BBC R4 Today - gender woo followed by Afghan women

[2023username]

How could anyone listen to Thought for the Day (gender/soul woo flavour tripe) just now directly followed by a segment on Afghan women being trapped at home and excluded from public life, and not think WTAF … no identifying out of the hell it is to be female in Afghanistan

So very true. Puts it into sharp relief.

Agreed. Presumably none of the people who want to identify as a woman would want to identify as an Afghan woman. So dreadful that they are being wiped out of public life so completely.

I normally dive for the of button when the god slot starts, but stopped to listen today. At least he made explicit that it was a religious belief.

that's a good point, but most people now seem incapable of being able to discern the difference!

I was grinding my teeth. I usually like his input (though my response to the godslot is also mostly to click it off) but FFS.

I very rarely listen to Thought for the Day, but I heard it today. Once again, it's a supposedly religious slot being used to make a political point. Shameful. And the contrast between gender woo and the harsh reality of women's lives under a viciously patriarchal regime couldn't have been starker.

I thought that the thought for today piece was quite good in that it framed the transgender issue clearly as religious/faith based, as well as making it clear that there were three separate things here - sex, personality and (faith-based) soul, the last of these being where you find your gender identity. He also said that all three were important.

@2023username

the today show is a news show.
therefore will and should leap from one area to another

what is happening in Afghanistan is a disgrace the world should be ashamed of. The west should have never left, and the surrounding countries need to fix.

that is the key point here. Not the other less than subtle digs.

Agree contrast with the Aghan women piece was star, though both about using religion to oppress women as a sex.

There are some who seem to believe that the plight of TW is as bad as those women in Afghanistan. It’s not true, obviously, but some are too stupid kind to question anything they are told.

I was listening to R4 this morning, in horror and disbelief that the God slot has now been replaced by the new god, the gender woo-woo god.

All the debunked nonsense was in there. He said that the brain could be a different gender from the body's sex. He said that somewhere (India?) had always had a 3rd gender. And I think that Be Kind or an equivalent got thrown in too

I was going to start a thread and then found this one. This was my twopenn'orth:

Thought for the Day on the Today programme this morning was about Trans. The speaker was sympathetic to Trans. He said that his religion considers soul, mind and body. Soul is the prime self, it is more important than the body. Mind is the interface between the two and that is where gender dysphoria can lie.

At the end of the piece Nick segues, without comment, into a piece about the Taliban and the effect that their religious beliefs are having on the women of Afghanistan.

Nick knows. It's not just about self, we don't live in a vacuum. It's about how people's beliefs become actions that affect others. Well played, Nick.

Afghan woman can't identity out of their oppression.

Uk TW identify into their supposed 'oppression'.

Why don't Afghan women just 'identify' as men? Simples!

(Ironic, clearly)

I suppose you could describe gender extremists as a religion. There again I might have differences with the Catholics or Anglicans - but they don't try to get me fired or tell all my friends I'm a heretic.
Perhaps it was inevitable some exciting and radical sect would replace them.

Doesn’t it just. Meanwhile over in the Western world men are LARPing about pretending to be women and riding roughshod over actual women’s rights.

….riding roughshod over actual women’s rights while eagerly claiming to be oppressed themselves.

The irony. But we must pretend not to notice it.

Like others I usually switch off for the God slot… Today’s ‘piece’ just made thought for the day seem even more irrelevant to most people …

Cant listen to the BBC woke rubbish

Didn’t hear it today although I usually do.

The whole thing about trans/Afghan women makes me INCANDESCENT with rage. You wouldn’t want to be a woman there, would you?

Later on, in In Our Time, a female academic shoe-horned "gender identity" in Lawls' Theory of Justice, a classic philospospical work. Somehow I don't think Rawls, a WW2 soldier-turned -philosopher was concerned with "gender identity" when he wrote his classic work in 1971.

Bloody autocorrect, Rawls, not Lawls.

Who was the speaker on TFTD today?

More sunlight.

Exactly. ‘The most marginalised group’ my left foot. Sick of hearing it.

Jumping on this thread to ask if anyone is listening to Woman's Hour and heard Anita (Paris Lees superfan) Rani tell a guest who is investigating sexism and misogyny in football that if women don't feel comfortable in football grounds they should just stay away. The guest eloquently outlined the hostility women face in these spaces, in terms of direct challenge or intimidation and sexual harassment, but also things like adequate women's toilet provision with locking doors and sanitary bins.

Anita's response, delivered in a tone of distinct impatience.
'It makes me wonder why you'd want to go into that space? It is traditionally where men go and if they can't express their emotions during the week on a Sunday they'll go to their game and they'll laugh and they'll cry and they'll have their community bonding moment. Why would we want to encourage women to go into that space?'

This is the Woman's Hour presenter who fawned over Paris Lees, saying how gorgeous PL looked, how attractive they are, and took to twitter afterwards to say she was 'disgusted' by the 'transphobia' of listeners who questioned PL's suitability as a guest on Woman's Hour (given that PL has been outspoken in praise of catcalling and encouraged the sexual harassment of women, framing it as a compliment, and that women actually enjoy being treated as a piece of meat - opinions which, as a non-woman PL has a spurious right to promote.)

It seems that Rani is in favour of single-sex spaces when they're for men. And not for their dignity, privacy and safety, but just so they can give their misogyny free rein, without being called out on it or asked to tone it down. Can she even fucking hear herself?