points of agreement (even if the agreement is partial, fairly superficial or you disagree with the motives of the other party) is useful in general. It’s the only real way to build any kind of consensus.

There’s no need for everyone to sign up to a full programme of anything.