#graham glinner

[thingstrumperssay]

The person who has the OF is a trans woman.

She did not get bottom surgery.

"My wife and kids left me because of my transphobia" Glinner, who will talk at anti-trans meetings, watches trans porn.

I wonder if he'll be invited to Posie Parker's next transphobe gathering?

At least this is a lot better than what they usually turn out to be- pedophiles. Plus he's supporting sex workers! (I mean, he could still be a pedophile, but we don't know that for sure yet. I don't, anyway.)

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Graham Linehan claiming he sold out all 10,000 copies of his book when every new source says he sold less than 400 total is actually a great representation of the average gender critical's relationship to the truth

[bathtaker]

haus of decline

[itsawritblr]

J.K. Rowling has been proven right!

"The Cass Review is a damning indictment of what the NHS has been doing to children.

"Dr Hilary Cass has submitted her final report and recommendations to NHS England in her role as Chair of the Independent Review of gender identity services for children and young people.

"Hilary Cass’s report demolishes the entire basis for the current model of treating gender-distressed children. Its publication is a shameful day for NHS England, which for too long gave vulnerable children harmful treatments for which there was no evidence base. It’s now clear to all that this was quack medicine from the start. 

"Dr Cass delivers stinging criticisms of NHS gender clinics, both adult and child, and her description of the Gender Identity Development Service is absolutely damning. It is disgraceful that GIDS, alongside the adult clinics, did not cooperate with her attempt to survey its practice, or to carry out a high-quality, long-term follow-up study on the treatment of children as part of the review, which would have been a global first."

You can read the entire review here. (pdf)

"Glinner" is Graham Linehan, a writer, screenwriter, and comedian who's been fighting against transitioning minors for years, losing friends, his job, and his agent along the way. But he's kept on fighting.

,

;

.

.

The tide has turned in the UK and in Europe. When will American media finally begin reporting on the closing of "gender clinics" and the bans on puberty blockers for children? I figure nothing will happen here in the U.S. until the lawsuits start flooding in. It's already begun. And with proof like the Cass Review and the WPATH files, it's going to be very, very difficult for clinics, doctors, and therapists to continue lying about how transitioning does no permanent and irreversible physical and psychological harm.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: The Most Divorced Time of year

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: today we continue our quessst to rehabilitate glinner Rowling: i will not ressst until he isss reintegrated into ssociety Rowling: and not ssleeping on my couch anymore

Rowling: cuz you know Rowling: that man isss Rowling: i mean ssure i hate transs people too Rowling: but i have other interesstsss assss well Rowling: Rowling: i'll let you know asss sssoon asss i think of sssome

Rowling: i do have other interesstsss outsside of transsphobia Rowling: like Rowling: for example Rowling: i like hating on autissstic people too Rowling: i mean, let's be frank Rowling: they've had it too good for too long

Rowling: and, you know, dissabled people Rowling: and the goblinsss Rowling: in fact actually i'm pretty versssatile Rowling: i'm almossst as well-rounded as hp lovecraft if you think about it

Graham Lineham: jk did you know that trans people have smaller skull shapes Rowling: it's 1 pm graham, why are you sstill in pajamas Lineham: i've been researching how the trans control the media Rowling: did you even try to look for a job today

Rowling: graham here's the newssspaper Rowling: hey maybe you could look at the want adsss Rowling: bet there'sss plenty of openingsss for a transsphobic comedy writer Lineham: i don't read newspapers, i heard that the wood pulp industry is captured by trans activists Lineham: they put estrogen in the news ink Lineham: you know Lineham: to get you Rowling: Rowling: wait really? Rowling: shit maybe i should sstart possting that

Rowling: graham ssseriousssly Rowling: you could at leassst apply Lineham: no everyone's against me Lineham: there's no jobs for a fearless truth teller like me Rowling: i Rowling: how Rowling: we live in england! there'sss nothing BUT jobsss for transsphobesss! Rowling: how are you still unemployed!?!

Rowling: look jussst march into the BBC and asssk if they're hiring any transsphobesss Rowling: maybe they'll be impressssed with your moxie and hire you Lineham: it doesn't work like that these days Rowling: jusst wear a sssuit and ssit in the lobby til they hire you!

