Interesting times Liberal handmaidens in every party fighting to destroy women’s rights, and Conservative men standing up for them. What a time to be alive. These have been great …and I haven’t been talking about them enough. It’s a real honour to have been invited to these webinars hosted by Baroness Nicholson. Here’s a link to
It definitely is strange times. I'm finding myself agreeing with people on the right, a concept that was alien to me all my life until early this year. I found this very confusing until it dawned on me that the left are standing idly by while everything to do with women is being chipped away at and erased. It is a painful realisation that they are complicit in this by enthusiastically cheerleading gender ideology nonsense.
Great interview with Andrew Doyle. Hope it brings new subscriptions.
But, here's my fear, and it is my genuine concern about the right (apart from the obvious that I don't want to support wealthy people crapping on the less fortunate) - why aren't all the right wing parties running on the ticket that a vote for the left is a vote for men in women's rape shelters, prisons, toilets, spas, change rooms, hospital wards, sports, and a vote for boys in girl's toilets in school.
Why aren't they shouting this from the heavens? Because you know, if they did, they'd win by a landslide. Instead, they barely mention it. I think they are planning to suckle at the enormously profitably teat of the trans juggernaut. I think they plan to implement trans policies by stealth too.
And PS, I will vote right if they make it clear they don't believe in gender idealogy. Because no rule, law, position or decision is more important than the human rights of half the human race. But I don't want to get in bed with people I disagree with for so many reasons, only to find they're going to shit on women's human rights anyway.
And the Right finally have the option to push their gay and lesbian children into conversion therapy by transing them, and now everyone will applaud them.
This one issue has turned me upside down politically. I agree with leftist ideals, but have lost all faith in leftist "leaders" with how carelessly they've cast women aside without any consultation or consideration. It's unforgivable.
I am very wary of the right-wing. I do agree with some of them regarding genderist ideology, but, but, but. In the U.S. it is clear they are exceedingly anti-woman wanting to return to some halcyon era that never existed where women were barefoot and pregnant and knew their place. Some of them even support ending women's right to vote. Look up Amy Coney Barrett's past and see what Republicans intend for women's future; it's truly horrifying. I know your Tory politicians are not so extreme -- at least I hope so! -- but the transfer of wealth from ordinary people to people already bloated with money and power does not bode well for women.
What the fuck is wrong with Owen Jones? I swear he used to simply be a journalist but now he's a remarkably horrible Twitter bitch on the wrongest side of history known to woman.
Reminds me to buy Helen Joyce's book immediately..
It's a wonderful, highly accessible read. One ends up flabbergasted at the shocking asininity of it all, but also grateful that writers like Helen Joyce are there to chronicle the madness and stand as witness.
Sorry to keep banging on, but I think it's important that we support Maya Forstater. As I said elsewhere:
Whilst writing, the courageous and wonderful Maya Forestater needs our help again as she continues to fight for the right of all humans in the UK to speak about reality and truth without being sacked.
If you're unsure, Maya is the woman Joanne Rowling wrote about in her famous, heroic, true and in no way hateful tweet which has earned her literal actual death and rape threats and years of abuse.
She could use some claps. For those who don't have a Medium account, it's super easy to sign up and you can read three pieces a month free. But you can also clap on all an author's pieces by just going to the clap button on their story list, even if you cannot read it.
Just hold the button down and give her 50 claps each time. It does matter. It matters that the public see we are supporting such women, publicly. Claps on Medium = popularity.
If you don't want to go to Medium, please do consider donating to her Gofundme. She has done women everywhere a huge service, and I feel we should support her too. https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stand-with-maya/
To those who are slightly perturbed to find themselves suddenly aligned with those on the right, I'd say this: It's not an issue of right and left. It's an issue of right and wrong. And the right just happen to *be* right on this one. Which means that it's perfectly okay - and indeed logical - to unite with them to further this particular cause.
A comment under the For Women Scotland tweet: "If you don't want the accusation that it's funded by right-wing Christian groups then aligning with Tories isn't the way to go."
"Liberals" rule by fear. Bully culture and insults.
There is a difference between believing in “trans rights” and believing in “gender-identity ideology.” That’s the subtly important distinction that fuels Helen Joyce’s “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality,” a book that offers an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight.
According to Joyce, a longtime staffer at The Economist, most people “understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity.” Joyce endorses this idea. Her bête noire is what she calls gender-identity ideology, which holds that everyone has a “gender identity,” an internal sense of being male or female (or both or neither), that is, in most tellings, innate and immutable, “something like a sexed soul.” When someone’s gender identity conflicts with their body, and/or with how society views their body, that person is transgender. (Disclosure: Joyce and I have corresponded sporadically over the years, and we got dinner when she was in New York City in 2020.)
