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Piers Morgan - Transphobe

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    Piers Morgan - Transphobe

    I ought to say I'm shocked but this is all too predictable:

    https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/c...-a4096266.html

    #2
    I fail to see how science hasn't mastered the technology required to fire this suppurating arsehole into the heart of the sun. Get to it, science!

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      #3
      He is loathsome, obviously, but GMB deserve equal criticism for keeping him on hand as their pet controversialist and trying to explain away his endless crass interventions as Piers being Piers, thrilling unpredictability or whatever the lame excuse of the week is. Having someone who ostensibly clears the low bar of being less repulsive sitting next to him doesn't get them off the hook.

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        #4
        Popular music still follows the gender binary quite strictly even though individuals have been bending their own genders from Bowie and Prince onwards. On the other hand, so much music today is done by collaboration that it's harder to discern who's making the most creative input.

        In addition, these baubles are largely just based on record sales so will be market driven, and the markets are still segregated into male and female buyers who support acts by gender often.

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          #5
          Yes, apologies. You could also make a case for female blues singers who were openly lesbian (Ma Rainey).

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            #6
            As it pertains to PM, I really wish people would continue replying to everything he says or tweets with 'Shouldn't you be in jail?'

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              #7
              Originally posted by Benjm View Post
              He is loathsome, obviously, but GMB deserve equal criticism for keeping him on hand as their pet controversialist and trying to explain away his endless crass interventions as Piers being Piers, thrilling unpredictability or whatever the lame excuse of the week is. Having someone who ostensibly clears the low bar of being less repulsive sitting next to him doesn't get them off the hook.
              This is what we do in this country, though. From churlish 'rentagobs' all the way up to out-and-out racist hatemongers, if it's believed that they can shift sh*te product, then they'll be employed for eye-watering amounts. All under the ever-more-tattered banner of 'free speech'.

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                #8
                1983 was the turning point: breakfast TV starting just after the Falklands turned the next election into a Tory certainty. The ITV version quickly deciding to go tabloid.

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                  #9
                  If Piers Morgan believes so strongly in the sanctity of what goes down on your birth cert, why isn't he still called Piers O'Meara?

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                    #10
                    Not to say that an American conservative media figure would be afraid of saying something equally offensive, but what is it about Britain that has made transphobia so big among public figures and others? We don't have celebrities/public figures outside of the conservative outrage sphere who have taken to being full-time transphobes like Graham Linehan and all of the TERFs with newspaper columns. Is because the tabloid press is more big there than in the US, and it's created a feedback loop of panic?

                    It really seems from afar that there are a large group of people that have lost their minds over trans people being open about their existence.

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                      #11
                      I really hope the rumors are true that Arthur Matthews was the real creative force behind Father Ted. Linehan was a shit journalist at Select in the early 90s, I'd like to think the terrible Alexis Sayle sitcom in fin de siecle Paris was his baby. A massive massive arsehole. Him and Wings Over Scotland are some of the worst Terf obsessives going.

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                        In addition, these baubles are largely just based on record sales so will be market driven, and the markets are still segregated into male and female buyers who support acts by gender often.
                        Do you mean that women buy records by women and men by men? Is there any data on this? That doesn't seem an obvious fact to me at all.

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                          #13
                          I don't know about women, but I can think of a lot of men that might fall into that sort of trap. Yer sort of aging Guitar indie types.

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                            #14
                            Yeah but if we're going by broad stereotypes you've also got a certain type of gay men listening to almost nothing but female pop singers. I imagine it's more likely to map onto the gender balance of whatever musical genres a person likes, rather than their own gender.

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                              #15
                              Yeah, fair enough. I think that the real issue is that it's so trivially easy to listen to music that you'd have to assume that the default is that people listen to all sorts of stuff that they might never have gone near at any point. And Blondie. Everyone loves Blondie .My parents love Blondie.

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                                #16
                                Inca, this relatively recent NYT op ed tries to answer your question

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                                  #17
                                  Thanks. Ken spoke about the issue briefly on a Second Captains last week in a discussion about trans athletes, and remarked how there is almost no controversy around trans identity in Ireland.

