AntiSocial on Radio 4 just after midday today (25 April)

[nauticant]

AntiSocial on Radio 4 looks each week at one of the rows in the "Culture Wars". As such, it positions itself as being part of the effort in the BBC to counter "misinformation" and while it does do that, there's clearly a strong secondary mission to promote the BBC's version of "progressive values".

This is the question they're dealing with today: What does the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex mean for the health service?

They've had programmes on about drag queens and other matters and tend to paint gender critical views as being somewhat extreme if not bigoted.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002b76x

When I hear people like Bev, or the Lesbian Project podcast with Julie Bindel and Kath Stock, I wish I could be a lesbian. Sadly, it just doesn't work for me in other ways (stubbornly straight) but the sisterhood and warmth and care and excellent senses of humour are just so lovely.

And the man (Cleo someone or other) saying that trans people hadn't been heard in the case??????
The Scottish government were arguing entirely on behalf of transwomen.

And Amnesty. Who not only the trans case, but used a trans- nonbinary-queer lawyer to do so.

Apparently Cleo has a PhD in Queer Historiography (???) and teaches at UEA in Norwich. Words fail me!

they just make up words don't they?

It seems Cleo is a veteran of Anti-social. Appeared in 2023 with Stephanie Davies-Arai on guidance for schools on dealing with children who identify as “transgender”. Stephanie is the founder of Transgender Trend and Cleo is a former employee of Gender GP who now works for another transgender lobby group, Gendered Intelligence.

Straight off the bat Madeleine claims that he was badly impacted by Section 28; which he claims banned discussion of homosexuality and gender identity. Madeleine is in his thirties and Section 28 was repealed twenty years ago. This is the text of section 28. It is focused on homosexuality. It makes no reference to “gender identity” which was not a thing at a time. Moreover, despite identifying as “queer”, “Cleo” is in fact a heterosexual in a relationship with a woman and, as we shall discover in a later interview, he was only ever theoretically bisexual. The interviewer should have picked him up on this.

https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/2023/12/18/cleo-madeleine/

Follow up article. https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/2023/12/19/cleo-madeleine-2/

LittleBigHead the sisterhood and warmth and care and excellent senses of humour are just so lovely.

Yup, that perfectly sums up us lovely lesbians all right. All of us, and especially me😏

Tell you what, LittleBigHead, if you want to rub shoulders with lesbians, you can do what Dawn Butler MP does, and volunteer to accompany butch lesbians into the women's toilet to make sure they don't get 'hounded out' by those nasty women who hang around women's loos acting tough..*

It's such a noble thing to do, and without selfless people like Dawn Butler, butch lesbians would have nowhere to pee without the risk of being beaten up by the merciless straight women who, as you know, aggressively police all women's toilets.

And a great topic of conversation -
'What do you like to do in your spare time?'
'I do voluntary work'
'Oh that's lovely - what do you do?'
'Well I belong to a group of straight women who volunteer to accompany butch lesbians into women's toilets...'
😂

*DB claimed recently on TV that she has a butch friend .. hounded out of women's toilets... has to be accompanied...etc...
Possibly from the same agency that supplies 6 foot transmen, women with PCOS etc to people who wish to angst about the Supreme Court ruling by referring with a quivering voice to what happened to their 6 foot transman friend etc ..🙄

Oooh thanks everyone - just been listening to The Lesbian Project podcast, which I wasn’t aware of. So interesting, witty & funny. I wish I was a lesbian.

Late to the thread but listened avidly in a supermarket car park!

Turned it off in disgust eventually after all the inevitable BBC ‘constantly interrupt an intelligent women speaking but never a waffly man’… I left it at the point they were advocating for nice private rooms for trans people in the NHS. How lovely for them and what an absolute smack in the teeth for anyone else who might want that…But no, even that wasn’t good enough.

The point I turned the radio off was when ‘Cleo’ (after being asked by Bev whether ‘Cleo’ cared about biological women’s rights), stated that women’s concerns were the same as transwomen and that they shared a common bond in that (or words to that effect). No mate. They might sound the same - privacy, dignity, safety - but they mean entirely different things to each respective group.

