You're right about compassion. I'm sorry to say it, but the lack of it is my least favourite thing about belonging to the left. There's a persistent mindset that the actions of oppressive states or institutions somehow devolve on to individuals. You used to see it during the IRA's mainland bombing campaign; after an attack, some leftwing friends and colleagues would say, "Well, it's our own fault, isn't it? Look how we've treated the Irish." And I would be left feeling empty: would that be the official response of a leftwing government to the parents of a child who's just been blown to bits by a bomb left in a dustbin?
I see it again in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict. This time the suggestion is that in some way it's the Israeli state's own fault some of its people have been killed, brutalised & taken hostage: just look how they've treated the Palestinians. Yes, the history is awful, but can leftwing people please show some compassion towards the actual victims before trotting this out? Because otherwise it sounds like you're simply trying to justify the terrorism?
There's something oddly Biblical about this outlook: just as the God of the Old Testament thinks it's fine to visit the sins of unbelieving fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generations, so lefties can seem to think there's a sort of justice in the sins of a state being visited upon its citizens. There really isn't, comrades; it's just a human tragedy.
I think they would have no problem dissociating themselves from the activities of their own government right now. I wonder if they think they should be suffering because of it anyway.
I understand there have been some big protests against the Israeli government; I suspect they're not well enough reported in the West. I just want left-leaning people in the UK to react to the human aspects of events before getting political. I'm not trying to say it's everyone, or even a majority, it's just a really noticeable tendency.
As a leftie it didn’t stop me believing that the Israeli government had deliberately allowed two thirds of the soldiers guarding that part of the Gaza barrier home leave for the religious festival. Nothing justifies the Israeli response which Trump is supporting in Gaza and the Left Bank. How this is going to be resolved will determine how Israel’s future will be seen when the history is written.
‘I’m proud that I stood up to my political “side” when that was unpopular.’ - Yes. I’m glad you did, too. People forget how much courage it took. Thank you for standing up.
On the topic of historical novels using modern language and psychology presumably not intentionally, this has been a deliberate trend in historical adaptations for television recently. Edith Wharton’s novel ‘The Buccaneers’ has been adapted in this way recently and it is jarring to me. It superimposes modern American preoccupations onto a story which is very much set in the societal mores of a specific time. I grew up in the US as an American child and teenager and I think this can happen more easily there than in a European context because it is easy to grow up and become and adult in the US without really learning history or reading historical novels and modern American culture has been so dominant that it is possible to not even realise there are other cultures or that society was once different. It is in effect a huge echo chamber.
It's also a bit self-absorbed. It's part of the American myopia in thinking that everyone out there is just like us, more or less. Totally failing to realize that there are cultures that are so different we cannot even begin to find common ground. The different preoccupations of historical characters is a good place to start cracking those blinkers open.
I also tried Buccaneers and felt the same way - couldn’t even get through the first episode. It felt jarring and anachronistic. I’ve read a lot of Wharton and felt so sad that the subtlety of her work felt completely destroyed.
I’m not American but have lived here for over 15 years now and Americans find it difficult to imagine that other people have other preoccupations- I can find myself turning into that too as so much media caters to American perspectives.
The historical novel thing reminds me of when a Jane Eyre adaptation came out reviewers criticised the use of the word 'depressed' in the dialogue, only to discover that it was in the original book...
Re Anora - Truffaut said that every film about war ends up being pro-war, and you could say the same applies to movies about sex work .
As a tangent from the Tudors, one thing I really enjoyed about The Last Kingdom series was how King Alfred was genuinely concerned about the doomed afterlife of "heathens," to the degree that it motivated some his military decisions.
“Because the NYT headline was so boring” is an evergreen comment. How *do* they manage to flatten everything?
My personal bugbear is TV shows set in particular periods - often police procedurals - where the cop or other character says to the bereaved person “I’m sorry for your loss” and I keep thinking: when? When did that become a phrase? I’ve never tracked it down but it would de-anachronise a lot of things if I knew. I never heard Columbo say it, for instance.
Also, I can’t help but wonder: what did they say before that? “Sorry he’s dead, guess they should have secured the piano better”?
