Six people on the panel, one of whom was a woman and one of whom was…Eddie Izzard.

Shortly before the Brexit referendum, I was invited to appear on Question Time. Knowing how much of a cage-fight such occasions can be, I asked the producer if there would be another woman on the panel. I didn’t want to be the only one. “Yes, of course, don’t worry,” came the reply. 

In retrospect, I was being a bit feeble; I was a big girl and I could hold my own. It was just that, in the past, I had always much preferred shows when there was another member of my sex taking part. A dash of oestrogen dilutes the gamey testosterone with which our political class is so richly imbued. Besides, it was hardly controversial to expect half the human race to occupy a third of one current affairs panel. 

Welllll not to you maybe, but to the fans of gamey testosterone…

Anyway, I got to Brighton and was sitting in the green room where all that night’s guests were assembling. Nigel Farage was there in a natty velvet-collared check coat, comedian Eddie Izzard sported a pink beret and there was a Tory Transport minister among the rest. But no female guest. Where was she? 

She asked the producer. He said they stopped looking after Eddie said yes.

I was dumbfounded. Did a pink beret and matching lippy really qualify Eddie Izzard to be a female panellist? Did anyone seriously think that someone who lacked all of the key milestones and experiences of a woman’s life (not to mention the matching female genitalia) was qualified to take one of only two places reserved for a woman? Astonishingly, the answer was, clearly, yes. In the eyes of the BBC, at least, although not in mine and not, you can bet, in the minds of the majority of viewers who were about to tune in. 

But we’re considered demonic for seeing through those eyes.

The Guardian is so upset it can hardly breathe.

Tory MP under fire for transphobic comments about Eddie Izzard

Define “transphobic.”

Don’t be silly; of course they’re not going to define it.

A Conservative MP has been criticised for making transphobic comments that questioned whether female representation in parliament would “increase or decrease” if Eddie Izzard was elected as an MP.

How is that “transphobic”? It is a real issue that pretending men can be women will skew statistics and representation and the like. It’s not phobic to say so. It’s a tad misogynist to pretend it is.

Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, told Talk TV he “would not follow him into the toilets” if she came to parliament, and even said Keir Starmer “is not sure what he’s all about”.

Anderson told the show: “… I think Labour have got 51% of their MPs now, in parliament, are females. Now, if Eddie Izzard gets elected, I don’t know whether that increases or decreases the percentage.

“Because I’m not sure what he’s all about, Keir Starmer’s not sure what he’s all about. And you know what, the old traditional working-class Labour voters will take a look at Eddie Izzard and think, y’know, really?

Working class???? Good lord, what does Labour have to do with the working class?

Labour MP Chris Bryant told the Guardian: “Eddie is more than capable of defending herself and has run more marathons for charity than this chap could ever manage, but what I don’t understand is why playground bullies always think they are God’s gift to humanity and that LGBT folk are just waiting to pounce on them in the loo.”

Why playground bully though? Eddie Izzard is a rich and successful man, not a spindly child in glasses. Izzard is a narcissist making his personal feelings a matter of public interest while trying to appropriate womaning from actual women. Is he the victim of playground bullies or is he a playground bully himself?

Next we get a few paragraphs of background in which the Guardian refers to Izzard with “she” and “her” no fewer than nine times.

Oh gee, how nice of him.

Eddie Izzard rules out appearing on all-women Labour MP shortlists

Izzard, 60, who became famous as a cross-dressing comedian and now identifies as a gender-fluid trans woman, has made the longlist of the open contest to become Labour’s candidate for the safe seat of Sheffield Central in the next general election.

In a short telephone interview with the Guardian on Thursday, Izzard said she had suffered a “torrent of transphobic abuse” since announcing her candidacy, including being photographed by a gender-critical feminist using the women’s toilet.

Oh poor darling. How dare those bitches talk back to him just because he’s trying to shove them aside.

