Smegg Wallace

[FinallyPeakedNow]

So I have been quietly considering all the trans stuff for years. Trying to see both sides. Acknowledging that my best friend's policing of my use of her trans kid's pronouns is just how the world is these days, and that my feeling that it is a devastating tragedy that they have removed their breasts and taken hormones that have made their voice break and hair fall out is simply the WRONG feeling and borderline transphobic.
It's been a struggle. I have always hated drag, couldn't put my finger on why. And then Masterchef reveals that they are featuring a drag act called Cheryl Hole and it happened. I peaked. I felt myself resist the instinct to feel that this name is deeply misogynistic, that if I was Cheryl Fernandez-Versini I would be forced to pretend I found it flattering, even if it's essentially being reduced to a hole so that people can laugh at the fact that women have holes.
I nearly peaked when I read that stupid university definition of lesbians as 'non-men attracted to non-men,' but I couldn't have had enough time to think about it then.
I just want it to stop now, please. I hate that left wing comedians I admire are all team trans. I hate that admitting I'm a terf puts me in the same box as a bunch of awful right-wingers, but also, terfs are my people. This is it now.

So, to my question:

WOULD THE BBC's MASTERCHEF PUT ON A MALE DRAG ACT CALLED SMEGG WALLACE?

I am going to get a baldy head cap and paint a dick on it and see if they bite. Who's with me?

I might write a letter of complaint to the BBC I'm that annoyed

It bubbles and niggles and eventually... boom. But it isn't team terf. It is team women.

Welcome to the club @FinallyPeakedNow 🙌
That sounds like a tragic story of your friend's child 😥
I know what you mean about being let down by people you liked or looked up to, it's a very common feeling to me now. Like when Dawn O'Porter interviewed Juno Dawson for her podcast and just totally confirmed him as a result woman - disappointing is putting it mildly. Or when Kae Tempest said she wasn't a woman 😕
One day I'm sure we will see many people regret their actions under the spell of their past gender religious fervor.

I'm disappointed by Sandi Toksvig. I couldn't watch her fawning over Eddie Izzard on that Extraordinary Escapes program, had to turn it off part way thru.

Incidentally, when did he start identifying as Pennywise?

I often think about Kae Tempest because they seem so wise. However I am heartened that they haven't decided they are male.

Sad also about Eddie Izzard because when I was growing up I used to really respect the fact that he owned his masculinity at the same time as presenting in a non gender conforming way.

Heartbroken that Sandi would be a trans advocate, but I suppose Eddie is a friend of hers.

Didn't know about Dawn O'Porter, what a shame.

I think the most tragic case might be that of Elliot Page. I was reading about him last week, their story is of consistent sexual abuse. She (Ellen) was a young lesbian person who was ND and vulnerable, in an industry full of people willing to take advantage, but this was in no way linked to them being trans. It feels like a tragedy to me.

Welcome to the club - and I think it’s worth reiterating that the only people who equate terfy women with right wing despots are TRA’s. Gender identity supports individuals to colonise and devalue community assets, to the detriment of roughly half the population - it is much more hard right-wing than left. I’m consistently surprised by politician’s inability to grasp this.

Or when Kae Tempest said she wasn't a woman

So Kate Tempest dropped the T to find her true self. We're in the post-irony world.

I suppose I am talking about it being a shame that I am now aligning with right wingers in general, those people whose knee jerk reaction is to reject difference and be afraid of diversity. This is part of the problem, really - on the surface trans ideology looks very much like gay rights or acceptance of other minorities. It's a shame that on this subject I will be standing alongside racists and people who are anti trans because they are, in fact, bigots. But I'm too sad and angry about it. And I have a daughter who is non gender conforming (and possibly a lesbian) and I'm terrified she will be sucked in.

I'm disappointed that my 3 favourite podcasts are all TWAW stunning and brave - No Such Thing As A Fish, ADHDAF and Stuff You Should Know. Largely, I love them, but every now and then I roll my eyes so hard I get a headache. Sandi is truly disappointing.

I think you should start a YouTube channel doing a drag king pisstake out of all the Smeg Wallaces of the media world.

Has No Such Thing as a Fish beem captured? I had nor clocked that and would be very sad if so. I followed a US podcast You're4 Wrong About for a long time, really interesting and also anti capitalist (which is very much my thing).but they started with the trans activism/cancel JKM stuff and I was disillusioned and out.

Sorry about the typos
Because wine

Yeah there's been at least 3 eps where they either talk about somebody trans in a stunning and brave way or referenced gender ideology with total seriousness. Pretty sure they were calling Eddie Izzard "Suzie" and "she" recently I just zoned out for a bit because otherwise I love them. Got a bit of a crush on Dan.
"You're dead to me" Greg seems to want to trans all the gay people from history. His podcasts have become a real chore to get through. But I still enjoy the others mentioned.

I hate that admitting I'm a terf puts me in the same box as a bunch of awful right-wingers

For something that talks so much about spectrums, gender ideology does like its binary boxes. But opposition to the ideology isn't binary. If there were boxes there wouldn't be 2 but 3:

1. Sex is binary and determines your gender - and therefore interests, abilities, role in life..... (Gender essentiallist.)

2. Sex is a spectrum but far less important than your gender which can be anything at all. (Gender ideologist.)

3. Sex is binary, gender is sexist bollocks. (Gender critical/gender abolitionist.)

On the whole the 'awful right wingers' that TRAs like to point at (by which they tend to mean the US religious right) would be in box 1, whereas feminist TERFs fall into in box 3 (and range from right to left politically).

