4. Although Jenkins may be channelling disquiet, he's probably mostly functioning as a safety valve. If he really wanted to fuck shit up, he'd call on Sunak and Cameron to publish all the details of Britain's defence treaty with Israel. Then at least we might learn what military treaty commitments towards Israel Britain actually has, and what Britain gets in return.
The UK - Israel agreement is nothing more than an attempt to maintain most favoured satrapy status with the US. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
Four pages of comments about trans, and transfem mascbois. It’s like one of those manias that afflicts African countries, when ghost monkeys make everyone faint, or albinos are accused of bewitching the President. We have all ingested ergotine
Perhaps even more so the penis stealing manias - where gents genuinely seem to believe that someone has stolen their todger.
That is all a clever ploy by Leon top promote his knapping business.
'Worried about getting to todger stolen? Make sure you have a ready supply of our special Tourmaline Todgers so you are not caught short when your lady friend comes to stay.'
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
And that would be good - if it didn't also recommend not giving kids trans healthcare if they want and need it.
Do you accept that there are some people who want it but don't need it?
Sure, depending on your definition of "need". Some pregnant people don't "need" abortions - but if they want them they should be allowed to have them. Some people may get surgical care and then regret that - but regret rates for surgical trans healthcare are typically very very small (so small, in fact, that if anything it suggests there is too much gate keeping). Again, across studies more people regret their abortions or having their kids - and these are things that teens can decide to do regardless of the parents preference.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
More rubbish. Puberty blockers used for treatment of precocious puberty are stopped and puberty then happens. What’s being done here is blocking puberty altogether - when going through puberty can help ameliorate gender distress. ...
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
What are home fries? I have never heard of them.
Potatoes cut into pieces about 1-2cm across, skin on, fried with onions, garlic, peppers, some pepper and other spices. Frequently served with fried breakfasts or brunch. They're so good.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
What are home fries? I have never heard of them.
My ex did a version of these. Parboil unpeeled potatoes. Then slice and fry the slices (about 1cm thick). The skin often comes off and becomes deliciously crunchy. When it’s all done sprinkle with sea salt, cracked pepper and some oregano. Really easy and delish
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
Didn’t you insist that article wasn’t about trans politics? 😁
UNBELIEVABLE. The EU & Brussels mayor are about to shut down the @NatConTalk event with Nigel Farage still on stage. They are so scared of the discussion they're shutting it down!!"
Humza Yousaf tells Good Morning Scotland that closing the Sandyford Clinic is not an option and that it provides "exceptional healthcare"....
In an extraordinary display of tone-deafness, his first response to being questioned about Cass is to approvingly quote Stonewall's response.
He also says that transwomen WILL be included in the Scottish Government's new misogyny law, in case men unwittingly shout rape threats at them. He says the bill will be progressed with "speed", "urgency" and "pace". A triple lock!
I predict that if Scotland does add women to the protected groups in its hate crime legislation, the first person prosecuted will be a woman, and her crime will be refusing to call a trans identifying man a woman.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Heading down the plato route into conspiracy theories now I see.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
What are home fries? I have never heard of them.
Bratkartoffeln
Oh dear. That looks dangerously divine.
They are. I make them at home when we do brunch, but I don't think I've ever seen them at a cafe in the UK.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
This is very obviously a 'who is in charge of the discourse' bit of litigation as no-one is going to mention the obvious truth that actual, as opposed to performative, prayer thankfully can be neither compelled nor forbidden, being as it is a disposition of the heart and mind. (See Jesus and all the spiritual greats passim).
Long suffering pupils might want to reflect on the Benedictine tradition of 'laborare est orare' which roughly translates for schoolchildren: Prayer is double physics.
Seriously impressive judgment. Really well written with great clarity as to each side's positions and arguments.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
He is vaguely popular.
He'd be doing far worse if he were not Andy Street, but when your brand is in the toilet you're simply not going to win.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
Here they seem to be called Parmentier Potatoes afaics.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
2019 (December) to summer 2020 - Labour could be finished, forever. At best, it will take them at least two parliaments to get near to power. 2020-21 - Starmer is a dud, and has no chance. 2022 - Well, the Tories are making a bit of a mess of things, aren't they? Could be a hung parliament. 2023 - Bloody hell, Tories have made such a mess Labour could actually win! 2024 - a Labour majority of under 100 would be somewhat surprising (though Starmer is still a dud).