Lineham: i've got a great idea to get back in people's good graces! Rowling: whatss that Lineham: well you know how david tennant is the most beloved man in the country? Rowling: right Lineham: well if i can bring him down, then i will assume his place Lineham: as the most beloved man in the country Rowling: Rowling: right ok that makess ssensse to me

Rowling: look i clipped out a bunch of adss for transphobic jobss Rowling: i'll jussst ssend them to graham'ss agent Helen Joyce: terrible news, dark lord! Joyce: his agent dropped him for attacking david tennant Rowling: Rowling: oh

[crinsgoblin]

chronically divorced man

[thingstrumperssay]

Queerphobes don’t like the fact that queer people have been re-defining the word to be an umbrella term for the LGBT+ because:

(For some context: Homer finds out that he befriended a gay man and freaks out. The episode makes fun of his homophobia.)

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Graham Linehan just posted about my boobs look ma I made it

Most feminist transphobe

[sophiamcdougall]

IMPORTANT NOTE!! This is not Glinner (Graham Linehan)!! Glinner used to be a comedy writer and is now a full time bigot, Gary Lineker used to be a footballer and is now a full time sports broadcaster. He was one of England's top scorers and has presented Match of the Day since the nineties. As such he is phenomenally popular. And to the best of my knowledge he has never been anything other than blandly pleasant and such opinions as he has espoused have been by any normal standards blandly uncontroversial. He just doesn't like, you know, overt fascism.

The reason this is all intolerably stupid is not, thankfully, that it requires us to side with a bad person. Gary Lineker does, as far as one can know, appear to be a good person -- he's supported refugee charities since 2015 and housed two in his home -- but because the fact that the government wants to lock up and deport child refugees has become a row about a multi-millionaire sports star's career. And yet if you see someone saying that we should forget the celebrity angle and return to focusing on the refugees that is, lamentably, the wrong take. It ought to be the right take -- Lineker will be fine* -- but if the government can silence dissent from someone that privileged and rich and beloved, with the full support of the infiltrated BBC, the rest of us are absolutely screwed. And our freedom to hear, let alone speak, the truth, will be immensely curtailed at a stroke. The fate of the British democracy should not come down to exactly how much people still like the former face of Walker's Crisps. But it has.

It's also stupid to the point of being funny because if you were a fascist-leaning government who'd lately tripped over your own bootlaces while attempting to stamp on a human face forever and were now bleeding popularity at an unprecedented pace, oh my fucking God why would you pick a fight with a real life Ted Lasso character?? Ever but now of all times??

But they did. And the fucking BBC, instead of just shrugging its shoulders and applying the same standards it had applied to right wing celebrities saying far more inflammatory things, i.e doing nothing, pulled Lineker from the air until he retracted his remarks and apologised.

But -- thank fuck -- he won't.

And then all of Lineker's sports colleagues refused to appear on air either and Match of the Day, a BBC institution, was reduced from 90 minutes of airplay to 20 minutes with no commentary because no one was there to provide it.

Both organisations -- the government and the BBC appear to be panicking and this is a good thing and needs to be made to continue, hence the petition. There is a chance this topples the current BBC Chairman, Richard Sharp, who got that job much around the time he helped arrange a loan of £800,000 for Boris Johnson, and maybe also Robbie Gibb, former director of communications for Theresa May who was appointed to the board of the BBC by ... Boris Johnson. Oh, did I say the other reason this matters is that it's also about corruption? It's also about corruption.

So anyway yeah, there's no shame in hashtag I Stand With Gary Lineker, or rather there is, but it's not his fault. It's deeply embarrassing that this is currently the most powerful that resistance to the government's assault on free speech has been, but you take what you can get. _____ *Except, there is now an imaginable world where this sort of thing carries on unchecked to its logical conclusion, in which he is not fine. In the meantime he'd probably get snapped up by Sky and paid even more money, though.

It's so stupid that this is important

The government should not be able to use the public broadcaster to silence criticism. Also, the public broadcaster's "impartiality" should not look like placid silence when 'talent" calls for strikers to be shot in front of their families and immediate crushing if different talent mildly mentions that ratcheting up hate against vulnerable minorities has a somewhat well-documented history of being Bad. Also, if the fucking public broadcaster had not lost its entire fucking mind it would not have chosen to create a free speech martyr out of Gary fucking Lineker of all people. Further, in a sane country the careers of former footballers would have nothing to do with either the basic rights of people fleeing oppression nor the fate of British democracy but here we fucking are I guess. If you're in the UK please sign. If you're not please don't ask me to explain this one, I just can't.