I propose a *trendy diagnosis* tax on adults: if you are self-sustaining and living independently and decide that you have what for some is a very limiting disability, but proclaim it to be no big deal, you should pay a large portion of your income to those who because of that shared diagnosis live a much more limited life. This would greatly cut down on the number of stars and podcasters who declare themselves to be “neurodivergent” or “on the spectrum,” and create a great windfall for my adult autistic son. As MAGA gets rid of Medicaid and thus the DDA (Developmental Disabilities Administration) programs on which people like my son rely, trendy-diagnosis funding might be quite necessary. Oh, but I forgot - the trendies believe that REALLY autistic people overcome, and are universally gifted but misunderstood. One of those horseshoe right- meets left things. The rest of us just can’t win for losing.
I have a friend with a high IQ who reads very fast, but imo her reading comprehension suffers. She has sent me articles that patently did not say what she claimed they did. I'm a little skeptical of anyone's ability to take in material at "the speed of someone checking that the page numbers are correct."
I saw a blogger who I usually respect, but who just lazily saw a bunch of left wing Americans he see's as on his side start throwing around the term TERF a few years ago and started using it himself much to my anger, anyway I saw him this week write the sentence 'maybe there is a rational discussion to be had about Trans participation in women's sports but right wing culture warriors have ruined this' and it just made my blood boil. There was no room for a 'rational debate' when without looking at the Scottish Gender Recognition bill he joined his fellow Americans in referring to bunch of British Feminists with impeccable left-wing credentials as TERFs 2 or 3 years ago, there was no room for 'rational debate' when they thought the wind was their back culturally and they dismissed women in rape crisis centres who didn't want a biological male volunteer to be assigned to them as bigots. No back then the only answer was to take the most extreme views of Trans Activists as the only truth and to attack anyone who questioned it as TERFs, Bigots and Closet Right Wingers. I really am not sure I can keep reading that blog after seeing that post, this despite the fact that for 10 years it has been the first website I open each morning, for someone who was actually in the middle of it like you Helen, I am not sure how you don't want to rip the throats out of these people when you are forced onto a panel with them
But more to the point (sorry you set me off an anti-Freddie rant that I imagine was very boring for you to read) I am genuinely interested to know just how enraged you are getting now that the centre-left has decided that a reasonable discussion about the intersection of trans rights and womens single sex spaces is acceptable after all, despite that exact sentence getting you condemned as TERF engaged in Trans Genocide just 3 short years ago
It was Scott Lemiux over at LGM (Lawyers Guns & Money blog) Sorry Helen, I know a lot of people I usually respect have, what is to me an inexplicable, blind spot when it comes to De Boer but I find him unreadable and can’t imagine many fates worse that starting each day with whatever self-aggrandising schlock he has spat out the night before :)
Ha, ok. The Bulwark has also just got into publishing "why are people picking on this vulnerable minority" pieces. I think the GOP cruelty has given people retrospective permission to just bewail the "culture war" and avoid saying out loud that they agree with the actual points the feminists have been making.
This agreeing with other men* without even listening too or attempting to understand women's arguments against gender ideology is part of what opened my eyes to the persuasive misogyny of the world. Men were (and still are) perfectly happy to give away women's rights and when women said 'hey, hang on a minute here' they were ignored at best or tarred as TERFs and fired from jobs and/or received countless rape and death threats. Maybe women's voices are too high pitched or something so men are incapable of hearing them.
**Of course not all men. Many men are great and have listens to women on gender ideology. But I have been disappointed by many men who I thought were intelligent people who can't seem to activate their brain on this issue.
