Thick as a plank
More genius thinking from Billy Bragg.
That’s not about trans women, it’s about violence against women!
How the hell does he think he knows the difference? How does he think anyone does? How does he think women do?
We can’t. That’s the point. That’s why all this self-ID nonsense is such bullshit – because it’s an open door the size of Texas for predators. There doesn’t happen to be any Magic Filter Device that turns purple when a “male predator” disguised as an innocent Trans Lady enters the women’s toilets. There’s nothing. We can’t tell, and we don’t want to be forced to have to try to tell. It shouldn’t be dumped on us. The end.
No true transcotswoman would…
What is the difference between men who impersonate women and men who impersonate trans women? I defy anyone to explain the actual difference. Jeez Louise.
I am left unclear as to his position on actual transwomen who are sexual predators. Would they be OK to be in female spaces under the Bragg rules?
Billy Bragg has always been insufferably smug anyway.
O/t: not all lefty Brits are lost to the cult. Friends and I watched the Ricky Gervais special last night. He gets it. And I understand he has gotten shit for it.
It’s not just that it’s impossible in fact to tell the difference between a trans-[wo]man and a real [wo]man. It’s impossible even in principle.
Nullius, I believe the claim being made is that it’s not possible to distinguish a “transwoman” from a man pretending to be a “transwoman”. That is, distinguish a man who genuinely thinks of himself as a woman from a man who is only pretending to think that way.
(I was going to phrase it: “distinguish a man pretending to be a woman from a man pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman”, but that gets confusing immediately, and also discounts the possibility of true feelings.)
(Rights that Billy Bragg thinks “transwomen” should have: we can call those Bragg Rights.)
Wait. That sounds like the anti-matter version of Victor/Victoria.
Naif, it seems to me that Bragg is saying that if someone is a male predator, they can’t also be a transwoman. So if anybody claiming to be a transwoman is demonstrated to be a male predator, such as the hundred or so listed here:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens?s=r
Then those must be not true transwomen.
Billy took his fake diamond to a jewelry shop to find out if it’s faking being a fake diamond. They found out that yes, it’s not just unreal, it’s really unreal. Inauthenticity is a spectrum after all. This is how we know if something is absurd, because it makes perfect sense. :P
Could we please get Bragg to talk to HMPS and the ACLU about this? Explain to them that male predators aren’t ‘trans women’, whatever the ACLU might think? If he manages to persuade them, then at least we’ll get them out of women’s prisons; that’d be a good start.
Self ID would be a lovely standard. No vetting or supervision required. No medical check-lists etc.
BUT…we know now that Self ID is an open door to a wide array of crackpots and weirdos, including violent misogynist criminals. If the ‘movement’ had any legitimacy whatsoever, it would have to face this issue instead of attacking women in the street and vandalizing women’s spaces.
John, at this stage it seems as if it is crackpots and weirdos all the way down.
To be fair, once upon a time there were some men who were being very unfairly treated because they preferred to imitate their conception of womanhood. They were entitled to ask not to be thrown out of housing, or jobs.
However, as soon as those rights were granted, that tiny number of mentally-troubled, usually gay, men was rapidly outnumbered in their little movement by a much, much larger number of narcissists, cross-dressers, drag queens, psychopaths, sociopaths, autogynephiles, child rapists, and other sexual predators (many of them are all of the foregoing) and the rights movement was rapidly turned into a world-wide cult.
THIS is what we’re up against; that exhortation to ‘be kind’ was only appropriate when it was a handful of harmless transsexuals wanting to keep their jobs. It is suicidal when it is thousands of monstrous men wanting to obliterate women’s and children’s boundaries, and succeeding.
What story is BB responding to?
tigger, the reason that it is horrible to talk about trans people at all, beyond shouting TWAW, is that pulling on the threads of logical inconsistency is totally oppressive of the most fragile among us. Consistency is a Western, colonialist, binary concept anyway. Bragg has transcended consistency.