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16 Oct, 40 tweets, 12 min read
The off-the-charts misogyny in this image has already been covered extensively by people more eloquent than me. So I'll comment on something else: modern protest movements of the left have completely lost any sense of discipline and optics.
By that I mean: consider a successful, effective protest movement like the US civil rights movement. The first thing its organisers considered when planning any action was: how will this look to undecided members of the general public?
So, discipline was prioritised. Whole families turned up in their Sunday best and marched in an orderly fashion. This wasn't to live up to some ideal of respectability, but to create the starkest possible tableau in the eyes of the world.
And what a tableau. Decent folks demanding their liberty on one side, bestial racist cops and klansmen on the other. That is what middle America saw. The result is in the history books: pressure for reform became so irresistible that landmark federal legislation soon followed.
Now consider the image at the top of this thread. Protest in 2021 isn't about outcomes at all, it's entirely about self-expression. It's about being your whole, unfiltered self as loud as you can, damn the consequences.
So let's return to the undecided, non-political person. What do they see when they contemplate this image? I'll tell you what they see: a male person aggressively demanding blowjobs with a crude handmade sign.
It doesn't matter how righteous you think your cause is. You've just done more to discredit the trans rights movement than a baker's dozen of Julie Bindels on speed. And something like this, or worse, is present at every single trans protest.
So this movement isn't just crassly misogynist and homophobic, it's fucking stupid as well. Morally stupid, conceptually stupid, but above all strategically stupid.
All of the above applies to every modern protest movement, including most right-wing ones as well. The whole idea of forcing political change has been abandoned in favour of postures, insults and me, me, me. And people wonder how the powers that be keep getting away with it.
When you're seeking change in a democratic polity, how you look in the eyes of others isn't just important, it's the whole ballgame. You can call that "respectability politics" if you like, but that's the playing field you have, for better or worse.
Postscript: this is a major reason why I think trans extremism will ultimately fail. These people have no idea how to sell themselves. They've taken the public's instinctive sympathy for an underdog and are busy squandering it at lightning speed.
You could well be right. But they certainly see themselves as a social justice crusade. The point of this thread has been to argue how they fail even on those terms.
Thanks for the RT, @asymmetricinfo. I was actually started down this train of thought by something you said in a @bloggingheads debate many years ago about protests against the Iraq war. What goes around comes around.
They could hardly have proved his point more spectacularly. When you're screaming and he's laughing, he's won by default.
This is a fair point. I could also have drawn attention to the prominent use of the C word, designed to degrade and dehumanise its female targets even further.
Great Thunberg is brilliant at this game. She delicately provokes the gammons until they explode, so what the world sees is a whole bunch of inexplicably angry middle-aged men screaming at a cool, collected teenage girl. Helps that she's right, as well.
All this applies to the right at least as much as the left. Donald Trump tainted the Republican brand by associating it with a mob of violent yahoos storming Congress. Now the midterms will be about who won in 2020 instead of the price of gas. Moronic.
As much as TRAs would like them to be seen as bigoted harridans, gender-critical feminists overwhelmingly come across - again, to the notional undecided person - as well-spoken and reasonable, largely because they are. Helps that they're all women, too.
People don't like bullies. They like men bullying women even less. And when I say "men", I'm not even referring to trans women; a lot of the nastiest ones are just boring old blokes-who-identify-as-blokes.
Yes, and they'll do a lot of damage along the way, not least to trans people. But they will fail in the end.
Left and right are tribes as much as, or perhaps more than, they are concrete positions. Trans extremism is of the left, for now, because, lamentably, the bulk of left-wing institutions accept and indulge it. But that could change.
I'm daily in awe of how consistently women maintain their composure in the face of such provocation. As a man, I could never manage it, which I suppose tells its own story.
I think about the "typical person" as a political entity quite a lot. She doesn't think about politics much and probably isn't on Twitter, but is on Facebook. Her main priorities in life revolve around the wellbeing of herself and her loved ones. She voted Conservative in 2019.
Damn, missed a typo and now it's far too late to fix it. It's *Greta, of course, though I suppose "Great Thunberg" works just as well.
There's something I should make clear: it's my view that activists like the one pictured at the top of the thread have about the same relationship to the average trans person as a Corbyn supporter does to the average member of the working class. Which is to say: not much of one.
That is, my beef is emphatically not with trans people, but with those who have appointed themselves to represent their interests. I've run across some GC people who don't believe there's any such thing as a legitimate trans person. That's not me and never will be.
I'm aware I'm in the minority here, but I'm not convinced we need a rigorous definition of "trans" to accept the existence and humanity of trans people. Life is messy and contradictory.
I have often compared left-wing activities to secular churchgoing. Changing the world couldn't be further from the point, it's all about hearing the liturgy recited among a community of the faithful.
