Women's rights general conversations - Thread 4

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 3.

There is so much excellent information and so many active discussions on FWR that I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread to sort of "cross-fertilise" between them - airing little thoughts or vignettes that wouldn't themselves merit their own thread, to highlight other posts/threads of particular interest or to point to notable developments on fast-moving threads so that casual observers know where to look.

(For example, "the X thread has meandered onto a fascinating discussion of Y" or "Poster P's amazing analysis on thread Z might have relevance to the scenario in thread W" or "Has anybody noticed this recurring theme that keeps coming up??" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions, grr"- that sort of thing).

This is absolutely glorious, from thread fave Dylan M: https://twitter.com/wokesocieties/status/1648391417784303618

And we thought Americans don't do satire!

I'm finding it hard to listen to what he's saying because my brain is just unable to stop thinking "Whoa, five o'clock shadow!"

Re. Lucy Worsley. She is very arch and I get that a lot of people would find her too annoying but with the dressing up. On the one hand, yes, annoying. On the other hand, I would totally do the same if I got her job. I'd probably dress up more.

Was that a recent thing from D M? There's no sign of any girlifying facial surgery - big bony male face.

Rosie Duffield and Miriam Cates have spoken about the erosion of WR:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11992261/Female-Tory-Labour-MPs-warn-extremist-activists-not-allowed-erode-womens-rights.html

The pair told the Daily Express: 'Women's rights must be protected at all costs and we have united across the political divide to make sure they are not wiped out by stealth because people are too afraid to speak out. 'This is not a party political issue, it's about protecting the dignity of women and girls by maintaining single-sex spaces, women's sport and female-only services, such as refuges and rape crisis centres.

I subscribe to a newsletter which had an interesting article in it, it's more background reading on pyschology research:
Language as a tool to shape how we think of gender | BPS

I couldn't think who else might find it interesting except perhaps the people here.

Thanks very much for this - have linked her to your post.

A male colleague of hers who she confides in, and shares similar views (I think he's gay, so understands the issues very well), has apparently emailed management with some polite questions about the new policy and its rationale. I think it's a lot easier for men to push back, but it's still heartening that people are doing so.

Just got round to reading this - it's really interesting! I would add the "default male" in general conversation, i.e. unthinkingly referring (anthropomorphically) to things/animals as "he" instead of "she" or even "it".

Forgive me for this long quote from a very interesting article on the Free Press Substack I just read, but I think it's relevant to our topic even though it's about postmodern literary theory discussed in the context of a childhood friend's descent into paranoid schizophrenia.

"“Part of the playful pleasure of postmodern theory was pretending that a flaw in a poem was evidence of a crack in society, and that verbal constructs held true for three-dimensional life like a pin stuck in a voodoo doll that made a real person scream. What would happen if such fanciful borrowings from the realm of magic and mental illness began seeping into law, public policy, or political culture? Turning everything into a text that meant only what the interpreter believed it meant.”
BW: The reason I so loved that passage is because you write in the book about dream worlds. Here in this passage you talk about it as fanciful borrowings from the realm of magic; a world where sort of the unreal is being mistaken for the real. How did that culture factor into Michael’s development and story?
JR: I think it had a huge impact. It helped shape the world that was there when he became ill. A world that was so ill-equipped to care for someone like him. If you believe that all mental illness is a social construct, even severe mental illness, and that the only reason why asylums were built in the eighteenth century, as Foucault says, is as a place to put your enemies who you’ve othered by calling mad simply because they swim against the rational stream, then there really isn’t any illness. There’s only power. And the people who have power can call the people they hate ill. Now, there’s plenty of abuse of power. But if illness is real, then that formula deprives people of any form of care, and the only response to a hospital, a mental hospital, or a psychiatric hospital, is to treat it like the Bastille and tear it down. In fact, one of the most devastating passages in Madness and Civilizationon^_ is about Philippe Pinel, who was the eighteenth-century reformist psychiatrist. He was really the father of humane psychiatry and he’s often depicted in paintings striking the chains from his patients because they were chained even inside the hospitals. And for Foucault, he is the villain. It takes a minute to realize that the reason he’s the villain is precisely because he improved the lot of people in those hospitals. The reforming impulse, the liberal impulse, is dangerous because the only response is the absolute destruction of that system and that world. The system of state hospitals that might have been reformed were instead effectively torn down and they were not replaced by anything equipped to care for the people who had once been in those hospitals.
Things like that—formulations like that—took place all the time. It’s Harold Bloom that says that “schizophrenia is bad poetry.” His whole theory was that you intentionally misread your predecessors so that you can insert yourself and make yourself primary by ignoring or misunderstanding what it is that makes them great. But that’s only possible if you do know that they are great. And if you really are in contention with something powerful, poetry has to mean something in order for you to contend with it. The reason why he said schizophrenia is bad poetry is because the misreading that it involves is not an intentional or constructive or creative misreading. It’s simply misperception. It was only much later that I learned that he had someone in his family who suffered from severe mental illness, and so for him, that was not an abstraction. These elaborate theories that erased meaning paled in front of his own experience of the world and of true illness. "
This all chimes so much to me with the gender ideological notion that identity is literal and outweighs biology.

