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I was sacked for writing about trans censorship The Australian media has been occupied by activists

'I got colour all right' (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

'I got colour all right' (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)


June 19, 2023   10 mins

For a quarter of a century, on and off, Melbourne’s “quality” daily newspaper The Age not only published my words — it was my intellectual home.

I had joined the paper’s staff around the turn of the century as a trainee journalist, progressing to social affairs reporter, senior writer, leader writer and, most recently, weekly columnist. For the most part, my views aligned with the paper’s superego, which fluctuates between soft Left and small “l” liberal. And there was always space for dissent, even when my opinions sharply diverged from The Age consensus — more on that soon.

About two years ago, my harmonious relationship with the paper began to deteriorate. The tension reached its climax last week when the editor, Patrick Elligett, sacked me as a columnist. The breakdown in trust was down to one issue: gender-identity politics, the trans debate — or severe lack thereof.

My dismissal was linked to a feature I wrote on youth gender transition that had been commissioned by a previous editor, Gay Alcorn, and which Elligett had refused to run. In response, I told Elligett that I intended to publish the piece on my new Substack and would disclose that he rejected it. He looked uncomfortable, but said The Age would take it on the chin.

And so, early this month I published the feature, announcing to the world that if they wanted to know why the piece was rejected, they would have to ask Elligett himself. A standing army of gender sceptics on Twitter did just that, under the hashtag “gutless” . This can’t have been pleasant for Elligett. But he attributed the sacking to another remark in my launch statement where I flagged that in future posts I’d be writing on gender-identity politics more broadly, “without the copy being rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary, such as ‘male’”. Elligett responded: “Obviously we can’t have our columnists publicly disparaging the publication like that so we won’t be commissioning further columns from you.”

In the piece he refused to publish, I discussed the growing debate around “affirming” care for children and teens in gender distress, and the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. While the controversy attracts regular coverage in Australia’s Murdoch-owned press, it remains taboo in the progressive media, where the “no-debate”, “the science is settled” mantras are consistently reinforced by stories of young people blossoming post-transition. The worst offender is the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC. The public broadcaster has even been rebuked by its own Media Watch programme for failing to report on the closure of the NHS’s scandal-hit gender clinic for children in England and Wales, the Tavistock; and for its partnership with Australia’s Stonewall equivalent, Acon, on the grounds it could lead to “perceptions of bias in coverage, or bias itself”.

Yet here’s the interesting part: Elligett said very little to me about my piece, other than that it was “good”. We had discussed it in late March, about a fortnight after Melbourne’s Let Women Speak rally, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis and which I had attended out of professional curiosity. The problem, he said, was not the piece, but its author: me.

He said I had nailed my colours to the mast on trans issues, so my byline would create a perception of bias. I said I had no firm view on paediatric transition. (You don’t have to believe in unicorns to see the affirmation model as an attempt to save kids from life-crippling distress and stigma.) He said that, nonetheless, publishing the piece under my name would damage the reputation of “the masthead”.

Let me attempt a translation: I had been pegged as a “Terf”, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a category into which many a reality-based woman, or indeed man, self-identifies. And this meant I was considered partisan where a veneer of neutrality was required.

I’m sad about what’s happened; as I know Elligett is, too. In writing this piece, I’m not seeking vengeance or vindication. Nor is this a “woe-is-me” story. On the contrary: I’m hugely grateful to the people I worked with. They saved me from howlers, and fixed my sloppy prose and wobbly reasoning more times than I care to admit.

But I feel a sense of obligation to commit to the historical record yet another account of a newsroom buckling under the challenge of gender-identity ideology: the belief system that deems “male” and “female” as more a state of mind than of body, and casts even the most gentle questioning of the doctrine tantamount to bigotry.

