April 4, 2022 - 3:00pm
One of the biggest lies about the conflict between feminists and trans activists is that ‘the debate is toxic on both sides’. It’s trotted out in just about every article that takes a supposedly neutral position, even though the authors never produce any evidence for this slur on women who’ve never threatened anyone.
The other side is, of course, a different matter. JK Rowling is a favourite target and now a music video has emerged in which trans campaigner Faye ‘Trust Fund Ozu’ addresses the author with the chilling words ‘hope you fit in a hearse’. The video also features vocals about ‘killing TERFS’.
It sounds like a death threat and Rowling certainly regards it as such. She posted screen grabs of the song on Twitter, adding: ‘I’m afraid I can’t give a shout out to everyone promising to murder me – there are so many of you, and I’m a busy woman – but this one deserves a mention for the nineties rave vibe, @TrustFundOzu’.
But here’s the twist. When the actor James Dreyfus reported the post to Twitter, the social media platform failed to uphold his complaint. Even more bizarrely, it claimed that the alleged death threat hadn’t ‘broken its safety policies’. It’s a colossal piece of cheek from a platform that regularly hands out suspensions to women who state facts, such as saying trans women are not biological women, or ‘misgender’ trans athletes like Lia Thomas.
Dreyfus made exactly this point in his response: ‘So, death threats = Good. Saying “women are women” = Bad. Congratulations, Twitter Support. You’ve hit rock bottom. Seek help.’ He’s right, of course, and it’s clear that platforms like Twitter are penalising gender-critical women for what is, since Maya Forstater’s successful appeal, protected speech.
What this episode tells us, however, is not just that we are dealing with entitled, narcissistic individuals. We already knew that. It’s becoming clear that there has been a collective decision that trans people are the most vulnerable group in society, regardless of what the statistics tell us, and anyone who speaks for them (or claims to do so) is endowed with the same mantle of victimhood.
Hence they’re given a free pass even if they are gloating about the imagined death of a children’s author or clutching a baseball bat and threatening to murder feminists. I’ve seen it so often that I’m more shocked by the widespread refusal to acknowledge the hateful reality than the threats, which have been documented on many occasions.
There is nothing even-handed about this debate (it isn’t even a debate, thanks to the other side’s refusal to engage, but that’s another matter). Feminists who use words and reasoned arguments are up against extremists who issue rape and death threats, try to get people sacked from their jobs and set off smoke bombs.
Social media platforms and commentators who use the ‘toxic on both sides’ excuse under the guise of being ‘kind’ should hang their heads in shame. In these circumstances, kindness is unkindness, as Orwell didn’t say — but maybe he should have.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
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SubscribeThe author refers to this being a conflict between feminists and t activists.
it is not of course. It is a conflict between the elite leftist tribe and all ordinary men and women who consider the aggressive demands of the activists as totally unacceptable.
Of course we know that the tribe in charge of twitter will not hold a balance but give free reign to the activists.
It’ll be interesting to see what Elon Musk, Twitter’s new major shareholder, does to the bias…
https://twitter.com/addicted2newz/status/1510960018090348559?s=20&t=eHeHKoIeGP65FX0MEiAG8w
I see this as a huge positive if he can influence Twitter away from so much censorship.
Yes absolutely. The other one is describing them as “gender critical feminists” which gets my goat.
Yes, just rational adults.
Why? That is what they are.
The author hasn’t come to terms with the actual number of professional feminists and feminist organisations driving this insane ideology. This is not to diss the writer, who like many other British women terfs, has shown personal courage and strength resisting the gender cult.
Fwiw, I too complained to Twitter about the the toxic bloke who made the video. He was gleefully doubling down and calling JKR a b**ch. Other blue ticks Like Reza Azlan were supporting him and excoriating JKR for complaining.
Would these people refer to themselves as logical thinkers defending human rights, or trans exclusionary radical feminists? I think the former, so let’s drop the ridiculous ‘terf’ word.
The terf slur is ridiculous but it has stuck. Given the circumstances, it seems best to embrace the term mockingly. Bigot, gammon, terf, islamophobe-the sting disappears when nearly everyone is one of the above.