By the same token, that's a salutary warning as to how rapidly things could change for Starmer.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
You are denying her lived experience?
How very 1950s of you.
I'd say a more scepticism about anectdotalising anonymous randoms, which if it isn't very 2020s should be.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
IIRC the BBC did a series with a trans actor on just this idea. Man meets woman in a bar, they hit it off and eventually there is a need for a hard conversation. Cannot recall how it ended.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
Checking Starmer by voting Tory is the strongest card the Tories have, and very logical.
Having 200+ very left-wing MPs on Labour's backbenches encouraging him to do psychopathic left-wing things - with no parliamentary opposition- is in no-ones interests, save the fanatics.
The only way that logic works is if Labour goes into coalition with the Lib Dems. Coalition helped avoid the crazies taking over from 2010-15, but a minority government hardly kept the right wing quiet under May’s government. Quite the opposite, it gave the backbench factions (both left and right) real power.
The logic works now.
Labour are on course for a majority well over 250 seats with the Tories virtually wiped out.
That isn't logical. Once the Tories are safely out of office, with Labour having a solid majority, anything extra isn't in the interests of good governance.
The problem with that sort of thinking, like with tactical voting, is that it relies on being able to predict how other voters will vote.
If every 2019 Tory voter follows that reasoning then the Tories will end up with an unlikely majority, not what the hypothetical voter wants to happen. It's extremely risky but to vote for the most important thing you want.
If the most important thing you want is to throw the Tories out of government then voters ought to vote for that
Yes. One of the reasons I like the Swiss referenda system is that it gives voters the chance to do more than one thing with their vote. With our system you are able once every 4-5 years either express your opinion about who's best for government, or try to defeat someone you don't like.
Tactical voting also has a problem, in that you may not much like the alternative either. Labour voters voting LD may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone who spends the next 5 years attacking the (potential) Labour government. LD voters voting Labour may be disconcerted to find that they've elected someone slavishly loyal to Starmer. Green voters may well be rapidly fed up with either.
On the 200+ idea, though, it's actually the other way round. The leadership has rightly or wrongly ensured that the overwhelming majority of candidates are centrist, so if most of them get in, the existing left-wing MPs will find themselves in a small minority. They will be much more influential if the majority is only, say, 30-40.
You used to pretend to be centrist in the peak of the Blair years.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
IIRC the BBC did a series with a trans actor on just this idea. Man meets woman in a bar, they hit it off and eventually there is a need for a hard conversation. Cannot recall how it ended.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
Legally clear cut - no hate crime. Sympathy - both of them. Not sure this is a tough one really!
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
President Zelensky said Russians completely destroyed Ukraine's power plant in Trypillia, Kyiv region, last week because of Ukraine's lack of air defence.
“There were 11 missiles flying. We destroyed the first seven, and four [remaining] destroyed Trypillia. Why? Because there were zero missiles. We ran out of missiles to defend Trypillia”... https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1780199737150390447
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
The big choppers thing is cultural.
A big chopper doesn't indicate a greater ability to score food in competition with other men, a greater likelihood of producing healthy offspring, or a greater propensity for sticking around to protect offspring and their mother.
With big tits it's a bit different. They don't produce more milk. (What makes them big is fat, not milk glands.) But on average they do indicate greater fertility.
No it’s not. A bigger penis (girth is possibly more important than length) is known to give greater sexual pleasure. Women like them for a practical, physical reason. Its not “cultural”
On planet Darwin women's sexual pleasure is cultural-only, though. The underlying needs on that planet are sex for men and food for women.
UNBELIEVABLE. The EU & Brussels mayor are about to shut down the @NatConTalk event with Nigel Farage still on stage. They are so scared of the discussion they're shutting it down!!"
@PippaCrerar Nat Con conference in Brussels is being closed down by police on behalf of local authorities. Our Brussels corr @lisaocarroll reports organisers just told delegates that shut down would be "gradual"... not least because Suella Braverman is currently speaking on stage.
@PippaCrerar Nat Con conference in Brussels is being closed down by police on behalf of local authorities. Our Brussels corr @lisaocarroll reports organisers just told delegates that shut down would be "gradual"... not least because Suella Braverman is currently speaking on stage.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
I think you're trolling at this point, william.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
I think you're trolling at this point, william.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
To change the subject - when we've imported so many duff things from American culture, why don't we have home fries in Britain? I could eat them all day.
What are home fries? I have never heard of them.
