How to ensure unanimity
There’s a public Facebook group called Edinburgh LGBTI+. Note the public part: anyone can read the posts. It shares details in a top of the page post:
Edinburgh LGBTI+ Community Group is intended as a safe space for all members of our community, regardless of race, religion, sex, gender, sexuality, trans identity, and ability/disability. We stand, to the best of our current knowledge and understanding, against both direct and indirect discrimination, striving to be anti-racist, anti-abilist, anti-ageist, anti-religious discrimination. We are anti-asexual erasure, anti-aromantic erasure, anti-intersex erasure, anti-bisexual erasure and anti-polyamory erasure. We are pro-trans rights, pro-nonbinary rights. Ultimately we are pro-human rights.
It’s oddly careful to say nothing about women or sexism or misogyny or feminism. It does say “regardless of sex” along with all the other categories, but that’s the closest it gets to mentioning women, i.e. not very close. (It also doesn’t mention class. There’s room to mention the aromantic, but not the working class.)
The admins just did a purge of people they call transphobic, and deleted all comments made by the women they call transphobic. The dispute was over a post calling someone…transphobic, of course. The evidence was an article at Pink News.
Our equalities chief is not fit for purpose and if she cannot represent the needs of all of us, then she should not be getting to serve any of us, please please please get in touch with your local mp and also to Nicola sturgeon as this should not be allowed to happen. Long story short, she is a transphobe and as such, is not fit for her job. I call on others to join me in sharing and encouraging others to also contact their mps in order to stop this being allowed to continue.
The Pink News headline is: New SNP equalities chief proudly supports JK Rowling and anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland.
Same old same old same old. She’s a witch, throw your stones now.
There were dissenters, as I mentioned, but they’re gone and so is everything they said. It’s unanimous! New SNP equalities chief is definitely a witch, everyone says so!
If she cannot represent all of us (except women).
Wait a minute–“aromantic”? “Asexual”? These are not just people who are merely uninterested in sex and romantic relationships, but protected groups due simply to their private, personal life choices that aren’t apparent to anyone else except friends and family? I have a couple of asexual/aromantic friends who seem perfectly content, with social lives and decent jobs. Should I tell them how oppressed they really are?
Btw, at first I read aromantic as aromatic, and for just a second wondered if there was an odiferous persons rights movement.
But H.G. Wells, who was fond of having affairs, apparently had a wonderful aroma that attracted his lovers.
Bruce, as an Odoriferous-American, I must protest your stench-phobia!
Of course, iknklast, this maxim doesn’t count with regards to women. Women, in the trans-cult, are so privileged to be women that their claims to rights are just triumphalism. So it’s okay to have a representative who doesn’t care about the majority of her constituents, but not one who doesn’t parrot the dogma of a tiny minority.
I am thoroughly enjoying the fights in the SNP over elections to the NEC. These are elected posts and they can’t be overturned by Trumplike declarations of not accepting the results. Sturgeon won’t be happy with the new elected members in the NEC, which includes a challenger to her leadership, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is on the wing of the party which calls for independence now! and she is detestable in other ways, but she is tough, clever and a fighter, and I would guess the most prominent anti Gender Recognition Act person in Scotland.
An acquaintance of mine, a thoroughly sweet bloke, who is a gay activist (transitioned into a TRA), has now resigned from the SNP over this issue. I rejoice in his resigning and hope the party will shed members from both sides of the trans debate, but it seems an absurdly tiny minority issue to split a party.
The Observer, sister paper to The Guardian, has an editorial totally endorsing the Court decision on Keira Bell.
Quite a final paragraph:-
“Any questioning of the gender-affirming model – and the role that trauma, internalised hostility to same-sex attraction or misleading online material may play in gender dysphoria in teenagers – is dismissed as transphobic. This is a chilling state of affairs that is detrimental to child safety. There are children who will find last week’s judgment distressing and it is imperative they receive the professional support they need. Children are not pawns to be deployed in adult debates about identity. Bell’s bravery has paved the way for a child-centred judgment that gives them the protection they deserve.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/06/the-observer-view-on-the-high-courts-ruling-on-puberty-blocking-drugs-for-children
Ah, thank you, KBPlayer. I have just read the editorial, and was going to write a comment about it. I doubt, however, whether it will lead to the reinstatement of Suzanne Moore, who probably does not wish to be reinstated anyway, given the way she was treated. Really, The Observer is simply the Sunday edition of The Guardian, is it not?
@TimothyHarris #8 – sort of – they used to be separate papers under separate ownership. They are now under the same ownership, but The Observer doesn’t have the same editors or staff – at least that’s my reading of it. My impression is that The Observer doesn’t have the stable of crap woke columnists that the Guardian fosters.