A primary goal of those who adhere to gender-identity ideology is to enact “gender self-identification,” or the idea “that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology,” into norm and law. According to self-ID, as I’ll call it henceforth, once an individual reveals their gender identity, that trumps anyone else’s understanding of it. If you say you are a man or a woman, or both or neither, that is exactly what you are.
When followed faithfully, gender-identity ideology has important implications. Take the common trans-rights flash point of communal female locker rooms. According to this view, allowing everyone who identifies as a woman to use such facilities, regardless of their degree of physical transition or any other factors, does not entail any trade-offs worth discussing. The “core mantra” of the belief system, as Joyce puts it, is that “trans women are women.” And why would you not let a woman into a women’s locker room? That’s nonsensical.
For most of the modern history of what used to be called “transsexualism,” Joyce writes in some engaging early pages, transgender people weren’t, for the most part, understood to really be the sex they felt they were. Rare in numbers, they were given hormones or surgery by “maverick clinicians” (if they were lucky enough to find any), and treated “as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion” by the bureaucrats who would sometimes swap out an M for an F or vice versa on some government form.
Since the 1990s and especially in the last decade or so, though, there has been a genuine revolution in the liberal intelligentsia’s understanding of sex and gender, Joyce argues. This was the result of a complex and hard-to-summarize tangle of political and cultural forces, but the end result has been the entrenchment of gender-identity ideology and self-ID in many politically liberal institutions. These ideas are also being written into law in many places, including in the United States — following the lead of certain blue states, the Democrats’ Equality Act, which passed the House in February but which is unlikely to ever get through the filibuster-choked Senate, seeks to expand federal law’s definition of “sex” to also include gender identity. Other countries, like Portugal and Joyce’s native Ireland, have enacted self-ID by making it quite easy for citizens to change their legal sex without requiring signoff from medical or psychological authorities. (Elsewhere around the world, it should be noted, doing so remains highly onerous or outright impossible, so it isn’t as though campaigns to liberalize these laws popped out of thin air or are meritless.)
The zeal for self-ID extends to trusted medical and mental-health organizations, too: As I was working on this review, the American Medical Association called for sex to no longer be listed on publicly available birth certificates in the United States, since (the thinking goes) this unfairly impinges on people’s right to declare it for themselves.
“Trans” is unapologetically opposed to all of this. Now, despite her evident disdain for certain flavors of trans activism, Joyce is no conservative hard-liner, nor is she seeking some reactionary rollback of trans rights — she favorably cites the United Kingdom’s status quo on these issues, which balances legally enshrined protections for trans people with exceptions that allow for truly single-sex spaces in some settings, such as rape shelters. She also opposes legislation that strictly polices trans people’s access to bathrooms.
But she does believe that biological sex matters, that females have a right to truly sex-segregated spaces (with some compromise-oriented exceptions), and that gender-identity ideology threatens these ideals. Treating transgender people with dignity and respect and accommodation, Joyce says, does not require embracing a worldview she describes as fundamentally anti-scientific. Here she appeals directly to liberal ideals of religious tolerance: “I demand the same freedom to reject and oppose gender-identity ideology, and in return gladly accept that others have the right to preach it and live by it.”
Many of Joyce’s arguments boil down to the idea that trans people aren’t the only ones with skin in the game here. Where self-ID reigns, she writes, other vulnerable groups potentially suffer. Cisgender women, for instance, lose full access to truly sex-segregated realms that offer protection and other benefits, such as locker rooms, sports teams and prisons, because the primacy of gender identity within this ideology renders the concept of biological sex fundamentally irrelevant.
Gender-nonconforming children, meanwhile, are told from a young age that if their sex or its associated gender roles make them uncomfortable, that’s because, despite their body, they have a “boy brain” or a “girl brain” and that’s who they really are on the inside — and so their only real choice is to transition or to suffer forever. This despite evidence suggesting that gender dysphoria, especially in childhood, can have multiple causes, and often (though by no means always) dissipates over time without transition being necessary.
Joyce offers many troubling examples of what happens when a fundamentalist strain of gender-identity ideology takes hold. In Ireland, England and Canada, natal males convicted of violent sex crimes, but who identify as women, have been housed in women’s prisons. In England, a previously convicted pedophile, in jail on suspicion of having stabbed a neighbor, sexually assaulted multiple female inmates she was housed with. In British Columbia, more than a dozen female beauticians were forced to spend significant time and energy fending off a human rights complaint filed by a trans woman because they refused to wax her penis and testicles. In Spain and Australia, female politicians faced official investigations for expressing public opposition to self-ID.
Recently, England and Wales considered making it much easier for trans people to obtain a so-called gender-recognition certificate, bringing the process in line with the precepts of self-ID. The process included a period of “public consultation,” and during it, Joyce writes, feminist activists attempting to organize public events opposing self-ID were met with constant threats of venue cancellations, intimidation from protesters, at least one assault (of a 61-year-old woman) and other obstacles to simply expressing public opposition to a proposed policy change. (The Conservative government pulled the proposal last year, announcing, as a compromise, a reduction in the cost of obtaining a G.R.C.) In light of the evidence she marshals, it is difficult to disagree with Joyce’s assessment that “intimidation and harassment are carried out openly and proudly” against many of those who question the tenets of gender-identity ideology out loud.
