Thread by @ContrarianQuinn

I'm not a fan of piling on individual women even when I think they're behaving stupidly but Jameela Jamil has a massive platform and there's an observation I want to make about her latest faux pas /1

What she said about "loads of girls" in her school being on puberty blockers for "very early heavy periods" is pretty obviously not true (see this thread for reasons why: tinyurl.com/7hx9wjf9). At best she's mistaken and at worst she's lying. /2

Maybe she's gotten puberty blockers confused with the contraceptive pill, which is often prescribed to adolescent girls for treatment of heavy or painful periods (and is still controversial). Or maybe she did know a girl on PBs for precocious puberty and is exaggerating numbers/3

And that's a fairly generous speculation because precocious puberty is rare. Or maybe she's just making it all up. But whether she's mistaken or lying the thing I want to comment on is the fact that she said this a couple of days ago now and hasn't corrected it /4

If she was mistaken then it shouldn't be a big deal at all to just own up to that and given that nobody is helped by incorrect information about medical approaches to gender dysphoria in children being circulated by someone with a massive platform /5

You'd think someone who cares as much about dysphoric children and adults as Jameela insists she does would be aware of that and would readily correct themselves if they'd discovered that they'd put out false info on the subject to a huge audience /6

But that's the thing, Jameela won't admit to being wrong about this because from the ideological position she's in that would amount to conceding ground to her "opponents" and that's the real priority here. She's fighting an ideological battle. /7

You'd think by now some of her trans friends would have pointed out to her that she's misleading people about the use and prevalence of puberty blockers. But her silence so far suggests that either that hasn't happened or if it has, her friends also agree that it's better to /8

Let the false information stand than to concede anything to the opposition. And as a woman she really can't concede a thing because on her side of this ideological divide women are either "good" (cooperative to a fault) or "bad" (uncooperative), and a "good" woman like Jameela /9

Can't concede anything to the "bad" women or speak up in defence of the "bad" women when she sees them treated unacceptably because that might make her a "bad" woman too. She can't admit she was mistaken because that's not what she's for and she knows it. /10

I'm not giving her a free pass because her insufferable ego probably has a whole lot to do with it as well and that's on her. But I do wish women like her would take a good look at the position they're in and understand that when they participate in the poor treatment of other/11

Women they're also turning the gun on themselves because the treatment of women they dish out or quietly condone is exactly the treatment they can expect if they fall foul of the people they're trying to appease. I know Jameela doesn't think any of the political aims of the /12

Trans community are unreasonable or in unfair conflict with her rights as a woman but I'd like her and women like her to ask themselves what would happen if they were to find a point of disagreement they did feel that way about somewhere down the line? /13

Do they think they'd be allowed to have an open conversation about why they feel that way and somehow be treated differently than all the women who already feel like that and who women like Jameela have participated in demonizing? /14

Brass tacks, do they think there's any scenario at all in which they'd be allowed to disagree with a transwoman about anything relating to womanhood and actually be allowed to win that debate? Because I know the answer is no and I know that the reason is sexism. /15

She might have also just deliberately pulled this puberty blocker story out of her ass, in which case she's also not genuinely acting in the interests of dysphoric children and it's also interesting that nobody who claims to advocate for them seems to mind either. /16