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Go to unherd for the full article. It is brilliant.
“This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.
As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.
So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.
Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?
In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.
My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.
Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.
There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.”
This excerpt from Megan Mackin writing on the Feminist Current:
“This review grew out of a discussion with a dear friend who, at the time, supported gender identity ideology. I, on the other hand, had become increasingly frustrated with the loss of women’s rights to female-only spaces and laws protecting us from sex discrimination, as well as with the silencing of dissent to transgender dogma, and had urged her to examine the available information for herself. Then, I told her, we could revisit the conversation. She did, we did, and together we found pockets of dissent where we could speak further. These small spaces for critical thought on the topic of transgenderism continue to grow across the political spectrum. While we are not alone, as feminists concerned with gender identity ideology, we are — through the loss of access to social and other media, and due to threats of firings and physical violence — effectively silenced.
My friend — herself an academic and writer — noted the eerie (apparent) disinterest in Abigail Shrier’s new book, Irreversible Damage, by political and literary communities. Last month, she wrote to me via email, saying “I, too, have been surprised by what appears to be a deliberate silence around [Irreversible Damage] by newspapers and magazines ‘of record.’” She named it, aptly, “a reception vacuum,” calling book reviewers “taste makers and opinion diffusers.” By pretending the book doesn’t exist, they are ensuring the book will not exist for potential readers either, depriving the public sphere of the research and arguments Shrier presents.
Shrier contributes frequently to the Wall Street Journal, and among her degrees is a Juris Doctor from Yale University. She is a skilled writer who offers complex ideas with accessible delivery. It is possible the media would have covered her work had she resorted to obfuscating postmodernist jargon. Shrier has received no reviews from the established liberal press — not from the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Kirkus Review, nor any other mainstream online publications. Amazon, which still sells and thus profits from Irreversible Damage — garnering rave reviews there — has refused to allow sponsored ads to promote the book.
My friend wrote to me:
“Book reviews are a way of creating and nurturing readers by guiding them toward understanding the meanings and significance of a work. That no politically or culturally ‘liberal’ publications online or in print have even dared to acknowledge the existence of Shrier’s exposé of ROGD [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria], the medical issues endemic to medicalizing children for life, infertility-producing surgeries, mental distress masked as dysphoria, and the real presence of de-transitioners, is no surprise for many of us.”
Shrier is terribly careful. She only addresses a narrow subset of “dysphoria”: RODG — the apparent social contagion spreading among circles of adolescent girls who have never previously expressed discomfort with their sex or sex role (“gender”). She explicitly acknowledges and interviews (favourably) adults who identify as transgender, and concedes that young children who insist they are the opposite sex consistently, from the time they are toddlers, may have a legitimate form of dysphoria. From a feminist perspective, because “transgender rights” mean women and girls must sacrifice their rights (for example, female-only shower rooms, shelters, and washrooms must allow males access, under gender identity legislation and policy), and the concept of fighting women’s oppression is undermined (seeking to become a member of the dominant sex is an absurdly individualist solution), Shrier’s acceptance of transgenderism itself is a great deal of ground to cede! Despite this, Shrier is silenced.”
Abigail Shrier, at least on this topic, inhabits the same area of Limbo as Noam Chomsky does when he writes about American foreign affairs or the the state of the American polity. The established press and the audience connects through them is suddenly no where be found. It isn’t some sort of dark magic; it is nothing more than the suppression of ideas that contradict the current orthodoxy.
Compare and contrast with the idea that the Left is a defender of free speech and a supporter of the free marketplace of ideas. Perhaps not so much. Especially when it comes to defending the rights, boundaries, and safety of women.
This is a key feature of almost every debate with the queer woke theorists – their arguments are based on a keenly negative facet of our society: gender stereotypes. To be a woman (or man) is to like and do X. It is the at the very root of oppressive patriarchal culture and thus trans ideology is also oppressive and regressive because of its adherence to toxic gendered norms and behaviour.
Imagine for just a second that, as the Second wave postulated, that men and women could dress as they please, act as they please, be who they please without worrying about what the gender gremlin has to say about it. It would be amazing.
Gender non conformity is what needs to be accepted in society. For example wearing a dress and make up should be acceptable male and female behaviour, period. What isn’t contested is the fact that wearing a dress doesn’t and will never change your sex.
This quote from “The Sexist Pseudoscience of ‘gender identity'”
“the sexist pseudoscience of “gender identity” is still written into their literature. This is of course inevitable, because without “gendered stereotypes” there would be no markers by which to identify anyone as transgender. Whether one thinks of it as a utopian dream or dystopian nightmare, had the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s achieved their aims there would just be women and men with a variety of jobs, interests, clothes and hobbies. Transgenderism can only exist if one believes that there are appropriate personalities and behaviours for each sex – otherwise what would be left to “trans”? Were this sexist social lens to be removed, girls who wear trousers and enjoy scrapping and boys in pink who bake would be seen and valued as the children they are.”
Sometimes one doesn’t have time to cut through the academicese to right proper call out the bullshite, the Legal Feminist had the energy and time to do so. A million thanks to her. Here are her words.
[JB] …[W]e can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality…
“In other words, anyone who thinks that it is dangerous to let male-bodied people self-identify into women-only spaces is guilty of a transphobic assumption that all trans women are sex-offending ‘cis’ males in disguise, and their only purpose in entering women’s spaces is to offend. This is a familiar move in the debate: “If you won’t let me into the ladies’ it means you think that because I’m trans I must be a perv! Transphobe!”
But that misses the point. Sorry, I’m going to rant a bit here.
