Stephen Fry - What a repulsive, condescending misogynistic turd

[Absentmindedsmile]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14820209/Harry-Potter-narrator-Stephen-Fry-turns-JK-Rowling-TERFs.html

Yuk.

His family might disagree with you. Massive mood swings, people having to walk on eggshells around him, etc etc.

Totally 😁

Although ironically, as he clearly overestimated his own ability to argue with reason, substance and cogency, the only person displaying signs of the D-K effect was him.

I was getting A-level student vibes. How old is that? 18?

16-18. Probably a bit older if he's on here. And yes, I said he sounded like a ChatGPT product of my father and my teenage diaries. God I'm glad that wasn't around when I was that age.

I'm glad you find it intellectually amusing to posit whether whether "women" can truly be said to exist , or is merely an illusion, a false meaning applied to random genetic flukes which makes all the heat and anger about "women's" rights as amusing and pointless as ants fighting on a dungheap. (Which BTW is neither amusing nor pointless to the ants, but since when did anthropologists care what the lesser peoples they study might value?)

Meanwhile, in the real fucking world, the pretty much half of humanity who meet the everyday boring intellectually stunted idea of womanhood, to whit, being born female, recognised as such at birth and throughout life and come to self knowledge within the sexist contructs of our society and through our treatment by both men who meet the boring definition of men, men who meet their own personal definition of women, women who meet the boring definition of women, women who meet their own personal definition of men and people of either sex who identify as small blue creatures from Alpha Centurii, can tell you it doesn't matter whether "woman" is a boring old sex or an ever shifting effeffable constellation of blankness whose greater role is to receive and reflect the obsessions of the other, what matters is that we are still treated a certain way because of our female bodies and what people believe they mean, and until that stops happening we need rights and protections and language and cultural recognition that also centres our bodies and our embodied experiences to make sense of what happens to us.

you are aware that we often use the term "malaga airport" for a reason, right?

stop trying to make out TRAs are oppressed. It is very far from the case.

Oh. I didn't know that. I thought he was a kind of sunny person. Maybe I'm being simplistic.

In an interesting coincidence, this is from 'Sir Stephen Fry's' X account.

(In quotes as not likely a real account as it's very Terfy)

is "LimeFinch" another bunch of young adult male geeks
It would appear so, and not even very good at trying to keep up the pretence of being one person. 1 star, would not recommend

Can you explain the malaga thing please

Out of interest, what do you think the reaction would have been if the SC had gone the other way? (I men, that was never going to happen, but as a thought experiment).

Do you really think the type of people who are happy carrying "decapitate a terf" signs and drowning out women's voices with megaphones and so on would have given a soft smile, a sad sigh and said "Of course I'm relieved we now have the rights we always said we had confirmed but I am also aware many women will be feeling scared and unsure right now. The important thing now is not to say "we told you so" or celebrate this as a win against women, it is to rebuild trust between the feminist and trans communities so that today is not remembered as a day when one group gained safety and another lost it, but the day we all started feeling safer together."

Yeah, I don't either.

It's generally thought that transwomen fall into two camps.

Men with a fetish, and homosexual men who don't really want to be homosexual men, and would rather present as women.

The fetish is known as autogynephilia. AGP for short. And it can take quite extreme forms.

But TRAs don't like anyone to mention it, so they report you if you do.

But AGP just happens to be the airport code for Malaga airport, too. So it is sometimes used as a euphemism to avoid deletion.

I'm not being disingenuous when I ask this. I honestly don't know the answer.
Is the objection to trans people in a designated woman space because a) some trans people could still have an aggressive mindset and male physical strength and could therefore pose a threat
b ) a biological male could dress as a woman and use it as a tactic to gain access and attack / rape
or c) simply a general principle that a biological man should not ever be in a biological female's space as in ' end of ' not even worth arguing about.

Hi @Datun I appreciate your measured post about this, and yes I do remember reading this.

I agree with a lot of your post but do not think it undermines the race point or my identification with Caster Semenya's experiences. E.g. some of those points are hearsay or may be down to cultural differences (i.e. Caster's coach referring to her as 'he', 'him' can easily be explained by language differences - in many african languages we don't have the same language distinction for pronouns).

I think with a lot of these things, multiple things can be true at the same time. It can be true that Caster is a biological man, it can also be true that she believed herself to be female and was raised as such, while also being true that she was targeted by self-seeking coaches and the victim of racist abuse.

