Identity Politics

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Gender debates, religion, race, class etc.

[birdseye]

Yes, but what about it?

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Well it seems quite popular

[Deleted]

Jan 24, 2022 14:48:13 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Well it seems quite popular

[Deleted]

Jan 24, 2022 14:48:13 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Well it seems quite popular

Might need a trigger warning before posting.

.....plus a trigger warning about the trigger warning.

[birdseye]

Popular with the identities using it but less so with the remainder?

[Deleted]

"The Equality and Human Rights Commission is not fit for purpose, say Liberty and Stonewall; it is “extremely dangerous and damaging”, rails the LGBT Foundation. “Hurt and angered” activists have branded it a “hate group” and the Scottish government is enraged. A furious response to a mere regulatory body, whose sole purpose is to enforce the 2010 Equality Act. So what bigotry has the EHRC committed to inflame these tribunes of social justice? Three things, in a single week.

First, it warned the Scottish government its planned reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, which will allow anyone to change the biological sex on their birth certificate by a simple declaration (aka self-ID), has consequences for women’s rights, particularly in data collection, sport and within the criminal justice system. Then it informed Holyrood that a census question which asks a person’s sex is not (as the SNP claims) a breach of human rights. Finally, the EHRC cautioned against lumping gender identity with sexual orientation in Westminster’s conversion therapy bill. A lack of clear definitions, it said, could criminalise therapists for counselling patients with gender dysphoria. It proposed pre-legislative scrutiny by committee to bring clarity.

In other words, the EHRC did its job. It considered the Equality Act’s nine protected characteristics — age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation — and kept their competing rights in balance. Previously one has been notably ignored — sex — in favour of a concept with no legal standing at all, “gender identity”.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine’s appointment as EHRC chairwoman by Liz Truss in 2020 has been condemned as a craven political appointment. Yet her predecessor, David Isaac, was also hired by a Conservative, Nicky Morgan. Falkner isn’t even a Tory herself but a former Lib Dem now crossbench peer. Unlike Isaac, however, she did not chair Stonewall for ten years.

Under Isaac’s tenure, the EHRC always supported government plans for self-ID, wafting away feminist concerns about single-sex protections, especially in prisons and refuges. But Falkner marks the tide turning against institutional capture by LGBT groups, who enjoyed privileged access to ministers and civil servants and, as their tantrums illustrate, were uncommonly used to getting their own way."



Janice Turner
"At last, there’s a champion for women’s rights
Self-ID campaigners have grown used to getting their way but the equality commission has now drawn a line in the sand"

Times
today

[domjg]

Happy to keep discussing identity politics if needed and will do so on the main thread as it has an impact on polling and politics generally.

[leftieliberal]

Jan 29, 2022 15:02:44 GMT colin said:

Janice Turner
"At last, there’s a champion for women’s rights
Self-ID campaigners have grown used to getting their way but the equality commission has now drawn a line in the sand"

Times
today

And here is a Observer editorial saying much the same. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/30/observer-view-ehrc-decision-scotland-gender-recognition-reforms

[birdseye]

Do newspaper editorials carry any special weight? I would have thought not these days - unless of course they are saying the same as you are thinking. In the end, both are just opinions and not facts.

Take for example the issue of your sex. The fact is that its determined at birth by your chromasomes for all but a tiny number of abnormal individuals who have three of them. That remains the case for the rest of your life. Only women can carry offspring and they need male semen to conceive. Doesnt really matter that whatever the opinion or vote  of anyone from the suprmeme court to the Senned - reality doesnt change.

Doesnt matter how many laws are passed to say that the moon is made of green cheese - it isnt and cant be.

[mercian]

Feb 4, 2022 14:55:41 GMT birdseye said:

Do newspaper editorials carry any special weight? I would have thought not these days - unless of course they are saying the same as you are thinking. In the end, both are just opinions and not facts.

Take for example the issue of your sex. The fact is that its determined at birth by your chromasomes for all but a tiny number of abnormal individuals who have three of them. That remains the case for the rest of your life. Only women can carry offspring and they need male semen to conceive. Doesnt really matter that whatever the opinion or vote  of anyone from the suprmeme court to the Senned - reality doesnt change.

Doesnt matter how many laws are passed to say that the moon is made of green cheese - it isnt and cant be.

Spot on.

[Deleted]

On International Women's Context Day-

You have to be so careful .   


womansplaceuk.org/2022/03/08/anneliese-dodds-on-womans-hour/


JKR prefers less prevarication  

[Deleted]

Lia  Thomas. As a man_ 554th. As a woman _ 1st.

Ridiculous. Destroying a sporting championship.

