To people with a slightly firmer grip on reality
James Kirkup on Greens and Challenors and Terfblockers:
Aimee Challenor was a prominent Green activist. She was the party’s spokesperson on equalities issues and a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership. Aimee Challenor was a Green candidate in the 2017 general election and the 2018 local government elections. In both elections, her election agent was her father, David “Baloo” Challenor.
David Challenor was last month convicted of torturing and raping a ten-year old girl in the attic of the family home. He was charged with those crimes in 2016. So Aimee Challenor was nominated for public office for the Green Party by a man awaiting trial for the most serious sexual offences against a child. (Read more about this here, if you want to.) Aimee Challenor was aware of her father’s arrest at the time she accepted his nomination; at least some Green Party officials knew too.
Questions are being asked, inquiries are being predicted, tweets are being deleted.
Aimee Challenor was an active Green campaigner on transgender issues. As the party’s equalities spokesperson, she was an enthusiastic participant in the debate about changing the law on legal gender, arguing in favour of rules where a person can legally chose their own gender (and gain the relevant legal rights) without external check or verification.
Critics of such a “self-ID” policy say that among the issues it raises are worries about safeguarding and access to girls or vulnerable women. They fear that allowing any man who says “I am a woman” to be treated as a woman could allow unscrupulous men to declare themselves female in order to gain privileged access to female-only spaces or to supervise girls through organisations such as Girl Guides.
To summarise, then, a politician stood for public office knowing her election agent was awaiting trial for the rape and torture of a young girl. The politician also advocated a policy that some people fear could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls.
Not only do some people fear the policy of self-declared trans womanhood could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls, they also have a very hard time seeing how anyone can promise that would not happen. It’s not just “self-declaration could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls,” it’s also “you have not enunciated any way to ensure sexual predators would not get access to girls via self-declaration.”
The Green Party ardently defended Aimee Challenor when all this came out.
All of this focussed some attention, in the Green Party and elsewhere, on those safeguarding questions some people raise about the gender policy Aimee Challenor so enthusiastically promoted.
Some Green Party members suggested that Lucas should listen to the people who asked those questions. Some suggested she should meet A Women’s Place UK (WPUK) a group of (mostly) left-wing women who organise public meetings to discuss gender law. To some transgender activists, WPUK are a hate-group spewing out bigotry. To people with a slightly firmer grip on reality, WPUK are a bunch of ordinary women who talk earnestly about equality law and can’t quite believe that the politicians who are supposed to represent them aren’t doing their jobs and debating this stuff themselves. Sometimes they have biscuits too.
So, credit to Lucas for saying that she would indeed meet WPUK and listen to what they have to say:
Completely agree and am already doing that. Am in contact with Women’s Place & hope to meet next week
— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) September 2, 2018
I saw that tweet yesterday. I also saw the predictable avalanche of oh noooooooo they are monsters, you mustn’t.
Never mind that Lucas had been an outspoken advocate of trans rights in general, and of Aimee Challenor in particular. Never mind that all she said she would do is meet some people and listen to them. None of that could mitigate her sins against transgenderism. The online mob quickly gathered to ensure Lucas was suitably chastised: she said she’d talk to witches, so she must be a witch! Burn her!
(As is common here, lots of the abuse directed at Lucas came from men keen to tell women what to do, say and think. My favourite reprimand was this one: “Sincere word of warning Caroline: the people you’re agreeing to have dialogue w/ may appear to be reasonable & well-meaning individuals – couldn’t be more untrue. #WPUK and its associates spread hateful rhetoric, & seek to deny #trans people their existing legal rights. Avoid.” That came from a person using the name Adrian Harrop and claiming to be an NHS doctor; I assume it’s a parody account because the alternative explanation – that an actual real person is so comically stupid and awful – is too troubling to contemplate.)
He’s joking, of course. Adrian Harrop is all too real, and a genuine NHS doctor. He spends a great deal of time verbally abusing feminist women on Twitter.
So then Lucas was added to “Terfblocker” – the one set up by the Challenors themselves. The circle was closed.