I’ll admit when the North Carolina bathroom bill was a thing in America I just reflexively backed the ‘left’ position thinking it was just more right wing hatred of minorities, but then a couple of years later when the Scottish Self-ID act was suggested, luckily I followed a few UK political writers, often people with impeccable left wing credentials, so they couldn’t just be dismissed and listening to their concerns about the Bill opened my eyes, at first I thought there must be a way to find a reasonable middle without turning it into a culture war thing. But then as those of us who followed it at the time remember, it wasn’t the right who made compromise impossible, it was the extreme trans activists who turned the entire debate toxic and because this was 2016-2022 they didn’t for a moment think they needed to moderate their demands because they thought the winds of history and public opinion were at their backs, so they just became more aggressive, more toxic and at times really quite scary (the ‘Suck my Trans Dick’ signs at the lesbian parade and the lack of condemnation from left wingers was really the moment I saw there was no entering into a dialogue with these people
Thank God for left wing women, UK feminists especially, is all I can say
I went back recently and read the 2017 Times piece that really got me put on to the shit list over gender. It is the mildest thing you'll ever read. The first paragraph is all about the genuine discrimination that transgender people face. Didn't help!
This is what I wish all the people complaining about the cruelty of the Republican agenda now could acknowledge: moderate compromise was on offer a decade ago and the left didn't want it. Instead they wanted to drum women like me out of public life.
That said, the backlash to this particular piece did teach me one thing: the people attacking it often *hated* the parallel with citizenship. They were also open borders people. That should have been a signal to the rest of the broader left that the pure self-ID ideology was a fringe position, no matter how loud its advocates were.
--
The Times, July 25, 2017
Transgender people face discrimination at work, casual abuse in the street and long waits for NHS care. None of those problems will be addressed by the government’s plan to change gender reassignment to a matter of simple declaration. It’s hard not to see Justine Greening’s proposal for “self-identification” of gender as a few rainbow sprinkles from a government that is struggling to pass any substantial legislation.
I’m not even sure that some of the politicians involved understand what they are proposing. The way I see it is this: everyone has a biological sex, and for most of us it’s unambiguously male or female. On top of that, we’ve built a whole cultural edifice that we call gender: girls like pink and can’t read maps; boys shouldn’t cry but at least they are good at parallel parking.
Many people find these roles restrictive and are trying to shake up our categories. A smaller group find that they are so unhappy in the role and body decreed at birth that they wish to transition to the other gender. The legal process currently requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and is signed off by a panel after two years living in your “acquired” gender. Think of the parallel with citizenship: you might feel British and wish to spend the rest of your life in Britain, but there’s still a formal process to go through to become a citizen. Crucially, once you’ve completed that process, you’re as British as someone who was born here. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s the least worst one we have.
What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence — a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head. In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room? That’s why feminists have raised the alarm over the move to self-identification, along with some older trans people who fear that “trendsters” will erode the goodwill they have worked hard to acquire.
“Perhaps these underpaid women BBC presenters should write again to Tony Hall and say that from now on they all want to be regarded as men,” joked Channel 4’s Michael Crick. But you can’t identify your way out of the gender pay gap. Biological females are a class of people who face discrimination too, and there has been little attempt during this process to listen to their concerns.
It’s crazy that people could read that first paragraph and even suggest the writer is anti-Trans in the sense that anti has its dictionary definition (though on the plus side the people calling you TERF must have read past the first paragraph!! 😀😀)
It’s funny you mention pay too, because I’ve long thought the easiest way for a progressive to beat the ‘what is a woman’ gotcha question from right wingers is to say “if you’re being paid 87 cents to do a job a man is paid a dollar to do, then you’re probably a woman”
The fact that no self-declared left wingers have thought of that answer is once again indicative of how divorced an increasingly middle-class left has become from the material concerns, like wages, of what was once our working class base
The Kevin Drum story illustrates that no good deed goes unpunished. It also illustrates something that many Americans do not understand: being selfless and giving to someone who is selfish and taking will never have the positive results that all your feel-good picture books claim it will. This misunderstanding is the basis of a great deal of failed foreign policy. And domestic too. Here's another hot taking: giving too much to someone will turn them into a selfish taker.
I haven’t read the biography in question, but I think one problem modern biography suffers from is that comprehensiveness and accuracy have become the touchstones. Whereas the great biographers and theorists of the past like Virginia Woolf understood the primary aim to be to present the person vividly (using what she called “the fertile fact; the creative fact”), we see the aim as being a faithful account of all the information. This is admirable but easily becomes dull. Biographers have always competed with poets and novelists. This is why some biographies do that odd thing of describing the weather and how the person felt on their morning walk or whatever. But there ought to be some greater concession to the reader’s interest than the simple worthiness of the subject and the importance of the facts. Blaming the readers, as that NYT piece frequently does, is quite justified, but it is only half the blame that needs to be apportioned. We cannot all be little scholars in our reading.
