Thinky think-tank
And in case we don’t have enough material yet…
Say again?
Wo. Feminist women are…Hitler in heavy makeup.
Let’s see if Sophia Siddiqui’s writing is as malicious as that image.
The rigid biological notion that ‘a man is a man, a woman is a woman’, is central to how the far Right mobilises across Europe in order to enforce heterosexual norms.
Is it “rigid” and a “notion” though? Or is it just reality? Is it a “rigid biological notion” to say that a giraffes is not an earthworm?
Gay and lesbian couples, trans people and progressive groups that advocate for reproductive rights and gender equality continue to be demonised under a vague and malleable ‘gender ideology’ …
When do trans people advocate for gender [or sex] equality? Trans people, especially trans women, advocate for themselves.
Moral panics around ‘LGBT ideology’ have been central to electoral campaigns…
This is why the T needs to be separated out. Yes there is homophobia, no that is not the same thing as saying that men are not women.
The past few months have seen a backlash against trans rights in the UK, led by ‘gender critical’ feminists who contend that sex is immutable and cannot be changed.
Blah blah blah; same old shit. It’s not a backlash against rights, it’s resistance to the monstering and negation of our rights. Nobody is campaigning to take any genuine rights away from trans people.
Of course the whole article goes on like that, relying on the core misrepresentation to build the entire house of cards. Along with the Hitler in lipstick and mascara image.
Techincally yes, I’d think, though it’s absurd to think of a world where one would even need to state this — and yet that seems to be, more or less, the world of the 2010s and early 2020s.
I bet if you put up a billboard saying “A giraffe is not an earthworm “ it would be taken down as hate speech.
Also, Hitler in lipstick is still a man.
So on the one hand, you have:
A man is an adult human male.
A woman is an adult human female.
On the other hand, you have:
A man is anyone who identifies as a man.
A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.
Which one of these is closer to “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman”? And which requires more rigid gender roles?
So if I never wear lipstick, I wouldn’t be able to be Hitler in lipstick, right? Or am I being too concrete?
As a biologist, I can state that there are very specific definitions of what the sexes are; they are defined by those differences. Nothing a man does can make him a woman; nothing a woman does can make her a man. If acting ‘like a woman’ makes you a woman, then they are enforcing the rigid sexual stereotypes the right wing would agree with. So who is it that is inadvertently (or advertently) pushing a right-wing agenda?
The TRAs have allowed the right wing to put on the mantle of feminism; they are the ones protecting our women, spaces for women, safety for women. Now they are for women, and basking in the reflected glory of all the work actual women have done.
Neither side wants anything to do with GC feminism. They both want us to go away and play with our dolls.
GW @ 1 – Technically, what’s rigid about it?
Perhaps “rigorous” is the word he was looking for.
This whole thing is such an own goal for the left. The right is not going to fight for women’s rights – especially not reproductive rights in the US. And the bathroom bills and other such things the right wing (again, at least in the US) is offering up are probably not going to do a whole lot for women and girls because it’s just not in the right wing’s nature to give much of a shit about women and girls.
But what’s different now is that the left’s ratcheting back their support for women’s rights, leaving people for whom that’s a big issue out in the cold. Where are they going to go? They’ve no political home, but the people who were going to vote for the right are still going to vote for the right. Net result? The left loses. And women lose.
It’s unchanging, constant, and not subject to any serious challenges. No?
So the term feminazi has been grabbed from the knuckle draggers on the right and is now being used by the knuckle draggers on the left. Yet the right wingers are the only ones with the power (in certain states in the USA) to knock the cult off stride. Guess my votes in 2022 midterms are going to be pure protest straight down the ticket for the Republicans.
Hope others do the same so that the Democrats get a jolt in 2022 and realize they need to change for the better or end up like Labour in the UK.
Oops, I was just inaardvarkedly identifying as an armadillo, but my armoire should protect me. :P
Well if the Dems lose the House in 2022 the Republicans will straight up steal the next presidential election so I don’t see protest voting as being viable.
To be fair here, the Hitler image is actually from a right-wing group’s bus in Spain (that the article is criticizing). But the article seems to think that it’s feminists’ fault that right wingers can weaponize the left’s confusion on sex and gender.
