Pink News reports that the BBC has doubled down on playing a queer punk song with “kick TERFs” lyrics.
London DIY punk/riot grrl band Dream Nails’ track “They/Them” features lyrics including “my gender’s not your business”, “non-binary resistance” and “kick TERFs all day / don’t break a sweat”.
A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, also knows as a “gender critical” transphobe. Most feminists are pro-trans.
According to WAToday the BBC has dismissed criticism, suggesting that the lyrics are ambiguous: “People will interpret songs with any element of nuance or ambiguity differently.”
Here are the lyrics:
Call me a girl again Not asking for the hell of it Call me a girl again My gender’s not your business Call me a girl again Not asking for the hell of it Call me a girl again Non-binary resistance!
Woah-oh They them, they them! x 3 Not asking for a friend Woah-oh They them, they them! x 3 Not asking for a friend
Call me a girl again Kick terfs all day, don’t break a sweat Call me a girl again Trans power is forever Call me a girl again My gender’s not your business Call me a girl again Non-binary resistance!
“Transphobes believe women are inferior to men in general”
TizzyEnt gives a great explanation of how the International Chess Federation’s ban of transgender women proves that such anti-trans policies are not about protecting women.
In the video he quotes Kate Montogomerie, who writes:
“In banning trans women from chess the insane anti-trans lobby has fully revealed their hand. They don’t just believe that sex is a non-material immutable binary, they also think that women are intellectually inferior. Which is what we’ve been saying they believe from the start. …
"To a transphobe there is a supernatural order. Men first, women second. Women are inferior in body and mind. And that cannot be changed, no matter what physical or social changes one undergoes. Because if it could be changed then that hierarchy falls apart. It threatens order.”
Trans activist, philosopher and scientist Julia Serano gives a solid presentation of the way joirnalists misrepresent the detransitioner issue to fit a cisgender and transphobic narrative. Click on the headline to read it all.
//Since very few people who detransition fit the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative, and most do not oppose trans-related healthcare for others, mainstream media outlets have relied almost entirely on the same handful of detrans activists for their articles and news stories. Notably, many of these activists ideologically detransitioned upon immersion in religious fundamentalism or “gender critical”/trans-exclusionary radical feminism (GC/TERF), and now work closely with anti-trans activist groups. Media outlets that platform these detrans activists rarely if ever disclose their ties to anti-trans activism.
With the rest of this essay, I hope to accomplish two things. First, I will share articles that discuss ideologically motivated detransition, prominent detrans activists’ ties to anti-trans organizations, and mainstream media stories that interviewed these individuals without disclosing their connections to anti-trans activism. Second, I will contextualize detransition — unpacking the concept, poring over statistics and studies, and suggesting potential future directions — for journalists and audiences who wish to learn more about the phenomenon without pitting such experiences against those of happily transitioned people.//
Nat Guest tells a fascinating story over at twitter. A security guard harasses a cis woman because he thinks she is trans.
She is referring to the Southbank Centre, a complex of artistic venues in London, England, on the South Bank of the River Thames. The center has all gender restrooms during the Pride celebrations.
Natalie writes:
I was just on my way back from the loos in the south bank centre & I passed a woman with short hair on her way down. Security guard started yelling at her questioning her gender. She yelled back then continued.
She was cis, not that it matters. He started interrogating me on her gender when I got to the top of the stairs while still yelling down the stairs to her. She’s a woman, I said repeatedly, she’s a woman. Not that it matters but she’s a woman.
THIS IN THE MIDDLE OF CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS MELTDOWN SEASON AT THE SOUTH BANK LIKE COME THE F*CK ON. I explained to the bouncer why this was so unacceptable & as he tried to apologise to me, he reached out & patted me on the head (!!)
Our girl comes out of the loo and explains to him too. She heads back to her pals so I assure her I have called for a manager and will detail the situation.
The manager arrives!!! And of course agrees that this is not acceptable and also that all toilets at the SB centre are all gender anyway. My point: obviously you’re not training that well enough.
Anyway it shook us both up. This is what TERFs want to happen outside bathrooms where people are literally just trying to have a wee.
“It was a mistake, we’ve had all sorts coming in trying to use the toilets today,” the security guy said. Yes!! You have!! They are all gender toilets at a queer festival during pride month in a public space!
I also walked by multiple public street urinals in Central London today - which, I note, TERFs who claim to want cis women to be nowhere near a penis, are not campaigning against.
I love the south bank centre and always see it as an open and safe space - and I know those in charge want it to be - so this was particularly jarring.
I have muted this now but if you are a weird little person with weird little questions you’re very welcome to phone the venue, 020 3879 9555.
Note that the event Natalia is referring to is a session with Christine and the Queens AKA Redcar. He is now using male pronouns.
//Organisers announced the 2023 campaign, called ‘Never March Alone: Championing Trans Allyship’, on Friday (26 May) as part of an effort to stop discrimination against transgender people.//
The message is clear: London Pride won’t accept any of that transphobic, TERF-fuelled «LBT without the T» hate propaganda.
This time they tell the story about the fictional teen Brie Chandler who is presenting as trans in order to take fourth place in high school or Division III collegiate swimming competitions.
Brie says:
“I don’t even want to be a woman—I just want to win at swimming. Imagine how I’ll laugh with glee up there on the winners’ podium, knowing that all I had to do was lie about my gender identity issues through months or years of psychiatry sessions, take a shitload of androgen blockers, go to speech therapy, and recover from multiple invasive surgeries!
Those feelings of isolation as my family members struggle to accept my social transition, the bureaucratic headaches of having to change my legal documents to reflect my correct identity, and becoming more likely to be the target of harassment from strangers will be nothing compared to holding that trophy in my devilish little hands!”
