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).

Joanna Cherry has been no platformed from performing at The Stand during the Edinburgh Festival -

twitter.com/joannaccherry/status/1652733664113881091?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

The Times have had to do a hasty re-write of the previous headline (presumably under threat of litigation) as it read 'anti trans campaigner...' rather than the rather more truthful 'Feminist...'.

The Mail reported on KJK's event and called it a women's rights rally. I didn't see anything about the woman being assaulted.

I can't see the twitter video, not enough bandwidth on the ship.

The predictable special cases are out in that tweet, saying she attacked the trans group, she deserves it, the trans group were "humane" and that women are more violent towards trans people.

The usual demented lies, of course!

This entire thread is horrific, but particularly appalling is the information posted by Bosky at 03:28.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4796258-where-did-pie-go-who-and-unesco-new-guidance-has-routes-in-queer-theory-sex-positivity-and-believes-children-are-sexual-from-birth?

Thanks for linking that, Kuc.

Speechless beyond that.

Think we were talking about PIE back at the old place, weren't we? It's the same old, same old, children as sexual beings, and meanie parents just wanting to restrict them... And the Labour Party, the NCCL, and the rest of the liberal establishment (with a very few honourable exceptions) fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And now, history repeats itself.

A lot of policy-makers in many different organisations have a lot to answer for.

Whilst we are in PIE mode, slightly adjacent to that this article in the daily mail today is very blghhh

AI being used to turn real photos of children into sexualised images https://mol.im/a/12033059 via https://dailym.ai/android

God people are sick.

Paul Stanley from Kiss published a terfy statement about transing children, he's now been supported by Dee Snider formerly of Twisted Sister. The tras are losing their shit and I'm...pleased...this is strange world.

They cannot get their heads around men in make up who know they are men in make up.

It's the same response that the older generation had to Adam Ant and Boy George. Not girls grandad, they are just men...in make up.

We've regressed 50 years.

I remember going to school the day after Culture Club's first appearance on Top of the Pops and there were a lot of people who thought he was a woman. Blows my mind because he was so obviously a man. Adam Ant; oh the beauty!

Appalling in the washington post today.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/01/transgender-biology-brain-science-freedom/

First comment:

The Washington Post has disgraced itself by allowing someone with a background in English to lecture us on the true nature of biology! It's very clever using the opinion section as a vehicle to let someone so totally unqualified, and in love with pseudo-science, bury the readers in horse-hockey. The business of the chromosome variations proving multiple variations in sex is not legitimate. In fact, it's absolute bunk. It's not hard to find lectures by a real biologist on YouTube, where this "shell game" is exposed. And no, things like a woman that has had her uterus removed does not prove that you can't determine sex by looking at the body. This is leading us into darkness, and it's tragically comical that the Post is leading the charge.

"There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.
And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology."

If only the writer had read their own article. Bunk. It's right there in the quote. The fact that some people keep looking doesn't mean there's anything to find.

Good comment though.

Sadly most of the other comments are supportive of Jennifer Boylan's argument.

Which I find really disorienting. I can't get a grip on what these people believe or if they actually, in all honesty, expect you to accept that they believe this stuff. Or is there some other through the looking glass interpretation of meaning here where you accept that they believe this for the purposes of belief but you're supposed to understand that it's a strategic belief.

I think they are sincere, but they seek narratives which support their preferred conclusions, rather than being committed to understanding the truth especially if that truth is inconvenient to their beliefs. "What could explain what my beliefs?" and "These facts do not support my beliefs, therefore they cannot be correct" rather than "What are the facts, what do they show, what could they explain? - hence my beliefs"

often sincere - there are always grifters.

I’ve lived in the USA. The cultural and legal landscape is very diverse and in so many ways it is a very different place from the UK. In many places in the States it’s very much white straight men are the default vs everyone else. Women’s rights, marriage equality, abortion access, Black Lives Matter etc are all on the same side of a long line (still) fighting for social justice.

In that context, you can see why those who identify as progressive would feel they need to support “trans rights”, because they’re on the same side of fighting for a fairer, more equal society, right? Throw in the mix the extremely polarised and tribal view of politics in the USA. I may very well be with them if I still lived there.

Whereas in the UK, at a society level it is fairly well established that abortion is legal, all adults can legally marry who they like, and we have the protected characteristics of the EA. Individuals may still face prejudices, but the state provides a legal framework for them to get support.

Because if these differences, situations arise like JKR’s essay where two different bodies of people react in very different ways. I’ve not gone anywhere near this topic with my American friends because I know how they’d react and it would break my heart. We’d align on 95% of our world views otherwise.

I think what's happening is essentially a multi-pronged approach to changing public opinion. When one "argument" (and I'm using the word argument VERY loosely) fails, they simply switch to another, even to another argument that is the opposite of the first. Along with this, there is a strong push for cancellation of, well, of the most effective voices, including any scientists who dissent from the new gender orthodoxy in public, and a vast river of propaganda masquerading as information. What seems to be the main approach now is to present "the science" on sex as being so complicated that biological sex essentially...doesn't exist. It's all so complicated that the best way to determine someone's biological sex is to "ask them."

