Sandi Toksvig "doesn't get it", poor love....

[HootyMcBooby]

Sandi Toksvig slams anti-trans bigots ‘claiming to be radical feminists’ (msn.com)

"I could weep. I don’t get it. It’s beyond me"

Yeah Sandi, I don't get it either.
How is it possible that men can say they are women and have unfettered access to females in their safe spaces?
How is it possible that we are medicating children against puberty?
How it is possible that a woman can be raped on a female hospital ward by a man claiming to be a woman and then gaslighted to be told a man was not on the ward?
How is it possible that men are claiming titles, sponsorships and medals in women's sports?
How is it possible women and females are being literally erased from so many spheres of life, including health/medicine and marketing campaigns? How come the same isn't happening to males?

As a lesbian do you like "lady penis"?
Or do you actually know that men remain men whatever surgeries they may have had, and are just on the "be kind" train?

Have you even THOUGHT about the issues this ideology ushers in?

Actually you don't need to answer that.
It's obvious.

I was talking about the deliberate decision to have children with minimal involvement of their father.

I know relationships are not always easy. I don't disagree with same sex parenting or any other arrangement that works to care properly for kids.

I am saying that children who don't have their dad (or their mum) in their life have a gap and look to fill that gap. We all used to know this and seem to have forgotten as a society. The optimal start for kids is to know their lineage and have a connection to it.

I can't say what I mean better than @RedToothBrush did at 18:01 above.

Once a family is created, the parents can only do their best and I know people do on the whole. I'm talking really about putting the desires of would be parents ahead of what we really know is best for kids when planning a family.

I know of several kids also with absentee fathers through the fault of the father. They feel it. I'm not having a go at women raising kids on their own or within a lesbian relationship. Far from it. But I am saying consider that kids really need to know their parents.

The thing that struck me most about Toksvig's comments is that she hadn't followed the debate at all. She hasn't understood that the issue is not about trans women per se, but about self-ID, and the idea that any man who says he is a woman must be treated as one.

Secondly, she hasn't grasped that this is not about toilets, but about all places or activities where access is determined or constrained by sex: changing rooms, hospital wards, sports, domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres, prisons and certain job roles (eg carers, sonographers carrying out mammograms).

If she hasn't understood these two fundamental points, then she can't have followed the debate of the last seven or eight years at all. She must have missed all the books by people like Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce, all the articles by people like Janice Turner and Suzanne Moore, all the public debates by everyone from Standing for Women to Woman's Place UK, all the podcasts, all the news stories, the furore about the Scottish parliament passing a gender self-ID law and the subsequent embarrassment over the trans-identifying rapist Isla Bryson, followed rapidly by Nicola Sturgeons's resignation.

For someone like her, an educated person in the public eye, who was involved in setting up a political party dedicated to women's rights, not to be aware of this stuff is quite extraordinary. You really have to work very hard to not have taken any of this in.

For a woman's party to work so hard at ignoring all of the the issues around consent is a huge red flag.
No woman can consent to make single sex facilities mixed sex on behalf of other women, and attempting to shame other women for saying 'no' is coercive.

The thing that Alison Hammond, Mel and Sue and Noel Fielding get about the Bake Off (and even Matt Lucas to an extent), and ST seems not to have got, is that it's less about the cakes and more about the personalities and the bakers' experiences. Having a laugh, supporting each other and making connections. The human thing.
For someone hugely intelligent, she seems very (perhaps wilfully?) dim about that. It's interesting because all the above named are also very intelligent; but they all understand the brief for presenting the show and what its point is

The thing that struck me most about Toksvig's comments is that she hadn't followed the debate at all.

I think its more a case of wanting to drag the talking points to more convenient talking points.

If she talks about being kind, toilets and linking it to the issues gay people faced in the past, she can avoid the realities of AGP, how easy it is for men to identify as women, children been taught that they must see a man as a woman, and children attending gender clinics.

She wants to pretend all of that doesnt exist, because if she did, she couldnt sit with eddie izzard in what amounts to a public information lecture and listen to his struggles and wants, nodding along like a fool.