[queenboudicaa]

From Graham Linehan from The Glinner Update grahamlinehan@substack.com

Played The Fool

Sue Donym

Sep 16

I remember my college days studying journalism, which don't seem so long ago, but actually are now, and as a young eighteen year old, a friend gives me something she says explains gender. It is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. I have heard of this book. People treat it like The Bible. I eagerly open the book and attempt to read it.

I cannot make heads or tails of it. I conclude I simply am not smart enough or well-read enough to understand the religious revelation. I make it to page sixty before giving up, the constant mentions of ‘Althusserian’ and ‘structuralist’ and ‘reifying’ finally defeating me. I don’t feel like any of the book has actually managed to lodge itself in my head.

I give the book back to my friend, and then I pretend to everyone around me that I have read the book. No one figures me out.

When I get older, I realize they all did the same thing.

In my senior year, I win election to student government. I am to represent ‘LGBT’ people. I am proud. I am unaware I am now standing on a cliff, the ground beneath me slowly breaking. I bury my head in the sand as my position becomes increasingly precarious.

I meet with faculty during the first semester. I read through a policy. Suddenly ‘LGBT’ has morphed. It’s ‘LGBTQI+’. I don’t know what the Q and I stand for, let alone that seemingly erroneous plus sign. I am supposed to be the expert, and all these middle-aged people are looking at me to explain the youth speak which is even bedeviling I, the putative youth. I muddle through, using this surprise new acronym, and then I Google it surreptitiously in the meeting. It means ‘Queer’ and ‘Intersex’, and the plus sign appears to be decorative in nature. I wonder what the Q covers that ‘LGBT’ doesn’t, let alone the God-damned plus sign, and I wonder why ‘intersex’ needs to be included at all.

They talk enthusiastically about how everyone has a gender. There are women with penises, men with vaginas. Gender is understood to be how you feel inside. I contort my mind around this way of thinking as best I can. A man is someone who behaves like a man, and a woman is someone who behaves like a woman. That is the working definition you have, even though you paper over it with phrases like ‘identifies as.’

I don’t think about. You can’t. You are told this is how it is, how it has always been, to think otherwise is actually you replicating the kyriarchy, over and over and over again, and you nod and accept it, because you are given this set of facts and told to nod. Pseudoscience justifies it. People talk about ‘brain scans’ and ‘the wrong bodymap’, and ‘indigenous genders’. It’s all conjectural bullshit, but everyone goes along with it.

When I can’t perform the cognitive contortions, I simply don’t acknowledge contradicting evidence. To do so would be to jump off a cliff into an abyss. It is a reflexive thing, unconscious, and its origins lie in the instinct for self-preservation.

Everyone goes along with it. I am a coward, so I accept it and move on. I am twenty two years old, and I don’t know any better, and I want to trust the organizations that say they hold my best interests at heart.

Part of my role on student government was providing student-based pastoral care in my college’s LGBT center. By the time I get there, it’s morphed into the LGBTQI+ Center. I consider myself even-keeled and well-adjusted, perfect to help ‘my people’.

Many of the people that come see me have fairly normal problems. I speak to lecturers about not being homophobic, meet with faculty about LGBTQI issues, and sit through interminably boring student government meetings full of bloviating Young Democrats self-assured about their future self-importance. Increasingly, more people come to speak to me about trans issues. Walking through the center one day, someone assumes I am a ‘pre-hormones trans man’. When I correct them, and say I am a butch lesbian, they suddenly become hostile. I don’t know why, but I feel offended to my very bones about being assumed to be a man.

More and more of my fellow butches suddenly start declaring themselves to ‘truly be men.’ I don’t think about this. You’re not supposed to think about it, or question them, just accept and affirm and acknowledge and adulate their new found authenticity. I get a new package of fliers from an LGBT charity, open them up, and suddenly find that I, simply defined as ‘butch’ (forget the lesbian!) am now supposedly ‘trans’ and under the ‘trans umbrella.’ I call this ridiculous, and loudly.

Someone pulls me aside to ask why I’m being so transphobic.

