I admit that I suffer easily from vicarious embarrassment, which is why I avoid a lot of breakfast TV and sometimes have to look away from live parliamentary broadcasts when Desmond Swain is speaking.
Ed Balls is in a league of his own. How do you possibly lampoon a man whose main driver for making a tit of himself ‘interviewing’ Professor Kathleen Stock, a philosopher, is not upsetting his radically avant garde adult son’s sensibilities back at home?
Yesterday on ‘Good Morning Britain’ (ITV), Ed decided that Stock was doing wrong-think, and talked over her continually. Not a great interviewing tactic, really.
He said to Stock,
‘Someone who has transitioned and wants to be a woman, I think it's fine to call them a woman. I don't know why you don't want to allow them to make that choice’
That’s not debating Stock. That’s a dismal attempt to mock a position Stock doesn’t even hold.
A very astute commentator known as ‘FlirtsWithRhinos’ writing on the popular parenting site Mumsnet, puts it this way:
‘I realise there's no point in answering EB on this thread, but as this line typifies one of the bad faith arguments that gets flung arount by TRAs a lot I think it's worth providing the counter anyway.
No, Ed. It's not that I don't want to allow "them" to make that choice.
It's that the choice they want to make for themselves forces a new definition of womanhood onto all women whether we want it for ourselves or not.
Because the only way to believe that male people can be called women is if one believes that a woman, which I also am, is a woman not because of her body, with all that entails socially and physically, but because of something in her mind.
And if society belives that, it believes that woman's rights and protections, and indeed women's experiences, needs and political voice, are not shaped by the needs and challenges of the female-bodied half of humanity but by those who feel they have a female mind.
As a female-bodied person, I look at the history of my sex's fight to escape from the legal, social, intellectual, political and cultural margins where male people kept us, and to be recognised as complete, equal and worthwhile humans in our own right. To understand and define ourselves rather than accept the definitions men placed upon us based on what they observed and assumed. To tell our own stories in our own voices, not simply be the characters in narratives written from the outside by men. And I am not prepared to go back to Womanhood being something men decide for us.
So it's not that I don't want to allow them to make a choice for themselves, it's that the choice they want to make for themselves is also a choice they are also making for me, and it is that which I cannot accept.’
Ed Balls also used the ridiculous technique of spouting, ‘lots of people would say that’s an extreme’, without any data to back up that lazy assertion. How many people, Ed? What’s the question?
Professor Kathleen Stock
I can’t think of anyone, ANYONE, in the UK (I can’t and won’t speak for North America) who thinks the way that Ed Balls is suggesting that ‘lots of’ people think, certainly not Stock. Certainly not me. He might know someone personally, but that’s his problem. The people I know in my life appreciate tolerance with their passions, fortunately.
Another Mumsnet poster, ‘WallaceinAnderland’, also swiftly and helpfully provided ‘an amateur transcript’ of the exchange, enabling those on the thread to revel in the full majesty of the debating skills Balls had learned reading PPE at Oxford.
This is what I’ll call the ‘penis excerpt’ in which Ed’s trendy-dad credentials slip as he attempts to toe the trembling Labour Party line while (probably not) keeping on the right side of Junior back home:
KS - it depends how you phrase the question. If you ask can a woman have a penis, most people say no.
EB - Yeah but I agree with that.
KS - Oh ok. Hmm <chuckles> Right. So obviously you are more extreme than many.
EB - I'm telling you. Yeah but I'm telling you it's complicated. That in your attempt to symphathise you end up extremely polarised.
KS - I know that you think it's complicated. I wrote a whole book about it, to go through every single argument and I assure you that I'm also prepared to go along with preferred pronouns, I'm prepared to immerse myself in the fiction that someone has changed sex but I don't think they actually have and I think we need words to describe the differences between males and females because they matter socially...
And there we have it. Ed Balls, former Secretary of State for Education, eviscerated easily by Stock (who really wiped the floor with him when he finally stopped talking over her) and women on Mumsnet, while he’s still telling himself ‘it’s complicated’.
Stick to Gangnam Style dad dancing, Ed. I don’t mind laughing at you for that - it’s the vicarious embarrassment you bring on that I resent.