So Joyce’s arguments are convincing. But here and there, I found myself wishing for a bit more nuance. For example, she leans heavily on the so-called desistance literature showing that childhood gender dysphoria often abates in time, but she doesn’t explain that some activists and academics have challenged its validity. These challenges happen to be overblown — my position is much closer to Joyce’s — but they warrant mention. It isn’t that some trans activists “forget that the majority of children will desist” if they don’t socially transition, as Joyce puts it — it’s that they deny that this is the case altogether. It’s important to render one’s opponents’ arguments as accurately as possible.
Similarly, in a section about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for treating gender dysphoria, Joyce writes: “New standards of care are being drawn up as I write. But I see no reason to expect any turn back from ideology and towards evidence.” My own reporting suggests things are more complicated than that, at least when it comes to the child and adolescent guidelines: The subcommittees responsible for writing those sections include a number of clinicians who openly share some of Joyce’s concerns and who think the climate surrounding youth transition is trending toward recklessness. Joyce’s narrative of radical activists having nearly routed sober-minded scientists is a bit too tidy, in this case.
“Trans” is also very thin on citations — this might seem like nit-picking, but in a book so focused on in-the-weeds political and scientific controversies of a morally supercharged nature, it isn’t. And it’s a small point, but Joyce repeatedly calls Martine Rothblatt, a famous transgender woman and entrepreneur, a “billionaire,” even though she doesn’t appear to be quite so wealthy.
In context, though, these are fairly minor shortcomings. “Trans” is a compelling, overdue argument for viewing self-ID more critically. Even those outraged by Joyce’s positions would benefit from understanding them, given that, as she notes, self-ID polls quite poorly when its actual tenets are fully described to Americans and to the British. The present situation, in which liberal institutions not only embrace these ideas unquestioningly but also, increasingly, punish dissidents, is unsustainable. Open conversation about such fraught issues is the only realistic path forward, and Joyce’s book offers a good, impassioned start.
Thank you for posting the NYT review, much appreciated.
Jesse Singal. Aaaagh. I haven't yet read Trans, only read about it and heard bits of Joyce in interviews. Yes a milestone that a major US paper printed this piece. And yes, to review Trans in the insanely polarised, bonkersly ill-informed US, and as a watershed for the gender-captured NYT, is no easy task.
But from past form and here, Singal has an overweening need to put himself forward as an ultimate authority. Too many blind spots, IMHO. An equivocating, mansplaining true believer. 'Cisgender women', Jesse? Really? F right off with that, you don't see the half of it.
I find that too much is about distinguising himself from Joyce, looking to protect his own a*se and what he seems to view as his territory, instead of just conveying contents of the book and what a groundbreaker people say it is.
So yes, good that the NYT admits the book's existence, unlike with Shrier's Irreversible Damage, and good that Singal conveys as much as he does, but it seems he diminishes what others report as the import and impact of Joyce's book.
Wonderful to see Baronesses Nicholson and Jenkin taking up the baton and doing their level best to get their parliamentary colleagues on board. Emma Nicholson is a campaigner of the highest calibre, with decades of experience in various causes. And she has a fist of steel in a velvet and ermine glove.
Child abuse springs to mind. Those parents have enabled significant self harm which is life long and may very well become life limiting not to mention all the adverse health implications.
An embarrassment of riches here, Graham! Thank you for your tireless efforts to collate these news snippets and bring them to our attention. You really are a star.
Sall Grover showed us her true colours way back in the r/gendercritical days. She was outright abusive when we told her men aka "transwomen" didn't belong in our spaces.
Read the giggle privacy policy. If you're not paying, you're the product. Not only is this app pink and called "giggle" (PUKE)🤢 (why not just spit in my face already?), this app uses facial recognition.
"We may disclose personal information to:
third party service providers for the purpose of enabling them to provide their services, including (without limitation) facial recognition providers, chat room providers, IT service providers, data storage, web-hosting and server providers, maintenance or problem-solving providers, marketing or advertising providers, professional advisors and payment systems operators;
our employees, contractors and/or related entities;
our existing or potential agents or business partners;
sponsors or promoters of any competition we run;
anyone to whom our business or assets (or any part of them) are, or may (in good faith) be, transferred;
courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights;
third parties, including agents or sub-contractors, who assist us in providing information, products, services or direct marketing to you. This may include parties located, or that store data, outside of Australia; and
third parties to collect and process data, such as Google Analytics. This may include parties that store data outside of Australia."
Sall Grover has been upfront that she originally thought of giggle as an app that might include TW, but after some research and consideration she decided against it. That's no secret. And it's not shameful to change one's mind.
