A vehicle to attack women in public
Rosie Duffield MP is taking heat again.
Rosie Duffield got a standing ovation in the House of Commons last year when she revealed her experiences of domestic abuse in a speech that left many of her colleagues in tears. The Labour MP for Canterbury has been attacked by left-wingers for speaking out against antisemitism and vilified by right-wingers for campaigning against Brexit.
Now she is on the front line in the culture war accused of being “transphobic” after she liked a tweet suggesting that “individuals with a cervix” should be described as “women”.
Tweet-liking crime – it’s an epidemic!
The vitriol poured on her has left her “completely terrified”, she says. She has in the past suffered intimidation at home and threats from Twitter trolls, but, she tells us, “This feels worse — maybe because it strikes at the heart of who you are as a woman, and because it’s base, pure misogyny.”
There is, she claims, a witch hunt underway. “It very much feels as though the stake is built as soon as there is even the mere hint of any charges. A word like ‘transphobe’ gets spread around without any actual evidence and the fire is lit.’’
And in addition to the lack of evidence, there is also the extremely generous way “transphobia” is interpreted and detected – generous to the people who like to accuse, that is. It’s called “transphobia” to say that men are not women, which seems utterly absurd on its face. Even the most adamant enforcers of trans ideology are perfectly aware that men are not women most of the time. They can’t help it. We know the difference; we can’t help it; even the fanatics can’t help it.
This is a row that started in July, when the broadcaster Piers Morgan responded to a CNN report suggesting that “individuals with a cervix” should have regular cervical cancer screening from the age of 25 with the tweet: “Do you mean women?” Duffield liked the tweet, then she further angered her critics by tweeting: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix . . . ?!’ ” Since then the row has escalated, with some Labour activists calling for Duffield to be deselected as an MP.
Last week Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, became the party’s first senior figure to get involved, saying that Duffield — who resigned from the frontbench after admitting breaching lockdown rules — should “reflect” on her comments and realise they could be “hurtful”.
Here’s a thought. It could be “hurtful” to women to pretend that men become women by simply saying so. It could be “hurtful” to women to try to force them to agree with that claim. It could be “hurtful” to women to pretend that sex is like a shirt or a hat, something that everyone can put on or take off at will. It could be “hurtful” to women to insist that men get to tell women what we can say about our own sex. I could go on.
So far, Duffield has avoided commenting, but she tells us that she wants to explain her views because she feels it is wrong that women are being silenced in the gender debate. “All people need to do to attack me at the moment is be male and misogynist and angry,” she says. “Once you’re labelled a thing, that’s it. People attribute certain things to you . . . and actually I’m not sure they are bothered what I think. It’s just a vehicle to attack women in public. I feel like my female mouth is being well and truly closed without ever actually having been opened.”
And, possibly the most disorienting aspect of all, people who consider themselves progressive look on in approval. They’re fine with all this bullying of women.
“The other day I was walking through parliament wearing my mask and I thought, ‘This is a bit symbolic. I feel like I’m being shut up,’ and it was really horrible. It does feel like Gilead [in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale], where women aren’t allowed to ask questions or proffer alternative ideas. The shutting down of ideas is particularly dystopian. I am in a university city where ideas are everything; you’re supposed to be able to discuss, debate, question without being labelled.”
Duffield has received death threats on social media and admits that she has started to feel scared walking down the street. “There was a picture of a mocked-up hanging . . . and someone had put, ‘I wish I could photoshop Rosie Duffield into this.’
“You could take that as a joke and think it’s just some silly boy behind his keyboard, but it’s pretty sinister,” she says. “I regularly talk to people who don’t agree with me on things like abortion or Brexit. We have civilised conversations. I’m not being cancelled or threatened with a noose, so why is this particular issue so toxic?”
So toxic, and at the same time so vehemently endorsed and echoed on the left? What is that? Why is the left so happy to see women threatened and verbally abused because we don’t and literally can’t agree that men are women if they say they are?
Technically speaking this is about the concerns of transmen (or TIF’s) that the feelings of transwomen/TIMs.
@Me;
True, though at some level both are involved.
The vitriol seems excessive from our point of view possibly because we see the radical nature of the claim as a reason for pause, whereas the trans activists seem to interpret it as a reason for urgency. The idea is that if a young female is ‘revealing’ that they’re male, the only reasons they’d do so is because 1.) it must be true and 2.) it must be necessary in order for them to live. Otherwise, why would they put themselves through the personal difficulty or the social disapproval?