In this, I can’t help but be reminded of Hadley Freeman’s fate, save that she left The Guardian voluntarily. She started there at around the same time I started at The Age. Like Freeman, I’m a veteran Left-leaning campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities. Like Freeman, the main tension I found myself navigating in my early years in the newsroom involved Israel. Like her, I’m Jewish and a Zionist. As a leader writer, I was sometimes asked if I was sure I could write “objectively” on Israel and Palestine. As with Freeman, the odd colleague would lecture me about what I should and should not consider to be antisemitism.

But as a columnist, I found no issue off-limits. Sure, sometimes an editor would disagree with me. Some had little appetite for edgy, post-9/11 critiques of the Left’s accommodation of political Islam. And most merely tolerated my regular meltdowns about government funding of private schools; they didn’t relish the blowback from the well-resourced private school lobby, or, indeed, from the great many Age readers who sent their kids to posh schools. I’m also yet to live down effectively backing the US invasion of Iraq long after the original liberal hawks had issued their mea culpas. Still, in no universe could I have predicted that ground zero of the culture wars would be the definition of a woman as an adult human female.

My first foray into the transgender debate was in February 2021 when Readings, Australia’s largest independent bookseller, apologised for having hosted an event three years earlier with Julie Bindel, the British radical feminist. This was a post-facto cancellation. In my column, I affirmed both sides of the discussion. “Each is mighty and indivisible,” I wrote. I saw the fight between the subjective (gender identity) and the objective (embodied sex) — a bit like how Amos Oz saw the fight between Israel and the Palestinians as a war between “two rights”.

My piece was well-received, but mostly ignored. Recently on Twitter I saw someone cite the column as evidence I’d once belonged to the #BeKind brigade, which was a bit harsh. I still subscribe to the views I expressed; to even speak of a conflict of rights is to acknowledge there are, in fact, two legitimate sides. I not only accept that trans people “exist”, but also that their right to dignity and equal opportunity requires the rest of us to affirm their identities to the greatest possible extent, at least in so far as the affirmation doesn’t undermine others’ sex-based rights. When these two rights conflict, it’s surely the job of governments to ethically adjudicate between the competing interests.

But gradually it dawned on me that Labor governments around Australia weren’t just failing to adjudicate between conflicting rights — they proudly disavowed a conflict even existed. “Anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman,” said Queensland’s Minister for Women and then Attorney General, in May, to the widespread indifference of the media.

Then, a year ago, Rohan Leppert, a senior member of the Victorian Greens, inadvertently laid bare the serious ructions in his party over trans issues. Members were calling for Leppert to be disciplined after comments he made in a private Facebook group came to light; shockingly reasonable comments, needless to say, about the affirmative care model, the state’s sledgehammer conversion-therapy laws and the conflict over single-sex spaces. Should I have held back?

I filed a column in which I defended Leppert’s views and his right to express them. The editing process was hell. I had referred to the pressure on women to cede their spaces to “males who have not medically transitioned”. Intense pressure from an unknown number of journalists further down the food chain saw the word “males” become “people” in the final copy. Hence the crack that got me sacked.

This was my first encounter with the self-appointed queer caucus. As to how many journalists sit on it, I’ve heard conflicting accounts. Less than a handful of zealots. Everyone aged under 30. Half the newsroom, when putsch comes to shove. The article ran under the headline “Trans rights shouldn’t automatically trump the rights of other groups”. This one got noticed.

The response to the piece was overwhelmingly rapturous, if only for the sheer relief that a Lefty journalist was saying the usually unsayable. But on Twitter, transactivists and their allies made chopped liver of me. I had interviewed two of these activists for my as-yet-unpublished paediatric transition story. They redacted their interviews, claiming — falsely — that I had deceived them about the story’s angle. (I would later learn that two female candidates for the Animal Justice Party in Australia’s upcoming federal election were ordered to undergo re-education after sharing or “liking” the column on social media. They resigned instead.)

A formal complaint was made about the piece to the industry body, the Press Council. It’s a frequent tactic of the trans lobby, aimed at keeping the progressive media on message. By contrast, it isn’t too exercised about Sky News and the Murdoch empire running “anti-trans” stories; in fact, such coverage helps them deter principled critics of the transactivist agenda who fear playing into the hands of “the Right”.