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                                    #18
                                    Can we put up a content warning for transphobia on the link posted by Central Rain?

                                    i mean, i think it lays out the Terf position more accurately than the NYT piece, and if you can read it critically it might be worth looking at, but it also repeats some anti-trans slurs and it's quite violent in its hostility. Also note the blogger's nonchalant response in the comments to a supportive message from a white supremacist.

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                                      #19
                                      I think the idea that "it has largely been confined to Twitter" is...well, a bit of a stretch, at best.

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                                        #20
                                        (and yeah, that's a fucking horrible piece)

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                                          I don't know about women, but I can think of a lot of men that might fall into that sort of trap. Yer sort of aging Guitar indie types.
                                          I can think of a lot that 'might', as well.

                                          Similarly, there's a nebulous school of belief that only women listen to Tori Amos or Alanis Morissette.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Fussbudget View Post
                                            Yeah but if we're going by broad stereotypes you've also got a certain type of gay men listening to almost nothing but female pop singers. I imagine it's more likely to map onto the gender balance of whatever musical genres a person likes, rather than their own gender.
                                            But a genre like boybands is bought predominantly by girls not just on its musical merits but on the gender image of the male performers so it's not just women buying music by women but also women buying men for what they offer as safe romantic fantasy objects.

                                            In addition many acts are marketed in ways that emphasize gender: hyper-masculine hip hop or hyper-sexualized hyper-feminine R&B. That's partly for same-gender identification (role models) but also for heterosexual fantasy to some degree.

                                            However, I'd agree that some fans do like gender blurring, as we saw in the too brief Lady Gaga phase of 2009-2011; and obviously Bowie's Ziggy period.
                                            Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 22-03-2019, 10:19.

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                                              #23
                                              Some musical genres tend towards a gender-specific audience but most don't, I would have thought.

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                                                #24
                                                Thank you Snake Plissken.

                                                i started thinking about Incandenza's question before i read the NYT piece. First of all i want to say that trans-exclusionary feminists (whom i'm going to refer to as 'gender critical': GCFs*) are to Morgan, Linehan etc as lexiters are to Ukip – strategically useful but unrelated. As regards the history of GCFs, i'm less qualified to give an answer than Sophie Lewis, and i didn't know about the sceptic movement in the 1990s, which would certainly help to explain the centrality of 'science' to the arguments they put forward. However, my own thinking about the peculiarities of British radical feminism went off in a different direction, which i'll try to expand upon here.

                                                tl;dr: i'm looking at sexual violence as the key issue, a legacy of binary thinking, and the influential role of shelters and refuges.

                                                Radical feminism is based on a reformulation of the marxist-materialist model, where society is divided into two classes: the exploiting and the exploited, men and women. The first task, implicit in the name (radix = root), was to explain how these classes originally came into being – to find the root of exploitation. Radfems argued that women's capacity to bear children, which made them a prize for men but could also limit their mobility and independence, tied them to their bodies like animals or slaves, whereupon they could be thought of as innately inferior and dominated.

                                                British second-wave feminism was comparatively slow to depart from its materialist origins. Whereas the first US activists emerged from anti-war activism and the civil rights movement, and French feminists from May '68, in the UK the centrality of social class and the influence of critical theory made it necessary to address, from the beginning, how the domination of women and the exploitation of the working class are related. i think the tradition of theorising oppression through the lens of the class struggle might have left a legacy both in the prevalence of binary thinking with regard to gender, and in the push for women to develop consciousness of themselves as a class, as a sex, as women.

                                                One of the great achievements of the second wave in the UK was the invention (in 1971) and proliferation of women's refuges for victims of domestic and sexual violence. It was built through grassroots, largely working-class activism, and some shelters came to function almost as separatist communes, drawing together into a kind of sisterhood women from different and mostly unprivileged backgrounds – the role of ex-service users in funding and running the shelters was (and still is) substantial. What they shared was a story of having suffered, and escaped from, violent men.

                                                i think a vaguely utopian vibe still lingers over the early days of the shelters. They were self-funding, self-managed and independent of state control. They took in women who were desperate and wounded and made them a part of a community. And they were spaces where women could be safe from men, spaces that were free of men. Separatism, in this sector, was a success.