Another thing I’ve become aware of is how popular the idea that “transphobes want to see trans people dead” is. It may have sprung from the constant citing of (dodgy) statistics regarding suicide and violence. Or it may have come out of that second assumption, which is often reinforced by trans people themselves: to live as the wrong gender (sex) is to live a lie which sucks the life out of you. But some people don’t care. They must like it, and want to see it.
If gender critical views are framed as sadism,, the hostility would follow.
The transmen and enbies complaining about the word “woman” are about as sympathetic as expat Brexiters whining that they will lose freedom of movement. They’ve deliberately opted out of the word, and now are making a fuss cos it no longer applies to them – and not only that, they’re trying to take it away from everyone else too (oh, except the dudes who redefined it as “submissive sex object” in the first place, which I swear is the main cause of the mass opt-out).
Funny (not funny) how humans are always so delighted to discover, eg, an obscure German word that describes a thing we need a while phrase for in English, but are so blasé about losing this one word that describes a pretty fucking fundamental part of all human experience. Once “woman” is lost, we have literally no word that concisely describes an adult human female. I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t immediately be rejected by the enbies and colonised by the dudes.
Me @ 1 – which this is about the concerns of transmen? Not the whole post; not the bits I quoted.
I get that saying “people with cervixes” instead of “women” is supposedly about the concerns of trans men, but as Sastra says it involves women too, and anyway I think bullying over the word “women” is aimed more at bullying women than helping women who say they are men.
The more self-evidently absurd the idea, the more vehemence and menace need to be used in warding off challenges to it. It’s like how the most absurd religious ideas are shielded from challenge by threats of Hell and the assertion that you’re a terrible person if you fail to show respect (and, until recently, blasphemy laws).
They know how absurd their claims sound, and that therefore anyone who questions has to be ruthlessly intimidated into silence, lest such challenges multiply.
Me, #1. Yes, it does concern mainly transmen on the face of it, but scratch the surface and it’s a different story. For example, if a health authority runs a campaign that stresses the importance of regular cervical smear tests for women, it is seen as excluding transwomen from the category ‘women’ because by definition no transwoman has a cervix. Such a campaign is therefore deemed transphobic as it denies the existence of transwomen.
There are TRAs who like to pretend that gender-critical feminists who insist that ‘cervix-havers’ are women are claiming by inferrence that anybody without a cervix is not a woman, so adult female humans who have had hysterectomies are no longer women. They play the same game over the term ‘period-havers’, saying that the insistence that only women have periods is the same as saying that anybody who does not have periods is not a woman, and by this illogical approach claim that GC feminists exclude all females who do not menstruate from the category ‘women’. Further, they also claim that by insisting on calling ‘period-havers’ women, the GC feminists believe that even pre-teenagers who have begun puberty are women.
In short, TRAs like to play devious word games – their entire set of arguments are nothing more than word games intended to confuse and mislead, so nothing they say can be taken at face value.
Curiously, by using biological distinctions between reproductive pathways to distinguish between “ female/women” and “ male/men” — the hated “binary” — people aren’t judged to be “more of a woman” or “more of a man.” You’re either one or the other, with only the tiny fraction of those with Disorders in Sexual Development requiring a bit of careful parsing out.
But with gender being a spectrum, with very feminine at one end and very masculine at the other — enbys in the middle— attaching “woman” and “ man” to gender means you do indeed get people being less of a woman, more of a man, etc.
Sastra, I suspect that’s a feature, not a bug. It allows the TW to be “more woman” than those of us who are born women who don’t perform gender very well, or not at all. Because we are not living the expectations of a woman, and they are, they are “more woman” than we are. Deeply sexist.
I would like to see, just once, an explanation of exactly how a trans-x is an x, without the explanation ignoring the trans part and delving into sexual development issues as if the two are indistinguishable/interchangeable, without the social construct nonsense, and certainly without the mind/body duality.
What we are given instead is what I think of as the argument from difficulty: it is really hard to define the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ therefore trans-x are x.
The explanation is…[drum roll]…muh lived experience.
Dammit! That’s conclusive.
Saying “individuals with a cervix” makes it sound like it’s a feature distributed randomly throughout the population, like eye colour, and it means the only “people” who get it checked are those who know what a cervix is and that they have one. The health of “people” who know they are women but are not familiar with the word “cervix” is being put at risk here. Raising awareness of the importance of cervical screening? Well, kinda. Effecting an increase in uptake? Quite the opposite.