Potatoes cut into pieces about 1-2cm across, skin on, fried with onions, garlic, peppers, some pepper and other spices. Frequently served with fried breakfasts or brunch. They're so good.
Can't you just roast them with those ingredients and create a similar result? I did rose harissa butter roasted spuds on Sunday. Oh yeah!
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
There was a similar and supposedly true dilemma posted a while back to a Guardian agony column. You have just started dating a new woman. It's going great and she invites you meet her parents, at which point you realise you previously had a gay relationship with her dad. What do you do, and say, and to whom?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
I think you're trolling at this point, william.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
UNBELIEVABLE. The EU & Brussels mayor are about to shut down the @NatConTalk event with Nigel Farage still on stage. They are so scared of the discussion they're shutting it down!!"
For the umpteenth time, why do you follow this bozo around?
The question of what he is up to is not uninteresting. Is he the thinking man's Lozza, or does he have a serious programme beyond making a living out of a fan club? And if so, what is it, and what is the aim? In some respects the question about Goodwin is as interesting as that about Farage and the Truss/Braverman tendency in the Tory party.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
On the contrary. There has been far more international support for the balanced, compassionate, Cass report than you suggest. For example, the Boston Globe (hardly a transphobic paper) argues the "comprehensive" Cass report points to a way out of the political impasse over youth gender treatments" -
And I really wish you wouldn't use hate speech like "brain poisoned with TERFdom". It's a protected philosophical belief, just like yours, and gender critical views are backed with serious research.
The problem you will always have is that gender is a societal construct that can and should be abolished. Sex is the basis of transhistorical oppression in societies across the globe (both indigenous and colonial) that is the model for all other oppressions, not gender. Globally, we have lived through a system of male dominance and female subordination which functions through structural sex class relations and is inculcated, enforced and maintained by gender socialisation (which you implicitly support), policing and hierarchy. Denying that reality is simply misogyny. By reinforcing gender all you are going is reinforcing that oppression. Gender needs to be abolished, not reinforced by unnecessary surgical intervention.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
If we're already there you'll be able to provide an example won't you? How many times has this happened in the last 3 years?
Can we ration discussion of Trans on here, the same way we do AI?
I am sworn to silence on AI, unless someone else bangs on about it. People should learn from my shining moral example
Also, we've talked it to bloody death. At least with AI there are constant new and astonishing developments, so there is a REASON to talk about it (plus it will change the world). The trans issue just dances around the same old handbags, never going anywhere, just tediously recycling the same talking points. YAWN
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
He is vaguely popular.
He'd be doing far worse if he were not Andy Street, but when your brand is in the toilet you're simply not going to win.
Which is what anyone who has ever done on-the-ground elections will tell you.
Doing a good local job will get you more votes than doing a bad job, but nowhere near enough to withstand the national tide.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
According to my calculations this year is both the wettest and warmest to this point since records began (HADEWP,HADCET)
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
An effective opposition is not a batshit party led by Priti Patel. If the Conservative Party wants to come back and have a go then great. But as it has gone away and been replaced by people suffering foaming dog fever, you can't demand their survival on the grounds of "Good governance"...
The Conservatives are not in opposition yet and Priti Patel has not been elected leader.
The greatest antidote to the "foaming dog fever" you describe is for a wipeout to be avoided and moderate MPs to survive.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
Can someone open up a trans issue free thread . Enough already ! I say live and let live but for the love of God no more !
Quite
I miss XL Bully chat. Those were the good old days on PB. When we’d discuss the latest mauling, post videos of kids being brutally chewed up, gossip about potential face transplants for ravaged victims. Now it’s trans trans trans trans trans trans
I know Brexit is dead and buried because it's only @Scott_xP still raging against it.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
An effective opposition is not a batshit party led by Priti Patel. If the Conservative Party wants to come back and have a go then great. But as it has gone away and been replaced by people suffering foaming dog fever, you can't demand their survival on the grounds of "Good governance"...
The Conservatives are not in opposition yet and Priti Patel has not been elected leader.
The greatest antidote to the "foaming dog fever" you describe is for a wipeout to be avoided and moderate MPs to survive.
But members get the final say and the more right wing / nuttier candidate of the final 2 is going to win the membership vote
Quite a good Trans discussion on here today imo. Plenty of comments from people who are both interested in it and have at least some relevant knowledge. So not a 'yawn' from me.