The Age began desperately hawking space on its opinion page for a “pro-trans” piece to “balance” mine. The transactivists refused: I was beyond the pale, too hateful to be savaged with intellectual argument. Ultimately, the takedown fell to the “Victorian Commissioner for LGBTIQ+ Communities”, in his words, “a young, queer Wiradjuri cis-man”. He accused me of creating a false divide “between women’s rights and the rights of trans people”, but didn’t explain why the divide was false. Nor did he address the concerns of “L”s within his remit who believe he’s sold out their interests to the “T”s.

In August, I learned that a detransitioner in Sydney — who had had testosterone treatment, as well as a mastectomy and hysterectomy before re-identifying with her birth sex — was suing her psychiatrist for negligence. The Age and stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald were keen on the story. Once again, the editing process was hell. This time, transactivist talking points appeared suddenly in my copy: “Trans groups say that the highlighting of those who de-transition is part of a campaign by anti-trans activists to de-legitimise gender dysphoria.”

Hilariously, they couldn’t even get their propaganda talking points right. Almost no one denies that gender dysphoria is a thing; they had meant to say “de-legitimise trans identity”. My critics were themselves trying to de-legitimise a straightforward report about a legal case, not to mention the testimony of a traumatised woman.

After I pointed this out, the lines were removed and the story ran on the front page. The following day, the mood in the newsroom was described to me as “edgy”. The day after that, the paper published a letter to the editor accusing me of “transphobic rhetoric.” This was a bit much. It was one thing to be called a transphobe on Twitter; quite another to read the accusation in my own paper. I raised the matter with the editor, who apologised, citing a breakdown in internal processes.

Before learning of the detransitioner’s case, I’d filed an entertaining column about Scotland appointing a bloke as its inaugural “period dignity officer”, his stated ambition to make menstrual products available to “anyone of any gender”. The column, being trans-adjacent, was spiked. I was told I couldn’t violate the church-and-state divide between commentary and reporting; I had started reporting on trans issues so now I couldn’t commentate on them.

The editors were, in part, trying to save me from myself. I was told they didn’t want me to end up “a Suzanne Moore” — a reference to The Guardian columnist martyred after her colleagues waged a campaign against “transphobic” content. And yet, just as The Guardian had done, The Age invited an LGBTQI+ organisation to address the newsroom about avoiding “harm” in their reporting on trans issues.

I went on sulk leave.

On my return, by which time Elligett had taken over as editor, I found the de facto gag order still in force. The state of Queensland was ushering through Parliament a gender self-ID bill similar to Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act, at roughly the same time that a doomed Nicola Sturgeon was tying herself in knots over whether a two-time trans-identified rapist — initially housed in the female prison estate, post-conviction — was “a woman”. (The bill was passed last week to the usual triumphal reporting.)

Similar legislation. Identical propaganda lines. And here, also, violent sex offenders were being sent to female prisons. I was told no. There was no “news trigger”.

But the mother of all news triggers came in March, when Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, the British women’s rights campaigner widely credited for popularising the term “adult human female” to define a woman, staged a Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne

I was — still am — looking to write a book on gender-identity politics in Australia. I thought the rally might yield a dynamic narrative, what we journalists call “colour”. I got colour all right: armed and mounted police several columns deep, two frontlines of counter-protestors of varying and bewildering political tendencies, and neo-Nazi gatecrashers performing a Sieg Heil on the steps of Parliament.

The Age published a very fair report in the immediate aftermath. But among the newsroom editors, a clear “line” took root: Parker was clearly linked with “far-Right” groups — the black-clad neo-Nazis had turned up to “protect” her. Never mind that in the week before the rally, far-Left groups had plastered the city with posters urging the comrades to turn up and fight the “far-Right”. Never mind that such rhetoric lures neo-Nazis to the scene just as flies are lured to shit.

