Julie Burchill's attack on transsexuals...

[frogwoman]

This is Julie Burchill visiting a private school in Brighton in 2009, as explained by a mainstream pro-Israeli Jew.

http://melpoluck.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/tangled-up-in-jews-but-why/

ive been to that conference, its not a private school. its like a week long religous/cultural thing. http://www.limmud.org

that sounds pretty distasteful to be honest.

 

[butchersapron]

The event might be but Rodean is a private school...

 

[frogwoman]

i cant see it mentioned anywhere there iirc the conference is at nottingham uni, that's where it was when i went.

 

[butchersapron]

i cant see it mentioned anywhere there iirc the conference is at nottingham uni, that's where it was when i went.

They have different ones at different places - the 2009 one was at Rodean.

 

[frogwoman]

ah yeh, fair enough!

 

[baldrick]

Did anyone catch Toby Young's vile tweet about 'giving Suzanne Moore one' so she walks bow-legged for a week?

Deleted now of course, but he's a disgusting specimen of humanity.

 

[Bun]

It was that other slime ball, Delingpole. A head made for butting.

 

[William of Walworth]

Given that in the past Burchill has described herself as Thatcherite and a Stalinist simulaneously, accomodating ultra-fanaticism towards Israel into that spectrum isn't too great a stretch at all.

For her

 

[brogdale]

It was that other slime ball, Delingpole. A head made for butting.

Quite so.

Though I must say that I enjoyed his QT performance...in a kind of 'car crash' manner.

Although at times he looked so odd and cortorted that i wondered if there's something wrong with him...apart from the obvious.

 

[teuchter]

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-l...honest-intentions-was-Guy-Fawkes/318151134603

Marvellous.

 

[elbows]

And posting it, especially in this thread, helps in what way exactly?

 

[ViolentPanda]

And posting it, especially in this thread, helps in what way exactly?

it doesn't. It doesn't even help teuchter. It just makes people think "that teuchter's a bit of a fixated cunt, isn't he?".

 

[elbows]

Well I cant say I was especially delighted with what your posts that he previously tried to point people towards were saying. But I was primarily interested in hate filled articles that are actually read by lots of people, as opposed to trying to unwind whatever the history and baggage is between you two and make judgements about what is acceptable humour in a situation I cant be arsed to understand.

 

[teuchter]

Well, facebook is actually read by lots of people.

Comments on facebook are often interesting to compare with comments on urban because of the different cross sections of people they represent.

Seems to be a bit of ambiguity about whether or not "people on urban" really see the kind of casual transphobia exhibited by that picture (and by certain people here) as a serious issue.

There are now quite a lot of comments under that picture on facebook.

 

[elbows]

Well, facebook is actually read by lots of people.

My comments about being read by a lot of people were in relation to the old post(s) on another thread by ViolentPanda that you tried to draw attention to here, and how I couldnt be arsed to try to figure out the context of that spat, and I was suggesting that it hardly offended the trans community or threatened them in the way the disgusting Burchill piece did. That doesnt mean I find casual transphobia to be acceptable in any way, and I was quite happy to run the risk of coming across as a tedious fart by picking on a poster earlier in this thread who thought they were knowledgeable on trans matters but in fact appeared to be at best woefully misinformed about the acceptable use of language and what gender might actually be.

Seems to be a bit of ambiguity about whether or not "people on urban" really see the kind of casual transphobia exhibited by that picture (and by certain people here) as a serious issue.

Nobody should kid themselves that u75 is sorted on this front. It blatantly isnt because there are still posters who get away with everything from transphobia to even more basic stuff, bonkers comments about 'the gays'. We may assume that they are left to their dribbling because they are either known bigots, socially conservative throwbacks or the village idiot who talks complete shit when (frequently) drunk, or arent worthy of the attention, but that doesnt exactly make it right.

