Everyone should read it
Also rewarding to read the replies to Jon Pike:
I wonder if the staffers who wouldn’t let the New Statesman publish Dawkins’s article without a contrary view are regretting it now.
Tip Jar
Also rewarding to read the replies to Jon Pike:
I wonder if the staffers who wouldn’t let the New Statesman publish Dawkins’s article without a contrary view are regretting it now.
It is indeed. Some sort ort of up-market Gish gallop. Say enough things your target audience is likely to agree with in an authoritative voice in the expectation they will assume you must also be right about whatever they take you to be saying (or some “most reasonable” version of it there’s a bit of motte and bailey in there as well.)
“Being a woman is at risk of becoming a protected category, as the binary man/woman hardens into place. This is happening even though it has always been a central goal of feminism to repudiate the very idea of womanhood, as a form of coercive control that means the end of freedom.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that Jacqueline Rose should lose that comma. My guess is that feminists don’t want to repudiate the very idea of womanhood but they do want to repudiate the idea of womanhood that limits what women can do and who they can be.
It is a trick with words (and punctuation) to go from saying that traditional/patriarchal ideas of gender roles that limit women’s freedom should be resisted to saying that the reality of women’s existence should be resisted.
“In the most prevalent version of this argument, trans women, who were once men, must be excluded from women-only spaces – which they threaten by dint of being, deep down, still a man – regardless of the lengths to which they have gone to leave that identity behind. They are frauds whom women should fear. But the case only holds if we are confident that we know what a man or a woman is in the first place.”
Well, since most people DO know what those words mean, the case holds up.
Then there’s the misuse of Simone de Beauvoir’s quote that we’ve all seen a gazillion times.
Then there’s that ahistorical nonsense from “Andrea” Chu about how “female” only applied to female Black slaves. Reading that insane paragraph one has to laugh at the idea of Chu as an expert on the history of the slave trade and wince at the suggestion that in that case were male Black slaves given full social and legal personhood? How did they know which Black slaves were male or female to begin with??? How could anyone since Chu says that “everyone is female and everyone hates it”?? (Wasn’t there something else about a blank stare and an open anus?) Did European AFAB people enjoy the same rights as European AMAB people? If not? Why not?
And the rest was drivel of similar “quality.”
Compare and contrast the GC position on the writings of their opponents “Everyone should read it,” with the trans activist view: “DON’T PUBLISH IT!!!!”
Ya know back in my day “piece of work” wasn’t a compliment. :^) Just thought I’d share.