Yeah. My favourite biography of all time is Nancy Mitford on Madame de Pompadour. Because she grew up in “society” she’s attentive to the mad etiquette of Versailles in a way that makes it live and breathe. But I suspect it’s not rigorous in the way that some 800-page doorstop would be.
I want to read O’Sullivan’s book if only to discover if her courage in tackling this issue extended far enough for her to dip her toes into the world of gender dysphoria diagnoses. Might grab the audiobook and find out.
I don’t think you can accuse someone who is willing to express scepticism about ADHD overdiagnosis of being a coward, no matter what else she does or doesn’t cover. Think of all of the people who’ve said nothing at all about any of their qualms.
Yes not to mention there is a pretty toxic illness community associated with ME and "chronic Lyme" (ask Simon Wessely).
I did have the same response as Cyrus on reading SO'S other works, she talks about how the existence of a category changes who ends up being described by it that seemed incredibly relevant to gender stuff, I'd be surprised if she had *never* thought on it.
Not at all! Mostly a joke on my part Helen, but it is a striking omission given the sensitivity of the other issues already being discussed as you said, and should perhaps ring alarm bells were they not already ringing anyway.
I’ll read her book, too. I’m genuinely concerned about the various social contagions among girls and young women, spread via social media, which include imitating Tourette’s; self-diagnosing autism or various conditions, such as CFS or fibromyalgia, for which no reliable tests exist so doctors rely on patients’ self-reporting; Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, and so on. There is a good episode of Blocked and Reported on mainly women diagnosing themselves with autism. I have a learning- disabled son, also diagnosed with autism at the age of 4, who will never be independent, and all these people, who aren’t learning-disabled and have been in mainstream education, yet either self-diagnose, or do receive a medical diagnosis of mild/high-functioning autism, risk weakening structures that exist to support genuinely disabled people and are potentially taking resources away from much more vulnerable people, who aren’t able to advocate for themselves as they do.
Helen, you weren't wrong to call out the bullying and illiberalism on the left. I only wish more people had listened. Instead, it was all "cancel the TERF Nazi who's plotting a trans genocide!" And now Trump, Musk, and DOGE are doing terrible damage to the fabric of the U.S. - smothering free speech and democracy itself, strangling science, condemning millions to death who would've been saved with USAID, and perhaps worst of all, making incels feel studly.
My fellow Americans on the left and liberal-left still need to do some serious soul-searching so we can offer a compelling alternative to MAGA, but for now we're in emergency mode - so much so that I find myself using Bleuski, even though on that app I bear the scarlet letter of "Jesse Singal follower."
I was lucky enough to see Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet and have no problem with Branagh passing the actor’s edition on to him. It’s a crime that the production didn’t get at least filmed for a wider audience - Hiddleston is a gifted Shakespearean verse-speaker and the production as a whole was wonderfully lucid and immediate. Would have been a perfect first Hamlet for Shakespeare novices, young and old alike.
Ben and Kevin missed the point about persuading management to use the sacrificed salary increases to improve the salaries of their junior colleagues. Unless there is evidence that it happened, it probably didn’t happen. Management have an enormous capacity to think that they are more worthy than the staff they supposedly serve.
A particularly delightful edition of The Bluestocking. Thanks for the Tyler Cowen link, I’m a big fan - his discussion with Stephen Kotkin is one of my all time favourites, and I was an early adopter of podcasts.
You're right about compassion. I'm sorry to say it, but the lack of it is my least favourite thing about belonging to the left. There's a persistent mindset that the actions of oppressive states or institutions somehow devolve on to individuals. You used to see it during the IRA's mainland bombing campaign; after an attack, some leftwing friends and colleagues would say, "Well, it's our own fault, isn't it? Look how we've treated the Irish." And I would be left feeling empty: would that be the official response of a leftwing government to the parents of a child who's just been blown to bits by a bomb left in a dustbin?
