Familiar to many women
Madeline Grant at the Times on Ed Balls trying to patronize Kathleen Stock:
Given the crisis unfolding in UK daytime TV, I shouldn’t have been surprised to turn on Good Morning Britain and be confronted with a bona fide monster. To her detractors on social media, Prof Kathleen Stock is the ultimate bogeywoman.
One of them. Let’s not forget JKR, and Maya, and Julie, and Allison, and – they are many.
You’ll be shocked – I repeat, shocked – to hear that Twitter doesn’t reflect reality. Instead, what GMB viewers saw was a clear thinker and lucid speaker with a dry and understated wit. Perhaps all those years of harassment and intimidation by maniacs have afforded Stock a certain gallows humour.
Her interviewer was Ed Balls, a former MP, who in recent years has undergone a considerable rebrand, from Brownite bruiser to the comforting voice of breakfast television. But it seems old habits die hard. Balls repeatedly insisted that Stock’s position – that humans cannot change biological sex – represents an extreme view. “I think I do know what most people think,” he smirked.
Men telling women that it’s “extreme” to know that men are not women. How did we get here so fast when it took women decades to pry the door open just a little?
She asked Balls to explain why he purports to speak for everyone. He could not, and his blustery attempts at self-justification quickly and embarrassingly backfired.
Balls’s manner will be familiar to many women who’ve engaged in arguments with a certain type of progressive man.
There’s the faint sneer, the knowing air; muscular centrism, at the point of a verbal bayonet.
In other words the clueless assumption of superiority.
I was curious, so I went looking and found the Good Morning Britain clip. Prepare to be annoyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBcsVU4vVIo
The bit in question begins around the seven-minute mark.
I wonder if the fear of Dr. Stock is that she sounds like a normal, reasonable person, and not the folk devil trans Twitter would have you believe.
Also, off topic, but have you seen this? Veteran feminist activist Catharine A. MacKinnon has declared for the pro-TRA position in a new academic paper:
Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling.
There’s a discussion of her paper on Mumsnet:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4817640-catherine-mckinnon-on-transgender-law-and-politics
How hard is it? Woman = Adult. Human. Female. Not a turf. Not a set of imperatives. Not limitations to be transcended. Woman is an adult human female, the sex that makes the large gametes, the sex that has the ovaries and uterus (or had them once), the sex that has been marginalized, oppressed, and abused for centuries.
Woman. Adult human female. It isn’t difficult. Just say it. Go to the window, open it, stick out your heads, and shout as loud as you can. A woman is an adult human female!
I’ll tell you what’s startling. It’s startling to see even Judith Butler being that disingenuous. Give me a break. She knows what the gc feminists are defending, she knows it’s not “turf” and she certainly knows it’s not the rules and boundaries imposed on women.
What on earth are men like India Willoughby doing to criticize, challenge, change, or transcend the imperatives and limitations imposed on women? Not one thing. He’s just forcing his way in and stealing all our stuff.