You WILL agree that men are women
Sian Cain at the Guardian writes:
The Women’s prize for fiction has issued a strongly worded statement saying that it “deplores any attempts to malign or bully” authors nominated for the prize, after trans novelist Torrey Peters was targeted in an open letter.
In other words the Women’s prize for fiction has issued a statement maligning and bullying women who say the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women as opposed to men who claim to be women. So I guess the Women’s prize for fiction isn’t for women any more.
The US writer, who is nominated for the £30,000 award for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, was the subject of a letter published online on Tuesday by the Wild Women Writing Club. The letter, which is signed by several dead women writers including Emily Dickinson and Daphne du Maurier, claims that some signatories were using pseudonyms “because of the threat of harassment by trans extremists and/or cancellation by the book industry”.
Says Sian Cain in the paragraph after the one where she reports that the Women’s prize for fiction has shouted at women for saying the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women. Gee I wonder why any woman would think there’s a threat of harassment and/or cancellation if she dares to say that women are women and men are not women.
The signatories argue that the decision to longlist Peters for the Women’s prize, founded 25 years ago in the aftermath of an all-male Booker shortlist, “communicates powerfully that women authors are unworthy of our own prize, and that it is fine to allow male people to appropriate our honours … the moment you decided that a male author was eligible, the award ceased to be the Women’s prize and became simply the Fiction prize.”
Obviously. If you make male authors eligible, obviously it’s not a women’s prize any more.
The letter was condemned by numerous authors around the world, including previous nominee Elif Shafak, who congratulated Peters on her nomination and said: “After seeing yesterday’s unacceptable, unethical open letter, we need to say, again and again, #TransWomenareWomen. Trans women writers are my sisters.”
But they’re not. They’re not women, and they’re not anybody’s sisters.
In their statement, published on Wednesday, the Women’s prize organisers said they were “immensely proud of the exceptional and varied longlist””.
“Varied” is good, but if it’s “varied” in the sense of including men, then by definition it’s not a women’s prize any more.
“The prize is firmly opposed to any form of discrimination on the basis of race, age, sexuality, gender identity and all other protected characteristics, and deplores any attempts to malign or bully the judges or the authors.”
Well that’s just fucking stupid. If we’re not allowed to “discriminate” i.e. see the difference between women and men any more, then we can’t organize politically, we can’t talk about misogyny and sexism, we can’t campaign against rape, we can’t press the police and the courts to take rape seriously and not assume women are always lying, we can’t sue employers for paying women less, we basically can’t have anything.
Is that a problem? Isn’t that the whole point of TRA?
You lose, they win. Simples.
I guess it’s now the People Who Sometimes Wear Lipstick and Dresses Prize for Fiction. And they admit so here: “The prize is firmly opposed to any form of discrimination on the basis of … gender identity” – sex was not mentioned, it has been replaced.
“Sex discrimination” was the whole point of the prize in the first place, to secure a space for female authors and female authors alone. Just as sports exclusively for women and girls is for the benefit of women and girls.
One of these things is not like the other. One’s race, age and sexuality do not prevent one from being a woman. Being male does. No “gender identity” can turn someone who is a non-woman into a woman.
No prizes for guessing which dishonest FTB ‘blogger’ wrote that. No surprise that she followed up with this bit of hypocrisy over the ‘dead writers’ who signed the letter:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2021/04/07/the-silent-majority-agrees-with-me-gender-critical-edition/
The letter did not “malign or bully” the male-who-thinks-he-is-female author; it disagreed with his claim to be a woman…and his claim to be eligible for a prize set aside for women.
Nor is it unethical to disagree with someone’s self assessment. Sometimes I think they throw around every possible negative word in their limited vocabulary.
No. It means that we are directly claiming that it is not unusual for men to ignore women’s writing, and refuse to consider it for prizes…or publication…or anything else.
Displaced.
WTF is “unacceptable,” or “unethical” (!) about pointing out that the Women’s Prize should be for women writers.
All this uproar over an open letter that addressed the issue is ridiculous. One public letter, containing fair comment on the author and his writing, is not “maligning or bullying” anyone, particularly if the criticisms are true. One open letter is as nothing compared the pile-on cascades of rape and death threats that TAs deal out to women who don’t agree that men are women. That’s not “targeting.” There was one male person put forward for the Women’s Prize; who else should the concerned women talk about? That’s not “targeting.” The harassment and abuse that TAs pour down onto individual women who don’t agree that people can change their sex is several magnitudes worse than publicly criticizing a relevant author one time.
I guess that means a biological male doesn’t even need to identify as a “woman” now. Can’t have any discrimination against people with gender identity “man”, can we. The Women’s prize for fiction said so.
Reminds me of Ron Swanson winning Woman of the Year… So much sitcomedy of yesteryear coming true…
Hell, the Futurama episode “Bend Her” that had Bender cheating at the olympics and getting a sex change is spot on as well.