Drill Baby Drill...the US Politics Thread (Part 3)

There is too much bullshit in this nasty little post, to address it all, and I promise the rest of the forum, that we are looking at it, and thinking what we do about this poster and his constant stream of right wing hate mongering.

But I wanted to address the nastiest, most insidious part of his post. The allegation that Trans people are disproportionately sexually deviant.

This allegation gets thrown around a lot, and sometimes bogus studies get cited to give it credibility.

I got into an argument a little while ago with someone claiming that trans women were sexual degenerates, along the lines of this post. She eventually sent me a list of 100 names of trans sexual predators and invited me to ‘do my own research’.

So I did. And I found that in every single case, bar one, the offender committed their crime while presenting as male, and subsequently ‘realised’ they were a trans women after offending and getting caught. Now, I can’t rule out the possibly that some of those people were actually women trapped in male bodies, but it does seem suspicious to me that so many male sex offenders suddenly realise they have a burning desire to join the sisterhood after getting caught for an appalling crime and facing a spell in male prison. Certainly enough to make me doubt the veracity and intention of people spreading this libel.

But nobody was present at any point in proceedings to represent Trans Women. Isn’t that weird. And also one of the reasons why the ruling will fall.

Do you know what the ruling actually represents? I doubt you’ve looked into it.

It puts the onus on service providers to deny gendered services (like toilet provision) to people if they suspect they are not biologically female (whatever the fuck that means). The guidance accompanying the ruling is clear that this is based on appearance and reasonable suspicion, and a person displaying ‘masculine traits’ can be refused a service.

If you actually understand the logical consequences of this, it should be immediately apparent why this is going to be hugely problematic. People who look like a societal ideal of feminity (including some trans women) are going to be fine. People who don’t (including a lot of CIS women) are going to be subject to abuse, hassle and embarrassment.

Feminism has fought for generations for the value of a women to not be placed on how she compares to a male centred, societal view of beauty and feminity, and here we are with that fucking confused ghoul (we all know the one) creating legislation that rolls back that progress.

And this is all in response to a pretty non existent threat of - and it’s almost funny to actually type it out - male sexual predators pretending to be women to infiltrate female toilets.

I did’t have ‘will have to explain feminism to self professed feminists’ on my 2025 bingo card, but it’s been a funny old year.

Ah yes, the weapon of choice of the far right. The unsourced, uncited, unevidenced infographic found on Twitter. I mean, someone has taken the time to type it out and created a little icon for it, so it must be true, right?

One of the most interesting parts of this newly resurgent, reactionary right wing opinion isn’t even the bold, carefree way people are willing to throw around comments and opinion that previously would have been halted by the inbuilt decency and kindness filter we all used to have.

It’s how little people care anymore about whether what they are commenting on is true. It’s like the opportunity to spew some hateful opinion - whatever the opposite of ‘virtue signalling is - is greater than caring about facts.

Case in point. This week Marks and Spencer’s got themselves in a PR mess because they apologised to a customer because they complained that person she thought was trans (being tall seems to be the only factor here, and it isn’t clear whether the person actually was trans) asked her if she needed some help while browsing the lingerie with her daughter.

Now despite that being as much of the story as we know, that hasn’t stopped the transphobic crowd, led by Robert Galbraith herself, flying off the handle at M&S permitting this kind of sexual deviancy on their premises - deviancy ranging from perving over young girls choosing a bra, to enticing them into fitting rooms to fondle their breasts under the guise of a measuring up.

I’m torn between believing that for these people the opportunity to put the boot into the trans community transcends trivialities like facts, or whether we are dealing with people so sexually deviant themselves that they can’t imagine something like a bra fitting being anything other than an opportunity to perve over women’s tits.

9 Likes

Meanwhile Murica slides ever closer to a dictatorship. But ya know, extreme left yada yada, trans woke revolution yada yada yada…

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1954928412738691496

4 Likes

…and yet there are deluded fools who believe that there will be free and fair elections again in the US.