                                                i think shelters and rape crisis centres have been the first places to go for young British proto-feminists wanting to get involved in activism and to meet like-minded people. As an issue, i'm arguing that violence against women and girls (VAWG) has the rallying, uniting appeal for UK feminists that abortion seems to have in the US. And whereas gender is irrelevant to abortion rights – if you're pregnant, it doesn't matter what gender you are – in VAWG it's a flashpoint.

                                                The women who work in refuges or operate rape crisis helplines see the effects of men's violence over and over. Many have experienced it for themselves. During the New Labour years, local and central government tried to make it a condition of funding for shelters and helplines that they offer services to men as well as women. The shelters resisted this, not only for practical reasons of space, security and lack of training, but also for ideological reasons. Refuges don't see their mission as just providing a roof and a bed and a triple-locked front door. They see it as explicitly feminist, a way for women to regain confidence and trust and self-worth in a safe environment. It is therefore incompatible with providing a service to male victims of violence.

                                                Women working in the sector suspected that New Labour was not simply centralising and micromanaging, but that, prompted by men's rights activists, it was trying to alter the ideological basis of what they were doing and had done for decades, towards a liberal model of 'equality' rather than a radical one of liberation. i believe the retrenchment of radical feminism accelerated in this symbolically critical field at this point, which was pretty much the same time that queer theory and deconstruction began to dominate women's studies in universities, and that trans activists started organising via the internet to protest their exclusion from women's spaces – notably, from safe spaces such as shelters. (i'd like to add here that trans people were also excluded by a fair few LGB organisations, which in any case had lost a lot of their grassroots activists to Aids, and were more thoroughly co-opted by New Labour's middle-class mainstreaming agenda than the radical feminists were.)

                                                The hyper-defensive, siege-mentality attitude of GCFs can, i think, be partially explained by the fact that the VAWG sector has genuinely been under siege for a long time, and not just from the whittling down of its funding during the Tories' austerity drive. i think they consider trans women to be the latest in a long line of schemes and trojan horses designed by men to undermine their autonomy. They blame trans women in the same way that people blame immigrants for all sorts of things that are not their fault. It's bigotry, and sloppy, rigid thinking, and it must be rebutted, but in the great British tradition i'm suggesting there is a materialist root.

                                                Sophie Lewis brings up mumsnet, which i agree has been key in the spread of gender critical feminism far and beyond the VAWG sector. Mumsnet has a subforum for discussing women's rights issues and it has always been dominated by radical second-wave ideas. For a few years when i lurked on the subforum, which was buried like Books in a dark corner of the site, there were few passers-by and a very small community of regular contributors, most of whom seemed to be over 45. They were all very smart, very lucid, and held strong opinions; most of them were GCFs, but the subject of trans women rarely came up. From about 2014-15, the subforum began to be blitzed with threads about trans women, and the issue crept into the other subforums too, reaching users of all ages who had minimal interest in women's rights and no tools for critiquing what they were reading. i don't know what caused this eruption, but the owners' response was absolutely dismal, and the site became a cesspit of fallacy and bigotry. (The phenomenon of mumsnet, and its relation to feminism, is interesting in itself – it is the one Brit-centric place on the net where you can find a community of women, and the ambience, the content matter, the style of argument really are different. But the centrality of motherhood makes it problematic from a feminist viewpoint, even without the hard selling of baby products, the full-on trans-hatred, etc.)

                                                i think in the UK we have to reluctantly accept that the schism is here for a while, at least until the GCFs, who are mostly older, begin to retire or to die out. Where i live we have two groups of feminist activists (one is trans-welcoming, the other not so much) and two VAWG organisations (ditto). In both cases the splits seem to date from around 10 years ago, and hostility to trans people was what caused them.

                                                If the problem was just Piers Morgan being an arse the divide would be so much easier to heal.

                                                HTH.

                                                * i dislike Terf because it associates radical feminism with transphobia, when plenty of radfems are trans-welcoming, and plenty of transphobic feminists are not radical.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  That is very worth being published, if you are so inclined.

                                                  Thank you for posting it.

                                                  I find the apparent centrality of Mumsnet to British/English life to be completely bewildering.

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