BBC at it again withholding fact ‘woman’ charged with murdering husband is trans

[Heylo]

You know what to do Mumsnet. BBC apologised previously because of mass complaints about sick cat killer Scarlett Blake not being referred to as trans and just being referred to as she / woman in original article. They’re now at it again.

this person arrested for killing husband with samurai sword.

bbc article
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp00de3r3qro

daily mail article https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13480347/amp/Trans-woman-70-appears-court-accused-murdering-husband-samurai-sword.html

complain and let’s get a precedent set, these are not our crimes!

Yeah, exactly Annavira.
It's all "lol", this women's rights bollocks isn't it?

Wimpunds, stop frothing! Be kind!

Anyway, must go now for my shift at the zoo where I now work as a keeper. Just as an aside, we cannot go into some of the male animals enclosures, because you know.......aggression and all that shite.

Or are they just victims of "toxic masculinity"?

There needs to be a change in the law to satisfy both sides of the debate.... not discriminate against one side to please the other which is what is currently happening. Regarding sport/law and single sex spaces.

It baffles me that you can agree with the issues presented and still be told you don't care about "woman" because you refuse to be cruel to another human being. It really says alot for "feminism" I'm leaving this thread now because I really will just end up carrying on and I don't want too.

Are you really a zoo keeper?

Yes. Ex vet nurse now working at a zoo.
Which is why I am firmly on the side of biology being a VERY REAL and immutable thing.

And gender being a pile of steaming horse shite.

To use your own words, "Being a woman doesn't define me... being me and my thoughts and actions define me". I don't think being a woman is terrible or great. I don't place any moral value on it, it is simply what I am, for good or bad.

But anyone who can look at the history and current position of women in the world and think "yep, no unfair treatment there!" - well, the most charitable thing I can say is that person is either not much interested in what happens outside their own bubble or a little too scared to be honest with themselves.

Also, please specify exactly what you felt was a "derogatory personalised attack" towards you because I do not believe I did any such thing. I do, however, believe your statements like "some women who arnt happy in life feel better" and "you can be happy without making others miserable" are nasty little digs that are not only uunnecessary and incorrect, but also undermine whatever point you think you are making.

@Mummy2024, please consider reading "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado Perez.

I didn't think we were discriminated against that much any more til this issue arose and I started reading around it. What I read appalled me.

You know what strikes me most about this thread? That you don't see - just as many of us didn't used to see - that women (in the old sense of the word) are still discriminated against, and in the most unthinkable, actually deadly, ways.

Why do you think that is? Why is it not a focus in PSHE lessons alongside race and gender? Why is it not headline news, trumpetted from the rooftops as the human rights issue of our time, that British women are dying weekly because of discrimination against their body-type?

Why, instead of this, is that fantasy headline in bold above no longer possible to use or understand, because we've lost the right to a word to describe us?

Why do thoughtful, empathetic people like you support that?!?!

It's two sides of the same coin, Mummy. It's sexism so absolute, so devastating, so insidious that - whereas racism is, rightly, unthinkable, transphobia awful, and homophobia still induces disgust - the prejudice we face isn't even seen or acknowledged, and when we do attempt to highlight it, we're told we have no right to the words necessary to do so.

Seeing this clearly for the first time is bloody terrifying - life-changing, frankly. But also so, so, very important as a first step to addressing it.

IF a change comes, it will come because the sort of women you are dismissing here, the ones who do speak up, did not say "oh it's more important to be kind to trans people than ensure women's language, rights and legal status are protected" but stood up and said "No, this is not fair, it is not reasonable" on your behalf. I hope you will have the grace to thank them.

Well you can "agree" whatever you want, the trick is making it happen isn't it? I can "agree" that everyone can have a bacon sandwich every Sunday and no pigs need to be killed ever again, doesn't make it possible in practice though 😂

You can't protect women's rights in law if there is no agreed language in which to write that law. If you use the words Woman, Girl, Female and She to refer to men, then you do not have the agreed language you need to write the laws you want to have.

😍

Amazing! What are the best animals? What ones are crap to look after? Do you do 'Goodnight, Zoo' every night?!

Always a soft spot for the primates, I was in the pygmy marmoset enclosure the other day and they were sitting on my arm as I was cleaning, very curious and affectionate.
Prairie dogs are super cute too, and the lemurs which take food from your fingers ever so gently and rest their little hands on your hand as you feed them.
I'm so lucky.
Can't think of a bad animal TBH, some are incredibly messy though!
I wasn't being facetious upthread when I said that some enclosures we cannot enter BTW. Males of every species have the potential to be far more aggressive than the female counterparts, which is why I get pretty incredulous when someone claims that biology has nothing to do with aggression or violence (obviously extrapolated in humans as violent crime).

We are nothing more than a great ape ourselves.

With a coat on.

“Addressing them on a personal level how they would like to be addressed does not make any difference to the sport/toilet or criminal law level.”

And that is where you are incorrect. In sports and other activism, the male people you have declared should be kindly referred to using the pronouns they demand, have used exactly that ‘kindness’ as leverage and evidence to make changes to policy that have harmed female people.

