Jon Ronson and I were friends for 25 years…
On May 27, 2019, I was doing everything I could to hold my sanity and my marriage together, waiting for the first of my supposed friends to say something in my defence while trans activists online and in the press went after me. That day, I was the one defending Jon, against someone I thought was attacking us both. To my astonishment, Jon took the other person’s side instead. I asked him what was going on. This was the reply:
“I couldn’t support you after you posted that picture of the sports team. That was incendiary and came over as just really unpleasant and harmful. Ditto your publicising the prison story. I’m sorry Graham but I’ve thought about this a lot and that’s where I’ve come to.”
The sports team photo showed a 50-year-old male basketball player Gabrielle Ludwig competing against college teammates and opponents decades younger than him. The prison story was Karen White, a convicted double-rapist, who told the authorities he identified as a woman and was duly sent to a women’s prison, where he set about trying to double rape two more.
Note that Jon doesn’t say the photo was faked. He doesn’t say the prison story was wrong. Accuracy isn’t the issue. The issue is sharing information that makes Jon Ronson uncomfortable. Incendiary. Unpleasant. Harmful. To whom? Not to the girls on that court, and not to Karen White’s captive victims, the only people who actually mattered in either story.
It’s so familiar and so annoying. It’s Freethought Blogs in the person of one toadying man. Never mind the truth, never mind the harm, never mind the freedom of thought – just close your eyes and think of the trans woman sobbing into her pillow because YOU said she’s a man.
There are categories of things we shouldn’t say, because they can hurt and because there’s no value to saying them. We shouldn’t go around telling people they’re ugly, for instance. The law doesn’t come into it, but basic sympathy with other people should.
This is not that.
It’s not, but it seems to look like it to a lot of people, which may be why the whole Just Don’t Say It thing has taken such a grip on people.
This is not that because people being ugly has no effect on the population at large, so it does not need to be pointed out. Men pretending to be women has a cascade of effects on women, so it does need to be pointed out.
Furthermore, given the obvious aggression in men claiming to be women, it’s hard to believe that their feelings are so tender and vulnerable that telling them they’re men will crush them. They’re more like the sneering playground bully than they are like the sobbing child they’re tormenting.
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