How to elevate the debate
JKR firing with both barrels.
Is there a clinical term for an individual who has extreme thinness of skin when it comes to their own perceived hurts, coupled with a rhino-hide when it comes to the fear and suffering of others?
I’m thinking in particular of the two women Isla Bryson raped, who had to watch their First Minister squirm and smirk on TV as she tried to avoid admitting he was a man; of the five survivors of male violence who were ready to give evidence to Sturgeon’s committee on gender self-ID, but were told to put their concerns in writing while seventeen trans-identified people appeared in person; of the mother of a young girl with a learning disability who campaigned against self-ID because she wanted her daughter to be guaranteed same sex intimate care, should she need it (the mother was presumably one of those female opponents Sturgeon calls ‘shrill’ and ‘hysterical’ in her memoir); of the ten-year-old girl sexually assaulted in a public bathroom by a 6’5″ paedophile who served his jail sentence in a women’s prison because he called himself ‘Katie’; of Sandie Peggie, forced to discuss her own menstrual history in public to justify not wanting to undress in view of a 6ft straight cross-dresser in the nurses’ changing room; of Marion Millar, dragged into court because she tweeted a picture of suffragette ribbons; of the Scottish rape crisis centres reliant on government funding who were pressured to admit trans-identified males into their services if they wanted funding to continue.
When Sturgeon refers to an ‘elevated debate’, she means a discussion that takes place within a tiny, smug bubble from which regular women suffering real life consequences of her policies are firmly excluded. These faceless ants are loftily dismissed as bigots, or, to be more precise: ‘transphobic, misogynistic, homophobic, maybe racist as well.’
Nicola, you hated the T-shirt picture because you couldn’t ignore it, as you’d ignored so many other women trying to make you understand their concerns. Appeals to your empathy, your intelligence and your compassion all failed. Apparently the only way to get through to you is through your vanity.
Ouch.
By whining again, Sturgeon is doing a mashup of the Streisand Effect and the First Law of Holes. She really doesn’t know when to quit when she feels she’s been wronged. She’d be better off letting this go, rather than giving JKR a reason to have another go at her, particularly given the vast disparity of reason, compassion and communications skills between Rowling and herself. Except that she brought this upon herself, one could almost feel sorry for the poor little “rabbit in the headlights.” But any such sympathy would be misplaced, as her victims are far more deserving of our consideration, sympathy that Sturgeon herself lacked and denied. Her attention to them was calculated, malevolent contempt. Sturgeon should consider herself lucky that she’s only being faced with just a T-shirt and not a full public inquiry
I think at this point, if I were Sturgeon, I’d be rushing to buy back all the copies of my autobiography in order to have them pulped, burned, or both. I would also have spontaneously combusted in shame. But perhaps, like Trump, she has no capacity for shame, though Rowling’s T must be finding some small target in her soul to cause her such discomfort, even if it is her vanity. In any case, she’s made of tougher (or at least thicker) stuff than I am. Sturgeon must be wearing one of those volcanologist suits that make you look like a turkey wrapped in tinfoil, though I think by now this turkey has gone from “done” to “incinerated.”
Oh yes; it also helps if the cause you’re espousing is not fucking, dangerous, misogynistic bullshit.
I recall that the word mimophant (portmanteau of mimosa and elephant) was coined for exactly that purpose in the 1970s to describe Bobby Fischer
I tracked the coinage of the term to Arthur Koestler. It appears in the introduction he wrote to the account of the 1972 Fischer Spassky World Chess Championship by Harry Golombek, chess correspondent for The Times.
Sturgeon apparently believes that winning the vote of this tiny male minority of men who identify as women is worth the inevitable loss of female votes and of those females’ male supporters involved.
I can only conclude that Sturgeon is tired of politics, has an assured financial future, and wants to go out with a bang at the next election. Nothing else swimming around in this Scottish Loch Bullshit makes any sense to me.
Alan – do you know why mimosa? Is it considered fragile? Google tells me it’s considered an invasive over here. (V pretty though.)
Omar, she’s probably angling of a cushy sinecure at UN Women, “the global champion for gender equality.”
I think Mimosa pudica, called the touch-me-not plant, was Koestler’s referent. It apparently has a wilting response to its leaves being touched.
Ah! How interesting; thank you.
That is a good survival strategy, though. It makes it more difficult for insects to land and consume the leaves. It might not work the same for a human, though, and JKR is definitely of more stature than an insect. She is awesome.
I promise I had no intention of dissing the mimosa!
Wilting is certainly apt, but there’s another “Touch me not”, Impatiens capensis, or the Spotted Touch-me-not, where the seed pods burst when brushed. I remember, growing up, going to a wooded area behind our home, where my mother introduced me to this neat little botanical grenade. It’s quite a remarkable and ingeneous bit of biological engineering for seed dispersal: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/15vymtw/impatiens_capensis_also_known_as_spotted/
I think “a tendency to explode with a bit of pressure” is also perfectly apt for gender ideologues, as you’re just as likely to get this response as you are wilting. Sometimes it’s one, followed by the other.
Or changed my name and moved to Nepal. Come to think of it, this might be a good time for her to become Nicolas, take some testosteron, and grow a beard.