There is ample evidence that they have done this. Look up a cyclist philosophy lecturer called McKinnon as a start. These activists claim in consultations that because people use she/her, that it would be cruel to exclude them from female sports events. ‘Because society treats them as female, therefore why should the Olympic committee be different.’

So, perhaps you are again so focused on the individual and you cannot see the damage at the collective level to all female people. But it is there.

I LOVE PYGMY MARMOSETS!!!!

Sorry.

Feminist ones, obvs.

No one said it and no one thinks it other than those determined to interpret words to fit their predetermined idea of what they think people are saying, rather than what they actually say.

"So, perhaps you are again so focused on the individual and you cannot see the damage at the collective level to all female people. But it is there."

I think that's how I understand what's happening here.

It's so hard to conceptualise the abstract (at least in the sense that they're not immediately experienced, in front of us & by us, right here & now) implications of no longer having a word to describe us, and impossible to comprehend the sheer scale of those implications. And it's too frightening for many people to want to try to conceptualise or comprehend. It's a horrible understanding to live with. But it's easy to imagine a single, distressed individual.

And it's almost impossible to begin to contemplate how to deal with the implications of no longer having a word to describe us. Or the reasons we need one so badly. But it's easy to use socially-condoned language to make someone smile. And it makes you feel good, instead of bad.

What I think is really fascinating and infuriating is, now that violent men aren't sent to women's prisons, we have cases (such as Blake and this one) where the offender is reported as a woman, women's pronouns are used and the crime is recorded as being carried out by a woman..... but the offender is sent to a man's prison because (spoiler) they are a man. Even though the state/system is trying so hard not to admit to anyone they are a man they still know it when it comes to it.

So they say they are a woman, we call them a woman, we record them as women but (whisper it) know they are a man - so need to be jailed either with the men or at least not with the women.

What a farce.

Apparently it's 1in7 men there's an article in the guardian about the mist recent stats

Men are bad.

I'm a man too and I'm fine with saying that because I know that men are responsible for almost all violence. It's not a slur, but a fact that everyone else is aware of so how did you come to miss it?

And yes it's not all men, but because it is so common women have had to be careful around us since we evolved into humans. The differences between men and women have led to all kinds of cultural consequences. The recording of women's crimes separately is just one. Single sex spaces are another.

We tell children not to run with scissors and that is not discriminating against spoons is it. It's about recognising reality.

Who are the trans people that have taken their own lives "to make some women who aren’t happy in life feel better”?

And how have you tied their deaths and suffering to 'some women'?

I think this bears repeating:

We tell children not to run with scissors and that is not discriminating against spoons is it. It's about recognising reality.

Who are the trans people that have taken their own lives "to make some women who aren’t happy in life feel better”?

And how have you tied their deaths and suffering to 'some women'?

FFS I missed that particular gem.

I think some people have such a shed load of internalised sexism that they honestly can't bear the thought that men are responsible for almost all the violence in the world. And that it's down to feminists to try and protect women from that.

And I don't think mummy would ever acknowledge that the entire reason why mummy can have a bank account, a mortgage, a job, equal pay, an education, can receive service in a pub and can't be legally raped by her husband is also entirely due to feminists.

Or maybe, it's a lot simpler, and mummy is actually a daddy.

"The nurse will take your smear test. She'll be here in a moment".
"My friend will drive you home after drinks. She'll pick you up at 1am".
"You'd make a lovely couple. I'll give her your number if you're fine with that?"

If I were a female rape victim, I'd very much want to know if your shes include males. I might be fine either way, but it might be massively important to me.

That's unlikely to be anything to do with the trans issue, but to do with males.

We evolve language in order to communicate important concepts. To a rape victim, someone's sex might be an extremely important concept indeed.

Personally, I'm happy in some circumstances to use preferred pronouns, but there's a sacrifice each time, to clarity and shared meaning, and that's not always consequence-free.

I also question how it's making a man who says he's a woman 'suffer' by disallowing him access to women's spaces. He has male services available. It's not 'suffering' to deny a man access.to women.

"Happy" in my post above is the wrong word. I will use preferred pronouns in some circumstances, but it's a judgment each time and not a comfortable one.

I tend to think in parallels to religion on that one. I wouldn't put "Christ is Risen" in my email signoff or wear a star of David. I wouldn't add p.b.u.h. when referencing Mohammad. I would remove shoes in a temple. I might or might not call someone Sister X / Rabbi Y, etc. I support the right of people to publish cartoons of Mohammad but I can't think of any circumstance in which I would do that myself.

I think it often depends on what the other person is inferring from my choice of words, weighed up against the actual (not 'on principle') risk of causing real hurt or discomfort. If no-one is inferring that I believe/support things that I don't, then I'm much more relaxed with using preferred pronouns. A bit like (real example) when I tell a certain story that would reasonably imply that I am a Christian, I try to unobtrusively mention that I am not.

I don't know. It's difficult. I understand why some people start of very accommodating and become hardline on pronouns over time.

There’s a saying: ‘Good men stay out so bad men stand out’.

Good men know that men as sex class are dangerous to women. It doesn’t make any difference whether the individual man would never harm or intentionally distress a woman. They understand that other men would.

Is this internalised sex discrimination?