Zoe Williams -

[Sizzlysausage]

Kate doesn’t want Prince George to go to Eton – and for once I agree with her | Zoe Williams | The Guardian

Sorry if there is another thread on this article by Zoe Williams which is rather extraordinary on a number of counts, but especially confusing is the following:

"Which isn’t to say that nothing good came of it – my experience of an all-girls’ school, followed by twice as long as a trustee of a prison charity, informed a lot of my politics, including why I became a transgender ally. Before I had thought seriously about trans rights, and the immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life, I thought: “Wait, are you saying all-female spaces are kinder? Purer? Inherently less violent? More supportive? Are you joking? Are you out of your mind?”"

I think I might be struggling with my comprehension today - but I don't think gender critical feminists are necessarily saying all-female spaces are kinder or purer - although, yes, almost certainly inherently less violent. It seems like a conflation of different points flung together to construct a straw man argument and entirely misunderstanding safeguarding as a concept in the process. Is this deliberate? Or is she not able to see this? Baffling.

😂It's all a bit Kent 'and I for one welcome our new insect overlords' Brockman, isn't it?!

Glad (in a way) that it's not just me who is baffled. I feel like this piece could be used in one of those reading comprehension tests where you have to identify failure(s) of logic. The notion that she had a shit time at her single sex school and therefore there should be no single sex spaces is really quite a stretch.

Another issue here is that she mentions never feeling privileged for having attended a private school. I get that in one sense but the point about privilege is that it is nuanced and not either/or but often quite paradoxical (ie there is both privilege in attending a private school which she seems to have leveraged quite effectively in career terms and it also made her unhappy which is bad).

I think this is significant as trans allies also aim to place trans-identifying people at the bottom of the privilege hierarchy (when in fact a white educated trans-identifying man might actually be towards the other end, in many though admittedly perhaps not all ways).

So she thinks that the thing that made the kids she went to school with obnoxious was the fact they were girls? Not the fact that they were from a family background which made a fee-paying private school in London affordable for them?

She seems to make assumptions based on very little and then to thinks everyone MUST agree with her. I’ve seen her doing this recently on the Newspaper review on Sky News. She leaves me quite perplexed as to how any sane person could come to some of the conclusions she comes to.

Have any posters had any success in getting a response to this kind of drivel printed in the Graun letters page?

This is the crux of it. Why not just have mixed-sex spaces for everything? Prisons, changing rooms, toilets, domestic violence refuges etc.

Has she ever given any consideration to why the UN states it is a human right for women prisoners to be housed in a single-sex prison?

I just can't get my head around how it is possible for someone supposedly so intelligent to be so stupid.

Williams is bullheaded but consistent in her refusal to acknowledge her own educational privilege.

She had a row on twitter with Janice Turner, and during the course of it, she tweeted the following. Bolding mine.

Well, for one, i think it's absolute horseshit to imagine some class of "vulnerable" women who won't attend their smear test unless they're specifically invited as women. I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one. So, for two, I think you're doing that >>

thing again, where you ventriloquise your view onto some imagined "weak" woman who needs the ferocity of your protection. And I just think it's in really bad faith.

https://twitter.com/zoesqwilliams/status/1362006560118083588

I'd go as far as to say everyone with a cervix knows they have one.

LOL Zoe Williams didn’t even know she was 20 weeks pregnant https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/13/anti-natal-zoe-williams

Glad to see someone else remembered that article! Zoe Williams also didn't realise that poor eyesight was genuinely debilitating and inconvenient until she needed reading-glasses. Or that hayfever existed until her son developed it.

She seems to be someone who needs to experience something for herself to understand it exists. All her friends know what a cervix is, therefore she reasons all women do. Doubtless she'd have been the first one to ridicule women for not noticing pregnancy symptoms, if it hadn't happened to her!

She is immensely privileged and ignorant of the wider world, I can't take her seriously at all. Smartarse sophistry is not intelligence. Her alma mater charges almost £27,000 a year these days, she's not a great advert for an expensive education.

https://www.godolphinandlatymer.com/admissions/fees/

You’d think as the trustee of a prison charity she would have access to the numbers of female inmates compared to male inmates, and the number of female inmates convicted of violent offences.

