I know this has been asked a million times already but I’d like a serious answer if there is one. Why is the UK so weird about trans people? Sure there’s very few countries that aren’t weird about it but these bozos seem to be one step above the average western country, why is that?
Did JKR really manage propagandize the whole nation with her bullshit?
The difference between the UK and the US on almost all topics involving women can be answered by understanding that in the US second wave feminism achieved absolutely nothing at all whereas in the UK second wave feminism found a huge number of victories.
This success of second wave feminism in the UK has created a large number of women that, having achieved what they wanted to achieve, have actively worked against third wave feminists. In the US third wave feminists have had no such barrier and had quite a bit of success (and quite a bit of reaction in the form of abortion rollbacks).
These second wave feminists got absorbed into the framework of Britain through writing and journalism, and as such they see third wave feminism as a threat to themselves just as capitalists see it as a threat to a pillar of capitalism, patriarchy.
The issue fundamentally is that all these second wave feminists exist in writers or journalism positions in media. At the bbc, at the guardian, not just the news but a lot of show writers too. The result is a situation where terfs completely and totally make up the entirety of media.
Another factor in this is that Britain stands very little to gain from pinkwashing imperialism. It has had very little success with using lgbt or race issues to divert away from class, which seems too heavily rooted in British political tradition to distract from. The US on the other hand has had success with this and has in fact seen considerable success with using women and lgbt people as an excuse for why other countries should be bombed. Supporting trans people is an overt method of supporting lgbt people at the radical end, so the US political ghouls had more incentive to weaponise lgbt people.
Other commenters are probably gonna cover all the other stuff like the fact British transphobic orgs are being funded by American fascists like the heritage Foundation as part of a trial run on how they intend to destroy queer rights in their own country.
I’d like to briefly spotlight the stratification of British society as a factor. In specific Bourgeois feminism.
CW: brief mention of CSA, homophobia and transphobia throughout.
Ok, so Britain isn’t a democracy, it’s a feudal theocracy with a parliament bolted on. Everything from the levers of power to who appears as an extra in the BBC’s latest drama about a morally grey cop on the edge, are all selected based on whether they knew some lord Sisterfucker or other during their time in boarding school. The private school nepotism is so endemic we have a slang term for it, jobs for boys.
Now Britain’s feminism has always been split into two opposing movements: grassroots, activist feminism and bourgeois, academic feminism. The latter has always been exclusionary whereas different waves of the former have had various degrees of intersectionality, for example bourgeois feminists during the fight for women’s suffrage supported the disenfranchisement of black people. During what’s referred to as second wave feminism, academic feminists in the UK got really weird about lesbians. You had political lesbians (who are too dense a mess to wade through in just this comment) but you also had what have retroactively been referred to as LERFs, because much like the TERFs of today, LERFs argued for the segregation of single sex spaces for the safety of women. LERFs would print homophobic zines about predatory lesbians in public toilets, claim lesbians were dangerous to their straight competitors in sports, any of the “protect women” moral panic stuff you’ve heard nowadays got its origins here.
As working class intersectional movements gained ground (such as with movements such as “lesbians and gays support the miners” causing unions to change their stance on homophobia and by extension drag the left of centre political parties with them), homophobia began to lose ground politically but still held ground within academic feminism. It’s at this point that intellectuals such as Germaine Greer began shaping modern academic feminism. Cliffnotes on Greer - she’s a pro-paedophilia, anti-gay, bourgeois feminist author, although her most famous work is about how the patriarchy structures the role of women in a way that denies their sexuality (it’s okay I guess but not particularly ground breaking). When she was doing a talk about that book “the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
Now former LERFs were having to disguise and tone down the intensity their homophobic views as they became increasingly marginalised, they found their target in trans people since they had not yet entered into the British zeitgeist outside of shitty jokes in sitcoms. Greer’s rhetoric was largely about trans women infiltrating and erasing womanhood and fit well into the transphobic milieu.
The kinds of privately educated failchildren who now fill the heart of this country’s liberal parties are the kindsa people whose views of feminism were informed by that milieu and hence these parties stance on social issues are shaped towards SWERF/TERF rhetoric. While the further right parties are filled with homophobes who’re using the destruction of trans rights as a wedge issue to attack the larger queer movement.