I hear you…. let’s put it in inverted commas to infer the mocking.
Should men wear t-shirts with the slogan, “This is what a TERF looks like.”?
Absolutely!
Well put. You are quite right of course. Woman are more in the firing line which persuades some to assume incorrectly that it is an argument between trans activists and feminists and that the feminists are getting their just deserts.
Women are more in the firing line? You are newcomers to this basket of deplorables.
Are not feminists just reaping what they sowed?
And here comes Ethniciodo… no they are not.
Unless you think having the vote, having the opportunity to have a meaningful career and the opportunity to build an independent life is unreasonable….?
….problem is Lesley, they didn’t just stop there.
Yes, once the bit gets between proverbial teeth and ‘have it all’ becomes a ‘thing’, covetessness blurs reason aka all things thy desireth but are all beneficial? ‘Shot’ and ‘foot’ spring to mind.
Bernard, ‘they’ is a very small group of women now.
Some brands of liberal feminism contributed
Please don’t just blame feminists
Feminists invented the modern form of cancel culture. Attacking and silencing people – insisting anyone who challenges their ‘facts’ is a misogynist, etc. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for cancelled feminists.
Did they? This is on my mind a war of reason against fanaticism, so hardly the time to be calling for ‘a plague on your two houses’. Women actually exist for a start (while the category of ‘trans’ is much more questionnable) and have legitimate reasons to campaign for change in society. For example almost all sexual and other violence is perpetrated by (a minority of) men; the culture in some organisations has been casually misogynist etc.
And on a more trivial level, women do seem on any survey to carry out much more than half of household chores, whether or not they are working. Of course this results from the complex and even unspoken negotiations of private family life. Perhaps women are more likely than men to worry about tidiness, and there are many other considerations. Therefore it is not something that governments can or should try to change, nonetheless it seems rather churlish to say that feminists should not make the point!
Why some men seem to get so defensive about these facts is beyond me.
Feminists don’t all agree with each other. You posit a homogenous mass of feminists who have been censoring opinion. I’m not aware that this is the case, can you substantiate this?
I would go further and include the state and big tech with the leftist tribe. Twitter is spreading propaganda. Most people mistake propaganda as an attempt to cover up lies or smear enemies. Its real purpose is to humiliate the populace by telling deliberate untruths and getting away with it. In the case of transgender activism it’s about getting people to refute the evidence of their own senses and to listen to the ‘experts’ instead. It makes sense: if you are wrong about what constitutes a man and a woman, you must be wrong about most other things too, therefore your own frameworks of thinking are not be trusted either. 2 + 2 = 5 and all that.
The point of the exercise is to force you to say something which isn’t true.
Yes, exactly.
To be fair, ‘some of the’ elite leftist tribe, not all. But those who fall foul of the ideological hatchet men rapidly fall from grace. An example Joanna Cherry of the SNP. I don’t think many on here will live her with her past positions on Brexit, but I watched her chair a Commons Select Committee on the ‘trans’ issue; she was forensic and excellent. (I suppose as a QC she would be expected to be!).
Twitter has been allowing death threats for years, before the trans thing even got started big time. They’ve had quite the reputation for allowing rape threats against conservative women as well, claiming no policy was violated, while say, banning the founder of the #WalkAway movement who was apparently causing harm by suggesting people leave the Democrat party. It lets you know what, or who, Twitter considers a true threat.
Why do we keep being surprised that people who tell us they hate us and think we’re Nazis don’t want to engage in conversation?
When you think someone is wrong, you seek to convince them.
When you think someone is evil, you seek to destroy them.
The Republicans are likely to win a majority of Congress in 2022; how much would you bet that the first thing they will try to pass is a tax cut?
The Right needs to start throwing rocks instead of whining. Here are a few ideas:
1) revoke Disney’s special Mickey copyright extension. This would be a nuclear bomb dropped on woke corporations.
2) pass a law making it illegal to teach collective racial guilt against any race
3) require that any Internet company that edits content for anything but imminent threats of physical violence loses their section 230 protection.
4) ask Victor Orban for more and better ideas. He plays to win.
The relevant excerpt from my heroic couplet satire, The Wokeiad by Richard Craven:-
……….