Yeah, in a system like the US’s, a protest vote doesn’t really work. Particularly if you’re not just voting for a third party but actually voting for the opposing party. I mean, if you’re a conservative and you want to vote for Republicans then just own it, because voting in more Republicans won’t do jack shit for women’s rights.
Not to mention a Vice President who uses pronouns, speaking of women’s rights, which is still a huge problem that I shouldn’t mention, but I keep mentioning. She’s on the wrong side of this, and I hate to think it’s because of stupidity. Someone give me an apologetic please, actually make it a double. :P
It’s really not a politically polarizing issue, because there is no such thing as polarization, because politics is a spectrum of course, just like gender. Like hell, literally, but there is no heaven and hell, there is only a spectrum. There are no dichotomies, only differing perspectives. Postmodernism wins by a nose. Thanks Humpty. :P
#11 #12
I have lived through several Republican presidents so living through a couple more is a chance I can take. At least we know what Republicans are likely to do and if Roe v Wade falls, then it falls and the battle over abortion goes back to the states. At this point, I find myself with no hope that decent left wingers can or will raise a finger to hold back the vicious misogynist left wingers who seem to be savoring the thought of a future where they can rape and torture and murder uppity women at will. The atrocities have already begun with Male rapists being put in prisons for women.
Almost daily now, we see women threatened by cultists and abused by police. So no matter who first made that Hitler image, the term feminazi is being taken by the left now as a way to further gin up their side to commit violence against women who won’t obey men.
We better realize that old allegiances to political parties that have changed for the worse are the chains that will pull us under and drown us.
SW @16 I’m not terribly happy with the current situation, but OMFG I’m glad Donnie Dipshit is gone. But yes, being stuck with your political party no matter what is foolish and closed minded. I almost voted Libertarian because of Kamala’s pronoun bullshit. Almost. If Joe Biden had shown the same amount of (seemingly) blind support for the trans cult, I would have.
Well for my part I want to run against the Woke cultists in the local school board/community college director elections. It’s really sad that the local candidates are basically a choice between the MTGs and the Robin DiAngelos of the world.
I’m not saying the Russians are behind this, but… it’s the Russians.
SOUTHWEST88, the problem I see with your protest vote idea is not that it will jolt Dems into becoming a better party of the Left, rather it will push the Dems closer to the Right until eventually, the political centre will be Trumpism.
GW @ 8 – no. I think Harald @ 6 is right, you mean rigorous rather than rigid.
#20 Roj Blake
Not sure I can agree with your take on that because Trumpism was not the Republican party in the past and I see no reason why the Republicans cannot leave Trump in the dust eventually. I respect your opinion and it is a possibility but the reality we face is that some women’s prisons have been turned into rape camps in at least 3 large Western nations. Women are being arrested and charged for tweets.
The atrocities are here and future atrocities are coming soon so we have to decide how many and what atrocities we are willing to accept to avoid the Orange Man coming back. He is just a man, he will die soon. The agenda we are fighting has billionaires of all ages pushing it. I will risk a resurgence of Trumpism rather than an expansion of the rape camp program and a future where uppity women can be murdered for not obeying men and their killers celebrated as most oppressed ever..
Southwest88, I make my comment based on observing the shift right by US Democrats, UK Labour, NZ Labour, and most egregiously, my former natural political home, Australian Labor.
It has been a slowly accelerating process since the rise of Chicago School economic theory, neo-conservatism, and the vacuuming upwards of wealth to those already wealthy. Many socially progressive policies have been wound back, such as free tertiary education in Aus, the gradual dismantling of the NHS in the UK, and the rise of anti-intellectualism everywhere. Expertise is no longer a desirable trait, it is a mark of elitism and must be howled down at every opportunity.
Parties of the Left are no longer proud of their heritage, but distancing themselves from their roots and becoming clones of the right. Thus my declaration that Trumpism, once an outlier, will soon be the norm with something far worse to the right of it.
#23 Roj Blake
I can see where you are coming from and you make a good case which still leaves us with the current situation where free speech and women’s rights are being destroyed by the left so what can we do to fight this coming right wing tide if we lose the current battles? Seems we are screwed no matter what.
