Streisand Effect: "Irreversible Damage" is Now Number 10 Best Seller on Amazon's Most Popular Books in the USA

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-11-18T10:58:03+00:00

It certainly backfires somewhat, but they still manage to achieve the current desired effect of keeping it out of "left-wing" media coverage.

Apparently there's been a total left-wing blackout in terms of reviews, and they are happily extending that blackout to surrounding controversies like the Target thing.

Which in turn means that as it's only "right-wing" sources reporting it, if anyone brings it up it can be claimed that the book itself and all those promoting it are "right-wing".

Their aim is more to discredit the idea, than to merely hurt sales of the book. Book sales are pretty insignificant, compared to wider knowledge of the concepts.

Good stuff from Téa Smith on it:

https://twitter.com/tealou/status/1328166973696397313

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpRnj1Y1pfw

At some point their antics become counterproductive, and the whole thing explodes, but they can keep a lid on it for a while.

Téa has a new video up comparing it to Big Tobacco's antics, but not watched it yet. They kept a lid on things for quite a while.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-11-09T06:19:22+00:00

"ContrarianQuinn" on Twitter had a good go this time last year:

https://twitter.com/ContrarianQuinn/status/1208367259502010368?s=19

I am a trans woman. I was born with a vagina. Yes we exist. We are an even more vulnerable minority within a minority. We face all the same things as other trans women except many of us also menstruate and are vulnerable to pregnancy

We are at even greater risk of sexual and domestic violence than other trans women, but also we are trafficked, sold into marriage as children, and have our genitals mutilated in huge numbers globally

We are subject to medical gatekeeping which prevents us from receiving gender affirming surgery, medical science has left us in the dust and surgeons refuse to give us neovaginas simply because we have vaginas.

And the worst part is that bioessentialism excludes us even from the trans rights movement just because of the genitals we were born with. They say trans women born with vaginas aren't valid and insist on defining us by our genitals.

But the #MayaForstater case has established that the belief that sex is observable is a philosophical belief no worthy of respect in a democratic society and the time has come for the trans community to get with the times and accept trans women born with vaginas #translivesmatter

Trans women born with vaginas are and always have been trans women, regardless of the assumptions a bioessentialist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society makes about us based on our bodies.

We face an insidious form of transphobia known as transsexism. These are the norms which privilege trans people who's bodies meet bioessentialist expectations about what it is to be trans over those who don't (eg. trans women born with penises over trans women born with vaginas)

This is the Meta Trans Woman Pride Flag, representing all trans women born with vaginas. That might look like a uterus but if you turn it upside down it kinda looks like a lady penis, demonstrating how meaningless so-called "sex" actually is. #TransRightsAreHumanRights

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-10T06:30:43+00:00

That was a longer reply than that deserved. How very you :)

Seeing Canada is interesting - always thought they were more sensible. Maybe they are, but apparently excessive politeness cancels out and then some.

Plus they clearly suffer from the "complex about having a bigger more powerful neighbour" you also see in Ireland and Scotland which apparently compels them to show they're more "progressive" by really enthusiastically getting into something their "backwards" neighbour isn't as keen on.

Look at all the anti-women, transmaniac policies embraced by the UK Labour Party, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP. And the nutty things said by all the women who ran against Starmer in the Labour Party leadership race recently. I wouldn't judge the entire UK based on their nuttiness.

True, but at least we're not the centre for it - they're just tagging along. It does make them look very out of touch though - it's as if a large chunk of our ruling elite identifies more with America than their own population. (On top of the obvious fact they identify more with men than women...)

But it doesn't half open up opportunities for hilarity when they have to actually justify what they're doing in public meetings and phone-ins. They can't totally avoid the British public, much as they'd like to, so they are going to get repeatedly grilled about what a woman is, and why they're teaming up with "males-in-women's rugby" groups to discuss misogyny.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-09T20:10:44+00:00

dying of embarrassment.

Speaking as a Brit, seeing this sort of nonsense kind of confirms my basest low stereotypes of Americans and their gullibility.

So open-minded your brains have fallen out, as Magdalen said.

Can you not go back to do something more entertaining and harmless, like Scientology again? :P

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-05T09:38:30+00:00

This group does kind of deserve to get trolled from now on. And I think you could almost do that in good conscience.

