SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Well you didn't add much in the way of context tbf.
Disruption at Book Fairs
- Thread starter PeterTCA
- Start date
Well you didn't add much in the way of context tbf.
which explains sooo much
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Do you seriously think that any "radical feminist" around today considers enforcement of a rigid gender binary to be part of their thinking? If you do, you really really haven't understood what you're talking about. If the multiple radical feminisms out there have one linking thread it'll be the abolition of gender fullstop let alone "rigid gender binaries".
One of the basic grounds for rad fems contesting trans ideology is because it's de facto (or quite openly) pushing a deeply reactionary gender binary; this is were many would say the ideological split started.
Of course the water's now got pretty muddy since everyone's coming out with different theories "queer" and otherwise left, right and centre - and some of those do seem to me to be anti-gender. But you only have to look back at some of the reactionary "male brain/female brain" garbage Aunty Stella used to come out with on these pages a few years back to see that "rigid gender binaries" has - for many trans activists - been utterly intrinsic to their way of looking at the world. Of course rad fems rejected this - rightly so.
co-op exactly.
It’s not just fucking dunce comments like likesfish that make me despair. It’s shit like SpookyFrank “authoritatively” explaining about terfs, other feminists, and the gender binary, whilst talking out of his fucking arse.
It’s women being patronisingly told ‘we’ve decided this isn’t up for debate at anarchist bookfairs, so that’s that’. Or the hounding of university professors. Or feminist meetings being shut down (by young men in balaclavas screaming ‘my pronouns are they, cunt’). And how quickly the men on the left are to dismiss women, en mass, to support men who feel like they’re women.
The misogyny of likesfish post is blatant and contemptible. The misogyny dressed up as open mindedness is far more dangerous. But I’ve got the measure of it.
It’s not just fucking dunce comments like likesfish that make me despair. It’s shit like SpookyFrank “authoritatively” explaining about terfs, other feminists, and the gender binary, whilst talking out of his fucking arse.
It’s women being patronisingly told ‘we’ve decided this isn’t up for debate at anarchist bookfairs, so that’s that’. Or the hounding of university professors. Or feminist meetings being shut down (by young men in balaclavas screaming ‘my pronouns are they, cunt’). And how quickly the men on the left are to dismiss women, en mass, to support men who feel like they’re women.
The misogyny of likesfish post is blatant and contemptible. The misogyny dressed up as open mindedness is far more dangerous. But I’ve got the measure of it.
Not one meeting has been shut down, not one. There's been a couple of bodged attempts to disrupt meetings and some protests, which given some of the rhetoric at some meetings is unsurprising. You can't have meetings where speakers attempt to claim an entre community of people are perverts and sex pests without expecting some blowback.
The other thread is full of lefty men criticising the trans side of the debate. And anarchist bookfairs have never been a free for all, non-anarchists and non-anarchist ideas have never been permitted formal space.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
It is weird the strength of opinion combined with the degree of ignorance on display; in recent weeks or months posters have utterly piled into me for;
a) talking about "self-ID" (to paraphrase - 'how ridiculous! No one's asking for that!' - as if the past 12 months haven't been completely dominated by just this topic),
b) 'because I support feminism that thinks that women are intrinsically better than men' (haven't heard that one since the 1980s)
c) 'radical feminists believe in a rigid gender binary' - which is just wtf?
In holding these beliefs they can just write women like Helen Steel and Ruth Serwotka out of the debate because they are embarrassed by their very existence.
In some ways it's kind of reassuring because most of these people are fighting against absurd ideologies that simply don't exist (I mean you can probably find some loony who holds these views if you dredge the internet hard enough but I haven't heard them expressed in the flesh either ever or in 35 years). So many 'trans allies' just have no idea what the ideological terrain is and no idea of what they're talking about and maybe once they start to grapple with reality we'll get some more interesting progress.
In another way of course it's just profoundly depressing because it's hard to believe that this degree of ignorance would be excusable anywhere else, to the extent that it's hard not to see underlying misogyny as being the root of it. It's like the Daily Mail fulminating about the "hard left' - and lumping anarchists, the SWP, the USSR and Momentum all into that category. It could be that they don't know any better but it's a hell of a lot more likely that they don't care because they just hate them all and conflating them together and deliberately misreporting their beliefs suits their wider political agenda.
For a certain sort of lefty bloke, the opportunity to put the boot into teh feminists is irresistible it seems.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
- Being a rapist for selling pronoun badges
- Being part of a Big Pharma conspiracy for voicing support for trans people
- Being a conspiracy theorist for highlighting that the "reasonable questions" strategy used by Helen and co was in fact deliberately designed to cause an argument and misrepresented their real views (lo and behold...)
