Struggling to name the gender
Anoosh Chakelian, Britain editor of the New Statesman (and a woman), talks to Nicola Sturgeon:
The UK government blocked her attempt to introduce gender self-identification to Scotland. She believes she “lost the dressing room” when struggling to name the gender of a rapist, identifying as a woman, who was initially sent to a female prison. But still she remains an increasingly rare mainstream political voice standing up for trans rights.
That’s the end of the paragraph, and the next one shifts the subject. We are left with no clue what is meant by “standing up for trans rights.”
Journalists really need to stop doing this. They really need to ask their subjects exactly what they mean by “trans rights.” Not doing so implies that the opposition opposes rights for trans people, which is a calumny and a lie.
Perhaps just as divisive for some voters was Sturgeon’s attempt to pass a law allowing Scots to self-identify their gender. This was thwarted by the UK government, but deepened a rift in the Scottish left perhaps best symbolised by two of Scotland’s most prominent public figures and feminists: Sturgeon and the vocally gender-critical Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
In Frankly, Sturgeon describes Rowling’s decision to wear a t-shirt with the slogan “Nicola Sturgeon – destroyer of women’s rights” as a turning-point, making her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”. In her review of the memoir on her website, Rowling wrote that her intention was to prompt journalists to ask Sturgeon questions about women’s safety, adding that she has never blamed Sturgeon for threats she’s herself received.
When I asked Sturgeon about this review, she said: “I don’t know where she gets the time! She is a highly successful woman. I’ve bought Harry Potter books for all the young people in my life, I think they’re great, but my goodness, where does she get the time to obsess about me? I hate to tell her that it’s just not reciprocated.”
Sorry to repeat myself (previous post) but come on. She was the first minister of Scotland! JKR paid attention to her because of the power! It wasn’t personal!
She knows this, of course; she’s being facetious, not to say flippant. But it’s a ridiculous and childish way of being flippant. Women’s rights are not a joke, thank you very much.
She continued: “I don’t obsess about other individuals who happen to have a different view about me, they’re entitled to have a different view. There are some people in this life who, it strikes me often, spend an awful lot more time, like immeasurably so, thinking about me than I ever spend thinking about them.”
Sigh. Yes of course they do: you were the prime minister.
Maybe she wasn’t even being flippant? Maybe she really doesn’t get that people are bound to pay attention to bosses?
Will the two women ever come together to heal this split? “I think it looks really unlikely, but that’s not from my perspective,” Sturgeon replied. “Look, I have no great animus towards JK Rowling. I never have done. We disagreed vehemently on independence. She has a very different view to me on trans rights. She’s entitled to that. I wish she would argue her position without what appears to me sometimes indulging in a bit of gratuitous cruelty to trans people.”
Oh hey. Take a look at what some trans people say to us. You’ll find more than a bit of gratuitous cruelty, I assure you.
After the Catholic School Shootings, there were calls by Minnesota Republicans to restrict trans identified men from buying guns. Which to me, brings the lie to their claim that the Second Amendment is inviolate. Apparently domestic abuse is not a sufficient reason to deny someone the right to buy guns. But they can find other reasons.
While I don’t think such men should be singled out for denying them the right to buy guns, I do think that there should be some restrictions on gun ownership, and I do not mean to imply that trans rights includes the right to be recognized as women and be given complete access to women’s private spaces. The concept of what rights actually are is poorly understood.
I’m pretty sure people obsess more over Donald Trump than me. Can’t imagine why.
Anyway, as so often happens, this just underscores the problem with placing gender over sex. Regardless of how the rapist felt or identified, he was male, and at least by the British definition of rape (as I understand it), being a rapist entails being male.
Mike, that isn’t the only time 2nd Amendment rights appear to waver. When there is a police shooting and the victim is a man of color, and he happens to have a (perfectly legal) gun, that will often be used as an excuse for shooting him.
