Telegraph: growing prejudice against transpeople

[Queenofscones]

Very dodgy article in the Telegraph about the British Social Attitudes survey, a survey that has been held annually for the last 40 years. The questions asked was whether people were 'very prejudiced', 'a little prejudiced' or 'not prejudiced' against transgender people. According to the results, twice as many people declared themselves 'prejudiced' against transgender people as did in 2019. But the question is appalling — it assumes that having questions about the validity of a belief system that actively seeks to destroy women's rights is prejudice, when it's a rational response. The authors of the article seek to blame it all on JKR...

Link to the archived version here:

http://archive.today/yOlJF

Yes, or it's meaningless. But I'm not holding my breath.

Actually the general public didn't really care much about Karen White at the time. That case came out back when it was a slog getting anyone to even mention the issues.

Things have changed.

That's what I find so depressing when people say stuff like 'it was sports that peaked me!' while simultaneously admitting that they didn't really care (despite knowing!) about males being placed in the female prison estate. Those who didn't know, fair enough. But for the ones that did, it feels like women in prison just weren't seen as important enough to care about.

I agree. I also used to ‘be kind’ as, to be fair, most of the transsexuals I met exhibited signs of poor mental health. Now I have knowledge of the fetishistic nature of males who dress as women, there is no way I want to be wank-fodder for their sick fantasies.

Perhaps the survey results are a reflection of what happens when the general public choose to ‘educate themselves’ about what TRAs are actually fighting for?

My post was in response to @BlessedKali but the quote didn’t pull through.

'Education' not going so well then?

Yep. They don't care about women being abused, raped, intimidated, threatened, self excluding, the urinary leash, fair representation on boards, or women's rights.

But a bloke doing the hurdles and spoiling the game? Hold up, now!

I appreciate that sport matters a great deal to a lot of people. I just can't quite fathom that it matters more than womens' rights.

Hey ho.

I think it’s the power of a visual

Sports and Isla Bryson clearly show the reality

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that

The men are stronger, bigger, have anatomy. It’s a pretty blunt but powerful

I think it's largely timing.

And political, of course. Isla Bryson was used as a tool to bring Sturgeon down and minimise the power of the Scottish govt, so the media leapt at the chance.

Karen White had no such connections.

I think it was an error of judgement. I have wondered, now and then, whether those pushing it really believed that those transitioning males in prison were genuinely men with brains so feminine that they wouldn’t act as other men would, or if they thought there were so few that they would get away with it, or if they thought the general public wouldn’t care, or thought they would pass the laws they wanted before it came to light, but whether it was one of those reasons or another I haven’t thought of, I do think it will eventually turn out to have been a massive miscalculation. Putting male rapists in with women, even ones people don’t care much about, is a very bad look in anyone’s book.

Nancy Kelley wishes shame on herself.

https://twitter.com/Nancy_M_K/status/1704775761851306230

I agree, but sports are a useful conversation opener.

My brother is sports mad, he loves all kinds of sports, including women's sports. The Olympics is his happy time, Jessica Ennis is his heroine, he is the kind of person who will post equally on social media about the men's football and the women's football.

When I first started discussing trans issues with him, he was looking at it from a "be kind" perspective - and he is genuinely a very kind person - but said, "What I really disagree with though, is trans women competing in women's sports. That's just really unfair."

So I said, "Well, yes, it's wrong and unfair. But it's just sports. It's not as serious as being raped in prison by Karen White, is it?"

Suffice to say he is now pretty well peaked.

I suspect the real reason why sports are the easiest gateway to having a conversation about this is because female athletes are relatable. They're young, often pretty, clean cut. They behave themselves. They achieve these amazing physical feats and then they appear on the TV, all smiles, brimming with enthusiasm for their sport and congratulating their competitors. They could be your best friend, or your daughter. You see Jessica Ennis being interviewed after winning an Olympic medal and you are reminded of your little girl overjoyed about winning the egg and spoon race on sports day and you wonder whether your little girl might one day go to the Olympics. And then you see Laurel Hubbard and you think, "that's so unfair" and you think that the young female athlete who just missed out could be your little girl too. That you could spend 15 years ferrying your daughter around to swimming practice at 6am five days a week only for her to have her opportunities and victories stolen from her by Lia Thomas.

Whereas someone like Cheryle Kempton, serving a sentence for stealing money to buy drugs, isn't relatable. You don't know anyone like her, and you don't want to. She's too far removed from your life and you prefer to keep it that way. And you don't really want to think about rape either, so whilst you might be peaked learning about Sarah Summers having to sue the Survivors' Network, rape counselling isn't an easy thing to drop into the conversation. No one wants to kill the mood at a dinner party talking about something horrible like that.

