Maya’s response to Radical Notion’s GC divisions

[HiccupHorrendousHaddock]

I thought this was a very interesting answer to the recent issue of RN.

Shout out to the vipers and their Mumsnet Feminism within!

mforstater.medium.com/on-gender-critical-disputes-db2e456ad9cd

Thanks for posting this

Thanks. Maya has perfectly expressed so much of what I think/feel on the issues.

There seems to be a lot of wonky maths going on where this subject is concerned - 1 = 0! 2 + 2 = 5! ??? !!!

I'm afraid the clock just struck 13 and i don't much like this game of Numberwang!

Thank you for sharing this. It's fab and I totally agree with Maya on this stuff. Better to have impact than to be ideologically pure.

Thanks, Maya has clearly explained what is going on - I've been reading for days to try and get my head around it.

I stand with Maya! And Mumsnet!

Thank you for the link. What an interesting article and what will be almost as interesting is watching to see who retweets it and who doesn't

Maya is formidable. I am grateful.

Thanks for the link. I totally agree with Maya. The harm to children and teenagers is indeed pressing.

Wow, Maya has expressed very clearly how I feel about this whole movement.

Much as I respect academic feminists like JCJ with their big words and long sentences, I don't have the concentration, the time or perhaps the intellectual capacity to read and understand their work.

I don't agree with every single word of every single person in the GC movement, and we all have different hills to die on and lines we will not cross, but I feel like we have a lot of major common goals and the more people pushing towards them the better.

I think the really clever people are the ones who can express complex issues in words that everyone can understand.

Hmm.

I agree with some of that. But not this bit:
So too is the ability to mock and laugh (which is a means of saying that something isn’t right). None of this should be forbidden.

My family have been variously mocked and pointed at for being gay; autistic; ginger; tall; physically disabled. None of that mockery is a true indicator that 'something isn't right'.

I'm exhausted by by the ridiculous infighting. Agree with Maya here.

In a choice between being part of an ideologically pure sisterhood and pragmatic and effective impact, I would chose impact.

Erm...so Maya is also a Farage Feminist?

There are some minor points☆ I'd quibble with in that article, but the overall message is spot on. Pragmatism will get us much further than rigid ideology.

☆ A small number of the things she mentions as biologically baked-in patriarchy are not actually universal (so could in theory change - although they would require a massive shift in society and attitudes for 99% of the world, so I don’t by any means expect it to happen; and the change might well not be for the better).

And I don't think men in women's clothes are inherently funny or ridiculous - as long as everybody is clear that they are men in clothes and that putting on a garment that one particular culture and time period thinks of (for no good reason) as 'female' doesn't actually change anything about the wearer. The fabric is not the problem.

Apparently, so.

I pretty much agree with all of that.

Worse!

If Maya has come within wang baton distance of the heritage foundation, she must be some sort of Trump Supremacist!

😱😱😱

The infighting is so damned tedious. I only just caught up on the Radical Notion thread since yesterday and it’s literally 100s of posts engaging with what seemed to me to be a spurious attack. (Although being a shire wife amused me - does mean I move to Hobbiton or to the Cotswolds?)

I think Maya makes excellent points. Being pragmatic beats idealism and gatekeeping when it comes to making the world change.

I like that quote by Otto Vin Bismarck:
“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best.”

Pragmatism is underrated.

And I don't think men in women's clothes are inherently funny or ridiculous.
Yes and no. Some men come from cultures where men wear dresses and skirts. Man-shaped dresses and skirts. And that's fine.
It's when men-shaped men wear women-shaped clothes that it goes wrong.

Fair summary.

It’s also got some stuff about crocheting a Union Jack thong for Nigel Farage.

Excellent.

I think they usually look ridiculous. Especially if they imagine themselves to look feminine. Obviously a kilt or a kanga might technically be skirts, but they are not women’s clothes, so they don’t make men look ridiculous. Also if a man is wearing something like a woman’s cut of jeans, you might not notice. It’s the whole caboodle. When you can tell a man is dizzy and actively turned-on because he is wearing nail polish and bangles in public - you definitely sense something is off.

Another thing, as a woman, I know what clothes do and do not suit me, or which would be too sexualised to be appropriate. Blokes in women’s clothes do not think like that.

I don't think she's saying that. I think she's saying that she doesn't think any group of people should be venerated to the extent they are never mocked.

In any event, identifying as trans is not biological like height or disability is. We have been told time and again that it's not a medical condition so should be removed from the DSM.

Agreed - I'll take impact, I don't need to agree with anyone's politics/religion/etc in order to work with them on protecting women's rights against the trans lobby.

Possibly even a grim horrendous bigoted shire wife of Nigel Farage! Like me!