What I find more disturbing is that a well respected poster who has plenty of knowledge and insight into the subject, appeared to throw their hands up in despair on more than one occasion and declare that they were giving up discussing the subject seriously here quite some time ago, long before this thread. Presumably this was because they were beyond bored, offended or enraged by the range of ignorant responses they routinely received as people stumbled around trans and gender subjects as if the last 40 years never happened. And if I recall correctly, on the occasions they ran into this stuff, they didnt exactly get a lot of obvious backup from the u75 masses, no matter how sound various peoples attitudes towards this stuff may be. They were allowed to give up without an outcry of support, without a mass recognition of our collective failures to address the problems, the ignorance, etc. The very fact that I've been so vocal on this thread is another worrying sign, because although I care about these issues quite a bit, its not an area I have an especially deep understanding of myself. So when its left to me to drone on about it, I assume things aint right.

 

[toggle]

urban isn't sorted on a lot of fronts. a banning of someone for baiting on a disability thread was widely opposed. there's a fair few posters who deliberately post up sexist funnies when women try to discuss their expereinces of living with sexism. and the recent threads on gay marriage really brought out some deeply unpleasent homophobia.

 

[elbows]

And even if we somehow reached a point where we were sorted most of the time, the big challenge will always be when it is tempting to apply these issues cruelly against people deemed worthy of our hate. Thatcher and Cameron are hated for obvious reasons, and this will lead to a drop of standards and revelations about how far attitudes about certain things havent really come. A classic u75 example that springs to mind would be the thread about David Shayler when he developed a female alter ego. We wouldnt expect that situation to give rise to sensible discussion about gender and trans issues, because of the baggage he brought with him, ie the reasons people had for already disliking him, and indeed it did not.

Likewise u75 can feature people preaching sophisticated positions regarding issues such as mental health, drug addiction and autism, yet that offers few barriers against venom and hate on the occasions that someone struggling with one or more of these issues ends up talking shit here. It seems inevitable that such situations will quickly give rise to u75's equivalent of George Galloway on Big Brother saying 'poor me, poor me, poor me another drink' to Michael Barrymore, with the excuse that Barrymore has baggage and was behaving like a control freak at the time with some sinister menacing undertones oozing out of the tv set.

And it only takes a woman in the public eye to have a dodgy political opinion about something to unleash a stream of sexist, violent language or crude comments about how she looks. Or a closeted Tory suffering innuendo in the press to open the gates and let flow the nudge-nudge wink wink playground smears against teh gays. I dont see this changing, and the most I expect I'll be able to do about it is to simply acknowledge it once in a while.

 

[elbows]

Apologies to toggle that Ive been tweaking my posts immediately after posting them, possibly causing them to like something thats since undergone the addition of a few sentences.

 

[toggle]

you're ok there.

 

[ymu]

Considering how many pages there are to some of the whimsical game threads in the general forum, I am not sure why someone decided to come into a thread of only thirteen pages and complain that it was about the thing it is clearly labeled as being about. Unless gunneradt meant "wonderful" quite sincerely, and I doubt (s)he did. Also, Sirena should stop talking about "what women do" as opposed to "what men do". "Women" and "men" are not boxes of identical items for sale, but are a great complicated network of billions of different things that are only very loosely connected by fine threads we call gender. There is no one way that men act as opposed to the one way women act. To say that there is is to do the very thing these radical feminists accuse trans people of doing - engaging in gender-related stereotypes.

I don't agree with the tone or content of Sirena's posts, but I think there is a serious point in there.

I do not agree with those 'feminists' who want to exclude trans-women from the domain of all that is female, but social conditioning has a much bigger effect on behaviour than biology. All men have to put some effort and empathy into understanding what it is like to be a woman, and many of them fail to do so in spectacularly offensive ways. There is absolutely no reason to think that trans-women will automatically get it when cis-men don't.

That is not to dismiss their own struggle or insist that it is separate from other struggles around sex and sexism, it is simply to point out that people who have been brought up as male (whether or not that is a personal tragedy) have a different perspective on the world, different ways of interacting with it and different expectations of how others will treat them and how they can treat others.

Working-class feminists have exactly the same problem with (some) middle-class feminists asserting their own agendas with the confidence and aggressiveness that comes with their life experience. But middle-class voices are louder, so they don't get excluded. More's the pity.

