Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Boab's a bit like trevor phillips in a way - a right-wing reactionary blue labour bigot who thinks because they went through a radical lefty spell in the 80's it excuses all sorts of reactionary tory bullshit attitudes they have. And he's probably getting the same fear Nick Cave was getting a few months back, because he probably knows he's done enough to get me-tooed or even put on the sex-offenders register!

https://guardian.gyford.com/ is handy if you just want to read today’s paper. The opinion section is in there but it’s all siloed off in one section.

siloed is le mot juste

xp excellent link thank u

far less hideous to look at as well

*Such* an great piece. Superb in so many ways. Not the main point, perhaps, but I don't think anyone can drop an immaculately crafted gag (and there are several) into otherwise serious journalism quite like @helenlewis https://t.co/d9K2ty12zg

— Tom Peck (@tompeck) November 16, 2020

HL retweets high praise of her article about why women should be allowed more access to aristocratic titles.

It has taken me a while to come to understand what a terrible person HL really is.

oh god that article which i didn't read tbf despite HL saying she thoroughly addresses any concerns you might have within it, but the whole premise of that article at least, is one of the biggest pisstakes I've ever seen!

I thought it was a very interesting article, describing a curious and bizarre world that I’ve not previously had sight of. I somehow missed the well-crafted gags though.

alright Helen, I knew you were lurking here somewhere!

You’ll notice HLew didn’t miss a chance to crowbar her pet subject in there.

always good to mix a bit terfery with class-baiting I presume?

anyways I can't understand anyone who wouldn't want HL fired from a trebuchet into oblivion, everything about her is rank. Although at least she has fucked off to the US for now, just need to get that passport revoked and they can fucking keep her!

"I can't understand anyone who wouldn't want HL fired from a trebuchet into oblivion"

That makes me laugh out loud! :D

There isn't any TERFery that I could see, she just mentions that the GRA has a clause in that says inheriting a title is the an area with a specific exception - you can't change your position in line by changing your gender.

Look Andrew, as much as I love you doing your usual thing to jump into a thread to defend a woman no matter what a bad person she is, you’re still wrong here: she actually can’t resist going wELl YoU cAnT iNhErIt PrOpErTy BuT yOu CaN bE nOnBiNaRy because of course she does.

idg what is so singularly alluring abt helen lewis 2 u?

lol.

also, helen lewis is just fucking awful.

If lockdown has tipped you into problem drinking, you're probably not alone

it's definitely statistically unlikely that only one person reading this has started problem drinking, and that person is you.

I'm not aware I'm defending her, I'm just pointing out that there's nothing TERFy there - but there doesn't have to be, if we just meditate on her badness long enough.

You did it again! Should start keeping a log.

Can you explain to me, then, why she manages to shoehorn in a bizarre, unnecessary, out of context reference to nonbinary people, in the midst of an article that otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with nonbinary people at all? Can you provide any context or meaning for that bizarre insertion, other than to make the recognition of nonbinary gender look strange, unnecessary or otherwise opposed to the putative rights of the cis women in the piece?

I mean, I cannot believe I had to read this PoS article to affirm that yes, it is weirdly obsessed with the existence of nonbinary people.

I agree, there is nothing *radical* about this article at all, in fact I’m struggling to see her portray it as even remotely feminist. But trans exclusionary? Yes, she definite drops a reference to nonbinary people in there for no other reason than to ride her hobbyhorse about how our rights and existence are... a weird joke to her?

The context seemed to me to be that the article talks about gender and 'modern times' - the passage starts It reveals a country trapped between tradition and modernity, between the Middle Ages and the 21st century.

If you're talking about signifiers of modern attitudes to gender, trans rights and non-binary rights seem like a fairly obvious hook?

with the context that helen lewis is thoroughly opposed to trans rights and one of the most prominent british transphobes, that section happens to come across a little differently! without that context i'd think wondering 'how many lords are nonbinary' etc. would just be a strange aside and i wouldn't think that much of it but considering she's an obsessive transphobe who no doubt considers the concept of nonbinary genders ridiculous, everyone else's reaction of "ffs helen you can't even write a stupid article about how the aristocracy needs to be less sexist in its rules without mentioning your pet issue" is very reasonable

A recently unearthed Suzanne Moore classic:

https://twitter.com/myblacklife23/status
/1329228698113990657?s=19

Goodbye England's rose or whatever I guess

My friend just reminded me of this absolute stinker from S**anne M**re pic.twitter.com/DuJbf2kbSI

— Madame Guillotine (@myblacklife23) November 19, 2020

Goes nicely with this column.

Get on a bus and you will hear many a robust exchange about "ethnicity" which polite and political conversation is afraid of.

I got the bus to go to work every day before the pandemic but somehow never heard this chat.

fbclid=IwAR2KgE5E6T8wKjB4uI0bbLEF6l5ONOGd4QA1rfX_JAhiXu1Q_ZGdtSDb_bo

https://nostalgiacentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/otb1971film.jpg

some robust political debate happening beside a bus recently

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/08/14/23/Lewis-PA.jpg?width=982&height=726

Labour on the meth

Great photo! There’s probably a phd available on the semiology of buses in political campaigning.

