An actual still from the latest Oxfam ad campaign

Cannot wait for the next chugger to sideways leap into my path 

It has a real “are we the baddies” vibe

When you’re doing nazi/soviet style posters demonising your political opponents, it’s a fair bet that you have veered from the path of righteousness

I'll show them the photo and ask what they think. Most young guys will have no problem with the portrayal of the middle aged jkesque woman but the racist stereotype men are hard to defend even on psycho tra grounds.

Ah right so you'll do nothing but abuse a low level worker 

Brave 

It's a poorly thought out and probably racist picture tbf tbf 

Not sure how it got through the various layers of approval it would need 

Not sure how it got through the various layers of approval it would need 

ideology blinds people into doing bad things ‘for the right reasons’

LGBTQI+ people around the world are preyed on by hate groups online and offline. The ad, which does seem to exist tbf, seems exactly correct to me.

heh @ all the rof tories sore about a charity that does ceaseless good work, saves lives and makes them rightly feel pitiful about doing nothing themselves but clawing their meagre pile of pennies to their chest and shouting MINE! ALL MINE!

they don’t have a lane, they are an organisation with the same right of comment on anything as any other organisation, particularly one powered by donations from the millions of people who know what good work they do

You can just imagine exactly the type  of weird fecker that dreams up these ridiculous campaigns for these ghastly organisations.

Marshall Hall06 Jun 23 07:27

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Oxfam is institutionally a very sick entity, and has been for a long time.

You just know if Marshall's against something, its probably something well worth supporting    

Lol. It didn't even occur to me what was wrong with this picture. Some people will pretend to find offence in anything if it means furthering their Right-wing agenda. 

Basically, wot Laz said at 08.01. 

Pathetic.

It's poor by Oxfam, although their casual attitude to sexual abuse of women and children over many years is more concerning than a slightly offensive cartoon.

"slightly" offensive?

if you took out the middle character would you still think it was only slightly offensive? it's an international development charity ...

snowfoxberry they didn't deliberately plan to rape children as part of a PR move so not sure they're comparable

Certainly not comparable incidents Threep, which is definitely not what I said. That story has an impact on whether or not I would support them as a charity. Whereas this cartoon, despite my view that is a bit offensive, probably would not change my attitude to the charity as a whole.

in the context of the video it’s not bad at all

it’s meant to depict “preyed on by hate groups online and offline”

i assumed the one with the red tie was a republican

not in my view clive

it looks dodgy in the still but when you see the art style used throughout the video it’s clearly not signifying “asian” (all the human characters are different colours of the rainbow)

Brown isn't a colour of the rainbow afaik.  The particular shade of yellow is not rainbow yellow but maybe more the shade of yellow you might pick if you wanted to draw a guy from East Asia.  Rainbow yellow is the Simpsons. 

I actually agree the yellow bloke in the red tie is probably supposed to be a republican. The hair is very Nixon. No idea who/what the other bloke is supposed to be.  Obviously JKR in the middle is pretty sh1tty.

Point is it is absolutely appalling 'othering' of the opposite side. 

I don’t disagree Donny, but have you seen how ‘the other side’ portray trans people and their allies?

Very Fine People on both sides…

i don’t think the one in the middle looks particularly like jkr - if she didn’t have the badge i think it would have been seen as “generic people who attack lgbt+ minorities”

i do find it darkly ironic that that bit that’s gotten them into trouble is meant to represent lgbt+ people getting attacked by online hate groups, and as soon as those groups turn their eye on oxfam they’re immediately like “oh wow this is unpleasant, isn’t it? let’s immediately back down and delete everything”

imagine being an lgbt+ person

Lol @ the one in the middle is JKR. If you think that looks like JKR then you're the one who hates her.

Chill - I am not sure 'oh well at least they took it down, unlike those online hate groups' is a very good defence. Online hate groups shouldn't really be the target comparator for a major international aid charity. 

you’re misunderstanding me donny - i don’t think they should have taken it down, they should have stood behind it

the ad (correctly) identifies that lgbt+ people are the targets of hate and attacks online from those labelling themselves “terfs” - that’s the point of that bit of the ad

it seems counterproductive to delete it now that it’s been shared by a bunch of anti-trans twitter groups and oxfam itself has become the target of those attacks

either they stand with lgbt+ people or they don’t, they can’t have it both ways

”we know you’re the subject of bigoted hate online, but if we get any of it we’d like it to go away please” isn’t particularly honourable 

but ofc the whole thing is just rainbow capitalism anyway so i’m not particularly surprised

fwiw i wouldn’t have bothered putting the badge on the woman, it doesn’t seem necessary to make the point

but once they’ve done it it seems pointless to back down once all the haters come out of the woodwork

does anybody actually label themselves as a terf?  or is it just a label applied to them by people who want to shut down their point of view.

they used to diceman (i think jkr even tweeted out “merry terf-mas” to her supporters once years ago) but most of them have given up pretending to be feminists now and call themselves “gender critical”

Subscribing to ultra-trans dogma doesn't respect women's rights, so the last three words are incompatible with the preceding 4 words. However they have played the "people are nasty so we get what we want" card as is usual in these circumstances. 