Though Izzard announced two years ago that she preferred to be addressed with female pronouns and wanted to be “based in girl mode from now on”, she said “I don’t mind he/him”.

Anything as long as we’re all talking about Eddie Izzard. The key thing here is to keep TALKING ABOUT EDDIE IZZARD.

Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, suggested recently that she would rather be arrested than refer to Izzard as “she”.

When asked about the possibility of misgendering someone becoming a hate crime, Duffield said: “Is that a serious thing? Is that coming to parliament anytime soon? I hope not because you might as well arrest me now. I’m not calling Eddie Izzard a woman.”

Imagine arresting people for saying Rachel Dolezal is not black. Now imagine arresting women for not saying Eddie Izzard is a woman. The first is absurd, the second is commonplace. Shut up, women, you don’t matter.

Asked for her message to Duffield, Izzard said: “She has got to join the 21st century. She’s got to catch up with the rest of us. The vast majority of the world is now moving forwards … The millennium has happened and we’re 22 years into it. So come and join us in the 21st century.”

Fuck you, Ed. We haven’t “got to” do anything at your command.

On the pronoun question, Izzard said: “I am not telling anyone else to do anything. I prefer she/her. Don’t mind he/him. Changing my pronouns after a number of years being out just seemed to align more with how I was living my life. And am I not allowed to do that?”

Depends. If you’re doing it inside your head, sure. If you’re doing it outside your head and ordering the rest of the world to play along, not necessarily.

But…

But sir. But sir, why does a system that puts compassion at its heart=taking rights away from women and giving them to men who call themselves women? Why are trans women, aka men who call themselves women, deserving of compassion at the expense of women? Why are women not deserving of compassion?

Not that we want “compassion” of course. We just want our fucking rights. We just want men like you to stop cheerfully giving our rights away and ignoring us when we object and calling that “compassion.”

The bullying escalates some more.

Those fists. Those fists used to stand for we won’t back down, for courage, for solidarity, for speaking truth to power. They stood for workers or women or people of color or lesbians and gays uniting to resist oppression. Here they just stand for we will punch you bitches.

Just to make sure everyone has all the facts –

Good

to

know.

Helen Joyce’s talk at Gonville and Caius went ahead yesterday evening; the Telegraph has details:

Naï Zakharia, an attendee of the talk, said: “There were hundreds of protesters. They screamed and hit the door. It was hard to hear the speakers. In the middle of the talk a group of protesters got in to right behind the door of the auditorium.”

All because of a woman who doesn’t believe in magic gender.

On Tuesday night, organisers were expecting 75 masked protesters to assemble at the church.

Students rallied each other via other emails, seen by The Telegraph, to “bring pots and pans to make some noise” along with “banners, flags and signs”. Protest organisers added: “Facemasks are recommended for privacy reasons.”

Make noise in order to disrupt the talk, and wear masks to do it with impunity.

Prof Ahmed said: “Senior figures in the University have expressed regret that this debate is even going ahead. The only response to that is to arrange another, bigger event like it. That is what I intend to do.”

Helen reports:

Why can’t India Willoughby be accurate?

Rowling doesn’t “view” trans women as men, she just knows that’s what they are, because it is what they are. Women are just called women; the modifier “trans” means “not literally.” The word “trans” points to fiction, pretending, fantasy, playacting, imagining.

Of course Rowling believes trans women should use “the right facilities.” It’s Willoughby who thinks trans women should intrude on women.

As for the clumsy “uses cases from around the world as proof to fear us” I suppose he means she cites examples of trans women assaulting women. Well? What’s the point here? That we should keep our bitchy mouths shut about men assaulting women? That’s not going to happen.

Pink News rushes to compile a self-serving story on how Benjamin Cohen is without flaw and critics of Pink News are demonic:

Kemi Badenoch used her first appearance as equalities minister to attack PinkNews CEO Benjamin Cohen, while claiming she would work with “compassion”.

The new women and equalities minister made her comments when asked about a series of tweets posted by Cohen in response to her appointment in Rishi Sunak’s government.

