How to fool the Guardian reader
If they could at least manage to talk about it honestly that would be a start.
First sentence of Libby Brooks’s article on a survey of attitudes toward trans people:
The British public are not bitterly polarised over trans equality, according to new research, which found a majority agreed schools should talk to pupils about transgender issues and that one in four knows a trans person personally.
But “equality” has nothing to do with it. Nobody wants trans people to be “unequal” in some never-specified way. The well is poisoned in the title and the very first sentence, and of course goes on being poisoned throughout.
Thought to be the most in-depth UK study to date of public attitudes to what has become a notoriously toxic discourse in politics and on social media, the report from More in Common identifies a radically different attitude among ordinary people, who approach issues of gender identity from a position of compassion and fairness, often informed by their own relationships with trans people.
Radically different from what? Notoriously toxic in what way? She doesn’t say, but she does then imply that we – feminist women critical of trans ideology – oppose compassion and fairness. Poison poison poison that well.
More than 5,000 people surveyed for the thinktank did not see trans issues as a big divide in Britain today, with rows about JK Rowling or the Keira Bell case barely mentioned in focus group discussions held across Scotland, England and Wales. However, people did feel strongly that trans women should not compete against cis women in professional sporting events.
In other words they think what we think, but we stand accused of opposing equality, being toxic, and opposing compassion and fairness. Talk about manipulative…
Writing in the Guardian, More in Common’s UK director, Luke Tryl, said the research had uncovered little interest in “the latest ‘gotcha’ trend of posing questions to senior politicians about whether or not women can have penises”.
Aw yeah hahaha why would anyone ask a stupid gotcha question like that, apart from women who don’t want to be forced to pretend men are women in all circumstances and locations.
Polling showed wide support for openness in education. In contrast to the advice last month of the attorney general, Suella Braverman, that schools do not have to accommodate pupils who want to change gender, there is also broad agreement that schools should support young people exploring their identity.
There it is again. Libby Brooks apparently cannot help doing this manipulative translation everywhere. Changing gender is not the same thing as exploring identity. Disguising the first as the second is reckless and destructive. Of course young people should be free to “explore their identity”; trying to change your sex is a much more drastic endeavor. She said “change gender” but that’s another manipulation.
But the interviews also revealed some concerns about medical treatments for young people who were questioning their gender identity, with the majority believing physical interventions towards transition should not start before the age of 18. While almost half of the public are comfortable with the idea that someone should be able to take hormone blockers under the age of 18, they are much less likely to say the same about cross-sex hormones, and a significant minority believe that gender reassignment surgery should only be available to those aged 21 and over.
That of course is because “the public” has been told for years that hormone blockers are harmless and fully reversible, which is not true. Manipulation everywhere.
“notoriously toxic discourse”?
What “discourse”? The notoriously toxic part is the strenuous efforts expended to prevent any discourse from taking place at all. 100% of that toxicity belongs to gender ideologues.
I wonder how many would support puberty blockers if they were told the puberty blockers would delay maturity? Possibly delay brain development? Put the kid way behind the maturity level of their chronological peers?
Of course that’s literally the point of them; it’s in the name.
Except that puberty and maturity don’t mean exactly the same thing, which is rather interesting. I’m guessing people are working on a probably buried assumption that they’re completely independent. Given what experts have been telling us about what blockers do to prevent brains from maturing, that’s got to be a mistake.
Come to think of it, it could also explain some of the childish absurdity of the whole ideology. It’s created and promoted by people with stunted brains.
Don’t take blockers: they make you dumb.
So what’s PZ’s excuse? He hasn’t used blockers (that we know of), and he isn’t dumb.
And here she’s appropriating gay rights, when a common belief that gays & lesbians were strange, exotic, & disturbing was expelled when the Come Out campaign revealed that no, they were your friends, family, & neighbors. You know them, you like them, they’re normal.
Opposition to trans rights on the left isn’t based on anything like “they’re weird and icky.” The exact same person being gay or gender nonconforming raises no eyebrows or concerns here. Instead, it’s about redefining biological categories and infringing on women’s boundaries. It doesn’t matter if you like them, any more than liking lots of Christians changes your mind on the separation of church and state or personally admiring the Republicans in your life makes you start ticking “yes” on the Republican platform.
I don’t think they’re weird; I think they believe weird things. So I’m unimpressed by the whole “but just talk to them, get to know them” crap. And I recognize it as a conscious or unconscious propaganda technique which reframes the issue.
And on top of that, when I do talk to them, they will yell at a person for a single “wrong” word. Someone I know wrote a play about “trans gendered people” and was lambasted because that was no longer correct wording. Talking to trans people might actually have the opposite effect from what the trans lobby wants, just like educating ourselves often leads to the opposite effect.
Just like reading the Bible has made more Atheists than reading Dawkins, reading PZ turned me from “trans rights are human rights” to trans rights must not infringe on women’s rights.
If the post-truth era and the rise of trumpism should have taught us anything at all, it’s that one cannot take people’s words at face value. You always have to read the small print. Again I think it’s instructive to look at the way words and expressions like “equality”, “solidarity”, “power to the people” etc. under Soviet-style communism were turned into euphemisms for tyranny, one party rule, leader worship, forced conformity, thought police, censorship, endless purges and show-trials, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, labor-camps, torture, executions, and genocide. If the Guardian had applied the same standard (as indeed some left-wing newspapers did!) back then, they might have written something like “Despite the toxicity surrounding public discourse on Soviet policy, the most in-depth study to date find that the British public are not in fact deeply polarized over questions of equality and fairness, but worker’s rights enjoy broad support across etc. etc.”. As Ophelia once framed it, you might as well say that people are “against bad things” (and in favor of “good things”).
As I have previously put it, I think we have to deal with modern media much like a critical scholar deals with the original texts of the Bible. There are more or less plausible conclusions that can deduced from the texts, but they won’t be found by taking the authors at face value. Instead you have to ask questions like “what is the agenda of this particular author?”, “who is the author responding to?”, “what does this tell us about the various power struggles and rivalries among competing groups of Jews or Christians at the time” etc.
Gotcha questions, they say. A gotcha question is supposed to be one “designed to entrap interviewees into making statements that are damaging or discreditable to their cause, character, integrity, or reputation.” It’s an unhelpfully broad term, actually, as it applies to situations where the response only appears bad (or can be spun so) and to situations where the response actually is bad.
Why do people write like this? What does this sentence even mean? What do the weirdly-invoked and definitely fictional focus groups have to do with anything and how would anybody know whether ‘rows’ were ‘barely mentioned’? What significance would that have anyway? Perhaps that wasn’t the focus of the focus groups (not that they existed), we haven’t been told. For all we know, they were (definitely fictional) focus groups about climate change or which is the best shade of blue. Those ill-defined ‘rows’ would indeed have been unlikely to have come up. If the focus groups were real, of course, which they definitely weren’t.
It’s infuriating.