Facial recognition technology is part of the consequences of that decision.
"If you're not paying, you're the product..." yes, that's the case for every free app in the world. Not giggle-specific.
What Sall has not been up front about is that she was so abusive to us -her app's target audience- that we had to ban her.
She asked us to try her start up app.
We told her we found the pinkness, the app name, and the use of the term "girls" in place of "women" to be offensive.
We told her the privacy policy + facial recognition were deal breakers.
We told her that TWAM and "sex work" is not work.
She received priceless free feedback that a serious developer or investor would have been grateful to get. But instead of implementing it and retooling the UX/app/site skin/branding and having an ethics expert and a security expert recommend best practices, she got defensive and abusive.
If nothing else, this was not the behaviour of a professional who should be given investment capital.
>>And it's not shameful to change one's mind.<<
I completely agree.
But I don't think she changed her mind. I think she realized that she had alienated her target user base and couldn't get her business off the ground.
The use of facial recognition raises very serious ethics and data privacy issues the same way letting men self-ID as women raises very serious safeguarding issues. It's not enough to say to users, "you knew what you were signing up for." She has duties, both ethical and legal, to her users. That's a whole 'nother essay.
Sall has created a honeypot. The data she is mining can be stolen/sold/requested by law enforcement and used to identify, target, and harass GC women. Hostile countries like Canada and Scotland can make requests to obtain user data and pursue women like Marion Millar, and the copious user data Sall collects will make it easier. Women should know this is not a platform where they are safe to speak freely.
She changed her mind because after telling us all off for being bigots, she received the standard TRA death and rape threats anyway. This apparently was triggered because letting the trans-identified-men in required manual review and approval when they failed her facial recognition check (which reminded them they don't pass).
Then she came back and told us we'd been right. But she still didn't implement any other feedback we'd provided...
And she had TIMs help build the app, so there were concerns about them extracting user data, building back doors, etc., that she was not able to address.
Thanks for the link to Exulansic and her YouTube channel. I've just watched a two and a half hour interview with her (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejdb1O40wqY). She's funny, calm and very intelligent. Apparently she majored in gender studies (amongst others), so understands exactly what she's criticising. Definitely worth getting her on the Mess.
I've been following her for some time now. She's one of the most incisive and intellectually astute commentators there is. A definite must for the Mess.
Let's face up to the facts here. What we must really be against is not the REAL cases where gender dysphoria is a real problem, for example in cases where the physical characteristics of a persons body are in question, such as in the case of hermaphrodites, but those people who are using this as an excuse to harm, women and children and their human rights. We all know the problem now, but what we need isnt more explanation of the problem but a solution to the problem. The only problem in my mind is how to restore sanity to a nation that has been brainwashed into believing that there is no problem, if you have a problem you are the problem. NO! some people are sick, and we should not condone their illness but treat it and no0t in some namby pamby way but restore a culture where there is a prevailing ethic, not a duality of morality. A singular morality by which all people can rest assured that the most vulnerable in society are protected from predators and abusers. In other words a restoration of the idea that the law applies to me and you and him and her, not a set of laws that subscribe to the idea that mental illness is an excuse to ride roughshod over another persons rights. Put common decency first and foremost, let the majority rule, and my belief is that the majority do not want kids groomed by men in dresses, lesbians do not want to be propositioned by men in dresses, The whole idea of gender being different to physicality is nonsense, and all we have to blame is the idiot politicians whose sons and daughters are not being raped by men in dresses. If you really need someone to blame dont vote for liberal, labour, SNP, or conservative, they are to blame in the UK
I watched the webinar hosted by Baroness Nicholson this morning...all excellent contributors.
I thought Winston Marshall (Mumford and sons) like Graham showed integrity.
"I would have had to participate in a, in a lie I think of excusing the far left, which I don't wasn't okay for my conscience so and and I think from an artistic point of view.
If I can't stick to the truth and whatever I create has no value."
It definitely is strange times. I'm finding myself agreeing with people on the right, a concept that was alien to me all my life until early this year. I found this very confusing until it dawned on me that the left are standing idly by while everything to do with women is being chipped away at and erased. It is a painful realisation that they are complicit in this by enthusiastically cheerleading gender ideology nonsense.
Great interview with Andrew Doyle. Hope it brings new subscriptions.
But, here's my fear, and it is my genuine concern about the right (apart from the obvious that I don't want to support wealthy people crapping on the less fortunate) - why aren't all the right wing parties running on the ticket that a vote for the left is a vote for men in women's rape shelters, prisons, toilets, spas, change rooms, hospital wards, sports, and a vote for boys in girl's toilets in school.
Why aren't they shouting this from the heavens? Because you know, if they did, they'd win by a landslide. Instead, they barely mention it. I think they are planning to suckle at the enormously profitably teat of the trans juggernaut. I think they plan to implement trans policies by stealth too.