But of course there aren't boxes - life doesn't work like that. Agreeing (partially) with someone on 1 specific issue doesn't mean you align with them on everything else. Especially when the thing you agree on is simply acknowledging reality. I'm sure plenty of the 'awful right wingers' agree with me that water is wet, fire is hot and dropped apples fall on the floor. Doesn't mean I support their views (or they mine) on abortion, gun ownership, the death penalty, the age of the universe ...or what 'being a woman' actually means beyond biology.

So welcome to the dark side, pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable - most of us aren't nearly as awful as we're painted. 😀

Tbh all of the terfs I know are vehemently left wing.

I know and understand why drag is disapproved of here and I agree some of it is awful and misogynistic women face and definitely not for kids, but I do think Cheryl Hole is quite sweet. He has a genuine love of girl bands and Cheryl herself which is very different from certain other acts imo.

You should defo do Smeg Wallace. Welcome to Terf Club.

There's a lot of aggression towards those of us on the political right in this thread.

The ones putting you in a box with us are the TRAs who do so to dismiss any criticism of their ideology as "right wing bigotry". And they're primarily able to do so because repeated casting of the right as reactionary bigots has created a bogeyman for them to scare Left Wing people into silence for fear of association. But the Right has largely been saying the same things and the same arguments against the trans movement as we see now for years. The idea that we've been saying so because we have some horrible prejudice motivating us but other more virtuous people say the same thing because they mean it and are good... I feel that underlies a lot of comments like I see on this thread. It's false - we say it for the same reasons any other GC person says them: they're logical, factual and we mean it.

I have never understood why people check who believes what before deciding what they ‘believe’. You can’t truly understand and believe something for yourself if it depends on or is influenced by who else shares that view and what your ‘team’ position is - it’s just another form of peer pressure groupthink and tribalism. Bedfellow politics is devoid of genuine principle.

I don’t know who these GC racists are, nor do I care. I oppose racism wherever and whoever. When campaigning against the Iraq war I did know that the far-right also opposed the war. So?? What I do know is that the clash of women’s rights and identity politics has exposed the fact that many people who espouse progressive politics including anti-racism do so not because they understand those positions in their hearts and minds but because they must appear to support the ‘team’ position. Their 'principles' are worth nothing if they're based on tribalism and keeping up appearances.

The right in U.K. is vastly different from the right in North America. My husband is Canadian and has lived over here for years note, but he recently made a comment about the underfunding of preschools being because the tories wanted to force women back into the home. I tried to explain that there really isn’t a huge support for that here. If anything, conservatives would prefer all working class women to work, they just don’t want the state to have to support this with additional funding. The religious bio-essentialist side is just not here to the extent it is in the US. I know more politically active Methodist/Quaker types on the left than I do anti-abortionists on the right. The intersection of religion and politics is totally different over here. For example, there is a post on transwidows about a woman who used to receive support from the church, but that same church is now embracing her husband as a trans lay preacher. The discussion there is that the Anglican Church is going woke in a desperate bid to gain popularity in groups that it may previously have been thought to have been excluding.
The UK is one of the least religious countries on the planet and no one seems to take this into account when discussing trans issues as being based in right wing left wing politics.

Most of my favourite US podcasts are the same. Every time I think it's going to be ok they say something that makes me roll my eyes. There's no nuance to the subject at all. It's all taken for granted that twaw and should go anywhere they like and how awful and bigoted anyone who objects is.

The only US podcasts who don't do that are the ones who are there solely to discuss trans issues. Heteradorx is the obvious one and Blocked and Reported to some degree.

So far I've stopped listening to :
Qanan Anonymous
Maintenance Phase
Fever Dreams

There are lots more, but I stopped listening ages ago and can't remember all of them.

Even the UK podcast The Rest is Politics, which I love, skated a bit too close to the wrong side in one episode. I will be upset if No Such Thing have got it wrong too. What was said?

Even if that were true, I suggest that much of what people consider 'right wing' is actually just plain old conservatism - with all that implies about keeping what works and maintains social stability, and not just throwing everything out for the sake of revolution or to be 'disruptive'

There can be no real difference or true diversity unless there are boundaries and integrity. Genuine tolerance requires boundaries in order to have any meaning. There is not much 'diversity' when no-one is permitted to hold a different view or can be cancelled for speaking biological truth; or in recognising differnces and being able to differeentiate.

In fact there is a whole lot of group-think and lack of integrity involved in much that passes for 'left wing' these days. It is all about group identity and the politics of that.

I'm a little suspicious of you referring to people as 'anti trans'. It doesn't seem to fit with your protestations around having " peaked"?

Can you explain further?

I don't know what the terminology is, but 'anti trans' just means, in this context, those who don't like the idea.

I have peaked but I am surrounded by wokes. My best, most dearest friends were deeply offended when I was talking about Dylan Mulvaney and the tampon stuff. I did a sort of impression of him and they said it was offensive and were genuinely shocked. I thought, oh shit I am going to lose all my friends if I tell them how GC I am. Especially those friends whose children have been captured, who are on the path to medicalisation. There is nothing I can say to them on the subject that won't mean they cut me out of their life.

I feel alone, and scared to speak out. There must be loads of people like me.

You will discover a lot of what you thought was great about left wing politics will come crashing down once you see the misogyny of many of the men on the left.
It's no different to the men on the right except they throw insults at the other side to hide their own hatred of women.
Cross party is the only way we will defeat this.

Also the left/right wing thing I realise am using badly, and carelessly. I need to look into it further because I've just assumed I'm left wing because we are middle class but not well off, in artsy/teaching jobs, read the Guardian etc, believe mostly liberal things and think the rich should be taxed more. Massive fan of comedy, most of which is leftie and when a right wing person comes along (Geoff Norcott, Simon Evans for eg) they shout about it.

But GC views are not left or right, they are about reality. I'm just clutching my pearls a bit about clicking on Daily Mail links.

Great explanation!

"Sex is binary, gender is sexist bollocks"

THIS