A senior Labour figure is flat-out denying scientific truth
Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things but not about the hot new trend of pretending reality can be altered by saying a magic word or two.
Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex.
There are a lot of things you could say that about. Babies are born without a language. Babies are born without a religion. Babies are born without a driver’s license. Babies are born without a political affiliation. Babies are born without a list of top 10 movies. But a sex? No.
Last week, a group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights issued a purge-like document insisting that everyone in the Labour party bow down to the mantra that ‘trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’ or risk being branded a transphobic bigot and booted out of the party.
You would think the Labour Party would be a little less eager to shun people who don’t believe men are women than, say, Freethought Blogs.
To put this bluntly, this means if you do not accept that someone with a penis and a beard who calls himself Sharon is a woman — a complete woman, as much as your mother, wife or sister is a woman — then you are a hateful creature who has no place in the Labour party.
And here we are roughly reminded that Brendan O’Neill is wrong about most things. He apparently assumes that women don’t read, or at least don’t read the Spectator. It’s not just your mother, wife or sister who is a woman, Brendan; some eccentric people are actually women themselves. Amazing, isn’t it?
Still, he does say some necessary things.
We need to recognise the seriousness of all this. A senior Labour figure is flat-out denying scientific truth on national TV. Another senior Labour figure is proposing putting male rapists into close, walled quarters with vulnerable women. This is backward thinking. It feels like a kind of hysteria, where otherwise sensible people are saying things that are clearly untrue and even unhinged.
Rather like the alien abduction thing, except that this is political, and doing more harm to women and girls every day.
H/t Lady Mondegreen
The sad thing, of course, is that it’s almost true. Babies are born without a gender, because that’s something you learn as you grow up. Gender is tied to sex, but it’s not sex, and the two shouldn’t be treated as equivalent. The TRAs conflating of the two concepts is probably the biggest shot in the arm the social conservatives have had since they lost the gay marriage fight.
Well she could have just said babies aren’t born knowing what sex they are, or babies aren’t born knowing they’re girls or boys…but she didn’t. She could have released a statement later saying that’s what she meant, but as far as I know she hasn’t.
The ability to hold a position contrary to the evidence of reality is a sign of commitment and Righteousness to the Cause. She gets extra woke cookies for making a statement that is perfectly consistant with, supportive of (and as accurate as) the TRA formulation “assigned (sex) at birth.” If babies are born without a sex, then perforce it can only ever be “assigned” as there would be nothing to observe. So called “natal sex” is just the result of some careless, random toss of a coin in the delivery room. (Though one is forced to wonder exactly what could have possibly served as a model in the 70’s for the “anatomically correct” Joet Stivic doll…)
UK Labour might be making themselves more unelectable by the hour, but by God, they’re going to be Holy, Pure, and Virtuous as fuck.
Of course, one can be mother, wife, and sister, and still be eccentric. I know, because I have managed. ;-)
I only score 1/3 on the mother, wife and sister thing. Happily I am not related to Brendan O’Neill.
It’s a dark day when I agree with him and he’s not being annoyingly contrarian but sounds sane and ordinary.
And to be fair, a lot of women write for/read the Speccy.
As for Labour, I feel the UK is totally cursed with its political parties at present. An awful Trump tribute act as PM, and we desperately need a decent, sane Opposition.
Jesus and Mo have had their say on it:
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/lives/
This position, crazy as it seems, is entirely logical. The modern trans ideology is not that tans women should be admitted to the category of woman alongside women born with female characteristics, but that the category contains only those with the internal sense of womanhood (whatever that may be), or maybe, simply those that say so. This is vital, because otherwise trans women would still be men (by virtue of their bodies). Expanding the categories with associate membership won’t do. You are led to the conclusion that babies must have no sex, because they are yet to do the one thing that matters: choose.
Guess I’m out, then. Don’t know what that is, or what it feels like. I know what it feels like to be me, and I am a woman, but that doesn’t mean feeling like me is the same as feeling like a woman.
In fact, I usually feel like a woman when I am being condescended to, groped, ignored, spoken over, denied autonomy, or in other ways being treated like a second class citizen by entitled male counterparts. So maybe the transwomen shouldn’t be so eager to be accepted for what they are, and loved for it. It is the very lack of validation that makes me feel like a woman most of the time. I am never so keenly aware of being a woman as when I am treated like I am barely adult (or not adult at all) or like I am an object for man’s gaze (which means now that I am 59 and overweight, I don’t exist for many people – hey, they deny my right to exist!).
Hey! Demand that those bastards gaze upon you as an object of desire!
It they don’t, they are committing ACTUAL VIOLENCE! And I know that’s true, because I used all caps and ended with an exclamation mark.
Just as a pedantic aside, n.b.: That particular sense of gender is a term of art. The predominant senses of the word are (1) grammatical and (2) euphemistic (for sex). Not marking TOAs are employed is how the TRAs illicitly conflate the concepts, creating question-begging arguments.