Which abuse is more abusey?
The moral high ground?
Hmm. Remind us who and what Boy George is?
JK Rowling has highlighted Boy George’s conviction for beating a male escort with a chain after the singer criticised her campaign to protect women-only spaces such as prisons.
It’s a tough one. On the one hand a guy who handcuffs a male escort to a bed and then beats him with a chain, on the other hand a woman who says men are not women and should not invade women’s spaces. Which to choose, which to choose.
The author of the Harry Potter books was called a “rich bored bully” by the former Culture Club singer in a row on X that erupted when Rowling was accused of being “the person maybe most responsible for the push to take away trans rights”.
When Rowling asked the X user “which rights have been taken away from trans people?”, Boy George responded: “The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!”
Says the guy who handcuffed a male escort to a bed and then beat him with a chain.
That takes some gall.
Boy George was jailed in 2009 for handcuffing an escort to his bed and inflicting “wholly gratuitous violence”. The court was told that the cocaine-fuelled attack on Audun Carlsen, a Norwegian man, had been “premeditated and callous” and had left the victim “traumatised”.
But he’s atoning for it now by flinging verbal abuse in the direction of a woman who defends women’s rights.
Boy George was happily posting tweets with the “T-Slur” (rhymes with “Granny”) in them around 2013. Seems like BG has, like Frankie Boyle and James Corben, cynically pivoted to the pro-TRA side after the “trans movement” became career-destroyingly powerful.
BTW, my sister and her friend once met Boy George when he was DJ-ing at a nightclub in Ireland. Her memory of BG was that he was “incredibly foul-mouthed, – he especially liked using the c-word.”
Finally answered his own question, didn’t he?
Another indirect admission that no matter how much we “educate” ourselves, we’re not going to find the trans equivalent of the NSDAP, the Ku Klux Clan, Anders Breivik, the Taliban, or the Westboro Baptist Church. If JKR is “the person maybe most responsible for the push to take away trans rights”, then there isn’t anyone obviously worse out there.
OtherActually oppressed and persecuted groups are up against people like the KKK. People of gender are up against a popular author of young adult literature standing up for women’s rights while writing some of the least hateful things I have read in my life. When they talk about generic “TERFs” advocating a trans “genocide”, denying their “right to exist” etc. this is what it amounts to. This is all it amounts to. If this is the worst thing you have to deal with, then at least to an excellent first approximation every other person in history had more reason to complain than you do. There have been emperors who had more legitimate grievances than this.On the same note, if they really had been denied any substantial “rights”, you’d think they’d be able to come up with something less generic than “the right to be ‘left alone’…” or “the freedom to live without constant ‘persecution’…”. “Left alone” to do what to whom? “Persecuted” how exactly? “Doubleplus ungood” would do just as well. Imagine asking women in Afghanistan what rights they have been denied. Provided they were able to answer at all (i.e. probably not), what are the chances that their answer would be something so vacuous as opposed to, say, the right to an education, the right to be seen or heard at all, the right to not be married against their will, the right not to be raped etc.?
One of the characteristics of a thought-terminating cliché according to Robert Jay Lifton was “prematurely abstract”. Once again, it’s very much like the way generic talk of “justice for the working class” in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China was a Trojan Horse for tyranny, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, thought police, the surveillance state, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, labor camps, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc. Any criticism of the latter would be construed (without the analysis to back it up) as an attack on abstract, generic “worker’s rights” etc.
I love “There have been emperors who had more legitimate grievances than this.”