I see it again in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict. This time the suggestion is that in some way it's the Israeli state's own fault some of its people have been killed, brutalised & taken hostage: just look how they've treated the Palestinians. Yes, the history is awful, but can leftwing people please show some compassion towards the actual victims before trotting this out? Because otherwise it sounds like you're simply trying to justify the terrorism?
There's something oddly Biblical about this outlook: just as the God of the Old Testament thinks it's fine to visit the sins of unbelieving fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generations, so lefties can seem to think there's a sort of justice in the sins of a state being visited upon its citizens. There really isn't, comrades; it's just a human tragedy.
I think they would have no problem dissociating themselves from the activities of their own government right now. I wonder if they think they should be suffering because of it anyway.
I understand there have been some big protests against the Israeli government; I suspect they're not well enough reported in the West. I just want left-leaning people in the UK to react to the human aspects of events before getting political. I'm not trying to say it's everyone, or even a majority, it's just a really noticeable tendency.
As a leftie it didn’t stop me believing that the Israeli government had deliberately allowed two thirds of the soldiers guarding that part of the Gaza barrier home leave for the religious festival. Nothing justifies the Israeli response which Trump is supporting in Gaza and the Left Bank. How this is going to be resolved will determine how Israel’s future will be seen when the history is written.
‘I’m proud that I stood up to my political “side” when that was unpopular.’ - Yes. I’m glad you did, too. People forget how much courage it took. Thank you for standing up.
On the topic of historical novels using modern language and psychology presumably not intentionally, this has been a deliberate trend in historical adaptations for television recently. Edith Wharton’s novel ‘The Buccaneers’ has been adapted in this way recently and it is jarring to me. It superimposes modern American preoccupations onto a story which is very much set in the societal mores of a specific time. I grew up in the US as an American child and teenager and I think this can happen more easily there than in a European context because it is easy to grow up and become and adult in the US without really learning history or reading historical novels and modern American culture has been so dominant that it is possible to not even realise there are other cultures or that society was once different. It is in effect a huge echo chamber.
It's also a bit self-absorbed. It's part of the American myopia in thinking that everyone out there is just like us, more or less. Totally failing to realize that there are cultures that are so different we cannot even begin to find common ground. The different preoccupations of historical characters is a good place to start cracking those blinkers open.
Yes - exactly this
Yes! (American here.) The Metropolitan also had a great piece a while back on the whole "macaron timeclash" genre: https://www.themetropolitan.uk/p/sofia-coppolas-marie-antoinette
I also tried Buccaneers and felt the same way - couldn’t even get through the first episode. It felt jarring and anachronistic. I’ve read a lot of Wharton and felt so sad that the subtlety of her work felt completely destroyed.
I’m not American but have lived here for over 15 years now and Americans find it difficult to imagine that other people have other preoccupations- I can find myself turning into that too as so much media caters to American perspectives.
Agreed
The historical novel thing reminds me of when a Jane Eyre adaptation came out reviewers criticised the use of the word 'depressed' in the dialogue, only to discover that it was in the original book...
Re Anora - Truffaut said that every film about war ends up being pro-war, and you could say the same applies to movies about sex work .
As a tangent from the Tudors, one thing I really enjoyed about The Last Kingdom series was how King Alfred was genuinely concerned about the doomed afterlife of "heathens," to the degree that it motivated some his military decisions.
“Because the NYT headline was so boring” is an evergreen comment. How *do* they manage to flatten everything?
My personal bugbear is TV shows set in particular periods - often police procedurals - where the cop or other character says to the bereaved person “I’m sorry for your loss” and I keep thinking: when? When did that become a phrase? I’ve never tracked it down but it would de-anachronise a lot of things if I knew. I never heard Columbo say it, for instance.
Also, I can’t help but wonder: what did they say before that? “Sorry he’s dead, guess they should have secured the piano better”?
Some data: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I%27m+sorry+for+your+loss&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
I think that phrase became popular in Hill Street Blues. I can hear Dennis Franz saying it awkwardly.
| “Because the NYT headline was so boring” is an evergreen comment. How *do* they manage to flatten everything?
