Blaming a ‘media campaign’ for ‘transphobic rhetoric’ is absurd. The media were silent until it became clear that thousands of individuals were protesting against the removal of their most fundamental human right - to speak.
While of course I am grateful that journalists are now speaking up, let us never forget how - with some honourable exceptions - journalists were every bit as supine and captured as every other organisation.
And it took grassroots organisations to campaign and to resist and to demand that we have open and public discussion about very necessary issues - the erasure of the female sex and the harm done to children by medical transition.
To claim that these thousands of angry people are simply ‘puppets’ of a non existent ‘media campaign’ is wrong and is dishonest. You would have think some lessons would have been learned by now about dishonest narratives. But so be it.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Here’s how we do it. We continue with a regime of criminal and civil law which protects people against abuse and harassment based on their physical characteristics or quasi religious belief - which is what a belief in gender identity is.
We continue with a regime of protection for people at work, who are allowed a peaceful working environment.
We continue to have open discussion about what to do when rights are in tension - what single sex spaces must be preserved? When are people compelled to use pronouns?
And most importantly of all, we encourage and support children who reject gender stereotypes without telling them that life long medication or surgery is the only option. We create a society where a boy doesn’t have to choose between his penis and a dress.
Particularly the assertion that press exposure must be minimised as the ‘public’ are too misinformed to understand! I think the public understand only too well, is what you meant to say.
But it’s good to see Ryan Grim flying the flag for nominative determinism.
A fantastic end to 2021 with @HarryTheOwl101 victory over the Hate Crimes Guidance. Let’s hope 2022 is just as interesting. We are not out of the woods yet.
My dearest wish is that we will be able to call out such risible and offensive arguments without any fear whatsoever that we will be called ‘hateful’. And that such disgraceful trolling will become nothing but a dim and horrible memory.
There are just over 3K videos for 'cis women' pleasuring themselves in toilets. About 1K more 'trans women'. However I doubt the effectiveness of 'Porn Hubs' search function as BOTH searches revealed top video to be very clearly a penis.
Broadening my search to simply auto erotic pleasure 'in public' shows 2,324 results for 'cis' women - but 2, 978 for 'trans women'.
Perhaps Scarlett is simply more expert in such searches. I will confess it is my first go and I am not tempted to gain any more expertise.
But I find this extremely interesting. As we chart the evolution of 'no debate' - through 'shut up', 'be kind', 'you must be mad', 'you are funded by the Right Wing' - again a new strategy emerges; a narrative that 'cis' women are inherently without sexual boundaries.
So why is it, I hear some of you cry, that we can’t just #bekind and accept that people are who they say they are? Now that I know I may discuss this with the promise of some nice damages if the police record me for doing so, let me explain my perspective.
Because we are not simply being asked to offer dignity and respect to an individual who may be suffering emotional pain. It is being demanded that we deny what is real - to accept there are no differences between men and women.
This is obviously mad. It defies everything we know about male bodies, male sexual responses and male violence. And it leads to offensive absurdities like this. Same newspaper, 2 months later.
As they have neither joined the debate nor felt their silence worthy of explanation, I can only speculate as to what explains this puzzling lack of engagement.
But if you asked me, I would say the reason for the silence is that those who profess to be active in the field of human rights now have a very narrow view indeed of who is worthy of their protection. This is dangerous. I hope they will wake up.