What's going on with Genspect?

[MalagaNights]

I've seen Stella O'Malley tweet about being unfairly attacked.
I've seen a weird exchange from James Lindsay about feminists trying to take down Genspect.

But I can't work out what's happened or who is fighting with who.

Any ideas?

Except when it comes to KJK.

I read it as someone using speech to text. I could be wrong though.

KJK isn't my personal cup of tea but I have never, under any posting name, dissed her because I recognise that she reaches women that WPUK and Julie Bindel will never reach and we need every woman (and man) we can get.

But thinking about it KJK and Uhler have similar styles. They just let it flow, often not in a hugely joined up or thought-through way, and they end up saying things that perhaps they didn't intend to, or things that can be interpreted very differently depending on the way you read them.

It's a crying shame that Uhler, in particular, with his very specialised knowledge, can't cut all the surrounding verbiage and chest-beating and personal stuff and just present the clinical evidence. He'd be very effective. A three-hour interview? Really? Sometimes style undercuts substance.

Seems that in the clamour to be the go-to on "GC" issues, two things have happened:

1. We've started to talk ourselves into GI as a belief. It isn't. It's never been tested and the chances of it becoming legally protected are definitely questionable. This is becoming a regular feature in GC commentary and it needs to be challenged each time we see it.

1. Safeguarding discussions have been made smaller, and swept aside. This board used to feature a lot on safeguarding and now it's much more GC-focused. We've been influenced by the loose group of feminists who collectively benefit from waving GC belief about in discussions.

The more we pin everything on GC belief, the further away from Sex we are both moved, and we move ourselves. The further away from Sex we are, the harder it is for safeguarding to be meaningful.

An example would be these awful "universal" toilets with floor to ceiling doors. We need toilets segregated by sex (born sex not bits of paper sex) for privacy and dignity.

We need gaps under the doors so people can see if anyone has collapsed inside.

We need to be able to deal with sanitary wrappings without men hearing us.

But pinning everything on GC beliefs pushes us further from arguing for our Sex. And in the case of transing minors, the further we are from this, the harder it is to maintain a focus on who should not be at the table.

To circle back to the most recent points made in this thread: men with fetishes SHOULD NOT BE AT THE TABLE. We don't need them, we don't want them, they bring us nothing. And their influence pushes children further away from being safeguarded. In fact to go even further back in this thread, it pushes vulnerable people towards men with fetishes.

Frankly I wonder not only how they afford it but what this next conference of Genspect's will be like. And whether some go-to GC people will wish they'd not focused so much on nebulous beliefs, but picked up more about safeguarding. We shall see.

It worries me how many of the ‘GC’ tribunal wins the claimant stresses how tolerant they are of GI. They want to win so want to make themselves look ‘reasonable’ but each time these compromises nudge us further away from being able to speak the truth.

Those are interesting perspectives, Rex and Saffron.

I wonder if they deserve their own thread? I'm not sure I fully grasp them tbh, but my brain often takes a long time to percolate!

The problem has been in dealing with a captured system the ‘politic’ campaigners started from a position of compromise; using false pronouns, agreeing with the idea of poor transsexuals, and GI belief (which Rex has given me food for thought on). This may seem diplomatic, small steps etc. but traps them into a position that landed us with this mess in the first place.

@ResisterRex - I consider a ‘belief’ something which someone holds to be true, irrespective of objective verification.

Some people believe in fairies and sprites, some people believe in intelligent design, some people believe life after death, some people believe in reincarnation, some people believe there is only physical reality and nothing supernatural, some people believe we all have a gender identity.

My personal take is that we should tolerate a multiplicity of beliefs and faiths in a free society, but we should not base laws on any entity which cannot be physically proven.

But of course feminists should be concerning themselves only with matters of sex and not getting wrapped up in some postmodern mind pretzel trying to establish a hierarchy of beliefs. Feminists are concerned with material reality. But ‘gender critical’ people are not necessarily coming from a feminist perspective.

I find these in fights over differences of opinion on evolving unclear issues to be baffling & tiresome.