Opinion polls across the UK consistently trend towards a sorta live and let live attitude towards gender identity, but why step out of your insular bubble and see what people actually think when you can just do what you want and then yell “will of the people!” over dissenting voices?
“the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
lmao, so many eunuchs were historically trans people. imagine being like ‘wow im so gender divergent im basically like them’ then hating trans people
That episode of South Park where Richard Dawkins freaks out when he finds out his girlfriend Mrs. Garrison was trans, and unravels his budding atheist world empire because of this, was so prescient.
But here’s my attempt at figuring out what happened. Those anti-evangelical British Lib Dem/Labour atheists (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Graham Linehan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Stephen Fry, Maajid Nawaz John Cleese, Ricky Gervais) who were so beloved by libs in the Bush and early Obama eras, splintered from the younger liberals/leftists on the degree to which the west should tolerate Muslims, and attributed this split to younger people’s obsessions with “political correctness.” They began bleeding their following, and got extremely obsessed with affecting a “nuanced intellectual” persona and reveling in their persecution complex by going “I’m as liberal as they come but the modern left is doing ____ too much and is even calling ME a racist and sexist!”
The alt-right/chuds/Conservative dark money network loved hearing this shit and started glomming onto these people, because their movement was dying and needed a less cringe, marginally more secular sheen. Suddenly these atheist personalities found that their cries about political correctness on videos/podcasts would always garner a huge response (even if it’s from the right), and so started playing this shit up more. Around the same time JK Rowling was getting obsessed with twitter because she regularly dunked on Trump and got fawned over by Tumblr-types. However, as she reveled daily in adoration, once she did get criticisms about her trepidation towards trans people and Jeremy Corbyn, it was like turning off her pleasure tap, and drove her insane.
All this converged in the form of bitter Brit atheists backing JK Rowling because of their shared animosity toward the younger left’s “coddling” and “cancel culture” (i.e. not thinking they were the ideological vanguard anymore). Once Caitlin Flanagan’s article “The Coddling of the American Mind” framed this behavior of the younger left as an open academic inquiry issue, a new collective of influential “anti-PC” web personalities was born.
The Brit libs became willing to do anything to stick it to the young people who didn’t like them anymore, and began jamming up liberal spaces with claims that reducing racist/transphobic literature from college syllabi was hindering “free inquiry” and “intellectual growth.” This got them invites to Real Time with Bill Maher, JRE, and the Rubin Report, and even suckered many liberal/leftist comedians/academics like Whitney Cummings/Kumail Nanjiani/Zizek/Finkelstein. So they just stayed stuck like this and helped portray Rowling as a martyr, and “serious concerns” about the “excess” of trans rights became the mainstream UK culture among even the Labour Party, subsequently even echoed and appreciated by Hillary Clinton.
This is a very pop-cultural explanation that looks specifically at a few random bourgeois actors and their interactions with traditional and social media. I think a better explanation for why TERF island is so transphobic has less to do with New Atheism (i.e. Dawkins et al.) and JK Rowling (who are symptoms of the underlying problem rather than the source). It has to do with the fact that the UK is fundamentally a dethroned world superpower. The UK lost all its colonies and became a vassal of the United States, and for a while was just an appendage of the EU. The same thing that is behind British transphobia is the same thing behind Brexit. It’s the same old reactionary “we used to be a REAL country. We used to be an EMPIRE. But now we have FALLEN FROM GRACE and we need a nonconformist scapegoat to blame for our current geopolitical irrelevancy!” And what better scapegoat than trans people, who have been undergoing a civil rights struggle similar to the struggles of other marginalized groups. When a marginalized group is actively undergoing a civil rights struggle in a dethroned empire like the UK, they become a convenient scapegoat for why the country is no longer powerful. This is especially true of trans women, who are seen through a transphobic lens as “biological men who refused the call to be masculine revanchist imperialists.”
TL;DR transphobia is just another genre of “the west has fallen, billions must die”
EDIT: Not “just” since transphobia exists outside of empire, but it takes on that flavor in the imperial core
That’s a great explanation that’s much more big picture, as I recall some of the #FBPE libs were even blaming Brexit passing on the left being too PC and pro-trans, thereby aggravating the leavers too much.
Plus the situation for trans people is getting worse in the US as its standing in the world declines. That also explains why the UK is furthest ahead in its transphobic crusade.
