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.
All movements seeking social acceptance for a new idea have their daft fringes.
Consider the women's suffragists and the suffragettes; the tactics and some if the arguments of the fringe set back their cause - but it didn't invalidate the fundamental argument.
The Suffragettes proudly described themselves as terrorists. People died.
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.
Listening to the Truss Mason interview I was struck by how much Trump/MAGA she is channelling. The casually provocative one-liners, the brutish simplifications, the idea of a deep state thwarting the interests of ordinary people, One Nation Conservatives branded as "CINOs". Yuck.
Can we ration discussion of Trans on here, the same way we do AI?
Only if we do similarly with 'woke'.
Brexit too.
Yes, as I said before Brexit is for righties what Trans is for lefties. Trans is an internecine lefty war. Red on Red. The right doesn't really inderstand it. Brexit was a war within the Tories, and on the right. Blue on Blue. Lefties didn't really grasp it, and found it dull and pointless
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...
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.
Sometimes it helps to state the obvious: Encouraging young males to be neutered, and young females to be spayed, may not be the best way to deal with a demography problem.
(The veterinarian terms I just used are not perfect, but they are more honest than "gender-affirming care".)
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?
"...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?". it reinforces the patriarchy by suggesting that certain behaviours are intrinsically linked to certain body types, and they have to modify their bodies, like changing a costume, to make that behaviour more "realistic".
Without gender there would be no need to change your body as there would be no behaviours to conform to and nothing to fetishise. People are not assigned a "gender", they are assigned a sex. Gender is a role, like a performance in a play, a pretty nasty play. Gender roles are designed to supress females as a sex based class. The idea that males can become women by performing such roles is deeply problematic.
Gender is just a tool. Other than gender, tools used to supress females as a sex based class include female infanticide - which has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own recent ancestors in the west (1). Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule and, self-evidently, occurs before the gender expression of the individual has developed. Females that have, throughout time, been able to survive infanticide are, instead, forced to perform a series of roles we describe as "feminity".
Gender proponents, on the other hand, deny that sex based oppression exists (2) and advance an individualistic programme that says that the unique experiences of women as a class should be disregarded for the needs of a small number of individuals. It's shocking that people who profess to be socialists prioritise the needs of such individuals over the needs of the group as a whole. It's the sad result of 50 years of Neoliberalism that left-wing thought has been infected with liberalism to the extent we are even discussing this bollocks.
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
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?
I'm against all forms of permanent body modification for cosmetic reasons.
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.
I didn't say it was brilliant or devastating, just entertaining. But whatever gets you through the day.
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.
I didn't say it was brilliant or devastating, just entertaining. But whatever gets you through the day.
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.
Listening to the Truss Mason interview I was struck by how much Trump/MAGA she is channelling. The casually provocative one-liners, the brutish simplifications, the idea of a deep state thwarting the interests of ordinary people, One Nation Conservatives branded as "CINOs". Yuck.
Sarah Owen was deliciously catty about the whole thing, along with the full suite of bitchy eye-rolling, there was her comment that "that book will be in the bargain bins before summer"
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.
I didn't say it was brilliant or devastating, just entertaining. But whatever gets you through the day.
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.
Name recognition perhaps.
Also the incumbency effect - but negative, for Khan. She benefits from being Not Khan, and unknown.
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'?
Perhaps you know better than Truss herself as to when the Second Coming will be? There are many, many people, worldwide, awaiting the day – the very hour! – when she stages her much-anticipated return to the throne. Put that in your postbag and smoke it.
Liz Truss is an absolute lunatic, and it’s scary what it says about the Tory Party in parliament, and the membership at large, that she was ever thought to be a viable candidate for PM.
But she surely has a point that the British governance is frankly ramshackle. Downing Street appears to run like a badly-managed charity. It *is* an indictment of risk management that all four key principals during Covid were afflicted at the same time. It *is* a disgrace that governance seems to take place via WhatsApp channels which if nothing else is surely a national security risk.
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.
I didn't say it was brilliant or devastating, just entertaining. But whatever gets you through the day.
Oh petal, not a fan of a bit of sarcasm??
More a fan, like you, of THE TRUSS. No sarcasm required. She is the real deal, wouldn't you agree? Truly one in a billion.
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.
Listening to the Truss Mason interview I was struck by how much Trump/MAGA she is channelling. The casually provocative one-liners, the brutish simplifications, the idea of a deep state thwarting the interests of ordinary people, One Nation Conservatives branded as "CINOs". Yuck.
Sarah Owen was deliciously catty about the whole thing, along with the full suite of bitchy eye-rolling, there was her comment that "that book will be in the bargain bins before summer"
Brilliant. Like Joan Collins in her Dynasty heyday.
She claims she based her character, Alexis Carrington, on the Trumpdozer. Collins that is, not the obscure backbench MP.
Can we ration discussion of Trans on here, the same way we do AI?
Only if we do similarly with 'woke'.
Brexit too.
Yes, as I said before Brexit is for righties what Trans is for lefties. Trans is an internecine lefty war. Red on Red. The right doesn't really inderstand it. Brexit was a war within the Tories, and on the right. Blue on Blue. Lefties didn't really grasp it, and found it dull and pointless
Lots of the strongest anti-Brexit voices are on the left. And with Trans the ranks of the 'antis' are bursting with right wingers. Think about on here. When Brexit is discussed it's not a Tory/Right civil war, is it? People like me love to get involved. Nor is Trans an argument amongst lefties. We hear plenty from posters who are anything but. So I'm not sure what you mean.
