Who has most disappointed you?

[Calistano]

I'd say Russell T Davies when he had his drunken rant. I get his concern that lgbt is being fractured. But his absent concern for Women and their rights was palpable. I honestly thought he had more sense.

Almost every politician I have ever come across.

I was listening to David Mitchell's new audiobook-a history of English Kings- and out of the blue, in the middle of a section on the Reformation, and how it had a mixture of good and bad outcomes depending on your point of view, he said "That's why I never comment publicly on trans issues".....

Yet he has no issues commenting publically, and loudly, on Brexit, Tories, migration etc etc.

It's a wonder Mitchell feels safe on the Reformation then. Actually the Rev Giles Fraser compared Brexit to the Reformation. He approves of both. Fraser is pretty left / liberal , as I recall from his Guardian days and a fan of the Occupy movement. Of which I am sure they are good and bad things to be said.

I wonder what his views on gender ideology are? Could one try to justify it using the Bible I wonder.

Not sure anyone's ever lost work because of their views on the Reformation....

Thomas More lost his work and life so, yes. It happens.

Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burned at the stake because of their views on the Reformation. This is likely to have led to loss of work on their part.

I have been most disappointed by the people who should have deeply delved into these questions, who should have good theoretical frameworks for the analysis, who should have studied all relevant statistics and scientific papers, and, in particular, those among this group who are paid to work for the good of all female people in NGOs or academia or governments.

So feminist organisations, academic feminists, feminist scientists etc. Pretty much all legacy organisations in feminism have fallen.

Doctors in general.

It terrifies me that I might have to put my life in the hands of someone who believes this shite.

I had four lesbian friends and acquaintances, three of them GPs, one of them a consultant/ head of department, who are now full-on trans activists. One of them — who describes herself as autistic and has often been mistaken for a man due to her cultivated androgynous look — left her GP position and went off to train as a gender specialist and is now promoting transition. It's been quite exquisitely painful at times, watching good, intelligent women (and lesbians, who should be the last to capitulate) not just go along with, but wholeheartedly adopt this misogynistic, homophobic ideology. I think the way in which intelligent, science-based, apparently rational people have adopted GI is one of the most terrifying things. I, with my arts-based, not very impressive CV, turn out to be the rational one, the critical thinker and the real feminist.

That's really tough, VWdieselnightmare.

Really glad I studied A Man For All Seasons at school.
It really helps when you know what your non negotiable personal principles are, even if it takes an extreme scenario for those principles to clarify.

Sometimes I feel we are going through a collective identity politics/narcissism on steroids phase of history, sometimes I feel it's a collective codependency on steroids phase. Hoping for it being a phase and this too shall pass.

If you throw in the Prayer book Rebellion , the Northern Rebellion, sundry persecutions under Mary and Elizabeth and Cromwell - there's a few people out of work.

I'm so sorry @VWdieselnightmare . That sounds desolate indeed. Quite terrifying in fact. One can only hope these women are not representative of lesbians as a whole. I wonder how - or if - they will adjust to reality when the walls come down. There might not be a career in ' transition ' for example. Short of emigration to the US or Canada perhaps.

Even before all of the current madness, I had a very strong sense that there was something deeply wrong in science education at the university level. It seemed to be producing quite a lot of people who seemed to be poorly educated outsie a narrow field, often without any strong understanding of philosophy or literatire or history, and especially, the historical emergence of science or it's philosophical underpinnings.

When I've said that I think this is a problem, the response is often, those things may be nice, but aren't necessary for a scientist to do his or her job. I beg to differ, I think what we are seeing now, or some of the crazy attitudes of some doctors and scientists around covid, show that this kind of wider understanding is necessary. Otherwise you really just have a sort of technician.

I'm afraid those of us looking on aghast just don't understand how powerful the concept of the trans child is. It's absolutely bamboozled so many previously sane and skeptical people. Scientists and doctors have put aside their normal mindset to fully get on board, because to deny the child is the biggest sin of all.