I know this has been asked a million times already but I’d like a serious answer if there is one. Why is the UK so weird about trans people? Sure there’s very few countries that aren’t weird about it but these bozos seem to be one step above the average western country, why is that?
Did JKR really manage propagandize the whole nation with her bullshit?
The difference between the UK and the US on almost all topics involving women can be answered by understanding that in the US second wave feminism achieved absolutely nothing at all whereas in the UK second wave feminism found a huge number of victories.
This success of second wave feminism in the UK has created a large number of women that, having achieved what they wanted to achieve, have actively worked against third wave feminists. In the US third wave feminists have had no such barrier and had quite a bit of success (and quite a bit of reaction in the form of abortion rollbacks).
These second wave feminists got absorbed into the framework of Britain through writing and journalism, and as such they see third wave feminism as a threat to themselves just as capitalists see it as a threat to a pillar of capitalism, patriarchy.
The issue fundamentally is that all these second wave feminists exist in writers or journalism positions in media. At the bbc, at the guardian, not just the news but a lot of show writers too. The result is a situation where terfs completely and totally make up the entirety of media.
Another factor in this is that Britain stands very little to gain from pinkwashing imperialism. It has had very little success with using lgbt or race issues to divert away from class, which seems too heavily rooted in British political tradition to distract from. The US on the other hand has had success with this and has in fact seen considerable success with using women and lgbt people as an excuse for why other countries should be bombed. Supporting trans people is an overt method of supporting lgbt people at the radical end, so the US political ghouls had more incentive to weaponise lgbt people.
It’s a confluence of multiple causes.
Other commenters are probably gonna cover all the other stuff like the fact British transphobic orgs are being funded by American fascists like the heritage Foundation as part of a trial run on how they intend to destroy queer rights in their own country.
I’d like to briefly spotlight the stratification of British society as a factor. In specific Bourgeois feminism.
CW: brief mention of CSA, homophobia and transphobia throughout.
Ok, so Britain isn’t a democracy, it’s a feudal theocracy with a parliament bolted on. Everything from the levers of power to who appears as an extra in the BBC’s latest drama about a morally grey cop on the edge, are all selected based on whether they knew some lord Sisterfucker or other during their time in boarding school. The private school nepotism is so endemic we have a slang term for it, jobs for boys.
Now Britain’s feminism has always been split into two opposing movements: grassroots, activist feminism and bourgeois, academic feminism. The latter has always been exclusionary whereas different waves of the former have had various degrees of intersectionality, for example bourgeois feminists during the fight for women’s suffrage supported the disenfranchisement of black people. During what’s referred to as second wave feminism, academic feminists in the UK got really weird about lesbians. You had political lesbians (who are too dense a mess to wade through in just this comment) but you also had what have retroactively been referred to as LERFs, because much like the TERFs of today, LERFs argued for the segregation of single sex spaces for the safety of women. LERFs would print homophobic zines about predatory lesbians in public toilets, claim lesbians were dangerous to their straight competitors in sports, any of the “protect women” moral panic stuff you’ve heard nowadays got its origins here.
As working class intersectional movements gained ground (such as with movements such as “lesbians and gays support the miners” causing unions to change their stance on homophobia and by extension drag the left of centre political parties with them), homophobia began to lose ground politically but still held ground within academic feminism. It’s at this point that intellectuals such as Germaine Greer began shaping modern academic feminism. Cliffnotes on Greer - she’s a pro-paedophilia, anti-gay, bourgeois feminist author, although her most famous work is about how the patriarchy structures the role of women in a way that denies their sexuality (it’s okay I guess but not particularly ground breaking). When she was doing a talk about that book “the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.
Now former LERFs were having to disguise and tone down the intensity their homophobic views as they became increasingly marginalised, they found their target in trans people since they had not yet entered into the British zeitgeist outside of shitty jokes in sitcoms. Greer’s rhetoric was largely about trans women infiltrating and erasing womanhood and fit well into the transphobic milieu.
The kinds of privately educated failchildren who now fill the heart of this country’s liberal parties are the kindsa people whose views of feminism were informed by that milieu and hence these parties stance on social issues are shaped towards SWERF/TERF rhetoric. While the further right parties are filled with homophobes who’re using the destruction of trans rights as a wedge issue to attack the larger queer movement.
