Clearly concerned
I have been in contact with Jo Rowling for two or three years. She got in touch with me on Twitter having seen the abuse that I had been receiving at the hands of misogynists since 2004. I don’t know when she picked up on what was happening to me, but she was clearly concerned about women’s rights and safety.
…
We have talked regularly ever since and I soon learnt what an amazing person she is. She has a wonderful sense of humour, in fact, she is one of the funniest women I have known, and has an enormous amount of integrity and generosity.
…
This lunch has now become infamous, but contrary to the idea held by some on Twitter, there was no plotting, we didn’t sit around coming up with an evil plan. I’ve never heard Jo say one anti-trans thing, I’ve never even heard her say one anti-trans word. She is pro-women’s rights, and to some people that is somehow the same thing when clearly that is nonsense.
Misogyny has managed to become more acceptable through the guise of trans rights but some of us have been in the movement for decades and we have fought with our blood, sweat and tears for the single-sex spaces and refugees that have been built.
We would happily fight beside trans people for their own safe spaces, we don’t want anyone to be vulnerable to male violence and we have the skills to help. We just don’t want them to be taken from women in the process.
There will be more meetings, more lunches, more gatherings. This movement is growing and we are fighting against misogyny, not against trans people.
The tide has turned. The ordinary person in the street, who once might have thought this argument was just the product of the mad rantings of two loony groups, has now seen it for what it is: deeply unfair.
Onward!
No doubt this entirely reasonable bit from Julie is now being referred to in trans-circles as “transphobic evil that is literally killing the most at-risk people in society”.
We would happily fight beside trans people for their own safe spaces, we don’t want anyone to be vulnerable to male violence and we have the skills to help. We just don’t want them to be taken from women in the process.
This is absolutely pitch-perfect. If anything, I’d argue that trans people NEED their own safe spaces, ones set up to accommodate their specific needs and concerns. In urban centers, where population means there’s likely to be a sizeable trans population in need of services like rape counseling and domestic abuse shelters, such facilities should be built. Speaking as a white middle-class male, I say tax anyone who looks like me, or the horse I rode in on, to pay for it.
But don’t force women’s shelters and rape crisis lines to abandon their missions.
Sure, Freemage, that’s the obvious solution. Of course, it will never fly with TAs. There is no validation; in fact, the very fact of having their own shelters marks them as “not really women” and that isn’t acceptable. No, women must be thrilled to accept them, or women are evil overlords.