Who is actually confused here?
(My other yodels into the void are:
AND
Dear Steph, I wrote you but you still ain't calling...
And, thank you for the concern. I remain very lucid, I am in receipt of the facts.
You were challenged with copious credible sources and asked entirely reasonable questions by many people.
You were reassured that no one is linking you in any way with White/Woods. My only area of perplexity is why you continue to flog this long-dead horse. 'Karen White' is absolutely an over-referenced case - there are so many more - and many never go to prison because they are trans! Why continue this? Why show yourself up as so bereft of fucks for women? It's a strange pastime, that's for sure.
At least you didn't call us 'gender crits' (read - feminists and other women grounded in reality) hysterical, unhinged or delusional. Not out loud, anyway.
So let's unpack quickly.
Steph's assertion that White/Woods was not trans is founded entirely on the misapprehension (which I've explained twice now) that he only began to identify himself and present as a transwoman after being inprisoned. This is objectively wrong. If you hadn't blocked me, I'd reply to you, tagging in Jenny Ann Bishop of Transforum. She could tell you about old Karen from as far back as 2013. But I'm guessing you read my blog, and saw the statement from Bishop as well as White/Woods' former neighbours - one being a transwoman! Inconvenient, isn't it?
Steph's other bit of headline news was from a source who has an unexplained relationship to, and familiarity with, a trans sex offenders wing of a prison. They had the ground-breaking discovery that hardly any of the purported transwomen there are true-trans, which, obviously, put a very different slant on almost every other statistic! Compelling.
Minor incidents: Just wow. It was bad enough you displayed such disregard for these victims, that you minimised the incidents as you did. Now you call them minor. That sort of brutal erasure of the gaslighting, intimidation, forced sexual contact and all the trauma that creates and triggers is a red flag. A very big, bright red flag.
So, Karen is not trans, although I've no idea how anyone is assessed on the basis of an unfalsefiable claim, and the sexual assaults on the women forced to live alongside him were 'minor'.
“he would get special privileges to buy make-up on certain sites like Asos and he was allowed to use the internet to buy his wigs,” said Cheryle Kempton, who was in jail with White.
“We were never allowed to do that, so why was he?” she asked.
Kempton was in jail for a series of petty crimes arising from drug addiction. A situation ii understand all too well. You might Steph, have a low opinion of these women, who have of course broken pretty critical elements of the gender expectations placed on women, but this isn't Bad Girls or Prisoner Cell H, and women like Cheryle are enormously vulnerable, and the removal of liberty is the punishment, not being predated upon by men.
Cheryle describes the shock at White's arrival. The size of him, the depth of his voice, the fact he never spoke about anything other than sex and this made everyone, even the hardest of the prison officers noticeably frightened.
Steph is, as my gran would have said, muttering both sides of his bread - the entire crux of his argument is White wasn't 'true trans' and anyway, it was only something and nothing. Touching a boob (as if Steph has ever understood the fear) now covers walking up behind a woman who can't escape, pressing an erect cock into her backside and numerous other gruesome acts. Fuck off.
Still, it was gracious of Steph's Place to correct the 'statistic' that a transwoman is sexually assaulted every thirty three and not every three days.
Which is no problem. I'll be the snopes of genderwoo. A bit. When the kids are behaving themselves, anyway.
Also, a lesson was learnt on this side! It was silly of me to use copy and paste when sharing a live link, because they immediately update when amended - I, too, know better now! Isn't that great? It's like we're growing, together!
It seems hard to believe was a simple matter of missing the second (or first, who am I to be pedantic?) 3 digit, since you said it in both your pieces prior to this. Och well, it's only a small matter.
Not like the way you relentlessly downplay the sexual assault of several women in prison.
That really gives us an insight into how much you empathise with, understand and care about women.
There's a visceral level that sexual violence strikes us on. It's ingrained since our first experience of it: often as children. The threat and fear of it is life restricting. We live with trauma - trauma that is triggered by many things; It's a pity transition doesn't require having an even rudimentary understanding of this.
Lets talk about women in prison.
Women who; make up less than 5% of the prison population but account for over 19% of self harm incidents
Are more likely to have been imprisoned for non-violent offences and commit a vanishingly small number of sex offences
Women in prison are highly likely to be victims as well as offenders
Over half the women in prison report having suffered domestic violence
53% report having experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child - compared to 27% of male prisoners.
Where 80% have suffered a significant head trauma - many of them repeatedly - 9 times out of ten due to male violence.
When have you heard any popular campaign try to help these women? When has a woman to be confined with Marie Dean or Jessica Winfield or Paris Green or Kayleigh Louise Woods or Alex Baker or, indeed, White/Woods, had a petition on social media, pleading for her dignity and safety?