I meet with a charity group. They have this young woman on staff who declares herself ‘non-binary’ and uses ‘they/them’ pronouns. She does not strike me as gay, and her entire purview of ‘LGBT’ seems to forget the first three letters. She assumes that I am a trans man. When I tell her I am a lesbian, she asks ‘are you sure? Maybe you’ll change your mind’. She then starts talking to me about her boyfriend.

I wonder why this straight girl with dyed hair is telling me what to do on gay issues. What gives her the right?

At the end of the meeting, someone I know from the charity group tells me that ‘Aiden’ is upset I forgot her pronouns. I hadn’t realized. I tell him that this dyed hair fag hag told me I’ll change my mind about being a lesbian. He says that doesn’t excuse messing up Aiden’s pronouns.

The next time I meet Aiden, she keeps calling me ‘he’. She gets upset when I get angry with her.

My student body president sends me a please explain email the next day about upsetting Aiden.

One day in the center, in walks a man in a dress. That’s what I thought in my unfiltered thoughts, before the cognitive dissonance kicks in. But the Aiden experience has taught me a lesson to not speak up. The man uses ~the magical pronouns~, ‘she/her’ and this means he is a woman. He dresses like a prostitute downtown and declares he’s a lesbian.

He says he is a trans woman. But Chloe is different from all the trans women I had met before. They would call themselves ‘gay men gone too far’, tell you hilarious stories, wingman for me at the bar, argue about ‘when Madonna went bad’, arguments that turned into handbag duels at dawn. Many of them were older, and many of them had stories about surviving in a homophobic world, surviving AIDS, dangerous johns, and the joy they felt now, that gay rights had gone somewhere. This man was very different to them.

My hair stands up on the back of my neck every time I deal with ‘Chloe’. It requires conscious effort to make sure I don’t mess up his pronouns, because my brain says that’s ‘a fucking man’, but my cognitive dissonance around the situation and my sense of self-preservation knows that if I don’t call this man a woman I will be in for it. I have seen the results - ‘Chloe’, all six feet of ‘Chloe’, screaming at a fellow trans woman, Clara, half his size, for saying ‘you’re a man honey’. Chloe himself came to me demanding I ban her from the space. I refused.

Clara stops coming into the center. I ask her why, and she says ‘those flipping transvestites, they’re not us.’ Clara never comes back to the center.

None of this thinking about Chloe’s pronouns is conscious. I feel guilty every time my thoughts use the ‘wrong pronouns’. My head is tied up in knots - not something freshman me would have considered, turning up to the center with the goal of getting laid, now trying to smile and put up with this man.

He makes every conversation in there uncomfortable. We relax when he is gone and only homosexuals are in the room.

Suddenly, my straight friends start asking if I’d ‘sleep with a trans woman’. I try laughing this off. One friend gets very insistent, and when I tell him that I wouldn’t consider someone with a dick, he starts wondering if my preferences are ‘rooted in bigotry’. I ask him if he’d sleep with a trans woman. He tells me that no, he’d prefer a woman who can have his children.

I smile and nod, and when the conversation ends, walk out of the room as fast as I can.

Chloe tells us at length about their sexual proclivities. Bondage and leather and ‘being a dom’. Chloe tells us about his lack of luck on lesbian dating apps. I keep to myself that I had ended up setting a height filter to filter out ‘the trannies.’ Nor do I tell him that me and a group of women had made fun of men like him on lesbian dating apps, swapping screenshots and Silence Of The Lambs jokes.

Soon there are more Chloes and fewer women. They all start talking about radical communism, about ‘sex work is work’, ‘cultural appropriation’, and about ‘TERFs’ and how hideous they are. One of them expounds to me at length why I shouldn’t read any feminist works from the seventies, because they hated trans women, and I wouldn’t want to hate trans women, wouldn’t I?

They all behave the same way. I keep getting reports about the Chloes harassing people in the center, particularly young lesbian women. Then there is an influx of ‘Aidens’, straight women declaring themselves to really be gay men. One of them tells me I am ‘appropriating the culture of trans men.’

One day I am in the center, and I look out the glass window of my office. There are a dozen people sitting in the common room of the center, talking animatedly. I realize none of them are lesbian or gay in the actual sense of the word. I feel uncomfortable, but I cannot articulate why I feel such discomfort.