I would not trust Sturgeon’s concept of what she considers “gratuitous cruelty to trans people”. It likely includes the non-cruel, nnon-gratuitous, non-crimes of “deadnaming”, refusal to use wrong-sex pronouns, and refusal to accept men-claiming-to-be-women as women. Throw out all of those from Rowling’s pro-women comments, posts, and articles, and I bet the remaining amount of “gratuitous cruelty” to trans people is exactly zero. If that is the case, then Sturgeon believes that Rowling’s refusal to accede to the demands of those whose agenda she is opposing, and her insistence on robustly arguing for and upholding women’s rights, are gratuitously “cruel.”
It’s not Rowling’s fault if genderists see reality as gratuitously cruel. She is permitted to reference that reality when she stands up for women’s rights, when she fights for women only spaces and services. Sturgeon worked to destroy these things; that is women’s reality. If Sturgeon can’t own this, then maybe she shouldn’t have tried doing it, no?
Women were supposed to shut up and submit. Rowling is not allowed to fight her own corner because women are not allowed to say “No”. Women saying “No” to men-claiming-to-be-women is cruel. Women are supposed to give TiMs everything they want OR THEY’LL KILL THEMSELVES!* Resistance to the Genderborg is not futile, it is, by their own wildly miscalibrated standards, murderous, trans-genocidal bigotry. I’m surprised that Sturgeon didn’t make her own counter-T-shirt, saying “JKR: SHUT UP AND SURRENDER TO THE DEMANDS OF TRANS IDEOLOGY, OR WE’LL CONTINUE TO CALL YOU A BIGOT, AND A MEANIE! (Not as short and catchy as Rowling’s slogan, but this pretty much encapsulates Sturgeon’s position.) Not that Sturgeon’s failure to don such a shirt prevent exactly that from happening regardless.
*If this were actually happening, the names of those who had killed themselves would be solemlny intoned on every one the many Trans Days/Weeks/Months of Visibility/Remembrance/Vengeance they’re so keen on proclaiming and promoting. They don’t because they can’t: there is no such list of suicides, otherwise activists like Sturgeon and Maugham would already be accusing Rowling of having essentially murdered them personally. I believe they wish they could actually do this, that some co-morbid, dysphoric teen would take their widely telegraphed
hintsinstructionspredictions of suicidal ideation and become a martyr for the cause. Hell, Maugham thinks that there’s already been a wholesale cover-up of such much-to-be-wished-for suicides follwing the end of “treatment” for minors. It must be galling for them that the many women who are victims of femicide are memorialized, while they have no such list of trans dead to crow about and brandish in response. Their envious, vaunted, self-regarding “Remembrance” remains stubbornly prospective, hypothetical, and aspirational.*In reality, they are far more likely to kill the women who don’t give in.
But, but, but if reality is gratuitously cruel you totally get to pretend that it isn’t and anyone who does anything to upset that pretence is a big bad meanie and therefore complicit in the cruelty (if not it’s ultimate source).
Of course, there was a time when that attitude was largely confined to the sentimental side of Christianity but genderism is the sentimental religion par excellence and everything wrong must be the fault of the Devil or rather all those terfy witches who worship him.
A small point – Sturgeon was First Minister of Scotland, not Prime Minister.
And the “obsessed by” is utterly stupid. Why were suffragettes “obsessed” by H H Asquith? Because he was Prime Minister and opposed votes for women. Why were those opposing the Vietnam War “obsessed” by LBJ and Richard Nixon? Because they were Presidents who were continuing the Vietnam War. If you are someone who who is in a position of power and compromising women’s rights a campaigning feminist is going to be “obsessed” by you i.e. tell you and others that you are a destroyer of women’s rights.
Oops, sorry, Yank blunder. Fixed.
That accusation of obsession is yet another indication of possible sociopathy. Sociopaths like to be in positions of power, but they most certainly do not want to be held accountable. They always place any blame for their actions on somebody else – usually, their victims.
Good ol’ reverse victim and offender.