The United Nations has been dragged into the global conflict between the defenders of biological reality and the demands of transgender activists. UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, has dared to acknowledge the existence of two sexes in her reports — at once a fact so mundane and an act so rare — that over 200 NGOs have signed a letter denouncing her.
According to this outraged coalition, co-led by Planned Parenthood International (PPI) and Women Deliver (WD), Alsalem’s “sex-based” approach is nothing less than a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress.” Apparently, recognising that men commit violence against women “further marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred.” Because nothing threatens safety quite like correctly identifying the sex of rapists, wife beaters or extremist religious leaders who stone rape victims. The furious missive is the latest attack on Alsalem, an expert who has faced calls for her dismissal from her UN role for over two years, alongside constant accusations that she is transphobic.
“Colonial” ffs – as if colonized people think men are women. That’s colonial if you like.
Bizarrely, to the NGO set who enjoy expense-account lunches in Geneva while churning out unreadable reports, Alsalem’s insistence on biological sex is supposedly rooted in white supremacy. As the letter states: “The category of ‘woman’ has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming.”
They’ve been reading Judith Butler, haven’t they.
Alsalem’s work, which exposes the brutal reality of male violence — child marriage, sex trafficking, femicide — triggers the #BeKind conformists because it refuses to kowtow to their luxury beliefs. Anyone with a functioning moral compass should be horrified by these crimes, not by the language used to describe them. Yet WD and PPI seem more exercised by words like “biological sex” than by the actual atrocities committed against women and girls worldwide.
It’s all in the language, you see. There is no reality, there is only chat.
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10 responses to “Spot the insult”
Alsalem is pulling the spotlight away from the only true victims she should be centering: men who claim they’re women. It’s counterproductive, rude, and distasteful to distract everyone from the struggle for the use of preferred pronouns.
Ai seah, Ponsonby. Ever since we entered this dark godforsaken jungle here in darkest TransZoolooland, ai have seen natives of both sexes cavorting around as they please, but not a single transzooloo; neither male trying to be female or vice versa.
Ai can only conclude that they have all taken off for the Western World, where aiI take it they think that they can pretend as they like and get away with anything. God, these leeches are bad here. And will those damned drums never stop.?
This prompted me to look for the origins of the phrase ‘chattering classes’ and my subsequent reading led me to the conclusion that middle-class people who: have been highly educated; have an enormous amount of free time for socialising; have a high enough income to be entirely comfortable; but have failed to acquire any actual power, are the cohort most likely to assume that they can put the world to rights by simply chattering amongst themselves, and that their agreement on various issues will influence reality. Add to the recipe a mutual distaste for discussing anything which is objectively horrible, and it’s easy to see why the issue of ‘trans’ ‘rights’ has become the topic du jour. It requires no action, no effort, or significant financial input from them. On the contrary, their ‘solution’ to all the problems of the world – the redefinition of basic vocabulary – only requires the acquiescence of the lower classes, whom they view with the utmost disdain.
I forgot to mention that the earliest known use of the phrase ‘chattering classes’ comes from the 1840s. This dovetails neatly with the timing of expansion of the right to vote and the rise of the middle class as a distinct phenomenon.
Tigger #3&4
Bloody right!
Or ”discourse” as more enlightened thinkers would say (basically the same thing but sounds so much more intellectually sophisticated and profound). Once again, I don’t think it’s possible to truly understand how we ended up in this mess without a basic familiarity with the larger world of ideas (derived from postmoderism) from which gender ideology has arisen. The only ”reality” we have any access to (so the argument goes) is how we talk about things, hence we can literally change ”reality” (at least as far as we are capable of perceiving it) by changing the way we talk about it. E.g. we can literally make it true (or as ”true as anything ever gets) that some biological males are ”women” by forcing everbody to refer to them as such.
I’m not altogether surprised that Planned Parenthood is sticking its nose in; it’s already come out in favour of child marriage. In 2023 it joined the ACLU and religious groups in opposition to proposed laws to ban child marriage in California.
Why does gender-woo often go hand-in-hand with dubious views on the rights of children when it comes to sexual matters? https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/09/child-marriage-laws
Arrggh
Which is exactly why I called it chat – the insult was highly intentional.
You can sign an online petition supporting Reem Alsalem here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5H6nWKjJd34n7zdtE9bn0syTIcfpqKxw1BH1bSz63KN-QMg/viewform