Ash Sarkar on the News Agents - the backpedaling continues...

[mantaraya]

Apparently identity politics is silly and divisive. According to Ash, oppression is not a competition and the left is eating itself up accommodating to "woke" victimhood. Any quotes that sound like she has been pushing this line of thinking have been taken out of context.

On trans - this is very unlikely to be in anyone's top 3 issues politically so we should all just shut up about it and focus on the real problems (please ignore the fact that Ash has been banging this drum for years). Oh and the reason the left (i.e. Ash) has supported (ridiculous) things like transwomen in women's sports is because there aren't enough trans political organisations leading the way so they're just trying to do the right thing and defend vulnerable trans people. Ahem.

Quite amusing to listen to just for the various attempts at arse covering. I only wish I could have been the interviewer!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tdUDCkv3oc3kBjN9VkzGI

Here's what's tricky about gender: every time we look for a physical characteristic to pin it to, it wriggles and squirms out of our grasp. We find exceptions to every rule, hard facts which turn out to be assumptions. What makes a woman - or more precisely, what makes us willing to treat someone as a woman - isn't fixed.

"...And that's why it's essential that we use it as a determining factor for any situation where physical sex is highly important."

Yeah why not

Ash doesn't believe that a penis person in a women's toilet is likely to show her his penis?

Has Ash met any men?

Next couple of pages:

I don't think most politicians who get bounced into taking these positions are themselves committed ideological transphobes. But they're pushed, through media and other forms of lobbying, by those who are. As Shon Faye points out in her groundbreaking book, The Transgender Issue, The Times and the Sunday Times between them ran more than 300 articles -almost all of them hostile - about transgender people in one year alone. And the impression you'd get from this media coverage was that we were subject to something like an invasion from within. Whether in hospitals, schools, refuges sports, prisons or even just the census, trans people were apparently popping up like dandelions and disrupting the day-to-day functioning of institutions through their mere existence. Even just recognising that some people might be trans was enough to invite criticism: "Census trans question under scrutiny for 'confusion'" went one headline in The Times, while another signalled "Anger at transgender handbook for children in care". These pieces are fairly typical of the news offering - I'm not even looking at the comment pages. This steady drumbeat of reporting builds up a foreboding sense that trans = bad, and there's just too damn much of it. It's crude, but it's effective at closing down space for politicians to argue for more trans-inclusive policies.

Ideological transphobes seem to live in an alternate dimension, where genitals are central to every social interaction - and trans people want nothing more than to focus your attention on which ones they might have. In February 2023, a Tory councillor named Ruby Sampson alleged that a trans woman in a pub toilet turned around to her and said: "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis." Weird, right? (Not least because I've never heard of an absorbent penis.) "The close proximity [of the stalls] made it much scarier still," Sampson wrote in an article for the Daily Mail. "What if she turned violent?" And look, if someone said that to me in a ladies' loo, I too would be a bit perturbed. "I felt like I had been flashed," she said, "as the penis image was put in my mind by her announcement. It was said to intimidate."

But just stop and think for a minute. How likely do you think it is that a random person in a bathroom would say, "I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis," to an absolute stranger? Much like the average pub toilet, this story didn't pass the smell test for me when it was published. Then, a couple of days later, a transgender woman posted a thread on Twitter. She suspected it had been her in the loos with Ruby Sampson. She'd been attending a vigil for murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, and nipped into a nearby pub for a drink with friends afterwards. There was no toilet paper or hand towels in the toilets - and what she said to Ruby Sampson was that she was going to wipe her hands, after washing them on her jeans. Jeans, penis, potato, potahto.

I get that people make honest mistakes. But it seems this one was made precisely because someone saw a trans woman enter a public bathroom and was fixated on what their body might be like under their clothes. Indeed, Sampson wrote at length about how she perceived this stranger's appearance: "She wore a skimpy top which made her shoulders seem bigger. And she spoke with a strikingly deep voice." It sounded like she was trapped in her own personal version of Kath Day-Knight's lesbian panic - when you're thinking about something obsesively, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere. Nightmares and fantasies are but a hair's breadth apart, and you'll warp your perceptions to fit what you've primed yourself to encounter.