@PippaCrerar Nat Con conference in Brussels is being closed down by police on behalf of local authorities. Our Brussels corr @lisaocarroll reports organisers just told delegates that shut down would be "gradual"... not least because Suella Braverman is currently speaking on stage.
If true, and at this stage I don't know if it is, it neatly summarises why I wanted to leave the dissent-loving EU.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
An effective opposition is not a batshit party led by Priti Patel. If the Conservative Party wants to come back and have a go then great. But as it has gone away and been replaced by people suffering foaming dog fever, you can't demand their survival on the grounds of "Good governance"...
The Conservatives are not in opposition yet and Priti Patel has not been elected leader.
The greatest antidote to the "foaming dog fever" you describe is for a wipeout to be avoided and moderate MPs to survive.
But members get the final say and the more right wing / nuttier candidate of the final 2 is going to win the membership vote
Depends who the MPs put forward, neither Badenoch or Braverman got enough MPs support to make the final 2 last time and Patel didn't even have enough support from MPs to be nominated as a candidate for leader.
If Badenoch got to the last 2 she would likely beat all alternatives with members but she may not. Remember on current polls a lot of ERG MPs in the North and Midlands will lose their seats and the remaining Tory MPs left are more likely to be more centrist from the South percentage wise than they are in the current parliamentary Tory party (albeit with a few losses to the LDs in the Home Counties especially and to Labour in London)
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
If we're already there you'll be able to provide an example won't you? How many times has this happened in the last 3 years?
The way out of this conundrum is easy, you just say: I'm a Tory and I voted Leave. And then bid them a good evening.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
An absolute, bare-faced lie
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
If we're already there you'll be able to provide an example won't you? How many times has this happened in the last 3 years?
The way out of this conundrum is easy, you just say: I'm a Tory and I voted Leave. And then bid them a good evening.
Liz Truss devotees should head over to YouTube which has several hour-long videos of various media interviews given by the great lady in the past day or two.
Apparently the whole thing is the Bank of England's fault.
When do PBers think that TRUSS will return to the throne? Could it be as early as May so she can seek a new mandate as early as June?
Who would count against her?
You know when you tell other posters to 'give it a rest'?
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
What are you talking about? it hasn't rained here since the back of 10 o'clock. Marvellous.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
All part of the culture wars. Which, given we - as in the main parties - have largely stopped debating economic policy except for tinkering around the edges, is all we have.
At least we used to be able to argue about Brexit policy or - when Corbyn was LOTO - nationalisation and such.
Here's some hard polling as a distraction. Isn't Street supposed to be vaguely popular & successful (however that's defined in Toryworld)?
Edit: LDs called Siobhan with approximately latin surnames seems to be a thing.
That's Greens called Siobhan.
On the poll, there was talk of maybe Street could hold on and be one piece of good news for the Tories. On that... no.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
What are you talking about? it hasn't rained here since the back of 10 o'clock. Marvellous.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
What are you talking about? it hasn't rained here since the back of 10 o'clock. Marvellous.
Isn’t that time for a national drought warning, in Scotland?
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
On the contrary. There has been far more international support for the balanced, compassionate, Cass report than you suggest. For example, the Boston Globe (hardly a transphobic paper) argues the "comprehensive" Cass report points to a way out of the political impasse over youth gender treatments" -
And I really wish you wouldn't use hate speech like "brain poisoned with TERFdom". It's a protected philosophical belief, just like yours, and gender critical views are backed with serious research.
The problem you will always have is that gender is a societal construct that can and should be abolished. Sex is the basis of transhistorical oppression in societies across the globe (both indigenous and colonial) that is the model for all other oppressions, not gender. Globally, we have lived through a system of male dominance and female subordination which functions through structural sex class relations and is inculcated, enforced and maintained by gender socialisation (which you implicitly support), policing and hierarchy. Denying that reality is simply misogyny. By reinforcing gender all you are going is reinforcing that oppression. Gender needs to be abolished, not reinforced by unnecessary surgical intervention.
People will still want body modifications even if we achieved gender abolition. Indeed - I would assume that they would be more common and acceptable under a society that has abolished gender than now. And I don't know why people seem to think that medical transition is reinforcing gender stereotypes or gender socialising - what breaks patriarchal norms more than people defined by society as one gender showing that they are, in fact, not that gender and taking the control of their own body to show that?
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
What are you talking about? it hasn't rained here since the back of 10 o'clock. Marvellous.
Isn’t that time for a national drought warning, in Scotland?