 

[co-op]

What I find more disturbing is that a well respected poster who has plenty of knowledge and insight into the subject, appeared to throw their hands up in despair on more than one occasion and declare that they were giving up discussing the subject seriously here quite some time ago, long before this thread. Presumably this was because they were beyond bored, offended or enraged by the range of ignorant responses they routinely received as people stumbled around trans and gender subjects as if the last 40 years never happened. .

I'd like to make a small plea for understanding people who unwittingly say things which are offensive. When you talk about the "last 40 years" I think you might not realise how little some of these topics have crossed over into the mainstream. I was active in leftish squatting circles in London in the 1980s and what is now called identity politics were really really flavour of the day - for every political discussion involving class there were 10 or more on gender, sexuality and race (or at least that's how it seems to me now when I recall it). And this was partly because a lot of those issues were really pressing ones - many squats had women in them that were fleeing domestic violence and had no where to go, I was in Brixton and racist policing was an everyday problem, homphobia was again an everyday problem - the idea of safe spaces seemed extra important (I think) because the wider society was often (probably usually) aggressively hostile.

Anyway that's by way of a preamble to say I've had quite a lot of exposure to the general topic and I've taken part in debates which seemed to talk it from one end to the other and back again. But before the Suzanne Moore article I had never heard of "cis-gendered" and only heard of "intersectionality" on the manarchists thread on here in the past 12 months. And I couldn't be arsed to look up "intersectionality" before the recent transgendered rumpus when it seemed like it was a word that was going to be around for a while. I'm still not sure if I really know what it means because frankly it's unlikely to come up in my everyday working life. It's like the melt down of the SWP - it just doesn't matter.

My point is that it's very easy to say the wrong thing if you haven't been part of the debate and getting massively self-righteously angry with people for doing so is just vanity (NB not saying you are doing this but my god I have seen plenty of it on this kind of topic on the internet - U75 included - in the past month or two). The fact that someone has been inducted into a debate early and can stamp around scolding anyone else who uses the "wrong" words is more likely to be a sign that the scolder is a member of (or very close to) a privileged in-group who gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable language in the future.

I guess this has all been done to death on here but when you talk of "ignorant responses" I find that my response is to think - well that includes me half the time, and if it includes me then that's going to be quite a lot of the population.

 

[elbows]

I'm sure it also includes me! Although I find it easy to start sneering at and condemning ignorance, I dont think its a shootable offence or a completely solvable problem. Its when ignorance is used to justify the terrible treatment of someone or a group, that we should be looking to stand against the ignorami with urgency.

Personally I am a perpetual outsider with few opportunities to put anything I've learnt into practical use, apart from woffling on here about whatever subjects take my fancy. The bottom line for me, despite my often harsh criticisms, is that I'd rather have people speak their minds and run the risk of putting the foot in it, than have silence.

And the timing of this thread exposed something of a dilemma when it comes to identity politics, because immediately prior to the Suzanne Moore thing exploding on twitter people had been busy taking the piss out of identity politics and its failings.

 

[ymu]

There's nothing wrong with being ignorant of other people's experiences and sensitivities. There is something very wrong with being told that you're ignorant and refusing to do something about it. Some people jump on others too quickly, but that's partly because there are plenty who are wilfully ignorant and do it deliberately.

The excesses of identity politics are partly at fault here. Parts of the left are reclaiming the ground for class-based politics, quite rightly, but the subtleties of the valid critiques of identity politics are often lost in translation. The take home message for some seems to be "-isms don't matter at all" rather than "-isms divide the class and these middle-class wankers are co-opting these struggles to pretend that class doesn't matter at all". Merely mentioning an -ism can get you accused of identity politics in some circles, and it's definitely used by some 'would rather not be reconstructed' types to close down debate that they find uncomfortable.

 

[cesare]

^ absolutely

 

[toggle]

Speaking from my own expereinces dealing with my own issues, I don't think it's necessarily ignorance that is th issue. ignorance can be excusable when it is based on lack of exposure to the ideas. it is when someone is willfully ignorant. demands education, nitpicks the resources offered to them rather than attempting to understand them and then goes on to defend either their position, or their right to be ignorant, or starts posting up bullshit to stifle debate.

ti's like mrsfran 's thread. on her experiences of having deaf parents and growing up with deaf culture. Lot of people there who were coming from a position of not having a clue. but no one telling fran her expereinces were wrong. or trying to stop her discussing them so the not knowing was not a problem so much as an opourtunity to learn. that's a huge difference in approach.