What series of tweets?

Then Benjamin Cohen, scourge of “transphobes” everywhere, calls someone a cunt.

You never have to work hard to uncover the misogyny.

Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, can dish it out but he can’t take it.

What he leaves out when he says “No we were not either sued, that’s a lie!!!” is that they weren’t sued because they backed down. True but incomplete, in short, so incomplete as to be misleading, which should not be the goal in journalism. Pink News purports to be journalism. It doesn’t call itself Pink Chatter or Pink Think, it calls itself Pink News, so it should do better than “We avoided being sued by withdrawing the assertion.”

But it’s not such a big difference morally or ethically or journalistically, and a news outlet CEO should understand this.

Even Young Labour hates women.

Originally a comment by Eava on A world with.

I feel like this rhetoric runs in parallel to that of some disability rights activists, deaf activists who oppose cochlear implants as destroying deaf culture, autism advocates who oppose therapies to help reduce or eliminate autistic behaviors, that instead we need to embrace “neurodiversity” just like gender diversity/gender expansiveness, etc. There is research being done on treatments for children with Down Syndrome that can improve their cognitive abilities, it would not be a “cure” but it would help them live fuller, independent lives, but this leads to similar claims of, if not genocide, eliminationism. Which is so ironic because if there were treatments for Down Syndrome that could help those children become functionally independent, I would bet more women would opt to continue a pregnancy vs have an abortion if they got a prenantal diagnosis of Down Syndrome.

The idea that we’re all perfect how we are born gets twisted by TRAs and disability rights advocates to make any attempts to cure or repair disabilities “genocidal”. Of course, the irony is overwhelming where a surgery to restore a child’s ability to hear is verboten, but surgeries to remove or create body parts, leading to sterility and lack of sexual function, is “life saving health care”.

I think the other big sleight of hand at work here is equating being trans with being gender nonconforming. This rhetorical tactic is trying to say Gender Critical feminists not only want to eliminate trans people, but they want to eliminate people who don’t conform to the societal stereotypes for their sex. It completely misses the point that GC feminists don’t believe we have a “gender identity” and nothing about how we dress, how we behave, or who we sleep with changes that.

I want a world where no one feels they have to physically alter their bodies to be happy, where a gay boy and lesbian girl are free of the homophobia that makes them feel the only way they can live the life they want is to alter their bodies and claim to be the opposite sex. Where a heterosexual girl does not feel targeted, devalued, and unsafe in her female body, so worthless because of misogyny (familial or societal) that the only way out she sees is to make her body appear male and claim a male identity. And a society where pubescent boys can find treatment for AGP behaviors before it becomes their identity and way of life.

I do think there will be people who can’t get to the point where they make peace with their body and natal sex. There are people for whom no treatment, psychological, medical, etc. helps them achieve peace. I believe we can make space in society for people who can’t find relief any other way than transition. But that number is incredibly small and doesn’t require rewriting laws and language to accommodate them.

Here’s the whole letter sent to all Cambridge sociology students by the big boss of sociology:

In the first sentence Desai takes for granted that “distress was caused to” the students by the fact that Helen Joyce was giving a talk at Cambridge – as if she were a proponent of genocide or something equally horrifying.

In the next sentence she takes it for granted that Helen Joyce’s lecture is “potentially harmful” – as if she were a proponent of genocide or something equally horrifying. It’s pretty evil, this kind of thing. If someone were giving talks at universities advocating slavery for lesser races, or literal non-metaphorical LITERAL genocide, or the right of men to murder their female relatives, I would consider that harmful, but after all these years I still don’t consider it harmful to point out that humans can’t change sex.

In the next sentence Desai says with regret that “we” (the good people?) can’t tell independent colleges to disinvite speakers “we” disapprove of. She doesn’t, of course, go to the trouble of saying why “we” disapprove – she treats it as self-evident.

