1/ For people who've known me a while, before I crossed over to The Dark Side & became gender critical, and who are possibly shocked & think that I now hate trans people, here is a hopefully short thread summing up what I think.
2/ I believe some people have gender dysphoria. I care about access to well-evidenced treatment for people with dysphoria. For those dysphoric ppl who decide to transition, I care that they have the means to thrive in our society.
3/ I think that Woman = Adult Female Human. I don't think there is another definition possible, that is not either circular & therefore meaningless, or based on sex stereotypes.
4/ I believe that women need to remain as a recognised class, because we have particular needs that male people do not have, and we need to be able to talk about these clearly.
5/ I think that there has been regulatory capture on this issue, and laws have been rushed through without proper scrutiny.
I think that dissent has been silenced in academia, in medicine and in wider society.
6/ I believe that many people are being harmed by the way this movement has gone. Groups affected include lesbians, other women, dysphoric children, children hurt by reinvigorated sexist stereotyping, and transsexuals.
7/ I think the Left has fallen for this partly due to entirely understandable compassion, but also due to a tendency to squash dissent and demonise those with different views.
8/ I don't know what the law needs to be on this. I think it's a really difficult issue. I just think we need to be able to talk about it.
โข โข โข
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Some people who are gender critical nevertheless use gender identity based pronouns for trans people.
I think it's a complicated question & everyone has to decide it as best they can.
I don't use preferred pronouns. I used to, but changed my mind. It wasn't out of spite./
/ I'd use female pronouns for a male person if it was understood to mean "I know you want to be seen as female & I'm going along with that because I don't want to hurt you, with the understanding that we both know you are really male & you won't disregard women's boundaries."/
/In this society, today, that is not what is understood. Using female pronouns for a male person is, very often, taken to mean "I accept your claim that you are literally female, which means you are entitled to access all women's spaces & resources."/
This is the Trunchbull problem.
Transactivism is so outrageous that when you talk about it you sound like you're making things up or misrepresenting things./
/But it also means that once you have realised what's going on, you can't understand why there isn't more of a public outcry about it. The danger then is that in your desperation to get people to pay attention you refer to exactly the most outrageous aspects, those aspects/
/people dismiss as misrepresentations or outright lies.
Language like "menstruators" is often defended as being more accurate than women - after all, some women don't menstruate.
As some have pointed out, language like this tends to confuse or mislead women who are disadvantaged - women whose first language isn't English, for example/
/But it's also unscientific & inaccurate, I think, & interrupts the way in which we understand & navigate the world, impeding our ability to do so.
Human beings live in a dynamic world. We know that living things change throughout time. When trees lose their leaves in the winter/
/we're not flummoxed as to what these things without leaves are, even though if we were asked to draw or describe a tree we would probably include leaves as a characteristic.
Even if we don't articulate this, we understand living things as systems, not as static unchanging/
I haven't read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in years but we have a Christmas tradition of watching the TV series. It has several great lines (some definitely straight from the book, not sure about others) in defence of free & robust debate & continued diversity of views./
/This is the prime minister's response to Norrell when he wants to set up a Magical Court which would effectively give him control over anything written about magic, on the grounds that contrary views are dangerous./
/When Strange tries to persuade Childermass to leave Norrell & work with him as an equal./
I have an avalanche of notifications from the thread I wrote yesterday and, like some sort of a thing that gets anxious with too many Twitter notifications, have muted the thread.
I mute threads a lot. The reason being that I think discussion and disagreement works best if we can draw a line under them. If you have a robust argument with a friend in a pub, you go home from the pub & that's the end of it. If you get in an argument on Twitter, it can be like
never getting to go home from the pub. No wonder this causes stress, leading to over-defensiveness and a feeling that someone who disagrees with you is an enemy. So I mute threads to go home from the pub. I don't limit replies because if people want to add counterarguments or
Unsurprised to see people angry that women met yesterday in Dublin to talk about the problems of gender identity ideology. Irish women have been told repeatedly and forcefully that none of us are gender critical, that that heresy is a sin confined to the Brits (or occasionally
1/
2/ the Yanks, when the denouncers aren't at that moment cosying up to the various Americans who happen to be fellow denouncers). When you've settled on xenophobia for your counterargument, no doubt it stings when your own countrywomen ruin it all by organising a blasphemous talk.
3/ I didn't talk to many there, I was there just to hear the talks, really, but two women I did happen to bump into made much the same observation: it is so surreal that we are in this situation at all. How did we get to a point where the prevailing orthodoxy is that men are