She has to pretend that the biggest issue is izzard not being able to use the mens loos, and its fine for girls to tolerate his presence, because anything else is far too dark for her.

I think its more a case of wanting to drag the talking points to more convenient talking points.

I agree this is a more likely explanation than her not having followed the debate. If she reads the news at all, she must know what's going on. But if that's the case, she is guilty of deliberate dishonesty by pretending that the debate is about a small group of lovely people called trans women (as opposed to the much wider group known as men), and it is entirely about their access to toilets. So who is she trying to kid? Herself - or everyone else?

There are several MSM articles from a few years back that quote from ST speaking on a Loose Ends podcast. I'll put the DM link here as it isn't paywalled. But there is a Times article too. All say she was a student at Girton https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8681143/Sandi-Toksvig-nearly-kicked-Cambridge-University-having-girlfriend-sleep-over.html Which is neither here nor there really. But I just remembered having read this.

Joody, I do agree kids should know their fathers if at all poss.
I was raised by my mum & gran,
When I was young I didn't feel a gap, it was just my normal. (My father wasn't, and still isn't, physically or emotionally safe to be around)- I had to know this from a young age due to contact cases, bit I never took it as my fault. It helped that my godmother was also basically a single parent so I didn't feel like the only one. He was never involved, so I didn't feel abandoned as I would have probs done if he had & then walked away. Also, my childless uncle acted to some extent as surrogate father.
Now I'm older, I think that children will always have a bio father (or mother) so it's best they're loving & involved in some way, but if they can't be, there isn't necessarily a hole. I sometimes think it would've been nice to have a loving father like some of my friends do, but then others have ones who are distant, & one has abandoned his family entirely. So ultimately, it would've been good for me, personally, to have an involved father, but I'm v happy w the family I have.
I think it's v different for adopted children or children w some other contact w their birth parent/s before a separation. Surrogacy is also v different as there is a physical connection w the mother before the separation. Sperm donation, on the other hand, doesn't have this, but there are still issues obvs.

I suspect sandi wouldnt see isla bryson as female, a woman, or even trans. But she's in a position where she doesn't have to legalise the difference between bryson and her good friend izzard.

If there was solid safeguarding around identifying as a woman or getting a GRC, would izzard get one, given his chapter about using public toilets when 13 year olds are there? Would Jordan on QI get one given his stage show?

What happens then? If TW pose no danger, why cant we bring in safeguarding? It's because if we do, she knows good friends wouldn't pass the test. Best pretend 13 year old girls arent in any risk with grown men using toilets at the same time, don't mention swimming changing rooms or sports groups when middle aged men want to get fit by joining the teenage league.

We can see from lots of celebrity scandals that other celebrities aren't really critised for not seeing or speaking up, but they can be blacklisted for doing so.

Sandi has just swapped her thinking skills for her media career. But she gets marketed as an intellectual, so shes fine with that.

She’s just so arrogant and authoritarian as evidenced by the undemocratic life time presidency of WEP nonsense

Shut up. Let’s join together and fight stuff that actually needs fighting.

feels like if I joined together with her it wouldn’t be collaboration, I’d very much be doing as I was told I think. So no thanks

I have never liked Toksvig. The women's equality party which she Co founded was an absolute joke.

Article here

www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-is-sandi-toksvig-to-lecture-radical-feminists/

@AliasGrace47 Thank you so much for sharing that experience. Where I live it is a common one and I agree with everything you say. I'm not at all saying that families aren't supportive and successful with an absent father. I have very similar experiences, as most of us do now, to you in my immediate and wider family.

That's not what I was saying though. I was talking about the decision making, before creating a family, being optimal. As a society we want men to be involved and responsible for families. It is best for our society if that happens, as the default.

I really appreciate you sharing. I am really glad that your family life is so positive. Wish you well.

Absolutely...both gave me the creeps. Neither were comfortable in the roll at all. I love Noel Fielding, though.

I always feel that Noel truly cares about the purple on the show. You see him helping out to get final touches on, checking in and consoling when contestants are struggling. He genuinely seems like a very good human. Unlike Lucas who seems to be about Lucas.