In the next sentence Desai gloats that the University’s alphabet groups have written to the guilty independent college to “express dismay.” Hooray for universities and students and the right and need to think carefully about things!

In the next two sentences Desai says grovel grovel grovel grovel please don’t hit me.

In the final sentence Desai says there’s a “welfare event” and a “gathering” in the evening – I guess so that the stricken prostrated students can get medication and prayer and mugs of Horlicks.

What a pathetic display.

Inclusion crime klaxon:

Dear Students:

PANIC!!!!!!

PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC

love,

Head of Sociology at Ancient University

Cambridge is what now?

It aimed to encourage students to speak more “inclusively” and not fall foul of those who may be offended by sex- specific pronouns. But the University of Cambridge’s decision to say Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German has prompted warnings from linguists that students risk making a fool of themselves when talking with native speakers.

[There’s also singular and plural. …students risk making fools of themselves, not a fool of themselves. Subject-object agreement.]

The students have been urged to

use “inclusive language” and “to use gender- and non-binary-inclusive language when we address or refer to students and colleagues, both in writing and in speech in English and in German”.

Language can’t be “inclusive” in that way without ceasing to do the job language is there to do.

Course managers said they encouraged students and staff to choose newer forms with plural nouns.

When writing, they may render feminine nouns unisex by inserting an asterisk before the suffix — a nonstandard usage known as the “gender star”.

Funny that there’s no mention of making masculine nouns unisex. Funny how it’s always women who have to be disappeared, and never men. Ha ha.

A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said: “As it clearly states on the faculty of modern and medieval languages and linguistics website, ‘students are free to choose for themselves how to engage with inclusive language when speaking and writing in German’. To suggest otherwise is entirely wrong.”

But by calling it “inclusive” language they’re implying that the alternative is the enemy of “inclusivity.”

This is an odd question.

Meaning, do I want a world without people who are so unhappy in their own bodies that they wreck them in an attempt to be the other kind of body? Of course.

On the other hand if he means do I want a world where everyone conforms to gender rules, of course not. He’s apparently not bright enough to frame the question carefully.

And then he goes on to pretend he asked something different altogether.

Ah ah ah no you don’t, that’s not what you asked. You didn’t include the bit about being forced back into the closet.

He’s such a sleaze.

Here’s another question: do I want a word without gender ideology in it? Again: of course.

The Times reports on the NHS’s shift on gender magic:

Most children identifying as transgender are simply going through a “transient phase”, new NHS guidance states. Doctors caring for youngsters distressed about their gender have been told that it is not a “neutral act” to help them transition socially by using their preferred new names or pronouns.

The draft guidelines say doctors should “carefully explore” all underlying health problems, including mental ill health, amid concerns that the NHS is rushing children on to irreversible puberty-blocker medication. The new “watchful approach” adopted by the NHS is a significant change of course from the “affirmative” approach advocated by campaign groups, including Mermaids.

This is in the wake of the damning Cass report.

NHS England’s draft guidance states that there is “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making” for children with gender dysphoria. It stresses that “in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” among younger children. “The clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence,” it reads.

If the child has “transitioned” and the gender incongruence does not persist, that child is pretty much guaranteed to experience “difficulties.”

There are situations in which you can’t claim to be “bullied” even though the other party has more power or social clout than you do. Like, for instance, when you’re the bully. A spindly kid can’t hit a bigger kid with a rock and then scream “bully” when the bigger kid demands an apology.

A Twitter warrior can’t tell a venomous lie about JK Rowling and then scream “bully” when Rowling says it’s a lie.

TinyWriter doesn’t get to complain about the number of Rowling’s followers when TinyWriter is the aggressor. It’s a very special kind of bullying to think you can bully someone famous because the fame makes it morally suspect to fight back.

Well done Ralph Fiennes.

Ralph Fiennes has mounted a vocal defence of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, saying that the “abuse directed at her is disgusting”.

In an interview with the New York Times, Fiennes discussed his role as Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films and reportedly “bristled” at the controversy surrounding the writer. Fiennes said: “JK Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centred human being. The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting, it’s appalling.”