Oxford Famine Relief should stay away from this type of BS and I expect it is contrary to their charitable purposes. 

It’s straight out of the Corbyn book of art - evil looking (((bankers))). Now we have evil looking (((authors))).

they know what fate awaits them come the glorious day

Fair play to Chill for just doubling down on being a baddie

eh? either you think terfs abuse trans people online or you don’t 

clearly i land on one side of that line, dunno why i’d need to “double down”

i don’t think the woman in the middle looks anything like jkr tbf

Chill - some terms abuse trans people online but not all do.
Would you be happy for the opposite ad to have a caricature of an evil trans person on the basis that “trans people abuse women online” (because some do)?

All stuff like this does is drive the wedge between the two sides in deeper and deeper. Is there any wish at all to engage with people of the other viewpoint or is it OK now for a charity just to demonise people who disagree with their viewpoint?

P.S. Fully echo Rob’s comment, “Kudos to Davos for being willing to call out an org on his side of the debate.”

Nice to see someone who isn’t being tribal to the point of being blinkered.

Chill's idea of "darkly ironic" is... well... ironic.

Not particularly darkly so, as he's just an internet muppet.

well we’ve done this before jim but imo they’re not equivalent

being trans is an identity, being a terf is a political position that is at best hostile and at worst hateful to trans people

if the woman in the middle had a button saying “woman” i’d agree with you, but it’s specifically calling out terfs

Badly advised, badly implemented, badly rowed back from and in bad taste* 

Happy to take kudos and also kudos to those giving kudos to me despite previous

 

*Or offensive I just wanted to finish with another bad 

the current gender critical movement aren’t even terfs any more i dunno why they’d get so angry over it

Very few people call themselves terfs. It was coined by trans advocates and is widely considered an insult. Yes some women have “reclaimed” its use and described themselves as such but, as you say, most see themselves as GC. Terf is almost exclusively now used as an insult by trans protesters.

It is also, as has repeatedly been said, inaccurate. The vast majority of people called terfs are not trans exclusionary at all, they are fine with pre-op transmen in their spaces. They are against sharing some spaces and services with biological males.

Don’t know why I bother saying this, it’s all been done before and you just stick your fingers in your ears and go “la La La”.

Very few people call themselves terfs. It was coined by trans advocates and is widely considered an insult. Yes some women have “reclaimed” its use and described themselves as such but, as you say, most see themselves as GC. Terf is almost exclusively now used as an insult by trans protesters.

jim we’ve been doing this back and forth for years you can’t think this is in any way true

What exactly is untrue?

It was coined by a trans ally.

Very few people self-define as terf but rather as GC (you said as much yourself)

It is mainly used by trans allies at protests as a form of insult.

Which of these are you disputing?

(heh for hotnow)

thats nonsense

i’ve explained this at least half a dozen times on these threads

whatever - give me a few minutes (am having dinner) and will try to recap again

Don’t bother Chill. The above, as far as I am aware, are all facts. If I am wrong on any of those I’m happy for you to provide counter facts but please don’t “explain” it to me. Your explanations are significantly lacking in balance, facts and (as last night) simple understanding of English words such as “motivation”.

Enjoy your meal - eet smakelijk!

ok well i’ll do it anyway for posterity

trans exclusionary radical feminists (i’ll use “terfs” for this post but i’m specifically referring to the historic thread of feminism, not the more recent gender critical advocates, and ofc not using it as a slur) are an actual movement that dates back to the 1970s/1980s with janice raymond and - for reasons i’ll go into below - are virulently anti-trans (specifically anti-transwomen)

when what are now called “gender critical” believers started becoming prominent in the mid-2010s (and i’ve been through this before but as encouraged and promoted by the far-right) they were associated with and associated themselves with “terfs” - because on the one hand their arguments were essentially the same as the original terfs (ie we need to kick trans women out of all these spaces we’ve decided are suddenly “single sex”) and on the other the gender critical believers wanted to position themselves within a feminist framework and terfs were the only place to go (because the vast vast majority of feminists were and are trans-positive)

the problem became that most of these new “terfs” had no history or interest in feminism or feminist theory - they were just uncomfortable with trans people - and didn’t appreciate that trans exclusionary radical feminism had grown out of radical feminism, which is…