3 Likes

You’ve been told on more than one occasion that you’ve swallowed the populist pill and have been ignorantly posting RW propaganda as fact while completely ignoring the elephant in the room.

Quite hilarious that you posted a link to an article without reading the actual article and understood what it says. Quite happy to swallow the disingenuous message though. Really special that.

Your choice obviously but the reality is it is you that isn’t adding anything. You’re free to do this of course. Free speech is a thing but be wary of consequences

3 Likes

I know it causes some amusement that the arch-transphobe has serious form of trying to pass off as a man. But that name is rather more loaded than people imagine. Robert Galbraith Heath was an American psychiatrist that carried out highly unethical experiments on US prisoners trying to change their sexuality by attaching electrodes to their brains.

You wonder how long she has harboured these views or, for that matter, why she wrote a series of children’s books that seemed to appeal to the sort of kids that didn’t fit in with their peers.

3 Likes

Didn’t pay much attention to Rowling before. But wow. Just wow. Something that should be made available much more.

My take with trans rights is simply this.

They’ve got every right to identify themselves with a particular gender. What I take exception to is in sports. You can have the rights of whatever gender etc etc. Just don’t get sports into the equation.

Don’t call me out as a transphobe. I’ll be really scared.

And I’m still waiting for the so called sanctions / tariffs that can be applied to Turkey for trading in Russian oil.

All the while when the head of a rogue nation in Pakistan says on American territory that they have the nukes to take half the world along with them.

I was really surprised by it. I did look up old interviews and she said something about always liking the name, and there are historical people (16th century Scotland) with a similar name. I’m assuming that her publishers checked before hand that there were no other authors that she might be confused with (this is often the reason for pen names) but they obviously missed that.

2 Likes

There really was no need for the passive aggressive coda.

We’re probably quite similar in our beliefs, mine being leave people alone, let them be who they want to be.

There are very few areas where we can’t just accept trans women as women and crack on. Space where women are being cared for following male inflicted trauma being one. Sports with a physical dimension being another.

Even then though it isn’t a straight yes/no. It has to be set against stuff like testosterone levels and muscle mass.

3 Likes

It is intentional.

1 Like

Didn’t mean to be passive aggressive. Sorry if I came across that way.

Just feel that if these lines were deliniated before. There won’t be a question on that.

My opinion is that female sports are to be restricted to those being biologically female. Keep it simple and keep it fair. Doesn’t infringe on the rights of transpersons and them wanting to live their life with dignity.

Pre dating her current obsession with the trans community being a front to attack women, one of the plots of her crime novels involved a man putting on a dress as a disguise to attack women in public toilets.

Looking at this sequentially, it really seems like she has dreamed up a horror scenario for a novel, freaked herself out, convinced herself this is a real threat and set out to do something about it. That makes about as much sense to me as Tolkien setting up a foundation to protect women from Orcs.

7 Likes

I think that is the way they are heading anyway, but that is more because of athletes that have intersex conditions rather than being transgender. I think it mainly hit the headlines after Caster Semenya became successful. She was appallingly treated by the authorities, but it did, at least, force them to define what they meant by women’s sports.

Fencing? Snooker? Archery? Curling? Bowling?

Generally I think you are right, but there doesn’t seem to be an argument to banning people competing where there is no competitive advantage to being male.

1 Like

Should have been done earlier. The vaccum in making the decision didn’t help some people getting mauled by a "female " boxer in the previous Olympics.

Sadly this would actually come in handy in Ukraine.

1 Like

So why doesn’t the conversation start with sports first before going into the nitty gritties later.

No one really cares if people in archery and chess have a physical advantage to the others.

That’s harsh, mate. The case of Imane Khelif is a really complicated one.

There are opinions that she is probably intersex (although she doesn’t not identify as such, but that may be due to repressive attitudes to these things in Algeria) she was assigned female at birth, and has lived her whole life as a women. She believes herself, as has every right to do so, to be a CIS women.

She has become the go to case study for the dangers of allowing trans women to freely compete in sports, when she isn’t even bloody trans!

5 Likes