 

[co-op]

Speaking from my own expereinces dealing with my own issues, I don't think it's necessarily ignorance that is th issue. ignorance can be excusable when it is based on lack of exposure to the ideas. it is when someone is willfully ignorant. demands education, nitpicks the resources offered to them rather than attempting to understand them and then goes on to defend either their position, or their right to be ignorant, or starts posting up bullshit to stifle debate.

This (the bolded bit) very much. I think there are two meanings of the word 'ignorant' - there's 'just not knowing' (a bit like that line they used to use on the easy rounds of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? - "it's only easy if you know the answer") but there's also "ignoring" - i.e. being presented with the info and choosing to pretend you haven't been.

And the "ignoring" meaning is likely to be the political one anyway because when people ignore something that's a choice and it'll be based on all sorts of other pressures from 'wanting to fit in' to 'believing what the priest says' or whatever. Not knowing something isn't a choice.

Let me give an example - articul8 - everyone's favourite whipping boy (I can't join in because I've used all his lines too often in the past, I was that political position) let slip on a thread about sex work that it clearly hadn't occurred to him that a female prostitute might be married and he got flamed out of sight (mostly because he's a Labour apologist-fantasist I'd guess). But it was kind of obvious that he just didn't know that this might be the case. Now this might be a borderline case because ?maybe it betrays a lack of imagination about other peoples' lives but I bet this is a very common assumption. That's just not knowing; now he does. As I said the flaming is probably to do with other things anyway but I thought a lot of the "of course prostitutes can be married" posting was just the vanity of being in the know - I bet some of them only learned that second hand off the internet a couple of weeks earlier.

NB I do not know about my use of the word "prostitute" here - seriously.

ti's like mrsfran 's thread. on her experiences of having deaf parents and growing up with deaf culture. Lot of people there who were coming from a position of not having a clue. but no one telling fran her expereinces were wrong. or trying to stop her discussing them so the not knowing was not a problem so much as an opourtunity to learn. that's a huge difference in approach.

God bless the internet for this kind of thing, you can get a look into someone elses life and experiences without all the media intermediaries that we have to put up with normally.

I mean the lesson maybe is to not sound off about what you don't know and then you won't get flamed, but for me a lot of that is about growing up and I've said before I'm glad I didn't have to deal with the internet when I was in my teens and twenties and much more of a gobshite than I am now.

 

[ymu]

And the "ignoring" meaning is likely to be the political one anyway because when people ignore something that's a choice and it'll be based on all sorts of other pressures from 'wanting to fit in' to 'believing what the priest says' or whatever. Not knowing something isn't a choice.

I swear half the time no one knows what butchersapron is talking about but they're too afraid to say so.

(Not a dig, butchers. It happens because you're usually right, dammit. )

 

[Frances Lengel]

He watches some decent films as well - I'd never have heard of Wake In Fright if it wasn't for butchers.

 

[toggle]

I mean the lesson maybe is to not sound off about what you don't know and then you won't get flamed, but for me a lot of that is about growing up and I've said before I'm glad I didn't have to deal with the internet when I was in my teens and twenties and much more of a gobshite than I am now.

nods. I don't comment on a lot of the history of politics threads, cause i'm painfully aware of my lack of understanding of anyhting other than the mainstream of the late 19th century. and i'm only just coming to terms with that. i do understand some of the sisues involved in gender, because a very lovelly transman spent some time pointing me in the direction of where i might educate myself, and explaining his expereinces because being young, black, living the wrong life and being the far less common transition gave him a very interesting perspective on some of these issues. i owe him for his patience.

 

[co-op]

I swear half the time no one knows what butchersapron is talking about but they're too afraid to say so.

(Not a dig, butchers. It happens because you're usually right, dammit. )

Oi! I wasn't calling out ba - everyone steamed into a8 on the one I mentioned!

Pax ba. Pax.