Try the truth next time
Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Tribune:
Recently, of course, we saw people like JK Rowling using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating against a group of people who were not responsible for it. Trans people are no more likely to be rapists; in fact, they are more likely to be victims of sexual assault themselves. That’s why, despite JK Rowling’s hate towards them, hundreds of trans people wrote to complain to The Sun when it trivialised her domestic abuse on a recent front page.
Of course Rowling isn’t advocating “discriminating against” trans people. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they are not a thing that they are not. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they are not horses or shovels or Canada or Mars or a bucket of gold coins.
Rowling expressed no “hate towards” trans people.
They can’t do any of this without lying, it seems, because the truth isn’t on their side.
Well, you must admit they’ve got a point. Any domestic violence against a woman is trivial compared to the vast amount of damage caused by making trans* people read about violence to others. Every bit of violence not done to trans* is erasing trans*. Trans* must be front and centre of all violence, it is all we have to validate our identity.
Sure, the hundreds wrote in to complain about the Sun’s abusive approach to JK. This was undermined just a tad by their continued harassment campaign against her, but never mind that.
putting aside the blatant statistical inaccuracies around the number of assaults, we still see several magnitudes of erasure at play here – for instance –
what is the demographic that attacks trans people?
are they just random sociopaths, or is there some other consistency?
missed this one . . .
i suspect i’m not entirely clear on the legal ramifications around the concepts of “reproductive rights”
is this a clear proclamation of the end goal? and the alignment of the rad-trans movement with the incel movement?
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1235219950849216513
kh, I think they’ve reached the “Mad Libs” stage of advocacy.
________________ rights are Trans rights!
This, is one of those things that disgusts me on a visceral level.
JK Rowling, so far as I can see, hadn’t used her status as an abuse survivor as adding credence to her views. Instead, what happened was that the Daily Sun had published an article by her ex saying he wasn’t sorry for being an abusive piece of shit.
Rowling’s status as an abuse survivor only entered the equation after someone else tried to use her stance on trans rights as excusing his own abuse of her.
What Lloyd Russel-Moyle demonstrated in this article wasn’t simply rank misogyny, but the precise sort of attitude that abuse survivors have to contend with when they come out with having been abused – the use of that abuse to discredit the survivor on other topics.
Moyle has since said he’s sorry, but it really, really isn’t good enough. That he went there at all and still remains a Labour MP raises serious questions on how Labour even pretending to fight for the marginalised and abused.
Nah, what he did is just gross.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (what a name – about as bad as Jacob Rees-Mogg) has now apologised and removed the offending comments for Tribune. – Ah, I see Bruce Gorton has got there before me, and rightly says that what he did is disgraceful. I should not be surprised if Keir Starmer has had a word with him. He has just removed Long-Bailey (another double-barrelled name) from the shadow cabinet for passing on an anti-Semitic slur, and before the Labour leadership election he made it clear that he was not going to go with the rest of the contenders and come out on the side of men identifying as women being allowed to invade women’s spaces.
This is not quite the right order. Rowlings revelation of her personal history of domesic violence and sexual assault was a part of her longer essay explaining some of the reasons for her position regarding the safety of women and girls. She herself had needed single sex spaces for support and recovery and thus knew from first hand experience how vital they are. Her earlier pushback against the use of the woman-erasing term “menstruators” , which elicited the oh so courageous responses of Radcliffe and Watson, had raised the ire of TA’S. Rowling’s essay prompted even more abuse from TA’s, some of whom accused her of weaponizing her abuse. The Sun story quoting Rowling’s ex husband came afer her longer essay, with many of Rowling’s supporters pointing out that it was a bit rich for TA’s now to protest the Sun front page, when so many on their side had been more than happy to heap abuse on her over Twitter before the Sun got in on the act.
I hereby take offence at any suggestion that I might have a double-barrelled name. Such an unsavoury bunch, those folks!
#8 My mistake, thanks for the correction hey?
