Hack letter
There’s an open letter. Of course there is.
It’s a barely literate open letter, I must say.
An open letter to the BBC regarding an article published by Catherine Lowbridge
Dear BBC Upper Management and Editorial Staff,
The day this open letter is being written (26th October 2022), you published an article on the BBC News website by Caroline Lowbridge titled ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’¹.
Wait. Is it Catherine or Caroline?
You’d think they would at least get that straight before starting to type.
The article headline may use the word “some”, but the clear implication of the article and its headline is that transgender women as a minority group pose a threat to cisgender lesbians, and should therefor have their rights restricted in the UK.
Which rights? There is no “right” for men to try to bully lesbians into having sex with them. Which “rights” would have to be restricted to keep men from bullying lesbians for sex?
Do you mean the entirely fictitious “right” to lie about what you are and be believed? Not a right, pal.
The implications proposed by this article suggest that transgender women generally pose a risk to cisgender lesbians in great enough numbers that it is newsworthy, and something the general public should consider as a common occurence rather than a matter of incredibly rare, isolated experiences.
Define “incredibly.” Also, implications aren’t “proposed.”
Additionally, the article itself acknowledges that outside of this small sample size self selected study there is basically no evidence for the claim that this is happening in any sort of numbers that would justify generalising this as a widespread experience.
In other words “we claim that this happens only a little bit, therefore nobody should pay any attention to it at all.”
The article itself routinely implies that transgender women are not women, uncritically quoting people who call transgender women men without at any point clarifying that this is ignoring their legal status as women in the UK.
Even the law can’t actually make a man a woman. The law can declare a man a trans woman, but declarations don’t change anyone’s sex.
Also, there’s an ever-growing number of men who call themselves women who don’t fit the legal criteria, but we’re ordered to call them women regardless.
The fact that the people cited in this article largely do not acknowledge that transgender women are women, by refering to them as men, should make it clear that they are not representative of the wider community of cisgender lesbians.
When men bully women for sex, the women tend to see those men as men. It’s a hard habit to break, and many of us have no fucking intention of breaking it.
After that there’s a lot of JUST BECAUSE SHE HAS A DEEP VOICE AND IS TWICE AS BIG AS YOU DOESN’T MEAN SHE’S A MAN.
A transgender woman with a deep voice, a square jaw, and a penis that you do not want to have sex with is not a man. She is a woman that you don’t find attractive.
It’s sheer poetry.
The above cited woman also notes she would feel the same if the transgender woman in question had lower surgery. So, she would still feel that a transgender woman is a man, even if said woman had a vagina rather than a penis.
No, sport, because an inverted penis is not a vagina. She would still feel that the trans-identified guy is a guy.
There’s a lot more. It’s a very diffuse, wordy, pompous, boring letter. Trans dogma not good for the verbal skills, I guess.
How many beans make a heap? How many lesbians (not cisgender lesbians, you git. There is only one kind of lesbian – the female kind) must be bullied and abused before it is enough? Shouldn’t even one lesbian facing this elicit at least some concern? One trans woman “bullied” (i.e. called a male) is enough for the entire Twitterverse to lose their shit; any number of lesbians bullied is just “but she’s a bigot, so it’s okay to force her, even though we are going to make the pretense that we think nobody should be bullied. We really do think she should be bullied, and all women should be bullied if they don’t accept what we are, but until we are completely validated by every person on the face of the planet, there will be meanies who get upset when we say that and try to make us explain on Twitter what we really mean…which of course we can’t do, because then everyone will realize it’s stupid and incoherent”.
And given the numbers of women who do not report their rapes, the fact that these are the only women the author found does not mean they are the only women who have been bullied, harassed, and raped…yes, raped. That’s what it means to coerce sex, whether these open letter bullies realize that or not (a typical male thing, by the way. “I didn’t rape her. Oh, yes, I did force her to have sex, but I didn’t rape her). It is possible this article could generate the lesbian version of #MeToo.
I wonder how trans activists would identify (as a transitive verb! finally!) a man that called himself a man, wanted people to use the appropriate male pronouns when referring to him, used the male toilets, never claimed to be anything other than a man, but nonetheless inverted his penis to create a simulacrum of a vagina, in order to fulfill a fetish that he had? Would the trans activists claim him as one of their own.