A whole generation of activists has been convinced that the very concept of free speech is a right-wing conceit aimed at normalising fascism. We've barely begun to feel the consequences of this epistemological catastrophe.
Good for Helen for calling this what it was: an anti-feminist action, not a pro-trans one. This is not how you'd behave if your real aim is to make life better for trans people.
As I said in another thread, the gender identity question is just one of countless women's issues discussed at #FiLiA2021, but to these people, it has to trump everything, even such things as women's rights in Afghanistan and FGM.
It's obviously not true that all problems have been fixed in the Western world, but it is true that stakes are lower in our politics than they've ever been. This is the idea behind @mrianleslie's "MLK syndrome", as expressed here: ianleslie.substack.com/p/mlk-syndrome
It's really not how "everybody" speaks, is it? That trans rights activists feel able to claim so with a straight face tells you a lot about the sort of circles they move in.
With all due respect, this is a conspiracy theory. There's no need for any "elite" to "seed" disunity in the left, it's always been more than capable of tearing itself apart all on its own, People's Front of Judea style.
Sidebar: the idea that there exists a singular "elite" or "establishment" is quite widespread. If it was ever true, it's certainly not today. What we have in 2021 is numerous competing, overlapping elites, often with contradictory and mutually exclusive aims.
So, someone like Owen Jones can write a book about an all-powerful "establishment" that entrenches a right-wing status quo, while his opponents might feel that "wokeness" is just as hegemonic. In a way, they're both right.
I know so many left-leaning women and men who started out with a "live and let live" attitude, then were radicalised, or "peaked", as we say, by the extremism of TRA demands. Maybe a whole bunch of fuzzy liberals all caught bigotry at once?
I think it was the physical intimidation of women that really stirred me out of my complacency. This is so visibly not a social justice movement, it is something else, something uglier.
There is a basic asymmetry in the trans/gender debate. Gender-critical women are often intemperate, or absolutist, or rude. But they don't, as a rule, post pictures of themselves brandishing a baseball bat, captioned "die TERFs".
Suffragette violence was justified, to some extent, because by definition they had no democratic recourse, and peaceful suffrage protests were met with brutality from the state. But I think the jury's out on how effective these tactics actually were.

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Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
Unfashionable opinion: the overwhelming majority of politicians in this country are dedicated public servants who are in it for the right reasons.
"They're all on the take, aren't they?" is a very lazy and stupid way of sounding clever and knowing.
The conventional wisdom among non-political people - who I admittedly don't talk to all that often - seems to be "they're all the same. Maybe I just need to get out more.
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16 Oct
I have just embarked on a four hour journey on a coach full of very loud, very jolly people. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers.
Don't be silly, I'm far too middle class to actually engage them in conversation.
They're delightful and the salt of the Earth, obviously, but I still quite powerfully want to die.
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Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
Don't. Be. Silly. Islamic extremism is a common terrorist motive and its adherents are disproportionately from certain ethnic and national backgrounds. Acknowledging this isn't remotely bigoted, and is a lot more relevant to his crime than him being a British national.
This is going to be an exceptionally stupid day to be on Twitter.
This is like a mini 9/11, with liberals and leftists far more concerned about potential racism or Islamophobia than they are about, you know, a politician being stabbed to death.
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Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
It's routine in Zionist circles, particularly when Israel is at war, to call the IDF "the most moral army in the world". Now, I'm aware there is a strong factual basis to this claim, but to my mind, laying too much stress on it is too big a concession to the enemy. (1/4)
By that I mean, Israel shouldn't have to command the world's most moral army in order to earn the right to defend itself. Israelis are not obliged to hold themselves to a uniquely high standard just because the rest of the world does. (2/4)
I'll also add that, on a philosophical level, there is something queasy-making about the very concept of waging war in a "moral" way. Warfare is inherently immoral, it's something a legitimate state does because it has no other choice. (3/4)
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Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
Shit. It was shit. If you wanted to know something, you had to look it up in a book, and if there was no book, you were fucked. I have no idea how I'd have made any post-school friends if the internet hadn't become ubiquitous in my teens.
Encarta was amazing, it used to occupy me for hours, much as Wikipedia does now. But compared to what's now available online, it was a very meagre resource indeed.
There's so much about the pre-mass-internet world that feels bizarre now. Apple was more or less a joke company, for example, barely considered a serious rival to Microsoft.
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Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
My dear friend @davidfrum is briefly in London for the weekend, so I'm travelling there later today to spend some time with him. Four hours there, then five hours in the capital, then another four hours back; it'll be an exhausting day. But worth it, I hope.
My usual weekly routine is both extremely monotonous and extremely local, so the change will probably be good for me. Taking the train would be a lot faster and give me more time in London, but it'd also be ten times more expensive.
Americans must find it very quaint that we consider the trip from Cardiff to London quite a long journey. They think nothing of driving thousands of miles. As the old saying goes: to a European, a hundred miles is a long way; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.
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