#anti helen joyce

[sleeppaw]

Well, that was a plot twist

You know J/K/Rowling's TERF friend Helen/Joyce? Well, she was caught reading a smutty Harry Potter fan fiction on a train involving Draco and Hermione. Yet TERFs and GC scream "TRANSGENDER PEOPLE ARE PERVERTS AND ARE AFTER OUR CHILDREN!". If someone yells about "Protecting kids" it usually means they can't be trusted. Even more hypocritically, the fanfiction in question is called "Mudblood Bitch", with GC and TERFs often complaining about "bitch" being sexist

[of-monsters-and-werewolves]

Already seeing people, including many folks I respect, seemingly implying that the mere act of reading the underage non-con smut fic at the heart of the TERF on a train debacle means you must be a dangerous nonce, and like once again this argument does not hold up to any level of scrutiny.

Does this apply to other Harry Potter fic? Riverdale fic? Glee fic? How about canon texts like Bottoms, a film literally about horny 17 year olds attempting to shag their fellow students? Teenagers do, in fact, have sex with each other. Are teens not allowed to write about it themselves? Are adults who had sex as teens not allowed to write about it, based on their own experiences? There are a myriad of different reasons why someone might read or write that kinda stuff.

The problem with this argument specifically isn't about Helen Joyce, it's about the other readers and the writer now hearing they're automatically viewed as potential threats to children. This wasn't an unpopular fic, but the author has decided to delete it, and I just hope they're not harassed as a result of this whole event.

What the incident shows is that Helen Joyce, and gender criticals as a whole, are massive fucking hypocrites who will throw around accusations of grooming, perversion, and child molesting towards trans people, especially transfems/trans women, for simply breathing, whilst simultaneously indulging in weird, fucked up content. Not that the content or the people writing or reading it are inherently morally reprehensible devoid of that context.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

Helen Joyce, a virulently anti-trans “gender critical” campaigner, was recently shortlisted for the Maddox Prize, which purports to recognize people who “who stand up for science and evidence, advancing public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility,” even though she promotes an agenda that denies science and demonizes trans people. […] Let me put this statement by the board behind the Maddox prize into context:

1. Joyce is a prominent member of the UK “gender critical” movement and author of a “deeply anti-transgender” book. “Courage” is not a word I would ever associate with her. 2. Joyce did not “highlight the need for further research and evidence,” at least not in any sort of productive way. Physicians practicing gender-affirming care and scientists involved in transgender studies generally agree that there is a need for more research. However, we neither need nor want a gender-critical trans-exclusionist to highlight the areas of need and thus continue the pattern of stigma and research about us without us. We’re on it. What we need are resources and funding, regular and consistent data collection on gender identity, notably absent from prior research, and involvement of the trans community, along with overlooked intersectional minorities previously excluded or underrepresented due to issues such as systemic racism, not lectures from people who deny existing science. 3. Trans health and research-all medicine and research-belongs in the realm of science. It is the ignorant meddling of policymakers that harmsour work. Gender-affirming healthcare should be between the health professional and the patient (and the patient’s parents or medical guardians, as applicable). Though politics are inextricably linked to trans healthcare—as is the case for all healthcare, actually—that does not mean that politicians should be able to dictate the standard of care in medicine, any more than politicians should be able to force a woman to carry a nonviable fetus to term when there is no chance of the fetus surviving and continuing the pregnancy risks the mother’s health. 4. Here, we have on display two scientific organizations espousing the “importance of acknowledging biological sex differences,” an essentialist trope that serves to criminalize, dehumanize, and pathologize trans and intersex people. Their reasoning is also scientifically unsound. The science of biological sex does not mesh with Sense About Science’s comments. Trans people are very aware of biology and how our bodies work, sometimes painfully so. This is not about human biology and its supposed denial; it is about advancing a hostile agenda toward trans people and bad science. Updating gender markers to match one’s identity—which, naturally, Joyce is vehemently opposed to—has nothing to do with denying biology and everything to do with personal dignity, respect, equality, autonomy, and safety. Having the wrong marker on documents means being constantly exposed as trans in a cruel and sometimes violent society and being regularly undermined and questioned about gender. Gender is determined by one’s gender identity, which in turn should determine one’s legal sex designation. As for Nature, it has published multiple articles about the spectrum of sex and the fallacy of biological sex differences. So what gives?