Anyone agreeing to work with them at this point must be aware of the sort of people they are, and hence is at least implicitly approving of things being pulled for wrongthink.

Therefore if we can "problematise" every single thing they try to do or show, they should only be grateful. I'd love to see if we we can achieve a cancellation combo - get 3 or more things cancelled in a row.

Either they'll learn to say "no" to the cancellation attempts, or they just deserve it.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-05T06:04:54+00:00

Yes, and that's perfectly fair. All those all-male discussion panels about women's fundamental rights. Utterly aggravating.

But there are an awful lot of ways to write an article about that which wouldn't be... that article.

And the optics are just horrible. I was on the GC/radfem side basically immediately as soon as I became aware of the fight because I could see how each side was approaching it. The TRA side was repellent. My natural inclination was that the GC side's demands sounded utterly reasonable, but I had to check how much they were operating in good faith. Did TRAs' claims about TERFs have any basis?

If there was any significant number of articles like that around I would have been far more resistant to this side. The near-total lack of them gave a lot of reassurance about good faith/intentions and that it wasn't just trans-bashing.

Think about the lurkers/undecideds.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-04T19:02:38+00:00

Reread what I wrote. Infertile.

The way you would attempt to treat them would depend what sex they were. It would be futile to try to induce ovulation in an infertile male. Feel free to try though.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-04T16:05:18+00:00

You know, I wonder if you'd get more or less nonsense from trans activists if we WERE clownfish?

If you were a species where individuals actually DID change sex, what would that do to all the trans clownfish who insisted they were the opposite sex despite the fact that they HADN'T changed sex?

Would it actually be easier to point out that they hadn't?

Is it only hard to point out that trans people haven't changed sex because we don't, and hence don't have a comparison?

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-04T15:49:48+00:00

Q1: A lot of this question seems to be more about the definition of "binary", so it's just word games? Some, like Jane Clare Jones, say that sex is NOT a binary because she interprets binary to mean "X or not X". She would say there are exactly two sexes, but having "two" of something does not make a binary.

There are exactly 2 sexes because there are exactly 2 roles in reproduction (for the creatures that it applies to). You need exactly 1 of each gamete to make a new creature. 2 gametes, 1 of each sex = 1 child.

Which of the 2 reproductive roles an individual may play, and how that is determined, varies somewhat more. When we say a creature is "male" we mean it is organised to produce the male gametes. A creature that could produce both would be a hermaphrodite - not something ever observed in humans. If a creature changed from producing one to the other, it would be a sequential hermaphrodite. Again, not something humans do.

So you say "Why don't hermaphrodites show that in other sexually reproducing species sex is not a binary?". That's a question about the word "binary". There are two sexes. An organism of a 2-sexed species can be one, or the other, or both, or neither, in principle. But humans have never been observed to be both, and there is no "unsexed" development path for humans, only infertile humans that failed to go all the way down the male or female development path.

There are certain common DSDs that occur - some are sex-specific, and others present differently in males and females - but they're not a new sex, any more than Downs Syndrome is a sex. A condition that causes infertility is not a sex.

Q2: We're talking about the type of organism they are. A cat isn't less of a cat if you chop its legs off. An elephant isn't less of an elephant if you remove its tusks. A peacock isn't less of a peacock if you remove its feathers. Our technology is almost purely cosmetic - it's mostly surgery with crude use of hormones to stimulate development of secondary sexual characteristics. You're making a male more feminine or a female more masculine. You're doing absolutely nothing to their actual sex. And male/female are sexes. Not sex characteristics.

I remember being young and reading about "sex change surgery" in the 80s, I guess. I was rather flummoxed at the time - it seemed out of line with what I knew about medical technology. Surely we weren't able to do that? If we did, how on earth did it work? I felt rather cheated when I found out what they meant - hormones and cosmetic surgery, no actual sex change. Bunch of liars.

If we were to make a similar argument about other classifications, it would be: Backbone (the feature) = mammal (the category). Any number of vertebrates could have backbones

Eh? backbone (the feature) = vertebrate (the category).

verterbrates with mammary glands (the feature) = mammals (the category).

(The clue is in the name in both cases!)

