Fantastic piece by Kathleen Stock

[RoyalCorgi]

I love this. It's a great rebuttal of Ed Balls (in his recent tv interview with her) and Matthew Parris's confused Times article - as well as a lovely tribute to the other brave and brilliant women campaigning on this issue. Thank you, Kathleen.

[[https://unherd.com/2023/06/the-gender-wars-are-not-a-gift-to-the-right/

Sorry, hit Post too quick!

Here's what I was trying to quote from her book:

LGBT activism also fails on intersectionality for trans people themselves. It has no interest in acknowledging the somewhat different political and social situations of trans men and trans women respectively, but insists on treating both as identical for the purposes of lobbying. As far as trans activism is apparently concerned, there is no relevant difference in the situations of a fourteen-year-old trans-identifying teenage female, attracted to other females, who is crowdfunding 'top surgery' and self-harming in the meantime, and a forty-one-year-old late-transitioning autogynephilic heterosexual male with no intention of divorcing his wife.

I think the libertarian Right has always been tolerant of transsexuality, because libertarian. Not so tolerant of women generally, because women’s lives are inconveniently constrained by the responsibilities that often come with being a woman, so women tend to eschew libertarianism.

For me, I've seen far too many people taken in by a manipulative AGP, (and I'm not even a transwidow,) to be able to read what she says, presumably about the likes of Debbie Hayton, without concluding that she doesn't get it.

I've watched women interact with these apparently pro women AGPs, and expose them in a few short paragraphs.

The experts on AGP men are their wives and ex-wives. And their children.

Whatever ones own opinion might be, one should, surely, concede that one is not in a position to understand it as well as them.

I know that paragraph looked a bit poncey, with all the 'ones'

Kemi tweeted about this article (same one, right?)

twitter.com/kemibadenoch/status/1666377035168509954?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

Good article. Some good comments too, such as this one:

^If ‘trans’ means, as it has come to, a systematic denial of the rights of women to their own spaces apart from men, an insistence that lesbians’ refusal to sleep with men is tantamount to racism if the men in question call themselves women, and the ongoing project to poison, sterilise and/or mutilate the healthy bodies of confused teenagers, many of whom would simply grow up gay if left alone, then anyone who disclaims the appellation ‘anti-trans extremist’ or ‘transphobe’ has some explaining to do. At best they are spineless conformists; at worst, willing accessories to some of the worst human rights abuses we have seen since the abolition of slavery. Every human being with a working moral compass is
automatically a ‘transphobe’ in this sense.^

Likewise the grimly amusing sight of tweets replying to the Equalities minister with rage that she would dare to care about women and other people too, when equality should mean TQ+ lobby only.

Just fuck all this for a game of soldiers. It's insane.

Not getting AGP actually might account for her success. The fact that she is so moderate, because she doesn't see the sexual motivations that a lot of other women do.

It was the only misstep in the article, as far as I'm concerned. That she thought her professional status, 'right' vocabulary and rounded vowels are what makes her more acceptable and is getting her coverage.

I don't think it is. I think it's the fact that not only doesn't she doesn't mention AGP, she's not motivated by the misogyny of it.

I think Datun has hit the nail on the head there. Stock’s book is more ‘palatable’ than Joyce’s because Stock’s book engages with the issue mainly as an intellectual concept and, unlike Joyce’s book, doesn’t set out very plainly the sexual motivations behind this movement. So for anyone keen to approach the topic in as inoffensive / don’t scare the horses/ naice a way as possible, then Stock’s book is a good starting point.

The page of the book linked to in Tinsel Angel’s post with the twitter link is the element of Stock’s book I disagreed with. I found it a bit cool girl, frankly. That’s possibly a bit mean on my part though. However, Stock was certainly presenting herself as the moderate compared to the more ‘hardline’ approach described on that page. So maybe not that mean on my part.

To be fair to Stock, she’s been put through the mill since she wrote her book, and I expect her perspective may well have changed as a result.

I don’t think she could have gone into the trans widows issue in that particular unherd article though - there’s word limit and focus/key message to consider in any article, and it’s more Joyce’s area of expertise perhaps, than Stock’s. But it’s a good thing that she’s raised the point about middle class v working class voices. Hopefully it may make some individuals in the media consider including a wider range of contributors.

it’s more Joyce’s area of expertise perhaps, than Stock’s.

Only because Helen spoke to me for her book and Stock didn't. Had Stock have asked I'd have been happy to speak to her.