What is in the water this week?! Glinner now making a mockery of the cause

[RobynMiller]

I know I know I should just get off twitter but this week is just back to back GC news and not in a good way.

If you haven't seen, Glinner posted a video mocking Green Leader Zack Polanski, understandable plenty of material for a comedy writer there, but the video is so unhinged and unfunny.

Some speculating Graham was drunk when he made it but it's been 24 hours and he's left it up so maybe not.

I feel like we are finally gaining real ground in this fight and this makes GCs look like a bunch of lunatics.

I know there is no formal hierarchy but like it or not, for better and worse, we do have public faces and 'spokespeople' for this fight and this is just embarrassing.

I just feel so helpless because there can't be any accountability for this kind of thing but my God.

Thanks for listening to my rant, just been a very frustrating week.

Video here: https://x.com/Glinner/status/2047187374699126873?s=20

Mate, you can't even describe who it is who does the raping. You have no words to describe them.

You do know trans guys exist, right?

A lot of inclusive language is aimed at them - to encourage them to seek pregnancy care, smear tests etc.

It's life-saving. I'm currently supporting someone going through prostate cancer, and seeing that the advice websites are inclusive of trans women (and non-binary people) is such a relief. So many people avoid testing, because they worry about how they'll be treated - and inclusive language reassures them.

Pronoun information is vastly useful. My kid has a friend called Memphis - if that person emailed you at work and said they'd see you soon, the addition of he/him would help, right? Often it's just a cis guy who's fed up with the "I was expecting a woman" greeting. Younger cis people sometimes give their pronouns because they look androgynous, and don't care if someone mistakes them for trans.

Trans people have existed and been sharing facilities with cis people forever - they're just more visible now.

Why would I, as a cis woman, fear someone who likes women and wants to permanently transition more than men?

I explained t'other week that my trans son wears skirts and make-up precisely because gender is not a costume.

Trans women mostly wear what cis women do. But they are in a bind: in order to be accepted as women, they have to be recognisable as women. Then if they do that, they get condemned for 'wearing a costume'.

But being trans isn't cosplay. I find it deeply offensive that a trans woman dressing for work is labelled an attack on women (especially when violent cis men join in and pretend they're feminists, scolding those of us who don't hate trans people for 'harming women' -!!) while actual VAWG is never given such prominence.

Oh and there are no safe spaces. Just designated facilities which are totally open to any cis male sex offender.

Best not to get me started on kicking a couple of trans girls out of the Guides but keeping the cis male volunteers who work with them every week. Especially since the Guides do most sleepover events with the Scouts. Such a waste of money and effort for no benefit to girls at all.

So men are sending you pictures of children. As I said, time to find a new friend group. I can honestly say no man in my life has ever sent me a picture of a naked child. And I know lots of men. I mean, these people must know you right? So yeah. Also, you use the word cis. Now I’m not one to do guilt by association, and judge people for their language choices but. Oooh Nelly. I mean, if you want to be aligned with Volkmar Sirtusch and John Money, that’s on you. Not a good look though. #wordtothewise

If there are no safe spaces, and all spaces are open to men, it won’t make any difference if trans identified males use male spaces will it? If they’re just as likely to get attacked in the women’s by these males as you say, what is the difference? Actually they might be safer, because if all the “attackers” are invading the women’s spaces as you say, there’ll be none left in the men’s will there?

Glinner’s tweets aren’t improving. He’s retweeted a tweet of Libs of TikTok that says:
“Just three months ago Mark Ruffalo called Trump a “rapist pedophiIe”
Yesterday a leftist tried to kiII Trump and repeated this exact same lie as justification.
Democrats spread disgusting lies and smears about Trump so that someone will take action.
This is their goal.”

Are all the stories/lawsuits/monies paid to women about Trump really disgusting lies and smears? And are Democrats really just repeating those lies just so someone will “take action”? What a fine way to insult all those women and girls - and Glinner is endorsing it.

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2048505366762213399?s=61&t=3wYru9P_J0h74BXKFXAfmw

Yes. There is a great deal of work to be done to the policing system and to better protect female people from violence and sexual attacks.

However, what you have mentioned is irrelevant as to whether or not the language demands of one group that render terms meaningless in the English language, will remain unacceptable or not.

”Why on earth someone would consider the word "cis" an emergency for women at this horrific time is beyond me.”