And PS, I will vote right if they make it clear they don't believe in gender idealogy. Because no rule, law, position or decision is more important than the human rights of half the human race. But I don't want to get in bed with people I disagree with for so many reasons, only to find they're going to shit on women's human rights anyway.
You make excellent points.
And the Right finally have the option to push their gay and lesbian children into conversion therapy by transing them, and now everyone will applaud them.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/father-of-trans-daughter-delivers-powerful-testimony-against-missouri-bill-i-had-a-child-who-did-not-smile/ar-BB1eEMXA
By the right here I am talking about the parties, sorry, not the individuals, should have made that clear.
Me too. Think it may be my age and realizing you can’t just follow a label “left” vs right”. I focus on individual issues more now.
You are not alone.
This one issue has turned me upside down politically. I agree with leftist ideals, but have lost all faith in leftist "leaders" with how carelessly they've cast women aside without any consultation or consideration. It's unforgivable.
My sentiments exactly
I am very wary of the right-wing. I do agree with some of them regarding genderist ideology, but, but, but. In the U.S. it is clear they are exceedingly anti-woman wanting to return to some halcyon era that never existed where women were barefoot and pregnant and knew their place. Some of them even support ending women's right to vote. Look up Amy Coney Barrett's past and see what Republicans intend for women's future; it's truly horrifying. I know your Tory politicians are not so extreme -- at least I hope so! -- but the transfer of wealth from ordinary people to people already bloated with money and power does not bode well for women.
What the fuck is wrong with Owen Jones? I swear he used to simply be a journalist but now he's a remarkably horrible Twitter bitch on the wrongest side of history known to woman.
Reminds me to buy Helen Joyce's book immediately..
It's a wonderful, highly accessible read. One ends up flabbergasted at the shocking asininity of it all, but also grateful that writers like Helen Joyce are there to chronicle the madness and stand as witness.
Asininity is my new favorite word!
Sorry to keep banging on, but I think it's important that we support Maya Forstater. As I said elsewhere:
Whilst writing, the courageous and wonderful Maya Forestater needs our help again as she continues to fight for the right of all humans in the UK to speak about reality and truth without being sacked.
If you're unsure, Maya is the woman Joanne Rowling wrote about in her famous, heroic, true and in no way hateful tweet which has earned her literal actual death and rape threats and years of abuse.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033
It's nearly a miracle Maya still has a Medium account, as they are nearly as pro misogyny as Twitter (run by the same men).
This is Maya's latest Medium piece.
https://mforstater.medium.com/going-on-to-the-employment-tribunal-26fd58cee8ae
She could use some claps. For those who don't have a Medium account, it's super easy to sign up and you can read three pieces a month free. But you can also clap on all an author's pieces by just going to the clap button on their story list, even if you cannot read it.
Just hold the button down and give her 50 claps each time. It does matter. It matters that the public see we are supporting such women, publicly. Claps on Medium = popularity.
If you don't want to go to Medium, please do consider donating to her Gofundme. She has done women everywhere a huge service, and I feel we should support her too. https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stand-with-maya/
To those who are slightly perturbed to find themselves suddenly aligned with those on the right, I'd say this: It's not an issue of right and left. It's an issue of right and wrong. And the right just happen to *be* right on this one. Which means that it's perfectly okay - and indeed logical - to unite with them to further this particular cause.
A comment under the For Women Scotland tweet: "If you don't want the accusation that it's funded by right-wing Christian groups then aligning with Tories isn't the way to go."
"Liberals" rule by fear. Bully culture and insults.
Hi Graham, NY Times reviewed Joyce “trans” book. This is breakthrough bc they ignored AS “irreversible Damage” book.
Not bad. Some problems are author never mentioned fetishized issues and said Jessica Yaniv wanted to have “her penis and testicles” waxed!?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/books/review/trans-helen-joyce.amp.html
Posting NY Times review of Trans.
Again this is a milestone for major US paper.
TRANS
When Ideology Meets Reality
Review by Jesse Singal
There is a difference between believing in “trans rights” and believing in “gender-identity ideology.” That’s the subtly important distinction that fuels Helen Joyce’s “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality,” a book that offers an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight.
According to Joyce, a longtime staffer at The Economist, most people “understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity.” Joyce endorses this idea. Her bête noire is what she calls gender-identity ideology, which holds that everyone has a “gender identity,” an internal sense of being male or female (or both or neither), that is, in most tellings, innate and immutable, “something like a sexed soul.” When someone’s gender identity conflicts with their body, and/or with how society views their body, that person is transgender. (Disclosure: Joyce and I have corresponded sporadically over the years, and we got dinner when she was in New York City in 2020.)
A primary goal of those who adhere to gender-identity ideology is to enact “gender self-identification,” or the idea “that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology,” into norm and law. According to self-ID, as I’ll call it henceforth, once an individual reveals their gender identity, that trumps anyone else’s understanding of it. If you say you are a man or a woman, or both or neither, that is exactly what you are.