Having discussed gender variance with TERFs and other transphobes for some time now, it strikes me that they have a very old-fashioned view about what the term “real” means.
Take the idea that gender can be reduced to “biological sex”. Indeed, they say that gender is biological sex. What does this “is” actually mean?
Why are genitals more real than the brain?
They must know that what they do as gendered beings is not the same as what they have between their legs, their gonads or their chromosomes.
When they fall in love, it is not their genitalia that fall in love. Their X or Y chromosomes are unable to feel a thing. It is the whole person who falls in love, body and soul.
Much of that experience is anchored in the brain, but the body rides along: A beating heart, flushing cheeks, fidgeting hands…
The same applies to their sense of being a man or a woman or a nonbinary person. This sense is not located in their penis or their vagina (although it may feel that way under some circumstances). It is, again, anchored in the brain and experienced by the whole body.
Yet, for some weird reason, they think that the genitalia are real, while what is going on in the brain is not.
The systemic nature of nature
Contemporary science, whether this is the natural sciences and biology or the social sciences, underlines the systemic nature of nature. This means that everything that happens is caused by feedback loops between a wide variety of factors: genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, cellular, mental, psychological, social, cultural or environmental.
Your life experience affects the way your genes are working. Your cultural upbringing affects the way courtships and romantic relationships play out.
1960s reductionism
So where does this bizarre idea that gender can be reduced to biological sex come from?
I think we need to go back to the 1960s and 70s, where there were strong reductionistic, positivistic or materialistic schools of science, especially in the natural sciences.
Their dream was that everything around us could eventually be explained by the smallest common physical denominator, namely atoms. Social processes were unreal, biology was somewhat “realier”, while the true reality was found in physics.
In psychology this lead to “behaviorism”, a school of psychology that refused to look at the mind at all, as what went on in the psyche could not be “objectively” observed and measured.
By the end of the previous century this kind of thinking was all but dead, but it seems that the transphobes have not caught up. I suspect many of them rely of what they remember from their own school text books (which always leave out the complexity of the real reality) and popular science of the mid 20th century. These misconceptions are then seen as “science”.
In total denial
When we point out that both natural and social scientists that actually have studied gender, gender variance and sexualities actually accept transgender identities and that the medical manuals (DSM-5 and ICD-11) see gender incongruence and trans lives as very real, they have to dismiss that as “gender ideology”. The “real” scientists think like them.
This is completely absurd. Not only do they not understand concepts like biological sex, gender and gender identity. They do not understand the relevant science, either.
What the transphobes do understand, however, is how to be cruel.
The pile-on came after the app released a blog post in celebration of Lesbian Visibility Day, describing how it is “reclaiming ‘lesbian’” from “the clutches of TERFs and bigots who’ve tried to hijack it to fuel their transphobia and hatred”.
Anti-trans TERFs then got HER’s twitter account suspended.
After returning to social media, the app sent a push-notification to all its users telling transphobic users to delete the app, adding: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Decency and Justice 1, Bigotry 0.
Transphobic conspiracy theorist argues that Zendaya and Tom Holland are both transgender
Over at tiktok “Queen Awake” has been helping transphobes identify trans women and trans men among our celebrities. It all crashed with a sickening thud when she told us that Zendaya and Tom Holland, a cis celebrity couple, are both trans.
She has now closed both her Instagram and her tiktok accounts to the general public, probably realizing that she has made a complete fool of herself.
Now, you might say that “Conspiracy Realists | Mentor Hollyweird Exposer teaching Critical Thinkers how to identify Inverted Celebs, Top 1%” (yepp, that is how she describes herself over at Instagram) is an unrepresentative outlier, and that most “gender critical” anti-trans activists are a little bit more smarter than this. And you would at least be partly right.
But anyone who have followed transphobic TERFs and right wing extremists in social media, will know that many of them are desperately trying to come up with solid signs that can be used to distinguish between trans and cis people in public spaces, and, yes, quite a few of them promote signs based on body morphology (or body shape). They need signs they can use to police restrooms and locker rooms.
Others insist that we can decide who are women based on chromosomes, ovaries, testosterone levels etc., but this is, of course, impractical, in public spaces.
Over: Zendaya presenting her “male proportions.” To be fair: There are trans women who look very much like her. There is so much bodily variation among both cis and trans women that there is no way you can distinguish them on the basis of the way they look.
Transphobes often say that “they can always tell” if a person is trans, but Queen Awake’s courses in how to identify trans celebs clearly shows that some of them do not completely trust their trans radar. And they should not. You see, if we are to follow Queen Awake’s theory of male and female traits, a majority of cis women will have to be classified as trans, which makes banning trans women from public bathrooms very difficult.
Note that in the first half of the 20th century there was a whole “science” called eugenics (or “racial hygiene”) that used scull measurements to divide people into “Nordic”, “Alpine” and various non-European races. They wanted to ensure that the blood of the pure “Aryan” race was not diluted with blood from the inferior races. The Nazis loved this "science”.
Bruno Berger was a German racial anthropologist, ethnologist, explorer and SS officer who went to Tibet in search of lost tribes of “Aryans”. He, like most eugenicists, made active use of scull measurements.
In Apartheid South Africa the white racists developed the “pencil test”, a method of assessing whether a person has Afro-textured hair. If the pencil fell out of their hair, they were seen as black or “colored”, and they were banned from “white spaces”. Sounds familiar, does it not?
If someone starts using pseudo-science to exclude people they do not like from society, it is a safe bet that they are bigots.
Here’s a broader presentation of Queen Awake’s conspiracy theories by Rebal D:
