Sure, humans gonna human, but it's still dumb.

I am getting a good dose of humble pie with our current lot - yep. In it for themselves. It doesn't really matter. The evidence for, child transition, say, remains low quality, regardless of whether Matt Walsh says it or not.

Depends how you define art, I guess.

I mean, why allow yourselves to get wedged on things like men in female sport, or rapists in women's prisons?

Haha, no, I grit my teeth and vote Green, mostly, and they are utterly batshit on this issue, to the point they'd expel me if I tried to join. I can see why there might be political reasons not to raise the issues but 1. I think silence creates ethical harm and 2. It's not politically savvy long term.

I think ppl would find that if they stopped all their performative outrage, most ppl agree on letting adults do whatever, keeping sex salient only where it needs to be, and taking care of kids. Just quit the flipping insanity, would be good.

Tbf, I probably wouldn't care as much if my kids hadn't been impacted, and I didn't have a heart for female DV and rape survivors, and female prisoners. Idgaf if people want to play with gender, I just want evidence based healthcare for minors, and same sex provision for vulnerable women. Ooh, the evil!

Conservative politicians and commentators do this, sure. Pretty sure I am neither a conservative voter, not do I commentate in favour of hierarchical gender roles. Lol

Spoiler: no-one. No-one is being hurt hearing PCOS described as a female condition. It's all performative outrage, and a huge dose of longstanding personal animus.

This is delusional. I have addressed all three.

1. Because caring got my kids through it. 2. I don't appreciate institutional gaslighting. 3. I think it's a regressive social movement - homophobic and misogynistic a lot of the time.

PCOS is irrelevant to discussions of transness, HTH. Suggesting PCOS sufferers are being wildly misgendered at every turn is nonsense. Women with PCOS look like women.

Writers of fiction don't have to do anything, really. Other than write from the imagination. Sort of the point of art.

Omg For starters, the term isn't intersex. It's differences of sexual development. And not all DSD's are the same. DSD's are sex based. And no E of this has anything to do with PCOS.

It's just a fact of life, isn't it? It's no more a box than any other observable fact about the self.

This is so bizarre.

Only women have PCOS because only women have ovaries Men don't have ovaries. A woman with PCOS can see herself as a transman or an enby if she wants. She's still female. If she wasn't female, she wouldn't have PCOS. It has nothing to do with whether she is gay, straight or bi. And having PCOS does not make her a man.

Gender is a performance, so that makes sense to me.

What? My PCOS kid is straight, my gay kid is non PCOS, I have no idea what these comments about PCOS mean.

What? I don't understand this reply.

Someone used the 'is it trans or is it PCOS' in this thread. Someone used it in the drag thread too. It's very offensive. Having PCOS does not remove or call into question someone's femaleness. Being male, otoh, well...I mean, logic, isn't it? My dd has PCOS. She is clearly female. Nobody confuses her for a man, or for a tw.

My ex is an Indian novelist. He often bemoaned being pigeon-holed into post-colonialism because of his skin, when what he wrote did not engage with post-colonialism but with French and Australian literary experimentation. All the festival invites etc - can you be on this panel about race? All writers should be able to write about anything, and have their works judged on the text's own merits.

It's not new. The principles come from the 1950's. I agree all stories are a writer's to tell. A reader can critique how successfully a writer achieves the writer's own aims. They can have an opinion about whether or not a writer's background plays a role in the text's effectiveness and impact.

https://pen.org/report/booklash/ I was very glad to read this today. It's tangentially related to some of the issues discussed here regularly. Extract: Yet amid these necessary shifts, some readers, writers, and critics are pushing to draw new lines around what types of books, tropes, and narrative conventions should be seen as permissible and who has the legitimacy, authority, or “right” to write certain stories. At one extreme, some critics are calling for an identity-essentialist approach to literature, holding that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences.3 This approach is incompatible with the freedom to imagine that is essential to the creation of literature, and it denies readers the opportunity to experience stories through the eyes of writers offering varied and distinctive lenses. The article goes on to re-endorse Freedom to Read principles - very much worth reading and considering. It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority. Publishers, librarians, and booksellers do not need to endorse every idea or presentation they make available. It would conflict with the public interest for them to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated. It is contrary to the public interest for publishers or librarians to bar access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author. There is no place in our society for efforts to coerce the taste of others, to confine adults to the reading matter deemed suitable for adolescents, or to inhibit the efforts of writers to achieve artistic expression. It is not in the public interest to force a reader to accept the prejudgment of a label characterizing any expression or its author as subversive or dangerous. It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians, as guardians of the people’s freedom to read, to contest encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large; and by the government whenever it seeks to reduce or deny public access to public information. It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians to give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought and expression. By the exercise of this affirmative responsibility, they can demonstrate that the answer to a “bad” book is a good one, the answer to a “bad” idea is a good one.

OK, if we live in a world where people are calling Hitler 'German mustache man' in the service of 'history', I don't know what to say. It's so horrifyingly wrong that it makes me laugh nervously. OP, don't worry about being on a list. I google all sorts of things and if it's put me on a list somewhere, that list has no effect on my life I can observe.