Why can't we debate the differences instead of tearing down individuals who are taking a different position?

I admire Stella O'Malley, Julie Bindel, KJK, Benjamin Boyce, Graham Lineman etc as brave individuals prepared to speak up and take a lot of abuse for what they believe.

I don't agree with all of them all of the time.
But then on some of the issues I'm not sure what I think, or how we resolve it, or my views are/have/may shift.

Tbh I just don't think I get tribalism, so I don't think I feel the need to keep establishing boundaries for who I agree with or like, I can take it much more topic to topic, issue to issue.

I find GC tribalism as boring as any other kind.

This is interesting and something I've thought about.

I understand that the legal cases have had to pragmatically use the law available & the system but it's meant conceding some things that I think leave the door open to situations I'm not comfortable with.

I think Rex means that GI beliefs meet the Grainger criteria and are therefore protected beliefs. Maya ‘accepted’ them as a protected belief in order to argue her own absence of belief but they have never been actually tested in court. Adam’s vs ERCC judgement made it clear that the GI beliefs exhibited there were extreme which would suggest not protected. The Grainger criteria for a belief to be protected require that the belief ”be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others” which would appear to be clearly not the case.

I think what needs to happen is as things get corrected the ‘old guard’ of GC have to step away and let those not trapped by earlier argument become the louder voices. This may seem harsh to those who feel they were on the front line and want to feel the satisfaction of having shifted opinion to their position, but however successful we were at getting the troops off the beaches at Dunkirk, it took D-Day to win the war.

Yes: I did mean GI isn't Grainger tested, and I do agree about having another thread.

There now appear to be fault lines. If so then I think we need to understand them and how they impact real women and children. We need to return to a focus on safeguarding - which this board used to have loads of discussions on.

Let's think if the NSPCC James Makings incident happened now, or the dice game was discovered now, or the Girl Guides becoming mixed sex was reported now, what use would GC belief be? It's of no use whatsoever. And a relentless focus on "feminism" is also useless. We need to argue for our Sex and we need to support safeguarding for our children, and for vulnerable women.

Like it or not, feminism is a set of beliefs (even an ideology, some might say) and it's open to interpretation. We need clarity and reality, not navel gazing endless essays tweets and glossing over reality with politeness about pronouns.

I'm not sure why that needs to happen?

There are some key points a broad coalition can agree on and campaign for:
Sex matters in law
Single sex spaces and legislation
Not Transing kids
No gender ideology in schools

Then there will always remain issues where that coalition splinters and can't agree. And some of those issues will fall into personal choice/ political leaning/ religious beliefs rather than legal campaign:

Men in dresses at work
Boys in dresses
Drag
Adults transitioning
Sex education in schools
Whether gender is an oppressive social construct.
Feminism generally.
And others?

I'm happy to work with people on the group 1 issues even if they disagree with me on any group 2 issues.

Absolutely agree that we need to emphasise safeguarding in our arguments. I wish Kemi Badenoch had mentioned safeguarding when she was doing the rounds to promote the Tories’ election campaign pledge re clarifying the Equality Act to mean biological sex. Her legalistic points were correct but she neglected to mention the holes in safeguarding that a less strict interpretation of the Act has caused.

And others

Gender recognition certificates - that it is ok for some men to pretend to be women, and hide the fact that they are men, in certain circumstances

Destroy the meaning of female language by using it for men.

I wish Kemi Badenoch had mentioned safeguarding when she was doing the rounds to promote the Tories’ election campaign pledge re clarifying the Equality Act to mean biological sex.

I agree. I also think the EHRC has got parts of this wrong and should be deferring to safeguarding experts in some areas. Or at least consulting them. I wonder if KB did not mention it as it's not her remit, and would risk having a complaint made against her before officially on the ballot paper? But I'm guessing

I think that would be a group 1 issue within consensus?
It comes under sex matters in law?
If you didn't believe that then you would have no aligned with any GC people?

I think an area where difference will persist and has to be lived with is in personal use of preferred/ requested pronouns.
Although a decision on how this is managed in schools and workplaces is required.