[pete]

Mar 20, 2022 8:50:20 GMT colin said:

Lia  Thomas. As a man_ 554th. As a woman _ 1st.

Ridiculous. Destroying a sporting championship.

and the answer is?

[Deleted]

Mar 20, 2022 14:32:35 GMT pete said:

Mar 20, 2022 8:50:20 GMT colin said:

Lia  Thomas. As a man_ 554th. As a woman _ 1st.

Ridiculous. Destroying a sporting championship.

and the answer is?

Erm-close all elite swimming competitions???

You tell me.

What would you advise the woman who came  second in that race to do ?

[Deleted]

Mar 20, 2022 14:35:10 GMT colin said:

Mar 20, 2022 14:32:35 GMT pete said:

and the answer is?

Erm-close all elite swimming competitions???

You tell me.

What would you advise the woman who came  second in that race to do ?

I wonder if Sharon Davies will receive the same kind of 'attention' as JK Rowling?

www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/andrew-castle/women-discriminated-in-sport-trans-swimmer-lia-thomas/

FWIU the various sporting governing bodies (eg National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)) decide who can compete so if they make a decision that most athletes disagree with then the athletes in those sports need to refuse to compete. I will be very careful NOT to make a comparison to Russia competing in the para Olympics as that would be ripe for misrepresentation but if athletes want to protest against the rules imposed on them by their governing bodies then a LOC view would be to go on strike. I doubt the strike would last very long (maybe not even to the first event) before the governing body did a U-turn. 

PS I can even provide some polling for Brits view (might be some polling on US view but I expect it would be similar). See all the 'X' for disagree in the question under 'access' that covers 'women's sporting events'. 

yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/07/16/where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights

[Deleted]

Mar 20, 2022 19:05:20 GMT @tw said:

Mar 20, 2022 14:35:10 GMT colin said:

Erm-close all elite swimming competitions???

You tell me.

What would you advise the woman who came  second in that race to do ?

I wonder if Sharon Davies will receive the same kind of 'attention' as JK Rowling?

www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/andrew-castle/women-discriminated-in-sport-trans-swimmer-lia-thomas/

FWIU the various sporting governing bodies (eg National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)) decide who can compete so if they make a decision that most athletes disagree with then the athletes in those sports need to refuse to compete. I will be very careful NOT to make a comparison to Russia competing in the para Olympics as that would be ripe for misrepresentation but if athletes want to protest against the rules imposed on them by their governing bodies then a LOC view would be to go on strike. I doubt the strike would last very long (maybe not even to the first event) before the governing body did a U-turn. 

PS I can even provide some polling for Brits view (might be some polling on US view but I expect it would be similar). See all the 'X' for disagree in the question under 'access' that covers 'women's sporting events'. 

yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/07/16/where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights

Probably.

Anyone who claims such a race is fair has some explaining to do.

[birdseye]

Mar 20, 2022 14:32:35 GMT pete said:

Mar 20, 2022 8:50:20 GMT colin said:

Lia  Thomas. As a man_ 554th. As a woman _ 1st.

Ridiculous. Destroying a sporting championship.

and the answer is?

Simple. Reality is that his gender hasnt changed. He wishes to live as a woman which is his choice and as long as it doesnt negatively affect others is of no concern to anyone else. When it does affect others, then reality has to be recognised.

[Deleted]

This is the sort of thing which worries me :-

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-61648141

[jayblanc]

Not to be unpolite about it... But this thread seems to be a justification of having a place to complain about 'the wrong kind of progress', particularly since the thread title is it's self a canard used by those who seek to exclude certain kinds of people from politics.

Please remember that being able to open threads on new topics, is not a licence to be transphobic.

[Deleted]

Jun 1, 2022 8:55:27 GMT jayblanc said:

Not to be unpolite about it... But this thread seems to be a justification of having a place to complain about 'the wrong kind of progress', particularly since the thread title is it's self a canard used by those who seek to exclude certain kinds of people from politics.

Please remember that being able to open threads on new topics, is not a licence to be transphobic.

I don't think Kathleen Stock is "transphobic"

I don't think Zahawi is "transphobic" for agreeing with her.

I don't think shouting "Tory Scum " at him informs the debate.

But then I  have the impression that "transphobic" is a word describing anyone with a different point of view from the person using the word. A different point of view about a very complex question .

So debate itself becomes "transphobic"

[jayblanc]

Jun 1, 2022 13:24:12 GMT colin said:

I don't think Kathleen Stock is "transphobic"

I don't think Zahawi is "transphobic" for agreeing with her.

I don't think shouting "Tory Scum " at him informs the debate.

But then I  have the impression that "transphobic" is a word describing anyone with a different point of view from the person using the word. A different point of view about a very complex question .