One of the Chloes knocks on my door. This one wears a pink tube top and a pencil skirt. I am strongly reminded of Buffalo Bill. He asks me out for coffee. I decline. He asks why, as I am single. I say that I am busy that day. He tries asking for another day. I say I am playing club football that day. He keeps trying to cajole me. Eventually I dispense with the politeness and tell him I am not interested in him. He shouts at me that I am transphobic and leaves.

A few hours later, my phone blows up. His friends are calling me transphobic for not being interested in him. It’s just one date, they say. One little coffee. You might like it. You don’t know. Your last girlfriend dressed the same. You need to unlearn your genital preferences.

I think to myself my last girlfriend was a foot shorter and had a vagina, but I don’t say anything. I ignore the messages. He is allowed boundaries. I am not.

I am sitting in a class. It’s on sexual histories, a class I took to broaden my horizons from my journalism degree. I try not to think of the student loan I’ll be incurring from taking it.

Strangely enough, it is perhaps the first blow to the self-imposed contortions of my thoughts. The professor starts his lecture by pronouncing that sexual orientation is, in fact, a social construct. He explains that the word ‘homosexuality’ did not exist until the 19th century, and thus, homosexuals are a creation of repressive Victorian sexuality. I find this theory strange. I had grown up in the ‘born this way’ era, to be sure, but my homosexuality seemed biological, instinctual, basal to my very way of being. A powerful attraction to women came to me as naturally as breathing, or seeing, or farting inappropriately on the second date. Yet here was this man telling me, that in fact, my perceptions were merely constructs based on my surroundings.

It seemed strange to me. Someone from the class, notorious for asking questions, puts his hands up and asks about the Romans - you see, he is a student of the classics, and he remarks that the Romans knew of homosexuals. The professor gravely informs in that in fact the Romans were aware of a ‘behavior’, and that as ‘homosexual’ as a word did not exist at the time, there were no homosexuals. Only behaviors, that we codify and understand on a cultural basis.

This made less sense to me than before. It made even less sense to me when someone else asks about trans people. The professor remarks that ‘trans people have always existed’.

Yet homosexuals were invented by the first sexologists, rather than through self-definition? We had to have heterosexuals invent us, as other, first?

I am sitting with some gay friends, and one of them complains about the focus on trans issues when we still don’t have same-sex marriage federally yet. We talk about our disappearing spaces, and I voice that sometimes I am the only lesbian out of thirty people sitting in the LGBTQI+ student center (it had been renamed). I think of it in terms of getting laid - because suddenly all the ‘lesbians’ in the center had penises. It happened so quickly that it was easy to notice. I went to a lesbian group, and it was a sausage fest I made up an excuse to leave. The Chloes moved in, and the lesbians instantly left. I feel constantly uncomfortable, watched, stared at, envied. The Chloes all talk about their genitalia and violent pornography at length, in public, and it makes me feel gross and dirty, and I start to dislike most of them.

I post on my Tinder that I’m not into penis. I log in the next day to find out my account has been banned. Tinder never gives me a straight answer as to why I was banned.

I finish out my term on student government. I don’t run again. I’m a senior. I finish my degree and hurry off to the real world. One of the Chloes takes my place as ‘LGBTQI+ students representative’.

It is the one who tried getting me to go out on a date with him. He makes me feel uncomfortable throughout the whole handover.

I am upset, because he will destroy everything I worked for.

I go to the gay bar with some friends. But when we go, we feel like the only homosexuals in the whole god-damn bar. It’s full of people with dyed hair. A man in a dress tries grinding on me, and when I turn around and tell him no, he calls me ‘transphobic towards trans femmes’. When I declare I am a butch lesbian, people ask if I am a ‘TERF’. I don’t know what a ‘TERF’ is, other than ‘terfs’ are bad. I have been told terfs are bad, so it has to be true right? I don’t want to be a bad person.

I try going to other gay events, and suddenly I am outnumbered. Me, a few older lesbians, and some gay men huddle in a corner of spaces we once proudly called our own, as the Chloes and the Aidens declare it their own - and even worse, that they are just the same as us. It is unnerving, and they no longer feel like safe spaces for me. Gradually, we all stop going. There were no more gay people in the gay space.

I have a lesbian friend. She tells me excitedly about a first date. She meets them in a quirky coffee shop. It is a trans woman twice her size. When she tells the trans woman that she’s not interested, they lose it at her in the coffee shop, calling her a transphobic bigot and screaming and shouting and threatening to hit her.