It's almost as though there's people ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ARGUMENT who are intent on trying to win it by pitching the other side as comprising solely of ignorant bigoted wankers. And yes, it is profoundly depressing, especially when people have so little respect that they think by repeating the same crap over and over again they can win the argument through sheer pig-headedness.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
Lies. There's plenty of evidence showing that transgender is largely rooted in neurology. Plenty. I tried to talk about that but i kept getting "lady brains" shouted back at me by the TERFs so I gave up.
kabbes
First intersubjective, then internalised
Can you link to it?
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
honestly i have done so many times before and people have just disregarded it. If i do there will be pages and pages of abuse aimed at me so I'd rather not. Besides, it'd be a major thread derail. As I've been told before I'm not enough of an anarchist to have the right to post in one of these threads because I'm shit Green Party.
If there was a thread about trans science and it was given a neutral title I would post there - like i used to - and try to be honest, and I wouldn't troll, I wouldn't try to undermine it. I'd accept differences of opinion if it was genuinely about the science, about evidence and about reality and not just smears and lies and long debunked crazy theories being brought back in purely as a way to attck trans women.
I would - but if I started such a thread it would go to shit from page 1 and be shut down so it's not down to me. I'm just a passive observer here now only putting my oar in to defend myself when i feel i need to.
Here's an evidence review. Note Sea Star wassn't saying it had been proved, just that there is evidence supporting the position.
JHE
.
Was it you who posted a vid about this on another thread? I thought it was very interesting, but it was largely ignored. I suppose it just wasn't what other people wanted to talk about.
It seems to me highly plausible that some - but very few - people do have an innate propensity to see themselves as belonging to the other sex.
However, thinking that this is probably the case with Jan Morris (just to choose a very famous example) is one thing. It is a very different thing to think this is probably the case with most of the avalanche of youngsters - highly disproportionately many autistic and highly disproportionately many lesbians - who in the last few years have suddenly declared themselves trans.
Do you agree that the probable existence of some cases of innate gender dysphoria does NOT justify:
- ignoring women's concerns that some predatory men will exploit self-id to prey on women?
- providing confused adolescents with irreversible medical treatments, including surgical mutilation?
- deceiving children still young enough to believe in fairy stories that they can choose to be boys or girls, as if there were a magic wand?
- bullying people who refuse to go along with ideological fashion?
- pretending that it is somehow a blow against gender stereotypes (rather than in fact an extraordinary return to stereotyping) to encourage 'tomboy' girls to think they are not really girls or 'sissy' boys to think they are not really boys?
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
These are definitely interesting results, and prenatal sex hormone levels have been shown to affect brain organisation in various ways. However, a lot of what is spoken of in that review suffers the same problems as the studies that found differences in the hypothalamus between gay men and straight men. If you accept that trans is a real thing, that people aren't just pretending to feel deep down that their bodies don't match their gender identity, then that will of course show itself in the brains of those people if you look for it hard enough: it must do, otherwise they wouldn't feel it.
The study is rightly cautious, mostly, but this kind of thing rings alarm bells for me:
That's kind of equivalent to saying that enlarged sections of the motor, auditory and visual spatial areas of the cortex are the explanation for musical skill. You won't get that skill without thousands of hours of practice, and that is what is reflected in those enlarged areas.
kabbes
First intersubjective, then internalised
That is an interesting evidence review indeed. There's some very interesting studies referenced. Given the initial claim, I was expecting something a little more based around cause and effect rather than correlation, but it certainly shows considerable evidence that psychology and biology are linked. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that such a perspective is actually mainstream stuff -- it's mostly viewed as axiomatic that anything that happens psychologically -- even due to a social cause -- has a corresponding biological effect.
What I am struggling with in that review is anything that really supports is conclusion that there is a biological aetiology for transgenderism. I'm not sure how the authors come to that conclusion. As noted above, we already know that the social and psychological has impacts on the biological as well as the inverse. It should therefore not be a surprise that there will be a biological commonality between those who share particular social or psychological circumstances. But which came first? That's crucial if you're going to rule on aetiology. The grey matter post-mortems (for example) don't help in that regard.