I kind of like that sometimes. For instance, when a story is deeply bizarre--Texas cheerleader mom murder plot--the contrast is amusing.
I propose a *trendy diagnosis* tax on adults: if you are self-sustaining and living independently and decide that you have what for some is a very limiting disability, but proclaim it to be no big deal, you should pay a large portion of your income to those who because of that shared diagnosis live a much more limited life. This would greatly cut down on the number of stars and podcasters who declare themselves to be “neurodivergent” or “on the spectrum,” and create a great windfall for my adult autistic son. As MAGA gets rid of Medicaid and thus the DDA (Developmental Disabilities Administration) programs on which people like my son rely, trendy-diagnosis funding might be quite necessary. Oh, but I forgot - the trendies believe that REALLY autistic people overcome, and are universally gifted but misunderstood. One of those horseshoe right- meets left things. The rest of us just can’t win for losing.
I have a friend with a high IQ who reads very fast, but imo her reading comprehension suffers. She has sent me articles that patently did not say what she claimed they did. I'm a little skeptical of anyone's ability to take in material at "the speed of someone checking that the page numbers are correct."
No way you can read 5 books a day without skimming
I saw a blogger who I usually respect, but who just lazily saw a bunch of left wing Americans he see's as on his side start throwing around the term TERF a few years ago and started using it himself much to my anger, anyway I saw him this week write the sentence 'maybe there is a rational discussion to be had about Trans participation in women's sports but right wing culture warriors have ruined this' and it just made my blood boil. There was no room for a 'rational debate' when without looking at the Scottish Gender Recognition bill he joined his fellow Americans in referring to bunch of British Feminists with impeccable left-wing credentials as TERFs 2 or 3 years ago, there was no room for 'rational debate' when they thought the wind was their back culturally and they dismissed women in rape crisis centres who didn't want a biological male volunteer to be assigned to them as bigots. No back then the only answer was to take the most extreme views of Trans Activists as the only truth and to attack anyone who questioned it as TERFs, Bigots and Closet Right Wingers. I really am not sure I can keep reading that blog after seeing that post, this despite the fact that for 10 years it has been the first website I open each morning, for someone who was actually in the middle of it like you Helen, I am not sure how you don't want to rip the throats out of these people when you are forced onto a panel with them
That wasn’t Freddie deBoer was it? He’s often an interesting writer but he has a complete blind spot on gender.
But more to the point (sorry you set me off an anti-Freddie rant that I imagine was very boring for you to read) I am genuinely interested to know just how enraged you are getting now that the centre-left has decided that a reasonable discussion about the intersection of trans rights and womens single sex spaces is acceptable after all, despite that exact sentence getting you condemned as TERF engaged in Trans Genocide just 3 short years ago
It was Scott Lemiux over at LGM (Lawyers Guns & Money blog) Sorry Helen, I know a lot of people I usually respect have, what is to me an inexplicable, blind spot when it comes to De Boer but I find him unreadable and can’t imagine many fates worse that starting each day with whatever self-aggrandising schlock he has spat out the night before :)
Ha, ok. The Bulwark has also just got into publishing "why are people picking on this vulnerable minority" pieces. I think the GOP cruelty has given people retrospective permission to just bewail the "culture war" and avoid saying out loud that they agree with the actual points the feminists have been making.
This agreeing with other men* without even listening too or attempting to understand women's arguments against gender ideology is part of what opened my eyes to the persuasive misogyny of the world. Men were (and still are) perfectly happy to give away women's rights and when women said 'hey, hang on a minute here' they were ignored at best or tarred as TERFs and fired from jobs and/or received countless rape and death threats. Maybe women's voices are too high pitched or something so men are incapable of hearing them.
**Of course not all men. Many men are great and have listens to women on gender ideology. But I have been disappointed by many men who I thought were intelligent people who can't seem to activate their brain on this issue.