Next few paragraphs, on women's safety, media representation, and the EHRC:

I can imagine that some people reading this book might think that I'm not taking threats to women's safety seriously enough. Whether it's in prisons or toilet cubicles, women are physically vulnerable to those who might abuse that proximity to harm them. Those who describe themselves as "gender critical" feminists would argue that if the threshold for accessing women's spaces is dropped to simply identifying as a woman, predatory men will do exactly that in order to target their victims. They point to examples of trans women who've committed sexual assault, such as Karen White and Isla Bryson, as evidence that cisgender women are at risk from violence perpetrated by trans people, particularly in prison settings. But would imposing a blanket rule that trans women should be incarcerated in men's prisons really make people safer? The first thing to point out is that we're talking about small numbers of people. According to the latest available data, between 2021 and 2022, only six trans women were housed in female prisons. Between 2020 and 2022, there were no reported sexual assaults carried out by transgender women in women's prisons. The same can't be said for trans victims of sexual assault in men's prisons - in 2019 alone, there were eleven such cases. Though gender critical campaigners, politicians and the media all focus on the risk posed by trans women in female prisons, the fact is that they're far more likely to be victims of sexual assault in men's facilities. Surely that matters as much as the safety of cisgender women inmates?

I don't want to dwell too long on the "who goes in which prison" question - we incarcerate far too many people for non-violent offences anyway, many of whom could have been prevented from committing crimes if we had a functioning social safety net. Ultimately I think the case-by-case assessment of offenders, where prison officials and psychologists determine where trans offenders should be placed, taking into account both their safety needs and any potential safeguarding risk to others, is probably the best and fairest system. What I think is important here is that a narrow policy discussion about prisons takes up a disproportionate amount of space when we're talking about trans people in general. By virtue of its overrepresentation, we end up with a misleading and distorted image of trans people. It's like only talking about Muslims in relation to terrorism, black people to knife crime, or women to false rape allegations - it demonises and obscures the reality of that entire demographic. Sure, some individuals from these community groups do these things, but they're in a tiny minority. Giving any group greater rights and freedoms involves some degree of risk, because you can't guarantee that nobody will abuse them. Even the most hardline conservative would probably agree that it's bad to punish a whole group of people, to curtail or restrict their rights, based on the actions of a tiny few. But that's exactly the logic of trans-hostile feminists when it comes to transgender people.

For a cause which purports to be sticking up for all women, transphobia is something of an elite enterprise. Kemi Badenoch - a former Equalities minister under the Conservatives - shed light on the strategy behind the rolling back of trans rights in the UK. Key to the project was having "gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the postions that mattered most in Equalities and Health": i.e. stacking decision-making bodies not with independent, evidence-led experts, but with those who were ideologically opposed to transgender inclusion. In 2023, Vice News reported that seven senior officials quit the Equality and Human Rights Commision due to the organisation shifting in a more "transphobic direction"; rather than standing up for trans rights, they'd been providing the government with advice on how to exclude most trans people from using the toilets of their choice. Trans-hostile voices are well represented in the mainstream media, from supposedly left-of-centre outlets like the Guardian and Observer to the right-wing Spectator. Meanwhile, transgender newspaper columnists are basically unheard of.

So having heard two accounts of an incident, Ash decides to believe one and disregard the other.

I wonder what makes Ash believe the male, over the woman alleging sexual assault?

Maybe the CPS could employ Ash to see whether assault allegations 'pass the smell test'.

Why have assessment criteria when you could just employ Mystic Ash?

And what pray has Ash said to dismiss the concern of women being trounced by a tiny oppressed minority in sports.

God why does anyone give her any airtime? I'd happily forgotten she existed for a while there.

She has the viewpoint of a perpetual 15 year old. Tedious and embarrassing.

Good grief, I hadn't realised how bad her writing is.

She's totally not butthurt about that review from the Times. Oh no, definitely not at all bothered 🤣🤣

She's just not very smart.

There are some people who are well educated and so pass as smart, but really, they aren't.

I didn't realise that one could be awarded an honours degree in failing to understand fucking anything. Congratulations Ash. I have daffodils that display better critical thinking than you do.

I didn't realise that one could be awarded an honours degree in failing to understand fucking anything. Congratulations Ash. I have daffodils that display better critical thinking than you do.

Ash certainly knows her audience. The one example she picks of a woman being sexually harassed by one of these men in the bathroom is a Tory politician who writes for the Daily Mail. Her usual readers will already have dismissed Cllr Sampson's side of the story before it's even been told.