I'm also surprised the conclusion of aetiology doesn't acknowledge the problems with this claim that are mentioned in the main review. In particular, if there is biological aetiology, how comes it is so common for those with the same biology not to share transgenderism? The majority of the female-assigned patients in the DSD study did not initiate a gender change. The majority of monozygotic twins did not share common transgenderism. It's an odd thing for the authors to do this. Whatever the biological component is (and there is no doubt that the review provides evidence that such a biological component is worth looking for), it is clearly heavily mediated by other environmental factors that mostly tend not to cause transgenderism to be expressed.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
And then there's JHE, who seems to think that "concerns that some predatory men will exploit self-id" have been ignored (they haven't) but has nothing to say, for example, on the recent relevation that the bathroom predators myth (which in legal terms was always nonsense in Britain) was popularised by a US anti-gay hate group. And who actively lies that adolescents are given "irreversible medical treatments, including surgical mutilation" (reversible hormones are available but rarely used pre-16, surgery is only allowed for 18s and over). I mean fucking hell, this stuff has been gone over again and again, you must know it, yet you're accusing other people of behaving in an unjustified manner?
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I haven't proffered an explanation, tbf. Would be good to see the actual study there to see what kinds of numbers we're talking about, including how many men with those gene variants don't go on to become transgender. This kind of finding isn't necessarily incompatible with the gender-critical position. In a society with less rigid gender expectations, those who feel that they have 'feminine' or 'masculine' attributes as a result in part at least of the actions of sex hormones in their early development may not end up feeling alienated from their own bodies as a result.
Maybe not. We can't know. But that's not the society we live in is it?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It's not, no. Good thing to highlight and aim for for the good of all, though, no? And more importantly a good point of common interest that can potentially be shared by all.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
How's it "lies"? I characterised your position as being based on a male brain/female brain split and here you are - as far as I can see - saying exactly that again. Why object to the 'ladybrains' jibe if that's what you believe?
You're entitled to your opinion and you can bring 'evidence' for it from all sorts of academics if you like, it isn't going to stop me thinking this is reactionary right wing junk, exactly analogous to clever Victorian academics "proving" that women suffered from hysteria and needed their wombs ripped out to make them talk sense.
Yes and that's exactly what many trans people are aimng for, probably proportionately more so than non trans people. But that doesn't change the fact trans people have to live now, not after the hoped for downfall of patriarchy.
Are you for real? Have you read the evidence? Only an unscientific zealot would insist there is absolutely no possibility of some kind of biological basis for gender identity being found given a growing body of carefully considered peer reviewed evidence that suggests in fact there may well be.
Treacle Toes
Time
Can you say why it rings alarm bells for you without making the musical skill comparison please? What does it mean to you?
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
I routinely post (the obvious) point that this argument is never going to get anywhere via the 'your wankers are worse than our wankers' line. Especially with the internet you can find some crank somewhere saying just about any shite - and I don't doubt that there is deliberate confusion being sown both by 4-chan/MRA style dickheads and darker, more politically-focussed content providers.
My point wasn't that your wankers are worse than my wankers, it was that I routinely encounter posts on this specific forum from specific posters slating "radical feminism" who have an utterly bizarre and erroneous version of what RF is - I mean they have beliefs about it that are just crazily wrong (even allowing for the fact there are multiple versions of it - just as there are with trans/queer ideology).
And yes I attribute some of that to misogyny - that's my personal take on it. But the actual, observable ignorance is real.
Of your 3 examples of false claims about trans thinking (none of which seem to be from this forum?);
1) "Being a rapist for selling pronoun badges" - sounds so like some weird and partially reported incident that I'm not going to try and work out what's going on there.
2) "Being part of a Big Pharma conspiracy for voicing support for trans people" - yes there's plenty of people who see trans as an excellent opportunity for big pharma to make a healthy profit whilst at the same time doing some good PR for itself as the facilitator of a hip new marginalised group - it makes a change from being the scumbags that they obviously are. You don't have to believe that the trans movement is a Big Pharma Conspiracy - it obviously isn't - to think that Big Pharma loves it. What's so weird about that view?
3) "Being a conspiracy theorist for highlighting that the "reasonable questions" strategy used by Helen and co was in fact deliberately designed to cause an argument and misrepresented their real views (lo and behold...)" - this just sounds like a standard political strategy argument to me - you have a pov so you reject the "reasonableness" of the questions and endorse the exclusion of those seeking to ask them, people with the opposite pov think oppositely - what's so odd about this?
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
But as radicals we seek to change society to accommodate our human reality, not change the individual to conform to the demands of an unjust class society, right?
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
Yes but you also deny outright that one side has a problem. The reality is that you are part of the problem, to the point of putting your fingers in your ears when presented with evidence contradicting you.
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Yep I am quite old-fashioned about this stuff. I don't think clever scientists can "prove" much about who we "really" are, nor can they come up with a clever "objective" proof about social categories like race or gender.
They are just going to come up with whatever best fits the matrix of funding, ideology and political demands that they are working under at any given time.
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