What you said only didn't work because you mismatched the feature and category.

Males produce sperm, because that's the definition of the word male - the sex with the small mobile gametes.

So then it seems "those that produce eggs are women" or "those that produce sperm are men" is incorrect, as one does not need to have/produce eggs to be a woman or have/produce sperm to be a man.

Ah, the good old "a broken clock isn't a clock" argument. It is possible to be an infertile man, or an infertile woman. We have words like "broken" and "infertile" because we know that something in a category may fail to fully perform its function.

If you deny that, you deny the meaning of the words "broken" or "infertile".

But, given an infertile person, you can readily determine what sex they are, and whether you should try to treat them to make sperm or eggs.

I would hope a transactivist presented with an infertile person wouldn't try to pretend they didn't know whether they should be trying to stimulate sperm production or ovulation.

Really, all this stuff is just sophomoric philosophical flimflam that works equally well with any sort of categories. But the notable thing is that this desperate pseudo-intellectual energy is only applied to sex - specifically females - because male humans desperately want to LARP as women and get into their spaces.

It's almost comical how desperate they are. I'd be embarrassed to come up with this tosh.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-04T07:28:36+00:00

My issue with these TiMs is that they're constantly approached by the media

None of those 4 are. At least, I've never seen them in the media. There are others, like Debbie Hayton in particular.

And I don't recall the last time I saw a TiF on TV - that article was complaining about 2 TiFs and 2 TiMs.

Why are these men looked at as the experts and given the platform to discuss with other men their effect on our rights?

Because they're male and trans. From a quota point of view the program is going to want a trans person on - and I'd rather they invited Rose of Dawn than Munroe Bergdorf. As this is being framed as "trans" rights it's good for our side to show the dissenting trans voices. It's counterproductive to then have a go at the trans people who come on fighting our side. If the author got their way and stopped them, you'd just get TiMs from the other side instead.

But it would be nice to have a FEMALE trans person for a change. And just more women generally. Get away from the "just about trans" framing. It's about vulnerable women even more than "vulnerable trans".

It is ridiculous how male these discussions usually are. But it's not these 4 people's fault.

I agree with some of the points of the article. But no need to bully individuals (often with some quite unfair mischaracterisations). It's wrong, and it makes us look bad.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-03T18:16:57+00:00

Seriously? What changed your mind? Or were you just totally uninformed at the time?

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-03T18:02:56+00:00

It's almost comical how desperate TRAs are to invent bizarre new DSDs. They were talking about people with just a Y chromosome the other day...

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-03T18:00:44+00:00

The arguments used here work for any two categories.

If you can't separate categories because it's impossible to draw a precise line, then you can't say that day isn't night, that left isn't right, that water isn't ice, that space isn't the atmosphere, that red isn't blue.

It's all bollocks. Twilight existing doesn't mean day is night.

In humans there are exactly two sexes. There is no continuum between egg and sperm.

The fuzziness only occurs in the development of a very tiny proportion of humans with DSDs who produce neither egg nor sperm. (If they produced either, that would determine their sex).

But still, the existence of people with DSDs does not mean that male people can be female people.

The dividing line between male and female is FAR more sharply defined than any of my other examples above. The edge is SO sharp and well defined, it is effectively invisible. The "spectrum" is two solid colour bars with a sharp edge.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-10-03T16:01:20+00:00

I think that's the single most unpleasant, anti-trans article I've seen from the GC side in the 3 or so years I've been following this. Yuck.

This is "us" at our worst.

There are some reasonable points in there, but so many straw men, false dichotomies and just unnecessary personal attacks. It's almost a caricature of everything they say about TERFs. This is not a pro-women article, it really is just anti-trans.

But at least it helps throw into relief the comparison with the anti-women stuff from the other side - that's so regular and reflexive and totally accepted. But I always found the comparison difficult to even assess - I was wondering if I was just not seeing our side's sins. I have now.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-25T06:58:33+00:00

I know what you mean, but that's not the case in Ireland, apparently. Paraphrasing what someone I trust said in a comment about this case, in Irish law "rape" refers to penetration by any part of the body or object.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-21T14:35:39+00:00

Wasn't there some sort of mass exodus of genderologists from Tumblr a few years ago? (Due to some sort of content crackdown?) Maybe that's something to do with it - them scattering into other platforms like Twitter like Reddit.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-21T05:15:49+00:00

But presumably, as they share the website, they must share IT staff.

