Shifty - is Adam Curtis a TERF?

[LeFromage]

There’s a thread on this in Telly Addicts but I’m interested in thoughts on what Curtis’ commentary is saying about the transgender trend specifically since 1979 (when first episode starts)

30 mins in 1st episode he has an archive excerpt of a dog and its owner on daytime TV sofa being interviewed about the dog transitioning to become female while the dog looks sadly (it is a boxer 🤣 so it has resting sad face) into the camera.

then excerpt of teen being asked what “label” they are and them saying I dunno you mean what washing labels? And then an interview with punks saying they are punks.

Thats as far as I am but I’m looking forward to the rest of it - anyone else spotted TERFy/ Sane vibes? It would fit with his overarching theme

I've only seen the first one and the dog part made me laugh a lot. I thought the stuff about labels was making a point about the rise of individualism in Thatcher's Britain. I did think there were quite a lot of statements which were Adam Curtis' opinions and not referenced which made me a bit uneasy. I did go and look up the dog thing. Apparently male dogs can suffer from a form of hemaphrodism in which changes in their hormones mean their genitals start to shrink. Every day is a school day.

🚨🚨 This is an example of the shameful erasure trans gender animals and the suppressed struggle for trans awareness of our canine brothers and sisters. Man's best friend, indeed. Why does the human get to be gendered while his loyal companion gets the ungendered noun? 🧐

🚨 @damekatydenise_ should be coordinating a letter writing campaign to Ofcom to demand a sympathetic view on the matter be presented and gross misrepresentations and lacunas in trans pet history be filled.

There's an interesting interview with Curtis on The Rest is Entertainment https://podcastgo.pl/listen/?appleid=1718287198&guid=538ecef0-4c34-11f0-a5eb-cb5b98364731

Good to see Dr Dame Katy back on Twitter.😁

No Adam Curtis thread is complete without this youtube video:

@Lovelyview ahhh that makes sense more of what the woman owner is saying - you’ve educated me now too. Dogs can be the new clownfish 🫤

yes absolutely it is about rise of individualism and where that leads us - but he also commented on a podcast (not marina & Richard’s TRIE but it’s on YouTube ) about a vacuum of vision in political leadership which is filled by “shiftery” instead to hold onto power eg Trump’s overblown statements, boris and his dead cat announcements and the psychological effect on general populace . Haven’t watched enough episodes yet to see how /if the cognitive dissonance it results in for some or all of us in different ways is tied in by Curtis to the transgender trend.

OMG I love Adam Curtis documentaries! I had no idea there was a new one -looking forward to watching it tonight and I will let you know my thoughts on his TERFiness afterwards (although a lot of his work does centre around criticisms of individualism and US influence on modern day culture, so he'd have to 'Pull a Jon Ronson'* to not be a TERF)

*That is ignore all his previous work and intellectual focus to kneel at the shrine of gender ideology

Canine siblings please, non binary dogs are valid.

I watched and very much enjoyed the first and half of the second episode last night. I do wonder why he included the dog clips, whether it was for comedy value or to highlight that medical professionals (vets count as medical professionals, right?) have power over us in the sense that we trust them to make good decisions for us because of their training and knowledge, but this one was obviously insane and the poor woman believed the vet, meaning Bruno was going to get his genitals removed surgically.

I liked the identity clips ("I'm just me!" And "I'm just a woman!"), and, having grown up in the 90's, I was shocked at seeing the misogyny - the guy that told that poor woman he didn't like her and that she seemed empty, and the awful, awful police interview of the woman who had been raped 💔

Definitely Terfy elements but the beauty of Adam Curtis' docs is that they are open to your own interpretation of what's going on.

I'm sure in one of his previous documentaries he has had a clip of a man who identified as a woman, perhaps in the 80s, and it did seem to be part of a tapestry on the rise of individualism and the focus on the self. From his interviews Curtis does seem to have a healthy skepticism of the liberal elite crowd and their dogma.

I like to imagine that in decades to come, Curtis or some similar successor will be making a documentary on how the terves won :)