Oops, I did it again…….

Downstream of the dumpster fire that’s blown up around my support for J K Rowling’s tweet in support of Maya Forstater, I have once again been banned from Twitter, and this time it looks serious. (For those not in the know, google those two names together and you should come away up to speed). In essence, I gave notice that I would not tolerate anybody using the slur TERF on my timeline, and that anyone who insisted would be blocked. Cue a long line of angry Trans Activist types showing up to hit me with said slur in a variety of formats from lengthy and sometimes even coherent rant to FULL CAPS ON REPEAT SINGLE WORD TERF TERF TERF; as you can see, this particular brand of extremism is quite a broad church.

My response to these insults was pretty much what you’d expect from a grizzled Brit in no mood for bullshit – to hand out a quick jab-punch insult in response (usually that blunt Anglo-Saxon dismissal “cunt”) and block as I had promised.

A couple of days ago, some among my new Die-Cis-Scum admirers attempted to get me banned by reporting these retaliatory tweets. They failed. Twitter found no fault.

Today, the self-same tweets were reported again, this time resulting in a ban. I have appealed this, on the grounds of inconsistency if nothing else, and we’ll see where we go from here.

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At this point, let me insert a word on my actual stance regarding trans people, since the amount of bullshit proliferating about my views out there in cyberspace is really quite remarkable.

So:

I hold these truths to be self-evident – trans people are people, and thus deserving of the same human rights and protections as any other people. They should not be stigmatised, bullied, brutalised or otherwise excluded from the normal run of society, because no-one should be. Protection and provision for trans people to prevent such bigotry is a duty upon us all in any civilised society. Show me a petition to that effect, I’ll be right there with a pen. Show me a march (reasonably locally) and I’ll go on it.

However.

I also hold these truths to be self-evident – facts are stubborn things; human sex is binary, you are either born a man or a woman, and neither sex can change into the other. The much vaunted phrase “Trans women are women” or “trans men are men” is a semantic nonsense; it is quite simply objectively untrue. It’s ideological gibberish on a level with Orwell’s War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. And to note this fact is not transphobic.

It would, I think, be blatantly unpleasant to walk up to a trans woman apropos of nothing and say to them “Hey, you’re not a woman, you know, you’re a man.” – much as it would be to go up to someone short and say “Wow, you’re not very tall are you!” – but such rudeness does not, in either case, erase that person. It is rude, but it is not phobic, of trans women or short people. To claim otherwise is hysteria.

And to reach a place where refusing to parrot the phrase “trans women are women”, refusing to deny the facts of biology, is seen as transphobic and hateful – that is the height of Orwellian insanity.

For those of you who’ve come here uninformed about the trans debate, you might think that there things could rest, with a recognition that a bit of humane tolerance, live-and-let-live, and the avoidance of rudeness would be enough. But unfortunately, that’s not the place we have reached.

The place we have reached, instead, looks like this:

a female waxing salon gets sued by a trans woman demanding the workers there wax “her” balls and getting upset when they refuse;

a Rape Crisis centre is defunded and vilified for denying access to male bodies

a male rapist “identifies as a woman” and is relocated to a woman’s prison where he then proceeds to sexually assault other inmates;

a woman is considered bigoted and transphobic for demanding that her hospital examination be carried out by a female nurse, not a trans woman;

the protected status of women’s spaces in general – changing rooms, toilets, battered woman shelters – stands in danger of being annulled to allow in anyone who “identifies as a woman”;

trans women are able to enter women’s sporting events and crucify even the finest female athletes because male physiology gives them a massive unearned advantage;

Eve Ensler’s famous and fabulous The Vagina Monologues must be renamed The [Blank] Monologues in order to be “inclusive” – people without vaginas may be upset.

lesbians are told that if they won’t fuck someone with a prick and balls, they are transphobic because the prick in question belongs to a trans woman and is therefore a “lady dick.”

This isn’t a liberation struggle. It isn’t a human rights campaign. This is a supremacism. A bid to erase women as a class, a new misogyny in the making.

Don’t believe that shit? Go google.

Not that I’d blame you if you don’t believe it. It took me quite a while to find this stuff out myself because, like most uninvolved men, I was on the periphery of the issue and never gave it much thought. When the issue of gender neutral toilets and changing rooms came up, I shrugged and thought “Sure, why not; who gives a shit?”

Then I started listening to women.

And it turns out quite a lot of them do give a shit.

It turns out the stats prove that the vast majority of sexual assaults in changing rooms take place in unisex facilities; it turns out that even in our brave new inclusive society, women and girls remain at risk from male predators pretty much everywhere and if you eliminate female-only safe spaces, women get hurt.

So that’s where I stand. Against women getting hurt. In favour of facts. (But also, always, adamantly, for the human rights of trans people along with everybody else.)

And on that last point, it would be utterly wrong to lump all trans people in with the headbangers currently purveying this insanity. There are plenty of trans women and men who are just as horrified by the turn events have taken as anyone else. And lots of them are out there shouting the odds about it (and in turn – I kid you not – getting vilified as transphobic). If you’re on Twitter, they’re well worth following so look them up – here are a couple from my own follow list:

@DebbieHayton

@FionneOrlander

And for more on the nasty squeeze women now find themselves in, it’s also worth following these:

@Womans_Place_UK

@fairplaywomen

@ForwomenScot

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Meantime, I’m going to sit out my time here in the cooler while the Twitter appeals team deal with my ban, and hope they haven’t been infiltrated by this same barking insanity.

Because if they have, then I’m done with the platform.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been fun. I’ve learnt a lot, expanded my horizons, met a shitload of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, made some new friends, got back in contact with some old ones, generally felt more connected to the pulse of the outside world, and maybe even helped a couple of my IPs on towards greater things. Twitter has been great.

But if the price for that is to let people come and insult me and not insult them back because >bullshit woke ideologue reasons<; if the price is to deny material reality and line up to chant War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery with the rest of the ideologically sound – well, you know me.

Fuck. That. Noise.

And watch this space…….

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UPDATE 15/01/20

Twitter responded:

I’ve gone back to them iterating the reasons why this is bullshit – I have at no point threatened or promoted violence; the ban is for a tweet already cleared as meriting no action by their complaints team; out of 10,000 odd tweets over 8 years, barely a couple of dozen even mention trans issues – in other words about 0.3% of my output – and all of those in the last month since I came under attack. Primary purpose, my arse.

But I’m not hopeful. This is not rational dispute, this is religious hysteria. Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we’re in Spanish Inquisition territory all over again.

Didn’t expect that. But then I guess nobody ever does 🙂