Next page and a bit, she writes about JKR:

It probably helps that J.K. Rowling - one of the most commercially successful authors who has ever lived - has vocally supported the "gender critical" cause. Abigail Shrier, a journalist and author, credited Rowling for mainstreaming opposition to puberty blockers for the purpose of gender-affirming care in the UK. What's more is that, according to Shrier, Rowling's political value lies in her ability to drive a wedge on the left ("She helped gender critical feminists pry [sic] away from the progressive left on this issue") - another way in which the relentless demonisation of minority identity benefits the right. Though Rowling has described herself as being "empathetic to trans peo-ple", that empathy has been hard to detect beyond her occasionally professing that it exists. Her preferred terms for transgender women are "trans-identified males", "biological males with gender recognition certificates" and "surgically altered" men. Her focus is almost always on trans criminality, trans women in competitive sports, or on what she perceives to be the risks of young people taking puberty blockers: she has remarkably little to say about the pervasive discrimination that trans people face in employment, housing and healthcare. Rowling seems proud to be part of a network of like-minded figures, occasionally sharing photos of herself at dinner with other "gender critical" feminists like Julie Bindel, Joanna Cherry, Suzanne Moore and Kathleen Stock. No longer simply an author of wildly successful children's IP, Rowling has become a political force to contend with. A single article by Rowling forces government ministers to respond in a conciliatory tone. These views, of course, are well within her rights to express. And nobody deserves threats, abuse or harassment for participating in live political discussions online.

What's striking here is how clearly we can see a particularly famous and wealthy person wielding an outsize influence on the policymaking landscape. Despite presenting themselves as under attack by trans activists and their allies, the likes of J. K. Rowling are well networked, well placed and more widely represented than their opponents. Rowling rejects the accusation that she is transphobic. But consistently presenting trans rights as being in conflict with women's safety ("Trans activism demands that women give away their hard won rights to men") contributes to an overall climate of hostility towards transgender people. If your position is that trans individuals can't be accepted in their chosen gender after transitioning as adults, but can't access puberty blockers as youths, aren't allowed in spaces which align with their gender presentation (but aren't safe in spaces of the gender they were assigned at birth either), can't choose how they're addressed, can't play sports, can't use the changing rooms, can't use the toilets - you can't be surprised when others come to the conclusion that "gender critical" is code for "anti trans". What are trans people meant to do, if there's no way for them to be socially recognised as their chosen gender in public life? Never leave the house? Evaporate?

Next she tries to argue that banning puberty blockers is like banning abortion:

Trans people are objects of fixation and hatred because of transphobia, there's no doubt. They're targets of obsession, abuse and discrimination for no other reason than who they are. But the state of exception they're forced to occupy also serves to roll back on the rights and freedoms of women. In the UK, following the publication of the Cass Review (an independent review of the NHS's youth gender-identity services, published in April 2024), the prescription of puberty blockers to trans and non-binary youth under the age of eighteen was suspended.

Puberty blockers are a treatment which blocks testosterone and oestrogen, and can stop young people from developing periods, facial hair, breasts, etc. For trans young people, taking puberty blockers as they approach puberty can make it easier for them to live as their chosen gender when they reach adulthood. They're not just prescribed to trans and non-binary people - they can be offered to children entering puberty early, or to adults for other health conditions. In 2024, fewer than 100 children and young people were being prescribed puberty blockers by the NHS - and in the UK, trans minors can't have gender transition surgery. But the Cass Review, and the way politicians chose to interpret it, was a game-changer. The report concluded that there is "no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress" - that advocacy groups tend to cherry-pick the data which suits them about the benefits, or harms, of prescribing puberty blockers to trans and non-binary youth. I'm not a doctor, so that's not an area I'm going to wade into. But what I do want to talk about is bodily autonomy, and how imposing different rules for puberty blockers from other medications puts the rights of women and girls more broadly at risk.