When followed faithfully, gender-identity ideology has important implications. Take the common trans-rights flash point of communal female locker rooms. According to this view, allowing everyone who identifies as a woman to use such facilities, regardless of their degree of physical transition or any other factors, does not entail any trade-offs worth discussing. The “core mantra” of the belief system, as Joyce puts it, is that “trans women are women.” And why would you not let a woman into a women’s locker room? That’s nonsensical.
For most of the modern history of what used to be called “transsexualism,” Joyce writes in some engaging early pages, transgender people weren’t, for the most part, understood to really be the sex they felt they were. Rare in numbers, they were given hormones or surgery by “maverick clinicians” (if they were lucky enough to find any), and treated “as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion” by the bureaucrats who would sometimes swap out an M for an F or vice versa on some government form.
Since the 1990s and especially in the last decade or so, though, there has been a genuine revolution in the liberal intelligentsia’s understanding of sex and gender, Joyce argues. This was the result of a complex and hard-to-summarize tangle of political and cultural forces, but the end result has been the entrenchment of gender-identity ideology and self-ID in many politically liberal institutions. These ideas are also being written into law in many places, including in the United States — following the lead of certain blue states, the Democrats’ Equality Act, which passed the House in February but which is unlikely to ever get through the filibuster-choked Senate, seeks to expand federal law’s definition of “sex” to also include gender identity. Other countries, like Portugal and Joyce’s native Ireland, have enacted self-ID by making it quite easy for citizens to change their legal sex without requiring signoff from medical or psychological authorities. (Elsewhere around the world, it should be noted, doing so remains highly onerous or outright impossible, so it isn’t as though campaigns to liberalize these laws popped out of thin air or are meritless.)
The zeal for self-ID extends to trusted medical and mental-health organizations, too: As I was working on this review, the American Medical Association called for sex to no longer be listed on publicly available birth certificates in the United States, since (the thinking goes) this unfairly impinges on people’s right to declare it for themselves.
“Trans” is unapologetically opposed to all of this. Now, despite her evident disdain for certain flavors of trans activism, Joyce is no conservative hard-liner, nor is she seeking some reactionary rollback of trans rights — she favorably cites the United Kingdom’s status quo on these issues, which balances legally enshrined protections for trans people with exceptions that allow for truly single-sex spaces in some settings, such as rape shelters. She also opposes legislation that strictly polices trans people’s access to bathrooms.
But she does believe that biological sex matters, that females have a right to truly sex-segregated spaces (with some compromise-oriented exceptions), and that gender-identity ideology threatens these ideals. Treating transgender people with dignity and respect and accommodation, Joyce says, does not require embracing a worldview she describes as fundamentally anti-scientific. Here she appeals directly to liberal ideals of religious tolerance: “I demand the same freedom to reject and oppose gender-identity ideology, and in return gladly accept that others have the right to preach it and live by it.”
Many of Joyce’s arguments boil down to the idea that trans people aren’t the only ones with skin in the game here. Where self-ID reigns, she writes, other vulnerable groups potentially suffer. Cisgender women, for instance, lose full access to truly sex-segregated realms that offer protection and other benefits, such as locker rooms, sports teams and prisons, because the primacy of gender identity within this ideology renders the concept of biological sex fundamentally irrelevant.
Gender-nonconforming children, meanwhile, are told from a young age that if their sex or its associated gender roles make them uncomfortable, that’s because, despite their body, they have a “boy brain” or a “girl brain” and that’s who they really are on the inside — and so their only real choice is to transition or to suffer forever. This despite evidence suggesting that gender dysphoria, especially in childhood, can have multiple causes, and often (though by no means always) dissipates over time without transition being necessary.
Joyce offers many troubling examples of what happens when a fundamentalist strain of gender-identity ideology takes hold. In Ireland, England and Canada, natal males convicted of violent sex crimes, but who identify as women, have been housed in women’s prisons. In England, a previously convicted pedophile, in jail on suspicion of having stabbed a neighbor, sexually assaulted multiple female inmates she was housed with. In British Columbia, more than a dozen female beauticians were forced to spend significant time and energy fending off a human rights complaint filed by a trans woman because they refused to wax her penis and testicles. In Spain and Australia, female politicians faced official investigations for expressing public opposition to self-ID.
Recently, England and Wales considered making it much easier for trans people to obtain a so-called gender-recognition certificate, bringing the process in line with the precepts of self-ID. The process included a period of “public consultation,” and during it, Joyce writes, feminist activists attempting to organize public events opposing self-ID were met with constant threats of venue cancellations, intimidation from protesters, at least one assault (of a 61-year-old woman) and other obstacles to simply expressing public opposition to a proposed policy change. (The Conservative government pulled the proposal last year, announcing, as a compromise, a reduction in the cost of obtaining a G.R.C.) In light of the evidence she marshals, it is difficult to disagree with Joyce’s assessment that “intimidation and harassment are carried out openly and proudly” against many of those who question the tenets of gender-identity ideology out loud.
