Hobbycraft employee badge - no terfs, no Tories

[ItsCoolForCats]

Another example of why bringing your whole self to work is a terrible idea.

Hobbycraft seems to be busy trying to mitigate the fallout, presumably because they know which demographic spends the most money there.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/politics/5359520/dundee-hobbycraft-trans-row/

Ooo, am intrigued by the flying canoe! Do you remember the author?

Hilarious. My teens and their mates ALL think that trans 'rights' a load of attention seeking misogynistic bollocks just like I do.

You really need to spend some time outside of your echo chamber.

Chimamanda Adichie sets her books in Nigeria, bar for Americana. She's Nigerian and now lives in the USA. I'd be startled if she set her books anywhere other than Nigeria and the US.

I buy the books

but apart from me the one person in the family who are absolutely hammers his credit card when it comes to harry potter merch is my sons 29 year old husband 🤷🏻

he has fallen out with a good friend of his (female) because he has a degree of respect for JKR and her views

(although he is careful in front of some of his friends, went to a nightclub with them and he joined in with the JKR digs….i was sat there thinking ‘thats not what you said last week’ 😀)

Oh and ds1 and husband loved harry potter world and the universal worlds and are saving up for epic universe……soooooooo

This is US centric, but nevertheless an interesting insight into trans activism and public support.

https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/how-to-fix-what-ails-trans-activism

That's a very good piece. I'm sure TRAs have denounced it.

The vast majority of people, are not aware of gender ideology, or JKR trying to fend off manic TRA's. The majority recognise her, as a woman who supports women's rights, donates a huge amount of her money to various charities as the result of her amazing prowess as an author.

Yes, it's O.R.Melling.

The first in the series is A Hunter's Moon, and is I think entirely set in Ireland. If I recall correctly the action moves to Canada in the second and that's where you find the flying canoe, which is an idea from an old story about a group of Voyageurs who are deep in the wilderness and are offered a flying canoe by the devil to get home for Christmas. (There is a catch, of course.)

I’m 42 years old. Every single person I know apart from 1 is a staunch GC.

Most of those admit that they keep their gobs shut about their position unfortunately due to work or social pressures. But 99/100 know that men cannot become women.

I work adjacent to the university that has just spawned a new woman only network, and I’m positive that most who may be assumed supportive of the TRA are absolutely not. They’re just keeping their mouths shut until it’s safer to speak without being sacked.

Very interesting.

He criticises the zero sum game of trans vs women's rights...but never quite manages to explain how trans 'rights' (usually taken to mean the 'right' to be treated as the opposite sex) can ever not encroach on women's rights to our words and spaces (the peanut rule - one man in a women's space means it's not a women's space).

Also he massively misunderstands what gender critical means (he thinks it means finding the concept of trans threatening and wanting to suppress it by removing its language. Hmm this concept reminds me of something I can't quite put my finger on). Perhaps he didn't actually speak to anyone GC and just assumed he understood it all.

He's right that sex is binary, sex and gender are not the same and that fruitful discussions require terms to be defined first.

I agree the misunderstanding of what gender critical means, at least my interpretation. Also the gatekeepers of what being transgender means is a bit handwoven. Who decides? How much transitioning is enough? What is Gender dysphoria and how should it be diagnosed and treated? If its a mental condition, should sufferers be given risky drugs and surgeries?

I assumed the author is a TiF. Although the photo was a bit distracting I thought they had a really ugly growth on their ear!

A very sensible piece of writing until it (deliberately) mischaracterises “gender critical” thinking.

People with this “gender-critical” mindset operate under the misapprehension that they can suppress a phenomenon they find threatening — transgenderism — by simply removing the language that represents the feelings trans people have.

No “gender critical” person I know thinks like this, they simply recognise gender as a social construct to be clearly differentiated from sex and spoken of using appropriate language.

Yes it's quite telling that for all the "you all need to educate yourself and talk to some actual trans ppl then you'd understand" rhetoric spouted by TRA, they never trouble themselves to do the same and talk to some actual GC women.

I also was disappointed by their misunderstanding of what 'gender critical' means.

I will quote this section (below) though as I had a conversation recently (with a progressive left RSOH believer who has relaxed their stance a bit) which included them stating that they had come to realise that you can't just bully people into agreeing about the omnicause even when you are 'morally right'.

So the quote below stood out for me as it mentions moral superiority.

Why someone who thinks it is right to put Isla Bryson in a women's prison, or that children should have their puberty blocked has the gall to claim moral superiority, I just can't fathom... but there we are, they really do think it.

