I read The Second Sex twenty fucking years ago. It was written over 70 years ago.
Like, they keep acting like gender is performative is a new idea when it's absolutely old as living fuck at this point.
How long do we keep giving them to accept that this is clearly true and has value as a way to discuss a variety of subjects, from social expectations of what cisgender women are "supposed to look like" to why gender and biological sex are different things (on top of biological sex being a lot more vague than conservatives tend to think. protip: intersex people exist!)?
How long do they get to hide behind "It was a different world back then" when books written about this very subject come from that ancient fucking world they're always referencing for why they're such bigoted fucking shitheels.
They shouldn't get to hide behind "it was a different world back then" when a number of us who are older than this dipshit are familiar with these ideas already because these ideas existed before we were fucking born.
Maybe their stupid asses should have picked up and read a fucking book (that wasn't Mein Kampf) in seventy fucking years.
Anyway, it is sickening and ridiculous this far into the future this is still being discussed like its a controversial issue and not clearly fucking painfully obviously the reality of the situation.
Reactionaries and fascists usually seek to “return” to a mythologized version of the past that never truly existed. This is exactly what makes them so radical and dangerous.
What's crazy is we're talking about 1% of the population. All of this insanity over letting one out of a hundred people do something that harms nobody else. As if there's no other problems in the world.
Time, research, facts, priority, urgency... None of it means anything to them. They quote texts that are nearly 80 years old as if it's modern science while calling laws and programs programs that are 60 years old outdated, even though they're meant to hopefully level the playing field for people who were heavily abused for hundreds of years and now are only medium-abused.
Commenters keep talking about stopped clocks being right twice a day, but they're worse than that. These aren't stopped clocks, these are creepy old dudes jerking off in the corner and they happen to own a watch.
Someone asks them, "hey Steve wants to know what time it is," and they respond, "SHOW ME STEVE'S GENITALS! EW! Got anything younger?"
Hey, at least your conservatives aren't so dedicated to proving government doesn't work that they oust their own House speaker because he wouldn't shut down the government to prove government doesn't work.
Other than that, they're nearly as shitty. They're just not flat-out "we're breaking government to prove government is broken" yet. So far, they only seem to do that with the NHS. (I could be wrong, just looking from the outside, as a Yank)
Yeah, you're definitely wrong. The conservatives in the UK are every bit as bad as the USA. I appreciate it always feels worse when it's happening in the country you live in.
I don't know Rishi Sunak, but "a man is a man and a woman is a woman" seems like a tautology to me, so how it's "'sickening’ and ‘ridiculous’" escapes me, except as making yet another statement into a "dog whistle".
Of course he probably doesn't mean it this way, but taking the performative definitions and removing sex from the definition, then there is no actual thing to reference other than back to the word. There's no definition available - it becomes a qualia as far as I can tell. Actually, in some ways less than that - it becomes a bit of a "no true scotsman" argument, or a "what is canon in franchise" sort of thing. Because the performance of a man or woman is basically whatever each individual person says it is. It can convey nothing that isn't a stereotype and is likely harmful.
Anyway, the terms become meaningless - and in general anything we cared about there was to me actually based in the sex, not the gender anyway.