Another stonking column from Hadley Freeman

[SpringCalling]

‘Liberal’ thought police echo Salem witch trials

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/21eff8d0-fc8e-11ed-aa31-73394e195d29?shareToken=60d60e218a05fd3d5eac761e0767a2e5

If you can’t see how Trans-rights activism aims to remove the whole basis for women’s rights, I.e. the sex class on the basis of which we are oppressed, then I guess you won’t be able to see that women’s rights are being attacked from both ends of the political spectrum, and to gain any influence to stop this destruction, we are stuck with our writers and influencers having to pick traditionally “right-wing” media outlets to express their concerns on a topic on which they are otherwise silenced.

Of course we don’t want reproductive rights removed. We also don’t want all of our other rights removed.

No wonder everyone's so bad tempered, having to remember whether today's the day whether they are the oppressor or the oppressed.

Are there many plantation owners around these days, then?

t's a core tenet of intersectionality. It's pretty obvious that you can both be part of an oppressed class and an oppressor class, e.g. a white woman married to a plantation owner.
I think I understand, thank you. So
just like Philip/Pippa Bunce, part of the patriarchy Monday to Wednesday and oppressed Thursday and Friday. Got it.

'Today I'm oppressed, tomorrow I'm the oppressor, the day after that it's a bit of both.'

You must all realise that I didn't just invent intersectionality.

No, you just redefined it to include men in feminism. Like many other words.

Must we? is that an imperative or an excuse?

No, you didn't. Kimberle Crenshaw did in 1989.

I think Gooner doesn't understand that one doesn't need to be a minority to be oppressed. Majorities can be oppressed too which is what happens to women.

I love her, thanks Hadley ❤️

I'm not the one acting as if it's some novel, ridiculous concept.

Must be the way you explain it that comes across as ridiculous, then.

Spot on.

I said this, Gooner, to which you said I was dogpiling, bullying and leveling personal attacks:

"Sometimes they can't even attempt to do that. I've asked many a person to tell me what they assume I think, so I can agree or correct where they are wrong, and they always go silent."

Do you think this is incorrect? I can assure you it's true.
I will call out dishonesty where I see it - if you want to call that 'leveling personal attacks' then that's your call. If you think it is bad, then try to avoid doing it. If you think it's OK, then it's not really an attack.

My grandad managed a cotton plantation in India in the 1930s.

👋

I’m not sure you understand intersectionality. It’s not pick and mix oppression, even if that’s what passes for it on SM these days.

The concept was and should actually be about the ways that different aspects of identity intersect to produce a wide range of very particular outcomes. So the same situation can inflect in complex ways because power relations are complex.

Nothing all to do with pick and mix oppression or even the oppression olympics. The term is supposed to be a way of avoiding the reductive, binary thinking of oppressed/oppressor but any nuanced discussion of power relations seems to have been swept away to produce some sort of choose your own characteristics avatar generator on a video game.

‘Intersectionality’ should have sat in the toolkit of theories looking to disrupt essentialist concepts of identity. But it seems to have been grabbed on to by people desperate to reify and essentialise gender identity.

Such that they simply will not accept that intersectionality describes key differences between TW (as male humans) and women (female humans). Somehow we aren’t allowed to talk about that intersection. We’re supposed to pretend it doesn’t exist because it would be bigoted to offer an intersectional account of sex in relations to gender identity activism.

Intersectionality, like ablism and inclusion, only ever matters or is mentioned when it happens to be a means of TQ+ political power.

When it permits scolding, bullying, control and power.

If there was a genuine care for such things then the terms would be actually understood and there would be concern - oh say, for example, women of faiths, cultures and disabilities that mean they cannot share a space for some activities with males regardless of how the male person chooses to identify. And there would be a recognition that female only spaces must be preserved and respected for the sake of access and inclusion alongside mixed sex spaces for TQ+ people.

I have no respect for those who use those terms to get their own way without a clue as to their meaning or any true commitment to their value.

