Article on 'trans moral panic' - Mumsnet gets a mention

[WeeBisom]

Link here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gj/1/1/article-p78.xml

This is a very long article which, of course, adopts everything Judith Butler says wholeheartedly. It compares the current discourse around transgenderism to section 28. Astonishingly, the author appears to be a lecturer in law.

"Trans" is defined as "any person who does not conform to the sex/gender which they were assigned at birth, including non binary and genderqueer persons." A "cis" person is someone who identities to a self defined extent with the gender they are assigned at birth (so a gender non conforming lesbian, for example, can still be 'cis'). So...trans is someone who doesn't conform to the sex/gender they were 'assigned' at birth, but a gender non conforming person can still be cis. Make it make sense.

"Gender critical" people are not actually critical of gender, but want femaleness and womanhood to be biologically defined. And gender critical people are "anti trans". It turns out that anyone who is against gender self identification is 'anti trans'.

Mumsnet gets a shoutout: "another unlikely home of anti trans sentiment is the parenting site Mumsnet, where the feminist discussion board has been overwhelmed by those wishing to discuss 'gender ideology.'

The overall thesis appears to be that silly women are stooges of the patriarchy who buy into ideas like women and children are vulnerable victims who need protection from the trans/queer 'other'.

This part got an eye roll from me:
"Spaces for women are seen as sacrosanct in the absence of anyone male, or assigned male at birth. With the potential for assigned-male ‘invasion’, ‘[t]oilets, changing rooms, girls’ youth organisations, hostels, and prisons emerge as the dystopic terrain of women’s vulnerability to enduring predatory male behaviour’ (Cooper, 2019: 19). Of course, trans women are not male; they are women. But in the world of the ‘adult human female’, the potential of having to share a presumed private space with anyone in possession of, or ever having been in possession of, a penis, is unthinkable."

So trans women are not male (nor, presumably are they assigned male at birth) - they are women. But they are women with penises. Make it make sense! So the moral of the story is, women are hysterical for thinking there is any problem or danger with males being in their spaces, and should get used to the idea of sharing spaces with male people. Trans women don't pose any threat to women whatsoever.

The article ends on the hopeful note that all moral panics burn out so one day self ID law will be passed in the UK. Presumably when the silly women get over their irrational phobia of males.

Thanks for reading the article, and the summery of it. I'm not going to read, just the mention of JB is enough to put me off.

Uni's use to be where the smart people went, nowadays it seems it's where the dead in the head people go.

Insane. This point of view misunderstands so much. Gender critics are critical of gender because we don’t think identities are important when talking about sex. We’ve been non conforming since before these writers were born and have no interest in sex stereotypes. We’ve been burned at the stake for being hysterical women but this new method of misogyny is called progressive?

Moral panic? No. I campaign for safe loos. Based on evidence, research and my experience of saving someone’s life.The default should be single sex toilets and changing rooms. It’s not excitingly dystopian, it’s boring reality.

Mixed sex loos don’t work in public spaces, offices or schools. They are not safe and they are not healthy. We need as few of them as possible. Because women are now too reticent/afraid/silenced into opposing men in women’s spaces, the answer has been to even enclose and make private single sex cubicles too - which is more dangerous and less healthy for the occupant - whichever sex they are.

Happy to debate Bristol if you are watching. You need of bit of life experience (including the bad bits) to understand why toilets need to be single sex. I can give you the academics of it too if you want.

More evidence, if needed, that being as thick as two short planks is no barrier to an academic career at one of our so-called top universities.

Yes I read that the other day, didn’t have time to start a thread so glad to see one!

We’re very much getting this kind of logic in the current case against UCU.

Of course it’s by “she/they” Sandra Duffy 🙄

One useful way of stopping these people churning out their endless stream of effluent is simply to ban the phrases "moral panic" and "dogwhistle". Worth considering, surely.

Crikey are they still in 2018?

Urgh. My DD is hoping to go to Bristol University. I must try and direct her attention elsewhere! Mind you, she’s also applying to Brighton 😫

There is a moral panic. It is the belief that so many people are suddenly being born in the wrong sexed body and that there will be mass suicides if medication and surgery is not given.

Also I find it laughable about the talk on long lasting consequences of Section 28, I was at school during it and you wouldn't know it. People who were born after it was abolished should stop pretending that they are feeling the consequences of it, because they're not.

From a quick Google Sandra Duffy seems to have made a career out of gender.

I'm shocked; shocked, I tell you, to hear that.

I think 'moral panic' was the phrase du jour around 2021/2022. It's certainly past its sell by date now. Not exactly cutting edge. Not actually sure what the current accusatory phrase is. Are we still on 'culture war', or the old perennial, 'both sides are horrible'?

