Trans archdeacon story in the Telegraph – and my dilemma

[RevUlsion]

The Telegraph reports that a vicar is being investigated for calling trans archdeacon Rachel Mann a ‘bloke’.

Comments from Telegraph readers are predictable: ‘Well he is a bloke, and the Church is selling out to woke ideology’. Comments from gender critical people too: ‘Here we go again: another man pretending to be a woman.’

On the other side, progressives inside and outside the Church are outraged at what they see as disrespect and bigotry.

My dilemma is that I’m strongly gender critical, but I suspect a small number of people have real gender dysphoria (as opposed to AGP, sexual motives for entering women’s spaces etc). If anybody has real gender dysphoria, Rachel Mann does.

Somebody with long-term dysphoria who goes as far as having their bits removed as an adult, as Rachel has, instinctively seems to me quite different from men with penises and wigs demanding access to women’s spaces.

Interested to know what others think about this distinction.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/16/church-of-england-investigates-vicar-trans-archdeacon/

Why do we need to 'value and support' a man with dysphoria? Any more than any other group? Anorexics, say, or people with BIID, or 'trans race' people?

I have no animosity towards them but I don't understand why this group is being made into a sacred caste that deserves special treatment.

@Didoreththeterf, thanks, that’s really interesting. My understanding, in response to subsequent posts, is that gender dysphoria isn’t limited to a discomfort with social roles, but is also a visceral unease with the body, too - is that right? Just thinking aloud, but has the term gender dysphoria itself encouraged the unfurling of the trans umbrella to embrace lesbian tomboys etc.? Was the gender part of the term initially used as a euphemism for sex - sex dysphoria? Should we be distinguishing between sex & gender dysphoria - the one an unbearable dissociation from one’s sexed body, the other a discomfort with gendered social constructs? It would make it easier to facilitate debate about any unquestioning adoption of medicalised pathways for the latter.

I was wondering the same thing.

Social conditioning to "be kind" at work again, I think.

Yes, here it is.

This says it very well I think.

Of course, its all about arses.

Yes, here it is.
Thought so. The envying a teenage girl's arse poem puts an end to any debate about whether he's AGP or not.

😁

I sometimes think I've been doing all this for too long.

Yep!

I'm now wondering what Old Crone googled to find it.
"Trans vicar arse poem"?

I disagree that the articles suggests he was being deliberately offensive. It said

^The Rev Murphy, in a 32-minute-long YouTube video, criticised the CofE for putting “a radical rainbow activist” in a “position of high authority in a diocese”.
The Rev Murphy, who quit the CofE a month after the broadcast, had said in reaction to the appointment: “Now you may wonder ‘is that really newsworthy, Brett?’^
“You may roll your eyes, if you are a complementarian, that another feminist is getting a prominent high-ranking position in the CofE, but this is worse than that.
“The Rev Rachel Mann is in fact, biologically, a bloke, who identifies and lives as a woman.”
He goes on to question whether the appointment is “positioning” the Rev Mann to become the CofE’s first transsexual bishop and questions how she would deal with a member of her congregation who sees her lifestyle as in “complete rebellion against God’s word”.
“So what you are seeing here is someone who is a radical rainbow activist being put in a position of high authority in a diocese.”

He is merely state a fact. Remember a third of people think a transwoman is a female who identifies as a male rather than vice versa. Facts may seem blunt but against this backdrop of obsfucation (including she to refer to Rachel) you need clear language.

The specifics of the undercurrent of misogyny of the C of E are very well-documented. Four examples below. However, at no point did I say women were specifically excluded from applying for anything. The C of E doesn't work like that, which was my point.

Easy reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/female-clergy-face-institutionalised-discrimination-campaigners-claim

https://theconversation.com/as-metoo-harassment-claims-hit-the-church-of-england-its-an-institution-still-steeped-in-sexism-86884

Academic:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050303220952868

https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/24736/

Sometimes I think it's nothing but turtles, all the way down.

OK, thanks. Will have a read of these.

I ask because my own experience is that the C of E at all levels goes out of its way to encourage women to apply for jobs, and is desperate to appoint women to senior posts.

Ew.

This.

OldCrone has managed to dig some up (thanks 🙏)

I thought it was all long vanished and sanitised.

There was plenty more, but that one was particularly grim.

Ew.

Quite. Still think he's just genuinely dysphoric, and definitely not... that other thing we're not supposed to mention?

Archdeacon you say? Well… that is interesting. Regardless of rank, they are a male despite the insistence that they are ‘a woman’.

That poem is disgusting in so many ways. What a vile way to think.

Rachel's demand to be called a woman is an act of blatant and shameful misogyny. We should see it as such and that should be the main focus in this analysis.

OP; there is still some sentiment over; true trans for those transwomen who rid themselves of their genitals .
But at my lesbian social group there was such a person, I know because he informed us loudly and yes he was no different than the archdeacon....save your pity

^^^ This