At what point is there going to be another backroom rebellion, this time against the transphobic Observer? A lot (maybe even most?) of the anti-Suzanne Moore mob were something to do with the website.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-19T11:18:48+00:00

the only males in the world that undergo pregnancy and give birth to their offspring.

The important question here is - how did we identify that this was the male?

What is the defining characteristic that makes this creature that "gets pregnant" and "gives birth" male?

Having checked this answer, you can then correlate with humans to check which type of human is male and confirm that in humans the male does not do this.

Edit: same applies to clownfish - if you can figure out that a clownfish has changed sex and what sex it is, then you can apply exactly the same tests to see which type of human is male and female, and again confirm that humans do not change sex. Unlike the clownfish.

If these transactivists were serious about their logic they'd be telling you that you can't possibly tell the sex of either the seahorse or the clownfish.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-16T11:35:02+00:00

Good effort, but I can't quite buy it.

identifying and eliminating anything that might provide even the slightest advantage

But those "things" are equipment issues, not physiological attributes. No-one is busy trying to exclude the people who are just too unfairly tall or whatever. Closest I can think of is Oscar Pitorius, but that was still equipment, albeit prosthetic.

I think I would basically say that Semenya clearly has the male advantage, and we have the category for that, so Semenya falls into that category.

It's far from clear that the "CAIS" advantage is the male advantage. It may be an advantage, sure, but if the sports population were made up of just CAIS and normal males, the first thing you'd do is separate the CAIS from the males for fairness. Given sufficient numbers, there's no way you'd force CAIS to compete against normal males. Whereas if the population were made up of 5-ARD and normal males, it's not clear whether there would be any point having separate classes. I don't think there's any reason an elite 5-ARD runner couldn't be up on the male podium. (Insert bad quip about being more streamlined here).

Lots of people assume that athletes like Semenya can't compete with males, but there seems to be no real logical basis to that aside from "she's a woman". But a CAIS athlete couldn't compete with a male any more than a standard female, what with not having undergone virilisation.

So the remaining question is, if there were no males, and the population was just normal females and CAIS athletes, would we create a category split just for CAIS? In a CAIS versus female field, is the CAIS advantage so huge that it overrides everything else? Surely not.

We really don't try to identify and eliminate every physiological advantage. We only do the really big ones. Sex in most sports, and weight in a few. And that's it. It really doesn't seem like CAIS gets anywhere near the level of a requiring a new category split.

I'd be interested to see more stats for comparison though - I've seen the thing about CAIS being dozens of times overrepresented (IIRC), but how does that compare to, say, certain heights, or weights?

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-11T06:24:26+00:00

I agree CAIS is borderline - I wouldn't like to draw that line. I was just noting where the IAAF have drawn it.

Thinking more deeply, I agree that it's likely that they have competitive advantages, but I doubt it reaches the point of being "unfair" enough to exclude them. It's not the fundamental male/female physique difference as in Semenya's case that led to the creation of the other split category in the first place. And I don't think we're seeing podiums full of CAIS athletes.

It feels to me more like a place where the whole "big feet/lungs/whatever" argument used to support including Semenya would actually apply. It's that scale of advantage. We don't have separate athletics categories for any advantage smaller than sex, as they're not so large that they're an absolute requirement to be competitive at all. I feel that a CAIS vs non-CAIS competition is still meaningful, as Ross Tucker might put it.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-10T05:31:48+00:00

It's sufficient to detect that an athlete is male or male-genetic intersex, and hence should be subject to the extra determination. Main problem is that they don't want to rule out everyone with an SRY gene. Certain disorders like CAIS have the SRY gene and produce the testosterone, but it has no or negligible effect due to other genetic problems. So it's deemed fair for CAIS athletes to run as women (regardless of testosterone level).

Certainly anyone without an SRY gene is definitely eligible as female, though.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-09T07:10:12+00:00

They have separate sets of rules for DSDs and trans. Although obviously there's a lot of overlap in analysis, for the DSDs where you've got XY genetics and androgen sensitivity. Does a 5-ARD XY male have any different performance to a normal XY male? The results of testosterone suppression are probably similar.

