Category Archive

Laurie Penny is a compelling writer.

Her smackdown of the Charlatan-Known-As-Jordan-Peterson is a joy to behold, as was her behind-the-scenes look at the Milo Yiannopoulos phenomenon.

What makes her worth reading isn’t just her facility with words, but her well-honed bullshit detector, which she wields like a knife. Cutting through nonsense is her superpower.

Except when it isn’t.

As in her essay on being a genderqueer feminist. I’m not going to discuss the bulk of her essay, leaving it for others to parse her uses of femininity, gender, deviance and womanhood.

What I want to focus on is this:

Many of the critiques of trans politics from feminists through the decades have been openly bigoted…

Buried under the bullshit, though, are some reasonable critiques. One is that people who claim a trans identity are only doing so because gender roles are so restrictive and oppressive in the first place.

I don’t know how to draw but I made this because I’m tired of people thinking we don’t need feminism. These are just everyday examples of patriarchy, sexism and toxic masculinity. The tip of the misogynist iceberg.

Two main things turned up in my timeline this morning. One was the fall-out of Rachel McKinnon’s egregious and unconcealed bullying of Martina Navratilova, and the other was a Call For Papers from Brighton University that Kathleen tweeted here.

I was already planning on doing this post on Martina when the CFP popped up – because Rachel’s behaviour last night was a pretty copper-bottomed rendition of what trans activist coercion looks like, and I thought it was worth taking a look at it blow by blow. The academic CFP might, at first glance, seem a little tangential to the issue of trans inclusion in sports, but it refracted with Rachel’s behaviour in an interesting way, so, happy or unhappy accident, this is what you get guys…

The CFP sketches out the familiar claim that ‘queerness’ is ‘inclusive’ and ‘fluid’ while ‘gayness’ or ‘homosexuality’ is ‘exclusive’ and ‘oppressive,’ a dichotomy…

1. Human beings have a right to freedom of conscience and belief.
2. Human beings have a right to their own perceptions.
3. Humans beings have a right to speak in a manner which expresses their own conscience, belief and perceptions – providing that speech is not an incitement to violence against another person (see 14).
4. The only pronouns one can prescribe to oneself, ethically, are ‘I’ and ‘me.’
5. Third person pronouns are granted to you by another person.
6. Pronouns function as a ‘recognition procedure’ in order to instruct someone else how they are to recognise someone, often in the absence of, or in contradiction to, observable cues.
7. Asking someone to use certain pronouns is a request that they perceive or recognise you in a certain way.
8. Prescribing pronouns is a diktat that another person perceives or recognises you in a certain way.
9. Prescribing pronouns and enforcing that prescription is an…