So Joyce’s arguments are convincing. But here and there, I found myself wishing for a bit more nuance. For example, she leans heavily on the so-called desistance literature showing that childhood gender dysphoria often abates in time, but she doesn’t explain that some activists and academics have challenged its validity. These challenges happen to be overblown — my position is much closer to Joyce’s — but they warrant mention. It isn’t that some trans activists “forget that the majority of children will desist” if they don’t socially transition, as Joyce puts it — it’s that they deny that this is the case altogether. It’s important to render one’s opponents’ arguments as accurately as possible.
Similarly, in a section about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for treating gender dysphoria, Joyce writes: “New standards of care are being drawn up as I write. But I see no reason to expect any turn back from ideology and towards evidence.” My own reporting suggests things are more complicated than that, at least when it comes to the child and adolescent guidelines: The subcommittees responsible for writing those sections include a number of clinicians who openly share some of Joyce’s concerns and who think the climate surrounding youth transition is trending toward recklessness. Joyce’s narrative of radical activists having nearly routed sober-minded scientists is a bit too tidy, in this case.
“Trans” is also very thin on citations — this might seem like nit-picking, but in a book so focused on in-the-weeds political and scientific controversies of a morally supercharged nature, it isn’t. And it’s a small point, but Joyce repeatedly calls Martine Rothblatt, a famous transgender woman and entrepreneur, a “billionaire,” even though she doesn’t appear to be quite so wealthy.
In context, though, these are fairly minor shortcomings. “Trans” is a compelling, overdue argument for viewing self-ID more critically. Even those outraged by Joyce’s positions would benefit from understanding them, given that, as she notes, self-ID polls quite poorly when its actual tenets are fully described to Americans and to the British. The present situation, in which liberal institutions not only embrace these ideas unquestioningly but also, increasingly, punish dissidents, is unsustainable. Open conversation about such fraught issues is the only realistic path forward, and Joyce’s book offers a good, impassioned start.
Thank you for posting the NYT review, much appreciated.
Jesse Singal. Aaaagh. I haven't yet read Trans, only read about it and heard bits of Joyce in interviews. Yes a milestone that a major US paper printed this piece. And yes, to review Trans in the insanely polarised, bonkersly ill-informed US, and as a watershed for the gender-captured NYT, is no easy task.
But from past form and here, Singal has an overweening need to put himself forward as an ultimate authority. Too many blind spots, IMHO. An equivocating, mansplaining true believer. 'Cisgender women', Jesse? Really? F right off with that, you don't see the half of it.
I find that too much is about distinguising himself from Joyce, looking to protect his own a*se and what he seems to view as his territory, instead of just conveying contents of the book and what a groundbreaker people say it is.
So yes, good that the NYT admits the book's existence, unlike with Shrier's Irreversible Damage, and good that Singal conveys as much as he does, but it seems he diminishes what others report as the import and impact of Joyce's book.
Any thoughts from people who've read it?
Can't read it w/o a subscription, unfortunately.
Thanks to Abw for now posting it.
🙏🏾
Wonderful to see Baronesses Nicholson and Jenkin taking up the baton and doing their level best to get their parliamentary colleagues on board. Emma Nicholson is a campaigner of the highest calibre, with decades of experience in various causes. And she has a fist of steel in a velvet and ermine glove.
Every time I see Jazz's family I have an atavistic urge to bash something with a rock.
Child abuse springs to mind. Those parents have enabled significant self harm which is life long and may very well become life limiting not to mention all the adverse health implications.
An embarrassment of riches here, Graham! Thank you for your tireless efforts to collate these news snippets and bring them to our attention. You really are a star.
That Scottish MP, wow, awesome, claps for that guy! And I guess BBC has finally done something 25% right.
God, I almost wanna give Bennie Butters a hug 0_o
Sall Grover showed us her true colours way back in the r/gendercritical days. She was outright abusive when we told her men aka "transwomen" didn't belong in our spaces.
A relevant SaidIt thread from people who were there: https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/5kyb/avoid_giggle_app_see_tweet/
Read the giggle privacy policy. If you're not paying, you're the product. Not only is this app pink and called "giggle" (PUKE)🤢 (why not just spit in my face already?), this app uses facial recognition.
"We may disclose personal information to:
third party service providers for the purpose of enabling them to provide their services, including (without limitation) facial recognition providers, chat room providers, IT service providers, data storage, web-hosting and server providers, maintenance or problem-solving providers, marketing or advertising providers, professional advisors and payment systems operators;
our employees, contractors and/or related entities;
our existing or potential agents or business partners;
sponsors or promoters of any competition we run;
anyone to whom our business or assets (or any part of them) are, or may (in good faith) be, transferred;
courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights;
third parties, including agents or sub-contractors, who assist us in providing information, products, services or direct marketing to you. This may include parties located, or that store data, outside of Australia; and
third parties to collect and process data, such as Google Analytics. This may include parties that store data outside of Australia."