One thing we are told endlessly in teaching is that relating it to personal experiences is a good way to teach; I use it a lot in my classes, discussing the work I did on ecological restorations and the time I spent in a permitting agency, as well as other personal experiences to help make things real for the people.
Then when you do that in a setting where it is extremely cogent (Rowling’s use of her abuse in her essay was highly appropriate, and served to relate abuse to the lives of real women, not just statistics), they scream and howl and curse. Though they are happy to bring out instances of ‘abuse’ that they have suffered, such as the dude who was called names in the women’s room.
Ikn, I find anecdotal teaching the most interesting and relatable. I think a lot of people have simply not taken the time to see what JKR has written or tweeted, there is just nothing offensive there that I have seen, since this first started. There seem to be a lot of people who can’t seem to work their way out of established thought patterns, or herd mentality thinking. I haven’t run across anyone who is against JKR, I have only seen it on the interwebs. On the other hand, the people I have talked to about Trump are fairly stubborn about him. I have on more than a few occasions expressed some dislike of him, only to be met with the equivalent of them sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “lalalalalalalalalala.” Blissful types, virtually unteachable.
Grovelling apologies to Harald Hanche-Olsen, #9, but anyway I would forgive you for having a double-barrelled name because of the beautiful alliteration if your first name is included (and having brought myself up on Icelandic sagas, I have a fondness for Scandinavian names). But Rees-Mogg – it sounds like a particularly nasty breed of cat, particularly when it stretches itself out on the front benches of the House of Commons and spits at the Opposition in Etonian accents; and Russell-Moyle – well there are rhymes with ‘moil’ (drudgery, wading about in mud), ‘boil’ (as in a pustular excrescence), ‘toil’, which are made more salient by the middle-class inoffensiveness of ‘Russell’. Long-Bailey, which is not so bad as the preceding, suggests the outer wall of a large Norman castle or a tall, ill-tempered Scottish bailiff.
Ok but I won’t hear a word against Reilly-Cooper.
Not one word!
Actually, my grandfather and father, who succeeded him, used a double-barrelled name for professional purposes, since, I imagine, it was supposed to sound better than boring old, common old ‘Harris’ (the original Harris seems to have been a farm-labourer from Hertfordshire who came to London in the mid-19th-century and made good), but this was never legally formalised. The ‘G’ in my name stands for ‘Gibson’, and was the maiden name of some great or great-great grandmother who was the daughter of a Church of Ireland priest in County Cavan. Double-barrelling was a way of showing that you were respectable, in addition to honouring your mother. I suspect that usually, unfortunately, the first consideration came first in reality.
Tim: I am not really offended of course, but you probably figured that out. After a few generations in which my forefathers were alternately named Greger Olsen and Ole Gregersen (following the same naming convention still in use in Iceland), the Olsen name stuck. My grandfather, being a civil engineer, probably thought that was too simple, being a name often used by the common folk. So he stuck his mother’s maiden name Hanche in front of it, and that’s the way it has been since. (Two Hanche sisters each married an Olsen, giving rise to two branches of the Hanche-Olsen family name.)
Dear Harald, thank you. No, I know very well that you weren’t really offended, but I thought a bit of grovelling might be enjoyed! Followed of course by a few digs at double-barrelled English politicians, who are very good, as politicians are everywhere, at insincere apologies. You will perhaps be pleased to know that I am trying to read Gisla Saga Surssonar in the original (sorry about the missing accents!).
I wish I could say the same, but a good friend of mine (who is also directing my play this summer) actually caused a long discussion about what is a TERF in my playwriting group by including something about JKR and TERF in a play. Suffice it to say, 2/3 of the group had never heard of TERF (which is roughly the same ones that never heard the term Feminazi; they don’t get out much, I guess), and my friend was able to drive the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go, so now any hope of my getting my plays produced goes out the window if I am discovered to be a “TERF”.
I am not used to being grovelled at, so I found it slightly alarming, but also rather enjoyable, perversely enough. Thank you. 8-)
Harald,
It gets tiresome after a while.
https://youtu.be/VZ42IMu7HIQ