Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

The UK also has a problem with the right wing trying to import American "culture wars" issues for their own benefit, and it has nothing to do with Gaza — specifically, they bring in the US talking points about trans issues, using "woke" as the next step on the euphemism escalator now that "politically correct" has worn off, blaming millennials for everything, and a conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities (despite almost all of the UK being within 15 minutes of all the important things already, including the car-focused bits like Milton Keynes and small Welsh hamlets like Abermad).

Still, at least it means the Tory party completely forgot about wanting to bring back the hunting of foxes on horseback.

View on HN

> they bring in the US talking points about trans issues,

The Cass report is certainly not a "US talking point".

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...

These all seem like really bad examples, panic over trans people has some very real, very British sources and 15 minute cities (and related concepts like LTNs and the ULEZ) is not something regularly discussed in the US.

Much better examples are US Southwest/Californian concerns around water scarcity being imported to places where water is not scarce, or similar concerns around emissions from electricity generation being imported to places that use high amounts of renewables/nuclear energy. Another example is civilian disarmament fear mongering switching from being about cheap handguns to "assault weapons" after DC v Heller.

The reaction to George Floyd in UK was quite strange, with "don't shoot" protests and "defund the police", when the UK police is not even armed and gets paid like half of their American counterparts.

That's not a bad one, although issues of police brutality and overfunding definitely aren't unique to the US

Police regularly having tanks and other epic equipment from war is definitely unique to democracies.

That's true, autocracies usually just deploy the military domestically!

Although the pushback against trans activist policy has come mostly from the right in the US (with some notable exceptions - Kara Dansky of Women's Declaration International, for example), it's a different story in the UK.

Around the mid-2010s, two events occurred in close succession: the Conservative government of the time proposed a policy of gender self-identification, and trans-identifying male prisoner Karen White was charged with sexually assaulting female prisoners while he was incarcerated in a women's prison. He was later convicted and it was uncovered that he'd been sent to the women's prison due to his "female" identity, despite having previous convictions of sexually assaulting and raping women.

The reaction from women was immense, organised on Mumsnet and other forums, mostly by left-wing feminists. After a lot of protest and publicity, the Tories dropped this policy. It was only later on they changed tack with policy proposals that shifted the balance away from trans activism, mostly to draw a line between them and Labour.

Cis women who rape women and cis men who rape men have always gone to prisons aligned with their gender identity. The issue with the normalization of rape in prison is unrelated, and should be solved without throwing trans people under the bus

The UK prisons are a total clownshow atm, recently there was a string of female prison guards that were jailed for having sex with (male) prisoners, filming it, and of course smuggling drugs, etc. Also Prisons have run out of space so many offenders were let out early.

- https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/02/inmate-filmed-sex-wandsworth-...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-67955865

Jesus, sounds like it's just the UK prisons trying to project their awful "justice" system on their own victims. I give the American justice system a lot of shit based on my personal experience with it, but it sounds like police in general are struggling with maintaining their representation of justice in the modern era, especially with how publicized it can get when they fail to deliver.

All government funded systems in the UK have spent the last 14 years struggling, because the UK government of that era tried to get over the recession caused by the global financial crisis in the late 00s by cutting absolutely everything they could possibly cut.

This ideological argument was attempted back then too, but it's rejected by most people, who see the reality of the situation: men being locked up in women's prisons.

It should be no surprise to anyone that such a policy is very unpopular. Prisons are separated by sex for good reason.

Trying to pretend that some of these male criminals are women just because they said they are is not a particularly convincing argument.

Pretty interesting how being anti-prison rape is considered an ideological argument. But hats off to the real winners of this situation: the bisexual rapists who get to rape no matter what ideology their captors have, I guess.

This might seem clever, but it ignores human biology and sociology.

Sociology of the society as a whole perhaps, but the first three letters of LGBT are not magically immune and the fourth letter is not magically capable.

And physiologically, someone whose outie was surgically modified into an innie is going to have just as many difficulties topping as a natural born woman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com