You want aggravated offence?
Even if someone looks like a man, talks like a man and actually is a man, you can now get yourself in trouble if you refer to him as a man.
That’s been true for at least ten years.
That’s the take-home message of last week’s social-media bust-up over Melissa Poulton, previously known as Matthew Viner.
Previously known as Matthew Viner because that was his name, presumably on all kinds of official documents and records. It’s his new handle that’s the alias, not his old one.
Poulton is a transwoman who has been selected as the Green Party’s candidate for Bromsgrove in the next UK General Election. He describes himself as a ‘proud lesbian’. Last week, Rachel Maclean, the MP for Redditch and deputy chair of the Conservative Party, shared a post on X that referred to Poulton as a ‘man who wears a wig’.
I wonder why the Greens selected him. Is he particularly electable, charismatic, effective, inspiring?
Poulton was then invited on to BBC News Midlands to respond to Maclean’s comments.
Easy way to get onto the BBC, isn’t it – look ridiculous, tell silly lies, inspire someone to point out that you look ridiculous and tell silly lies and boom, you’re talking into a microphone.
As the Mail on Sunday reported earlier this year, Labour is considering making it an ‘aggravated offence’ to purposefully ‘misgender’ a trans person. Should Labour win the next election, people may soon face serious legal trouble, even imprisonment, for accurately describing a man like Poulton as a man.
It’s so churchy – so theocratic. You have to repeat the lies; you may not say they are lies; if you defy our rules we’ll torture you to death.
And people wonder why right wing nuts get elected. The left has destroyed its credibility on so many issues.
Brian, it’s the horseshoe effect I think. At a certain point the political extremes become functionally indistinguishable. The incoherent Trump supports who just want to see ‘libruls’ hurt, even at their own expense, vs the ‘progressives’ who support anything or one the right hate on the grounds that it must be good.
I listened to an episode of the Bulwark today. They played a clip of a progressive Democratic Party supporter saying she would not vote for the D’s if Biden was the candidate because of his failure to denounce Israel, and that even if he softened his position now it was too late. She said she would rather Trump was elected and that everyone experienced the short term pain before coming to their senses. Apart from the delusions that it would be short term pain, or that people would come to their senses, the total lack of understanding about the consequences of Trump, or even the modern Republican Party winning the next elections is mind boggling.
@Rob
I think, this “horseshoe” came about as follows:
Originally, a core principle of the left is to evaluate people not by the group they belong to (which is the basis of most right-wing politics), but on an individual basis.
But then, the left realized (correctly) that people in marginalized groups suffer from aggression those in dominant groups may not even perceive and that their voices are often not heard (all-white, all male conference panels, for example). So the conclusion was that we (privileged people) need to amplify those voices and listen to claims of aggression, even if we do not fully understand or can feel the nature of the aggression (like men saying “I’d love to be cat-called”.) In addition, we realized that marginalized people had it more difficult than others, so affirmative action was born.
All that was reasonable.
But then some people realized something “nice”: If you amplify the voices of marginalized people, you have to mute some voices of privileged people. The nice thing about this is that you can use this to actually silence people – claiming someone is “an old, white man” suddenly becomes an argument against his views, no matter how correct they are.
This worked together with the post-modern idea that all arguments and realities are more or less equally valid (I once read the statement that the god Apollon and the concept of an electron are both stories to make sense of the world, nothing more), makes it possible to simply dismiss the views of people if they belong to a privileged group.
And from that, a purity spiral/oppression olympics emerged: If all points of view are equally valid on their own, the only way to evaluate them is to think about how marginalized the person holding the view is. The more marginalized they are, the more importance we should ascribe to what they say.
And this, the most important question to answer is “who is the most marginalized”? Their point of view is then automatically the most valid. This also implies that no matter how marginalized you are, if I am more marginalized than you, I can claim superiority and tell you to shut up. This is why narcissists are very attracted to the idea of being “trans” – it centers them and allows them to silence others while feeling totally justified.
The end result of this is that the left lost one of their core principles and suddenly the group you belong to is more important than your individuality, exactly as right-wing people do. And this is how the left got to justify males in women’s prisons or the murders committed by Hamas.
8.9m people have now viewed the BBC’s original tweet about Melissa, and 649 have liked it – just over i in 14,000. I wonder how many are more likely to take Green policies more seriously as a result. Incidentally I have good friends who are Green Party activists who seem unaware that this nonsense is being perpetrated in the party’s name.
How I wish there were a party that took the threats of climate change really seriously, and articulated effective science-based policies for getting to grips with them. Unfortunately the Green Party is not it.
Richard, in my view, and in the view of many here, the NZ Green Party is dead as a science based environment oriented force. It’s doing well politically. It’s never had more seats or a bigger share of the vote. But the old hands who drove the party from obscurity, who gave it the teeth and the mana to achieve have gone due to retirement, untimely death, or being sidelined (too old, male and white). The leaders and face of the party now are all squarely focussed on social justice issues and pay lip service to the environment except as a way of gaining support from swing voters who still perceive them as the party of the environment.
Well of course not, because being a (logical) environmentalist means you’re telling people of an inconvenient ethnicity, “No, you can’t industrialize, you must limit the number of children you have, and oh, by the way, we need to knock over your sacred mountain because it contains lithium and cobalt.” Much more fun to just validate everyone’s ridiculous beliefs…
I’m not at all bothered by someone correctly referring to Poulton as a man, but think bringing up unfortunate but irrelevant aspects of an opponent’s personal appearance is in poor taste.
Is it irrelevant in this context though? He doesn’t wear a wig to cover baldness, he wears a wig to mimic the appearance of a woman with longish hair.
Rob, it makes zero sense to hope for Trump to win if you really don’t want someone supporting Israel. I suspect a lot of that is just performance art. It’s possibly someone who just wants someone to break shit, and Biden isn’t doing that.
Sastra, I usually agree with that, but in this case, I think the point is well taken. He’s a man wearing a wig to pretend he’s a woman. I think that’s legitimate; she isn’t criticizing his personal appearance so much as the fact that his supposed womanhood is superficial. At least, that’s how I read it.
I’m not sure it’s irrelevant here. It’s more than a matter of aesthetics, personal grooming or fashion. The wig is part of what he’s using to “prove” he’s a woman. If he’s claiming to be a woman and a “proud lesbian,” then he’s the one who’s brought his “womanliness” into the conversation. If his “femaleness” is made up entirely of his outfit (which it must be, because he’s male), then it’s fair game: it’s a part of his “womanface” costume. It would be similar to pointing out that a white candidate who was claiming to be a “proud member of the Black community,” was in blackface. It’s not just an ill-advised choice in cosmetics.
So saying that he’s the former Matthew Viner, former Conservative Party candidate, now wearing a wig and claiming to be a woman, that’s fair game. He might prefer to be called Melissa Poulton, but his past is still his past. So if the wig is both womanface and an attempt at disguise, then that’s double the grounds for fair comment.
My complaint was meant to be humorous — all the agonized handwringing is over the first part of the phrase — but I see the argument.
If Poulton was running as a transvestite — or was trying to pass for a long-haired man — pointing out that hey, it’s really a wig, would be petty and, well, Trumpian. But the wig is, presumably, “something he’s using to prove (or signify) that he’s a woman” so it’s perfectly legitimate to point out he’s not. Though of course if it was his own hair that’s not exactly an improvement.