Yes. We are. Right now, we can only fight and hope for peak trans. I don’t hold out much hope.
But if we allow ourselves to say oh well, what’s it matter, I’ll vote Republican, we regain the global gag rule, hurting women all over the world. We could lose Social Security. There is no chance for national health insurance (not much with the Dems, I realize, but that’s because they’re worried about moderate voters). The Second Amendment will kill the First.
Children in cages. Attacks on the capital. Playing footsie with Russia and North Korea. Latent (and not so latent) dictator tendencies. General assholery. Assault on the American language (I won’t insult our English friends by calling what we speak English; it’s modified English). Hamberders. Covfefe. I have a lot of reasons not to accept oh well, ,just another Republican. I don’t have a lot of energy, strength, or time left, but if we have to fight that fight again (and I suspect we will, with or without Republicans), I would at least go out fighting.
And I think the GOP is the party of Trump. They weren’t colonized, they were assimilated. They’ve been sliding into ridiculousness for a long time, and Trump was the natural progression of the choices they have made. Now they are the party of Trump, and I do enjoy watching some of them squirm, but I live in fear that Trump or one of the Trumplings will return to the White House in triumph. If that happens, they will not be merciful. They will punish.
Southwest88, at the risk of drifting too far OT, I think we need to acknowledge the harm done to the Left by Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” as the marker of the real loss of Left ideals. The Left joined the Right in placing “The Economy” before anything else and made the Right’s job easier than ever.
Economies exist because people trade, not the other way ’round.
There has also been a rapid decline in engagement with politics, and this is most notable for the decline in party memberships. When the masses leave a party it is left open to capture by small special interest groups, hence the rise of Evangelicals to prominence in the GOP and of money both Left and Right. Until people throw off the shackles of consumerism and re-engage with political parties the narrowing of the gap between Left and Right will continue apace until the gap is no longer there.
It is interesting to me that the Right seems to wallow proudly in all their despicable policies, but the Left cannot muster the courage to challenge them, let alone return to their roots and be the party of progress.
But while too many people consume only the content of Lord Moloch’s press and TV, I too see little hope.
Like the “right” of incels to gain “access” to women’s bodies with or without consent, or the “right” of Republicans to govern with or without winning free and fair elections (or winning elections at all…). What we used to think of, and some of us still do, as non-rights.
J.A. #19
Timothy Snyder has often been accused (wrongly in my view) of blaming everything on the Russians to explain away the failings of the West, when in fact what he seems to be saying is that the Russian link is important mainly because of what it reveals about our own weaknesses, or vulnerabilities”, or “susceptibilities”. With that in mind, I am not going to suggest that the whole Gender War is manufactured by Russian trolls, but if it were manufactured by the Russians, I see no possibility that it wouldn’t work.
But so is the English they speak in the UK. All language is modified from a previous form; change is constant. And just because the descendants of the people who brought their Englishes over with them changed their language in different ways than the descendants of the people who stayed (and in some aspects maintained older forms, as in the rhotic dialect spoken in much of the US), that doesn’t make it any less English than what they speak on the other side of the pond (or north of the border, or down under, or in all the other places where the English left their linguistic mark).
Surprisingly many of the terms we tend to deride as ‘Americanisms’ are actually the older, British English terms and it’s we Brits who have quite recently changed our words for them, not Americans.
Very true, WaM. I don’t imagine anyone knows what the original, pure, unmodified language was. It would be lost in the deep, dark past because languages don’t fossilize and until we started writing things down, there was no record to maintain.
Remember all those arguments waaaaaaaay back then about whether the word “cunt” is misogynist or not? Which often featured the fact that it can be an endearment in Scotland? In SCOTLAND?
Fun times, fun times.
iknklast,
Yeah, we don’t even know exactly when language first arose (conservatively it was at least 100k years ago, but who knows if, say, Neanderthals or Homo erectus had some form of language), or even if it arose just one time. But if our proto-Indo-European-speaking linguistic ancestors came back today, they’d be shocked at all the crazy ways their descendants speak.