But the racial discourse around black women's bodies and how using "eyesight" (re-attaching image of JKR's tweet) as the first step for determining whether gender verification testing is necessary, plays into racist systems and stereotypes about black women's bodies that are borne from structures rooted in white supremacy. JKR is the first to say being a woman is not about looks, but then tweets something like that. There are many posters who agree, yet have used how Semenya was dressed on her wedding day as an example of how she clearly thinks of herself as a man (ignoring the many biological women who dress in men's style clothing). It really does come down to "looks" a lot of the time, which then allows biases around race to creep in, no matter how well meaning we are.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I see the cultural and racial impact in a very different way to you having been on the receiving end of the same racism Caster experienced (I have been called a boy/man growing up competing in gir's events because I was naturally more muscular than my white counterparts and very good at my event due to genetics and training). Yes Caster's finish point was that she was a biological man, whereas mine is that I'm a biological women. But the starting point of being looked at and accused of such as a result of race is the same. That's what I mean when I talk about black women's day-to-day experiences of the collateral damage from the extremes of this discourse being very different from the average white woman.

The first thread that I will ever hide

for no other reason that as dull as dishwater!

Oh I get it. Thanks for taking the time to explain

To me, Stephen gives off the same sneery dislike of woman as the fox basher.

Yes, I agree, I picked up on that too.

If gay men had to give away rights he’d be shouting from the rooftops, but women can be safely thrown under the bus to help polish his gay credentials.

It's only complicated because a political movement have said not only that "woman" and "female" cannot refer to the people they always used to, but that those people, despite having manifest significant physical and social needs and challanges in common, cannot have any word that means them and only them, nor speak of what they epxerience because they are members of this group, nor raise a political presence or have legal existence or rights as a group, and painted disgreement with this not as the reasonable and rational response of people who have a valid reason to disagree but as mindless hate.

It is not "complicated", it is conquest. You know what the truth is, you are just scared to use the words because your colonisers have decreed them unsayable.

You took this from JKR tweeting that she can tell thie difference between a man and a woman by using her eyes? 🥴

'But the racial discourse around black women's bodies and how using "eyesight" (re-attaching image of JKR's tweet) as the first step for determining whether gender verification testing is necessary, plays into racist systems and stereotypes about black women's bodies that are borne from structures rooted in white supremacy.'

Given that no-one can tell the difference between the person in your example (a) from the person in example (b) then (c) is the only sure safeguarding stance.

I'm sure you won't find many women here disagreeing with the racism that a lot of black women face in terms of masculinity and femininity

I think the problem here, specifically, is that transactivists will find a zillion different ways to shut down discussion, discourse and challenge.

And one of those ways has, consistently and relentlessly, been trying to stop women talking on the basis that the man being objected to is Really a woman and is only being objected to on the basis that he does not fulfil western beauty standards of white women.

It's just one of the millions of ways that they try to shut women up. Racism.

And you've inadvertently walked straight into the middle of it.

There is obviously a discussion to be hard around the claims that black women are masculine on the basis of racism. But unfortunately, the argument gets used on this board, on Twitter, absolutely everywhere, all the time just to shut down discussion of women's rights.

That's why you're getting the pushback. Because we see it all the time. But actually, you're having a completely different argument to the one we are, even though it's using a similar basis.

It's sort of like arguing at cross purposes, but not quite, but I bet there's a linguistic term for it somewhere.

I hope that helps. (not sarcasm!)

edited to add, bear in mind that this is the sex and gender board, where dismantling, refuting and challenging transactivist arguments is its bread and butter.

It's probably not the right place for the discussion you're having

But many people do accuse them of looking like and being men. That is the plight of many black female athletes. The fact is that black women will always be disproportionately targeted in such accusations because of racial stereotypes.

The image is a post Serena wrote precisely because the accusations of being a man got too much. To ignore that this is a huge issue that needs to be acknowledged when discussing how to deal with identification of biological males in women's sports, is to ignore the pervasive and ongoing impact of racism.

@Christmasmorale if you want to watch about a white athlete who was male with a DSD and had originally thought that they were female and competed and won in the female category of their sport (skiing), there is this video on Ecic Schinegger.

It really isn't about race. We need to test the sex of every single athlete who wants to take part in female categories of sport. It is a simple cheek swab and only needs to be done once.

All of the above. We have single sex spaces to protect women from men. TW retain the same offending profile/strength/danger to women as men. TW should not be in female SS spaces, whether they authentically think they are women or are just chancers.