How pasta made me a Terf

Thanks for educating Giles.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

– George Orwell

Thank you, as I was reading I was composing in my mind what transpired you had already eloquently written.

One point:
“A “trans woman” is also a man but who perceives himself to be a woman. Likewise a trans *woman* is a woman who perceives herself as a man.”

I think a *wo* too many
has slipped in 😀

It is disconcerting that it’s taken this long for Giles to realise that stating facts is not bullying, however trying to destroy peoples livelihoods is.

There is a distinct lack of backbone in today’s society that we feel this need to coddle adults with trigger warnings and special treatment. These people need to get a grip.

The thrust of the article is about bullying and aggression and in the patronising tone of your comment you too are falling into a trap. I like the article because it reflects what many are thinking and doing. Being simply aggressively tribal about the topic as many of the other comments are is not helpful. I generally agree that much talk around transgender issues is silly and naive but it will pass and we can accommodate those that genuinely feel uncomfortable. Of course everybody needs to be something so many jump on the band wagon and fight the cause. It was an alien topic to me but having had discussions with friends very for or against you can get a feel for the nuance. I feel very male but what if I didn’t? (resist the temptation to crack a joke unless it’s properly funny).And that is probably a reality for some. But the sooner we all remember that we have to share the world with many others and accept it the better.

One of the most eloquent summaries I have ever read on the subject, thank you!

Good comment.

N Forster said: “A “trans woman” is also a man but who perceives himself to be a woman.”
At best, we can say that a “trans woman” is a male who wishes others to perceive him as if he was a female, but we cannot know what’s in his mind about how perceives himself.

Thank you for putting so well what I thought

Excellent reply.
Everyone suffers, regardless of their position in life. Everyone is subject to ageing, craving, sickness, loss and death. 
I would like to add what I call the Axiom of Woke Marxism “there is no genuinely meaningful difference between any human beings whatsoever …, that all such categories [of difference] are ultimately fictions …, and that there can be (almost) no consequential effects of holding different cultural values …, and thus any differences must be wholly the result of injustices that exist in the power dynamics between social identity groups.” I attribute this to James Lindsay of newdiscourses IIRC.

NF privilege is an honor to be shared not squandered.
Reality is proven when one is in jail.
You can pretend to be anyone or thing in the outside world.

I love you. Are you single?

+495 likes, and counting. Sure, Unherd’s readership isn’t necessarily (or at all) representative of anything but Unherd’s readership, but this is a sign of our times. I wonder how many corporate HR departments are now having meetings about how they are going to climb down from the heights of the madness that they’ve been pushed to by a tiny minority of committed fringe activists, in which people can’t quite meet each other eyes or agree who it was, exactly, who decided that “the right thing to do” was to purge any reference to “women” from their all of their guidelines and policies and to bully everyone into proclaiming their pronouns on every email they send. And how many of them conclude vaguely, with an unspoken agreement to quietly drop it and never speak about it again.

A bit like the unspoken agreements not to officially unwind or discuss the Covid madness, which mean that we are left with arrows on floors everywhere and signage that literally everyone – even the poor folk out there in the jungle still fighting the last war in their surgical masks – ignores.

Giles is part of woke church.
What do you expect from him?
People preferring neo Marxist dogma to teaching of Christ.
So well outlined in latest Douglas Murray book.

I think Giles is coming round to this point. Slowly, but surely, kindly and thoughtfully.

One of the finest responses ever written.

Spot on. #DontPlayTheRiggedGame.

Suffering is universal but not uniform. And it is non-uniform in predictable ways. Privilege is — or should be — a useful shorthand for advantages that tend, on average, to reduce suffering. If a 19th-century slaver had told a slave to stop moaning on the grounds that suffering was universal, the slave might reasonably have suggested that they swap places, and the slaver on refusing the swap would have been confirming (even if he didn’t admit it) his privilege. To dispute that there is such a thing as privilege, simply on the grounds that you dislike the politics of those who invoke it, is at best thoughtless and at worst downright dishonest.

It starts with begging for tolerance and it is ending with verbal war against normal people. These people are a small minority but large enough to cause damage in society.

Agree. He’s not “cis,”, and he isn’t “privileged.”

In Giles’ defence he means his friends – so that is perfectly reasonable for him to be polite and respect their wishes if he so chooses. What happens between him and his friends is his business.
Where it’s not acceptable is to force someone to use preferred pronouns. Key distinction I think.

Thank you. There has recently been a court case going on about this very issue: https://www.christian.org.uk/news/christian-professor-awarded-400000-after-refusing-to-refer-to-a-man-as-female/

I was listening to Matt Walsh, of the Daily Wire, talk about his film “What is a Woman”(I haven’t seen it as I refuse the paywall it is behind). Anyway, Walsh is bang-on, in my opinion, when he said “I cannot demand that others perceive me the way that I perceive myself. My self perception is not a joint project shared by me and the rest of human society. “

I’ll use male/female pronouns but I refuse to use neo-pronouns (I mean, “xzy” or “fish-self!” Really?). It’s also a direct assault on the most important of individual freedoms to have governmental or institutional enforcement of pronoun usage.

