When you say some things that some people don’t like
James Kirkup wrote about the Jenni Murray denunciation yesterday:
Here we go again. Perhaps there should be a template for journalists writing about transgender issues and the treatment of women with the “wrong” opinions. The template would look something like this:
A small group of noisy, angry people, many of them male, have demanded that [Insert woman’s name] not be allowed to speak/ appear/ have a job/ do anything because [woman] once said things the small group of people didn’t like or agree with.
Really, we could use it for so many cases and so many women: Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Janice Turner, Posy Parker, Linda Bellos…
…me…
And a great many more, and the ranks keep growing all the time.
This comes about because last year, Murray said some things that some people didn’t like. You can read about them here but the gist was that someone who is born male and has lived as a man cannot truly become a woman by use of either surgery or makeup, because biology and socialisation are, well, real and cannot be magicked away by someone’s words or feelings.
For those remarks, Murray must, of course, be cast into the outer darkness forever; nothing should ever be heard from her again, on any subject. Never mind that the Oxford event in question is a broad one about “Powerful Women in History”. Never mind that it will see Murray be questioned about her positions and views, explaining and answering for them. The mere fact that she once said something some people didn’t like means that hosting her and allowing her to speak (about any topic) is a harmful and transphobic act, at least according to our excitable young friends at Oxford.
Literally once. It was that one Times piece. One piece, expressing one view that they consider Forbidden, and they need to do their best to get her thrown out of everything they can reach.
There’s nothing new or surprising about this, of course. It’s just part of the same old story that’s seen those women I mentioned above face attempts to make them shut up. It’s also grimly consistent with the anti-intellectual, anti-evidence approach taken by rather too many people at universities and which has been described eloquently by Prof Kathleen Stock and colleagues here.
Kirkup ended on a cheerful note, because the History Society didn’t comply, but he had to update it today after Murray canceled.
(Shortest passage I have ever blockquoted.) Oh yes, OB. They would have you high on their list and come for you very early on.
Trump’s America is not Nazi Germany yet; but it is headed in that direction. (I must check if de Tocqueville anticipated Trumpism in any way, and how he might have suggested it be dealt with.)
Trump loves mass rallies. So did Adolph. Trump loves being the centre of attention; as did Adolph. Both favoured programs of political revenge for purported past injustices, and proclaimed to their mass of supporters the need for ‘greatness’. And their supporters bought it by the truckload and lapped it up like cats around a dropped pot of custard.
Trump’s fanfare for the common man is the line of an ambitious salesman peddling junk from door to door. Behind his smarmy veneer, he has nonetheless a contempt for his customers that he tries not to show because he needs them so badly and bigly. But it is there in his play to their once-greatness.. He treats them like Homer and Betty Simpson, because that is what they are; in his exalted, bonespurs-elevated view.
But to give Trump his due, he does not head up a party all dressed in military-style uniforms.
Yet.
Of course, Omar, it is not Trump that has Ophelia in his sights, but leftists that have abused and maligned her. It is leftists that are thought policing people on trans issues (okay, Trump may be, too, but he isn’t getting people no-platformed for being trans-positive).
In short, while Trump tears apart all the checks and balances, the entire bill of rights, and the body of the constitution, burns down all the institutions that are supposed to protect us from people like Trump, and works to destroy all global cooperation, while he insults world leaders and withdraws from the world into an isolationist stance (except for supporting every dictator he can), the left is tearing itself apart by purity doctrines that insist everyone must believe one thing and one thing only about an issue that is not as clear cut and simple as they want it to be. Both right and left are doing their level best to impose a gender-essentialism on women that we (we being feminists, at least up to and including second wave – in fact, mostly second wave) have spent decades trying to defeat. They are both trying to tell women to sit down and shut up and let the men talk. They are both telling women what to do, how to do it, what to think, and how to think it. And the two camps hate each other with a passion, but they come together on one thing: they both hate women, at least women who prefer to determine for themselves what it means to be a woman rather than letting self-interested and/or lustful men determine it for them.
We are screwed.
So, guess you missed the whole Freethought Blogs “Transwomen are women: yes or no?’ shitshow, eh? This is not Ophelia making a prediction, this is Ophelia recalling history.
YNnB:
Damn and damn again! I done did…! And there’s nothing I love more than a good old-fashioned shitfight. Damn and blast!
iknklast: Thanks for that. It appears that the Left has learned nothing from its own history, and is thus condemned most likely to repeat it. ‘Holier-than-thou’ can be a dangerous game. I think they would all be best advised to switch to Russian roulette.
Just a thought.
It’s a good bet that it’s a lot less entertaining for those who, like our host, have had one forced upon them. You might relish the prospect or sit back and “get your popcorn,” but it’s not something I would wish upon anyone I cared about. It’s ugly, hateful and vicious. And that’s from my perspective as a distant, online bystander. I can’t imagine being the actual focus of the ugliness, hatred and viciousness. Ophelia doesn’t have to imagine it at all; she was the focus of such bile and vitriol. It’s not something anyone should have to endure for others to take in as a spectator sport.
I just about left FtB over the whole thing (I restricted myself to Ally and Mano after that) but then Mano and his crowd got too toxic.
Ally just wasn’t enough to continue giving them clicks.
YNnB:
“It’s a good bet that it’s a lot less entertaining for those who, like our host, have had one [shitfight] forced upon them. ”
Nothing more to say on that, except re my comment @#4, where my intention was irony. But I was away from school the day we had irony, so I’m still catching up, particularly on the presentation part. ;-).