Meanwhile Wil Wheaton has been harassed off of Twitter *and* Mastadon because he once employed a block list that included quite a few vicious bullies who happened to claim to be trans, and so the vicious bullies organised mobs to harangue him for being an evil TERF until he got tired of personally apologising to any and every self-righteous smug lefty on the Internet and decided to hang it all.
Was that Billingham’s block bot?
I honestly have no idea; I just know that he was (is) unambiguously a Good Egg that far too many assholes are happy about having conquered. His blog post here has more details. I honestly didn’t know anyone had a problem with him beyond the usual tired ‘Shut up, Wesley’s until I read the blog post and realised I hadn’t seen him around Twitter for awhile.
Anyway, I’m not trying to hijack this post to make it about a man; I was just strongly reminded of it because some tans activists and their so-called allies on Twitter decided this was a better use of their energies than asking any questions at all about the Challenor affair.
(Re-reading the post, Wheaton says that he quit Twitter over Jack’s continued support of Alex Jones and similar sleazy lying fascists, rather than due to the harassment; but he was unambiguously harassed off of Mastadon for thoughtcrimes he supposedly committed on Twitter, and Mastadon is supposed to be the ‘good, safe’ version of Twitter, so I suppose I elided the both of them into the same poisonous root cause.)
Ah no that’s ok, it’s not a hijacking. I did know the troll faction had a problem with him, because, you know, SJW yadda yadda yadda. He’s been targeted by them for years.
The single-most ridiculous response to this idea I’ve seen came in a thread at PZ’s place a couple of years ago. It was brought up in a comment and I don’t recall which of the horde replied, but they basically said ‘Well it hasn’t happened before’ (followed by the usual insult pile-on to the questioner). Jesus! No predator has pretended to be trans in order to access female-only spaces yet, so why would that change if unfettered access was allowed on the basis of self-identification alone, no questions (allowed to be) asked?
On that same thread, a father spoke of his unease at the thought of his pre-teen daughters having to change in locker rooms where naked male-bodied people could be in full view of them. He was told that if he was scared of his daughters seeing a penis, he was a ‘fucking shit parent’.
Oh, and anybody asking for some form of external checks before accepting transwomen into female-only spaces are Nazis who would make transwomen wear stars just like the Jews had to.
It’s hard to communicate with people whose responses to honest, fair concerns are disingenuity, aggression, lies, and hyperbole.
It has happened. Men have claimed to be trans women, been moved to women’s prisons or given access to women’s shelters, and committed sexual assaults there.
Then there is this:
“The vast majority of reported sexual assaults at public swimming pools in the UK take place in unisex changing rooms, new statistics reveal.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sexual-assault-unisex-changing-rooms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html
Re #6
I was going to describe a recent FB “conversation”, but really, the quoted bit says it all.
And a friend posted about how it was impossible to reason with a “TERF”. I’d respond, but there’s no positive outcome for doing so that I can see.
Sackbut, re your #7; that was mentioned, but was ‘different’ because they were ‘real’ transwomen and therefore it was straightforward woman-on-woman assault. Further, it would have been a breach of the transwomen’s rights to put them in male prisons or deny them access to women’s services, not to mention – and this is almost genius-level deflection – putting them in danger of physical and sexual assaults.
Irony? What irony?
#9
I’ve actually seen the reverse: that any trans person that secually assaults women in women only spaces are not genuinely trans, but are merely men lying about their gender identity to gain access to said spaces. A blatant no true scotsman fallacy, and also one that really only demonstrates the problem inherent to self-ID policy, yet it was used as ‘proof’ that trans people are always innocent and hence self-ID laws are fine.
Well, mark this as a major coup! I know of no other group of people that are “always” innocent, so the trans community must have indeed figured out some secret the rest of us can’t figure out – how to keep assholes out of their midst. Oh, wait. Christians…ignore the above.
“men have claimed to be trans women”
All transwoman are men. There is no such things as a trans woman who is magically not a man. I hate this distinction that people like to draw between the “genuine” and “fake” as if a man who really really believes he is a woman because of his disturbed beliefs about “womanhood” should be given a pass to abuse women whereas the ones who are just pretending to hate women shouldn’t.