The current rules for both are basically "males can compete if they're legally 'female' in their country and their testosterone is 'low enough'", broadly. Ruling out XYs with DSDs altogether wouldn't have made sense while they were permitting XY without DSDs.

Actual females can compete without restriction - the "levels in female runners" is a lie.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-09T07:01:51+00:00

The media seem determined to lie/mislead about this. They keep saying Semenya is a "female with high testosterone". No, Semenya is a male with atypical genitals. It's just wilful at this point - they're trying to make out that the rules are bizarrely arbitrary.

(I agree that they are somewhat arbitrary - why certain sports, and why let any 5-ARD person in? Is lowered testosterone really enough to offset the advantage for 5-ARD any more than it is for any non-DSD trans-identifying male? To some extent the testosterone rule is making a rod for their own backs - it allows it to be reported as "restriction of testosterone levels", rather than simply "restricting certain XY DSDs".)

Semenya could possibly successfully father a child (has he already?) - Erik Schwinegger did, after surgery.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-09T06:57:03+00:00

Isn't the headline totally wrong? The IAAF rules make clear they have NO restriction on testosterone levels in female runners. There is no need. There is no female DSD or disorder that would produce excess testosterone levels that would give a significant advantage.

What they have is a rule that will permit genetically male athletes with certain DSDs to compete in women's sport if they have low enough testosterone. (PAIS, 5-ARD etc).

So this is a limited inclusion rule to permit some intersex males who may be legally "female" to compete as women. Not any sort of restriction on females.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-09-01T14:24:53+00:00

Yes, that is Jo Swinson, former leader of the Liberal Democrats. She actually lost her seat by a thin margin in that election, hence former leader.

The margin of loss was small enough that that interview on its own must have pushed her over the edge to defeat.

(Parties normally manage to arrange for their leaders to be in safe seats, but the Lib Dems have so few MPs, they don't have much choice).

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-08-29T04:50:11+00:00

You've just crystallised a thought for me.

"JL" on Graham Linehan's site recently referred to them as the "Munchausen Mums of Mermaids", which is a great turn of phrase. There is a school of thought that says that the surge in infant transing is the newly trendy form of Munchausen-by-proxy. (Quite distinct from the female ROGD surge, which is substituting for previous teenage female acts like anorexia or cutting).

And Munchausen-by-proxy is very much a female thing. I just went to check if that's true, not a stereotype, and Wikipedia cites a study saying it's 93% female. (I'd be curious to see more stats - have recorded Munchausen-by-proxy cases gone down recently? What about if you add back in childhood trans children? I'd be willing to bet there's a substitution effect).

And I think that wraps up the whole package. Women know that the world (and maybe their partner?) doesn't give a shit about them. But they know they might give a shit about their children. Hence some women go off the rails and use their children. They don't use self-harm - they harm their children.

And Mermaids is a whole organisation founded by these women - no experts, just a group of women who are supporting and justifying themselves in their acts of harm.

And, obviously, it now follows that the organisation itself is engaging in blatant child manipulation. Why wouldn't it? They don't see what they're doing individually, so why would they see it in their group's public statements?

But we see it.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-08-10T10:39:59+00:00

For a GC or radfem influencer list:

Jane Clare Jones, Kathleen Stock, Louise M Perry, Kellie-Jay Keen (Posie Parker), Venice Allan, Heather Heying, Emma Hilton, Colin Wright, Helen Joyce, Debbie Hayton (TiM), Miranda Yardley (TiM), Rose of Dawn (TiM), Abigail Shrier, Nicola Williams, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Victoria Smith, Claire Graham, Benji ("GNC Centric", detrans TiF), Arty Morty, Helena Kerschner ("lacroicsz", detrans TiF), Benjamin Boyce, Téa Smith

Also, check this couple-of-years-old video roll-call for more names and orgs: Women are Fighting Back

I posted that one a couple of weeks ago with links to many other videos from the names mentioned above.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-08-10T10:22:56+00:00

"TERF" is usually women - men often get just "transphobic". So including that...