It concludes that there is no ‘gender crisis’ in the UK, but there are powerful social forces at work to stoke a moral panic

Powerful social forces. Is that us? MON THE WIMMINS.

Ah, but the powerful social forces are the extreme right evangelical Christians in the US, Arabella - we're just their mouthpiece. Surely you must have wondered here that fat monthly deposit in your bank account was coming from?

I'm increasingly thinking that because they cannot sin or risk the trauma of actually reading or listening to anything women say, they have no idea and just make it up.

And really cannot see the very serious and multiple issues with this.

Ah yes.

The far right. That well known bastion of defense for women's rights, voices and autonomy.

But then facts and logic isn't on first name terms with GI at the best of times.

'but there are powerful social forces at work....' that would be all the people in the country who are fed up to the back teeth of all this genderwang crap.

Society has spoke and society have said 'it's all a load of bollocks'.

This sounds like it was written by AI based on a question of how best to ingratiate yourself with the university establishment, both staff and students.

And obligingly AI has pumped out every cliche from the past decade or more.

And of course there isn't a moral panic.

The only people who say that are people who are captured.

Or AI obliging providing the phrases to show that the "author" is fully on board the Stonewall agenda.

Her absolute conviction that "transwomen are women" frightens me. She'd see that as evidence of trans-phobia, but it's not. It frightens me that a young female academic feels she has not just the right but a moral duty to remove from the 51% of the world's population the only collective noun they have. Female foxes have one, and cows, and cats. But the _ of Afghanistan? Better go with adult human females, eh? But that, no doubt, would be a transphobic dog whistle...

It worries me more and more that girls aren't being taught at school how appallingly recent our gains are. Sandy, if you're reading this, among the women you work with right now are those who were prevented by law or rigid social convention from opening a bank account, taking out a mortgage, or refusing a husband's advances. (Marital rape. 1991).

Please don't take from us the word we need to write that sentence and express those truths clearly and directly. And if you must, then at the very least, don't cynically conflate our rational arguments that we need this word with an arbitrary wish to gatekeep "womanhood". At best, this is intellectually dishonesty. At worst, it exposes a seriously limited understanding of language. Sandy, "womanhood" is a social construct, much of which I and fellow GC feminists reject in any case. "Woman", on contrast, is a collective noun. The only noun that names the demographic currently enslaved in Afghanistan.

What would you have us call them? Please, don't say "females", or "female humans"! We don't do that for "blacks", or "gays", or "disableds". It sticks in the throat even to type those words - so what makes it different for women? (One difference is, of course, that of those dehumanising adjectival nouns I've just typed, females alone are the one that still couldn't vote around the time your great-grandmother was alive).

Could it perhaps, just perhaps, be significant, Sandy, that the one demographic that was only given a political voice in 1928 (less than 100 years ago) - that is, the one demographic that was only given full bodily integrity in 1991 (25 years ago) - is, now, the one and only demographic that is being told, in cynically distorted (or blithely indifferent mis-) representations of its concerns, that it's being irrational and unethical to want to retain a word to name itself?

I got as far as paragraph one of the introduction. It's fucking cock custard! 🙄

Did he pay for his degree from some random country abroad?

It really is the academic equivalent of the proverbially Christmas-loving turkey... I hope some day she sees it. I also really hope she doesn't have to. I mean, it's wonderful that we've at last, after millenia, got to a point where women don't always see it any more. But don't they realise how lucky they are? My goodness, what other demographic, on gaining some semblance of liberation, instantly seeks to give it back again, all the while dismissing its own using the very same emotive stereotypes the previous generation had to overcome?

I thought the article would help to explain - I was expecting legal precedent, stats, facts... But it just seems to be the same tick-box misrepresentations and misunderstandings we've all read a hundred times in a hundred forms, from the lazy tweet to the Pink News polemic.

How can she so blithely dismiss the risk of opening single-sex spaces indiscriminately to the class that includes 98% of sexual predators without examining the overwhelming statistical evidence available that shows that mixed-sex spaces put women at risk - and that transwomen are just as likely, if not more likely to perpetrate such crimes. Single-sex spaces upheld by the social contract are no more trans-phobic than they're man-phobic! They're common bloody sense and simple safeguarding.

Third spaces, open to all who favour them, would address this issue, without increasing women's physical risk or risking excluding some women from public life entirely.

committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/#:~:text=Ministry%20of%20Justice%202020%20Data&text=The%20hyperlinks%20below%20link%20to,and%2010%20for%20attempted%20rape.

I don't see the trans thing as moral or immoral, I see it as factually incorrect.
Human sex is either male or female and you can't swap between the two.
As far as you can be sure of anything, I'm sure of that.

Anything that relies on any other interpretation of sex is just wrong - not morally wrong, just inaccurately factually wrong.

No morals and no panic involved, Sandra Duffy, just verifiable facts.