Let’s make it bigger news then
And another thing about this business of the police calling people on the phone to “raise awareness” of complaints about a blog post that says cadavers reveal sex…
“A number of people”. Trans rights activists are using the police to harass people with gender critical views. HOW IS THIS NOT BIGGER NEWS? https://t.co/1Z8P8Ihb2n
— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 4, 2019
Another thing about that…What the hell makes them think anyone needs awareness raised when social media already exist? Not to mention phones, and Margaret Nelson said she’s easy to find. The people who have complaints can express them to Nelson; what makes the police think they need to help out? Since when is it part of the police’s job to amplify tweets and blog comments?
Also…they are the police. They don’t just “raise awareness” by phoning people early in the morning to say there’s bin complaints about u. They scare the bejeezus out of people by doing that. And guess what, they’re perfectly well aware of it. A phone call from the police to report complaints about your activities is not just a friendly sharing of information, and they fucking know it.
So don’t give us this “for no other reason” shit. They are the police. They’re not in the business of “raising awareness” of random gripes, they’re in the business of putting the frighteners on people, as well as of forcibly arresting people when need arises. They are the police. They’re not an arm of Twitter, they’re not social media outreach assistants, they are the police.
Anyway what do they mean “for no other reason”? Why do they think awareness needs raising at all? They don’t call us to raise our awareness of the sale on at Tesco, so why would they call us to raise our awareness of “comments made online”? Other than to give us a very broad hint that we should stop doing whatever it is we’re doing?
The answer: they fucking wouldn’t. Calling us to “raise our awareness” of complaints is telling us to shut up. It’s the police, telling us to shut up, because men who want us to pretend they are women have been whining to the police about us. That’s what it is.
I’m really not used to police forces being so leading edge, progressively “woke.” I’ve more often associated with the trailing edge of regressive social policy (e.g. race and homosexuality), not the vanguard of gender politics. The fact of police intervention around this issue is making it a lot more “official” and “mainstream” than the cause, or the number of its adherents and allies, merits.
And, oddly enough, more than once in the course of reading and thinking about gender politics and its enforcement, I’ve thought to myself “What pathogist or archaeologist is going to recognize anyone’s “gender identity” from just their mortal remains.” Bones are an excellent marker for “lived experience” when it comes to physical exertion, nutrtion and geographic origin. For states of mind and fervent wishes, not so much. It would seem that skeletal anatomy is much harder to browbeat into accepting the demands of the trans lobby than metropolitan police departments.
YNNB, that thought occurred to me, too. But my experience is that many police are also misogynistic. What better way to get to harass women and appear enlightened at the same time?
I’m reminded of how every so often I read a story of some police force in the U.S. that gets the bright idea of randomly pulling over motorists to give them “good driving certificates” and a Starbucks gift card or something, and it’s portrayed by the media as some feel-good positive program. It usually takes someone on social media — often a minority — to point out that being pulled over by the police is at least mildly stressful (“oh shit, what did I do, I can’t afford to pay a ticket, and is this going to affect my insurance, and I’m going to be late for work now”) if not outright panic-inducing (for many non-white people who have not-unreasonable fear of being shot), and oh by the way it’s technically illegal.
My point is that police intruding into your life for no good reason is a shitty thing even when the result is an assurance that you did nothing wrong, and here’s some free stuff. When the message is “we’re watching what you post,” it’s much much worse.
I know that’s enough to explain it, but part of me expects more behind this remarkable shift in institutional inertia. I demand a more nefarious conspiracy! I want my own tinfoil hat! So let’s begin!
It must be coming from higher up the chain of command as I can’t imagine rank and file officers initiating something like this. SOMEBODY had to organize and mandate that “training course” the police officer in the “limerick” case claimed to have attended. From what I’m gleaning from UK developments (as documented here on B&W) this institutional change of heart is occuring in several branches or levels of government and the civil service (university administration, political party bylaws, municipal codes and councils). I wonder what is the lowest level of government at which all these changes could be launched? How many people in how many positions would it take to start something like this? Once the ball gets rolling loud trans activists and louder allies can keep it rollong. Is this just effective lobbying, or something else?