Martina Navratilova, Hibo Wardere, Richard Morgan, Rachel Rooney, John Boyne, Robert Webb, Jonathan Ross, Bea Campbell, Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, Emma Nicolson (Baroness)

That's for the "accused of" list - amount of actual gender criticalness varies immensely.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-08-08T10:49:16+00:00

I'm not involved, but I thought I recalled hearing that it was one of those communities which had paradoxically been hit hard by the Woke/TRA nonsense, much like some atheist groups apparently unable to spot a new religion when it's slapping them in the face.

But I've just checked, and one of the key analyses of Gender Ideology by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper was indeed presented at a Skeptics meeting. So there is maybe some connection:

Critically Examining the doctrine of gender identity

Don't really buy that it's a very big part of the attribution to the UK movement overall though. (I'm personally inclined to see a lot of it as part of a UK-vs-US culture war thing - we're naturally inclined to be quite against ideas from the US, good or bad, so when one this spectacularly bad comes along, we love getting stuck in)

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-31T12:05:08+00:00

Glad to be of service!

I did think to myself after compiling it, "Jesus, that's probably 24 hours' worth". Wondered if it might be a bit too much homework :)

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-31T11:34:14+00:00

Yet something like 98% of all people with a cervix think of themselves as women.

And the vast majority of the remaining 2% know that they're really women, so would only be "excluding" themselves if they chose to ignore health advice for women.

Statistically, it is utterly crucial to concentrate the messaging clearly towards women. Even cluttering it with a load of "and transmen and non-binaries and otherkin" etc could statistically do more harm than good overall, by distracting from the core, inclusive "all women" point.

People choosing to go down the path of biology denial and their organisations have to take responsibility of targetting specific information tailored to them and their delusions - it's not a good outcome to cause overall harm by making them the focus of general messaging.

How hard would it be to repeatedly make clear (as was historically the case) to them - "the medication you are taking does not actually change your sex - unless specifically advised otherwise all general medical advice for women continues to apply to you".

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-28T15:48:15+00:00

The inability to post video links in r/GC drove me nuts.

So I'm going to go nuts now.

General inspirational intro with names you should look up if you don't know them:

Women are Fighting Back

Kellie-Jay Keen (Posie Parker):

Magdalen Berns:

Rebecca Reilly Cooper:

Critically Examining the doctrine of gender identity

Jane Clare Jones:

Helen Joyce:

Gender, Journalism, & Justice

GNC Centric:

Coercion & Abuse in the Gender ID Community
The Mess We're In series with Graham Linehan and Arty Morty

Meghan Murphy:

Debate: Does trans activism negatively impact women's rights?

Maya Forstater:

Women's Liberation 2020 speech

Abigail Shrier:

Joe Rogan Experience #1509

Hands Across The Aisle (WoLF / Heritage Foundation):

The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-22T11:23:24+00:00

I have always noticed from a young age that Americans appear obsessed with race...

Indeed. But there is a reason for that - they have this large black population that are largely descended from a transplanted population, and that population's history and culture is uniquely American. They were, as a policy, decoupled from the culture of the countries they were brought from. That makes American's black population a form of diaspora, with their own unique culture.

American's "race" issue is really about the collision between the three groups that combined to form America - the indigenous population, the settlers, and the settlers' slaves.

They view that 3-way collision in terms of "race", approximate that by skin colour, and then nonsensically reassign the American historical roles to people with the same skin colours in another country. Which is just dumb.

The ending of that response to that Harpers open letter was a gob-smacking example of this American genre:

The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse, especially when compared to how writers from marginalized groups have been treated for generations. In fact, they have never faced serious consequences — only momentary discomfort.

PS, recommended if you haven't seen it - Bret Weinstein's recent round table with a bunch of black writers and academics. More sense than you'll hear from any of the Woke crowd.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-22T05:37:50+00:00

We get this a lot in London form people who think London is the whole world.

The same problem gets even more ridiculous when it goes international. In the knitting purity spiral you had Americans getting upset that events and organisations in Scotland or Finland were so much whiter than they thought the "correct" ratio was. Because everything has to reflect American racial sensibilities apparently.

The trouble is that London attracts people into the arts from all over the country, not just the local community.

