HardTalk - Shona Fay

[Treaclemine]

My friend picked this up last night, and I've been waiting for comments.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006mg2m/hardtalk

She does seem the acceptable face of trans, and reasonable, but I spotted a couple of missed points. The interviewer mentioned problems about prisons, but there was no answer to that.
The other was her suggestion that there are now so many more girls seeking transition because they can see it is possible. But that if this were so, there would be strings of middle aged and older women wanting to transition as well, and that was not pursued.
She wants all women, our sort and her sort, to act together to improve women's status.

I'd be interested to know what others think.

Aye if that’s the ‘acceptable face’ I’d hate to see the unacceptable.

Privately educated as a boys school weren’t they? Explains the entitles attitude (not that all private school kids act entitled, but there are some who do with absolute confidence).

There was something about Shon being very upset by stickers on a train.

Shon 'found' the stickers, which referred to women's sex based rights, & having happened upon these stickers made a big hoo ha about having peeled them off & ripped them up, because obviously sex based rights are BAD & 'enjoy ur erasure'.

Shon's gone quite quiet lately.

I wouldn’t recommend reading Shon Faye’s book but I would recommend reading Brendan O’Neill’s review of it in Spiked.

I started the book but couldn't get past the disconnect between the very self-consciously student radical, Marxist Theory Study Group language and the hardcore libertarian world view. I kept picturing a fifteen year old furiously pounding away on a MacBook Pro surrounded by Che Guevara and Angela Davis pinups and empty kombucha bottles, deep in some cushy upholstered basement in Cupertino.

It didn't come across as intentionally misogynist, to be fair, just completely and utterly clueless about women, possibly even unaware that we exist.

I noticed when the presenter said "you're a woman", to Shon, when talking about female only spaces that for a second Shon looked a bit blank, as if Shon didn't click Shon was supposed to think they were one. The interview was generally good from the presenter's side but I did roll my eyes at being expected to go along with the idea that SF was a woman. Shon's sex was actually more obvious in that interview than others I've seen.

Shon Faye as discussed on MN will come up if this is put into a search bar.

site:mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights shon faye

It didn't come across as intentionally misogynist, to be fair, just completely and utterly clueless about women, possibly even unaware that we exist.

interesting

my view on shon fwiw is shon is suffering from some serious internalised homophobia. i suspect a world without women would inconvenience shon not all, leaving aside having a mechanism to interpret shon's sexual orientation in a way that's acceptable to shon.

Lots of filler there!

Thank you for reminding me about this brilliant book review.

www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/03/the-transgender-delusion/

It's a thing of beauty.

I hadn’t read that review. It’s a cracker

Would be nice to just dismiss Faye as yet another misogynist irrelevance. Unfortunately Welsh Government listen to Shon who is on the staff of Stonewall Cymru. Shon's view that women who don't enjoy their erasure are bigots reflects WG's stance. Head. Desk. Repeat.

Amazing. Helen Joyce writes a bestselling game changing book and I think I'm right in saying she's never once been heard on the BBC, never mind seen.
She'd be brilliant on Hardtalk.
Will never happen.

I shall never get over the disappointment that the cover of SF's book is not a pic of a randy budgie pecking at its own reflection in a mirror....

Helen Joyce issued a very classy invitation recently (in the light of the news of the closure of GIDS).

Open invitation to journos who have interviewed me and seen the result spiked by high-ups who say I’m “transphobic” to reach out again. I’ve been proven right on it all - women fired, charities becoming extortion rackets, kids sterilised. I won’t hold a grudge. Drop me a line
Or if you’ve wanted to interview me or commission me but been too afraid, or convinced you wouldn’t get it through more senior editors - now’s the time. You’re already very late to a huge story. You’ve ignored the biggest medical scandal of our era. Time to do your job properly

twitter.com/HJoyceGender/status/1552924642863620096?

terry

To be fair, in the past Hard Talk have spoken to Sharron Davies:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csy97q
and Kathleen Stock:
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1n6y

but I know what you mean.

I agree, I don’t doubt Shon has suffered homophobia both internal and external, but Shon clearly has no concept whatsoever of what being female is like. That’s certainly the impression I get from Shon’s, erm, poetry:

I'm not normally one for trigger warnings but that "poetry", oooh... could we preface it with something like Warning: Self-obsessed doggerel

I'm sure Shon has had a hard time and being privileged in some ways certainly doesn't negate those struggles. But it does make the apparent despising of women slightly harder to take.

Brendan O’Neill has now reviewed Travis Alabanza’s new book, 'None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary':

www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/21/the-dangerous-narcissism-of-the-trans-lobby/

Well worth reading.

Wow that piece sums the whole nonsense that is gender identity

That was fantastic thanks for sharing. Probably worth its own thread!

Glorious review. I particularly liked this line:

"I don’t use the ‘they’ pronoun. I didn’t spend years being taught good grammar by severe nuns only to discard it all in my middle age."

Non-binary theory according to Alabanza sounds like the arguments feminists had been making for years, bashed out of shape by angry teenagers into a cartoonified pastiche. I guess this is rebelling against social censure - but it seems with mixed motivations - is it really about self expression or is it about attempts to control the responses of others? Dress like a clown, rage when people don't respond to you in the way you want them to.

'One man’s therapeutic needs taking precedence over the right to privacy of thousands and thousands of girls – show me a better example of ‘male privilege’.'

Bingo.

Gender, to him, feels like an ‘internal neverending monologue’.

And here I guess I can sympathise with Travis, only it's not internal, it's having to listen to these people and their non-issues.