So debate itself becomes "transphobic"

You can choose who you want to defend, and you can choose what your opinions are. You do not have a right to a platform to spout those opinions, and mount those defences with. Particularly if they are directly harmful to an already oppressed and marginalised minority. I invite you to actually read the statements, publications and opinion pieces you are wholeheartedly defending rather than making a knee-jerk defence of them on the grounds of 'debate' and 'free speech'.

This is not a place where people referring to a trans woman by saying "Reality is that his gender hasnt changed." is going to be viewed as 'innocent debate'. It's transphobic misgendering. And you seem intent on deliberately and antagonistically riling people up with 'jokes' about 'trigger warnings' and cherry picking opinion pieces and comentary from the 'gender critical'. This is not a thread started to have a 'debate', this is clearly a thread started to oppose and rattle the 'lefty liberals'.

[Deleted]

"A:gender, a network supporting trans and intersex staff across government, gives lectures to thousands of civil servants each year. Videos obtained by The Times show a course leader saying a woman or female cannot be defined and there is “no conflict” between women’s rights and transgender rights.
She insists that calling someone an “adult human female” — the dictionary definition of a woman — is bigoted and claims that “transphobia is increasingly presented as feminism”.
Civil servants fear that the voluntary courses clash with the Equality Act and breach the civil service code, which requires them to act with impartiality.
After the course, a person who did not want to be named said: “I thought it was propaganda. It’s the promotion of one view — how to think about gender and gender identity — which is not supported by legislation or common sense.
“What horrified me so much is that for anyone at the heart of the civil service interested in supporting transgender people, this is the education they are getting. Civil servants are then implementing legislation and government directives. They sign up for these courses and get told what to think.
“It is definitely against the civil service code, which says we should be dispassionately following the law and government directives without any concern for our own opinions. It’s the corruption of what should be an impartial body.”

Times June 4.



"Here are some facts I learnt by watching an “inclusion workshop” for civil servants. A brain in a jar “knows” if it is male or female and, if transplanted into the “wrong” body, would exhibit distress. This country has no legal sex-based rights. It is impossible to define what “woman” or even “female” means. There is zero conflict between women’s rights and trans rights, so beware colleagues asking too many questions; they’re probably bigots.
A:gender, “a network supporting all trans and intersex staff across government”, trains thousands of civil servants annually, from the NHS to the Cabinet Office, yet it forbids its presentations being recorded. Having endured 90 minutes of anti-scientific, legally fallacious twaddle, I can see why it avoids scrutiny.

Concerned women civil servants secretly taped and sent it to me, as they believe this “training” violates central principles of the civil service code: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. In particular it breaks the rule that they cannot frustrate policies once decisions are taken “by declining to take, or abstaining from, action which flows from these decisions”. It is their job to implement decisions, not to undermine them.

This A:gender session is conducted by Emma, who tells us she is intersex, having a vagina and uterus but XY chromosomes. She claims that as many people are intersex — 1.7 per cent — as have green eyes. The more precise figure is about 0.018 per cent. But intersex here is deployed to muddy the very idea that human sex is binary.

Indeed, the difference between sex (biology) and gender (a social construct) seems to confuse Emma. “You’d look at my nails and make-up and realise I am female,” she says. We are asked to position ourselves on spectrums of “woman-ness” and “man-ness” and told if some days we wake feeling more manly or womanly than others, we may be “gender fluid”.

This might just be tiresome gender woo-woo if it wasn’t being taught as fact to people who write and implement the small print of public equality guidance. Emma warns that defining a woman as an “adult human female” is a transphobic dogwhistle, equivalent to antisemitism. She claims that sex-based rights, which feminists speak of defending, don’t even exist. “We have equal rights!” she cries.

Women civil servants say they are scared to speak up for fear of bullying and suffering professionally. Their union, the FDA, won’t protect them. It has passed a conference motion stating there should be “boundaries” on gender-critical speech, while banning “trans-exclusionary language”, which could just mean insisting that NHS cervical smear guidance retains the word “woman”.


Although a civil servant herself, Emma seems unfamiliar with the 2010 Equality Act in which “sex” (explicitly defined as male or female) is a protected characteristic, and single-sex spaces are allowed if they are a “proportionate means to achieve a legitimate end”. Female sports, domestic violence refuges or changing rooms are among our sex-based rights. But Emma isn’t fussed about exact wording: “gender identity” is not a protected characteristic in law, but she tells us to think like it is."