Normally yes, but given the weather since last November, probably not.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
An effective opposition is not a batshit party led by Priti Patel. If the Conservative Party wants to come back and have a go then great. But as it has gone away and been replaced by people suffering foaming dog fever, you can't demand their survival on the grounds of "Good governance"...
The Conservatives are not in opposition yet and Priti Patel has not been elected leader.
The greatest antidote to the "foaming dog fever" you describe is for a wipeout to be avoided and moderate MPs to survive.
How strongly does the bit in bold work? I imagine the 2019 Boris loving red wall MPs will be for the chop even on small swings, but what's the distribution of batso MPs elsewhere on the swingometer?
Liz Truss devotees should head over to YouTube which has several hour-long videos of various media interviews given by the great lady in the past day or two.
Apparently the whole thing is the Bank of England's fault.
When do PBers think that TRUSS will return to the throne? Could it be as early as May so she can seek a new mandate as early as June?
Who would count against her?
You know when you tell other posters to 'give it a rest'?
He is quite right to criticise the soul-less and vile reprobate that he pleads to "give it a rest".
Sarah Owen on Daily Politics doing a good line in side-eye and eye-roll when speaking to Mark Littlewood, one of TRUSS’s outriders. All very entertaining.
The tories on anything more than 150 after the GE will be a bitter disappointment tbh.
As will the Starmer government that follows close after. I did used to think that maybe he'd grow into the job of PM and SOTU but it's apparent that there isn't much there beyond not being tory scum.
Can we ration discussion of Trans on here, the same way we do AI?
Absolutely. I love a class 33 - I'm from the south and often used to see them looking dandy in the glorious NSE colours. Partial to a 47, but my absolute favourite has to the the class 59's, and happily, after waiting nearly 40 years, you can now buy them in N gauge...
Oh you said Trans! No, its impossible to debate sensibly because there is at least one zealot on here who has the time (apparently) to spew forth endless posts about why trans is the new gay etc.
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
That's now what the review is. I am still reading it. One can, I'm sure, disagree with it, but it is misleading to exaggerate as you are now doing.
For example, you suggest, "Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions." The Cass review has not acted anything like that. They spoke extensively to trans young people, they spoke to trans adults, they spoke to parents of trans young people, they spoke to medical practitioners in this area.
Don't make shit up, 148grss.
One senses you are seeing the light this morning. Good to see.
I am wearing my new varifocals and seeing all sorts of things, but I've not particularly changed my position on trans healthcare.
Can we ration discussion of Trans on here, the same way we do AI?
Only if we do similarly with 'woke'.
I'd be more than happy with more active moderation when it comes to topic diversity or staying on topic, etc. My issue is if people are going to sound off, I'm not letting them go unchallenged, and down that route madness does often lie...
I’m really surprised by that Redfield and Wilton poll .
I thought Street was popular in the West Midlands . They also published a GE voter intention poll for the region which was horrific for the Tories .
The poll is still significantly closer than the Westminster voting intention polling for the West Midlands, so there does seem to be an incumbency effect of some sort, just drowned out by the general party political swing.
Street polls 4% higher in the mayoral race than the Conservatives in the general election question. So, that's a bit of an incumbency or Street effect, but not much.
The date of this Copenhagen fire is a quite STARTLING coincidence
Conspiracy theorists are going to have plenty of material over the coming days.
Ultimately, I dismissed the many conspiracy theories around Notre Dame. Despite the alarming number of church and cathedral fires in France which really ARE arson, generally by Islamists or immigrants
eg Nantes. The arsonist - a lovely chap - then went on to murder the priest who tried to help him. We really are importing the best of the best
Sarah Owen on Daily Politics doing a good line in side-eye and eye-roll when speaking to Mark Littlewood, one of TRUSS’s outriders. All very entertaining.
Sounds brilliant and so devastating to Littlewood too. Gutted I missed it as I was watching an old episode of Bergerac.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
And that would be good - if it didn't also recommend not giving kids trans healthcare if they want and need it.
It recommends more funding for trans healthcare. It recommends shorter waiting lists. It recommends providing individualised care. It recommends listening to patients/service users. It recommends providing more joined up care. It recommends lots of things that you should be able to get behind.
It also recommends only giving certain kinds of treatment within a research context until such time as we can see the results of that research. That's clearly the controversial bit. It's not quite stopping certain treatments, although both sides of the trans debate have described it in those terms. I need to read further, but it's certainly not saying kids should receive no treatment.
