Trans Ex-Judge on BBC Newscast

[CaveMum]

Can’t bear to listen to it mussels, but if anyone has a string stomach/wants to take one for the team, today’s Newscast is a 43 minute long interview by Laura Kuenssberg of Victoria McCloud who is planning a challenge to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

There aren’t enough 🙄 emoji’s in the world!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0lh0c9r?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

And the shameless co-opting of DSDs into the argument is beginning to really irritate me.
It REALLY annoys me.
I know someone who genuinely has a DSD, which means it pisses me off even more.

@GallantKumquat- yes exactly. All of that.

And I’ve seen it countless times from trans people: ‘I strongly suspect I’m intersex’ etc (they always use the term intersex rather than DSD/VSD.)

Any person who had real reason to think they were in that category would surely have spoken to a Dr about it at some point.

It would be great for BBC Verify to do a fact check on the DSD claims. Are people with DSDs really as common as redheads? 🤔🙄

Didn't Laurie Penny* claim several years ago that she "suspected" she had Turner syndrome? I'm not an expert, but I don't think it's the kind of condition where a person well into her thirties can say "I've never had a diagnosis, but I think I might have it."

I'm inclined to put that alongside the laundry list of other conditions Laurie has self-diagnosed with.

*Not trans of course, but swims in the same social media pool.

People with birth defects that affect the reproductive tract might be as common as redheads: people with a DSD that makes sex assignment (sic) scientifically or philosophically difficult are not.

They talk about intersex to confuse the casual uninformed listener.

We can point out that gender clinics used to test for DSDs but stopped bothering because they didn't find them.

Or that people with those particular DSDs can correct their birth registration retroactively, whereas the GRC process doesn't change the original registration, but creates a new one in the gender recognition register.

If you can be bothered, when a trans person claims to be intersex, say 'that's great! So you don't need a GRC then!'

This is an interesting observation and just adds further weight to the fact these people have delusional beliefs.

Only if you include really tiny anomalies that many people wouldn’t even know constituted a DSD- or at least that’s how I understand it. An example I read about is where the urethral opening on a male is on the side of the glans, rather than right at the end of the penis. This would certainly constitute a difference from the norm and might be considered a variation of sex development, but in the absence of any other differences or symptoms, seems fairly minor and certainly doesn’t make the person less male or in any way female.

The DSDs in which a person’s sex is genuinely ambiguous and difficult to determine are extremely small in number, is my understanding (much smaller than the ‘redhead’ statistic).

I wonder what the long-term plan is. All this deluded nonsense sure as shit isn't going to make the slightest difference to the Supreme Court ruling.

It might get you a couple of quid on a few interviews. But as soon as your campaign to change the ruling goes nowhere, it becomes evident that it's just a never-ending, complaining rant.

It just doesn't have any legs.

So I wonder what the ultimate point is.

To confuse everyone. (In the meantime, quietly lobby for an amendment that says Section 158/Schedules 3 and 16 can be satisfied - as an optional alternative - by a single-gender grouping (meaning sex or acquired gender, whether certificated yet or not). Make it sound boring and technical. If successful, we'll be right back where we started.)

That's what I'd do. And I don't think the poverty of VM's reasoning is anything like as obvious to the general public as to us (not saying they're stupid; it's genuinely confusing).

Quote fail! That was a response to:

So I wonder what the ultimate point is.

So even if technically true (which I do not know for sure but don't particularly doubt) using redheads is a very tendentious comparison. The number of redheads globally is very low - but the UK happens to be the corner of the world where they are most common. So to a British person it sounds significant. I bet that's not the comparison they use in eg Nigeria or Thailand.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000222z

Haven't listened yet, but 'intersex' seems to be being bandied about a lot recently by trans people. Having being rejected as a term by people with DSDs, is intersex the latest gender identity?

I think intersex is the 'I' in LGBTQIAP2S+. So maybe!

I think it's plausible that people who grow up with DSDs are more likely than the general population to adopt a trans identity in adulthood. But looking at the rarity of feminising/masculinising DSDs and multiplying by the rarity of trans identities, we're talking tiny tiny numbers here.

Not unicorns in the sense of being non-existent - I've known one for sure and probably met a second - but approaching unicorn status.

I'm afraid that for most of these people, their natal sex is extremely obvious at a glance, and they're adopting an "intersex" identity the same way everyone on trans reddit claims to be some sort of neurodiverse.