This tribe’s succeeded by the tribe of Pride:
Cowboy in leather chaps who sits astride
Pup masked in black and shiny neoprene;
Bear and his twink, waxed smooth and epicene;
The buzzcut butch with stubble on her chin,
The connoisseur of methamphetamine, 1320
The dominatrix and her cringing simp,
The exhibitionist and hog-tied gimp.
As these march past, a bitter fight breaks out,
Trans sophist brawny against sapphist stout.
Speak not of saintly Nozick nor good Rawls:
Instead prop forwards scrum for shrunken bawls.
Transwomen weaponise ‘they/them’ pronouns,
And Logos in the muddied waters drowns.
The fighting spreads, engulfs the whole parade,
The trans castrated and the cuckold spayed. 1330
Here Lived Experience vanquishes Truth,
Boomer decrepit yields to coxcomb Youth.
Alarum and the screams of the erased,
My Lady mansplained and My Gaylord tazed,
The rampant T batters the LGB,
And gender activists shriek “Me! Me! Me!”
Their personalities stripped of pretence:
Just narcissism of small difference;
No more shall superego restrain id
Upon the apex of woke’s pyramid. 1340
Love “just narcissism of small difference”
He’s quoting Sigmund Freud who coined the phrase “narcissism of small differences”
I found this last year on the Telegraph. I thought it was just funny at first but I’m not so sure now. Copyright – tony moore 21 Sep 2020 1:48PM The Telegraph comments section
Favourable treatment based on minority status = equality
Treated like everyone else = oppressed
A philosophy of maximising individual liberty = fascism
A philosophy of controlling thought and language to insist all do and achieve the same = liberal
Placing ideologies based on superstition and mythical stories ahead of facts and science = progressive
Treating people of different races equally = racist
Radically narrowing the language, ideas and discourse in an organisation or group = promoting diversity
Outlawing, banning, canceling and denigrating those with different perspectives = inclusiveness.
White people born into low income, low social mobility areas = privileged
Non white people born to wealthy, educated parents = disadvantaged
Incomptent = vulnerable
One who ignores the massive majority of black lives lost at the hands of other black lives = BLM supporter
Wishing white people dead, joking about their death or similar = satire (according to the BBC anyway)
Those who carry knives and weapons with an intent to hurt others = vulnerable
Following an ideology that believes itself morally supreme and others to be sinful and unclean = moderate
Born with male or female reproductive systems = genderless
Groups that choose not to participate in an organisation, or pursue qualifications to = underrepresented
Taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those that don’t = fairness
Offering nonintrusive and well-intended complements to women = harassment
Facts and logical arguments that aspire to objectivity = hate speech
Concocted stories, anecdotes and biased or warped presentations of experiences = “powerful”
To offer an inaccurate, incomplete and biased description of the events of a matter = to educate
To make a relevant and fact-based counterargument to a left-wing view = inappropriate.
To offer a relevant and fact-based suggestion or proposal to tackle a social issue = offensive
Politically correct = “A narrative about a situation or event that ensures that positive and negative attributes are given to participants according to the perceived ranking of their immutable characteristics and irrespective of realities of their behavior according to objective standards or social norms
Twitter is a hate platform in and of itself. That’s why it allows men in dresses to threaten women. However, that’s a small part of what this is all about.
It is a ‘conflict’ between arrant nonsense and simple fact. Nothing controversial at all.
This ‘collective decision’ has been taken by about 3 people and imposed on the rest
I’m pretty sure Rowling isn’t ‘taking’ any of this. Despite wokeist ideology, words aren’t actual violence. Sadly I guess she’ll have reviewed her actual physical security though.
She’d be unwise not to — some of these extremists really believe their own hype and it only takes the sickest of the cretinous bunch..
It is now beyond any doubt that Twitter is now hugely abusing its legal privileges to selectively decide which posts it should allow and which censor. It does so an outrageously biased way. It is well past time that a conservative (??!!) government starts to fight back and passes legislation on the issue. The penalty for overt political bias on any issue would be, say, 10% of the profits generated in this country, estimated by UK regulators and not the corporation.