Once upon a Sam

Human being, lover of the journey, my views are my own. Woman = Adult Human Female. Lesbians are same-sex attracted.

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

Remembering those on whose shoulders we stand, some with us at #LesbianPrideLondon2023 to share their stories. We have come far but we must not forget our history as we move forward.

#LesbiansTakeBackPride
#CelebratingLesbians
#LesbianPride
#LesbianVisibility

[London Lesbian Collective @ldnlesbian]

Massive thank you to @BDimyon for your commitment and your contributions to our celebration - flags, banners, pictures and postcards. All hard work to remember the lesbians that came before us and that furthered our rights. #LesbiansTakeBackPride #LesbianVisibility

[Women's Rights Network - WRN @WomensRightsNet]

Our letter to the CEO of @AmnestyUK makes clear our dissatisfaction with the initial response received - and our expectations.

Their defamatory and scandalous actions have placed the safety of our members at risk. This is far from OK and they must take responsibility.

[Lucy Hunter Blackburn @LucyHunterB]

“This letter constitutes formal notice of Genspect's claim arising from defamatory statements published by Amnesty International UK.”

[FiLiA @FiLiA_charity]

Read the exclusive story about @Plaid_Cymru and #Plaid24 below - thanks to @NationCymru for covering this important outcome!

#WomenWontWheesht
#NiFyddMenywodYnDdistaw
@RhunapIorwerth

[FairPlayForWomen @fairplaywomen]

Two male boxers now have Olympic GOLD medals taken from WOMEN’S competition.

#Paris2024
#imanekhelif
#LangYuTing

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

@Keir_Starmer Affirming is not a neutral act. When are you going to stop affirming men who identify as women into women’s spaces and services and allowing businesses like dating apps to discriminate against lesbians. Wish you were as upset about that as some cornflour on Stonehenge

[Sex Matters @SexMattersOrg]

The Equality Act provides for “single and separate sex services”

These provisions allow services to be provided on the basis of sex: divided between “male” and “female”, not between “safe” and “unsafe”.

It is important to be clear that what are needed are single-sex services ☑️

[Southall Black Sisters @SBSisters]

🚨 Hindu cult leader stands accused of rape and extortion by 4 women.

We are appalled and stand in solidarity with the women.

Join us outside the High Court on Monday, 24th June to call out the corruption of the religious establishment.

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

https://t.co/ePs3f0RakA

Being a lesbian or bisexual does not require surgery.

Androgyny and rejection of traditional gender roles does not require surgery either and has nothing to do with Pride.

[LGB Alliance @AllianceLGB]

We have written to Sadiq Khan about this shocking campaign. We have requested a meeting as a matter of urgency.

https://t.co/2u6wTfE9I9

[LGB Alliance @AllianceLGB]

We have written to Sadiq Khan about this shocking campaign. We have requested a meeting as a matter of urgency.

https://t.co/2u6wTfE9I9

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

@jk_rowling So say lesbians about men

[FiLiA @FiLiA_charity]

#FiLiA #Newsletter

Silencing Scottish Women #FiLiAScotland, London Lesbian Collective, #Solidarity for Selma, Divina and Danae and more!

🔗 https://t.co/bU81avwazT

#SelfDefenceIsNoOffence
#DropTheRacistCharges

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

@UN_Women @free_equal Lesbians are same-sex attracted women. Men aren’t lesbians. Your tweet is homophobic and an apology needed.

[Once upon a Sam @OnceuponaSam1]

It is dystopian that lesbians have to use legal support to be able to socialise.

This is a huge win, well done Jenny! And so grateful that @AllianceLGB is there to support us

#lesbians

[Liberal Voice for Women @LibVoice4Women]

The fact that women who say they are trans and women who say they are non-binary can menstruate is not evidence that "menstruation is not just a women's issue". It is evidence that women who say they are trans and non-binary remain women.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on @YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

Originally Posted on Evening Standard

[Malcolm Clark @TwisterFilm]

1./ How serious is the LGBTQ+ lobby about child safeguarding? From sex education to "gender affirming care" for kids they claim we can trust them. So why, just 2 years ago, did the lobby applaud this song, We Are Coming For Your Children? It was a joke, they argued.
1 of /12 👇

[Janet Inglis @ThatAussieWoman]

Australia has a woman going to court next week to defend herself against 2 charges of 'misgendering' males.
How is this even considered an offence?
Men who claim they have assumed the gender identity of a woman in Australia have no burden of proof.
There are no standards of 'woman gender' they must comply with.
No fair arbiter of woman gender exists.
A woman is being punished for recognising that a couple of humans are males.
This is horrifying.
On what basis could calling anybody a male be considered criminal?
Being called a man has no defamatory or sinister connotation.
Does it?
I've been called a man by people intending to offend me.
I wasn't offended.
Because I know I'm not a man, and also because being a man isn't in and of itself an undesirable or evil existence.
It's reminiscent of the young girl who was arrested in her own home for saying a female police officer looked like a lesbian.
Where is the insult?
It comes across as the state imposing sanctions on women who dare to expose reality.
@KirralieS
The women of Australia are right behind you.

[SurrogacyConcern @SurrogConcern]

“When the new laws do come in it will be amazing for the intended parents”. A Dad on @BBCWorldatOne today.

It will be harder for women to change their minds re keeping their own babies.

This is dystopian. We object to liberalising #surrogacy in the strongest possible terms.

[Women’s Rights Network- Greater Manchester @WRN_Manchester]

https://t.co/xjZvisoqsG the Women's Institute saying they champion 'inclusivity.' However, questions arise as a man openly expressing violent intentions towards women becomes a member in Manchester. Does WI not prioritise safety and respect?