Are you aware of the case in America, where a transwoman in a women's prison has moved back to the male estate because of the constant presence of sexual violence from the guards? Pity the actual women can't move, huh?
Your website has its opening line thus:
"Welcome to Steph's Place, a website dedicated to feminist transgender women in the UK"
How 'feminist' is this? To studiously avoid showing any compassion for the victims of sexual predation? To now diminish it even more, after I pointed out how glaring this omission was?
You go on to say;
"But as I read more and more I started to appreciate that my human rights to be a trans woman were not being improved, they were being eroded!"
But, that just isn't true, is it? Why continue to push fallacies, showing not one iota of concern or respect to women in the most vulnerable scenario?
It's not you who has to live with this. It's not you who has to flee domestic violence in the middle of the night, give up your pets and possessions, uproot your children and local connection to find a refuge. It's not you who is expected to cohabit with a transwoman who's had no medical transition, who could have any kind of history, having been forced to leave your adolescent son at social services because the refuge doesn't allow for males old enough to pose a threat.
The thing is, while you won't see a professional portrait photograph of me on here (or any - as your friend Julie Miller said, we have been harassed into the shadows. 'Cleansed' from society, in fact - always the right side of history with that chat, innit?) and I will not bore everyone with my autobiography: but I have been in a situation like that. You could never comprehend it, neither could many liberal feminists.
It's amazing how unimportant working class, uneducated and desperate women are. Women who's dignity and security isn't defended by lawyers or parents, isn't taken seriously by the police; who've ended up on the streets as teenagers. Or in refuges (we do tend to keep a low profile). Or in prison.
It isn't your life at all, and you never had to do any of this. You don't have the faintest idea of the perpetual danger women are in from perverts.
You can very easily campaign for an advancement of your rights without displaying contempt for the welfare of women far, far more vulnerable than you can comprehend. Your name will now be associated with Karen White. With you dismissing his crimes as 'minor'.
Is that a success for you? Are you trying to advocate for your rights, or pour scorn on ours? What have you achieved here, Steph's Place?
You even have a 'Truth and Lies' section, stating:
"There is probably no minority group in the UK that takes more negative publicity than trans folk"
Seriously? What about Muslims? Or travellers? How do you think travellers are reported on? Do you think that Irish travellers (a distinct ethnic group under attack for hundreds of years) get a good press, make the news for positive reasons? Ever?
Tell me if you ever hear of a case of the police tracking someone down via social media after they used a slur like 'g*po' or 'p*key*. I'll wait.
I have a strategy here, however. I don't deny travellers have certain cultural issues that need addressing. I don't deny that there are endemic problems. What I do say is there is a reason for the antipathy and division. That the prejudice and persecution absorbed over centuries have caused deep mistrust and insularity. I point out the amazing qualities of travellers; the care for the elderly, the loyalty, the reverence for the dead and the heaps of charity work many do that goes unnoticed.
But, of course, it is worse for you:
"From newspaper owners who are transphobic and directs their editors to "slate" us - to exclusionary women's groups (sometimes known as Terf's or GC's or Gender Critical) - to even "Christian" churches who see transgender people as "unclean."
Steph accused Transcrime UK of being a 'database of pure hate' which even logged people for driving offences. It wasn't exactly true, of course - it was a tag that grouped murders and sex offenders who used a vehicle in their crime.
Ah well.
"All these groups "throw mud" and, of course, some sticks. My community calls all exclusionists "Transphobes.""
Do you call all exclusionists transphobes? My god you must be busy, what with certain jobs requiring certain qualifications or training; with bus passes only being available to those of pension age; to child benefit only given to those with children. And of course you think I'm using hyperbole and sarcasm, but it's all the same principle - society requires checks and balances. You need to help some groups of people if you want anything approaching an egalitarian system.
"This page is devoted to debunking the lies and rhetoric from the above groups in easy to read, short facts, almost like a FAQ page as seen on other websites. Any links will take you to pages with more detail"
This bit I've included just for shits and giggles. If you go along with the cult narrative of never look at anything from a feminist page, The Times, the Office of National Statistics (numbers, man? Why do we need numbers to talk about people in the 21st century?) etc and you block dissenters on sight, this may be exactly the place for you!
I still would like Steph's Place to challenge their own side, just a bit. Since the triggering has reached maximal clenching over this inconvenient story, it really might be worth asking people to stop saying self identification is the only true way of knowing someone's gender.
All the 'Acceptance without Exception' and 'you can't police other people's genders!' and talk of compelling rape victims to speak of their attacker with she/her would go a long way. Unless it's the tacit understanding that challenging the 'be kind', 'right side of history' is liable to end, well... badly.
No comments:
Post a Comment