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blahflowersFirstly, I have to say that I think the premise of Hecklers, someone says something controversial, four people argue with them, is rather dumb. It’s like admitting that people don’t really care about the throwing around of ideas and the structured back-and-forth of proper debate which actually allows people to both develop and explain an argument, while also forcing them to think on their feet when the audience gets to take part. The other problem is that, because the audience is not allowed to either heckle or question any of the participants directly, it renders them unable to take part.
The audience was mainly comprised of transpeople and their allies. There was a row of people, around ten to a dozen, who seemed to be there to support Julie Bindel but the vast majority of those present were there to disagree with what Julie said. An unscientific straw poll afterwards was about ‘eighty-twenty’ against the proposition.
What follows are my notes. Not being used to taking notes and not knowing shorthand I restricted myself mainly to just getting the main parts of Julie’s arguments. The structure of the show was that there would be three sections, Julie would be given two minutes to speak uninterrupted, after which she would have to stop every time one of the panellists wanted to say something. In effect this meant Julie spent two minutes talking, five minutes arguing with the panel and then the panel would spend five minutes arguing with the chair Evan Davis as he tried to get them to agree to some minor point that Julie made. I wasn’t quick enough to be able to get their interruptions down so left them out but on the whole you can guess what they would object to. The panel were Peter Tatchell, Professor Stephen Whittle, Michelle Bridgman and Kevan Wylie. In most cases I’m paraphrasing what was said but I don’t believe I’m misrepresenting what was said.
Part One.
Julie starts off by announcing that the title of her thesis is that ‘Sex change surgery should not be available’. This is quite different to what was printed on the flyers but no-one followed this up so I don’t know whether the BBC made a mistake or Julie is deliberately moving the goalposts. Julie says she believes this because she believes in equal rights. She compares sex-change surgery to the electroshock therapies used to ‘cure’ gays in the last century.
‘Transsexuality’ (you could almost hear the air quotes) is caused by the strength of the stereotypes of male and female in our society.
Professionals in the transgender movement are gender conservatives, things that would be rejected by modern women are embraced by transsexuals (when she comes close to talking about transpeople in the specific rather than abstract she is talking about male-to-female transsexuals. Despite sharing a stage with a transman she doesn’t mention them at all). There are many people that are railroaded into sex-change surgery, when really they should be given talking therapies until they realise they were mistaken in wanting to change sex.
Julie says she is someone who has changed their gender role and not their body, transsexuals reinforce gender roles, gender is used by men to oppress women.
Part Two.
The sex change industry has ‘a veneer of credibility’. There is no medical/physical diagnosis for gender dysphoria, only self-diagnosis, which would not be accepted as valid in any other situation.
There are an increasing number of people regretting sex-change surgery.
Most vocal transsexuals are not representative of the disenfranchised voices of the unhappy (Stephen Whittle: The David Batty’s of the Guardian would give the unsatisfied a voice).
Transsexuality comes out of deeply misogynistic psychiatry, it’s not a condition.
Part Three.
Julie compares transsexualism to anorexia, if we give transsexuals what they want, why shouldn’t we give anorexic’s liposuction?
We have ‘a crazy situation’ where someone just has to say they are a woman to be accepted as one (this went down well in the room, as you can guess).
Julie mentions without specifics the case of the transwoman that applied for the job in the rape counselling centre (I don’t have the details to hand but I think this came up in one of her earlier Guardian columns and was explained as not being as black-and-white as she presented, the transwoman had been sexually assaulted herself and was looking to help other women).
Women aren’t genetically programmed to wear dresses and high heels.
All gender reassignment surgery should be banned.
(A few minutes later) The industry should be questioned, I’m not arguing for a ban. (Michelle Bridgman: You’re perpetuating the stereotypes you are so hard on)
Sum Up.
Julie brings up the 19th century gays argument again (I must admit, I don’t remember what this actually means).
Transsexualism adds to and maintains the lower status of women in society.
Then it was over to the audience for their opinions. Most of them happened to be transwomen who were either pre or post, who talked about passing or not, about whether they were happy or not, one woman who said she’d had the surgery in 1979 said “If I’d been genitally mutilated, don’t you think I’d have noticed by now?”. They disagreed with varying degrees of vehemence to Julie’s proposition with the exception of Claudia Maclean, who spoke briefly about her plight, which has been mentioned recently by Julie and David Batty in the Guardian.
When asked, Julie says she knows personally one transsexual woman who was happy for the first year post-transition, then unhappy after that. Whether she means Claudia or not is not made clear.
The Last Word.
Julie’s argument is with the industry and diagnosis which, until now, has only been questioned by homophobes and transphobes.
“I am a voice in the winderness”.
In my opinion it was useful only in that I found out exactly WHY Bindel has been slamming transsexuals for the last couple of years while doing so much to try and help women-born-women. The obvious problem is that she clearly believes she's not transphobic because she's got what she thinks are valid reasons not to like the trans community, my impression is that she would believe that someone is only phobic if they haven't thought about why they hate. The theorybitches amongst you will be able to help me with whether the type of things she says above are typical or not of feminists of her era.
This is probably where the listen again feature will be for this show after it is initially broadcast on the 1st of August. I'll be listening to hear whether it's edited to try and make it sound like Julie won any argument, she did not and I'm saying that as what I believe to be the truth, regardless of the fact that I disagree with her. She was laughed at for some of her more outrageous statements and the vote on the motion at the end was, as I said before, overwhelmingly against her proposal, whichever one it was that she was proposing.