I saw a bizarre sight on YouTube recently - footage from a "Black Lives Matter" march in London which was so incredibly white, it must have been whiter than the average London Tube commuter crowd. It looked like a load of white middle-class college students had travelled in with their pink-white-and-blue flags. Something for anthropologists/sociologists to analyse...

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-21T14:18:06+00:00

Well, those aren't contradictory. The point of ending blind auditions is to re-introduce bias to force the selection process to treat people differently to artificially skew the selection outcomes.

You make the selection process unfair to balance out an (alleged) unfairness somewhere else. Injustice towards individuals in the name of "justice" for groups.

Because clearly an orchestra has to "reflect" a community rather than perform to a community (?)

How helping a mediocre player from a favoured group get an undeserved place because a potentially brilliant one from the same group chose to get a better paying job and never applied isn't clear.

(How long before we start seeing complaints of police sexism and insistence than men and women need to be equally represented in prison?)

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-21T05:18:01+00:00

not "on our side"

honest person to the core

Does not compute. From my point of view, that's enough to be "on my side", at least at this point in history. I'll take rationality.

Even if someone disagrees about the woman/trans thing, if it's an honest disagreement, that's a starting point and we can try to figure out why we disagree and have a discussion.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-21T05:11:04+00:00

The authorities can come down quite hard on this sort of activity when they want to. There are an awful lot of quite heavy-handed laws about all sorts of "cyber-crime".

Not holding my breath though.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-17T08:50:52+00:00

But so far the costs of not going along with the most extreme online trans activism have been very high and the costs of not going along with gender critical views have been zero. Rather, nice rewards come from the latter.

Yes, if the costs/rewards you're thinking are what sort of dinner parties and social events you get invited to as part of the establishment.

Unfortunately journalists need the general populace to buy the newspapers to pay their wages, and politicians need the general populace to vote for them.

This lot are so entrenched in their bubble that they can't grasp that what they're doing is costing them their actual livelihoods.

Jo Swinson, the former leader of Liberal Democrats, lost her seat at the last election because she couldn't manage to say what a woman was. (Her loss was by a small margin, so there's no way that shitshow of an interview didn't push her over the edge).

They are paying the price, but they're in denial about it.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-16T13:51:04+00:00

Not suing, but applications for judicial review:

First case:
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/protect-children/
https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3881347-Keira-Bell-from-Tavi-case-here-AMA

Keira's new case:
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/challenge-innate-gender/

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-14T05:25:50+00:00

Semenya built her career in good faith, believing herself to be a biological woman (she has female genitalia and a female body).

Good faith is highly debatable. There's very little supporting evidence, and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Semenya certainly doesn't have a "female body", and that would have been obvious since puberty. And hence the restriction. Semenya's DSD interferes with genital development, not the rest of the body.

Semenya may have been believed to be female at a very young age, but it seems likely that they were enrolled onto an athletics program because the DSD condition had become known - it appears that African countries were deliberately trying to find XY DSD individuals who had been declared female at birth to take advantage of the recently relaxed sex testing rules in athletics. This tactic was more easily exploitable by poorer countries where DSDs were less likely to be detected at birth, so there was a greater chance of male DSDs being wrongly registered as female, and hence eligable for women's sport.

And that's how you ended up with 3 DSD males on the women's 800m podium at Rio. And the IAAF realised they had a problem.

More than once competition staff (sometimes not even medical staff) demanded to see her genitals before she could compete.

I might be wrong, but I thought dignity was out of the window for most athletes at top level, when it comes to urine tests for doping, for example.

But that response is understandable. Semenya does not have a female body. It is very typically male, apart from (apparently) genitals. This really isn't a case of a "butch" female - Semenya is viralised to typical male physique by the presence of internal testes. Being sceptical of Semenya's claims to be female makes just as much sense as being sceptical of Charlotte Clymer's or Danielle Muscato's. The genitals may be naturally undeveloped, rather than surgically removed, but Semenya is basically as much of a TiM as them. (Would you accept that Danielle Muscato was a woman rather than a TiM if he'd been recorded as female at birth and raised "as a girl" for some years before puberty? What would you do if Clymer insisted on taking part in your sports event?)