A plugged-in Conservative recently told me they thought Andy Street was going to get heavily beaten at the mayoral election. I dismissed it at the time as overly-zealous expectation management, but maybe not...
I’m really surprised by that Redfield and Wilton poll .
I thought Street was popular in the West Midlands . They also published a GE voter intention poll for the region which was horrific for the Tories .
The poll is still significantly closer than the Westminster voting intention polling for the West Midlands, so there does seem to be an incumbency effect of some sort, just drowned out by the general party political swing.
Street polls 4% higher in the mayoral race than the Conservatives in the general election question. So, that's a bit of an incumbency or Street effect, but not much.
By the same token the London Tory Mayor candidate, so derided here and on social media, polls around 5/6 points higher than the Tories in London as a whole.
Unlike Street, she has no record as Mayor to support her.
Or rather weather clearly impacting British food security. It might be that climate change has driven the wet weather over the last year, and its certainly the case that models predict more and heavier rain for the UK, but its still not really possible to say with certainty that the last year would not have happened without climate change. We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
We need more years like 2022 tbh - warmest England and Wales year. 7th sunniest, below average rainfall.
The sunshine hours for this year so far are off the dial - in a bad way. Less than half what we would normally expect, and this is in the gloomiest part of the year. No wonder people are bit grumpy about it - plus the endless rain
What are you talking about? it hasn't rained here since the back of 10 o'clock. Marvellous.
It was snowing here yesterday
Unfortunately the weather is turning both cold and, from tonight onwards, calm and relatively sunny at precisely the wrong time for tender fruit crops.
My grapevines have all gone through budburst now, and I can see in the nearby orchards the apple and pear trees are in blossom. Everything is a few weeks advanced on normal so it’s more vulnerable to late frost than it would usually be in mid April. A couple of nights of anything at or below -1C and it’s goodbye harvest 2024.
Comments
'Worried about getting to todger stolen? Make sure you have a ready supply of our special Tourmaline Todgers so you are not caught short when your lady friend comes to stay.'
“The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
Very good made in an air fryer.
@GoodwinMJ
UNBELIEVABLE. The EU & Brussels mayor are about to shut down the @NatConTalk event with Nigel Farage still on stage. They are so scared of the discussion they're shutting it down!!"
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1780192719496716426
In an extraordinary display of tone-deafness, his first response to being questioned about Cass is to approvingly quote Stonewall's response.
He also says that transwomen WILL be included in the Scottish Government's new misogyny law, in case men unwittingly shout rape threats at them. He says the bill will be progressed with "speed", "urgency" and "pace". A triple lock!
https://x.com/WingsScotland/status/1780170112776998941
I predict that if Scotland does add women to the protected groups in its hate crime legislation, the first person prosecuted will be a woman, and her crime will be refusing to call a trans identifying man a woman.
https://x.com/HJoyceGender/status/1779773840781963459
I loathe this dreary debate. I shall take your advice, have a coffee, and do some actual work
👍
How very 1950s of you.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/uk-facing-food-shortages-and-price-rises-after-extreme-weather
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Børsen
https://news.sky.com/story/fire-breaks-out-at-old-stock-exchange-building-in-copenhagen-13116344
"Imagine you have a son aged say, 18 -20, who hooks up with a woman over drinks in a club and they end up going back for "coffee".
As they undress your son feels that something isn't quite right and the woman says proudly that she used to be a man but is now a woman complete with parts fashioned by a surgeon. Your son, who is now suffering from a severe case of floppy-dick, politely backs-up and makes his excuses.
The next day the woman (gender) (man (sex)) files a complaint against your son for a "hate crime" because he has clearly shown discrimination towards a transgender person.
Where does your sympathy lie? You may say this is far-fetched - but it isn't - we're getting there and may already be there."
He'd be doing far worse if he were not Andy Street, but when your brand is in the toilet you're simply not going to win.
For the industrious:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/parmentier-potatoes
For the lazy:
https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-four-seasons-garlic-herb-parmentier-potatoes-500g/4088600537139
Aldi also have a Rosemary one iirc, which I can't find online.
We have always had extreme weather, and always will. Dealing with it is the challenge.
I don't believe a word of it.
Dammit.
What's the latest on TRUSS's much-awaited comeback?