Now all we can do is wait for the show. It was nice to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
slightlyfoxed and thornbushrosy, even if I get to sneer at them for not having the mental fortitude to withstand a FULL HOUR OF BINDEL!
The audience was mainly comprised of transpeople and their allies. There was a row of people, around ten to a dozen, who seemed to be there to support Julie Bindel but the vast majority of those present were there to disagree with what Julie said. An unscientific straw poll afterwards was about ‘eighty-twenty’ against the proposition.
What follows are my notes. Not being used to taking notes and not knowing shorthand I restricted myself mainly to just getting the main parts of Julie’s arguments. The structure of the show was that there would be three sections, Julie would be given two minutes to speak uninterrupted, after which she would have to stop every time one of the panellists wanted to say something. In effect this meant Julie spent two minutes talking, five minutes arguing with the panel and then the panel would spend five minutes arguing with the chair Evan Davis as he tried to get them to agree to some minor point that Julie made. I wasn’t quick enough to be able to get their interruptions down so left them out but on the whole you can guess what they would object to. The panel were Peter Tatchell, Professor Stephen Whittle, Michelle Bridgman and Kevan Wylie. In most cases I’m paraphrasing what was said but I don’t believe I’m misrepresenting what was said.
Part One.
Julie starts off by announcing that the title of her thesis is that ‘Sex change surgery should not be available’. This is quite different to what was printed on the flyers but no-one followed this up so I don’t know whether the BBC made a mistake or Julie is deliberately moving the goalposts. Julie says she believes this because she believes in equal rights. She compares sex-change surgery to the electroshock therapies used to ‘cure’ gays in the last century.
‘Transsexuality’ (you could almost hear the air quotes) is caused by the strength of the stereotypes of male and female in our society.
Professionals in the transgender movement are gender conservatives, things that would be rejected by modern women are embraced by transsexuals (when she comes close to talking about transpeople in the specific rather than abstract she is talking about male-to-female transsexuals. Despite sharing a stage with a transman she doesn’t mention them at all). There are many people that are railroaded into sex-change surgery, when really they should be given talking therapies until they realise they were mistaken in wanting to change sex.
Julie says she is someone who has changed their gender role and not their body, transsexuals reinforce gender roles, gender is used by men to oppress women.
Part Two.
The sex change industry has ‘a veneer of credibility’. There is no medical/physical diagnosis for gender dysphoria, only self-diagnosis, which would not be accepted as valid in any other situation.
There are an increasing number of people regretting sex-change surgery.
Most vocal transsexuals are not representative of the disenfranchised voices of the unhappy (Stephen Whittle: The David Batty’s of the Guardian would give the unsatisfied a voice).
Transsexuality comes out of deeply misogynistic psychiatry, it’s not a condition.
Part Three.
Julie compares transsexualism to anorexia, if we give transsexuals what they want, why shouldn’t we give anorexic’s liposuction?
We have ‘a crazy situation’ where someone just has to say they are a woman to be accepted as one (this went down well in the room, as you can guess).
Julie mentions without specifics the case of the transwoman that applied for the job in the rape counselling centre (I don’t have the details to hand but I think this came up in one of her earlier Guardian columns and was explained as not being as black-and-white as she presented, the transwoman had been sexually assaulted herself and was looking to help other women).
Women aren’t genetically programmed to wear dresses and high heels.
All gender reassignment surgery should be banned.
(A few minutes later) The industry should be questioned, I’m not arguing for a ban. (Michelle Bridgman: You’re perpetuating the stereotypes you are so hard on)
Sum Up.
Julie brings up the 19th century gays argument again (I must admit, I don’t remember what this actually means).
Transsexualism adds to and maintains the lower status of women in society.
Then it was over to the audience for their opinions. Most of them happened to be transwomen who were either pre or post, who talked about passing or not, about whether they were happy or not, one woman who said she’d had the surgery in 1979 said “If I’d been genitally mutilated, don’t you think I’d have noticed by now?”. They disagreed with varying degrees of vehemence to Julie’s proposition with the exception of Claudia Maclean, who spoke briefly about her plight, which has been mentioned recently by Julie and David Batty in the Guardian.
When asked, Julie says she knows personally one transsexual woman who was happy for the first year post-transition, then unhappy after that. Whether she means Claudia or not is not made clear.
The Last Word.
Julie’s argument is with the industry and diagnosis which, until now, has only been questioned by homophobes and transphobes.
“I am a voice in the winderness”.
In my opinion it was useful only in that I found out exactly WHY Bindel has been slamming transsexuals for the last couple of years while doing so much to try and help women-born-women. The obvious problem is that she clearly believes she's not transphobic because she's got what she thinks are valid reasons not to like the trans community, my impression is that she would believe that someone is only phobic if they haven't thought about why they hate. The theorybitches amongst you will be able to help me with whether the type of things she says above are typical or not of feminists of her era.
This is probably where the listen again feature will be for this show after it is initially broadcast on the 1st of August. I'll be listening to hear whether it's edited to try and make it sound like Julie won any argument, she did not and I'm saying that as what I believe to be the truth, regardless of the fact that I disagree with her. She was laughed at for some of her more outrageous statements and the vote on the motion at the end was, as I said before, overwhelmingly against her proposal, whichever one it was that she was proposing.
Now all we can do is wait for the show. It was nice to see
slightlyfoxed and thornbushrosy, even if I get to sneer at them for not having the mental fortitude to withstand a FULL HOUR OF BINDEL!
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Date: 2007-07-20 03:41 am (UTC)I'm a yank, so can you clarify what is her age/era?
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Date: 2007-07-21 07:45 pm (UTC)