Debbie Hayton has written an article in the Spectator in which she describes herself as a transsexual who has “undergone a meaningful gender transition supported by medical interventions.” In the article she argues against change to the Gender Recognition Act.
I do not wish to argue either for or against changing that Act. I said my piece on all that two days ago. However, I would like to highlight one particular point that Ms Hayton made:
There is danger, too, to transsexuals – albeit one which is less obvious. As a transsexual woman, I have lived alongside women for many years. My acceptance has been based not on legal mechanisms, but on trust and confidence. When transsexuals like me transition gender, most women assume we have done so to preserve our mental health and usually respond with acceptance and kindness. We have been helped by excellent role models – like Jan Morris and April Ashley – who have engendered a sense of decency and decorum.
Sadly, some campaigners in the current climate have projected a sense of entitlement and recent events – whether it be a convicted rapist sexually assaulting female prisoners or transgender athletes sweeping aside female competition in women’s sports – have inflamed the debate. If this carries on, trust and confidence will lie in tatters. Even if the government does introduce self-declaration it will be worthless if our acceptance is the collateral damage.
I have no doubt that Ms Hayton will be roundly abused by more militant transgender activists for having sought the acceptance and friendship of cisgender women. Why, it’s almost like she thinks they have the right to refuse! Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.
Added later: “Demand” is putting it mildly for some transgender activists. By following a chain of links I have come across a website called “TERF is a slur”. Its strapline is “Documenting the abuse, harassment and misogyny of transgender identity politics.” The website consists simply of screenshots of social media posts by transgender people expressing their hostility to “TERFS”, i.e. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The tweets are astonishingly violent. I don’t for a moment think that this behaviour is typical of transgender people, but nor do I see this stream of threats of death and rape coming from the other side.
The ONLY reason that ANY media noise is being made about the trans caper is because the scum of the left want to enshrine Marxist subjectivist evil into UK law.
The idea that there is NO such thing as objective truth,that every fuckwit has their own truth ALL of which are equally valid. That two plus two equals five if the Party tells you it does. That witnesses, courts, evidence etc are white male patriarchy. That men can become women by declaring that they have. That socialism hasn’t murdered 150 million human beings because they SAY they haven’t and that’s their “truth”. That if some female says Kavanaugh raped her– Christ knows when–then he did even if he was 30000 miles away in Australia on TV in front of 10 million people at the exact moment she says he did it. Because everybody has their own truth and those truths are true even if they are a pile of lying Marxist shite being delivered by lying Marxist shite.
That is what this “gender recognition” cockrot is really all about. And why the scum of the left have adopted this particular mental trouble as their new boo hoo crew.
And–of course–the FFC is right behind it.
I can very well believe the vitriol coming from trans people towards “TERFs”. I recently stumbled upon the Facebook of a girl I used to know at uni who has now transitioned to being a man. She was always very lefty and I was expecting to see the normal deluge of “Fuck the Tories”, “White men are evil” etc that these people litter their fbook with. Instead I just saw post after post of vitriol and even photos of demonstrations against “TERFs” going back for years. It seems she was posting literally nothing else. I think she even got a tattoo saying “fuck TERFs”.
It will be quite fun to watch the factions in the left fight it out like this.
I will not pretend to be an expert on this stuff – but it is getting everywhere. For example yesterday I was at a local conference – and along with such infuriating stuff such as the speeches (and bureaucratic bodies) about the “Oxford to Cambridge corridor” when the east-west rail link was actually closed more than 50 years ago and there are no clear plans to reopen it (over 50 billion Pounds is being wasted on the demented “HS2” project instead), there was also a police contribution at the conference.
There was the normal war-on-drugs speech (with no evidence at all presented that the police actually are cleaning up the streets)) – and there was a police form for every person who went to the conference. The form with the war on drugs – it was all about age, and “gender”, the first question had such language as “cis gender” in it (I have no idea what that even means – and I DO NOT CARE). The only progress I can report is that it was not just me who did NOT fill out the form – I did not see anyone filling out the form. If the police really think they have nothing better to do than to think about “race, sex and gender issues” then it is time we revisited the 1856 Act that made county police forces. Actually I do NOT think that the police really want to waste time on this nonsense about “cissy gender” or whatever, it is the “liberal class” – vile people such as Mrs Theresa May (ex Home Secretary and now Prime Minister – although hopefully this person will be forced out soon).
I must give a hat tip to Mr Ecks – over some years he has understood Mrs May and used the correct language to describe this person.
We voted for independence in June 2016 – the first European Union conference that Mrs May attended as Prime Minister was in September 2016 – it is now October 2018 (more than two years later) and we are still paying money to the European Union and we are still subject to all the regulations of the European Union (for example attacking Freedom of Speech) that are increasing every day. “Thanks” to the vile Mrs May.