Where are the TQ+ people who have been arrested by the police for speaking the truth, because of malicious allegations?
Where are the TQ+ people who have been kettled, screamed at, voices drowned out, punched, had liquids thrown over them, had bones broken because they tried to discuss their experience in a public place?
Where are the TQ+ people who have been harassed and assaulted while police stood by and watched, or shrugged, and who have made reports with evidence of crimes others would be arrested for and seen the police shrug?
Where are the TQ+ forums relentlessly bullied and controlled in an attempt to doxx and threaten TQ+ voices into silence?
Where are the TQ+ people who have lost their jobs for being found out to be TQ+ ?
Where are the TQ+ people who have had to grass roots fund raise to defend their existing rights in law in court against wealthy, tax payer funded lobbies?
Where are the tides of death and rape threats towards TQ+ people for daring to state gender ideology?
What labour is being demanded of TQ+ people?

These are the features of actual oppression. It has taken years of women relentlessly talking here, writing, raising awareness, shouting into the void, to get to the point where the truth is in the public press - against the control of the TQ+ lobby who had the power to set a policy for the press that disguised and silenced women's truth in TQ+ political favour. This journalist had to leave her job to be allowed to speak the truth.

Perhaps 'oppression' has been redefined to mean the same as 'genocide' in the UK: someone who hasn't done what I told them to.

Which really is the ultimate in privileged, self centred ignorance, to have so little knowledge or concept of what these words really mean that 'no' is the worst they can imagine.

Intersectionality’s don’t seem to be viewed with any thought that they should really be applied on a case-by-case basis. That’s surely the whole fucking point.

Somehow they are instead used to take a middle-aged, professional white man with kids from being incredibly privileged down to the most oppressed person in the universe, the minute they put in a dress. I’m pretty certain that they wouldn’t bother putting on a dress if that were really true.

It completely clouds the issue where we are trying to actually protect children who are actually vulnerable from being dragged into a life of medicalisation, just because it suits the agenda of a few.

Perhaps 'oppression' has been redefined to mean the same as 'genocide' in the UK: someone who hasn't done what I told them to.

Which really is the ultimate in privileged, self centred ignorance, to have so little knowledge or concept of what these words really mean that 'no' is the worst they can imagine.

It’s almost like that’s not exactly what you’d expect the effect of the male human in a patriarchal society would add to the ‘intersectional’ mix. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Im sure someone can explain to me how late transitioning Middle Aged middle class men who like to wear women’s clothes are an oppressed minority compared to a woman with a disability relying on personal care who is called a bigot for only wanting women of the biological kind to carry out her intimate care 🤔

Great user name

Being silenced, being villified for saying things you haven't said, being told when you say X you mean Y and Y is hatespeak, losing your job, your network of colleagues, having your existing body of work shunned, all for being told you believe something you don't believe and have made threats you haven't made? Death threats, Rape threats, threats of violence to you and your loved ones. If that isn't persecution, what is?

These have happened to Moore, Freeman, Linehan, Rowling.

@nilsmousehammer - it’s insane, isn’t it?

The real danger to trans people seems to me to come from TRA endlessly telling young people that Those Bad People want to kill them, eradicate them, drive them to suicide.
Way to fuck up people’s mental health and create a paranoid environment, TRAs.

Whereas GC or ‘terf’ people want natal males to stay out of women’s spaces and prevent young women who are lesbian, or have mental health issues, or are autistic to be put on a pathway to sterility, lack of sexual function and self mutilation, at least until co-morbidities are addressed and informed consent can be given.

Any physical threats the trans population face come from the same place everyone experiences physical threats - violent males, regardless of identity.

It's not trans people losing their jobs for having the wrong opinion on gender. It's women.
Hadley is right. This is gender McCarthyism.

Yes exactly. Funny how are the threats of death and rape and actual wanting to kill and decapitate people only ever come from the trans side. Women are attacked for saying men have penises. That's literally all they are saying. The hypocrisy shown by @TraumatisedGooner is unbelievable. Do you even hear what you are defending? Bit much to say mumsnet is an echo chamber when that's because women have beeb threatened into silence with the bbc and guardian fully on board with mutilating children and telling them women want them dead. Actually think about who benefits from hundreds of kids whose bodies will never grow up?? There is absolutely no evidence that hormones and surgery help dysphoria anyway.