I also think that people have looked at previous social justice movements (for women, ironically, and blacks, gays, disabled) and want to be fully on board and fully able to signal solidarity in social situations.

Throw in humans' need to belong to groups, atomisation of society to pure binaries (if you don't agree with me, you're against me), and the vast majority of these people having a trans child and/or knowing people with one, and not having their rights personally downgraded or threatened as so many women have, and you have the basis of where we are.

And if any doctors or scientists are doubting themselves, the sunk costs that are so deeply buried are too painful to reconcile and cash in, it's so much easier to keep playing the same record over and over.

This is my take as to how Dara O'Briain, Dr. Brian Cox, the Van Tulleken TV doctor twins, Sir Richard Attenborough, and every scientist and doctor that tacitly doesn't kick back against this trend, is reconciling their position in supporting pseudo science less reputable than astrology, crystal healing, homeopathy, psychic phenomena and ghost hunting etc.

because to deny the child is the biggest sin of all

This helps explain a lot.

Amazing really. Rationality being overturned for the whims of children, and adults acting out what they believe are their authentic selves.

This is the age of naives and knaves.

When I've said that I think this is a problem, the response is often, those things may be nice, but aren't necessary for a scientist to do his or her job. I beg to differ, I think what we are seeing now, or some of the crazy attitudes of some doctors and scientists around covid, show that this kind of wider understanding is necessary. Otherwise you really just have a sort of technician.

But technician jobs are usually what someone with a BSc or often an MSc will be doing. I even know a few PhDs who are basically technicians, at least in the UK and also US or NZ/AUS. In some other countries, Germany for example, there are schools for technician training and you wouldn't expect to become a technician with a university degree but here it's different.
When I first came to the UK for a postdoc (my second) I was really disappointed with the general lack of curiosity in anything outwith their immediate research area in the grad students and the other postdocs and that was at one of the highly regarded UK universities. Very different to anywhere I had been as a student or postdoc before.

Hozier, Im sorry to say. I love the music but can't be doing with his apparent espousal of all things trans.
In Nashville, he appears to be performing beneath it.
Does he have even a clue how the ideology is negatively impacting children and women?

That's my thinking too and saying we're in an age of naives and knaves puts it well. I keep thinking about the philosopher Giambattista Vico, who wrote of the Barbarism of Reflection.

"Vico sees that history is cyclical. Vico claims that history begins in a barbarism of sense and ends in a barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of reflection is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric.

Vico describes the returned barbarism this way, "such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure". These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. This takes humanity back to where it started, individual giants acting solely on their own individual passions."

Sounds depressingly familiar, doesn't it.

My DDs - I feel a total failure of a mother that they are both TWAW.

I brought them up to be strong feminists and I am so disappointed that they are more interested in pandering to LARPing males.

I really hope they see the light soon but my youngest wants to transition, which is breaking my heart .

Wow @Vegemiteandhoneyontoast that really sums up our present moment. Ashamed to say I've never heard of Vico.

Reality Fan's ' naives and knaves ' is bang on the money too. Can they be embodied in the same person I wonder.

@Abhannmor he's fairly new to me as well, but he sums up perfectly what we see around us. It amazes me that someone from hundreds of years ago could see what Vico saw.

I also wonder about that 'poetic wisdom' provided by established religions and wonder if it's something we've mistakenly discarded. The new 'religion' provides no poetic wisdom, just angry authoritarianism. Like Vico, I don't know how to resolve this barbarism of reflection, but I can certainly see it developing all around me.

@Daiyu that sounds awful, I'm so sorry your daughters are like this and hope they eventually see the truth of the matter.

Maybe not most, but recently, Mathew Baynton (Horrible Histories; Ghosts).

Surprising (or maybe not, I see a lot of people who don't seem to get the contradiction) as a few years ago he publicly spoke about how his son was mocked for wearing a pink bicycle helmet and how he eschewed categorising toys and colours in gendered categories. Apparently he stated "I won't be teaching my boy how to be a boy."

So if boys can (reasonably) wear pink and play with dolls whilst still being a boy, why does he think a boy can become a girl?