This isn't working - Trans Identified Men in the workplace

[Niminy]

Not sure if anyone else has flagged this, but the latest edition of This Isn't Working podcast has an absolutely brilliant interview with psychologist 'Dr P', which absolutely nails why cross-dressing men are so disturbed and disturbing. She goes right to the heart of the matter and is absolutely fearless in her (in my view totally convincing) analysis. Youtube linked but audio version also available on podcast platforms.

Thanks, will watch later. I follow Dr P on Twitter- she’s great.

Wow! I've got this on while browsing the latest SP thread. It's a relief to hear two women (Naomi C) and Dionne J highlighting the coercive control aspects of GI in the workplace and how both trans policies and behaviour turns the workplace into a hostile environment for women (and no doubt many men).

I've just listened to this and it is so refreshing to hear the quiet parts said out loud! So many points which have clarified for me some of the nebulous feelings about the whole trans issue, but particularly about trans identifying men.

I’ll stick it on this afternoon.

Yes. She says the quiet bits out loud. The bits that so many women know but are feart of saying . So powerful.

The bit where she talked about how having to deal with a TiM (and actually I think TiF as well) slows down your cognitive processing. That's so recognisable. It's a similar mental load to having to translate from another language you don't speak fluently. Also the insight that whatever concessions you make will never be enough; and that women's discomfort is a feature not a bug. Actually, all of it.

Im half way through it and the penny has just dropped for me about why the PC of GC was created.

Talk about wanting to you amputate your leg and you get sent to HR. Talk about wanting to amputate you penis or breasts and everyone is forced to cheer.

It protects behaviour that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise.

Also the insight that whatever concessions you make will never be enough; and that women's discomfort is a feature not a bug

Just what we've been saying here for the last 6/7/8 years!

I'll give it a listen. I usually quite like this podcast but had to turn off the last episode as it annoyed me so much.

The guest was an American recruiter who built a 'woke free' agency. Fine as a lot of the nonsense you have to put up with in some parts of the US are legitimately infuriating. What annoyed me though was he kept saying he wanted to appeal to companies and people who wanted to be neutral but it was very clear from what he way saying that it wasn't actually neutral but rather traditional and conservative values. Again, to each their own but just say you want to do different politics in your workplace rather than no politics.

He also kept saying that all 'woke' stuff in the US like BLM and trans stuff was down to "Marxism". He said it a number of times and clearly has no clue what actual Marxism involves in terms of material analysis. Identity politics is world's away from actual Marxism. Makes me think he has just spent his time listening to terminally online podcast bros ranting on about cultural Marxism and not actually engaging with the topic with any intellectual curiosity.

I do wish Tanya would challenge the guests a bit more as she does tend to just agree or hmm her way through the episodes.

Even when they do know what they are talking about, a bit of challenge would allow them to strengthen their arguments.

Slur in title + podcast asks why anyone would hire someone with zero violent convictions = appearance-based bigotry. Nah cheers.

I'm watching it now and it's bloody fascinating! Dr P is very insightful and Tanya asks really interesting, useful questions.

I think companies hire new staff based on more than whether they have violent convictions or not. Or do you think that any trans person that applies for a job should automatically get it because any other outcome can only be based on transphobia?

I know he is a knob but I don't think that "Eddie Izzard" is a slur.

He may have expressed himself inelegantly but the history of Critical Theory in academia does have origins in Marxist theory as well as postmodernism.

https://afaf.org.uk/an-opportunity-for-uk-academia-reject-critical-social-justice-pseudoscience-from-the-usa/2/

"It may help to trace the history of this critical social justice movement, and examine how scientific or reliable of a foundation it is to build on. Jumping back to perhaps the beginnings of this branch of thought, the critical theory movement ultimately connects back to Karl Marx’s dialectical philosophy and Sigmund Freud’s individual psychology, but some elements of those have been deemphasized more recently. Critical social justice also has shared roots in postmodernism."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

"“Critical theory” refers to a family of theories that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies. In a narrow sense, “Critical Theory” (often denoted with capital letters) refers to the work of several generations of philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. Beginning in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, it is best known for interdisciplinary research that combines philosophy and social science with the practical aim of furthering emancipation."

