Another Hadley Freeman corker - a plea to labour not to just leave us with the right wingers

[SpringCalling]

Hadley summing it up again so well!

Awful rightwingers are the unlikely feminists

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f9eae71f-afa8-4091-b471-d84b22fec772?shareToken=0c4abd8ad4023ecf2ed5ec408d12d064

Good article (again). It’s depressing how many times it has to be said, yet still ignored by those who should know better.

Thanks for the link - an enjoyable article but I fear it's a futile one.

Thanks for link.

She’s spot on as usual!!

How anyone can think putting a convicted male rapist in a woman’s prison makes them on the right side of history is just 🤯🤯🤯

Great article. Some cracking lines as well! Two plus two does not equal a unicorn

I need an I ❤️ Hadley Freeman t-shirt for my upcoming birthday I think! Another absolute corker of an article that nails it, just bloody wish they'd get the message....

"Anneliese Dodds — no stranger to rakes — "
😁

That's so funny!

What I'm about to say is totally unfair on Hadley Freeman, who has done more to shine a light on this than most journalists, and who left the Guardian so that she could do so. But, with less than 6 weeks before I have to cast my vote, I am getting frustrated with well written, wittily argued but, I fear, ultimately toothless articles.

Not Hadley's fault - at least she's trying to do her job - but that's the way I'm feeling today.

It must be a zillion times worse if you're in the US. At least I've a fighting chance of an independent candidate with a working brain.

Continuing to frame this as a feminist issue is not going to do us any good. Men with bits of paper in our prisons, mental health wards, rape crisis services (I could go on) is a clear safeguarding issue.

Forget the ins and outs of the Equality Act. I could not give a shit and the relentless focus on it has got us absolutely nowhere - not to mention how bad a situation that's created for children.

This is a safeguarding, not feminist issue, and that's the tack we have to take if we are going to correct these egregious wrongs against us and our kids.

Yes, and so true!

I’d be interested to know if there’s been any reports of a trans man receiving a custodial sentence, and if so have they wanted to be assigned to a men’s prison?

It seems nobody gives a shit about safeguarding, any more than they give a shit about feminism though.

This is so true. And the potential real possibility of legal action against those who deliberately put women and children in harmful situations should be a reason to stop it.

I know there are legal firms looking to take class actions in relation to this? And the confirmation from Cass that there's no data / evidence about the harms these drugs do to children and young people surely must make this a case of epic proportions considering the life altering / long term harmful effects on the young - and all because adults persuaded them that they could change sex.
Presumably politicians and governments pushing gender reassignment at children will be easy pickings given there are receipts everywhere for all their undermining safeguarding fuckwittery.

Yes and they were put in the female estate, for their safety

Dear God, when I grow up I want to write like Freeman!

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

I'm voting for Robert F Kennedy Jr. the Independent candidate.
He doesn't want children to access puberty blockers/cross-sex hormones, men in women's sports. ...good enough for me! Vote for 3rd parties and change politics.

I appreciate that HF (like other women commentators in MSM) has to tailor how she writes about what she thinks to what her editor will publish.

Yes its a good comedy piece, but in view of how long this has been going on and the now endless reports of actual harm to women, I think in this instance she is just feeding the media lie, that this is a culture war, and its all about left vs. right.

And for some the fact that a few on the right make statements about women being biological femles, for too many this just means anything a right winger says is wrong, and so entrenches even further the left progressive position that TWAW.

So disappointed.

(Not forgetting that many on FWR have written even funnier and more hard hitting comments about how the patriarchal structure of left vs. rights in fact take dominance over an issue, so that an actual women's issue is just a useful platform for the usual left vs right.)

Agree it's much bigger than feminism. But also bigger than safeguarding. It ties into things like evidence based science and policy, medical ethics, identity politics in general, freedom of thought and speech, the neutrality of the civil service and the way liberal democratic states function, and plain old how we talk about true things vs false things.

The effect on women is important, but it's not in the end the measure of the effect this ideology is having. And that's in large part because the ideology isn't just gender ideology, that is a small part of a much bigger set of propositions.

I don't think begging the LP or most of their left political parties to change course on GI will work, because they have embraced, and still unreservedly embrace, the bigger set of propositions - in fact it's clear they think that set of propositions is fundamentally what they stand for.

I opened that article expecting it to be about UK politics, but the first para showed me it was in fact mainly about US politics. I'm getting really fed up with the false equivalence being drawn between the UK left wing and the US liberals. They are not even close to the same.

x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1662061344814768129?lang=en

I wonder why HF chose to do that.

Yes - it feels quite frightening - and I've a lifetime in safeguarding, maintaining vigilance while not descending into paranoia.

Once society abandons truth and reality in favour of lies (TWAW and anyone can change sex) we're into the Emperor has no clothes territory. The rule of law / the social contract depends on people respecting each other, the law and facts. Once the law is an ass (it's possible to change sex) then trust in it and in those who administer it fails.

It'a one thing for the young and foolish to promote this - twas ever thus. But when legislators, the judiciary etc buy into lies, then we're in real trouble.

In the context of “trans rights”, what is the difference? I accept that there are differences in some other areas.

I don't agree it's a false equivalence. It's a warning of where we are headed, in particular if Nandy types are writing our laws and policies.

Try reading the full article. Why does she do that? She’s a dual US-UK citizen and often comments from the middle of the Atlantic and fully understands the difference between the two. In this case she’s commenting that left leaning women who hold sex realist positions in both the USA and the U.K. are politically homeless in this election year. A fairly common position started on here, but a point made in a well written way in mainstream media.