I think I might need to get the pens out and scribble on Andrea Chu Long.... Okay dokes...

'ANDREA CHU LONG ON THE MORAL CASE FOR THE UNIVERSAL BIRTHRIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SEX BECAUSE WE WANT AND WE SAY WE WANT'

This is in a lot of ways a recapitulation of the famous Edinburgh Action for Trans Health Manifesto (which always gave me the vibes of being ranted up by large angry toddlers on speed waving plastic water pistols' )tumblr.com/edinburghath/1…

Our arguments aren't grounded simply in a liberal notion of autonomy.

They're grounded in an an analysis of harm, control, power and exploitation.

https://twitter.com/benappel/status/1731544945243075042

Liberal notions of autonomy don't give us a substantive enough analysis of harm, they don't take account of power structures and their investment in controlling and exploiting women's reproductive or sexual capacities.

So, the great sword wielding king of concepts has dropped his blistering analysis of my critique:

1. You is a crazy bitch. 2. You got Marxist cooties.

So, about James Lindsay - and also Pluckrose and Lindsay - and why its not a great surprise that he's turned out to be a misogynist anti-feminist asswipe.

Lindsay's analysis consists, basically, in nothing more than the claim that what is wrong with 'wokeism' is that it is an analysis of oppression. That's why he's running around all the time shouting about 'Marxism' and 'cultural Marxism' and 'race Marxism' and wotnot.

As far as he is concerned, the witch-hunting cancel culture phenomenon we have been dealing with over the last decade is a direct result of the idea that some groups of people oppress other groups of people.

That is, James Lindsay is against all analysis of structural oppression.

The resentment that men feel about desiring women is the key to misogyny and a great deal of male violence.

Desiring women makes men vulnerable. Because women are people. And women get to say yes or no. Depending on their own desires.

And men are not supposed to be vulnerable. Stop showing pictures of the roses.

Roses are not sweet or romantic when they are delivered as a sign of murderous entitlement.

Am listening to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. It's a truly excellent analysis of the growth of the populist conspiratorial right and the rocket fuel given to it by the pandemic and covid conspiracy theories. One thing she's very good on is the way Steve Bannon has strategised the platform of issues on the basis of balls that have been dropped by liberals/progressives. There are kernels of truth in everything that turns up in what she calls 'the mirror world.'

JFC I am so furious right now about how TRA and related bullshit has completely fucked up the basic norms of political discourse. 1. You are allowed to say whatever you want - bar incitement to violence - even if it upsets or offends people.

2. If people are upset or offended, they are allowed to say they are upset or offended.

3. It would be even better if they explained why they are upset or offended.

So, I'm going to give it my best shot to exit this conversation now. As usual, when this topic comes up, the conversation devolves through analogies to locked cars and whether one should look twice when crossing the road, through claims about swamps of alligators, and into a conversation about why feminists are ridiculous and stupid for not accepting that the staggering rates of male sexual violence in this society are just some immovable rock like datum put there by evolution.

These are the comments made by Meloni’s partner and the responses by critics. amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug… I’d like to point out:

a) Gambruno compared male rapists to wolves, and said that ‘the bad guys are always out there.’ You don’t have to be straight out saying ‘men are entitled to rape women’ to be perpetuating narratives that feed into rape culture.

This. This is one of my principal concerns.

- I do not think that is a representative portrait of feminist women's concerns about shifting the discourse about rape onto women's behaviour, to claim that we are denying the fact that women who get very drunk in public are >

https://twitter.com/redandgreenish/status/1698302005939163506

vulnerable, to all kinds of unpleasant things happening to them. Every decent woman I know responds with concern when they find a very drunk woman out alone at night. Usually we stop and talk to them, try and get them a taxi, wait with them until we know they are on their way

Very pleased to have this reply to *that* (nonsensical and enraging) Catharine MacKinnon speech published in @philosophersmag.

philosophersmag.com/essays/318-wom… @sleeepysandy @philosophersmag It staggers me they can’t hear the internalised misogyny in it…

It impacts (not determines) social relations *in a patriarchy.

And the mechanism by which sex impacts social relations in a patriarchy is called…. Gender.

https://twitter.com/elanabrell/status/1689785528621600768

Because in a patriarchy women are oppressed along the axis of sex.

And erasing the recognition of axes of discrimination isn’t a good way of doing law.

https://twitter.com/elanabrell/status/1689788075117817856

The thing is, ‘gender critical’ was coined to mean exactly what it says. ‘Critical of gender.’

The term comes out of feminist critique. It didn’t just mean ‘against gender identity.’ There are a whole load of people who are against the trans rights project who are not remotely critical of gender.

They dislike gender identity ideology because they think it is against god and/or nature for men to be feminine and women to be masculine.

We live in a structurally sexist society.

It was always going to be the case that the women who built the resistance to trans ideology would have to push 100 times as hard to be heard, and that when we were finally heard, powerful men would turn up and either ignore or even blame the women who worked so hard to push this into the mainstream.

In one sense it doesn’t matter, because what matters is that it is stopped.

In another way it really matters, because if people has been able to hear, it could have been stopped so much sooner.

Cool let’s play…

1. How would you outline the substantive differences between liberal, radical and socialist feminism?

2. How would you formalise the main differences between second and third wave feminism?

3. What are the differences between intersectionality in its original

https://twitter.com/sarahthehaider/status/1683215786284916738

form and the way it has been used by contemporary social justice activism?

4. How do you account for the fact that women did not exist as separate legal persons, or couldn’t own their own property, or couldn’t open bank accounts?

It looks something like this.

(Men who do a lot of childcare don't become women btw.)

https://twitter.com/Fausto_Sterling/status/1666979347717136384

Human cultural activity changes all kinds of natural things. We can chisel faces on the side of mountains, cut down forests, burn land to create growth. We can divert the course of rivers. That doesn't mean rivers are 'culture.'

Oh FFS mate. Look, I agree this is a gift to the 'wokeist-cultural-Marxism-is-destroying-the-West' crew.

But this is not a froth in a teacup over something that "isn't even happening."

And the only way to stop it is to deal with the actual issues.

thetimes.co.uk/article/e1a550… This whole battle is not a confected mess made up by a bunch of bored women who were sitting around one day and then decided, "I know what will be a laugh, let's pretend a bunch of people are trying to erase sex in law and replace us with gender wibble wobble."

So, here we go, 'Rainbow Pens of Doom Meet Catharine MacKinnon.'

This is loooong, and I seriously lose the will to live halfway through, so, let's see how we go....

signsjournal.org/exploring-tran… Is the problem feminists opposing trans people's existence as trans, or claiming that trans women are not women?

This distinction might matter.

This longread from the Guardian is a really detailed and useful account of how the current Culture Wars are playing out and impacting the work of academic knowledge making.

theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/… The kind of historical accounting that is being done by some of our public institutions into how their past finances were tied up with the profits from slavery is *exactly* the kind of *materialist* work into the mechanisms of exploitation and oppression that we should welcome.

As a doctorate carrying scientist you should realise we had this argument 5 years ago and you lost because you are talking absolute copper bottomed nonsense

https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1664310849568227344

Intersex is a common as redheads klaxon!!!

This one REALLY hasn’t done their homework…

Am a little too busy with making the new magazine right now, but this piece from Issue Three of @Radical_Notion answers to Catherine MacKinnon's apparent inability to understand the relationship between biology and history.

theradicalnotion.org/woman-as-resou… @Radical_Notion