Spoiler Zoe: men are more violent and more likely to offend

That pregnancy story is extraordinary. I mean, I know some women don’t know they are pregnant but at 35 and in a sexual relationship you’d think a pregnancy test would be the first thought rather than early menopause!

Argh these wretched over privileged women who don't seem to have the capacity to think things through or move off their own little hobby horse frame works.

While she's wanking on about the 'immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life' - and it is faux intellectual wanking with a dose of facebook meme sentiment complete with a picture of Piglet looking wistful - she is not talking about women with disabilities, women of different faiths and cultures, women who have been abused. She is not seeing them as 'precious' and she does not care about their capacity to have a public life at all, never mind a 'meaningful and truthful one'. That kind of privileged wankery is only for men in her mind.

I think yes, she is displaying an attitude from many naive and privileged women in their own little bubble, that her ableism and misogyny and religious intolerance and racism is all unconscious beneath a powerful belief of her own righteous enlightenment, she does not like other privileged women much, and her brownie points in her own mind all rest in being lovely to/mummying what is in her mind, 'vulnerable' men. Which is another massive aspect of her naivety. Bit of the Lady Bountifuls/Florence Nightingales going on there.

No you are right OP it doesn't make any sense and is shoehorned in to I assume appease or please a certain readership. Its quite honestly bad journalism and one of the reasons I no longer subscribe to The Guardian.

@irishfeminist This is what I was also thinking, people here have suggested she ought to be intelligent and you would think so given she is writing for a major UK broadsheet. The reality is that she is just an yet another extremely privileged person from the right kind of background. Exactly the sort of person who is is in almost every media job where they have a voice.

In the UK having that kind of background is considered better than intelligence, after all people like that are our "betters", its a rather grim aspect of British culture that is quite frankly holding us back at this point.

The stupidity of Zoe Williams on this issue is so illuminating to me, as it shows up how faux-intelligent some people with a supposedly good education really are. They know all the big words, but inside their brains there is nothing but a clown on a unicycle doing endless loops.

As a pp said, she worked with a prison and she can't see the issue there?! Wonder if she ever opined on Isla Bryson?

In which Zoe highlights some of the specific problems female prisoners face. None of which are to do with their ‘gender identity’. She’s clearly not the brightest. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/30/new-hall-womens-prison-inmates-equals

Whenever someone self proclaims as a trans ally, I automatically think they are either extremely gullible or a "do it to Julia" type.

“she's not a great advert for an expensive education.”

On the contrary, it demonstrates that the hot-housing and connections which her parents purchased via her school fees landed someone with no critical thinking ability both a place at Oxbridge and a plum job in the mainstream media.

Zoe Williams is reliably dreadful. Just one of the many Guardian commentators stealing a living.

And sooner or later you get the mention of the inevitable 'lovely trans friend' who appears to be a kind of badge of glittery social brownie points, and is used as a signal of superior status in their social circle.

There never is a lovely friend for example who has experienced severe DV and cannot now cope in a room with an unknown male and certainly cannot participate in support and counselling with a man listening and smirking in the group. Or a lovely friend who comes from an Orthodox faith who would quite like to be able to use a loo and go swimming please, or a lovely friend who is disabled and needs a same sex carer or cannot enter a mixed sex space or adapt their language and enact pretense on demand for someone else's benefit. Those kind of women hold no social status, no coolness or glitteriness that would boost social standing and are very clearly 'other'.

Margot Leadbetter snobbery for the 21st Century.

Margot Leadbetter snobbery for the 21st Century.

Too far! I won’t hear a word said against Margot.

Zoe Williams is very intellectually challenged as none of her arguments make any logical sense ever, in my experience, though I don't bother reading these days.

I'm assuming she has connections and this is why she is paid to churn out drivel which is considerable less entertaining and informative than most mumsnet posts (including AIBU).

It's clearly just Zoe taking up a fashionable position. Her book was called Bring It On, Baby: How to have a dudelike pregnancy (my emphasis). Republished as What Not to Expect When You're Expecting. Can't imagine why the change in title

Those women literally all went to another school, so she never met them.