Remarkably sensible article in the Guardian!

[NImumconfused]

Seems like the kind of thing you might have got in the Observer a year or two ago, but not the Grauniad.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/05/generational-divide-views-sex-gender-britain

You need to get a mug saying I'M SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS WITH MUGS SAYING THAT THE COLLEAGUES AROUND THEM ARE THE IDIOTS AND I CAN'T TAKE ANYMORE.

Yep, don't they wonder why if genitals are of no consequence or relevance society the world over has always split people into these two groups. Have they not noticed that one of these groups goes on to give birth and the other doesn't?

No rational people do disagree.
Unfortunately, that leaves a hell of a lot of people…

I don't think Marxists have ever been pacifists! ( viz Karl Marx himself in 1848 - year of revolutions across Europe, or Russian Marxists Revolutionaries of 1917 and of WW2 against Fascist Germany or France's Communist Resistance fighting the Germans occupying France 1940 on WW2, or China's Mao Zedong fighting the Japanese and the Kuomintang in 1940s or Cuba's revolutionary Castro etc. etc.).

Nor indeed do they believe in 'gender fluidity' see the Communist Party of Britain's stand on this ( surely Marxist ?) They don't believe in 'gender fluidity'. They totally believe you can't change sex and the latter is just a distraction from the Class War, the fight for justice for the Workers who produce our wealth v the Capitalists who own the industries etc. and exploit them.

Nice article, thank you for sharing.

They might be onto something …

Guardian Readers Respond

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/10/a-nuanced-approach-to-ageing-sex-and-gender

First letter - 'but intersectionality!'

Second letter - 'I bet you've never met a trans person'

Third letter - weary dinosaur relegated to bottom of page, still too afraid to reveal name.

Oh that first letter, so near yet sooo far away. GC women don't want our sex to define us, to place restrictions on us - that is the 'gender' bit we are critical of. But we do recognise that our female bodies are different to male bodies, that they can make us vulnerable, that they can bring forth the miracle of life and that in the few circumstances where sex matters is does matter more than anything else and these times and places, surrounding pregnancy and birth, places where we are naked or otherwise exposed need to be single sex to stop that difference or vulnerability defining us.

But even if they were right and it's all just a terrible mistake, all just social conditioning based on arbitrary assumptions, so what?

Does that mean any disadvantages that happen as a result of that conditioning magically didn't actually happen? That all the data that show people who meet that boring old sex-based definition of women face risks, challenges and headwinds that the people who people who meet that boring old sex-based definition of men don't are somehow no longer true because the reason they were disadvantaged was based on a false premise? Of course not.

Again, words are being twisted to hide the truth. Changing which people count as "women" doesn't change which people are female, or stop society treating us like it always has.

It's telling that the reddit poster picked two privileged and stereotypically white nations as the reductio ad absurdum comparator for socially constructed differences.

Yes, Belgians and Australians might be a laughable comparison, but no one would suggest that the difference in experience and social challenges faced by Black British and White British people (or Black Belgian and White Belgian, or Black Australian and White Australian) is trivial or laughable. Yet race differences are absolutely 100% arbitrary social conditioning.

Would the men (and for different reasons, the women) who are so amused/enraged by the concept that the social consequences of being female can be significant and not mitigated simply by one declaring one does not want to be constrained by society's beliefs about ones sex, and so confident in their opinion and so ready to share it, be as cavalier if it were the consequences of race that were being dismissed? I don't think so.

When it comes to race, anti-racists understand that it's perfectly possible, indeed essential, to aspire to and actively work towards a future where race doesn't matter to someone's opportunities but also recognise we are not there yet so people will for now still experience racism and need still support.

Yet when it comes to female people, suddenly the narrative becomes "this shouldn't happen, so admitting that it does happen and supporting the people who are impacted is as bad as saying it's ok".

Forty-nine years’ experience of living in a female body in a world deformed by class, caste and economic and racial inequality – never mind environmental destruction – has only made me wonder quite why it matters so much to some people.

Try being born 30 years earlier and consider how your life would have been different.

Also in the Guardian today, a big interview with Pippa York, whose cycling career as Robert Millar is acknowledged upfront in the first line of the article (and pictured), whingeing about having no athletic advantages as a male-born person and equates giving puberty-blockers to young girls to putting them on the pill.

FFS.

Some mild pushback from the journalist, Jeremy Whittle. But there’s no arguing with York. archive link here.

I can’t with the Guardian any more. The Gaby Hinsliff article the other day finished me off, as I usually respect her, but her obtuseness on this is staggering. I’ve closed the window in my browser and haven’t been back for a week. Enough.