This is what is important, this is the outrage. Not Mrs May and her demands for racial quotas for management jobs, and her obsession with “cissy genders” or the rest of this Frankfurt School of Marxism rubbish.
It’s kind of like saying that the more extreme outbursts of the radical feminists don’t help the cause of women generally very much. Or that revolutionary communists haven’t done the cause of the working classes much good.
But then, the same thing can be said in the other direction. Would women feel welcome with a political group that spent all its time screaming about the monstrous regiments of feminism? Would the working classes feel welcome among those who, in their righteous anger against socialist entitlement, argued they deserved their poverty? Are we making any visible efforts to make friends and allies among these ‘minority’ classes? To seduce them from the grip of the Marxists? And if we’re not, is it any surprise if they and all those who sympathise with them take to the other side?
The behavior of some trans people has accomplished what I would have thought was impossible – it makes me feel solidarity and sympathy for radical feminists.
I should have typed that the form (the form that the police left on every table for people to fill in – only to have their forms not filled in) was not about the war-on-drugs stuff that the speech was about – it was about this race and cissy gender stuff (the point being that the form was not connected with the contents of the speech – the police just put out these demented forms as a matter of policy).
Of course the 1856 Act did not create all the county police forces – it made it COMPULSORY for every county to have one. Even Rutland down the road from me and a fine place – which responded by creating a county police force with two members, the Chief Constable and one Constable. Rutland was essentially governed, and represented in Parliament, up to the First World War by the local landowners – freely supported (in elections with the secret ballot from 1872 onwards) by the local people. I think it is Aristotle (in “The Politics”) who mentions that in Carthage there was no Class Conflict as there was in some Greek Cities – that ordinary people in Carthage were not filled with envy for those who had more than they did, and that (on the contrary) tended to freely vote for such people as those with the most responsibility in ordinary society should also have the most responsibility in political matters – John Jay (first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court – and the Governor of New York who freed the slaves, including his own) put this point of view more simply “those who own the land, should rule the land”.
I doubt that John Jay would thought nice things about “gender politics” – but women having the vote would have appealed to him, as those women who did have the vote in his time tended to vote for his political party (the Federalists). As under old colonial law anyone who paid the PROPERTY TAX (be they man or woman) had the vote in such places as New Jersey. This being the meaning of John Jay’s position – the vast majority of State and local government revenue came from the property tax, so those who paid the property tax should be in charge.
The late Roman Republic – where the City Mob paid NO TAX but demanded benefits from the state and were the majority of voters, being (in the mind of the John Jay) something to be AVOIDED.
“Yes, but Paul, what would the opinion of John Jay have been on Transgenders and Cissy Genders and stuff?”
Well from his reading of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” – Mr Jay would have been aware that such things as “Trans Genders” existed, but I hesitate to give what I think would have been Mr Jay’s view of the matter – as Mrs May would have me arrested and sent to prison.
That would be those trans described at the end of the post and in Mal Reynolds comment (October 18, 2018 at 8:45 am), right (thought not Hayton)?
It certainly does not sound like the two-female-prime-ministers Tory party. Or this blog, on which Natalie, among others, seems to feel welcome. 🙂
I knew two postgrads (at different universities) who were frustrated in their attempts to join feminist groups. One was expelled for refusing to be a lesbian. The other was unable to join (a different group) for similar reasons. Many a feminist group does a better job of making women feel unwelcome than any group I’ve ever been in. From their rhetoric, there are similar trans groups.
“It certainly does not sound like the two-female prime-ministers Tory party. Or this blog, on which Natalie, among others, seems to feel welcome.”
Agreed. Making them feel welcome does seem to be the better approach, yes?
And I’m definitely not criticising this blog – it’s a lot more welcoming than many I’ve seen!
The intolerant and politically correct campaigning classes have decided that transgender matters are the latest way for them to create career opportunities for themselves and to demand obedience from everyone else.
Our expanding universities churn out ever more middle class people who think they are educated and should get a reasonably good job, and the public sector will continue to provide them as the number in the private sector declines.
I remember several years ago, when I first started seeing libertarian-leaning sites taking up trans issues.
Most of them supported giving people the option to self-identify, stating it as a natural consequence of self-determination.
I remember thinking “Okay, and then we’re going to get people who self-identify for the purpose of getting into sex-inclusive spaces of the opposite sex for titillation, or worse. Then we’ll get the people subject to that complaining that there isn’t anyplace they can escape it. In the best-case scenario, we’ll have some businesses providing sex-separated spaces and some providing gender-separated spaces… except that the trans activists will continue to complain that the former are discriminatory, so we’ll be right back where we started. A more likely scenario is that the government will publish official definitions and requirements for people to call themselves trans… which is even further from self-determination than what we have now.”
“The intolerant and politically correct campaigning classes have decided that transgender matters are the latest way for them to create career opportunities for themselves and to demand obedience from everyone else.”