No. The article is not suggesting anything about transwomen generally. The article suggests that actual coercion takes place and that common attitudes toward lesbians, suggesting that refusing penis is bigotry, contribute to coercion and are themselves a problem.
I fail at analogies, but it seems perhaps like attitudes toward women’s dress may promote the idea that a woman is “asking for it” if she dresses a certain way, but discussing men’s attitudes and the pressures and blame placed on women is verboten because only a tiny minority of men commit rape.
That’s like Trump’s way of denying something, then admitting it in the next sentence, in slightly different words, as if he doesn’t understand they are the same thing.
I had a friend from Connecticut who would respond “Yeah, and?” to a sentence if I didn’t make a point with it. It irritated me, but I realized that it was jutifiable because she didn’t like to be left hanging waiting for me to complete my thought.
I understand that now, reading this. Yeah, and? Does that mean that they weren’t coerced or raped? They are literally killing the English Language, doing actual violence, in this letter. Literally.
The article headline implies nothing. Reading comprehension–fail. English–fail. Logic–fail. You’re grounded until you can pass these subjects.
Or would that fall under restriction of rights?
iknklast:
Yep, Sorites abuse is rather at the heart of this whole smorgasbord of stupid. Unfortunately, only a tiny portion of humanity has the aptitude or expertise to recognize and either reject or respond to piss-poor arguments. The portion that can parse the problems in that particular argument is even punier. It would be great if those who lack the ability would at least recognize that about themselves and therefore not rely on their own evaluation of arguments for belief formation. I withhold judgement on medical matters until I can consult with at least one of the eleventy doctors in my family, because I have zero expertise in that field. My father (a doctor) withholds judgement on computing issues until he can check with me, because that’s one of my areas of expertise. We rely on each other’s strengths to make up for our own weaknesses rather than pretend that we’re all omnicapable. It’s almost like that’s supposed to be common sense or something …
It is little more than hashtagnotalltranswomen, in more words which amount to the same thing.
The statement is so transparent that she might just as well have come clean and written: The content of your article may be true, but, as only evil people will believe it, you must be evil yourself or you wouldn’t have published it.
A LOT more words. So many more words. Almost, possibly, a heap more words.
A very open letter indeed.
It’s great that so many people put their names on it. Now one knows who supports rape as long as it gets a man in a skirt laid, which is to say we know who to stay away from.
Jane Clare Jones wasn’t impressed either.
https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1453338695709433856
Heh. Being a person who works with data sets of dubious statistic value on a daily basis, I’m all for calling into question the conclusions of studies that are based upon convenience sampling, but the original article was not a study. It was a description of actual reported things; as such, the use of the word “some” was entirely appropriate, and it’s not the fault of the authors that the dingbats who wrote this “open letter” chose to infer something else. When one reports a thing, one doesn’t need statistics to back it up. If a meteor wipes out Stockholm, it’s clearly true to say “some Swedish cities have been wiped out by meteors”.
I find this sort of intellectual sloppiness to be common among these people, and yes, it’s reflected in their poor language skills.
“Here’s a study …”
“No! Listen to Lived Experience!”
“Here’s some Lived Experience…”
“You call that a study?”
“
@ Der Durchwanderer, #7
Why, that’s really the same as #notallmen. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This absurd epistle – roughly as long as St Paul’s to the Ephesians – has been signed by the Chair of the British Council’s Engliah Language Advisory Group, an Oxford Emerita who describes herself as a Trans Ally in her Twitter handle. Evidence that adherence to trans dogma can transcend professionaiism and self-respect.
Other signatories include Penis Haver Phwoarr, Paedo Pete, Herr Hitler, and “Figger Naggot, Figger, Nigger Faggot, Naggot”.
I hope the BBC treat it with the seriousness it deserves. I think they will but it might be helpful to offer encouraging feedback on Caroline Lowbridge’s article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385
via the Complaints page – https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints. It might be helpful to add some positive comments about Stephen Nolan’s Stonewall podcast too.