I loved watching Sandi though, so it's pretty disappointing to hear her actual thoughts about baking and the show. Baking has been way for women who were kept out of the "elevated arts" and out of professional culinary institutions to express their skill and creativity for hundreds if not thousands of years. Women who were denied education could still pass down their recipes, even if only orally/by demonstration, even if they were denied the opportunity to read and write. For a so called feminist to not have a feminist understanding of women's history in baking is shameful.

*purpose, not purple!

Tho Noel looks quite fetching in that shade [admits to crushing a bit on Mr. Fielding]

I think right now is a good time to revisit Toksvig's advice to breastfeeding women from earlier on in the thread.

Not all women have children, and not all women choose to breastfeed. Nevertheless, the humans on this earth who are disadvantaged by suboptimal social attitudes to breastfeeding are exclusively female, and breastfeeding and motherhood are thus feminist issues.

ST is truly a wolf in sheep's clothing. She knows it, we know it.

I've seen parts of the interview reproduced in other news sites. The ones I've seen have cut the guff about trans, leaned into the implied disdain for Noel and reproduced the kind things he's said about her. She's not coming across particularly well.

If it really bothers you there’s a toilet some place else. Go there. Shut up.

Is this saying that single-sex toilets are a good thing, then? Or does she think they shouldn't exist?

That breastfeeding 'advice' is bizarre. While the baby is latched on, you won't see much boob unless you're really looking, so not really any need to cover up.

When it's hard to latch and the baby pops off, yeah you're gonna see nipple, but draping a muslin over the baby's face is NOT going to help - I vaguely remember trying to hold a muslin with my chin, while one hand was on the breast and the other holding the child.

" If you are being discreet no one should mind." The implication being if anyone minds, it's because you weren't discreet enough.

She really is either dim, dismissive, or dishonest.

There's a sense that you can be a woman, with women's biology, but not too much.

It's still conditional.

I remember this. They stayed in a cottage or cottages together didn't they? I posted tongue-in-cheek idly wondering whether Sandi would consider Izzard as a potential sexual partner now he was a woman and was deleted because someone was outraged at the suggestion and thought I was disgusting. But if Sandi really does believe men can be women (and presumably thus be lesbians), as it would seem from the article in the OP, and if she really gets on as well as she appeared to with Izzard, then surely it would be transphobic to say the very idea was disgusting?

Of course it would. Which is why she absolutely does not believe it.

Does she never give a thought to young lesbians? Whose online spaces, bars and clubs have all been infiltrated by men?

she lives in the same street as Sally Hines doesn't she?

in a position of extreme privilege where she's insulated from, well, pretty much everything through little to no merit of her own.

I mean you can't help where you come from, but at least you can have the insight not to bang on about the privilege of others as if it's some kind of gotcha that proves your mad opinions are right

If it really bothers you there’s a toilet some place else. Go there. Shut up.

Is the suggestion that women, when seeing a man in the public toilet, should quietly leave and find another?

She can't mean that some toilets are single sex, and some are 'women and men with gender'. Because it would be necessary to be able to distinguish these toilets. Sandi must know that men with gender would not tolerate being excluded from some womens toilets.

Saying "Go there. Shut up." suggests to me she knows this is not a reasonable situation, but she cannot think of a better one, and is getting irritated with that fact.

Does she never give a thought to young lesbians? Whose online spaces, bars and clubs have all been infiltrated by men?

No, she can't possibly care about young lesbians. She doesn't care that almost all lesbian community groups have been driven underground and that hundreds, possibly thousands, of young lesbians have had double mastectomies and may have damaged their bodies permanently with cross-sex hormones because there are no visible young lesbian role models and no lesbian scene for them to find their tribe with. Well, none that doesn't include men larping as lesbians.

I used to know Sandy 40 years ago and I knew she'd had a rocky time at university because of her same-sex attraction and was sympathetic towards her. But she is so privileged and insulated, as others have said. Her father was a famous media/ TV presenter in Europe and worked at the BBC: she was a nepo baby.

If it really bothers you there’s a toilet some place else. Go there. Shut up.

Except the likes of India Willoughby has said they will go out of their way to go to any female only toilet.

There's not a toilet 'someplace else', when for some men it's nothing but a magnet.