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: The One Joke

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: today i am going to tell Rowling: the one joke Allison Bailey: the joke! the one joke! Helen Joyce: dark master is going to tell the one joke! Jesse Singal: masterful gambit, mommy!

Rowling: Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whosse large gametes were fertilissed resulting in ssmall humanss whose ssex was asssigned by doctorss making mostly lucky guesssess Joyce: she did it! she told the one joke! Bailey: the absolute madwoman!!

Joyce: haha i could hear that one joke a million times -- and i have -- and it never gets any less funny! Joyce: you should take that act on the road! Rowling: you think? Joyce: oh yeah definitely, people need to hear that one joke

JK Rowling: [at open mic] hello ladiesss and germsss Rowling: i'm "Just Kidding" Rowling and thisss Rowling: iss the anti-woke "you can't ssay that on televisssion anymore due to woke" comedy tour Rowling: sso Rowling: are there any jewss in the audience tonight

Rowling: but ssserioussly ladiess and germss Rowling: there'sss a lot of wokiesss out there Rowling: and i think they might Rowling: ssound a little like thisss Rowling: "Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametessss..."

Rowling: "Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametess were fertilissed resulting in ssmall humanss whose ssex was asssigned by doctorss" Ben Shapiro: SIR!! Shapiro: SIR how dare you SIR that joke SIR is my one joke!! Rowling: ya sssnooze ya lossse, shapiro!

Shapiro: i have a paper trail SIR going back decades proving ownership, i have told that joke SIR every year at mothers day SIR and fathers day SIR Shapiro: which by the way SIR today is NEITHER Shapiro: so that joke doesn't even make sense SIR Shapiro: owned with facts and logic

Rowling: ha ha get a load of this heckler Shapiro: SIR!!! Rowling: kid don't tell me how to do comedy, i don't come down to the sssissster fucking factory and tell you how to do your job [rimshot] Shapiro: SIR!!!

Shapiro: SIR!! Rowling: look i'm not saying ben sshapiro is sshort but when he liess around the housse he really liess around the housse [rimshot] Shapiro: SIR!!!!   Shapiro: SIR!!!! you have the boorish manners of a yalie!

Rowling: [reading newspaper] the reviews are in! Rowling: "rowling killss in new one joke comedy sspecial" Rowling: "no sseat left dry asss comedy-loving public pissss their pants in ssusstained debilitating laughter" Rowling: "you are legally mandated to enjoy it"

Rowling: "we look forward to hearing jk rowling tell her very hilariouss joke for yearss to come" Rowling: "jk rowling is the kindesst, bravest, warmesst, mosst wonderful human being we've ever known in our life"

[woman-for-women]

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[leministfesbian]

"Established gay-rights groups have stood by as people who assert same-sex orientation are told that they have a ‘genital fetish’ and lesbians are told to accept penises as female sex organs. Indeed, those groups have joined in the bullying. Stonewall was founded to fight homophobia. Yet, at a Pride March in 2019, when lesbians waving banners that read ‘Lesbians don’t have penises’ and ‘Pro women not anti-trans’ were threatened, the chair of Stonewall’s board praised the bullies, tweeting: ‘Thank you! The right instinct’.

Planned Parenthood, which used to provide contraception and evidence-based sex education to teenagers, now prescribes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones practically on demand, and presents gender-identity ideology as scientific fact. ActionAid UK, which campaigns against female genital mutilation and period poverty, says there is ‘no such thing as a biologically female/male body’.

The NSPCC, Britain’s largest children’s charity, provides training in child-safeguarding principles, which include separating children’s sleeping quarters by sex and ensuring that concerns about child safety are not ignored. But it cancelled an ‘ask me anything’ session on Mumsnet because most of the pre-submitted questions concerned the impact of gender self-identification on child safeguarding.

The British Humanist Association says it aims to ‘make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence’. But its president, Alice Roberts, has blocked Twitter users who asked her to define sex and cited clownfish as evidence that no such definition exists."

- Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021)

[sleeppaw]

Patrick Ness, an author, stood up for Sandi Toksvig, a lesbian, after she showed support for trans rights. And received a pile-on from TERFs for showing support to transgender people. Ness is the guy who wrote "The Chaos Walking Trilogy" and "A Monster Calls", the latter inspired by a friend of his who died of cancer, Siobhan Dowd. Dowd was dying of cancer, and knowing she was dying, came up with the idea of a monster that visited children whose parents were dying, but knowing she would not live to write the book, she gave the outline to Ness and set up a foundation to help disadvantaged children and young adults, with royalties from her books going to the foundation, The Siobhan Dowd Trust. Even on the cover for "A Monster Calls" it reads "Based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd".

[friendlymathematician]

wanna read grace lavery tying himself into rhetorical knots trying to prove that he is a gender abolitionist while the evil women writing pop-feminist books about being gender critical (trans, material girls, feminism for women) are being stupid, possibly anti-semitic, meanieheads?

highlights:

insisting that no one ever used gender as a synonym for sex, therefore early feminists being critical of the category "women" as a legal/social categoroy are in fact saying that there is not such thing as a woman.

claiming that de beauvoir says that sex characteristics may exist "at the level of the cell", but since mushrooms and plants and hemaphroditic species reproduce differently that means sexed bodies do not exist among humans.

first dismissing helen joyce's "sex is why women are oppressed, gender is how" as ""complete and utter bullshit" and then reaching his own final conclusion: "gender is how women are oppressed, sex is the excuse patriarchy uses for the oppression of women". which is obviously entirely different from joyce's quote.

[crossdreamers]

Vox documents the transphobia of J.K. Rowling

There can be no doubt about this: J.K. Rowling is severely transphobic.

Bigots do not want to seen as bigots, even when they are. They therefore often feign sympathy for the group they are harassing in a “I am not a racist, but...” kind of way.

I have lost count on the number of times gender critical TERFs have told me that calling J.K. Rowling transphobic is offensive both to her and to them. This is a fascinating exercise, as there are few people around that have done this much to harm and invalidate transgender women.

Vox has now done the excellent job of gathering J.K. Rowling’s most transphobic statements and acts in one easy to read article. I suggest that we all bookmark the piece and add a link to it in all threads where transphobes try to deny their own cruelty. 

(I am not recommending engaging them in a discussion, as they would love to drag you down into their dark rabbit hole of lies and half-truths. Just add a link to the Vox article, so that other readers are informed about the truth.)

J.K. Rowling’s rampant transphobia

Aja Romano writes:

Rowling has made her antagonistic position on trans issues clear through tweets, sound bites, actions, and even a 3,600-word blog post. 

By 2023, her transphobia has become so rampant and constant that it’s difficult to build a completely comprehensive timeline of it. For those attuned to it, she doesn’t have to spell it out every single time; it’s a huge part of her identity. 

These dog whistles only lead to more confusion, however, allowing people to point to the absence of immediately obvious bigotry to claim she’s being unfairly maligned. 

Additionally, she increasingly threatens detractors with legal action, which contributes to critics of her behavior falling silent. Conspicuously, many of her legal threats appear to be directed at individuals identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community.

The destructive nature of the TERF community

Since Rowling began airing her views, her community, especially online where many of these conversations are had, is now stacked with similarly minded people who share her transphobic beliefs. 

For instance, Rowling is friends with numerous anti-trans activists, including Helen Joyce, who’s made alarmingly transphobic statements calling for a “reduction” in the number of trans people. 

She’s tweeted public support for anti-gay, anti-trans activist Caroline Farrow. These connections are part of a social network echo chamber of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs (sometimes called “radfems” or the “gender-critical” movement). In Rowling’s native UK, TERFism has gained a unique stronghold over some particularly vocal, ostensibly liberal feminists like Rowling.

Read the whole article here.

[anotherpapercut]

Hi! I just saw your post about queer books in libraries, and my local system has always surprised me with its many good queer and trans books!