”Trans people existing is not an attack on women. But it is a useful distraction from rape culture and the very real crisis in our underfunded court system, schools and (deeply corrupt) police forces. Not to mention from the manosphere & far right.”

This statement is hyperbolic and emotional manipulation. Someone pushing back on your attempts to convince others that language will and should change is not an ‘emergency’.

The inclusion of male people in female single sex provisions and the rendering of the terms girl, woman, female etc as being meaningless because they then mean both sexes of human, is indeed harmful to female people. It could justifiably and emotively be called an attack by a group of people.

If inclusion of male people into female single sex provisions and demanded language changes is what people with transgender identities require to merely exist, then that is a significant issue that does need to be discussed.

At what point does a belief in a subjective reality that doesn’t reflect material reality get societal support for the structural changes in law and in language that have been demanded by those with transgender identities? At what point does that belief get equal treatment to other philosophical beliefs where it is treated as a belief but not as society’s universal material reality?

”Protesting a commonly-used adjective is shaking-fist-at-clouds behaviour.”

And this is just more emotional manipulation and hyperbole wrapped around a falsehood.

The term you refer to is not ‘commonly used’. It may be commonly used for describing humans in your narrow social group giving you that perception, but it is not commonly used within society.

Not forgetting that ‘cis’ is also a meaningless word when applied to humans. So even if it was commonly used in a specific group now, it will fade away because there is nothing material to support it. It is a term that was wrongly repurposed and is misused.

And your illustrative ‘shaking fist at clouds’ reads more like projection in your own post.

The distractive tactic of refocusing on wider societal issues is a common one. Yes, there are many issues that are requiring attention. That doesn’t change the facts around the issue about language that was under discussion though.

Those points about ‘cis’ being meaningless and only common in certain groups, remain unchanged by your broadening discussion. Those facts underlying that linguist demand will remain true regardless of your attempt to distract.

Did you want to discuss the very real impacts to female people with trauma histories, including those who are children at school, of male inclusion in female single sex provisions and the language demands where terms to describe female people become meaningless? It is, after all, relevant to the thread because of the Green Party’s current leadership’s points of view.

Doesn't your user name suggest that you're heavily invested in it too? Which is, of course, your choice, but I do wonder why you're choosing to come somewhere that clearly upsets you when there's a whole world out there, with ducklings and cygnets and goslings and trees in bloom and weather improving each day. Why not just close the window and go and enjoy your life?

”Pronoun information is vastly useful. My kid has a friend called Memphis - if that person emailed you at work and said they'd see you soon, the addition of he/him would help, right?”

No. Why would it be helpful? Why do I need to know what sex Memphis is unless I am in a situation where knowing Memphis’s sex matters?

And if Memphis was male and had female pronouns on the email, that is misleading me to expecting a female person when they are a male person. So the direct opposite of helpful.

“Younger cis people sometimes give their pronouns because they look androgynous, and don't care if someone mistakes them for trans.”

This sentence contradicts itself. If a person looks androgynous and don’t care if others consider them to be trans, why would they need to explain what sex they are?

The misinformation and confusion continues :

”Trans people have existed and been sharing facilities with cis people forever - they're just more visible now.”

This is a falsity. People with gender dysphoria might have existed forever, this has not been proven and is likely to never be proven.

No, male people who believe they are female have not shared facilties with female people ‘forever’. Even the homophobic cultures that put gay men into third genders didn’t believe those men were female people. As a call to authority to support your point, this doesn’t work.

“Why would I, as a cis woman, fear someone who likes women and wants to permanently transition more than men?”

The answer to this question is that I don’t believe many people on this thread would say you should fear a male person with a transgender identity more than other male people. You should, however, ‘fear’ male people equally.

There is no evidence that shows extreme body modification makes a male person less likely to sexually abuse or be violent or any otherwise cause female people harm than a male without extreme body modification.

Just to bring this back to the original topic - glinner being a twat does not mean men are women. No one can change sex and people from across the political spectrum also agree sky is blue, grass is green etc

Mark Ruffalo is an idiot whose agent should tell him to put the phone down. He became extremely rich by being charming and handsome in romantic comedies. Nobody hired him to be a political pundit.

Likewise, John Cusack's agent should have told him to knock the antisemitic memes on the head. If he'd paid attention he might still have a career.

