How do you echo a stance?
That’s a lot of wrong and dishonest in one tweet.
Kathleen Stock’s views are not “trans critical.” They can be called gender critical, though I don’t know if she calls them that or not, but “trans critical” is wrong, and wrong in a harmful and probably malicious way. (I doubt that Tatchell is unaware of the label “gender critical”.) In this context the word “trans” names people, while “gender” names an ideology. Tatchell is manipulating us to think Stock is Mean to a set of people as opposed to having a philosophical view on a new and contested ideology. He’s portraying her as bullying people when what she’s doing is dissenting from some ideas.
But that “SOME on BOTH sides” is even more brazen. Utterly utterly false. We’re not the ones who fantasize aloud on Twitter about doing violence to Them. We don’t rave about stabbing burning choking shooting trans people, but there are way too many “trans activists” who do all that and worse in their campaign to silence the people they call “terfs.”
It’s interesting that he “stands with trans people” AND supports “protection for women.” Notice a difference? On the one hand his friends, his people, the ones he stands with, on the other hand, some weakling weirdos who need “protection” and he’s ok with letting them have it. I for one don’t want Peter Tatchell’s grudging “protection,” I want him to fuck off out of our way and let us defend out rights without any insulting Both Sides patronage from him.
And no, not unity and solidarity with people who are appropriating our rights and freedoms and literal identities. No. We don’t tell Peter Tatchell to have unity and solidarity with theocratic and authoritarian homophobes, and he doesn’t get to tell us to have them with trans bullies. His cutesie photo of “diverse” teenagers isn’t going to change that, either.
What I find interesting here, and maybe even encouraging, is that this represents an acknowledgement of what I’ve found to be my major issue with the TRA crowd – the harassment and threats of violence.
On the specific issues, I think those issues need to be hashed out. You can’t really do that when you’ve got one side of the argument proclaiming any and all raising of issues to be “phobic” and the people raising them to be bigots-who-should-not-be-platformed.
And the treatment of women who say “Hang on one minute, we need to talk about this, not just blindly go along with…” essentially makes it impossible to agree with the TRAs, because it all reinforces the concerns the so-called “Terfs” raise.
Saying “Suck my lady dick” does nothing to reduce concerns about sexual violence and the issues around consent expressed by lesbians for example. Threatening elderly women with baseball bats, does not leave one with the impression that these people are safe to be around.
What Tatchel is saying is thus an important admission – that it is happening, and that it is wrong. The whole thing is cloaked in trying to make it all “both sides” – but it ends out as an admission nonetheless.
Of course both sides aren’t doing this, but I still find it an interesting tweet from this perspective.