It does bring to mind a Library Question that you might be able to answer for me, though: if a library book (say, anti-trans, antisemitic screed "Trans" by Helen Joyce) is destroyed (by accident of course) and the upstanding library patron who did it pays the lost book fine, will the fine be used to replace that book in the system, or just go to general library needs?

as a quick disclaimer I don't know how all libraries work across the country or world but most libraries I am aware of just have it go into their general revenue which will be allocated somewhere, probably to the collections budget for the purchasing of other books

HOWEVER! if it is a super popular book like if trump wrote a book or something they would definitely have to replace it to fulfill demand. but an older Ben Shapiro or whatever that no one has cared about for years? probably won't be missed :)

[lacangri21]

The Feminist Library

-7000 Years of Patriarchy by Petra Ioana

-A Deafening Silence by Patrizia Romito

-Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller

-Against Pornography by Diana E.H. Russell

-Against Sadomasochism by Robin Linden

-Ain’t I a Woman by Bell Hooks

-All Women Are Healers by Diane Stein

-Anti-Porn by Julia Long

-Anticlimax by Sheila Jeffreys

-Are Women Human by Catharine MacKinnon

-Backlash by Susan Faludi

-Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

-Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys

-Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln

-Beauty Under the Knife by Holly Brubach

-Being and Being Bought by Kasja Ekis Ekman

-Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly

-Big Porn Inc by Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray

-Blood, Bread, and Roses by Judy Graham

-The Book of Women’s Mysteries by Z Budapest

-Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua

-Burn it Down by Lilly Dancyger

-Butterfly Politics by Catharine MacKinnon

-Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

-Choosing to Conform by Avelie Stuart

-The Church and the Second Sex by Mary Daly

-Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

-Close to Home by Christine Delphy

-Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich

-Conquest by Andrea Lee Smith

-Damned Whores and God’s Police by Anne Summers

-Daring to Be Bad by Alice Echols

-Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle

-Defending Battered Women on Trial by Elizabeth A. Sheehy

-Deliver Us from Love by Brogger

-Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

-Detransition by Max Robinson

-The Disappearing L by Bonnie J. Morris

-Does God Hate Women by Ophelia Benson

-Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery

-The End of Gender by Debra W. Soh

-The End of Patriarchy by Robert Jensen?

-Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

-Female Erasure by Ruth Barrett

-Female Sexual Slavery by Kathleen Barry

-Femicide by Jill Radford and Diane EH Russell

-Femininity by Susan Brownmiller

-Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky

-Feminism Unmodified by Catharine MacKinnon

-Feminist Theory by Bell Hooks

-Firebrand Feminism by Breanne Fahs

-Flesh Wounds by Blum

-Flow by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

-For Her Own Good by Barbara Ehrenreich

-For Lesbians Only by Sarah Lucia Hoagland

-Freedom Fallacy by Miranda Kiraly

-Gender Hurts by Sheila Jeffreys

-Getting Off by Robert Jensen?

-Global Woman by Barbara Ehrenreich

-Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson

-Going Too Far by Robin Morgan

-The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor

-Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly

-Gynocide by Mariarosa Dalta Costa

-Handbook of Feminist Therapy by Lynne Bravo Rosewater and Leonore E.A. Walker

-Heartbreak by Andrea Dworkin

-Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

-The Hidden Malpractice by Gena Corea

-How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

-I Am Your Sister by Audre Lorde

-I Hate Men by Pauline Harmange

-Ice and Fire by Andrea Dworkin

-In Defense of Separatism by Susan Hawthorne

-In Harm’s Way by Catharine MacKinnon

-In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker

-The Industrial Vagina by Sheila Jeffreys

-Inferior by Angela Saini

-Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

-Invisible No More by Andrea J. Ritchie

-Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

-Jewish Radical Feminism by Joyce Antler

-Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

-The Laugh of Medusa by Helene Cixous

-Laughing with Medusa by Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard

-The Lesbian Heresy by Sheila Jeffreys

-Lesbian Nation by Jill Johnston

-Letters from a War Zone by Andrea Dworkin

-Love and Politics by Carol Anne Douglas

-Loving to Survive by Dee Graham

-Making Violence Sexy by Diana E.H. Russell

-Man Made Language by Dale Spender

-Man’s Dominion by Sheila Jeffreys

-Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens

-Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

-Men Who Buy Sex by Melissa Farley

-Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

-Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them by Susan Forward

-Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

-Misogyny by Jack Holland?