So I completely agree with you, it's terrible that sports are what tend to peak people whereas the more serious issues don't get the same coverage, but it's useful so I will take it. Just as long as we don't end up resolving the sports issue with some sensible rules and then going, "Well good, that's that solved!" and forgetting about all the vulnerable women whose rights still need to be defended.

Honestly I have no idea.

Surely you'd think, "If he really did have such a feminine brain that he wouldn't behave as other men would, he wouldn't have been convicted of raping women and children in the first place."

Wouldn't you?

I'm kind of relieved that people have cottoned on to the way they have been strong armed into framing their disbelief as prejudice and leaning in to it.

Looking forward to the next one when the question is phrased: 'Are you a complete fascist or do you believe that you can truthfully change sex?' And the headlines the next day to declare fascism is on the rise.

Yes, it is the utter dishonesty of the way this debate is framed that gets me.

If you are going to define:

• not believing that humans can change sex
• not believing that a trans woman is a woman
• believing that woman are entitled to single sex spaces, and
• believing that the Gender Recognition Act is bad law

as being prejudiced against trans people, then of course you are going to get answers suggesting that there is growing prejudice against trans people, but only because you have basically just redefined the word "prejudice" for the purposes of your silly survey.

Like so many other words have been redefined.

You can redefine blue as pink, or some shades of blue as pink, all you like, but people still know what blue and pink look like. Unless you succeed in teaching the next generation not to recognise blue and pink, in which case we're all fucked. And that does seem to be the goal.

"when did it change from transsexuals and cross dressers to transgender? It seemed to suddenly tip over and become #nodebate in a nanosecond."

Ngram viewer says, around 2002 (term "transgender" becomes prevalent) and around 2010 (begin of exponential growth of term "transgender" ). One can probably find out what happened at the respective points.
books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transsexual%2C+transgender&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

My god the irony from someone so totally instrumental in the current situation

I think every person who worked for Stonewall around the time they realised that LGB people had or were soon to achieve completely equal rights under the law and were accepted by the vast majority of people, and decided to shift the focus to "TQ+" in order to justify their own continued employment, has driven this and is profiting from it.

If there were no transphobia, people like Nancy Kelley really would be out of a job, hence the vested interest in defining an increasing number of completely mainstream views and scientific facts as "transphobia".

For some time, and still to a large extent, people didn't really appreciate what was going on in schools and with children who were adopting trans identities; especially people who had older and/or grown up children and grandchildren.

Many people are relatively shielded from what is going on in youth culture - unless their own grandchild suddenly declares such an identity ( see many MPs, authors, journalists, media people, middle class therapists...)

Even if we imagine it's prejudice in the sense of irrational bigotry that has increased...

A media company, or other organisation or individual, doesn't automatically become morally blameworthy just because they helped "drive" something.

You would need to argue for irresponsible or dishonest behaviour.

And of course that could be fired right back at the LGBT groups.

Thanks @Delphin 2002 to 2012 really is a nanosecond in time when changing established but not regularly used language.

That's what I find so depressing when people say stuff like 'it was sports that peaked me!' while simultaneously admitting that they didn't really care (despite knowing!) about males being placed in the female prison estate. Those who didn't know, fair enough. But for the ones that did, it feels like women in prison just weren't seen as important enough to care about.
I hold my hand up. I didn't really know (thanks to the quiet press) and whilst I wasn't comfortable with a man being in the female estate I naively assumed they would be away from the female population, not quite in solitary but a small wing for the more vulnerable. I never even gave a thought to the prison officers having to do body searches as I, again naively, assumed a male officer would be doing it. I assumed many things because the press weren't up in arms over a really bad government decision and they normally would have been. I am really, really starting to get angry with the press outlets now. They are complicit in these crimes against women.

It’s things like this that have made me stop and question if surveys or statistics can even be trusted anymore. I remember when statistics where considered a great way to gather information. Now they are manipulated or funded by shady resources.

Well yes I would, but then I think the strategy of putting men in women’s prisons in order to prove it’s safe to allow men access to all other women’s spaces is rank idiocy.

It is.

But even if you were a naive idiot enough to believe that you could do that and prove that said men were lovely and wonderful and would be sweet little lambs to the women trapped with them, you'd have thought that discovering that women were being raped would end your tolerance for the strategy.

Particularly when you discovered that the reaction from the political trans lobby to said rapes and assaults and distressed women was to shrug, say it didn't matter and that the men are fine so there's no problem.

How was it some lovely person here put it on a thread? Those rapes are just collateral damage all worth it for the 'greater good'.

You'd think at that point any sane person would realise they were dealing with batshit to the point of pathology and back away fast. And realise that the people planning this knew perfectly well that those men would harm those women and were trying to force this to be just a normal part of a woman's lot. No conscience, no capacity to see women as human.

What we're seeing is a growing 'prejudice' against queer theory.