Restoring Sanity Takes Time - Helen Joyce

[RethinkingLife]

A bracing read. I am still in a state of some despair about how long this will take. As several people have observed, in the last 10 days, the BBC (in common with other media) disseminated unscientific propaganda that male galactorrhea is better than mother’s milk, repeatedly called a deeply disturbed killer a woman while disdaining to acknowledge the alternate reality as a cat, and has publicly reprimanded Justin Webb for plain speaking that was probably helpful to many listeners.

What will it take to bring bigoted employers to heel? Part of the answer is time. During the past decade, the trans lobby has been stunningly successful in selling false analogies to HR departments: that separate toilets for men and women are like racial segregation; and that insisting people can change sex is “gay rights 2.0”.
Lazy, power-hungry HR managers and staff working in “EDI” (equality, diversity and inclusion) pronounce that the arc of the moral universe is bending towards denying sexual dimorphism, and relish imposing their will on others.
…
Imagine you’re an HR professional belatedly wondering if you’ve got the wrong end of the stick on the whole sex-gender thing. You might turn to A Practical Guide to Transgender Law by two barristers, Nicola Newbegin and transwoman Robin Moira White.
But that might not save you from serious missteps. The first edition, published before the binding Forstater judgment, enthusiastically endorsed the faulty lower court ruling. The second grudgingly acknowledged that yes, gender-critical beliefs were protected, but claimed that “manifesting” them — letting others know you held them — wasn’t.
Even before the recent string of judgments to the contrary, that was obvious nonsense. The law about freedom of belief expressly includes “manifestation”. And anyway, it takes but a moment’s thought to realise that the law can’t possibly concern beliefs that are never manifested, since it can’t reach inside the privacy of our heads.
…
At bottom, the mindset of the narcissistic identitarians joining in workplace witch-hunts is that of the Crusaders, who made converts at the point of a sword. They do not respect other people’s sovereign consciences, nor accept that their belief system is just one among many. And like the Crusaders, they need to be consigned to history.

https://thecritic.co.uk/restoring-sanity-takes-time/

Adding in a good read about the Meade and Phoenix rulings:

It actually does matter when people are either misinformed or simply lying about what a woman has said.

And as the TRAs have pointed out. HP fan fiction not likely to be consumer by those questioning their gender! Has a bit of a disconnect I think with those in that community again due to the stance of the author, which many on here will applaud, and her body of work.

Nonsense - they decided pretty quickly that they now owned Harry Potter et al and that leaching off JKR's work was the moral thing to do.

HP fan fiction not likely to be consumer by those questioning their gender!

On the basis of what research? I do read HP fanfic and non-HP fanfic. FFN might not be so bad for this, but AO3 fic with characters claiming gender identities, trans characters, characters generally espousing views we might term 'TRA views' are not usual. You mistake the negative (often vitriolic) attitudes towards JKR by such a group with negative views towards HP in general.

I'm loving the puritanical pearl clutching over fanfiction that TRAs are now going for because a notorious terf was seen reading some (for research - but IDGAF if she was reading it because she likes it, there's nothing wrong with fanfic).

The HP fanfic community is absolutely swamped with TRAS - putting in their nasty little disclaimers about how much they hate JKR and don't agree with ANY of her views... before they go on to write a story based entirely in the world she gave them. And they love to write about the importance of ao3 being an archive where anything is allowed because of freedom of speech, and how deeply disturbing things written there might be someone processing their trauma and this is a valid outlet for that, and liking to write and read dark and disturbing things does not mean you condone it in real life or are a dangerous person, and no one must ever ever kinkshame.

Fanfic is absolutely a TRA space (hence why there is a fanfic to trans pipeline, which HJ is researching)... so for them to be so morally outraged that she is reading fanfic is like they've started eating their own face. Either there is a lot of hypocrisy going on here, or HJ has just inadvertently created a massive schism within the movement, and they will end up tearing each other apart on whether fanfic is morally reprehensible or not.

😂
Your faux outrage doesn't cut it - especially given your absence on threads where safeguarding, VAWG are discussed. You know - as everyone does - that she was stalked & her privacy invaded by a creepy man desperate to find anything to discredit her. Faux attempts to smear Helen really don't cut it on here.

To repeat - the men policing women's thoughts, reading and phones are the Taliban so am a bit surprised to see that type of policing advocated for by any poster on here.

Please point out the minors who were around?

What assertions might they be Captain Disingenuous?

Children travel on trains, it's a pretty common phenomena.

So just to be clear, your take from the below is that women looking at legal material on their phones in trains are the problem in this scenario? Not a man invading a group of women's privacy? Not a man taking non consented photos of a strangers phone screen from across a train? Not a man who by his own admission, didn't speak to them at the time not because he had any awareness that he was in the wrong, but because he 'didn't want to look like a man shouting at some ladies'. Random men on public transport have the right to judge what women look at on their phone now,do they?

What 'needs to be looked into' is a man who thinks that's ok, not a woman looking at her own bloody phone.

And do they peruse the phone screens of strangers whilst doing so?