And I know Bev did great - she’s a superstar - but why oh fucking why do we always have to field the gracious, soft spoken, appeasing and respectful spokesperson? I’d just love a fearless Germain Greer type to basically tell it how it is instead of all this handwringing and overblown empathy. There is zero coming the other way for girls and women. We need to tell the story of women’s pain, endurance and vulnerability. Maybe we are all too good at hiding it.

You too, AppleBlossomTimeNow?

'Please take a number from the machine near the counter, an interesting, witty and funny lesbian will be with you as soon as possible'😃

What a lovely thing for Dawn to do and arguably very brave considering Nadia Whittome suggested yesterday that women of colour can frequently be mistaken for men too.

https://x.com/scotlesbians/status/1915444140499706141?s=46&t=ZX_bLozRqm8etdGICMcAvA

They really have no shame, any old made-up stuff will do, any old threadbare scenario with 'friends', and hey let's use women of colour as 'props' too, it's not like they'll mind...😡

It took several repetitions of Cleo’s name before I realised the bloke mansplaining senile sex spaces in the NHS was claiming to be a woman.

It looked as if Cleo had been sucking the end of a leaky biro or a particularly lurid E-number saturated lollipop. Not a great sartorial choice. I used to quite like Sian Williams, but her transition from journalist to psychologist seems to have utterly wiped out her nose for a story. Jamie Wallis and his family turned out to be a dodgy lot, didn't they?

It is so that they still have a “feminine” name if they are referred to by their surname only.
I initially saw it spectacularly employed by “Veronica Ivy” aka Rachel McKinnon. The change to 2 female names occurred as all and sundry referred to him as “McKinnon”, which was probably not as validating as required.

Interesting, didn’t realise that!

Oh of COURSE it is!!

Lol, I'm so naive and dense

Just listened - Bev was amazing, calm, clear, informative, emapthic.
Cleo - lost me early on with his statement that women w PCOS are at risk of being misgendered. What a load of shite. I’ve done my time in PCOS clinic waiting rooms, never had a doubt about the sex of the women around me. Never been misgendered (unless you count the time when I was about 9. In my defence it was the 80s and I had a terrible mullet. And it was dark.)
I hate it when people appropriate another group to make their point as Cleo did. I don’t need to borrow religious women to make my arguments about GI - the fact that it affects me is enough.

I think that works best with rescue penguins.

I don’t want to be ‘that guy’ but historiography is a pretty well established and ancient discipline.

Well fair enough but I doubt it had the word "Queer" in front of it

Indeed. Cleo self-classifies as queer on the grounds of having been theoretically open to offers from both sexes earlier in life but eventually realising that he never actually had sex with men and has married a woman, so he is of course heterosexual, i.e. straight. Queer here, however, seems to mean 'I'm not dull! Really I'm not. I wear blue lipstick! I have long hair! I wear very short leopard-skin shorts and little strappy tops!'

Oh my word.

Never been misgendered (unless you count the time when I was about 9. In my defence it was the 80s and I had a terrible mullet. And it was dark.)

I spent most of my childhood being misgendered. TBF I spent most of the 70s, and indeed 80s, as a mud-covered bundle of waterproofs 'with growing room', so clues were minimal.

Never bothered me, although I did roll my eyes rather at the one who asked 'Are you a boy born a girl, dear?' when I was wearing my best Clothkits pinafore dress and had my hair in bunches

I was worried by Cleo's suggestion that spaces should be inclusive by default until there is a complaint that needs dealt with. That has been the situation in many venues eg bars with "cubicles, urinals" signage instead of male and female, or "unisex" when they contain a row of blokes at urinals.

I worry that this might be the approach that smaller, below the radar spaces might still take, which would serve to intimidate and isolate any woman who does want to make a complaint.

Spaces like toilets should rather be segregated by sex by default and any trans people who want to mount a complaint or argue that it's disproportionate can do so on a case by case basis, not the other way round.