A new level of purity
Once again my credulity takes a beating, and nearly crumples under the blows. The LGBT officer of the National Union of Students has been emailing people to tell them she won’t share a platform with…wait for it…Peter Tatchell.
Peter Tatchell.
The emails from the officer of the National Union of Students were unequivocal. Fran Cowling, the union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, said that she would not share a stage with a man whom she regarded as having been racist and “transphobic”.
That the man in question is Peter Tatchell – one of the country’s best-known gay rights campaigners, who next year celebrates his 50th year as an activist – is perhaps a mark of how fractured the debate on free speech and sexual politics has become.
Or how fucking stupid and mindless and vicious it’s become.
In the emails, sent to the organisers of a talk at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday on the topic of “re-radicalising queers”, Cowling refuses an invitation to speak unless Tatchell, who has also been invited, does not attend. In the emails she cites Tatchell’s signing of an open letter in the Observer last year in support of free speech and against the growing trend of universities to “no-platform” people, such as Germaine Greer, for holding views with which they disagree.
Which does not make him racist or “transphobic.”
Cowling claims the letter supports the incitement of violence against transgender people. She also made an allegation against him of racism or of using racist language. Tatchell told the Observer that the incident was yet another example of “a witch-hunting, accusatory atmosphere” symptomatic of a decline in “open debate on some university campuses”.
It is. I have personal up-close experience of that atmosphere, and I can attest: they make this shit up. They invent it. They tell shameless lies. Like that shameless ridiculous lie that Tatchell “supports the incitement of violence against transgender people” – of course he fucking doesn’t! But I saw people telling the same lie about me, so I know it happens. Cowling isn’t particularly unusual that way.
One of the founding members of direct action group OutRage!, which caused a storm in the 1990s by outing establishment figures it claimed were homophobic in public and homosexual in private, Tatchell is used to being in the establishment firing line. But the original radical queer is now finding himself having to think long and hard about free speech.
In the recent furore over the Belfast bakery that refused to decorate a cake with a gay rights slogan, he stunned many by supporting the firm’s right to reject the customer’s order. Ashers bakery is appealing against a court decision that ruled it had discriminated against the customer by refusing to make a cake with the slogan “Support Same-Sex Marriage” because it went against their beliefs as Christians.
“If the Ashers verdict stands, it would mean a gay baker could be made to make cakes saying ‘I’m against gay marriage’,” said Tatchell. “A Muslim printer would have to publish the cartoons of Muhammad or a Jewish printer publish books of a Holocaust denier. So, much as I disagree with Ashers’ right to be homophobic, and I have spoken out against their anti-gay discrimination, they shouldn’t be forced to aid a political message they don’t agree with. I think it’s important to err on the side of freedom of expression and religion.”
He didn’t find that conclusion easy to reach.
But he insists his change of heart – he initially condemned Ashers – does not mean he has mellowed. In the past he has thrown himself in front of ministerial cavalcades, stopping the official cars of both John Major and Tony Blair with his placards, despite the best efforts of security officers, and pulled out banners of dissent under the noses of visiting dictators. He has helped track down a Nazi war criminal, has been arrested around 300 times and had about 50 objects smash his flat windows. He has also received such vicious beatings from the thugs of Presidents Robert Mugabe and Vladimir Putin that he has suffered lasting brain injuries.
But Fran Cowling sees fit to claim that he supports the incitement of violence against transgender people. It makes me sick.
When an Islamic group at my old uni received criticism about the appearance of a Hizb-ut-Tahrir member at an event that they had planned they initially cancelled the event and claimed that they had done so due to fear of violence from Peter Tatchell. The truth had more to do with the fact that another speaker had pulled out.
Tatchell responded with an open letter to say that he had not known of the event and would have protested peacefully if he had. He also pointed out that the claims were libellous and that Hizb-ut-Tahrir members had made death threats against him when he protested one of their conferences.
These kind of smear tactics are horrifying and while I expect them from groups of theocratic bullies, it’s terrible to hear of them from human rights activists.
Wikipedia reports that he received death threats after signing that open letter.
We have to stop calling them “human rights activists,” don’t we? You’re not, if your platform is “rights for *me*!”
It’s terrible the smears are coming from people I would have thought are natural allies, but, then again, anyone that self-centered never really was for human rights.
@quixote:
Isn’t it really more of a case of competing interests? Specific rights for “me” which would make “my” life better would in fact be infringing on rights for “you”. I won’t deny that it’s selfish, but it makes sense. The SJW patchwork has never been the most solid of constructions due to those competing interests (from what I’ve observed over the years).
In what way are they actually competing?
Does Cowling have any evidence other than signing the open letter that Tatchell is transphobic?
This is really stretching guilt by association.
@maddog1129
One example: if a woman–let’s say a rape survivor–is alone in a public bathroom and a person comes in who appears male, and she feels anxious, even, dare I say, triggered.
According to current orthodoxy, she mustn’t complain. Anybody who says she’s a woman, is one.
I can see this scenario being upsetting to some women, for reasons that have nothing to do with transphobia–the fear is of non-trans predators. But what of the alternatives? Not all trans women present feminine. Some of them can’t afford hormones or surgery, or are too young for them, or can’t use them for medical reasons. Do we gatekeep the pee room? Do we tell people, “You can’t use the ladies’ unless you look sufficiently feminine!?” (Oh HELL no.)
I see competing interests there that need to be discussed honestly, without hysteria from either side.
Welp, I sure screwed up THAT hyperlink. :P
Sorry.
Not to mention transwomen counselors in rape counseling centers (IIRC there was a stink up in Canada about that at one point), the general attempt to banish (icky) female genitalia from various venues, gender as an oppressive social construct vs. something that’s inborn, etc…
Yeah a rape crisis centre in Vancouver refused to employ a male to female transgendered
That was a few years ago
Everything is degenerating into a game of heretics and show trials.
Evidence is not required. Anyone who expects evidence has the blood of transgendered folk on their hands…. Strange, that of all the fragmenting possibilities it would be THIS one that has such destructive power.
Tatchell’s word.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12158352/The-intolerant-student-Left-has-even-turned-on-me-a-lifelong-civil-rights-campaigner.html