What bothers me about it is the absolute gaslighting of it and that apparently it's working! I've been told (me, a scientist with a PhD in Biology) by friends ("friends") who have zero science education post-high school, that I don't understand that male and female are impossible to define and that your gametes don't have anything to do with your sex. These people consume propaganda placed by gender ideology advocates and think that they have been given accurate scientific information rather than a highly biased political document with an extremely selective array of "facts." And then they present their propaganda as if it's the latest scientific update.

I have to be honest, I've sorta given up. I try to be very respectful of nonscientists and to understand that my role is not to steamroll over them but to use my knowledge for service and share it when appropriate. But when people, in all seriousness, counter my careful, nonthreatening explanations, with BS like "well does a woman become a man if she has a hysterectomy nyah nyah gotcha!" the only conclusion I can come up with, is that the reason this ideology is winning, is that people are really, really, really stupid.

I still blame my fellow scientists though. It's not our job to let political ideologies bias our science, nor is it our job to pull the wool over people's eyes for political reasons. It's shameful really.

I'm not a scientist of any stripe, but I think I can tell men and women apart using my eyes to a remarkably reliable degree, as can most people who aren't lying for some reason.

For example, I was chatting (elsewhere, sorry) about how people can't change sex. I was assured by this other person that they can indeed change sex and that mine was a politically motivated, unevidenced belief that I was using to demean people. Later, he admitted to someone else that you can't change biological sex. So what did the first part mean? What other kind of sex is there? Imaginary sex? Surely that's gender or something? It's impossible to talk to people who are so dishonest, disingenuous or just stupid.

Very well said!

Also what @Winterborne74 noted: "...they seek narratives which support their preferred conclusions, rather than being committed to understanding the truth especially if that truth is inconvenient to their beliefs..."

I've had conversations before where a TRSOHer would say something like "Here's my so-called scientific evidence of why sex is a spectrum in which it is impossible to tell what sex anybody is/ clownfish and snails mean that people can change sex/ other pseudoscientific nonsense" and I'd patiently dissect [always the same bloody article in CapturedSciAm] to explain why they had it completely arse about face and were talking (literally) bollocks.

Now, obviously I wouldn't expect a person of faith to say "Gosh yes, I've now lost my religion thanks to your input" but what always happened with a TRSOHer was that then they'd instantly pivot to "Nobody on TRSOH ever said that sex is a spectrum/people can change sex/etc and if you suggest that we did, ergo that makes you a bigot!"

Meanwhile, simultaneously other TRSOHers could be coming on the same thread saying "Sex is a spectrum in which it is impossible to tell what sex anybody is/ clownfish and snails mean that people can change sex/ other pseudoscientific nonsense" and (strangely) not being gently corrected by the first lot of TRSOHers for saying the things that supposedly nobody ever said...

It was always patently obvious that the really important thing to the TRSOHers was being on The Right Side, amongst the Good People Tribe, and if a bit of pious fraud and selective blindness would keep them safely ensconced therein, it was more than worth it.

"Here's my so-called scientific evidence of why sex is a spectrum in which it is impossible to tell what sex anybody is/ clownfish and snails mean that people can change sex/ other pseudoscientific nonsense"

Then surely, actual proper scientists should be saying this in public, loud and clear. Where are the likes of the Royal Society on this?

That this is bollocks, I mean, obviously.

I'm not sure about the RS, but a number of formerly serious scientific societies and publications have been captured by TRSOH.

A number of high-profile scientists are hyper-keen TRSOHers. Individual scientists who are on TWSOH (also known as reality), on the other hand, often daren't speak out, because we need to pay the fucking mortgage and can't risk being hounded out of our jobs or getting the cops called on us.

Yes, sure I remembered some talk here about Nature magazine. Found this:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/04/the-science-journal-natures-goes-woke-claiming-that-both-sex-and-gender-are-nonbinary/

@Kucinghitam "It was always patently obvious that the really important thing to the TRSOHers was being on The Right Side, amongst the Good People Tribe, and if a bit of pious fraud and selective blindness would keep them safely ensconced therein, it was more than worth it."

Yes absolutely agree with this. First they pick their tribe, then they pick their ideology based on their tribe, then they justify their ideology using arguments fed to them by their tribe.

And on the conservative side, many do the same thing.

One of the big problems with this is that most people cannot, in fact, evaluate all the data themselves, neither progressives nor conservatives. So most of the general public DO have to develop their ideas by trusting in "experts" to do their job properly. So a big part of reaching a reasonable outcome is having experts who have shown themselves to be worthy of trust. That is why I feel so strongly that scientists have made a mess of this. I believe there was a solution to this problem that would have given transgender people a hopeful path forward, not necessarily with perfect ability to simulate being the opposite sex, but with increased research, some reasonable public accommodations, and a chance that future research would come up with really effective solutions for living happily in the sex in which they were born. And instead, gender ideology advocates went for a scorched earth solution that is (how do I put this nicely), bat$#%t crazy, and scientists have failed to mount an effective defense. Now it's all politically polarized, and those of us with children under the age of 18 have to worry that our kids may decide to mutilate their own bodies and shorten their lifespans with cross-sex hormones and there won't be a darn thing we can do about it.