Muck
Sally Hines chastises the BBC for not pampering trans people enough.
It’s embarrassing how seriously the BBC takes trans ideology, that’s what’s embarrassing.
I read the Open Democracy piece the other day and was underwhelmed but if Sally Hines thinks it’s timely n relevant who am I to continue to ignore it. It’s by Natacha Kennedy.
The recent backlash against Graham Norton’s entirely reasonable suggestion that the media talks to more trans people was more revealing than people think.
The media talks to more trans people than what? I think she meant “suggestion that the media should talk to more trans people” but is a bad writer. At any rate, seriously? The media don’t pay slavish enough attention to trans people already? The media never shut up about trans people, which is somewhat annoying to women given how easy they’ve always found it to ignore women.
He came dangerously close to exposing organised transphobia’s core campaign strategy, something they don’t want people talking about. In collaboration with mainstream media, its main strategy has been to liberally platform anti-trans narratives, hermetically exclude trans perspectives, and at the same time accuse trans people of ‘silencing’ transphobes.
Notice that “transphobia” has narratives while trans people have perspectives. Nudge nudge. To put it another way “transphobia” tells lies while trans people have wise reasonable thoughts. Also “transphobes” are not at all silenced, including by this habit of casually throwing buckets of mud at them on all occasions.
For example, a transphobic group holds a rally somewhere – maybe a couple of dozen transphobes in a draughty church hall. There’s a protest outside. A journalist, with confected faux-indignation, then claims trans people are ‘silencing’ them.
How dare they, those sneaky bitches. How dare they hold a rally or meet up in a building. Obviously they don’t do it for the reasons normal people hold rallies or meet up, they do it for obscure but sinister reasons of their own. “There’s a protest outside” – kind of the way there’s a rain storm or an earthquake. It’s not a matter of trans “activists” trying to stop women meeting and organizing, it’s just an impersonal event: A ProTest. Then this wholly innocent uncaused not at all political protest is reported by a journalist. Is that sinister or what?!
There is a name for this mechanism of power: ‘mirror propaganda’. Mirror propaganda means doing to your enemies what you are falsely accusing them of doing to you.
But they are doing it. Nobody is falsely accusing them of doing it, because of the fact that they are doing it.
As, in fact, is Sally Hines. She’s treating us as illegitimate, and having no right to speak. She thinks an article that compares us to Nazis is good and worth promoting.
So the media creates the myth that trans people are silencing anti-trans activists, while the reality is that every major national media outlet in the UK, from The Guardian and The Times to the Mail and BBC, almost never includes any trans voices.
That’s the reality?
Not unless you change the meaning of “almost” and “never” and “includes.”
Kennedy goes on to compare “transphobes” and their dirty trick of being protested to the Rwandan genocide.
Kennedy is trans.
Well, you see, by holding a meeting in a draughty Church Hall they are positively forcing trans activists to protest against them, maybe even abuse and shove them around. It’s totally justifiable, just like the angry husband lashing out at his wife for dinner being a bit cool, or maybe having broccoli on the plate.
Tell you what though, on the media coverage front. I’d say in NZ I see 10 media articles minimum positively gushing over brave trans folk for every one that mentions women’s concerns over gender ID and its consequences (some of which are not sympathetic in any case).
Yes, some women meet together inside a building. “There’s a protest outside,” of people, men and women both, who shout, and scream, and bang on widows, and use bullhorns, and crowd around ingress/egress points so that women who want to attend, or want to leave afterward, must run a gantlet of thugs in disguise who are shouting death threats at them. The “protest outside” literally tries to drown out the women meeting inside, so speakers can’t speak, and listeners can’t hear. Who the hell is silencing whom?
Wait, “organised transphobia”? I think I’m going to need a citation. And “campaign strategy”?
Do you think the other TERFs left me off all these mailing lists on purpose?
You weren’t supposed to find out!
Who let them use the draughty church?! TERFs shouldn’t be allowed anything more comfortable than a pothole of stagnant water in which to gather, and even then it’s encumbant upon heroic trans activists to drive them out of it.
Well, that number is supposed to be ten to ZERO.
Trans activists seem to have inherited the male perception of female participation in meetings; once female voices are heard at a rate of a quarter to a third of the time (IIRC), men perceive this as women having more than 50% of the floor time. Except the triggering threshold for women vs. trans is much, much lower.
‘Well, that number is supposed to be ten to ZERO.’
That line reminds me of something Deborah Cameron wrote in You Just Don’t Understand–something like ‘women don’t ‘talk too much’ compared to men, but rather compared to silence.’
“You Just Don’t Understand” was written by Deborah Tannen, not Deborah Cameron. I enjoyed that book (and one or two others by her) as well. I kept thinking I misremembered the last name until I realized they were different people. Now I feel like I must read a book or two by Cameron to atone for my error. I follow and greatly enjoy Deborah Cameron’s blog. Two well-known linguists named Deborah writing about sex differences in language, who’da thunk it?
@7 Haha my bad, yes, thanks for the correction, hopefully that will avoid any further confusion if anyone not familiar with either Deborah goes to look them up. I do recommend You Just Don’t Understand, as Tannen clearly avoids stating that ‘men communicate like this and women communicate like that’, but rather describes two ways of using language, one typically used by men in our culture and the other typically used by women (and there are cultures, both Anglophone and non, in which components of these two styles are reversed). In fact the first time I read the book I realised that a particular ‘masculine’ communication style I used (immediately going into problem-solving mode when talking with a friend, rather than just being there to let her tell me her woes) was causing friction and hurt feelings without my understanding why.
DEFINITELY read Deborah Cameron’s books.