Previously sex tests were routine, and a simple mouth swab, which would work for 99%+ of people. They would have picked up Semenya as having male chromosomes (possibly unlike a genital check), and that could have been investigated more humanely. But I understand they had been ruled out, which possibly led to having to go straight to less dignified methods.

Her 5’10” 154lb frame is within reason for a woman. By contrast some of these hulking 6ft, 200lb biological men have an obvious advantage and in contact sports could seriously injure women.

It may be "within reason" for a woman, but 5’10” 154lb is average male. And a fit male of any weight easily outperforms a fit female of the same weight. It is not effective to only rule out males on weight grounds and assume that equal weights makes it fair. (Go look at any sort of sports like weightlifting that have weight classifications to see how vast the same-weight male/female difference is).

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-11T07:24:50+00:00

Yep, that was my point. That's the fundamental truth.

To steelman the argument though, then yes, maybe there might well be some statistical correlation within each sex between strength and propensity to commit violence. But I'd be willing to wager quite a lot that if you could isolate top end females and bottom end males to find individuals with the "same" strength, the males would be more violent.

In terms of evolutionary or societal success, the combo "violent + weak" is never going to be a winner, so you would only expect violent tendencies to arise as nature and/or nuture in a group that on average has the strength to back it up.

A female individual who is a strength outlier /might/ choose to be more violent, consciously knowing that they as an individual are capable of it, but that seems less likely a factor than just being part of the normally-stronger group and hence being predisposed by nature or nuture.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-10T09:05:29+00:00

Not really a fair comparison, but it took r/GenderCritical over two years to reach 2000 subscribers. (Created September 2013, hit 2000 in December 2015).

Reference: https://subredditstats.com/r/GenderCritical

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-10T08:59:54+00:00

Some say that if we were as strong as men, we would be just as violent as them.

If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-02T14:50:01+00:00

If I was in the US I would be looking at #Unity2020. The aim is primarily to disrupt the two party system, and oppose the authoritarian right and Woke/authoritarian left. Concept has been put forward by Bret Weinstein, who is pretty firmly gender critical. The ticket may not be GC, but should at least not be TRA captured.

Aim is to put up a left/right joint ticket, and gather the votes of Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged and Moderates as a block (67%), who outnumber Progressive Activists, Traditional Conservatives and Devoted Conservatives (32%).

Flip the voting axis from left/right to liberal/authoritarian, and defeat the authoritarians. Draw voters from both Republicans and Democrats equally to avoid an unbalanced spoiler, and withdraw if victory doesn't appear within reach.

Go find Bret Weinstein's Twitter and you find links to documents and interviews.

(As an aside, in the UK the SDP (Social Democratic Party) has just put out a policy document firmly balancing womens' rights with trans - another party looking for anti-TRA votes).

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-07-01T19:55:49+00:00

It's not "gendered language", it's "sexed language".

This is a context - indeed THE context - where sex is what matters. Therefore it makes sense to use sex-based terminology. There is no need for "gender" roles to be attached to that sex-based use. You are not projecting any societal preconceptions about what a "woman" or "mother" is - you are using the terms strictly in the biological sense.

Whatever hang-ups a female enby or TiF has about being called a mother need to be put at the door before they start attempting sexual reproduction. If they can't do that, they're probably not ready.

Freddie McConnell(?) recently lost her appeal to try to be named the "father" of her child. The court made the very clear judgement that it was wrong to assume that "mother" was a gendered term - it was the specific role in reproduction, and there was no need to assume the gender of a mother, and it was incorrect to assume that only "women" could be mothers.

That was an interesting piece of line drawing - sure, we let you identify as a "woman", and that might be a "gender identity", but that's no reason to couple actual sexual function to gender identity. By TRAs own logic, transmen can be mothers, have vaginas, uteruses, breasts... Those are not "gendered". Seems like a reasonable compromise to me, if these people could compromise. Sure, maybe you can be "he", but you're still the mother.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-06-30T05:13:12+00:00

Exactly the same things as reddit - centralised platform not under female control that could nuke you at any instant.

If you're not paying for the service, you have no rights. Mods of r/GC had no actual power at all.

Mods of this space have no power.

NecessaryScene1 · 2020-06-29T19:57:12+00:00

They had to kill it because it was taking off after JKR: https://subredditstats.com/r/GenderCritical

NecessaryScene1