Well you see we can’t say anything about the trans religion because we might get yelled at. You can’t expect a satirical magazine to risk getting yelled at!! Duh!!!

You might think that a Supreme Court ruling confirming the obvious fact that the word ‘man’ means ‘man’ and the word woman means ‘woman’ is a ripe subject for a satirist.

You might, unless that particular obvious fact had been magically transformed into a taboo enforced by sadists – sadists who rejoice in trashing people’s lives for saying men are not women.

Interlude for comparisons:

You can say apples are not carrots. You can say a hammer is not a wine glass. You can say France is not Idaho. You can say lakes are not mountains and vice versa. You cannot say men are not women.

‘It isn’t easy to do this particular subject, as Keir Starmer has found out,’ stammered an unusually flustered-looking Hislop. His teammate, guest Jo Brand, agreed:

‘I think this is a thing that a lot of people wouldn’t want to say anything (about), because it’s a very, sort of, venomous situation, and I think a lot of people are genuinely a bit frightened…no one really wants to get a death threat…’

Death threats from who exactly, Jo? Rabbits? Presbyterians? The Brighouse and Rastrick brass band? Not, I would strongly suspect, from the women who laboured for years at great personal and professional cost to raise the eye-watering sums of cash needed in order to get the highest court in the land to tell us what we all knew when we were two? The death threats, as anybody on the ‘gender critical’ side of this debate can tell you, flow thick and fast – and always from the other side.

Along with other kinds of threats, often having to do with jobs, careers, opportunities, alliances. The general idea is: everybody will hate you and you will starve on a rock in the middle of an ocean.

The admission of this fear, at long last, is an interesting first step. You’d think it would spark some reflection on the part of the cultural elite, because under our democratic system we are not supposed to be afraid to speak.

Well, yes and no. I agreed with that at first but then paused. It’s not really true. It’s not really possible to be totally unafraid to say X no matter what X is and no matter what kind of fear we’re talking about. Just to take one example, I have a deep fear of blurting something that would hurt someone’s feelings. Really really deep. I’ve told the story here at least once of blurting such a thing about an oldish man wearing an ugly tie to my mother only to have her whisper furiously “He heard you.” I glanced at his face and wanted to rip my own head off.

And starting from there it’s easy to think of lots of other examples. So it’s not really true. It’s generally true, other things being equal, yadda yadda, but it’s not an absolute.

But. Politically speaking, we shouldn’t be afraid to say things about claims that have massive implications for other people, especially other people who are of a race or nationality or status or sex that is considered inferior and/or subordinate.

It was fascinating to see all the varieties of awkwardness and denial on HIGNFY during the discussion on gender. Guest Richard Osman fell silent, with downcast eyes and the kind of terrified ‘please, please talk about something else, anything else’ look I’ve seen so many times in the last decade.

But then again, who can blame Osman? None of us should ever have had to deal with the madness of genderism. It caught comedians, and everybody else, unaware about ten years ago. Very quickly it became dangerous to even question it, let alone poke fun at it.

About ten years ago. Is that when I quit Freethought Blogs 5 minutes before they pushed me out? Why yes, it is.

In the days following the court’s judgment, for example, it’s been hilarious to watch political figures – Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Green co-leader Carla Denyer, podcast centrist dad Rory Stewart – squirming and obfuscating, appearing to pretend that they simply don’t understand the ruling of the Court. The interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission following the ruling is written in Ladybird Book, Year 4-level English. Yet these luminaries are apparently totally foxed by it. Or are they just frightened? Either way, it is agonising, but very amusing, to behold. As the lawyer Dennis Kavanagh remarked on X, ‘We are not debating this movement. We are babysitting it.’

…

It’s unfair maybe to focus on the antics on a flagging old show like HIGNFY. The show’s cowardice is merely a symptom of wider institutional failure. But what is plain to see is that the unwillingness to joke about gender is a class issue. Comedians today seem desperate to cling on to upper middle-class fads, however barmy they happen to be.

In a healthy, functioning democracy, satire should play an important part in the political and cultural ecosystem – yet on genderism, it failed, and failed badly. If supposedly satirical shows like HIGNFY had been firm with this rubbish at the start, the gender madness might not, perhaps, have ripped through our institutions in the way that it did.

Just imagine. No India Willoughby, no Dylan Mulvaney, no Freda Wallace, no Lia Thomas, no Imane Khelif.