Sarah Phillimore and Robin Moira White interviewed by Andrew Doyle

Sounds amazing, the corner where my tree was sat, still looks very empty.

I bought a pack of wee robins and I hide them round the living room for people to find, the kids, visitors, the guy who came to fix the boiler...you get the idea.

I'm usually still finding them come Easter.

I sympathise with Sarah's predicament. I find it impossible to use preferred pronouns on this board. At least I have distance and time to compose my sentence. I'd be merrily misgendering away were it not for the monitors. I think irl, I'd wind up sounding even more like a gibbering idiot...or I'd crack my jaw. Mental and verbal whiplash, disconnect between what you know, can see, can hear and what you 'know' you should say.

Many of us have been denied jobs and promotions because we were women. We didn't need to change reality or lie about ourselves though to fight it, we just did our jobs and proved that we could do those jobs elsewhere and the original employers were denied our expertise.

I was once laughed at in the canteen of the Royal College of Art for applying for a job heading up the section that was regarding metalwork [cannot remember the job title]. A bloke came and sat by me as I had a pre-interview coffee and said 'are you the women that applied for the job'. I said yes and he laughed as he told me 'nobody could believe a woman applied and they're all in there waiting for you'. There were 5 interviewers. I had no chance.

I once covered a role when a man left when I was in construction and wasn't considered for the job. I asked the boss why not and he said 'we need a man, we have to be able to talk to clients'. I said I was talking to clients as I had been covering the job and covering it well. He shrugged.

Being denied a job because we are women and might go off on maternity is still very much an issue. Nobody seems to be bending reality for us though.

Massive hypocrisy from RMW then as RMW is on record as saying it was a deliberate choice not to have the feminising voice surgery that is available, in order to retain all the advantages (all the advantages, as Helleofabore pointed out upthread) of a male voice in the exercise of RMW’s lucrative and prestigious profession.

Full disclosure here, I was food prepping whilst listening to this clip, but it did seem that Robin received more deference than Sarah.
Otherwise it was wonderful to listen to a debate without having to use earplugs and lipread.
All hail to GB news for this, or perhaps more specifically Andrew Doyle.
I used to think relying on anyone other than the BBC and The Guardian for excellent journalism was questionable. Those days are gone.

I'm pretty sure I have read - possibly even on this board - RMW saying that RMW deliberately retained RMW's male voice because it was advantageous in the courtroom.

If you are born male, you simply cannot go through any other puberty but a male puberty. This is what needs to be told loud and clear to any child who is being encouraged to go down that route. I am sorry that Robin has been denied the opportunity to have the kind of voice Robin would have preferred. I have been denied the opportunity to live as an able bodied person. Sometimes, we just have to suck it up. Regardless, we have no rights to demand that others are simply bit players on the stage of our own particular fantasies.

Well said, spero. The lying to children is unconscionable.

And as I said above, Robin is the one who has denied Robin the opportunity to have a more feminine voice, because Robin recognises the clear advantages to a lawyer of having a male voice - not just in terms of volume and carrying power but also, crucially, of socially ascribed authority.

Correct.

So boring, though, the fight for the rights of boring uterus people, isn’t it? Who can possibly be expected to maintain interest in that, when there are shiny new gender change penis people’s rights to campaign for!

On a serious note, sorry you had all those experiences though.

This

I listened to the clip while doing something else and had no trouble identifying when the woman was speaking and when the transwoman was speaking.

RMW talking about saving children from the horrors of puberty while choosing to still take full advantage of one of the legacies of male puberty puts me in mind of an even greater hypocrisy from US Assistant Secretary for Health R Levine.

Levine said both that life for Levine without the children Levine fathered was unimaginable, and that children/adolescents who now identify as trans should be given medical treatments that would prevent puberty and thus prevent them from ever having children of their own as adults. And both these things were said in the same interview.

The doublethink really is quite extraordinary.

I suppose there are two superficially similar but in terms of deeper meaning quite different versions of that sort of story:

1. like all 'gender affirming surgery', getting your voice 'done' doesn't really give you exactly what the other sex has, only a crude carbon copy with multiple risks attached, if your voice is the key tool of your profession then why risk it?

2. faced with a choice of presenting as male or female, in this regard it's advantageous to present as male.

And this

It was not conscious. I have always asserted that I would use preferred pronouns to be 'polite' but when the time came, my tongue rebelled.

You were brilliant @Spero and you were as polite as could be.

I can do pronouns myself, MumsNet has been good practice for me. I can't guarantee to get them right all the time in real time, but then I have mild aphasia so saying the name all the time would mess me up too.

I am concerned to note that I am now accused of 'disguised hate speech' and 'degendering' for using Robin's name!

Well there we go, anything that isn't exactly what our opponents want, makes us bad people.

"Degendering" used to be known as "gender neutral" or "non-sexist" language and it used to be a good thing, but people refused to do it because it was too much effort. And degendering is still a good thing in (self-identified) progressive circles if it's a "person with a cervix".

As a survivor of sexual abuse, the fact is that I would be petrified if I was in a cubicle in the toilets at Sainsbury's and I heard Robin's male voice booming out next to me. I think it's incredibly selfish for any male person to encroach on female spaces in that way.

Sadly I get the impression that even if Robin knew that Robin was causing women to feel extremely uncomfortable, Robin wouldn't care.

@IcakedefargeIam

I agree with you, and during Allison's tribunal, i sometimes heard a rather nice and melodious voice; and it was clearly a masculine voice.

I was curious about who it belonged to and was just about to ask the question in the thread, when i realised it was actually Robin's voice.

And that's how i knew the 'here we go' comment didn't come from Robin.

Is Robin a female?

But how can RMW be considered polite at all when RMW actually did say women are mad for raising these concerns?
Mad Women?

That is not polite at all.
That is on a par with «hysterical», which is (historically) something only women can be.
It is derogatory to women. And RMW is clearly thinking themselves not mad.

You could probably find a life size cardboard cut out of someone you admire! And stick that in the spot. Then just put tinsel over theirs shoulders at Christmas time and stuck a Santa 🎅 hat on it.

I used to afford some posters the courtesy of using their preferred pronouns. And then one of those posters plopped onto a thread I was on one day and were really disingenuous about their reason for being on the thread.

It was really off, and extremely intimidating. I felt so sorry for the OP.

I can't remember which poster it was now, or which thread, but at that point I was "no. That's beyond acceptable. I don't care what you want I'm done"

Wish I could remember which thread it was.

To quote a FOJN post from yesterday…

Robin's voice is unmodified. It is in the natural range expected for an individual with the same chromosomes as an adult human male.

There are no examples which support restricting the ‘Scottish’ route to a GRC as causing additional danger. That was the subject of the discussion.

It's just not equitable, is it? The men get to say what they like, but the women have to guard their speech.

@Spero you were wonderful. Thank you from all of us 💐

😂

Robin is male.

Annoyingly I've been seeing the terms 'legal sex' and 'biological sex' used more frequently, I hope we won't start having to qualify our statements.

And yes, Spero you were amazing. So calm and articulate. Thank you.