The prioritisation of the feelings of the chattering classes
So it is. Well spotted.
And even the “feelings” of said chattering classes aren’t that important. The feelings are seven or eight times removed. It’s not really any skin off the ass of the chattering classes if men in prison don’t get to pretend to be women in order to be housed in the women’s prison. It’s a political “feeling” of sorts, but not the kind we should feel either compassion for or solidarity with. It’s a feeling of fabricated and exaggerated “caring” about men who identify as women coupled with a brutal indifference to women. It’s not like the feeling of compassion for and solidarity with starving refugees fleeing violence in Nigeria or El Salvador, or for workers trying to unionize meatpacking plants in Wisconsin, or for women beaten and tortured and murdered in Afghanistan. It’s sentimental exaggerated “concern” for men in rich countries who want to pretend to be women.
It’s as I said on another thread, the abuse of women is treated as hypothetical – even though it isn’t – and the anguish of men is treated as real – even though it isn’t.
It’s that unthinking assumption that always angers me the most. That failure to check privilege. We humans are fatally prone to that, so what we do, if we’re adults, is try to correct for it. NO DEBATE is the polar opposite of trying to correct for it. It’s wilful refusal to correct for it. Correcting for it is a thing only an awful TERF would do, and you wouldn’t be one of them because you might find the it happening to you with a barbed-wired baseball bat.