FTB I found to be pretty obnoxious back in the time Ophelia had a B&W shopfront there. So I came back to this vintage site.
I have spent far too much time immersed in the many forms of Zen and Taoism and such to take the scribblings of the resident FTB egotists at face value.
Omar
?????????????????
What was that all about? Did you not read the post? It has nothing to do with Trump. If you’d read the post (rather than just a sentence or two?) maybe you wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that I was saying Trump was coming to get me.
To be perfectly frank you could just skip all the palaver about “irony” and apologize for accusing me of egomaniacal vanity on the basis of not reading the post.
OB:
I read both your threadstarter and the linked Spectator piece by Kirkup.
Iknklast I think nailed it pretty well at #2:
To me, in Trump’s America there are distinct echoes of the 1930s and the rise in Germany of the Nazi party. And transgender people were treated the same as all the other groupings whose removal in the Leader’s belief would purify Germany and make it great again.
To which list you added yourself. I do not question your justification for doing that; nor do I see any egotism in it, find any, or accuse you of any at all.
Not appropriate, so no.
NO.
Kirkup ends his Spectator piece with a postscript:
Murray, facing the prospect of trying to speak over a howling mob trying to shut her up, has for her own reasons withdrawn from the Oxford event. Maybe it was because in a university context, one interjection can lead rapidly to a chorus of them, drowning the speaker out. And that gives repressors everywhere a victory. Bad outcome.
If it is just another case of a public figure being criticised by a noisy minority, well that goes with the territory. But it is not. Your opponents are not exactly of the school of Voltaire. And they have had a win in Oxford University. IMHO repression is indivisible. Just like a mass shooting, it encourages copycats.
Could this theme be taken up inTrump’s America? Or is that too wild and off-topic a suggestion?
Emphatic refusal to apologize duly noted.
OB: I hope you have also noted in there that I have not said what you accuse me of saying. I cannot see what I have to apologise for.
“…accusing me of egomaniacal vanity on the basis of not reading the post.” ?
I made no such accusation, and only quoted what you said about yourself.
And I did read the post. So thank you very much.
Oh honestly.
See my reply @ 8. See all those question marks. See the question that follows. I was expressing inability to extract meaning from your reply @ 7. You didn’t even bother to answer that question.
You comment more or less at random, following some train of thought of your own. That can make it hard to figure out what you mean. As a result, it’s rather annoying when you insist that you had no intention at all of implying that I said “…and me…” in order to dramatize myself as being high on Trump’s list of people to lock up, given what you said @ 1. That’s what your comment @ 1 looked like to me and, I gather, to iknklast and Your Name’s not Bruce. You could have just said that’s not what you meant and explained clearly what you did mean, but instead you just wrote another random essay.
I don’t really understand why all this is not obvious to you. You seem to be coat-trailing aka trolling. It’s annoying.
Yes, this is what it came across as to me, sarcasm.
Maybe we can actually clear this up.
Omar: what did you mean by your first paragraph @ 1, after you quoted “…and me…”?
To me that looks like OBVIOUS sarcasm, saying “Oh yes OB Trump and his people would have you high on their list and come for you very early on” meaning of course they wouldn’t.
Please explain exactly what you did mean by it if it’s not the above.
Then please explain why you brought Trump into it when the post is about Jenni Murray and the assholes who wanted her to shut up.
Just plainly and literally, please, no irony or “irony” or other mystifications.
I was not being at all sarcastic there, and I thought it obvious. My mistake.
“To me that looks like OBVIOUS sarcasm, saying ‘Oh yes OB Trump and his people would have you high on their list and come for you very early on” meaning of course they wouldn’t.’
To me it was the very opposite. I was saying “Oh yes OB Trump and his people would have you high on their list and come for you very early on” meaning of course just that. They would. And I think you underestimate yourself there.
A win for the antidemocrats in one part of the Anglophone world cheers their cothinkers on elsewhere. Iknclast at #2 put it better than I could.
I stand by that. I see too many parallels with the 1930s in the modern world. And I am sure Trump, who IMHO is the most dangerous man around today, would approve of what happened to Jenni Murray at Oxford.
I sincerely hope that answers your questions.
Oh. Ok.
*scratches head in puzzlement*
I mean…they would have a long long long list of journalists, activists, podcasters, “disloyal” military and police, “suspect” people of the wrong races and nationalities, etc etc etc before they got to bloggers and then a long list of more prominent bloggers before they got to me, but ok.
In that case I apologize for misunderstanding you.
Thanks for that.
I aploogize too. Sorry for seeing your words through my sarcasm filter. Sometimes I’m just too cynical and too easily see it in, or project it onto others. I will try to be more cautious in my attribution of such in the future.
YNnB:
Likewise.
Not wanting to harsh the buzz or disturb the group hug, but Omar, can I sincerely say that this is not the first time that intelligent people have taken your meaning as the opposite of what you say you mean. Communication is a two way process and the reader has to actually pay attention, but if the writer is often having to clarify themselves and answer follow up questions, then maybe the original writing could have been clearer. I’m glad this has all been sorted.
That. To be honest I don’t think YNnB had anything to apologize for, and I apologized only because my exasperation nudged me into making a big deal of it so I felt somewhat obligated. But yes: the point about “You comment more or less at random, following some train of thought of your own. That can make it hard to figure out what you mean.” stands, and the habit remains irritating. If you’re being misunderstood, Omar, it will be because you’re playing this game you play, and it can get tiresome.
In other words…now I think of it, it’s quite passive-aggressive, this business of writing gnomic little essays and then being all surprised and hurt when we don’t grasp your meaning.