My personal take is that we should tolerate a multiplicity of beliefs and faiths in a free society, but we should not base laws on any entity which cannot be physically proven.

That’s really well put, @ThatLuckyDog And I agree that a lot of women, who are only alerted to the dangers of extremist gender ideology in the last 6 years or so, don’t necessarily have a longer understanding of feminist ideas, philosophies, theories or history of activism.

But that’s OK - to each according to her needs, from each according to her abilities.

Varieties of feminism exist in a broad grass roots movement and there’s room for a multiplicity of views and actions.

This board used to feature a lot on safeguarding

Quite a few of the safeguarding posters were banned weren’t they? Though on the thread about that Family sex show, there was an amazing poster discussing grooming and CSA that opened my eyes. Explaining how grooming manipulates by using the language of pleasure and the subsequent confusion and harm it creates for children.

The talk about ‘beliefs’ surely came from the Forstater judgement, which has become the only legal basis for anyone who believes in sex to be protected at work. At the time I thought how odd that knowing the material reality of biology had to be somehow transformed into a ‘belief’ in order not to lose your job.

I don’t know JB’s whole history but years ago in this whole debate wasn’t there a perceived need not to be seen as or dismissed as transphobic in order to be heard? On the #bekind ascendancy. In those days having DH agree they weren’t a woman was revelatory and perhaps the likes of JB, I don’t know, perhaps even appreciated DH saying that?

Certainly it’s only been because of the increasing transgressions of TW in sports and prisons and undeniable safeguarding failures of young people that we’re getting back to sex and safeguarding. Though I feel like GI and trans inclusivity is a race still running.

A long winded way of saying that going back to sex and safeguarding is a way of refocusing the conversation.

Like it or not, feminism is a set of beliefs (even an ideology, some might say) and it's open to interpretation. We need clarity and reality, not navel gazing endless essays tweets and glossing over reality with politeness about pronouns.

Thing is, feminism/s were/are about a lot more than combatting extremist gender ideology. And the women some posters are suggesting are the "old Guard" who need to step away, such as Julie Bindel, have always fought on a much broader frontier than simply combatting the social/legal impacts of gender ideology.

And one woman's navel-gazing is another woman's plan for action. All political movements need both theory and practice - strategy & tactics, if you like.

However, I think where we all can agree is that we do not accept the redefinition of what it is to be female and a girl or woman. As one organisation pithily and effectively puts it: "Nothing about us without us."

I don’t know JB’s whole history but years ago in this whole debate wasn’t there a perceived need not to be seen as or dismissed as transphobic in order to be heard?

Yup. (And Ms Bindel has been an activist feminist for over 30 years).

But those of us who've been hauled over the coals of a disciplinary, or had it threatened, or lost our jobs or livelihood will know what it costs in all sorts of ways, to speak out as Julie Bindel has. And she's been doing it for a very long time.

we do not accept the redefinition of what it is to be female and a girl or woman

I'm not sure about this. I think this is where splits are. If you are OK with the GRA then you do accept a redefinition of female. And this is when effective safeguarding ceases to be effective.

Losing a focus on safeguarding is how things like the dice game end up in schools. We thought sex education would be a good idea but its execution has made children less safe. Tackling that from a perspective other than safeguarding is the wrong approach in my view.

My point is broadly @ResisterRex that feminism is more than protection of safeguarding. There's a bigger picture about the analysis of the position of women within the power structures of our society.

But that where most (maybe all?) feminists converge is on the idea of girls/women as a sex class. I tend to agree with Professor Stock on the "legal fiction" of the GRA.

I actually started to feel that the safeguarding rationale was being strectched to the point of breaking. Safeguarding was being used when it was several steps away from any direct harm, or very tangential, and it gets hard to legislate when you reach that point.

That's what the orginal Genspect hoohas is about: can we legialate about men in dresses? which men in dresses?

I think we can only aim for unity on legislation with a very clear rationale, and the greyer areas will need to be decided through social contract, personal decisions, & a variety of options e.g. schools decide uniform policy, parents choose.