I’ll admit when the North Carolina bathroom bill was a thing in America I just reflexively backed the ‘left’ position thinking it was just more right wing hatred of minorities, but then a couple of years later when the Scottish Self-ID act was suggested, luckily I followed a few UK political writers, often people with impeccable left wing credentials, so they couldn’t just be dismissed and listening to their concerns about the Bill opened my eyes, at first I thought there must be a way to find a reasonable middle without turning it into a culture war thing. But then as those of us who followed it at the time remember, it wasn’t the right who made compromise impossible, it was the extreme trans activists who turned the entire debate toxic and because this was 2016-2022 they didn’t for a moment think they needed to moderate their demands because they thought the winds of history and public opinion were at their backs, so they just became more aggressive, more toxic and at times really quite scary (the ‘Suck my Trans Dick’ signs at the lesbian parade and the lack of condemnation from left wingers was really the moment I saw there was no entering into a dialogue with these people
Thank God for left wing women, UK feminists especially, is all I can say
I went back recently and read the 2017 Times piece that really got me put on to the shit list over gender. It is the mildest thing you'll ever read. The first paragraph is all about the genuine discrimination that transgender people face. Didn't help!
This is what I wish all the people complaining about the cruelty of the Republican agenda now could acknowledge: moderate compromise was on offer a decade ago and the left didn't want it. Instead they wanted to drum women like me out of public life.
That said, the backlash to this particular piece did teach me one thing: the people attacking it often *hated* the parallel with citizenship. They were also open borders people. That should have been a signal to the rest of the broader left that the pure self-ID ideology was a fringe position, no matter how loud its advocates were.
--
The Times, July 25, 2017
Transgender people face discrimination at work, casual abuse in the street and long waits for NHS care. None of those problems will be addressed by the government’s plan to change gender reassignment to a matter of simple declaration. It’s hard not to see Justine Greening’s proposal for “self-identification” of gender as a few rainbow sprinkles from a government that is struggling to pass any substantial legislation.
I’m not even sure that some of the politicians involved understand what they are proposing. The way I see it is this: everyone has a biological sex, and for most of us it’s unambiguously male or female. On top of that, we’ve built a whole cultural edifice that we call gender: girls like pink and can’t read maps; boys shouldn’t cry but at least they are good at parallel parking.
Many people find these roles restrictive and are trying to shake up our categories. A smaller group find that they are so unhappy in the role and body decreed at birth that they wish to transition to the other gender. The legal process currently requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and is signed off by a panel after two years living in your “acquired” gender. Think of the parallel with citizenship: you might feel British and wish to spend the rest of your life in Britain, but there’s still a formal process to go through to become a citizen. Crucially, once you’ve completed that process, you’re as British as someone who was born here. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s the least worst one we have.
What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now it’s a question of an internal essence — a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head. In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women’s changing room? That’s why feminists have raised the alarm over the move to self-identification, along with some older trans people who fear that “trendsters” will erode the goodwill they have worked hard to acquire.
“Perhaps these underpaid women BBC presenters should write again to Tony Hall and say that from now on they all want to be regarded as men,” joked Channel 4’s Michael Crick. But you can’t identify your way out of the gender pay gap. Biological females are a class of people who face discrimination too, and there has been little attempt during this process to listen to their concerns.
--
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/article/a-man-can-t-just-say-he-has-turned-into-a-woman-m5lltcgv7
It’s crazy that people could read that first paragraph and even suggest the writer is anti-Trans in the sense that anti has its dictionary definition (though on the plus side the people calling you TERF must have read past the first paragraph!! 😀😀)
It’s funny you mention pay too, because I’ve long thought the easiest way for a progressive to beat the ‘what is a woman’ gotcha question from right wingers is to say “if you’re being paid 87 cents to do a job a man is paid a dollar to do, then you’re probably a woman”
The fact that no self-declared left wingers have thought of that answer is once again indicative of how divorced an increasingly middle-class left has become from the material concerns, like wages, of what was once our working class base
The Kevin Drum story illustrates that no good deed goes unpunished. It also illustrates something that many Americans do not understand: being selfless and giving to someone who is selfish and taking will never have the positive results that all your feel-good picture books claim it will. This misunderstanding is the basis of a great deal of failed foreign policy. And domestic too. Here's another hot taking: giving too much to someone will turn them into a selfish taker.