He added: “I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women. But it’s not some obscene, uber-right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from. Even though I’m not a woman.”

I have to say, I can’t. I can’t understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women. I know what it is, but I can’t understand it. That’s the whole problem in a nutshell. No, I don’t understand how men can think it’s ok to pretend to be women and then try to bully all women into agreeing that the men are indeed women. I don’t understand how they can expect us to comply without a murmur, let alone agree that yes indeed they are women.

That’s not the point though, the point is hooray for Ralph Fiennes.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Feminism requires saying “This is not for you.”

I think the problem there, Bjarte, is that Capitalism and Socialism are both “dominator” structures. According to Riane Eisler, the ideal to strive for is the “partnership” model. So the struggle is framed as Left v Right, when it really should be framed as trust v demand, or order v mutual respect. I realize that what Eisler is referring to is an ideal form of society, and I’m not sure that we are capable of reaching for it as we are presently driven towards power.

When we talk about politics, we tend to fight each other based on the notion that either “right” is good and virtuous, or “Left” is the virtuous side, when neither is good nor virtuous. So, until we can rid ourselves of the dominator hunger for power, we will continue to struggle to find any sort of achieving equality for the minorities whehter they are sex, race or cultural. Authoritarians need to have someone to blame for their struggles in order to get more authority, and authoritarians populate nearly all of the ideologies on the left-right continuum.

When left-wingers talk about how evil capitalism and colonialism are, they conveniently ignore the coercion that it takes to convert a society from monarchy to a socialist society, as in China and Russia. And with XI’s moves to retain power over the weekend by purging those who were not his allies, we can see that even a capitalist-communist hybrid is not immune from being a dominator society. The Soviets made this clear when they told people that their usage of force was necessary in order to evolve into the New Soviet Man.

Pressing for diversity makes people feel good, but in the end, there is an aspect of coercion that is required. Whether it’s justified, as in bringing racial and sexual minorities into the power structure, or not justified in the examples of pressing for fake pronoun usage and male access to women’s private spaces, there is still a power exchange.

Eisler, being a futurist, is certainly aware that we can’t force a partnership culture (that would certainly be antithetical, that we perhaps have to evolve into it. I think that once we stop thinking of our possibilies as being limited to a left-right scalar, we will nudge towards that, but it’s so hard to talk about politics as they are without devolving into it. The reason that I remain a Democrat despite their capture by the TA’s, is that most of their social programs align with my perceptions of my needs and the needs of people I know about. But I recognize their limitations and am active so that I can try to influence them from a local standpoint.

Transactivism is a function of male domination, which is why it’s accepted and pushed by left-leaning men. It’s a socially acceptable aspect of male domination, and if conservative men figure that out, they’ll support it, too. We know that if affirms the gender structure, they haven’t figured it out yet.

Feminism at its ideal is in tune with the partnership model, which is why it struggles so hard to gain traction even among women. I see so many women who are mistaken in thinking the purpose of feminism is in using oppression to seek special favors in society, It’s hard to get through, because the dominator model is the medium we swim in and depend on, much as fish depend on water.

We can’t fix all this in ours or the next or the next generation, since we currently see through the lens of a balance of power. Once we get past that, in however many centuries from now, then we can advance as a society. In High School, the Catholics taught us that we need a “second Copernican revolution,” but instead of in technology, we need it in terms of a societal change in how we see each other. I had hope for the Church as a Catholic teen, but then realized in a confession one day, just how authoritarian it will always be and must be, because they are nothing without power and will never give it up willingly.

I don’t think a revolution could move our world into a partnership model, I think only evolution could do that. Revolutions are coercive, and you end up being in a battle against counterrevolutionaries to maintain what you achieved. But partnership is an ideal we can strive for now, if people can discard their reliance on a left-right model where all your political opponents are “extremists” on one end or the other. It’s still a hunger for power either way.