[Youngian]

Haven’t had the political bandwidth to acquire enough knowledge needed to comment on the trans debate but have noticed some ghastly people involved in the mud slinging. Julie Bindel, like Owen Jones, is a pundit who calls herself a journalist. This week’s clash is a claim that 60 anonymous girls bullied an unnamed girl at a school whose name is a secret. It might be true but Julie won’t win a Pulitzer filing flimsy copy like that. Owen then puts in his size nines going round the house to call bullshit on Bindel’s claims.

[Andy McDandy]

Julie does see to be channeling her inner Janet Cooke here.

[Youngian]

I was thinking of Enoch Powell’s letters from anonymous white people driven out of their homes by immigrants. Several papers went in search of these people and challenged Powell to divulge more information. All came to nowt.

[The Weeping Angel]

Owen Jones knows a lot about bullying since he is one allegedly.

[Abernathy]

More frothing outrage about people allegedly espousing "anti-trans" views, this time the writer Graham Linehan, who does seeem to have been rather more agressive and even nasty in doing so than Joanne Rowling :

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/05/27/g ... YK-jBQ8yGM

[MisterMuncher]

Linehan has quite firmly shit the bed on his legacy, I fear. Any nuance in the argument has long since departed, All trans people are evil or sick, anyone aligned with them is even worse. It's become an obsession for him and he rarely, if ever, holds forth on any other topic.

He's lost his wife over the head of it, too.

[The Weeping Angel]

TRAs TERFs are Nazis who want to kill us all

Also TRAs let's burn the books of an author we don't like

[davidjay]

Amongst the replies, one sentence stands out.

There are children in the world who dont even own a book.

[Andy McDandy]

I think professor Henry Jones put it best about burning books.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Or Heine.

[Boiler]

In time, will the 2019 intake of new Tory MPs be seen as The Rise Of The Berkeley Hunts?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-s ... e-61842311

Nick Fletcher, MP for Don Valley, South Yorkshire, said he wanted to "clearly set out his position" on the issue and asked head teachers to do the same.

His letter states that "boys are boys and girls are girls", and the media glamorises a "transgender lifestyle".

[Tubby Isaacs]

Glamorizes?! Trans people get shit all the time.

[Andy McDandy]

Ah yes, the guy who insisted Doctor Who was turning all the kids gay.

[Watchman]

Surely only the other day, one of his fellow intake was telling us to get a grip and focus on “real” issues, because we are at war!

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I'd love (not really) to see the shitstorm when a school decides not to take heed of one of the nine protected characteristics in their equality and diversity policy...

But no doubt that will end up being 'revised' under the new British Values and Tory Human Rights Convention...

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yep.

It's incredible that the government is all but nodding and winking that this is what they should do.

[davidjay]

Today in Bristol:

[Andy McDandy]

Well, now we know where all the EDL kids went.

[davidjay]

This whole thing is confusing me beyond redemption. Are we now seeing the E-E-EDL supporting transgenders?

[Abernathy]

I've been thinking about this issue again. Thinking back to my developing years, which I guess would have been the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s, I can recall seeing a TV documentary about a particular individual who was grappling with gender identity issues, and felt that he, (ostensibly) a man (their assigned gender at birth) had been assigned a gender that was a terrible mistake and that (s)he was, in their own words, a "woman trapped in the body of a man". I had never heard of this before, and it seemed to me profoundly strange. I'm somewhat ashamed now to admit that I presumed that this individual was suffering from some mental illness. The documentary showed how this person had been obliged to "live as a woman" for however long it was then in order to demonstrate their commitment, and went on to describe the gender re-assignment surgery that (s)he was about to undergo - something the idea of which viscerally appalled me (it does not now) and which I found quite incomprehensible.

Nowadays, of course, the issue of gender identity is a commonplace, far more than it ever seemed to be when I was growing up in the 1970s. What interests me is whether this is actually true - that there are far more trans people around now than ever before (and if so, why?) or whether there are just as many trans people around, but nowadays it's just far more prevalent in the zeitgeist. What does the panel think ?