Not in a million years with a gun to my head.
Sall Grover has been upfront that she originally thought of giggle as an app that might include TW, but after some research and consideration she decided against it. That's no secret. And it's not shameful to change one's mind.
Facial recognition technology is part of the consequences of that decision.
"If you're not paying, you're the product..." yes, that's the case for every free app in the world. Not giggle-specific.
What Sall has not been up front about is that she was so abusive to us -her app's target audience- that we had to ban her.
She asked us to try her start up app.
We told her we found the pinkness, the app name, and the use of the term "girls" in place of "women" to be offensive.
We told her the privacy policy + facial recognition were deal breakers.
We told her that TWAM and "sex work" is not work.
She received priceless free feedback that a serious developer or investor would have been grateful to get. But instead of implementing it and retooling the UX/app/site skin/branding and having an ethics expert and a security expert recommend best practices, she got defensive and abusive.
If nothing else, this was not the behaviour of a professional who should be given investment capital.
>>And it's not shameful to change one's mind.<<
I completely agree.
But I don't think she changed her mind. I think she realized that she had alienated her target user base and couldn't get her business off the ground.
The use of facial recognition raises very serious ethics and data privacy issues the same way letting men self-ID as women raises very serious safeguarding issues. It's not enough to say to users, "you knew what you were signing up for." She has duties, both ethical and legal, to her users. That's a whole 'nother essay.
Sall has created a honeypot. The data she is mining can be stolen/sold/requested by law enforcement and used to identify, target, and harass GC women. Hostile countries like Canada and Scotland can make requests to obtain user data and pursue women like Marion Millar, and the copious user data Sall collects will make it easier. Women should know this is not a platform where they are safe to speak freely.
I remember the various threads on it.
I don't know why she charged her mind (so no comment)…
but an all woman app is not for me anyway...so whatever.
She changed her mind because after telling us all off for being bigots, she received the standard TRA death and rape threats anyway. This apparently was triggered because letting the trans-identified-men in required manual review and approval when they failed her facial recognition check (which reminded them they don't pass).
Then she came back and told us we'd been right. But she still didn't implement any other feedback we'd provided...
And she had TIMs help build the app, so there were concerns about them extracting user data, building back doors, etc., that she was not able to address.
More dirt
https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/5hga/giggle_app_moves_to_become_female_only_after/
The internet remembers
Thanks for the link to Exulansic and her YouTube channel. I've just watched a two and a half hour interview with her (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejdb1O40wqY). She's funny, calm and very intelligent. Apparently she majored in gender studies (amongst others), so understands exactly what she's criticising. Definitely worth getting her on the Mess.
I've been following her for some time now. She's one of the most incisive and intellectually astute commentators there is. A definite must for the Mess.
Let's face up to the facts here. What we must really be against is not the REAL cases where gender dysphoria is a real problem, for example in cases where the physical characteristics of a persons body are in question, such as in the case of hermaphrodites, but those people who are using this as an excuse to harm, women and children and their human rights. We all know the problem now, but what we need isnt more explanation of the problem but a solution to the problem. The only problem in my mind is how to restore sanity to a nation that has been brainwashed into believing that there is no problem, if you have a problem you are the problem. NO! some people are sick, and we should not condone their illness but treat it and no0t in some namby pamby way but restore a culture where there is a prevailing ethic, not a duality of morality. A singular morality by which all people can rest assured that the most vulnerable in society are protected from predators and abusers. In other words a restoration of the idea that the law applies to me and you and him and her, not a set of laws that subscribe to the idea that mental illness is an excuse to ride roughshod over another persons rights. Put common decency first and foremost, let the majority rule, and my belief is that the majority do not want kids groomed by men in dresses, lesbians do not want to be propositioned by men in dresses, The whole idea of gender being different to physicality is nonsense, and all we have to blame is the idiot politicians whose sons and daughters are not being raped by men in dresses. If you really need someone to blame dont vote for liberal, labour, SNP, or conservative, they are to blame in the UK
I watched the webinar hosted by Baroness Nicholson this morning...all excellent contributors.
I thought Winston Marshall (Mumford and sons) like Graham showed integrity.
"I would have had to participate in a, in a lie I think of excusing the far left, which I don't wasn't okay for my conscience so and and I think from an artistic point of view.
If I can't stick to the truth and whatever I create has no value."
Years ago, I saw black people inquiring about why white people's lips fall into their mouths as they age. (There is an answer.)
Never thought I'd agree with Benjamin Butterworth on anything, but here we.
And as for the truly nasty Janey Godley: it's been a long time coming.
Yep, chicken karma for one.