In the UK, there's a principle called "Gillick competence" (officially known as Fraser guidelines, but I'm sticking with the more common phrase) which states that children can consent to their own medical treatment - including sexual and reproductive healthcare - as long as they are deemed competent to understand what's involved and there aren't any specific safeguarding concerns. The principle of Gillick competence is the reason I was able to access the contraceptive pill as a teenager, even though it would be a while before I had any tangible reason to worry about getting pregnant. Children in this country have the right, albeit caveated, to make decisions in concert with their doctor about medical treatment. Saying that puberty blockers for trans and non-binary youth are exempt from this principle puts a crack in the dam. Indeed, this appears to be the intention of some campaigners. In Bell v. Tavistock, a legal case in 2020, it was argued that somebody under the age of sixteen (in this case, Keira Bell) couldn't consent to taking hormones in order to transition their gender. After an initial ruling against Tavistock (a clinic in London which provides gender-affirming care), Bell lost her case at appeal; and in response, her lawyer, Paul Conrathe, released a statement alleging that the ruling demonstrated that "The Gillick competency test is no longer fit for purpose."

Paul Conrathe is an interesting guy. His CV reveals a long history of taking on cases which apparently seek to restrict abortion rights, from a man who tried to get an injunction to stop his girlfriend from terminating a pregnancy back in 2001 to a 2005 case in which Conrathe tried to argue that under-sixteens cannot consent to an abortion without their parents' knowledge. He previously acted on behalf of anti-choice groups such as ProLife Alliance and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Transgender people might be a small minority, but the principles which protect their access to healthcare uphold the same for the majority as well. I don't see my freedoms as a woman being threatened by transgender people: I see them as being profoundly interconnected.

Final part of this section:

I'm not trans, but I know what it's like to trigger outrage just by existing. When I'm reading the newspaper, or opening social media, and there's another scaremongering story about how trans people are invading women's spaces, I can't help but reflect on how people of colour and immigrants are discussed in the exact same way. Maggie Steed, on a special broadcast with the academic Stuart Hall, once said that "a number is a fact, you can't quarrel with it." But, Hall continued, "as soon as you say numbers, it doesn't matter how you wrap it up - there is only one lesson to be drawn, the numbers are growing. There are too many of them." That's how it feels when you're reading about immigration figures, or birth rates amongst different ethnic groups, or dog-whistle references to "cultural change": no matter what the number, or the context, there are always just too many of us. It's dehumanising - like reducing trans people -to what their bodies might be like under their clothes, it presents race as the single defining feature of who we are. This is the essence of demographic panic - it turns neutral characteristics like skin colour or gender identity into objects of terror. And this feedback loop of fear and hatred is used to justify measures which limit the freedoms of majority groups.

I don't know Ash Sarkar at all - just as I didn't know Owen Jones at all, but don't feel too envious, we have our own equivalents where I live🙄

So I approached the extracts with an open mind.

As well as the clunky writing '[ill-served by her editors' is I think the charitable way of putting it] and the misinterpretation of GC ideas, there was one more thing:

Yes, there it is! the unmistakable marker of gullibility and/or lack of proper research! the great gender shibboleth! the 1.7% intersex figure!

Even Fausto-Sterling who published it [in 2000 I think?] admitted that she couldn't back it up, and did a reverse weasel. The real figure of people born with DSDs [not 'intersex'] is more likely to be about 0.02%.

Once I spot 1.7%, I know that neither the writer nor their editors have done their job properly, so it makes me sceptical about everything else they say.

Christ, I'm losing the will to live reading that shite.

I get a third of the way down, and I can literally feel my life force ebbing away. I have to stop for the sake of my health.

God knows what kind of bubble this twit lives in, but she positively fawns over these men.

Talk about sacred caste - she can't pin their membership badges on them quick enough.

It's interesting to see how much the "progressive" line has shifted though.

From "we won't debate trans people's existence" to "we need to have a calm respectful conversation about this"

From "trans women are women in all cases, if you don't believe that you're a transphobe" to "access to prisons and refuges should be done on a case by case basis"

From "trans people have zero physical advantage in sport" to "...yeah ok sports is a tricky one"

From "we should all be flying the trans flag and mourning Trans Day of Remembrance" to "this is a fringe issues and we should all stop making such a big deal out of it"

I’m pretty sure a few months, after the toilet incident, there was some very negative feedback, from other trans people, about the person who claimed they were the person in the toilet.

Once I spot 1.7%, I know that neither the writer nor their editors have done their job properly, so it makes me sceptical about everything else they say.

Exactly, it's a huge flag!

Isn't she the one who didn't understand the toilet issue, because everyone has a gender neutral toilet at home?

I mean seriously.

She describes herself as “anarcho-fabulous”.

Which says it all.