Meryl Streep is about 10 times smarter than Ruffalo and Cusack put together, but it's fair to point out the absurdity of Meryl being a massively outspoken feminist, and leading the Time's Up campaign, while there's a tacit agreement in place that nobody asks Meryl what she did or didn't know about what her good friend Harvey Weinstein was up to.

These things being true does not require you to be particularly fond of Donald Trump. A smart agent or executive would not need to be a Trump fan to draw a connection between plummeting box office receipts on the one hand, and on the other hand entertainers spending every waking hour posting on BlueSky about how much they hate 50% of Americans.

Like everyone who knows Glinner, I have a kind of love-hate relationship with him, and yes, he misjudges some things and some of his jokes fall flat. But I'm not going to condemn him for being rude about Mark fucking Ruffalo.

The fallacies continue too.

”Oh and there are no safe spaces. Just designated facilities which are totally open to any cis male sex offender.”

I see. So why then do male people with transgender identities need to use the female single sex provisions? If it is the case that female people are not safe at all in female single sex provisions, those male people don’t need to be in the female provision.

Of course, publicly open provisions are not 100% safe. I don’t believe any person thinks that they are. That doesn’t stop single sex provisions from being a useful resource in minimising the risk of attack.

“Best not to get me started on kicking a couple of trans girls out of the Guides but keeping the cis male volunteers who work with them every week. Especially since the Guides do most sleepover events with the Scouts. Such a waste of money and effort for no benefit to girls at all.”

This is more falsity. Male volunteers are subject to many restrictions and safeguarding decisions. There is a wide gulf between a male volunteer (usually also a family member of one or more of the guides) and a male child who the girls treat as if that male child was a female child. The situation is very different in how those men are treated so the comparison is not meaningful at all. Not only that, if one girl has an issue with that male volunteer, then there is a range of actions open to the leader including to not use that volunteer again.

And yes, guides do go camping with scouts. So what? I don’t believe it is ‘most’, it is ‘some’ though.

Do you understand consent at all? The guides require parental consent to attend the camp. There is again, a significant difference between a male child sharing a tent with female children who either know or don’t know that child is male and female children going to a camp ground where other tents will have male children.

Parents need full information to be able to give informed consent. Where they might consent to being on a campground with male people, they are more likely to be not give consent to a female child sharing a tent with a male child.

“Such a waste of money and effort for no benefit to girls at all.”

No benefit? Fuck. How utterly dismissive of girl’s needs can you be. You have leveraged girls sexual abuse as a distraction point without then even considering the needs of those girls to have appropriate safeguards in place for their safety and wellbeing.

I am not sure if you intended to use misogynistic arguments or not but the outcome of your arguments would allow harm to come to girls.

Sexism seems to have become forgotten, but it exists and impacts many women’s lives.

Especially since the Guides do most sleepover events with the Scouts

Well that sentence proves you know nothing about Guiding. The vast majority of residential events are not done with Scouts. As they are completely different organisation from us, it makes no sense to do it together for just a standard residential.

It's going to be large scale jamborees that are joint and as they are so expensive, most units that go to them will do one every few years.

I think there is quite a lot of thinking that comes through that poster’s posts that are simply the unquestioned regurgitation of fallacious or simply false information that we have seen being used on media by spokespeople or those who have influence.

There doesn’t seem to be much deeper searching for accuracy or coherent understanding.

So many words, so much projection, and yet no engagement whatsoever with my actual point.

I don't fear trans people. I fear sexism. I fear the way switching the meaning of "men" and "wonwn", "boy" and "girl" simply serves to obscure the reality that sexism, whether it's professional sidelining, sexual exploitation, VAWG or domestic coercive control is directed at the female sex and the female body regardless of how that person happens to label themselves.

I find it unconscionable that the people who support trans identities cannot find a middle ground where the reality of sex is also named and recognised, but instead continue with this irrational and controlling need to undefine sex in all legal, social and political contexts and to hell with the half of humanity who will lose out because of it.

TRAs like TPA think this is all about hating transpeople, because that's where their myopic focus is. The idea that this is simply about recognising the reality of and the consequences of sex for women is so reasonable, and so obviously true, and so starkly exposes the sexism and misogyny of their movement that they have to do anything to avoid acknowledging it even to themselves.

And therefore they can never get it right, never understand the people they argue with. They unconsciously force themselves to wear blinkers to make thd things they need to believe and support seem reasonable.

I don’t care about the Mark Ruffalo part of the tweet. That’s not quite the relevant part. But by the same token, couldn’t you also say that nobody hired Glinner to be a political pundit?