The point is male violence, especially but not exclusively male sexual violence. We don’t want to exclude trans women from the spaces where we are undressed and vulnerable because they are trans, but because they are biologically male. They are members of the half of humanity that poses a far greater threat to women than the other half.
We want to exclude males because we are afraid of them. And we are right to be afraid of them. We don’t want to exclude trans women because we think they are more likely than any other male-bodied person to be violent offenders; but because there is no reason to think they are any less likely to be violent offenders. Men are unwelcome in women-only spaces not because we think all men are sex offenders, but because we know that almost all sex offenders are men.
And remember that we are not just spontaneously afraid! We are taught from early childhood that men are a source of danger. We are told it is our responsibility to keep ourselves safe from the ever-present risk of male violence; with the barely-concealed message that it’s our fault if we fail. We learn to limit our freedoms. We try not to be out alone late at night. We learn to be alert to the possibility of being followed; not to make eye contact; to shut down drunken attempts to chat us up without provoking male rage; to walk in the middle of the road so that it’s harder to ambush us from the shadows; to conduct a lightning risk assessment of every other passenger on the night bus; to clutch our keys in one hand in case we need a weapon; to carry a pepper spray, or a personal alarm. And we learn the hard way that these fears that have been deliberately inculcated in us are justified. We are followed, leered at, flashed, groped, cat-called; and that’s those of us who get off lightly. Every woman has stories of male abuse.
We are systematically trained in fear
And then we are told that we must lay aside, at a moment’s notice, the fears we have so obediently learned as soon as a person with a male body asserts a female identity.
Does this give you any insight into why we are so angry?
Let me make it even plainer. There is an attempt to force male bodies into female spaces where they are not welcome; and when we say “no,” that is met with rage, entitlement, abuse and threats of violence – attempts to overbear our consent by force. There are unmistakable echoes of rape. When it comes to attempts to force women who have asked for a female health care provider to accept a trans woman to undertake an intimate procedure, the echoes become deafening.”
The profession can change, the venue can change, but the gender-woo methodology remains the same. Personally attack the person who dares to speak about biological reality, libel and defame their character while poisoning the well as to prevent discussion of an import issue facing women.
The bullshit doesn’t change. It is especially disheartening to see professionals whose business is to be thoughtful and charitable completely abandon those principles in order to defend normative patriarchal values.
“A debate has arisen among philosophers concerning a couple of papers published recently in the prestigious journal Philosophical Studies. The first paper, “Are women adult human females?” by Alex Byrne (January, 2020) attempts to refute what Byrne identifies as “the orthodox view among philosophers,” that “the category woman is a social category, like the categories, wife, firefighter, and shoplifter,” rather than “a biological category, like the categories vertebrate, mammal, or adult human female.” Byrne argues woman is a biological category, that to be a woman is to be an adult adult human female. The second paper, “Escaping the Natural Attitude About Gender,” by Robin Dembroff (forthcoming, but available already online), attempts to discredit Byrne’s argument.
The controversy surrounding the two articles does not concern the arguments themselves but the fact that Dembroff’s article includes an ad hominem against Byrne in which Dembroff effectively accuses Byrne of bigotry against transsexuals despite the fact that there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge. The editor of the journal, Stewart Cohen, resigned in protest because he wanted to publish an apology for printing an article that included defamatory rhetoric, rhetoric which should never have made it past the journal’s referees, but the publisher of the journal, Springer, refused to allow him to do that.
Philosophers are not generally known for being warm and fuzzy. But Dembroff’s paper represents a new low in levels of civility. Usually, philosophers aim their barbs at an opponent’s cognitive abilities. Even then they aspire to some subtlety. They’ll intimate that an opponent is feebleminded, but they rarely say so directly. It’s not simply that it’s rude. It’s unprofessional. It’s rare, for the same reason, for a philosopher to directly accuse another of being a “shoddy scholar.” It’s rarer still, again, for the same reason, for a philosopher to accuse another of being immoral. Yet Robin Dembroff has advanced both charges against Byrne.
The debate amongst philosophers surrounding what Byrne has dubbed GenderGate, focuses on a brief passage at the end of Dembroff’s article. The line is:
Byrne’s paper fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan [“women are adult human females”] that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons. And it is here that I return to Byrne’s advice to question the motivations behind this debate.”If someone is personally heavily invested in the truth of [some proposition] p,” Byrne writes, “it is prudent to treat [their] claim that p is true with some initial caution.” I agree. So we may ask: What are the motivations of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed?
That is, Dembroff is insinuating here that Byrne has an anti-trans agenda that he is trying to advance in an scholarly paper published in an academic journal even though, again, there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge.”
The Gender-woo really needs to stop. :/
Catch the rest of the essay on Counterpunch.
Douglas Murray writing in Unherd describes the penalty and betrayal foisted on J.K. Rowling for having the audacity to speak about verifiable facts.
“This is because on that issue of minimal importance but maximal rage – the Trans debate – Rowling has taken the same view that the majority of the British public holds. Which is that while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everybody else, they do not have the right to redefine biological reality. Specifically, in the case of Rowling and many others, they do not have the right to redefine what a woman is.
Last week the author took exception to the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” in a news report — the headline writer clearly trying to get around having to use the increasingly triggering word “woman”. As Rowling wittily put it:
This brought the ire of trans Twitter down upon her. That whole army of people who used to be men who tell women to shut up, and the people who think they are helping trans people by pretending that biological sex doesn’t exist and that the clownfish is a suggestive comparison for the biological make-up of human beings.”
The offended feelings crew needs to f*ck off, and the sooner the better.
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