Too small to measure
A tiny step in the right direction, perhaps.
A senior member of the Labour frontbench has offered an apology to a fellow MP, Rosie Duffield, who has said she felt ostracised by the party because of her views on gender reforms.
Duffield had also accused male party colleagues of trying to shout her down in the Commons earlier this year when she spoke to back the government’s move to block gender reforms proposed in Scotland.
Well it’s not just a matter of “accusation”; we saw them do it.
“There are times when Rosie’s kind of tweeted or liked certain things and I’ve been really upset and there were times where, you know, I’ve taken a much more defensive position around trans equality and Rosie’s felt that [I] personally, and others, haven’t listened.”
What the hell is “trans equality” and what does it have to do with anything? Nobody on Team Gender Critical wants to make trans people “unequal” in any way. That’s a massive part of this whole problem: we’re accused of wanting to take away “trans rights” or taking a wrong position on “trans equality” when those are not the issue. It’s trans-identifying men who want to encroach on or just destroy women’s rights; it’s not the other way around.
A tiny tiny step.
Among other things that are weird about this phenomenon, there’s the zeal with which so many politicians tout their support for it. It’s bizarre, because why this when there are so many other things they could be passionate about and yet aren’t. You’d think that people would notice the outlier intensity, and yet somehow …
Indeed. I’ve never been able to figure that out. I’ve been trying for years but am no closer to understanding it.
That’s the thing about identity politics. It IS actually important that people from traditionally less-powerful demographics get heard. And that privileged demographics get forced to reconsider their assumptions and prejudices and, in the end, their privileges.
But for capitalism, at its core, it doesn’t matter if it’s a psychopathic greedhead woman, or racial minority, or GLBT2SqQFMLetc, who is maximizing profit.
If women and transwomen want to fight over access to shelters, … and you’re a male politician who is AGP and you jerk off to shemale porn, … you know what you have to do to be on the right side of history.
‘Rosie’s kind of tweeted or liked certain things and I’ve been really upset’ I’ve heard toddlers express themselves more maturely than this.
@NiV and Ophelia
I think this topic is so popular with politicians because it is like a towel in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
Support for “trans rights” is like a towel: If you express vocal support for “trans rights”, you can automatically be assumed to be right on all the other issues the left cares about. “Trans rights” are optimal here for three reasons:
1. They negatively affect only something deemed unimportant by most (women’s rights).
2. Implementing measures to ensure “trans rights” is easy and does not interrupt existing power structures. If you were to fight for racial equality, for the poor etc., you would have to actually DO something about it (increase taxes for the rich, improve social measures for the poor, fight against racial prejudice etc.). Trans rights are like an easy-to-carry-along towel: You can simply say “Let everyone be considered a woman who wants to” and you’re done and everyone will assume that you would also fight for other social justice measures even if you never do.
3. They are so contrary to common sense that you also signal to be a person of great sophistication who is able to overcome wrong misconceptions and prejudices (and if you can do this here, the towel effect makes sure that people will believe you do it everywhere). It is the ultimate virtue signalling.
That’s a great analogy, Sonderval.
It gets even better when you realise that anyone claiming to be ‘trans’ already has all the rights they need. Claiming to be in favour of ‘trans rights’ literally means doing nothing now, and when reality re-asserts itself at some future date, you can plausibly claim to have always been against their demands for privileges which would have taken away the rights of others.
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Expressing one’s own personal pronouns is like said towel and adds yet another wee brick in the TWAW wall.