Luxury beliefs
Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling…were threatened with murder by a man for daring to dispute the transparent absurdities of the extreme trans lobby, and championing the right of women to enjoy female-only spaces free of men who identify as women. Like Galileo before them, the two women prefer science to “luxury beliefs” as a guide to truth. They happen to share the view that some things just are, and whether or not people like them is neither here nor there.
We all (we heretics) share the view that like and dislike have no power to change reality (except in the very narrow sense of changing our feelings about reality). Normally adults are well aware of this. We can’t make it start raining with the power of thought, we can’t wish the planet into escaping climate change, we can’t resurrect the dead, we can’t reverse crop failures, we can’t go for a stroll on Mars. We know that. Yet somehow this one thing has become an exception to the broad general reality. Why? I have yet to see any convincing explanation.
In 2021 Rosie pointed out that only women have a cervix.
Twenty years ago, no one would have raised an eyebrow at this statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet her party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, reacted to her comment with condemnation. It was, he remarked, “something that shouldn’t be said”. Now, at last, Sir Keir appears to have rediscovered his notes from O-level biology. After taking a lesson from his mentor Sir Tony Blair, who appears to be clearer on the basics, Sir Keir now says women have vaginas and men penises.
Well, to be really exact, he says he agrees with Tony Blair that women have vaginas and men penises. I’m not sure we know he would say that without the Tony Blair intro.
This is an encouraging evidence-based statement from a former practising barrister and director of public prosecutions whose professional currency was indeed evidence. Sir Keir’s Damascene conversion — he once said only 99.9 per cent of women do not have penises — was made during an election debate on Thursday. Asked about why he reprimanded Ms Duffield for her cervix comment, he attempted to use context: it was, he said, “a very toxic, very divided” time.
Yeah, dude, and you jumped for the wrong side, and hung Rosie out to dry, and treated women’s rights as so much dandruff to be brushed off your shoulders. It was and still is a very fucking toxic time for women, and you are no help whatsoever.
I will never understand why they don’t see the absurdity of this. Throw half of humanity – some four billion people – overboard for the sake of a tiny minority of trend-hugging men who claim to be women? Why would any politician make such a grotesque calculation?
Perhaps it might be more understandable why people don’t see the absurdity of this if we realize there are people out there who believe all of these things (not necessarily one person believing all of them). I know people who believe at least one of these ridiculous things, and are dead certain everyone who doesn’t is wrong.
People will believe a lot of things against the evidence. It never made sense to me, especially since some of the people believing the current gender ideology have had training in critical thinking. Perhaps they are like my mother; she could apply critical thinking to anything she didn’t already believe (for instance, bigfoot) but not to things she did believe (god).
Not true. Our shared legal system is never about all the evidence, only that evidence which leads to conviction or exoneration, depending upon who is providing the evidence. If your evidence proves A, then it is my duty to tarnish your evidence while providing my own evidence that proves B & C. If I can also throw in some D, E, F, &G evidence to further muddy the waters then no one can really know the truth.
And from that career, Starmer is perfectly tuned to argue against the evidence of his own eyes, his own education, and all the evidence before him. His job was never to evaluate the evidence or enquire into facts; his job was to always obfuscate.
Well the quoted remark is “whose professional currency was indeed evidence” – which is entirely compatible with saying he knows how to manipulate, minimize, distort, express incredulity about evidence.