I tend to agree with the Rochdale Pioneers thesis that the Tory Party actually NEEDs a wipe-out if any form of sanity is to return.
The rabies needs to be stamped out utterly.
Sunak and Hunt and Cameron are the centrists in today's Tory Party, if they lose by a landslide the right will say it was their fault and the party needs to return to traditional rightwing values in opposition
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.
Newcastle is that different from Gateshead? Well, I never.
I tend to agree with the Rochdale Pioneers thesis that the Tory Party actually NEEDs a wipe-out if any form of sanity is to return.
The rabies needs to be stamped out utterly.
I have some sympathy with the view that the purifying flame of electoral oblivion is required, but I think it is to put the cart before the horse.
Voters have voted for insanity and so insanity is what they've got. If the Tory party is wiped out because the voters have voted for Reform, is that really an improvement?
Tremendous fun in the short term, but not exactly fertile ground for what you would identify as sanity.
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.
Newcastle is that different from Gateshead? Well, I never.
TBF Hadrian's Wall is well understood as a metonym for the border even if it is not geographically accurate.
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.
Newcastle is that different from Gateshead? Well, I never.
TBF Hadrian's Wall is well understood as a metonym for the border even if it is not geographically accurate.
Wallsend and Segedunum are also in North Tyneside.
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.
Was slightly taken aback this morning to find at least some of the rough countryside path actually "dry" and "hardening" - though plenty of water and glaur in places still.
Liz Truss is an absolute lunatic, and it’s scary what it says about the Tory Party in parliament, and the membership at large, that she was ever thought to be a viable candidate for PM.
But she surely has a point that the British governance is frankly ramshackle. Downing Street appears to run like a badly-managed charity. It *is* an indictment of risk management that all four key principals during Covid were afflicted at the same time. It *is* a disgrace that governance seems to take place via WhatsApp channels which if nothing else is surely a national security risk.
Her 'point' was not well made by trying to given without it.
There are plenty argument for reforming government - but it's not something you can improvise in real time.
By popular demand: Flow of the Vote, Scotland edition. Each block represents 25k voters in colour of 2019 vote, based on data from all Scottish polls this year.
Much like the Tories GB-wide, the SNP's vote has splintered in multiple directions, Labour the ultimate beneficiary.
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.
They had a poll question on general election preference and the Tories were 4% lower than Street's figure. So, he'd probably be doing 4% worse if he were not Andy Street.
Comments
(The veterinarian terms I just used are not perfect, but they are more honest than "gender-affirming care".)
Without gender there would be no need to change your body as there would be no behaviours to conform to and nothing to fetishise. People are not assigned a "gender", they are assigned a sex. Gender is a role, like a performance in a play, a pretty nasty play. Gender roles are designed to supress females as a sex based class. The idea that males can become women by performing such roles is deeply problematic.
Gender is just a tool. Other than gender, tools used to supress females as a sex based class include female infanticide - which has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own recent ancestors in the west (1). Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule and, self-evidently, occurs before the gender expression of the individual has developed. Females that have, throughout time, been able to survive infanticide are, instead, forced to perform a series of roles we describe as "feminity".
Gender proponents, on the other hand, deny that sex based oppression exists (2) and advance an individualistic programme that says that the unique experiences of women as a class should be disregarded for the needs of a small number of individuals. It's shocking that people who profess to be socialists prioritise the needs of such individuals over the needs of the group as a whole. It's the sad result of 50 years of Neoliberalism that left-wing thought has been infected with liberalism to the extent we are even discussing this bollocks.
(1) https://web.archive.org/web/20060815193200/http://infanticide.org/history.htm
(2) https://youtu.be/AdAdb5Jwl8g (Dembroff asserts at the start, “No one is oppressed because they are a woman.” Which is news indeed.)
It all bears the fingerprints of Arsène Lupin.
@GoodwinMJ
Currently trapped in a building in Brussels. If we leave we cannot return because that's how much Brussels values democracy & deliberation"
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1780210610979946946
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh_ByqfG2R4&t=1734s
In 2019, Conservatives had Strictly and IACGMOOH. Now Labour lead in both, so Keir Starmer will win. No more spoilers.
But she surely has a point that the British governance is frankly ramshackle. Downing Street appears to run like a badly-managed charity. It *is* an indictment of risk management that all four key principals during Covid were afflicted at the same time. It *is* a disgrace that governance seems to take place via WhatsApp channels which if nothing else is surely a national security risk.
The rabies needs to be stamped out utterly.
She claims she based her character, Alexis Carrington, on the Trumpdozer. Collins that is, not the obscure backbench MP.
NEW THEEAD
Voters have voted for insanity and so insanity is what they've got. If the Tory party is wiped out because the voters have voted for Reform, is that really an improvement?
Tremendous fun in the short term, but not exactly fertile ground for what you would identify as sanity.
There are plenty argument for reforming government - but it's not something you can improvise in real time.
By popular demand: Flow of the Vote, Scotland edition. Each block represents 25k voters in colour of 2019 vote, based on data from all Scottish polls this year.
Much like the Tories GB-wide, the SNP's vote has splintered in multiple directions, Labour the ultimate beneficiary.
https://x.com/Dylan_Difford/status/1780140319385756075