Think Keith could pick up a bargain here, bolster his hard lad credentials and see off a few tankies with this

https://tanks-alot.co.uk/product/margret-thatchers-armoured-bus/

good for driving roughshod over election pledges with as well!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/jan-morris-historian-travel-writer-and-trans-pioneer-dies-aged-94

another guardian obituary with a nasty take on the 1970s. this time dredging up classic period terf rhetoric.

theguardian.com what is yr problem

material interests 🤝 fixed progressive values

should probably have posted trigger warning but i feel like that could apply to literally anything in the guardian uk media now

It’s not British media unless you’re unable to tell the Spectator from the Guardian in a blind read!

So depressing. Those spiteful little bigoted comments must have been so unpleasant for her to hear at the time, how disgusting that almost 50 years later they are deemed worthy of including in her fucking obituary.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/jan-morris-historian-travel-writer-and-trans-pioneer-dies-aged-94🕸

another guardian obituary with a nasty take on the 1970s. this time dredging up classic period terf rhetoric.

revisionism about 70s feminism being 100% terfery is vexing- you'd never think it was controversial at the time, or that rejection of sex & gender essentialism/immutability was once considered a radfem position, based on how it gets remembered

likes of lewis, freeman, rowling, guardian etc should surely be called TELFs- afaict they don't have much in common with even the really awful 2nd wave stuff, apart from a few talking points so disconnected from any analysis that they might as well be taken from the far right

anyway death to the guardian

revisionism about 70s feminism being 100% terfery is vexing- you'd never think it was controversial at the time, or that rejection of sex & gender essentialism/immutability was once considered a radfem position

gender essentialism was rare but surely the position the constructionist viewpoint was most prevalent?

idk if essentialism was all that rare actually but afaict a constructionist view was often preferred- which like anything can be used in shitty ways but i dont think it’s necessarily transphobic, a lot of trans ppl hold / have held similar positions

these anti-trans liberals seem pretty straightforward biological essentialists, even if they occasionally cite social construction when it’s convenient for an argument. anything that works seems to be their guiding principle- their bigotry doesn’t seem to be connected to even the kind of nominally radical social critique I associate w old school terfs

yes, heartily agree with the last part. silly to call jk rowling terf really when she doesn't seem to be advancing any feminist viewpoints

I don't know if you guys are aware that today is Trans Day of Remembrance, or if this discussion is accidental?

I spent the evening reading the great long litany of the dead: https://transrespect.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/TvT_TMM_TDoR2020_Namelist_EN.pdf - literally hundreds of murdered women (and a handful of murdered trans men and nonbinary people), their last days detailed (or starkly anonymous), in heartbreaking and sickening detail. And of the identified perpetrators of those murders, like way over 90% are cis men - who rape, violently assault, and murder trans women en masse, on a systemic level.

But the conversation you guys are having on this TDOR, is this endless recrimination of... whether it's constructivist feminists or bioessentialist feminists who are somehow responsible for *causing* all this transphobia? (Because, yeah, I'm totally *positive* that these men are 100% down with 70s or 00s radical feminism, that is totally where they get their transphobia from, violent men are soooo inclined to listen to feminists.) Instead of understanding that "terfs" or transphobic feminists or whatever you want to call the various kinds of transphobes - are one of the many symptoms of societal transphobia, and not the root cause.

And every one of these conversations, of whether it's this kind of feminist, or that kind of feminist, acts as this kind of moral smokescreen of blame-displacement - so that we never, ever have to talk about the violent, transphobic, misogynist, entitled men who rape and kill trans women?

And you don't think that's a completely bizarre and off-kilter thing to be doing?

yes, I was aware it's the trans day of remembrance.

we're in a thread about the guardian commenting on a thing that was in the guardian. no one is saying that violence against trans people today is caused by 70s feminism. it's just most relevant to what we are discussing itt rn

I suppose I live in a bit of a bubble, I had seen the link you posted as it was emailed round my department at work, alongside with lots of other materials, this morning; I have trans co-workers, friends and family members. I don't really encounter transphobia in my day to day life as I'm cis. so it happens that transphobia in the media, which has the tendency to be "feminist", is what I see. I don't think jk rowling is the cause of violence against trans people, but I also know that when someone put up a billboard saying "I heart JK Rowling" by where I lived it hurt people I know. I think it's possible to think prominent people in the media being transphobic is bad while also being aware that they are not the font of all transphobia or as pertinent an issue as the shocking violence against trans people that exists everywhere in the world.

the feminist framing seems to be the context in which trans issues are most frequently discussed outside trans circles in britain in terms of actual controversy, the transphobia & misogyny of cis men being already assumed. popularity of this framing means attempts to raise the latter as an issue tend to be shouted down as if they’re part of the same patriarchal violence they’re calling out (and obviously violent men aren’t above using whatever ideological smokescreen is available). there is definitely a disproportionality with the focus on feminism- but in the context of the guardian it’s the primary weapon used, and it does act as a moral smokescreen for patriarchal violence, however relatively minor it might seem. of course we should be calling the actual physical violence out more than we do. the guardian is quite happy to enable it & should be called out for that. but maybe we’re falling into its trap if we accept it’s about feminism in any form