Is it time to raise the red, white and blue bunting and trigger a round of street parties?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/copenhagen-stock-exchange-fire-borsen-p556f07lr
“There were 11 missiles flying. We destroyed the first seven, and four [remaining] destroyed Trypillia. Why? Because there were zero missiles. We ran out of missiles to defend Trypillia”...
https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1780199737150390447
For the umpteenth time, why do you follow this bozo around?
Nat Con conference in Brussels is being closed down by police on behalf of local authorities. Our Brussels corr @lisaocarroll reports organisers just told delegates that shut down would be "gradual"... not least because Suella Braverman is currently speaking on stage.
LOL.
He is quite brilliant at it.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/15/opinion/cass-review-gender-affirming-care/
And I really wish you wouldn't use hate speech like "brain poisoned with TERFdom". It's a protected philosophical belief, just like yours, and gender critical views are backed with serious research.
The problem you will always have is that gender is a societal construct that can and should be abolished. Sex is the basis of transhistorical oppression in societies across the globe (both indigenous and colonial) that is the model for all other oppressions, not gender. Globally, we have lived through a system of male dominance and female subordination which functions through structural sex class relations and is inculcated, enforced and maintained by gender socialisation (which you implicitly support), policing and hierarchy. Denying that reality is simply misogyny. By reinforcing gender all you are going is reinforcing that oppression. Gender needs to be abolished, not reinforced by unnecessary surgical intervention.
Also, we've talked it to bloody death. At least with AI there are constant new and astonishing developments, so there is a REASON to talk about it (plus it will change the world). The trans issue just dances around the same old handbags, never going anywhere, just tediously recycling the same talking points. YAWN
Doing a good local job will get you more votes than doing a bad job, but nowhere near enough to withstand the national tide.
Any reliable news from Tees Valley yet?
According to my calculations this year is both the wettest and warmest to this point since records began (HADEWP,HADCET)
The greatest antidote to the "foaming dog fever" you describe is for a wipeout to be avoided and moderate MPs to survive.
Everyone else is talking about Trans.
https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2024/0416/1443807-gold-rings-fermoy-cork/
If Badenoch got to the last 2 she would likely beat all alternatives with members but she may not. Remember on current polls a lot of ERG MPs in the North and Midlands will lose their seats and the remaining Tory MPs left are more likely to be more centrist from the South percentage wise than they are in the current parliamentary Tory party (albeit with a few losses to the LDs in the Home Counties especially and to Labour in London)
Problem solved.
On the poll, there was talk of maybe Street could hold on and be one piece of good news for the Tories. On that... no.
I already have the one ring. Bwahahahahaha
Leave Mr Truss alone.
As will the Starmer government that follows close after. I did used to think that maybe he'd grow into the job of PM and SOTU but it's apparent that there isn't much there beyond not being tory scum.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/16/smoking-ban-liz-truss-takes-aim-at-unelected-health-department-officials
Oh you said Trans! No, its impossible to debate sensibly because there is at least one zealot on here who has the time (apparently) to spew forth endless posts about why trans is the new gay etc.
eg Nantes. The arsonist - a lovely chap - then went on to murder the priest who tried to help him. We really are importing the best of the best
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/13-august/news/world/french-priest-is-killed-by-man-he-was-sheltering-before-trial-for-nantes-cathedral-fire
Now this fire in Copenhagen, another iconic national building, another spire toppled, five years and 1 day later?
HMMMMMM
It also recommends only giving certain kinds of treatment within a research context until such time as we can see the results of that research. That's clearly the controversial bit. It's not quite stopping certain treatments, although both sides of the trans debate have described it in those terms. I need to read further, but it's certainly not saying kids should receive no treatment.
A plugged-in Conservative recently told me they thought Andy Street was going to get heavily beaten at the mayoral election. I dismissed it at the time as overly-zealous expectation management, but maybe not...
@RedfieldWilton
Richard Parker leads Andy Street by 14%.
West Midlands Mayoral Election VI (10-14 April):
Richard Parker (Lab) 42%
Andy Street (Cons) 28%
Elaine Williams (Ref) 13%
Siobhan Harper-Nunes (Green) 7%
Sunny Virk (Lib Dem) 7%
Other 2%
Unlike Street, she has no record as Mayor to support her.
Name recognition perhaps.
My grapevines have all gone through budburst now, and I can see in the nearby orchards the apple and pear trees are in blossom. Everything is a few weeks advanced on normal so it’s more vulnerable to late frost than it would usually be in mid April. A couple of nights of anything at or below -1C and it’s goodbye harvest 2024.