Are we a cult?

[CyclingSam]

I keep reading that sex realists, of which I am one, are a cult. Perhaps a genderist could be so kind as to explain what a cult is, and why we qualify. Sometimes one of us calls them a cult too. Who has a better case, hmmm?

Ok! Then just say you don’t agree - saying ‘but it’s not misogyny because Wallace is a man’ without acknowledging there’s been some discussion around this (people agreeing and disagreeing with the idea of trans misogyny etc) doesn’t really move the conversation forward.

Indeed.

The photo of Wallace demonstrates a male dressing in a male way even though it's 'feminine' attire. Precisely because it was inappropriate for the setting and any woman trying to be taken seriously in that situation would not have dreamt of turning up like that.

It shows up precisely that a skirt or a dress is not necessarily 'woman's clothing' anymore than a woman wearing trousers is being masculine or dressing in 'mens clothing'.

It's showing up the behaviour and the difference between a man and a woman. Even if they think they are the opposite sex.

More manipulation through language.

Look with your eyes. What are you observing? Do not repeat what you are told you should or are conditioned to say. What are you actually seeing? Remember Winston.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

No.

Again why this need to control language, police tone, and conduct the discussion in the way you think it should be conducted?

It's also not how forums work.

You'd have better luck with controlling everything if you were to talk to yourself and just fill in for other people. I'd suggest that's neither a proper conversation or a proper discussion though.

It is helpful and it's necessary in order to refute your repeated assertions that women can be misogynistic/"transmisogynistic" towards men, when they just can't because misogyny is directed at the female sex.

Is your position that, for any man to avoid scrutiny regarding his behaviour, all he really needs to do is to don a skirt and every comment can therefore be written off as 'transmisogyny'?

Except the misogyny is right there staring you in the face.

You just don't want to see it because if you do, you have to acknowledge that putting on a dress doesn't magically turn you into a woman because you want to be one.

Anyone else suddenly got "I'm a lumberjack" as an earworm?

I'm still recovering from your mention of knickers, 'cos now I'm obsessed with the thought of a Snickers ice cream😋

The fact Monty Python effectively were sending up this craziness shows up just how ridiculous this situation is.

There's a quote about journalism that sums up the point about observing not just taking what you are told at face value:

"If someone tells you it's raining and another tells you it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. It's your job to look out the fucking window and find out which is true."
Jonathan Foster

To be fair to Fred. His male pelvis has a different angle to a female one so he isn't as able to cross his legs demurely as a woman.

Apparently it is anyone who is male or indeed female.

The quotation marks were because the person called themselves a 'women'. I have no idea what they meant by that hence asking, bearing in mind their definition.

😂😂 Sorry but that's ridiculous. Getting your knickers into a twist is an informal humorous British idiom, at least according to the Cambridge Dictionary, and I use it to anyone, male or female, who is getting unnecessarily flustered or annoyed. After all there are male knickers of a sort too, usually known as knickerbockers.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/get-knickers-in-a-twist

We already have a word for that though, don't we?

It's 'human'.

Meanwhile we need a word for the 51% of the population whose body has developed along the pathway to produce small gametes.

A while back I wrote a very considered and nuanced post about how misogyny can manifest itself in discrimination and abuse of men as well, not because these men are in any way women but because the patriarchal devaluing of/disgust towards the female creates a cultural devaluing of/disgust towards men exhibiting socially female-coded aspects.

The illustration I used was the abuse white musicians and white people in mixed race couples got from racists in the 1960s in the US. They were not themselves Black but the racist devaluing of anything Black was why they were abused.

Others disagreed.

This is the type of nuanced, difficult and insightful analysis around the concept of male bodies and feminine behavous within patriarchy that we could be discussing/having a good productive feminist argument about.

But we can't do that while these neo-sexist Genderists are insisting the fundamental insight, the patriarchal rejection of the female body, isn't a thing we can recognise because if TW actually are women as well, anything to do with sex can't be significant to womanhood or misogyny.

In this case from the University of Santa Barbara. California is a lost cause.

