Ageism often lurks within the ideas and rhetoric of trans activists - Victoria Smith

[IwantToRetire]

... In a recent interview to celebrate 80 years of Woman’s Hour, programme editor Karen Dalziel was quizzed on its handling of the “what is a woman?” question. When asked why the programme didn’t simply reflect the law as clarified by the Supreme Court, she offered a rather convoluted response:

One thing we have to remember here is that you’re on Radio 4. Many of our audience are over sixty. They don’t understand the terminology and part of our role in the preceding years has been to help people understand the terms and what all the different terms mean.

A generous interpretation of this could be that this is about complex legal terminology (who wasn’t an expert in case law when they were in their teens and early twenties? Funny how you forget!). Except Dalziel goes on to say that the Supreme Court judgment has “helped listeners have some clarity about what is meant, but this is moving”. For many people, she argues, it’s “a beginning”:

People said that women couldn’t vote. Other people have different ideas and continue to campaign. We follow the story. ...

Full article https://thecritic.co.uk/you-dont-have-to-be-young-to-understand-gender-identity/

Also at https://archive.is/Ye7A0

The very people who wish to self identify, force identities onto others.

I remember a very astute comment from an article years ago, about all this being largely people who wanted to stuff everybody else into rigid boxes of their choosing in order to be able to say they were special and outside of those boxes.

As with everything else about this political movement, it is all about trampling and using others for selfish personal benefit, regardless of how it affects them.

True. I’ve just read a FB thread saying how wrong Karen Ingala Smith (Counting Dead Women) is to only count dead women killed by men (the whole reason CDW exists) and she really should include T women killed by other men. Even in death we are allowed nothing about ourselves as a demographic which includes 51% of the population. That contempt for most of humanity is one reason I will never use ‘cis’.

Yes.

When I think of some of the potentially dangerous situations I walked naively into in my 20s, I feel extremely lucky to have escaped unscathed. I just had no idea how dangerous/wily some men can be.

And my feminism was more 'lib' because I hadn't seen the consequences first hand.

I would have been a lot more 'be kind' back then (although I'd like to think I could have still spotted the logic deficit inherent in TWAW!).

Edit for clarity

women in their 60s were likely 2nd wave feminists who did a LOT of the heavy lifting that allows modern day women to do things like vote, own property, have a bank account without their husband of father countersigning it and not to be raped in marriage.

I think it's the 'old dears' in their 80s and 90s who did a lot of this, and even they would have been quite young at the time.

Joyce Butler raised the bill that would eventually, after a few attempts, become the Sex Discrimination Act (as well as, I understand from Wikipedia, campaigning for mass screening of Cervical Cancer) and she was born 116 years ago.

I think the key thing that younger women might miss is that women's rights depend on a framework of legislation and policies that can be taken away.

There was a twitter exchange years ago where someone said they hoped there was a special place in hell for all the women who refused to buy into gender ideology, and the best response was something like 'all the transwomen would be complaining they weren't allowed in there too'.