I’m still amazed at the rapidity of acceptance of trans ideology, though. I know I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but the swiftness and agility of this taking on of trans talking points to the degree of actually policing them is breathtaking. How long did it take/has it taken/will it take UK police forces to have a more “progressive” and “enlightened” attitude towards laying charges against men in domestic violence cases? I’ll bet it wasn’t as fast as this shift. It’s like seeing an elephant suddenly stand up and do a gymnastic floor excersize tumbling routine.
For institutions like the police, I think the motive is much like the Tories in the UK, who’ve been candid that their rapid embrace of transeverything is an attempt to get out in front of what, to them, looks like a repeat of past civil rights movements, over which they thoroughly shit the bed. So this is at least in part an attempt to rehabilitate their own ugly image. But the problem is I don’t think they really care about the issue at all. The swiftness and totality in their acceptance of whatever activists propose gives me the sense they’re actually put off by all this icky queery gender-ooky stuff; they’ll sign off on anything that promises to make them look on “the right side of history this time,” just get it off their desk as quickly as possible so they don’t have to think about it too much.
Frankly, I think it’s a lot more disrespectful of transpeople to just blindly repeat activist slogans than to do the hard work of trying to really understand the phenomenon and the people living with it, and to grapple with the hard questions of how best to accommodate everyone who might be affected by these issues, trans or not.
That’s what made me figure this wouldn’t be done by police services on their own, given the police’s perceived, tradtionally conservative outlook on things. Your summary makes sense, I think.
This uncomfortably reminds me of SWATing.
I think there’s probably an element of trans women shouting the loudest resulting in police capitulating just to shut them up.
I’m sure wokeness isn’t a particularly prevalent characteristic amongst the fuzz. I feel like trans women complain about their “rights” being violating (it’s not your right to have me believe you’re biologically female but whatevs….) really, really loudly and make demands frequently. Similarly to men who feel slighted, actually. Why on earth could that be? Hmm…
There’s enough real concern about vulnerable, poor/minority trans women to make institutions want to take some action. Thanks to the magick of ‘intersectionality’ this means that misogynist ‘women’ with beards and penises are given another platform to intimidate and diminish women.
None of the explanations really convince us though, do they. We can think of more or less plausible possibilities but they don’t really get at the fundamental weirdness of the whole thing – especially weird if you’ve spent literally years watching the same police do NOTHING about the constant threats and career-damaging attacks Kate Smurthwaite deals with, to name one well-documented example. Over and over and over they tell her with a shrug that they can’t do anything unless someone actually has a knife at her throat – yet they do have the time to terrorize a woman who writes a blog post about sexing corpses.
Nothing can make this add up.
I think a lot of this can be explained by the fact that, to a large extent, trans ideology doesn’t threaten the establishment, and actually reinforces it by reifying gender stereotypes. A lot of “small-c” conservatives probably figure that any “boy” who “acts like a woman” might as well be a woman, and vice versa; it’s no “worse” in their view than gay marriage, and they’ve already lost that fight.
That’s a good point, too. It soesn’t cost anything to the powers that be. they’re not being asked to give up or share power, rights or privileges (as movements for women’s rtights and civil rights have), so for the powers that be it’s not a threat in that regard. That the ones being asked/compelled to share or give up anything appear to be feminist women, rather than themselves, they can safely be trans “allies” and avoid the appearance of being on the “wrong side of history*.” That the establishment can then happily bash these uppity feminist women who are still demanding a cut of power, rights and privileges that they would still rather not share works out just fine. Extreme trans activism represents a second front on which feminism is thus forced to fight, dividing resources and attention to deal with sideshow issues that, while important, distract from basic, still unaddressed concerns of health, equity and safety in society at large. How much (if any)of this scenario has been conciously thought through on the part of the powers that be is another question, but I can see how some of these things might be seen to fit together…
That they are on the wrong side of reality appears to bother them not at all.
Another possible explanation is that police forces have allocated resources towards repairing trust with the LGBT community — like, maybe they’ve designated certain officers Special LGBT Outreach Coordinator Liaison Whatevers, that kind of thing. But there aren’t many opportunities for such people to take actions that feel immediate and concrete in that regard. So when they get a complaint from a transperson, no matter how flimsy, they leap on it as an opportunity to show they’re “doing something” real and tangible for LGBTs, even if that “something” is bullying law-abiding citizens over innocuous tweets. Sort of bureaucratic virtue signalling, if you will.