 

i mean to be honest i’d prefer a radfem to explain it properly, but it’s probably the most extreme end of feminist thought (“man-hating” is a term used often when describing it) - it’s anti-sex work and anti-porn, many of its proponents are political lesbians (ie they’re lesbian not because they’re necessarily attracted to women but because they believe lesbianism is the only moral way to combat the patriarchy) - andrea dworkin infamously believed “all heterosexual sex is rape” (which tbf she didn’t specifically say but may have heavily implied if you read it in context)

anyway, that’s the philosophical background to why some radfems didn’t believe trans women were really women and why a minority of them became terfs (to be clear, the majority of radfems were and are trans-inclusive, they’re not all terfs)

as the new terfs became more prominent, this belief system didn’t really sit well with them (and they were getting lots of abuse online for being “terfs”, who - again - are virulently anti-trans). it obviously also didn’t sit well with matt walsh, ted cruz, ron desantis, and the far-right overseers who wanted to use the movement to eradicate trans people but not have all women be lesbians

so they shifted to “gender critical” as a name

but this is why i say they’ve divorced themselves from feminism - you have to understand that “gender critical” believers have no philosophical ideology other than a distaste for being around trans people (in fact they reject all attempts to create or formalise a philosophy beyond a vague assertion of “women’s rights”, which is why maya forstater and posie parker no longer call themselves feminists)

Umm that’s all very interesting but “terf” is first recorded as being used in 2008 by Viv Smythe which rather blows everything above out of the water.

it was in use before that buddy, as viv smythe herself explains

(a lot of early feminist chat was zines and then usenet)

here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/29/im-credited-with-having-coined-the-acronym-terf-heres-how-it-happened

Due to a short series of blogposts from 2008, I have retrospectively been credited as the coiner of the acronym “Terf” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). I suspect I’m merely the first person who wrote it on a website that still exists – I wonder how many Elizabethans already used words now attributed to Shakespeare long before he (or the Jacobean actors whose annotated Folio transcripts are the earliest extant versions) incorporated them in a play?

“being trans is an identity, being a terf is a political position”

Not wanting to share a changing room with a man is not a political position. Not wanting to be told that a man in a dress is a woman because that’s how they feel is not a political position. I understand that trans people exist, it must be shit to feel as if you are in the wrong body but their freedoms do not trump womens’, however much you men want to tell us they do, so kindly FVCK THE FVCK OFF. 

Not wanting to share a changing room with a man is not a political position. Not wanting to be told that a man in a dress is a woman because that’s how they feel is not a political position

how do you mean dusty? - of course it is

who we share changing rooms with, or how we address and deal with other people in society is the definition of a political position

it’s not an “identity”, it’s politics

(also i believe trans women’s freedoms and cis women’s freedoms are aligned - because fvck the patriarchy- but that’s also a political position)

Forcing a biological woman to share a prison cell with a biological man is also a political position.

 

 

I’m not a cis woman, I’m a woman. I’m not a fooking subset of the thing I actually am.  

are you a straight woman dusty?

Forcing a biological woman to share a prison cell with a biological man is also a political position

sure - where we place prisoners is also the definition of a political position

Sexuality has nothing to do with me being a woman. Want to ask a lesbian how they feel about this, maybe you think they should accept that some women have penises…

I just cannot accept that Chill doesn't get off on the attention - his commentary is becoming increasingly dumbheaded and nonsensical, even by his standards...

Want to ask a lesbian how they feel about this, maybe you think they should accept that some women have penises…

um i have and ofc they don’t have to sleep with anyone they don’t want to for any reason

but yes some women have penises

some men have vaginas

this isn’t that big a deal tbh

+100 for everything Stardust said. Terf is misogynist slur. Cis can also get in the bin. Trying to tell women they have to re-categorise into something else is bullshit.

lots of different ways to define it dusty (i said that above)

mackinnon will say it’s a political group - women are that class of people who are politically subordinated under men

butler will say it’s a socially constructed group (but she thinks “sex” is socially constructed and i dunno if many people would agree with that)

i think it’s a social category that society assigns people to to enable the patriarchy to function (which is sort of a halfway between both ideas and where most mainstream feminists land as far as i can tell)

what do you define it as?

Woman saying she doesn't want to share a changing room with biologically male people - oh, just ignore the silly bint, she's just being "political".

Trans woman saying she doesn't want to share a changing room with biologically male people - how very dare you object, you evil genocidally inclined cis woman, it is her identity!!!