Not as familiar
Graham Linehan points out something I hadn’t realized – some or many defenders of trans ideology haven’t bothered to find out a damn thing about it.
I’ve been here before. I’ve read all the quotes by now, from all the old friends who couldn’t pick up the phone before speaking to the press. Bill Bailey – our secret sauce on Black Books – said he found my stance in supporting women’s rights “baffling”. Amelia Bullmore – one of the things that made Big Train classier than it had any right to be – spoke of the “unfathomable escalation” of me standing against the mutilation of children in gender clinics. They all have their little variations, but the tune is always the same. Baffled. Sorry for me. Can’t understand why I got involved.
“If only he had done it differently,” when they never did it at all.
…
I expected more from Ardal. I never thought he would intone the catechism.
“I still get on great with everyone,” he said in a recent interview with The Times, “though I haven’t seen much of the show’s creator, Graham Linehan, and am baffled as to why he got involved in the culture wars. I feel sorry for him – he’s entitled to his opinions, but the way he presented them made it confrontational.”
When I read that, I phoned him immediately.
When people betray me, I always make the mistake of phoning them straight away. My heart was thumping in my chest as I found his number and gave him a faux-polite, “Hey Ardal, how’s it going?”. My anger was already boiling. I knew exactly what he would say – the exact same things Bill Bailey said when I phoned him, the exact same things Amelia Bullmore said when I wrote to her. I knew, and I phoned anyway, because I can’t help myself. And when he started reading from the same script as all the others, I lost my temper.
At some point, Ardal said, “I just disagree with you.”
I was stunned for a moment. Then I said, “What? You think men should be in women’s prisons? You think children should be mutilated and sterilised? You think men should be in women’s sports?”
“Oh, er, no, I’m not as familiar with the subject as you.”
There. That.
So what is it you disagree with then?
If you don’t know enough about trans ideology to know about men in women’s sports and children being mutilated and sterilized then SHUT UP.
I mean honestly. What next? Slavery wasn’t so bad, unless you know about the lifetime of unpaid labor, the separation of families, the rapes and whippings, the inability to quit or leave or say no. Torture isn’t so bad unless you know what it is. War isn’t so bad as long as it’s thousands of miles away.
This is what we in the fight have come to call the Bananarama defence – “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” It’s never what we say, it’s the terrible, awful, confrontational way we say it.
…
We hear the Bananarama defence constantly, almost always from people who have never said a word about the subject. They won’t know the first thing about puberty blockers. They couldn’t name a single safeguarding failure resulting from the idea that a group of self-selecting men are actually women. They haven’t followed the debate at all, because they know it’s more than their career is worth to pay attention. But they’re very confident that I went about addressing it in the wrong way.
If you don’t know anything about it then shut up.
Ardal didn’t seem to have read my memoir. Possibly for the same reason he never phoned me over the 10 years in which my life and career were being dismantled by trans activists – anonymous paedophiles on Twitter, homophobic parents who had transed their children, Wikipedia moderators, Guardian journalists.
I’m guessing he hadn’t done any reading on the subject at all. He doesn’t know about the thousands of children permanently harmed in gender clinics like the Tavistock and Boston Children’s Hospital. He doesn’t know that the psychotic Barbie Kardashian can walk into any female-only space in Ireland behind a woman and not be breaking the law until he decides to assault her. He certainly didn’t know that I raised over £20,000 for Vancouver Rape Relief, which had a dead rat nailed to its door by trans activists, or about the millions we’ve raised for women fighting back against this appalling misogyny in the UK and across the world.
No. He just went to the press, said he was baffled, said he felt sorry for me, and went back to doing precisely nothing about the greatest threat to women’s and girls’ rights in over 100 years – and the greatest health disaster for gay people since the Aids crisis.
It’s mystifying.
Which is what Christopher Hitchens discovered after going through water boarding. Unlike a lot of the trans activists, he had the decency to change his mind.
There’s a bleak irony here that I’ve tried to point out more than once: the loudest champions of gender ideology are often the ones most afraid to actually look at it. “Transphobia” is real and common — it just doesn’t manifest the way we’re told. More often, it takes the form of incuriosity masquerading as virtue. It’s the Ardals of the world — people who don’t know the first thing about the subject — who are phobic in the literal sense: afraid of what they might discover if they examined it too closely.
They haven’t merely absorbed a set of beliefs; they’ve been handed a full epistemic template — a prefab way of slotting “trans” into the social landscape. Activists brute-forced the phenomenon into the moral mould of gay rights and civil rights more broadly, and once that move succeeded, dissent ceased to be merely rude or wrong. It became incomprehensible. They were never taught how to take the story apart. It never occurred to them that it might need taking apart.
Preassembled beliefs. Outsourced judgment. Critical thinking, for Ardal and so many like him, means following the Ikea instructions.
Graham built his own moral framework, guided by principles he actually thought through. It’s not a mystery why they can’t see it — the glass is a one-way mirror. The Dunning–Kruger effect explains the rest.
And this provides them a way of avoiding the hard part, too…the part where you have to think it through and evaluate what is really happening. Too many people are too willing to accept a handy story to avoid thinking about it, not just on this issue, but on a lot of issues. Just figure out if the people espousing that view are ones you agree with on most other issues, and voila! Instant right thinking.
Thanks forced teaming!