Edited because brain is not working and can't distinguish between Engels and Hegel today 🙈

If he meant critical theory he should have said. I think modern understanding of IDpol has much more of a postmodernism underpinning than Marxist. And I am no communist so not getting salty about that. It's just lazy thought that demonstrates he doesn't really know what he is talking about.

It just made me laugh because at one point he talked about getting a woman a job at a company where she could actually express her (traditional) values but was still presenting his company as apolitical. It's literally called 'Red Ballon' to describe people leaving blue states for red ones so they can be with people who think more like them.

Just to reiterate, nothing wrong with that. Gap in the market and all that. Just don't present it as being entirely neutral and superior to companies that want you to have pronouns in your bio.

Because it isn't apolitical. It's just different politics. Different values. And that didn't get any challenge at all in the episode.

Not sure how much that sort of thing relates to UK HR anyway. The US is quite different to us culturally, particularly in the workplace. Their left wing rhetoric is often madder than ours but their right wing is also much more extreme.

Just watched it. Powerful!
I don't agree with everything she says but I admire the way she's not afraid to say it.
Anyone who accuses us of being too direct on here should watch this.

Thanks for the link, one to keep for further reading, if only academia had listened in 2023 what a different country we would live in today.
Road not travelled, again.

Quite.

And appearance has nothing to do with it.

It is the coercive aspects, the involvement of others in one person's personal requirements and inner self expression whether they agree or consent or not, the demand that women sacrifice their privacy, dignity, single sex spaces and legal protections regardless of their own (wholly uncared about) needs and access requirements, and better not argue about it in case someone hoiks their bosom and scolds about 'you're a bigot'.

And that's just the starting point. The basic fact that women's discomfort is an openly enjoyed feature is the next step.

Izzard is only one such man who has repeatedly demonstrated all of this, plus requiring you to play along with whether today he feels conveniently 'girl mode' or 'boy mode'.

His official website is eddieizzard.com so if its a slur then it's one he's happy to use

Perhaps he has reclaimed it?

I just listened. She made a good case about coercive control and women's discomfort being a feature for some TiMs. And it's always interesting to hear what's really going in the back rooms in corporations - though have to wonder why there's so much appeasing still going on if this is what employers are really finding.

I did find some of her positions/arguments concerning. For instance, she made a big deal about it making people uncomfortable and while she partially linked that to incongruence (dealing with the lie and what our senses are telling us) she also made a big deal about it just not being culturally acceptable. And I find that argument worrying in the sense of it's necessarily rigid and conservative. All sorts of things we consider good have come out challenging cultural practices - women's current place in the working world amoung them.

Also she seemed vehemently anti- people with mental illness in the work place at all which I think was pretty overdone and unreasonable. Some aspects fine and well reasoned, but others seemed a bit hyperbolic.

I was glad to see her being very clear about the the mutilation of the body as being mental illness in other contexts and how we wouldn't be at all happy with workplaces positively supporting people having arms or legs amputated if they felt their body just shouldn't have them. But I think she also pushed the "wrong body" aspect a little hard as a lot of the trans movement have moved a way from that and it just doesn't apply to a lot of the arguments they are currently making.

Yes, I thought she failed to make any distinction between men (with no pretensions to be anything else) wearing dresses as in non-bifurcated garments made for men, and men wearing dresses as in garments clearly worn to say "I am a woman".

There's no sound reason why men shouldn't push the envelope with the former until it is a social commonplace, just as women (with no pretensions to be anything but women) did with trousers. After all, historical reenactor men wear "dresses" of this sort all the time, but nobody turns a hair because they are thought of as "robes" or "tunics".
The latter - dresses worn because they are a women's garment - is a different kettle of fish.

I wasn't sure whether she just hadn't considered the possibility of dresses and skirts designed specifically for men, or whether she thought there was something wrong with men in dresses per se.

What I took from the interview was that she was against people in active psychosis (with the added complications involved from cross sex hormones interaction with the brain) in the workplace because they can be dangerous to themselves and others.

As for her comments about clothing: 5 years ago I was much more easy going about men in women's clothing but I've since learned an awful lot more about the motivations behind transvestism, and AGP, and now I don't trust men who cross dress not to be doing it as a boundary violation or being in the early 'frog boiling' stages of fetishism. Which is a pity because I've grew up during a time where men were gender non-conforming and it really worked - I loved the creative expression that Glam, New Romantics and Grunge allowed men.

Why do men wear dresses? Why do men wear bras?