She tells me, because she knows I don’t tell people things. But she cannot say anything in public. She’ll be transphobic. So she keeps it to herself, and this man gets to continue preying on women who think they’re safe, catfishing, coercing and abusing them.

To say otherwise gets you labelled a terf. And terfs are bad. Why are terfs bad? Don’t ask. Just accept that terfs are bad. Terfs hurt trans women, and you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?

Eventually, my friend hears of her date doing it to someone else. She writes a call out post, saying that you shouldn’t hide important facts about yourself on dating sites. She gets called a terf for saying that ‘lesbians don’t have dicks’, and being verbally abused in public was the rational response of an oppressed person to oppression. It’s a scarlet letter, and she is branded with it. I am a coward and I do not speak up in public. I hate myself. I am thinking of my personal prospects, and not my friend, and not my people. Because if I speak up, I can kiss the career I dream about goodbye. I fear that scarlet letter being branded on my forehead.

I tell my friend in private that I support her. But I daren’t say that in public.

I daren’t ask questions.

One day, I am aimlessly browsing the internet at work. I have written enough copy to cover my ass for the next few weeks. I wait until my boss leaves for the afternoon, and wait out the rest of the day mindlessly scrolling. I see a post in an LGBTQI+ students group on Facebook I’ve forgotten to leave. It’s a troll post, which is apparently ‘terf rhetoric’. The link is still there, and the comments are blowing up, united in performative outrage.

I click the link . I find myself laughing at the description of ‘men in dresses’. To these ‘terfs’, a man has a penis, and a woman has a vagina. Anyone saying otherwise is a damned fool. It seems such an easy way to think about it. I mean, what is a woman, anyway? It doesn’t seem evil, wicked or bad. It seems… sensible.

Finding out more about this new way of thinking becomes addicting. I keep my scrolling through it on my phone. I have always had a fondness for reading people being harshly critical about anything, and now I have an endless source of it, articulating things I knew instinctually but could never find the words to verbalize, could never find the courage to verbalize. I wonder if I am being radicalized - images of ISIS radicalizing fighters over the internet run through my head. But everything seems to make so much sense. I am no longer contorting my thoughts around the desires of others, but thinking freely, observationally, openly, fearlessly.

It felt like my mind had freed itself from chains, chains placed upon it all those years ago, when that naïve eighteen year old who wanted to get laid tried reading Gender Trouble.

The gunk on my mind slowly unclogged. My way of thinking suddenly changed. I was no longer denying what my eyes saw in front of me. No, now I saw things as they were. There was no more contorting my way of thought. For the first time in a long time, I felt clear-headed.

One of the links I clicked in my flurry was a link to Dr. Ray Blanchard’s paper on ‘autogynephilia’. I read it, and finally, I had an explanation. Homosexual transsexuals. And ‘autogynephiles.’ The two types of his famous and controversial typology.

‘Autogynephiles’ - men who had a sexual fetish for ‘being a woman’, a fetish for an alter-ego female self, a fetish for our bodies, our minds, our souls, our experiences. All reduced to jerk-off fodder for some blockhead man.

It explained why they were so desperate for lesbians to date them. They needed us for validating their sexual fetish. Our lives and experiences, our spaces, our dating apps, our culture, our media, our websites, every breath we took, as far as they were concerned, needed to be focused on validating them. Because otherwise, the fantasy was ruined! This straight man would not be able to jerk off over ‘being a lesbian!’. We were not people, we were non-player-characters in their video game. Actresses in pornography, extras in a film where they were the protagonist, and we were off script. We weren’t fully-formed people, with our own desires, we were things, objects, film props.

The entire gay movement, from the lesbians to the gays, to the homosexual transsexuals, reduced to nothing props in some straight man’s sexual fantasy. That’s all we were to them, ultimately.

And I was expected to go along with it?! We were all expected to go along with it?

Not only that, I had gone along with it. I had advocated for this.

What had I done?

Every moment you come close, every moment you start thinking something isn’t right, you start feeling a little foolish.

Of course this is fine. Everyone is telling me so. The media, the public, the people around you. No one voices concerns. When you have them, you don’t say anything, because no one else is, and because you are a coward.

You feel a little foolish because this is foolish. Saying some women have penises is foolish. You know it is foolish, from the minute that idiot phrase leaves your mouth, to the minute it dances across your tongue, to the minute your nerves send the signal to your larynx to make the required movements to produce the very sounds. But, you think, you are no fool.