Opinion polls across the UK consistently trend towards a sorta live and let live attitude towards gender identity, but why step out of your insular bubble and see what people actually think when you can just do what you want and then yell “will of the people!” over dissenting voices?
lmao, so many eunuchs were historically trans people. imagine being like ‘wow im so gender divergent im basically like them’ then hating trans people
I have never heard of LERFS before, that’s some helpful context.
That episode of South Park where Richard Dawkins freaks out when he finds out his girlfriend Mrs. Garrison was trans, and unravels his budding atheist world empire because of this, was so prescient.
But here’s my attempt at figuring out what happened. Those anti-evangelical British Lib Dem/Labour atheists (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Graham Linehan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Stephen Fry, Maajid Nawaz John Cleese, Ricky Gervais) who were so beloved by libs in the Bush and early Obama eras, splintered from the younger liberals/leftists on the degree to which the west should tolerate Muslims, and attributed this split to younger people’s obsessions with “political correctness.” They began bleeding their following, and got extremely obsessed with affecting a “nuanced intellectual” persona and reveling in their persecution complex by going “I’m as liberal as they come but the modern left is doing ____ too much and is even calling ME a racist and sexist!”
The alt-right/chuds/Conservative dark money network loved hearing this shit and started glomming onto these people, because their movement was dying and needed a less cringe, marginally more secular sheen. Suddenly these atheist personalities found that their cries about political correctness on videos/podcasts would always garner a huge response (even if it’s from the right), and so started playing this shit up more. Around the same time JK Rowling was getting obsessed with twitter because she regularly dunked on Trump and got fawned over by Tumblr-types. However, as she reveled daily in adoration, once she did get criticisms about her trepidation towards trans people and Jeremy Corbyn, it was like turning off her pleasure tap, and drove her insane.
All this converged in the form of bitter Brit atheists backing JK Rowling because of their shared animosity toward the younger left’s “coddling” and “cancel culture” (i.e. not thinking they were the ideological vanguard anymore). Once Caitlin Flanagan’s article “The Coddling of the American Mind” framed this behavior of the younger left as an open academic inquiry issue, a new collective of influential “anti-PC” web personalities was born.
The Brit libs became willing to do anything to stick it to the young people who didn’t like them anymore, and began jamming up liberal spaces with claims that reducing racist/transphobic literature from college syllabi was hindering “free inquiry” and “intellectual growth.” This got them invites to Real Time with Bill Maher, JRE, and the Rubin Report, and even suckered many liberal/leftist comedians/academics like Whitney Cummings/Kumail Nanjiani/Zizek/Finkelstein. So they just stayed stuck like this and helped portray Rowling as a martyr, and “serious concerns” about the “excess” of trans rights became the mainstream UK culture among even the Labour Party, subsequently even echoed and appreciated by Hillary Clinton.
CW: Discussion of transphobia
This is a very pop-cultural explanation that looks specifically at a few random bourgeois actors and their interactions with traditional and social media. I think a better explanation for why TERF island is so transphobic has less to do with New Atheism (i.e. Dawkins et al.) and JK Rowling (who are symptoms of the underlying problem rather than the source). It has to do with the fact that the UK is fundamentally a dethroned world superpower. The UK lost all its colonies and became a vassal of the United States, and for a while was just an appendage of the EU. The same thing that is behind British transphobia is the same thing behind Brexit. It’s the same old reactionary “we used to be a REAL country. We used to be an EMPIRE. But now we have FALLEN FROM GRACE and we need a nonconformist scapegoat to blame for our current geopolitical irrelevancy!” And what better scapegoat than trans people, who have been undergoing a civil rights struggle similar to the struggles of other marginalized groups. When a marginalized group is actively undergoing a civil rights struggle in a dethroned empire like the UK, they become a convenient scapegoat for why the country is no longer powerful. This is especially true of trans women, who are seen through a transphobic lens as “biological men who refused the call to be masculine revanchist imperialists.”
TL;DR transphobia is
justanother genre of “the west has fallen, billions must die”EDIT: Not “just” since transphobia exists outside of empire, but it takes on that flavor in the imperial core
That’s a great explanation that’s much more big picture, as I recall some of the #FBPE libs were even blaming Brexit passing on the left being too PC and pro-trans, thereby aggravating the leavers too much.
Plus the situation for trans people is getting worse in the US as its standing in the world declines. That also explains why the UK is furthest ahead in its transphobic crusade.
MI5 is sitting on the feedback loop wire and amplifying anti-trans stuff.
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