I dislike how progressive has been hijacked. I still consider myself a progressive, but not so progressive I seek to deny reality and fact.

It’s “I”ll pretend this person doesn’t have mental health problems”..that way I can dodge their ‘victim’ bile.

Ah, that’s who it was. I saw the the preview image, but never clicked.

Highlighting this highlights the behaviour towards everyone. This restaurant literally did nothing but take a booking and they were targeted so it shows the militant lunacy of gender ideology. If its got people on the sidelines to say “oh hang on a minute this isn’t on” then finally the cavalry might have arrived.

Reminds me of those incidents during the early Trump years where people who were identified with him were literally chased out of restaurants by people who considered themselves to be righteous and tolerant.

Of course he is well connected, and shall we say, swimming with the sharks

“booked out for a fundraiser for Ukraine”
Often goes together with
“restaurant windows smashed in. …complaining that the restaurant is not welcoming to trans people”

in a certain area, with well connected restaurant owners and well off food lovers who really, really care about certain things, there are certain risks that go with the business.

If I were anywhere near it I’d go out of my way to dine there.

Yes. Excellent observations. I have a few more.
… you can’t call yourself ‘cis’ or use ‘preferred pronouns’ to affirm ‘transition’ at the same time as cleaving to traditional understandings of what these words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean.
I agree. Personal pronouns are proxy identifiers but they are also classifiers. They carry a designation of the particular sex class to which the identified person belongs. Thus, using a preferred pronoun is an admittance that the pronoun has a different function – it is a means of changing the identified person from one sex class into another – it is now not a classifier but a re-classifier.
And the goal is to re classify a person into a different sex class in order that they can access the privileges and rights designated for that sex class. But in order to do that the word loses its codified, shared understanding – its meaning.
I am a cis white middle-class middle-aged man, and I have always thought this is a subject on which I ought to mind my privilege
By the very adoption of this type of language to describe himself, he has ceded the argument. The emphasis of identifying a group and then generalising what he assumes are negative, moral-political characteristics to it is a prejudice that is preventing him from seeing himself as a unique human being with self autonomy and agency to speak the truth.
And the truth is sex is biological, and language has strict codified meanings that we use to describe our perceptions and experiences of reality. To be coerced to pretend to validate the false self-perception of others, is to agree to the downstream harms that result from the false idea that perception is built on.

Most excellently put!!

Well said. Language is very important, as we see currently in the attempts to redefine the meaning of the word ‘woman’.

An excellent report. One must never accommodate ‘shriekers’.

It seems you took nominative determinism as a personal affront 😉

So what was she expecting, you sound relatively mainstream to me?

Thanks Penny. Great to hear that my own opinion is also held by someone so close to real experience.

Your comment deserves 1000 upvotes.

Thank for your openness and kindness. I am certainly in agreement with your perception of misogyny as I have found it uncomfortable ever since this argument or debate or whatever we call it began.

“Why do they hate trans people so much?”

Because they are activist neo-Marxist lunatics. They hate everyone.

Excellent post by the way.

Rather than “late capitalism”, I use the phrase “consumer society”, as I think a lot of this gender nonsense is the product of an American culture that promotes the idea that we can be anything we want to be. It’s “lifestyle” versus real life. I also think that the proliferation of gender stereotypes in popular culture – from Kim Kardashian’s backside to Love Island – makes many young people feel alienated to the point where they want to opt out by identifying as non-binary.

“It is maybe what, as a country, stopped us sliding into fascism, or communism”

It isn’t. It was wise leadership, and the lessons from 1,000 years of history ingrained in our traditions and our institutions – which is precisely why those traditions and institutions are now under such sustained attack.

Wake up and smell the coffee.

If we can shorten it to Poo on all subsequent interactions, yes.

Was supposed to be an answer to NT below.

They won’t have read Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” either.

You have hit the nail on the head – this is a wedge issue exploited by culture warriors with a wider agenda. As the owner of Il Portico appeared to suggest in his interview with Triggernometry, the people who smashed in his windows probably were not trans – they were activists who are not doing trans people any favours. 
It reminds me of the early 80’s when there were organisations such as the Anti Nasty League and Troops Out Movement which were essentially front organisations for the Socialist Workers Party. Other organisations such as Workers Against Racism and the Irish Freedom Movement were front organisations for the Revolutionary Communist Party. In all cases, they were not so much concerned with the stated cause – they just saw the riots of the early 80’s and the situation in the north of Ireland as being a threat to the state that they wanted to exploit.
The only difference with the situation today is that there is no obvious malevolent party behind the trans / BLM / etc. movements. Maybe there is no malevolent party – the followers of Gramsci have just infiltrated people heads.

Yes. Every word.

I agree .. it makes me think this is all a deliberate ploy to break community & society apart into smaller, pernicious & downright mean sections. It’s like all the progress of the last few centuries since the industrial revolution is slowly being reversed. The worst part is that most people are live & let live & they do not see what is happening!