So, Susie Green was fired from Mermaids!

In the video below Jackie whilst doing a reaction video to an old KJK dissection of THAT Ted talk at 30.50 ish minutes in. Jackie says "she's not at mermaids any more they fired her"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKv-U9S1Gc&t=35s&pp=ygUQamFja2llIHBpZWNydXN0cw%3D%3D

Ooh. Nice catch! I screen recorded that bit for posterity.

Is it worth listening to the whole thing? Jackie’s voice is very weird (how does a kid from Leeds end up with Y2K Paris Hilton-esque California-girl vocal fry? 🙃) and I’m not enticed to listen to all of it unless it’s terf approved!

I do try to read around both sides of this issue, in order to try to make sure I understand how someone can come to a diametrically opposite conclusion to me. This is an interesting read on the GI point of view on the EHRC's proposal to amend the Equality Act 2010 to specify biological sex. I don't agree with it, but it did make me think about why.

https://t.co/F6jlqxH01U

I listened to 20-30 minutes of that youtube video, but I’m afraid all three of those voices drive me mad, particularly Jackie’s - how did they get a transatlantic accent? Watching too many TikToks? When my niece was very young she could do a brilliant American accent, just from all the US cartoons she watched.

Curious, innit?

Compare and contrast to Jackie’s accent circa 2012 (video clip on the BBC website)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0112bjt

Wow! No remaining traces of her Northern accent, how funny!

(Also, if I was a model in a catwalk show and they covered my whole face with a fringed gas mask, I’d be a bit offended.)

😃

The State Media have made a highlights clip!

the whole thing was a very painful watch. Going to admit it felt wrong to watch Jackie watch that KJK episode.

But this version is much better!

Right. I've just thrown The Bomshell into the chat for our women's network setup group. Time to go for a walk.

Which particular bombshell, @BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn ? Just the general "oh btw I don't believe men can become women" one?

Yes, I want to know The Bombshell too!

Well, the bit that's been picked up is the rejection of 'cis'.

The bit about who actually counts as a woman (the 'identify as' phrase had reared its head) has been glossed over, but will certainly crop up again. I think I can at least keep the phrase out of the main document.

Hard to know which is worse: 'identify as', or 'assigned at birth as'.

They're both as bad as each other, imho.

There's a quote I share from time to time:

"Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity, before it got contaminated with 'I am this' or 'I am that'. Your burden is of false self-identifications, abandon them all" - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Identify as is worse (and this was worse still 'identify or present as').

At least 'assigned at birth' has some relation to actual sex, even if erroneously/misleadingly expressed. A women's network open to those assigned female at birth would be a women's network for women.

'Identify or present' is entirely untethered to reality. A women's network open to those who identify or present as women includes those who aren't and excludes some who are. That's just a network of random people.

Apologies if this was posted already, it’s a couple of weeks old, but I enjoyed this piece on the “hydra” of trans/gender ideology.

https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/battling-the-hydra-of-gender-ideology