-The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty

-Nobody’s Victim by Carrie Goldberg

-Not a Job, Not a Choice by Janice Raymond

-Not for Sale by Rebecca Whisnant

-Nothing Matters by Somer Brodribb

-Objectification Theory by Barbara I. Fredrickson

-Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich

-Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon

-Our Blood by Andrea Dworkin

-Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective

-Overcoming Violence Against Women and Girls by Michael L. Penn and Rahel Nardos?

-Paid For by Rachel Moran

-The Pimping of Prostitution by Julie Bindel

-Pimp State by Kat Banyard

-Policing the Womb by Michelle Goodwin

-Pornified by Pamela Paul

-Pornland by Gail Dines

-Pornography by Gail Dines

-Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin

-Pornography and Civil Rights by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon

-Pornography and Violence by Susan Griffith

-Pornography Values by Robert Jensen?

-Pure Lust by Mary Daly

-The Purify Myth by Jessica Valenti

-Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce

-Radical Feminism Today by Denise Thompson

-Radical Feminist Therapy by Bonnie Burstow

-Radical Reckonings by Renate Klein

-Radically Speaking by Diane Bell...

-Rape by Susan Griffiths

-Rape in Marriage by Diana E.H. Russell

-Rape of the Wild by Ann Jones

-Refusing to Be a Man by John Stoltenberg?

-Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin

-A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

-Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists by Margo Goodhand

-SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

-Selling Feminism by Amanda M. Gengler

-Sex Matters by Alyson J. McGregor

-Sexual Harassment of Working Women by Catharine MacKinnon

-Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

-Sexy but Psycho by Jessica Taylor

-She Dreams When She Bleeds by Nikki Taraji

-Sister Outrider by Audre Lorde

-Sisterhood is Forever by Robin Morgan

-Sisterhood is Global by Robin Morgan

-Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan

-Slavery Inc by Lydia Cacho

-Spinning and Weaving by Elizabeth Miller

-Surrogacy by Renate Klein

-Sweetening the Pill by Holly Grigg-Spall

-Taking Back the Night by Laura Lederer

-Talking Back by Bell Hooks

-Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine

-The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

-The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

-The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone

-The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

-The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould

-The Legacy of Mothers: Matriarchies and the Gift Economy as Post-Capitalist Alternatives by Erella Shadmi

-The Lolita Effect by Gigi Durham

-The Man-Made World by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Porn Trap by Wendy Maltz

-The Prostitution of Sexuality by Kathleen Barry

-The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

-The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism by Janice Raymond...

-The Spinster and Her Enemies by Sheila Jeffreys

-The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond

-The Women’s History of the World by Rosalind Miles

-This Bridge Called My Back by Gloria Anzaldua

-This is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill

-Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine MacKinnon

-The Traffic in Women and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

-Trans by Helen Joyce

-Unbearable Weight by Susan Bordo

-Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys

-Unscrewed by Jaclyn Friedman

-Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn

-The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

-The Vagina Bible by Jennifer Gunter

-A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

-The War Against Women by Marilyn French

-We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

-What Do We Need Men For by E. Jean Carroll

-When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone

-Who Cooked the Last Supper by Rosalind Miles

-Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft

-Why Women Are Blamed for Everything by Jessica Taylor

-Why Women Need the Goddess by Carol P. Christ

-Wildfire by Sonia Johnson

-Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich

-Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

-Woman and Nature by Susan Griffith

-Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin

-Woman-Identified Woman by Trudy Darty

-Women v. Religion by Karen L. Garst

-Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws by Catharine MacKinnon

-The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

[jenatwork]

As pants-wettingly hilarious as it is that UK top terf Helen Joyce got caught reading Dramione smut fic on a train this week, to me this suggests that she and her ilk are absolutely gearing up to come for fandom and fanfiction. HJ has since said she's conducting research into how fanfiction might influence young people into 'adopting trans identities' (her words).