The relevant part is where Trump is called a “racist paedophile”. Not “BlueSky” or “falling box office receipts”. Do you have any thoughts on the body of the tweet itself?

"I'm afraid the word's in common usage. Objecting to a perfectly normal adjective is a complete waste of time."

It's really not, you know. In the Bluesky/ex-Twitterati TRA circles, or the "my kid is trans" parenting groups, maybe - but people like my neighbours, & a lot of the people I come across in normal daily life, would look at you blankly if you used that word, even if they are aware of the arguments about women's spaces, sports etc.

When it crops up on media interviews/talk shows or whatever, the host/presenter still has to intervene to say "and just explain what that word means, for those that don't know" - a significant portion of society has never even heard of it.

I can think of lots of words in common usage that I object to vehemently. Let's start with "slut", "bimbo", "hysterical", "frigid", "strident", and all the other gendered ways women ( in the original female meaning) are judged in ways that men (original male meaning) are not.

"Cis" is just another one of the many words that express sexist assumptions about people based on their body.

And what on earth good will it do women in these (awful) situations to dilute their sex-based rights, even further, by allowing a subsection of men to self-identify as women?

To take your very first example - a rape victim will most likely have had a physical examination. The one constant thing that women in this situation commonly ask for is a female examiner - she will be further traumatised to find a man in the room with her, allowed there because he self identifies as a woman.

That same woman might need counselling - and lo and behold, then finds her rape crisis service is headed up by someone like Mridul Wadhwa who calls her a bigot for wanting a female counsellor, or a female only group, and refuses her that service.

The list could go on and on - knowing that a man cannot be a woman is the most fundamental basis for women's rights. Without knowing this, there are no women's rights - because men can have them too.

“And what on earth good will it do women in these (awful) situations to dilute their sex-based rights, even further, by allowing a subsection of men to self-identify as women?”

The distraction presented by TransParentlyAnnoyed is a weak one. Because as you rightly point out, all that poster did was try to leverage those points without considering the deeper consequences of what the consequences are of what that poster ultimately supports.

Certainly the demanded language changes leads to all sorts of potential harms due to massive safeguarding failures. All because the language becomes meaningless. And any inclusion of male people in female single sex provisions creates a direct conflict in providing for female people’s needs.

Let’s not forget that calling for people to ignore issues and focus on something else doesn’t mean those issues disappear. And when those issues then directly interact and negatively impact the victims of the issues we are being told to focus on, it makes that call to action one that that poster clearly hasn’t considered fully. Or wants to then limit in scope.

The call to action of ‘look over there, stop looking here’ really doesn’t work as a distraction when it is a case of ‘look over there, but don’t look further because looking further will highlight again what you are looking at here’.

But if you, personally, have rejected the importance of the after care of those female victims to only then focus on the attaining justice aspect, I guess you wouldn’t have thought that through. It is siloed thinking.

Do you have any thoughts on serial abuser of women Neil Gaiman? Or does he get a free pass because he belongs to your political tribe?

Sure, all those rape allegations don't look great, but at least he never retweeted Libs of TikTok.

If Memphis emailed me, it wouldn't be remotely useful to know Memphis preferred he/him pronouns. All this tells me is Memphis's 'gender identity' which is of no use at all.
There are circumstances where I may wish to know Memphis's sex, but their preferred pronouns give me no idea of that and are often used to obscure it. Which couldn't be more opposite from 'vastly useful' when you're engaged in work where sex matters.

https://x.com/babybeginner/status/2048527840820486169/video/1?s=46

there is a great too many types of this superficial type response, no wonder we see it pop up on these threads.

And no. This man in this video does not actually care about women and girl’s safety. But he does feel righteous repeating arguments that are effectively saying ‘why have policies and laws at all about this issue because you cannot guarantee 100% safety.’

No law or policy guarantees 100% safety. In anything. It doesn’t stop making safeguarding important and laws and policies a significant effort to make in the name of safeguarding. Letting one sub group of male people into a provision they should be excluded from is a safeguarding failure that cannot be denyied or dismissed.

This argument in this male person’s video is weak and based on falsehood.

I personally don’t judge people’s sex category by appearance or prejudge that appearance in a work situation unless there is a reason for it. Generally there is no reason. I could work with Memphis without needing to know if I was in a role that didn’t require me doing more than meeting Memphis once or twice and sex simply didn’t matter.