'What went wrong? How did the left-wing trans movement squander a society’s worth of open-minded goodwill? Perhaps the biggest blunder was their refusal to compromise, especially over the most contentious policy areas, such as trans women in female-only spaces or youth gender medicine. On both of these fronts, activists steamrolled over scientific and ethical complexities, blithely dismissed or actively hid risks, and placed themselves at odds with a large majority of society. To make matters worse, they approached these issues, and all others, with an air of unassailable moral superiority and certainty that brooked no discussion. Anyone who expressed skepticism was either bombarded with alarming but misleading stats, or guilt-tripped, or screamed at, or systematically maligned, lied about, and lumped in with the far right. The movement tried to impose sweeping and unpopular changes without ever even attempting to persuade anyone. Their go-to strategy was public shaming, censorship, excommunication, and bullying. Activists behaved in a manner that made no sense unless the goal was to get people to hate them, and by extension, their cause.'

I should also add that the quote above is interesting when compared to some of Swift's posts, for example, the one about using shame to get people to vote the 'correct way'.

That passage is bang on!

My son in law thought it meant that you thought gender stereotypes were awesome 🧐

i told him that someone would describe my views (which aren’t far off his) as GC

It's the parable of the sun and the wind and the man with the cloak isn't it? The wind raged and stormed and the man pulled his cloak tighter, the sun shone and the man took it off. Using violence and intimidation got them what they wanted in the short term but it didn't make anyone other than a tiny % of ppl really believe men can be women because it's batshit they didn't quit while ahead so to speak but just demanded more and more and raged and screamed and now of course the backlash is significant. The tragedy is that LGB ppl have been dragged into this backlash because the TQ couldn't accept they couldn't have everything they wanted all the time no matter how mad the demand

Those were the two points that didn’t sit well with me as well.

So the TRAs went too far, according to this author, by demanding that “trans rights” be given to anyone who vaguely expressed a passing dislike of the expectation to perform gender roles. The author suggests pulling back - but how far? Where do you draw the line? Who gets to decide what is trans enough? Since “fully medically transitioning” isn’t a thing (as in, you can have all the plastic surgery you want, but you can’t change your sex), you can’t have that as your line in the sand. So where do you put it?

And the complete - deliberate? Or just ignorant? - misunderstanding of what the GC stance is just plain put me off. I know this is an opinion piece, but if you want to ascribe thoughts to another person or group, you might want to, I dunno, talk to one of them first? Educate yourself, maybe?

I do wonder sometimes how quite normal people can get it so wrong.

It's partly because, despite what they claim, they don't believe that transwomen are women. So therefore they see them dressing as women and think they're nonconforming. And that it's a good thing to be nonconforming. And that gender critical women are critical of nonconformers.

When those gender critical women say you can't change your sex, you're born that way, it only reinforces it to them.

Very early on, I had a conversation with an Italian woman whose husband actually taught feminism (I know).

It was a bit farcical and heated with us both getting increasingly louder and coming out with sentences that we each agreed with, despite thinking that we were having an argument until the very end. Where she pronounced, 'and so they wear dresses' in a sort of ta da way.

And I yelled, yes, because 'that's what women do, and she went completely silent, opening and closing her mouth. Watching her glance away as the cogs turned and the penny dropped was both very funny, but also incredibly rewarding.

Transwomen don't wear dresses because they're nonconforming men. They wear them because they believe they're conforming to female gender stereotypes.

Dismantling gender stereotypes is a cornerstone of feminism. And yes, it's very irritating when people get it wrong. Especially when they think that's exactly what they are doing by supporting transgenderism.

(I don't think that's necessarily what the person in the article thinks, she just hasn't bothered to ask any gender critical woman why they're gender critical).

THIS! So much this. I cannot believe that in my lifetime we have gone from embracing and celebrating actual gender nonconformity - women with short hair! Boys wearing makeup! - to this regressive BS that seems to insist, simultaneously, that (a) if you are a girl with short hair you are actually a boy, and (b) that people who say that no, there is no correct way to be a girl, are actually saying “girls shouldn’t have short hair”! FFS! Do people even listen to themselves?

Yes, quite. Or are we getting offended over everything these days.

Yes it's the inverse nature of it that is so galling.

You've got youngsters who think you should be able to present as you like, wear what you want, be as non conformingly masculine or feminine as is possible, loudly complaining that a gender critical feminist is an old-fashioned fuddy duddy.

It's that last bit of the story. The last sentence. Yes a man can have long hair, make up earrings, and a dress, right up until he says 'and that's why I'm a woman'.

It's extremely irritating when these proponents believe it is they who are progressive. When it's the opposite.

It's that last bit of the story. The last sentence. Yes a man can have long hair, make up earrings, and a dress, right up until he says 'and that's why I'm a woman'.

exactly - a man can do all those things and he's still a man

that's the point