Especially given how some (not all) of the responses have focused on the ickiness of that one specific fic - this is not the moment to start debating problematic fic content, not when the conservative orgs and politicians driving the anti-trans movement are also pushing for restrictions on online content and access and will take any opportunity to demonise online spaces that are queer-positive.

Yes, let's call out HJ for the hypocrisy of looking at smut in public while also being a leading voice in a movement that labels trans folk as 'porn-addled'. But let's not allow anyone to reframe this as 'fanfiction is dangerous'.

[spookyradluka]

"This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard's observation of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from 'envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them,' he has tweeted. 'They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.'"

Trans by Helen Joyce

[liskantope]

Since I have a continuing history of keeping up with IDW-ish podcasters on YouTube (Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, etc.) who occasionally do episodes on trans issues as well as a spotty history of clicking on videos with clips of Jordan Peterson, the algorithm recommends a lot of videos on "transgenderism" and "the trans debate" and so on to me. A noticeable and (to my thinking) really concerning aspect of the whole set of issues is how reliably anyone who expresses interest in debating or even critically discussing trans issues is, um, on one general side of them, and how little debating or critical discussion there seems to be available. I avoid clicking on videos with titles involving "transgenderism" or "transgender ideology" or "the trans debate" and other tribal buzzwords for a bunch of reasons, but I decided to make an exception the other day when I saw a video entitled "DEBATE: does transgender ideology threaten liberal values?" (a terribly-phrased question, like most debate questions are) because it appeared to be... an actual debate! With people on both sides showing up! (Though apparently not among the audience, which by the sound of it was entirely on the anti-trans side.)

So of course, as I should have fully expected, this debate only supported my conviction that the rhetoric of nearly everyone on all sides of this is just terrible. The only nuanced and halfway decent debater here was Peter Tatchell (on the trans rights side), and some of even his arguments were used to catch him in a bind later on (more on that later). The debate as a whole was generally a bit of a -- I can only use the term shitshow here -- with debaters (mainly Freda) interrupting each other, the (seemingly entirely anti-trans) audience heckling the trans-rights debaters, and the somewhat awkward and ineffectual moderator mostly failing to keep everyone in order. Well, what better could I have expected?

Marc Glendening (on the anti-trans-rights side) had less to say than everyone else and was basically just a robot trying to churn out dry legal summaries of the situation and spouting claims about free speech rights being taken away that I find extremely dubious as phrased by him (I don't know too much about what's going on in the UK, but if we took Marc's depictions of the situation at face value, they do not jibe with his teammate Helen's completely lack of inhibition in misgendering Freda in a video-recorded debate!).

Helen Joyce was the only person involved that I was familiar with from before, since many months ago I watched an episode of Coleman Hughes' podcast where he interviewed her, thought she had some reasonable points and liked her overall rational manner of arguing, but lost any sense of her credibility because of her completely unbending and extreme absolutism. YouTube had been recommending me videos with her ever since (I really hate how stubborn the algorithm is), and I had refused up until now to click on anything involving her again. In this debate I saw the same extremist tendencies and genuine TERFiness (up until fairly recently my exposure to TERF ideology was mostly indirect as something people on Tumblr criticized and I was beginning to wonder how much of it was actually out there in force and what it really looks like -- it seems to have plenty of force in the UK and Joyce is probably one of the gentler examples I suppose!) and also saw a rational and dignified approach which I admire but unfortunately didn't lead to actually good arguments. There is plenty of room for rebuttal to Helen's arguments from my perspective, and of course almost none of that material was ever rebutted by the other side, which again doesn't surprise me given how little (in my experience of watching/reading criticisms of, say, JKR's arguments) people on the trans rights side seem to actually directly address certain types of opposing arguments. I can't decide which bothers me more: Helen's repeated comments about how the rest of the debaters went through male puberty and therefore their male voices enabled them to talk over her (easily refuted, mainly in the case of the trans women sitting on the other side, and meanwhile neither of the men ever interrupted or talked over her, but nobody addressed this, and it places Helen across my personal "too borderline-misandristic for me to feel comfortable hanging around her" line), or her claim that those men who do insist on trespassing women-only spaces have proved that they are among the dangerous ones because they don't care about women's boundaries (a very dangerous mentality, and displaying exquisite lack of theory of mind, and again nobody tried to rebut it).