You are no fool, you think, when someone says ‘biological women have XY chromosomes’, or that it’s okay for a man on the college track team to identify as a woman and take a place on the woman’s track team. You know that’s not right. But everyone else is going along with it, and you are no fool, and you shouldn’t feel foolish, because everyone says this is the right thing to do, the right side of history, doing right by an oppressed minority, so you go along with it.

You are frightened of realizing you are a fool. So too, is everyone around you. No one likes being played the fool, no one likes realizing they were sold a pack of lives as a naïve eighteen year old looking for other gay people. And no one plays you for a fool. And thus the dance continues, everyone one too frightened to admit that, perhaps, we are all fools, believing in something physically impossible, no different to the bible-banging megachurch attendee, with our owns chants, our own magic words, ritual knowledge, and ability to be born again. We are smart. We liberal. We are on the right side of history. We couldn’t be believing in something that isn’t scientifically backed. We’re smarter than that. We’re not fools.

And when it finally gets too much, and you drift over to the cliff’s edge, the cliff that you can see the bottom of, the cliff you know you can’t come back from, you pull away. Because to go over it would to be to admit that you’ve been played the fool. No one likes that feeling, the shame, the embarrassment, the horror, the fear. What lies over that cliff is exile, a scarlet letter, fear and hatred and nasty women who just want trans women dead.

What lies beyond that cliff is a realization that you have been used. You have been used by something greater than yourself, to push medication on children. You have been used by straight men to participate in their sexual fetish without your consent. Your entire community, rendered a jerk-off prop for some straight man over night, and you were told that objecting was ‘transphobic’. You have been used to spread homophobia beyond your comprehension, to take part in the destruction of your own community, and you were told this was right and good.

To realize this, to acknowledge it, to move on and try and forge something better, that takes true strength of character. To realize this, to deny it, and obfuscate what you are doing, that I can understand. I too, was once a coward. I too, did not want to believe what my eyes told me was sitting in front of me. That cliff is scary, and to jump off it seemingly lies nothing but social death.

But eventually something pushes you over, without your consent. You realize you have been played the fool, because finally, something so gratuitous occurs that you must. Even the greatest cowards will eventually be blown off the cliff. The music will stop, and the dance will end, and you will finally feel the shame, the embarrassment, the horror, the fear, the guilt.

Because no one likes being played for a fool.

Perhaps, then, it is best to get this over and done with now, while you still have dignity to defend.

Some details have been changed to protect the identities of those concerned.

[profeminist]

“You won’t drag me into your weird, obsessive little culture war, mate. I wrote a message in solidarity of a group who’s life expectancy ranges in the 30’s solely due to murder and suicide (is it any wonder). Is your back not *aching* from bending to punch so fucking low.”

Hozier, responding to piece of shit and non-stop transphobe Graham Linehan, who had tagged Hozier in a bullshit post.

[daisies-and-internal-screaming]

It’s ironic how linehan has gone from writing jokes to being the joke.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

What's remarkable about the sheer depths of Linehan's twitter madness is that even soft-handed treatments from right-wing columnists who want, so desperately, to embrace Linehan as an ideological ally all end up sounding slightly queasy as they try desperately to keep the truth (twitter madness) at arm's length.

Take Ben Sixsmith's kid-gloves review of Linehan's despatches from his private twitter wars:

>Had you forgotten that he’s a comedy writer? I suspect he sometimes does as well

>Let’s face it, though. Most readers of Tough Crowd aren’t coming for the comedy tales. They’re coming for juicy gossip about the trans wars

>So annoying was the vitriol that would get promoted into my Twitter feed that I made a mental distinction between Graham Linehan, the author of splendid comedy, and “Glinner”, an arsehole

>(Linehan) hunted down a young rhetorical opponent’s Facebook page and posted a photo of the poor chap with his mum

>On social media, (Linehan's) writing can be such a blizzard of unfamiliar references that it’s hard to discern what he’s talking about

>At the risk of being patronising, I did find myself feeling a bit concerned for Linehan as I finished Tough Crowd. He admits to losing his rag in a way that might not always be productive

>Linehan’s ire, and the backlash in response, has consumed his life

This, from an ostensibly complimentary review that opens by placing Linehan above people who have actually cracked a joke in the past ten years (Morris*, Coogan, and Iannucci's places in comedy history are assured. Matthews can credit himself as the creator of Father Ted and happily state "no, not that one". As for Baynham, well, given the opportunity, who wouldn't take the easy Borat route and spend your days in Hollywood drinking daiquiris through a curly straw?). Though Sixsmith also serves up "Linehan writes with fire" as a complete clause, which may explain this as a simple case of casting pork scratchings before swine.

