- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
Extreme misogyny will be treated as a form of extremism under new government plans, the Home Office has said.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has ordered a review of the UK’s counter-extremism strategy to determine how best to tackle threats posed by harmful ideologies.
The analysis will look at hatred of women as one of the ideological trends that the government says is gaining traction.
Ms Cooper said there has been a rise in extremism “both online and on our streets” that “frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy”.
Considering crossdressing has been a major theme in British entertainment literally for centuries (see the Christmas panto for a famous example), I would wager that, JK Rowling notwithstanding, there are a lot more TERFs in the U.S. Not to mention just open bigots who don’t make any faux-feminist excuses.
I’m all about taking pot shots at the US, but “better at trans rights than Texas or Florida” isn’t what you are looking for.
Also, if the best you can do for “we’re not transphobic honest” is cross dressing entertainment, well, yikes.
Far, far, far better. As I said, since crossdressing has been a theme in British entertainment for literal centuries, it is much easier to accept someone saying they were born the wrong gender.
If you’re already used to seeing a man in a dress, you’re going to be a lot less upset about it overall. That’s why Eddie (now Suzy) Izzard got very little pushback both when he (at the time) did sold-out comedy shows wearing women’s clothing and, more recently, when she came out as trans. She does say she is fine if you call her he, and Eddie, but prefers she and Suzy.
Queer comedians in general have also had a long history in the UK. Even in the modern era, you had openly gay men like Kenneth Williams being hugely popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy
That cross-dressing tradition comes from the very opposite direction you’re assuming.
For example in their time Shakespeare’s Plays were entirely played by men, including female roles. This was not because they were very forward thinking about cross-dressing back in 18th century England, it was because it was deemed inappropriate for women to be actors.
It’s a reflection of the so called “Benevolent” Sexism still widely prevalent in those isles, especially in the Middle Class and above - women “are emotional and fragile creatures” and “must be protected” (were do you think the phrase “the gentler sex” comes from?), a paternalist take that justifies denying women access to certain things “to protect them” and certain responsibilities “because they’re too emotional and unlike men can’t handle the stress of such posts”.
You’re seeing the visible, surface artifacts of a society and applying your own values (very likely those of somebody with a high level of formal education and a big city upbringing in one of the most forward thinking areas in America) to try and derive the reason for those things when what you’re looking at is a society which is has been highly calcified socially for centuries, which, except for a bright period after the War that lasted until the 70s, has been dominated in terms of Power and Culturally by a very small section of society whose privileges are passed from generation to generation and were appearances are far more important than action, so with values massively mistatching yours, hence you’re drawing erroneous conclusions.
It’s not cultural openness that drives them, it’s various alive and well streaks of Victorian Values mixed with an unhealthy concern with “keeping up with appearances” (curiously there is a humoristic TV series with that name and tellingly it makes fun of Working Class or Low Middle Class people some whom desperately trying to look higher class, though probably one needs to have lived in that country for a couple of years to read the social context)
The proof that the UK isn’t transphobic is the Monty Python lumberjack bit.
Oh honey.
That is not a substantive response. Not that I expected one.
What you have to me is literally the trans ally-ship equivalent of “there is no race problem, black comedians are so popular”.
It’s not worth engaging with other than with empathy and pity.
Hence “oh honey”.
I never said there was no problem. So no I didn’t literally do that. I said it was much more accepted there than the implication that everyone in the UK was a TERF.
Since you’ve basically retracted your entire post piece by piece now, I’m just going to go away.
Now that you’ve been able to call a random person suggesting that the entire UK population does not hate trans people a bigot, I’m sure you can go away satisfied.
If it was mature and sincere, rather than mocking and crude, maybe.
But British Pantomime is closer to an American doing blackface than an A24 production doing transgender themed cinema.
There’s heavy cross pollination. Brits feed on American hysteria to fatten up their rumor mills and Americans use British accents to dress up their bigotry as sophistication.
But the percentages suck everywhere.
Cross dressing and transgenderism are not the same.
I realize this. It’s about getting people to accept those different than you, especially if they are queer.
I wrote a post just above about some self-proclaimed Feminist some years ago with a regular column there writting an Opinion Article in The Guardian about the “evils of men using sex dolls” without noticing how that Perl Clutching Moralizing about peoples sex practices was just a variant of the same thing that was being written a decade or two before about sex between people of the same gender.
I moved to Britain from The Netherlands and the spirit when it came to “accept those different than you” couldn’t be more different between those countries: the Dutch were all about “who am I to judge” and “as long as I don’t have to see it you can do whatever you want”, whilst at least the English (can’t really make informed statements about those from other nations) were all about “if I say certain things it will make me look bad” and “it’s not appropriate to voice criticism of <group>”.
I can’t speak for the past, but at least by the time I got there (mid 00s and for over a decade) the impression of “acceptance” projected by that country wasn’t driven by natural tolerance of others or the cultural repealing of Moralism (I would say, quite the contrary), it was driven by people not wanting to look bad in their social circle.
I’m not at all surprised that such Potemkin Village of “Acceptance” would so easilly collapse.