Freda Wallace is... a complete mess, and I think an embarrassment to her cause. She spoke a lot (while delusionally muttering that Helen wouldn't stop talking), and very little of what she had to say comprised actual argumentation but was more of a semi-incoherent jumble of points that often ended in punchlines that seemed to be deliberately phrased into ridiculous and bizarre statements perhaps crafted to be provocative and eliciting scorn from the audience. She frequently interrupted all three of the debaters generally with childish and semi-irrelevant ad hominems, even eventually visibly pissing off her own teammate Peter. Freda appears to be exactly the caricature of aggressive, loud, attention-seeking, obnoxious, shameless, hedonistic, fetishistic trans woman that J. K. Rowling types seem to imagine among trans activists. ("So, when I fuck men, with my female penis, in fetish clubs, it is my choice. It doesn't matter what you think. And those men support Sex Matters, because in public they will, but in private, they'll fuck me [ending in a smug grin]" is... I guess technically a way that someone can talk during a recorded public debate, but maybe shouldn't be recommended? I didn't notice until I read the comments later how a minute or two after that, her teammate Peter repeated tries to get her to stop interrupting, then gently grabs her arm as she lifts her glass of wine again saying, "No more drink.") If the trans-rights organization involved wanted to strengthen transphobia and transmisogyny in particular, they probably could not have chosen a better trans woman to put on their team. There's something to discuss here (although if I tried to develop where I speculatively want to go with this, I might quickly get myself into hot water) about how difficult it seems to be to get a member of the trans community to participate in an event like this, and how it requires the very thickest-skinned type of personality which unfortunately in this case also coincides with the most loud and shameless. (This is a very under-developed and perhaps sloppily-phrased point that I probably shouldn't be leaving in this post!)

As I said earlier, Peter Tatchell, along with many of his arguments, I actually liked; he seems like a pretty cool guy all around. He did get backed into a corner at one point through an audience member's question: he had repeatedly made the argument that excluding male-bodied people from women's shelters because men are more likely to be violent was choosing to treat an entire group based on a generalization and that he was against this on principle (compare to refusing to allow immigration from certain groups because some tiny minority of them is more likely to be dangerous, etc.), and he was asked whether he wasn't generalizing in the exact same way by being in favor of excluding cis men ("all men, as you identify who's a man") from women's spaces. At first Peter seems to misunderstand that the questioner is talking about cis men and be trying to duck the question, but eventually he is backed into acknowledging the question and taking the stance that "people who present as men" should be excluded from women's bathrooms but trans women shouldn't -- a position that sounds quite blatantly transphobic in more than one way by the lights of much of trans activism! Also, Peter's stern coldness in stopping Freda from interrupting him with disagreement during his point about transness showing in people's brains says all we really need to know about his opinion of his own teammate, and I do kind of feel bad for him for having been paired with her, which I imagine was not his choice.

I looked briefly through the comments section to see if there was any discussion of why the video (annoyingly) cuts off abruptly before the end of the event (which wound up mentioned only once that I could see). Never have I seen a sea of comments so 100% skewed in favor of one side of an issue and in one direction: how amazing Helen Joyce is (and with a heap of derogatory and sometimes extremely transmisogynistic comments about Freda Wallace -- they go further than Joyce did by naming her Fred, a few do call her Freda and use feminine pronouns, but in at least one instance someone's use of "her" was "corrected" in a one-word response by another commenter!). It makes me wonder what happens to create a section of hundreds of comments that are literally 100% on one side -- is there a sort of tipping point when one side becomes a strong enough majority that everyone on the other side is just afraid to comment, or gets downvoted to invisibility by the rating system? Either way, this debate strikes me as weak enough on the pro-trans side that trans right activists probably wouldn't want to advertise it on YouTube.

Anyway, very very discouraging for anyone who would like our public discourse on this set of issues to stop being more of a complete mess than the public discourse on pretty much every other contentious social issue has been.