Well this is the thing, isn’t it. Trans rights. What are they? What, exactly, are they? Is it a “right” to force everyone to agree that one is something one is not? If so, how do we know that’s a right? What chain of reasoning or history of injustices shores up the claim that that is a right? Is it a “right” for men to help themselves to everything set aside for women on the grounds that they are trans women? If so, how, why, on what grounds, and what about women who object?
Well I for one do indeed question both gender ideology and claims about “trans rights” that never ever ever explain exactly what these rights are and how they were discovered or established or justified or explained or anything at all besides asserted.
Is there a right for men to take everything women have on the grounds that the men are trans, i.e. that they claim to be women? Is there? Is that universally agreed to be a right? So universally that it fits seamlessly into the UDHR, the actual official written down Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Can Laurie Penny tell us where to find a record of this universal agreement? Can she explain how that can be a right without canceling women’s rights? Can she explain how and why that would be fair and just?
Many people have asked in reply to that tweet. Naturally she hasn’t responded.
Comments
10 responses to “Define them”
Laurie Penny: Transphobia is boring, cowardly and regressive.
Whereas LP is progressive, brave, but most importantly so, so un-boring. (Her un-boringness is, of course, so unique that it can only be defined in opposition to what it is not.) I think a good idea for a sitcom would be Laure Penny and Jolyon Maugham have to share a house and all they do is try to out compete on another in self-mythologising.
HAhahahahahahaha what a brilliant idea.
Assuming there are such things as “transphobes” and “trans rights,” neither of which is properly defined. She vilifies those who question gender ideology, presumably because trans ideology, according to her, should be uncritically swallowed in toto? The contempt is real.
We can name this sitcom “A Penny For Your Fox”
It would be a SMASH HIT.
Fucking brilliant! I think we should offer a part to India Whatsisname too. I hear he’s looking for work in media. With the three of them together I think we’d get the whole cis-boom-bah happening. We could add him from the get-go, or save it for the follow-up season: “A Penny For Your Fox: A Passage to India.”
They have the right to label themselves as they wish. Male people can call themselves women, female people men, boringly conventional people can call themselves nonbinary, hell you can even call yourself a wolf if you want. That’s freedom of speech, and it’s a precious thing.
But. By that same principle, we get to ignore those labels, or disagree with them altogether. We get to choose our own speech. Our disagreement is the expression of that same principle, and they don’t like that. They want the authority to coerce speech.
Season 3: “A Penny For Your Fox: A Passage to India: Willoughby Happy There?”
YNNB #6
Not “trans-boom-bah” ?
I figured Jolyon was the cis, (though Penny actually is too, despite the brightly coloured hair), and the other two could fight it out as to who was the boom and who was the bah.