HP fan fiction not likely to be consumer by those questioning their gender!
😂😂😂😂

The number of trans boy Reg kinnies in the world disagree.

Seriously, go to tumblr. Search the "marauders" tag - it is almost entirely LGBTQIA+ anti JKR, Terfs DNI, and filled with headcanons where canonically straight men are now in gay relationships, but where one of them has been massively feminised beyond all recognition. Or is a trans boy - but its a secret and the relationship is still gay.

It is a fandom almost entirely populated with girls identifying as boys and writing their wish fulfilment fantasies into their slash fanfics. This is what HJ is researching.

You embarrass yourself when you clearly display how much you do not know what you are talking about.

Some will and some won't, that's why it's best to be mindful about what is on your screen whilst in a public space.

Look at the photos. I couldn't read someone's phone from that distance. HJ had her privacy invaded by an entitled male who thinks he is free to do that because she has the temerity not to agree with his beliefs, and you think she is in the wrong, not him. PPs comparison to the Taliban was apt.

Also, there was no outrage targeted at the woman (?) who wrote it. Because they all love that stuff.

Let's be honest, is it the sexual content that's an issue for activists or the bit about it being Evil Harry Potter?

You’re right. It’s font size which is the issue here.

No indeed, the issue is entitled males trying to police women's perfectly legal behaviour. It's good you recognise that.

I have no idea if it was the text she found arousing, but based on what she said, it’s probably something very similar. I mean, she’s still reading it two years later, so she must be preparing a treatise in it.

And when I say “have sex” I mean “fuck”. With all the porn tropes of slapping, spitting, reaming, choking; the same gut-churning emphasis on the volume of ejaculate and other bodily secretions; the same very young women portrayed as cock-hungry collections of holes to be not just penetrated but “rammed” and “destroyed”; the same miserable, degrading, joyless, loveless stuff that has taken up residence in far too many young men’s heads via online porn, and that growing numbers of young women report is destroying their love lives. It inspires a mixture of disgust and arousal—a powerful and particularly unpleasant emotional state

Will get back to those who asked about discrimination in the workplace on Monday.

I have no idea if it was the text she found arousing

So you just lied then.

I think some posters here are confusing 'research' with 'leisure'. You can find yourself reading horrible stuff because you're researching a topic. If it's in the public domain, you're allowed to, no matter how hideous it is. You can read it on the bloody train: nobody was going to be able to see what HJ was reading without behaving like a Stasi-esque creep.

So can we return to the topic of the thread from yet another fucking tiresome derail by our resident TRAs, who are resorting to ad hominem attacks rather than discussing the points raised in the article?

A few months back a female detransitioner posted on Twitter that GC women were still talking about young lesbians transitioning. She said things had changed and it's now young straight girls who want to become gay boys, influenced by fanfiction.
I read and love HP fanfiction but only m/f or f/f because I'm a lesbian. The mainstream f/f are great. Really nice portrayals of women and relationships. It's sad these young girls delude themselves. Gay men love pen*s and they don't want women...
( I can always tell the male written f/f fics crude porn, no feelings or character development)

Is that a quote there in italics? Where is it from? Who wrote it?

Helen Joyce wrote it a few years ago. She's researching this subject now - presumably for a larger project.

Thanks @PrimalLass. I found some links here.
https://sex-matters.org/posts/press-releases/statement-on-helen-joyce-and-fanfic/

And as the TRAs have pointed out. HP fan fiction not likely to be consumer by those questioning their gender! Has a bit of a disconnect I think with those in that community again due to the stance of the author, which many on here will applaud, and her body of work.

Well this is bollocks. It was a trans-identifying friend who introduced me to Harry Potter fanfiction when I was 17. Most of it is written by TRAs now, they just put disclaimers at the top about how they hate JK.

The fanfiction in question has now been taken down by the author who didn't like the attention, but before she did, she clarified that she supported the trans community.

Seeing as the trans activist on twitter linked to it, I had a look. It was a standard Draco/Hermione fall in lust, before discovering their deeper emotions and falling in love plot, ending in Happily Ever After, with Draco and Hermione's wedding in the final chapter. It was set in sixth year or an alternate seventh year.

The grammar was entirely typical for ffnet, which is to say it was terrible. Mid-sentence tense changes and total ignorance of how to punctuate dialogue were the least of it.

Sex scenes were typical for a teenage writer trying to compensate for personal inexperience by reflecting crudeness from whatever she'd been reading elsewhere.

Helen Joyce is a writer and journalist of skill and erudition. She wasn't reading it for personal entertainment, because no-one of her literary calibre could; the grammar was that bad. I would have skipped over that fic when I was 17, and I had considerably lower standards then!

The quote DadJoke keeps posting on various threads is from Joyce's last article two years ago, so it will not relate to the fic the trans activist claimed to have seen her reading, because it wasn't that flipping long. It was only 23 short chapters long. You think she reads that slowly?

For comparison, I have today read a 40 chapter fic set in post-series 7 Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writer for that was also a TRA, incidentally.