I really don't mind them interviewing him, he's entitled to his view as I am to mine.
What makes me absolutely rage, as someone who worked in BBC newsrooms for 35 years is the total lack of impartiality or pushback. Unless they're going to do a similar interview with FWS or one of the other groups who intervened then it is totally and utterly inexcusable.
Trying to imagine a similar interview done by someone like Andrew Neil. none of this BS would have gone unchallenged, he'd have had all the facts at his fingertips.
It is so excruciatingly poor that I still find it hard to believe the BBC thinks it's fit for purpose. Poor, poor, poor.

The BBC used to do some of the best dispassionately impartial take-apart interviews with idealogues. I'm remembering David Dimbleby's interview of Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently he thought it would be a total softball interview because DD was this nice, polite "royal funerals" guy. I feel that BBC have lost a lot of their best interviewers over the past few years. I do like some of Adam Fleming's Antisocial programmes and I think VM on that alongside a person representing the other side of the argument would've been better.

The thing is that, post the SC ruling, this would be a good time for elders in the trans community, who are the people with clout and contacts and who know how to navigate the political system, to say "well, we obviously aren't going to get everything we want, so let's ignore the angry kidults and try to open a dialogue about what reasonable accommodations would benefit us".

If VM, Whittle, Kaveney et al are anything to go by, they seem disinclined to do so. On their own shoulders be it then.

I thought the 'elders' were as much a problem of not more than the youngsters tbh.

I’m not sure how open to dialogue the sex realist side is now. 10 years ago the TRA side saying, okay, so what the want doesn’t fly with you all, how about… would have resulted in a lot of engagement. But the last decade of violent and misogynistic rhetoric has left many with the impression the only way not to lose this is to dig our heels in, in large part because we didn’t have more than we needed in the first place. Compromise will negatively impact women.

If the dialogue is, instead, about how society as a whole can accommodate people who feel alienated from their own sex (e.g. third spaces), without asking women to “budge up”, or other wise pretend something isn’t true, then this might be a good way forward.

Well yes, they have left themselves without a leg to stand on if they want to argue for compromises now.

I can't say I don't find that satisfying.

I'm not remotely up for compromise. After having NO DEBATE screamed at me for years, and seen young people - too yoing for their brains to be fully developed - medicated by this ideology, my considered view is that all we can do is deal with the fallout in the form of the physical and mental health issues that seem likely to plague younger people who went down this path, and otherwise not give a fucking inch.

Our sports. Our single sex spaces. Our legal protections. Our foremothers fought so hard for them, and we'd been lulled into a false sense of security, thinking they were safe. They're not.

Feminist progress has been largely stalled over the last decade by the struggle to fight off these fucking men. So I'm done with them.

It baffles me that none of them have highlighted the obvious cases of men abusing the system to perv, flash etc. It would be so easy for them to say "yes, it does happen, and women must be believed". VMC came as close as I've seen any come by saying that bit about how it's better than there's one predatory man, VMC and a load of women as opposed to VMC in the men's toilet alone

@EdithStourton That's pretty much where I am too.

I'm just thinking that, if they hadn't been so arrogant, if they hadn't assumed they were cruising to total victory, if they'd recognised that other people exist and have rights and needs, they'd be in a stronger position now.

But I think they're people who psychologically have a huge problem acknowledging that anyone matters except themselves.

But I think they're people who psychologically have a huge problem acknowledging that anyone matters except themselves.

bingo

a person who chooses to live their lives attempting to fundamentally deceive others about their sex, and failing that to force others to behave as if they are deceived doesn’t really think much about how other people feel

But I think they're people who psychologically have a huge problem acknowledging that anyone matters except themselves.
Yep.
I used to think that was perhaps a bit harsh - and it probably doesn't apply to a fair few trans people - but the ones who come onto MN and lecture us pretty soon reveal themselves. There's a perpetual 'won't anyone think about meeeee?' attitude.

Never mind sportswomen knocked off the podium, women who have suffered sexual abuse feeling anxious in (what used to be) the Ladies, vulnerable women placed at risk of sexual assault in prisons, the narrative being pushed on confused, often autistic and otherwise vulnerable adolescents and young adults (and potentially wrecking their lives and health).

Nope. Just:
ME ME ME ME ME!!!