*Linehan’s involvement with the writing of Morris's masterpieces Brass Eye and Blue Jam is - well, it would be histrionic to say it’s like a reminder Hitler was behind the VW Beetle, but it’s at least on the level of Margaret Thatcher being part of the team who developed the Mr. Whippy, a slightly unheimlich fun fact in the history of something I tend to enjoy. (Rolling back from Godwin here actually helps the analogy, I do like Mr. Whippys and am fairly indifferent to the VW Beetle.) In retrospect, though, we can now be pretty sure who penned the Blue Jam sketch about the ‘forty-five year old man trapped in the body of a four year old girl’.

That sketch was on the final episode of the first series, the one which the BBC cut off midway through for reasons related to the Dadaist cut-up version of the Archbishop of Canterbury's eulogy for Princess Diana. Will cancel culture ever remove its fangs from our collective neck?

After Graham Linehan came down with twitter madness over the existence of trans people, everyone evaluated that episode of The IT Crowd where Douglas goes out with a trans woman in a new light, as you’d expect -

Yet nobody has read anything into the episode where cavalier Douglas explains to nebbish Moss that the secret of his confidence is wearing women’s trousers (playing it off with “I’m fairly sure it doesn’t make me a transvestite”), and it works. Has it just been a case of confused, deep-seated envy the whole time?

[itsawritblr]

Graham Linehan is right. These Harry Potter stars will regret their betrayal of JK Rowling.

via The Telegraph:

Michael Deacon, Columnist, 3 October 2023 • 7:00am

In Tough Crowd, Graham Linehan’s new book chronicling his battle against militant trans activism, the comedy writer reserves particular scorn for the three main stars of the Harry Potter films. When JK Rowling was monstered on social media for daring to speak up in support of women’s rights, those three actors – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – could have leapt to her defence. But they did not. Instead, they each loftily proclaimed their support for the trans rights movement.

“[They] instantly betrayed her,” Mr Linehan writes. “[They] deserve to be remembered as symbols of the most remarkable arrogance, cowardice and ingratitude.”

He needn’t worry. Because one day, I strongly suspect, they will be.

Obviously none of us is obliged to share the opinions of the people we worked for at the start of our careers. Whenever I sit down to write a column, I do not first ring up the manager of the Edinburgh branch of Bargain Books I worked at in summer 2001, just to check that my views on Sir Keir Starmer or the Duchess of Sussex meet her approval. Nor do I run my opinions on Black Lives Matter or Just Stop Oil past the former editor of J17, the long-defunct teenage girls’ magazine for which I was junior staff writer in 2003.

Those three former child stars, however, are in an unusual position. JK Rowling did not give them a paper round, or a Saturday job in their local corner shop. She gave them global fame – something they would have been unlikely to achieve without her. And so, even though they don’t share her views, their response should at least have been more respectful. They could have said in the immediate aftermath: “I will always support trans rights. However I am appalled by the abuse of JK Rowling. Nothing she has ever said is remotely bigoted or transphobic. She’s just speaking up for women, that’s all.”

So why didn’t they fight her corner? Are they absolutely beyond doubt that their views place them on “the right side of history”? Or were they simply scared of being cancelled themselves?

I don’t know. But I do know that, if “the right side of history” turns out to have been JK Rowling’s, their treatment of her will be the only thing that anyone remembers about them.

*~*~*~*

GCs and Radfems, if you're not reading Graham Linehan you should be.

On Twitter-X.

On Substack: The Glinner Update.

[terflies]

Via Gourmet Hot Takes on twitter, Graham Linehan figuratively associating being gender critical with hiding from the Nazis.

That the replies on Twitter have only support from other ~gender critical~ people, as far as I can see, sickens me.

[ianthomasmalone]

Here is my collection of Thomas the Tank Engine memes I’ve made to troll Graham Linehan. Fuck Glinner. Enjoy!