True. They seek out traditionally oppressed groups that the public have new sympathy for, and that their ideological opponents can be relied upon to kick up a fuss about and object to. Then they campaign to be given powers to fight that oppression, justifying it using the worst examples of the reaction. They did it with the poor and working class. They did it with women. They did it with black and asian people. They did it with the disabled. They did it with homosexuals. They even did it – in their guise as environmentalists – with tree frogs and baby polar bears. In each case they take the side of the group with public sympathy, and paint their opposition as the greedy, selfish, sexist, racist, homophobic, iredeemably evil haters despoiling the environment with their capitalist ways.
Many opponents, of course, are only too happy to play the part written for them. It provides the authoritarian left with the perfect justification. Any time the more liberal portion of the population baulk at some blatant infringement on liberty, they can silence protest by pointing at the “haters” and explaining how the regulations are needed to protect the innocent from them.
It works every time.
As a transman, I am sick to death of hearing about trans rights. As far as I’m concerned they can all naff off. Some of us have lives they are ruining with their nonsense and vitriol.
I support people’s right to think of me as crazy. I accept that as a problem element in society I shall face certain inconveniences. Life isn’t fair, nor can it be. To demand otherwise is rude and counterproductive. It certainly won’t result in the fairer society they pretend to want.
So I’m with the lady in the article. Gain trust, gain some form of acceptance—even if it will never be full. Abuse the system, it just makes things that much worse for everyone.
I’m a trans woman who sometimes reads this blog, please let that assure you that I am not a Marxist of any kind.
I agree fully with Debbie’s view as quoted. So far I have had remarkably little trouble out in the world, I put this down to having respect for other people and them recognising that and repaying me. There are a fair number of ‘trans activists’ who are shouty dickheads, in my opinion, who make things worse for everyone, make unreasonable demands or try to nail their other political agendas onto trans rights.
The Gender Recognition Act is ripe for reform, mostly because it has already been rendered superfluous. I am not yet eligible for a Gender Recognition Certificate under the current system, having lived ‘full time’ as female for 20 months, whereas 24 are required. I have however already changed almost all of my documents and records, including passport, driving license, HMRC and so on. The only things which I am not yet allowed to change are my birth certificate itself (which I have not seen or needed for over 15 years) and the sex on the records of my private pension provider.
Reform of the GRA would allow me and others to change these 2 things without applying to a panel of judges with a special recommendation letter from my gender psychiatrist with a cheque for £140. I’m sure all here would agree that removing obsolete red tape with no effect on the real world would be a good thing.
If reform would create an abusable system, I would argue that an abusable system already exists, and such abuse is sparse. If someone wants to go into a toilet or changing room for nefarious purposes, their bearing or lacking a piece of paper isn’t going to make any difference. There would hardly be a flood of extra abuse by letting someone have a new birth certificate at the same time as they have a new passport, and without jumping through extra hoops and waiting 2 years.
Paul,
I have told you before, I think that you are perfectly entitled to identify yourself on these forms by race, and I would recommend, given what I know of your background, and recent unpleasant trends in the Labour Party, using a classification developed in mid-20th Century Europe by a government that was heavily invested in such matters, and so may be presumed to have been totally serious about them, most would say far too serious, but these days one cannot be too serious, so just put yourself down as ‘Slav-Mongol Horde‘, if you wish. If enough people with the right to adhere that background description use it – I abhor misrepresentation – it might even be used to pre-populate the forms and save time later.
I just exercised my legitimate power to delete a pointlessly nasty comment. It was fun.
Natalie,
As a transwoman, I agree. I’ve removed myself from trans groups simply because it was too uncomfortable being there. And the louder people talk about “rights”, the more cautious I am.
I use the women’s restroom, and nobody complains. If they complained, I’d probably be doing something wrong. But I just live my life, and fit in as best I can (I’m a noted eccentric) and try not to cause a fuss.
And I vote.
“And I vote.”
Heh. Good for you, Ellen!
Nullius in Verba: October 18, 2018 at 5:58 pm
You got it!!!
Robert Heinlein noticed this 70 years ago, when he was active in California Democrat politics. It was the card-carrying Communists, not today’s anti-culture radicals, but the modus operandi was the same: find a sore spot in society and take sides with the sufferers. He wrote that Communists were a sort of litmus test for social problems.
In that day (1946) it was black Americans, who were still subject to segregation, discrimination, and even lynching. Communists embraced the “civil rights” movement, winning recruits such as the great athlete and singer Paul Robeson, and gaining influence and acceptance among liberals repulsed by “Jim Crow”. Heinlein wrote that the problem of Communist influence among blacks would vanish when the injustices inflicted on them stopped.
Incidentally, the opposition played the desired part – many anti-Communists were made suspicious of the civil rights movement, while some reactionaries and most white supremacists denounced the civil rights movement as a Communist front operation.