You were replying to this:

Being soft spoken, or liking to bake, wearing makeup and a pretty dress

Those are not typical female behaviours. At most they could be described as feminine-coded and many female people don't recognise themselves in them. In my own family as a microcosm, both our son and our son-in-law are the family cooks, whilst our daughter takes care of the family finances, whilst hardly ever wearing a dress of any kind. Don't you see how damaging and restrictive this idea of typical male/female behaviour is? GC sex realists certainly do.

What gets me with Wallace is we are supposed to just go along with what he says.

That's not the case with everyone else.

When you examine his behaviour and observe him and listen to what he says, he's just another misogynist man who hates women and wants power over women. That interview in particular is clear evidence of it. Hence we are told it's unfair to talk about or show that evidence.

That's why JKR is smeared, told she's unfair, etc etc. Because she speaks the truth to power and doesn't do what she's told. She is Winston.

We know she admires Orwell and read Orwell because the storylines in Harry Potter reflect this and pretty much reference this.

What frustrates me is we have huge debates about Ron's upbringing and goblins being anti-Semitic on MN. What we don't have is a debate about the references to Orwell in Harry Potter and how 1984 is therefore still as relevant and as important today as it always was. The intellectual lightweightedness of debate and demonisation of JKR kinda gets shown up by this. I mean there is a fucking Orwell statue outside BBC in London and there's journalists at the BBC who haven't gone out and checked if it's raining and have just done this bullshit of reporting "both sides". That's not bloody journalism! That's cowardice.

Central to point here is journalism which is precisely about pursuit of the truth. Not necessarily reporting something as an absolute truth but about asking questions, encouraging people to think and debate at a level which isn't repeating thought terminating cliches and calling people unkind or full of hatred because they happen to disagree and using evidence in pursuit of the truth to build an accurate and reputable case.

The truth can be really complex, inconvenient and difficult. No one wants to admit this today. They want a simplified world thats good on Instagram or Bluesky or Twitter.

I studied media precisely because I understood just how important this pursuit of the truth was. You can never really 'touch' the truth. Only get glimpses of it but you know it's there. And it's unchangeable.

You can only manipulate and change narratives around this.

Everything Wallace says and does indicates he does not think women are his equal and that women are like him.

Again to use another quote.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
Maya Angelou

These quotes all have something in common - pursuit of the truth and not taking something you are told at face value and to believe what you see and hear yourself.

That's the core of liberal democracy. You can not get away from this and claim to be progressive. You can not just tell someone they have to believe something because you say so. Like Wallace.

Wallace is a man. We all know it. We treat him differently to a woman in the same situation because we recognise and acknowledge his maleness even if he claims to be a man and this actually goes double if we decide to validate him and call him a woman whilst ignoring and over riding every single women who says he's just another misogynistic man.

That's your bottomline.

it's "Is it because I is black", but without the acknowledgment that Ali G is not black.

What we don't see is many journalists going "what if Wallace is a liar? Is he a credible source to quote as a representative of the trans community and should we be giving him this degree of respectability afforded to him?.

One of the problems with a large number of the rent a quote gang for trans news stories is precisely that they aren't. Why when talking about young teenage girls getting puberty blockers do we end up with a rent a quote middle aged man who transitioned as a middle aged man? And then have the audacity to claim it's representative. It doesn't even make sense. It's extraordinarily lazy on the part of news organisations to do this.

Abso-fucking-luetly.

And we are back at comedy.

I'm sure many do, but in case you hadn't noticed, women are physiologically incapable of doing what Fred did there in his sex dungeon.

All hail the sacred sperm

Look at the credibility of Wallace in the whole Graham Linehan / Sophie Brooks saga.

Look at the friendship between Wallace and Hayden.

This isn't insignificant.

But we have to call him 'she' because he wears a mini skirt and fish net tights and looks far more like Frank-N-Furter than Janet!

Like come on! Use your eyes!!!

That's an adjective, not a noun. What we want is a unique and universally accepted word for the adult female of the human species. We thought we had it with woman until men decided they wanted a bit of it. 🙄

Oh, I can just imagine the news headlines "Adult human female assaulted/raped/murdered". Really trips off the tongue doesn't it?