I haven’t read the biography in question, but I think one problem modern biography suffers from is that comprehensiveness and accuracy have become the touchstones. Whereas the great biographers and theorists of the past like Virginia Woolf understood the primary aim to be to present the person vividly (using what she called “the fertile fact; the creative fact”), we see the aim as being a faithful account of all the information. This is admirable but easily becomes dull. Biographers have always competed with poets and novelists. This is why some biographies do that odd thing of describing the weather and how the person felt on their morning walk or whatever. But there ought to be some greater concession to the reader’s interest than the simple worthiness of the subject and the importance of the facts. Blaming the readers, as that NYT piece frequently does, is quite justified, but it is only half the blame that needs to be apportioned. We cannot all be little scholars in our reading.
Yeah. My favourite biography of all time is Nancy Mitford on Madame de Pompadour. Because she grew up in “society” she’s attentive to the mad etiquette of Versailles in a way that makes it live and breathe. But I suspect it’s not rigorous in the way that some 800-page doorstop would be.
I want to read O’Sullivan’s book if only to discover if her courage in tackling this issue extended far enough for her to dip her toes into the world of gender dysphoria diagnoses. Might grab the audiobook and find out.
I don’t think you can accuse someone who is willing to express scepticism about ADHD overdiagnosis of being a coward, no matter what else she does or doesn’t cover. Think of all of the people who’ve said nothing at all about any of their qualms.
Yes not to mention there is a pretty toxic illness community associated with ME and "chronic Lyme" (ask Simon Wessely).
I did have the same response as Cyrus on reading SO'S other works, she talks about how the existence of a category changes who ends up being described by it that seemed incredibly relevant to gender stuff, I'd be surprised if she had *never* thought on it.
Not at all! Mostly a joke on my part Helen, but it is a striking omission given the sensitivity of the other issues already being discussed as you said, and should perhaps ring alarm bells were they not already ringing anyway.
I’ll read her book, too. I’m genuinely concerned about the various social contagions among girls and young women, spread via social media, which include imitating Tourette’s; self-diagnosing autism or various conditions, such as CFS or fibromyalgia, for which no reliable tests exist so doctors rely on patients’ self-reporting; Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, and so on. There is a good episode of Blocked and Reported on mainly women diagnosing themselves with autism. I have a learning- disabled son, also diagnosed with autism at the age of 4, who will never be independent, and all these people, who aren’t learning-disabled and have been in mainstream education, yet either self-diagnose, or do receive a medical diagnosis of mild/high-functioning autism, risk weakening structures that exist to support genuinely disabled people and are potentially taking resources away from much more vulnerable people, who aren’t able to advocate for themselves as they do.
Helen, you weren't wrong to call out the bullying and illiberalism on the left. I only wish more people had listened. Instead, it was all "cancel the TERF Nazi who's plotting a trans genocide!" And now Trump, Musk, and DOGE are doing terrible damage to the fabric of the U.S. - smothering free speech and democracy itself, strangling science, condemning millions to death who would've been saved with USAID, and perhaps worst of all, making incels feel studly.
My fellow Americans on the left and liberal-left still need to do some serious soul-searching so we can offer a compelling alternative to MAGA, but for now we're in emergency mode - so much so that I find myself using Bleuski, even though on that app I bear the scarlet letter of "Jesse Singal follower."
I was lucky enough to see Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet and have no problem with Branagh passing the actor’s edition on to him. It’s a crime that the production didn’t get at least filmed for a wider audience - Hiddleston is a gifted Shakespearean verse-speaker and the production as a whole was wonderfully lucid and immediate. Would have been a perfect first Hamlet for Shakespeare novices, young and old alike.
Ben and Kevin missed the point about persuading management to use the sacrificed salary increases to improve the salaries of their junior colleagues. Unless there is evidence that it happened, it probably didn’t happen. Management have an enormous capacity to think that they are more worthy than the staff they supposedly serve.
Doesn’t stop Kevin Drum being a mensch, though.
Thank you for “mensch”. A wonderful word for a good person and a new word in my dictionary.
A particularly delightful edition of The Bluestocking. Thanks for the Tyler Cowen link, I’m a big fan - his discussion with Stephen Kotkin is one of my all time favourites, and I was an early adopter of podcasts.