Times
(extracts from) "Civil servants are being fed gender drivel"
Janice Turner

[Deleted]

"It is “outmoded and dangerous”, an “insidious” word that “distorts our understanding of European history”. Of all the historical terms being reappraised, few might have expected the word “Viking” to be causing so much bother.
A senior lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews has called for the term, a catch-all for various Scandinavian and Norse cultures from the 8th to 11th centuries, to be cancelled.
He says that there was no such thing as “a Viking” and that the term is a 19th-century mistake that borders on racist. “It is high time that historians, both academic and popular, ditched the Vikings as an outmoded and dangerous way of thinking,” Alex Woolf writes in the lead article in this month’s History Today. “The Vikings never existed; it is time to put this unhealthy fantasy to bed.”

The “ethnicisation” of the term has also had an “insidious” effect, creating the idea of a physically strong race who imposed themselves on others. “By linking military prowess and savagery to an entire ethnic group, it encourages its appropriation
by racial supremacists,” Woolf argues.

Historians are divided. On the podcast The Rest is History, Dominic Sandbrook described
any effort at cancellation as “madness” and a “waste of time”.

“Everyone knows what a Viking is,” he said. “There is no point in fighting it.”

Professor Judith Jesch, a Viking expert at the University of Nottingham, pointed to her longstanding position that the word has “usefully expanded and developed” to include the broader cultures, rather than simply pillaging. “That is how we should use it,” she wrote on The Conversation, a website.

At the Norwegian University of Oslo, Anders Winroth, a professor of medieval history, admits the word makes his job easier.

“You get many more students interested if you put the word ‘Viking’ into a course title,” he said. “But Viking is a job description, not an ethnic label.” He agreed with Woolf that Viking imagery has inspired white supremacists such as the so-called QAnon Shaman who stormed the US Capitol last year.

The question is what term could replace it. “It’s hard to change ingrained habits,” Winroth said."

Times today

[jayblanc]

Ah yes, copy pasting from 'opinion' news articles of people wilfully misinterpreting the issues in order to make them look absurdist. Please do stop showing your ass, Colin.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Jun 1, 2022 16:11:05 GMT jayblanc said:

Jun 1, 2022 13:24:12 GMT colin said:

This is not a thread started to have a 'debate', this is clearly a thread started to oppose and rattle the 'lefty liberals'.

I’m not in the habit of discussing race, religion or gender etc. much at all, let alone baiting people about it. I started the thread because as I said the topic seemed quite popular at the time and I had some ideas to post about class, though stuff happened and didn’t get around to it. 

[birdseye]

Mar 20, 2022 19:05:20 GMT @Deleted said:

Mar 20, 2022 14:35:10 GMT colin said:

Erm-close all elite swimming competitions???

You tell me.

What would you advise the woman who came  second in that race to do ?

I wonder if Sharon Davies will receive the same kind of 'attention' as JK Rowling?

www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/andrew-castle/women-discriminated-in-sport-trans-swimmer-lia-thomas/

FWIU the various sporting governing bodies (eg National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)) decide who can compete so if they make a decision that most athletes disagree with then the athletes in those sports need to refuse to compete. I will be very careful NOT to make a comparison to Russia competing in the para Olympics as that would be ripe for misrepresentation but if athletes want to protest against the rules imposed on them by their governing bodies then a LOC view would be to go on strike. I doubt the strike would last very long (maybe not even to the first event) before the governing body did a U-turn. 

PS I can even provide some polling for Brits view (might be some polling on US view but I expect it would be similar). See all the 'X' for disagree in the question under 'access' that covers 'women's sporting events'. 

yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/07/16/where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights

Interesting and surprising you gov poll result. I had the impression from radio interviews that a lot of women objected to self identified transgender women using womens changing rooms. Clearly not correct

But the attitude that I have never understood is the need that LGBT people feel to declare their gender / sexuality etc. Is it just the attention craving "look at me I am different" ?

[jayblanc]

Jun 7, 2022 20:08:58 GMT birdseye said:

Interesting and surprising you gov poll result. I had the impression from radio interviews that a lot of women objected to self identified transgender women using womens changing rooms. Clearly not correct

But the attitude that I have never understood is the need that LGBT people feel to declare their gender / sexuality etc. Is it just the attention craving "look at me I am different" ?

What's up with Straight Cisgendered People constantly shoving their genders and sexuality in our faces, demanding to be called the normal ones just because they make up the majority of people, all these movies and tv-shows showing a 'normal' woman and a 'normal' man kissing! They should keep it private and not constantly draw attention to their gender and sexuality. Cis-straight people are just so  attention craving, they want it all to be about their genders and sexualities. The even give genders to underarm deodorants! How am I supposed to explain these things to my non-existent child.

[mercian]

Definition of normal
1: a form or state regarded as the norm : STANDARD