Having been at the scene of a huge story, I pushed to write an op-ed on the rally. I explained to the editors that I was incensed at the response of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, whose pro-trans government was the primary target of the protestors’ anger. The women who came to speak came from all walks of life: Christian conservatives, butch dykes, Jewish Leftists, disaffected Greens, health workers, women in hijab.

But in the rally’s aftermath, Andrews tweeted: “Anti-trans activists gathered to spread hate. And on the steps of our Parliament, some of them performed a Nazi salute.” I told the day’s op-ed editor that, in saying this, Andrews had at best slurred the women as hateful bigots; at worst, he’d conflated them with the neo-Nazis. “Well, that’s your interpretation,” the editor responded.

Frankly, I’m happy the column didn’t run: the pressure to describe Parker as associated with the “far-Right” strained the logic and the tone. (And, oh, it also happened to be wrong.) The piece wasn’t good enough, I was told. There were too many holes. The timing was wrong. I had glossed over “the Nazis’” appearance. “And then,” the editor said, “you have these… paragraphs of Terf rhetoric.” I think we both knew there would be no coming back from that moment.

The shockwaves from the rally were felt in the Liberal Party, the Greens and Melbourne University, bringing repercussions for many of the women who had attended and, I’m sure, for plenty who didn’t. By the time Parker arrived in Auckland, the ugly rest is history: her dousing in tomato juice, the slack policing and crowd surge, a woman in her 70s punched in the face. The placards reading “Suck My Dick” and “Get off our land, CUNT!” This — apparently — is what progressivism looks like in the 21st century.

After Elligett said he wouldn’t run my piece on paediatric transition, it became clear that I could neither report nor commentate on the trans issue, even as it made headline news day after day. When Barry Humphries died, for instance, I was told I was allowed to write about his cancel-culture controversy with the Melbourne Comedy Festival — so long as I didn’t focus on the anti-trans comments that had prompted his cancellation.

In the end, like Freeman, I felt I could no longer write about anything that viscerally mattered to me. Hoping against hope, I pitched a column that would advocate for nationalising the education system. That weekend, half the Saturday magazine was a paid advertisement for the private school sector.

My mood darkened. I went on sulk leave. Indefinitely, as it turns out.

My last column for the paper was pegged to Mother’s Day. It tackled the female body and ageing, the intergenerational feminist struggle. I wrote about Victoria Smith’s book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, and how it had “radicalised” me. Smith speaks for us middle-aged Gen Xers; how it’s now our turn to wear the age-old slur of “hag”, “witch”, or a contemporary variant such as “Karen.” There’s another slur I could have used, one that Smith writes about at length in her book: “Terf.” But I knew I had to leave that word out.


Julie Szego is a former columnist at The Age.

JulieSzego

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Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
1 year ago

The absolute intolerance of dissenting opinion by the trans cult will be its downfall. Their ideology being the most patent nonsense that cannot withstand any logical argument, they are obliged to spit their venom at anyone who comes near their absurd dogma.
Their inflexabilty leads them ever further into absurdity. Today the Telegraph reports on a teacher at Rye College recorded attacking her class of 13 year old children because they questioned the logic of their classmate who identified as a cat and stood up for biological reality.
The depths of stupidity the trans ideologues reach is quite extraordinary and will be their undoing. It becomes increasingly obvious to the vast bulk of the public that these people are dangerous ideologues captured by a cult whose beliefs make flat Earthers look like respectable scientific commentators.

Last edited 1 year ago by Marcus Leach
Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

It is indeed a totally incoherent cult belief system. If children can be berated for not accepting a classmate to be a cat why should a white identifying as black not be similarly affirmed. We know it won’t happen because it offends against one of the other shibboleths of the woke lobby that regards the colour of someone’s skin as a vital characteristic of identity with privileges attached rather than a mere incidental difference in melanin content of no great importance.

The important thing is that the woke should be able to enforce a belief system on others precisely because it is absurd and self-contradictory. Like the red guards of Mao’s China they revel in the authoritarian power and relish the humiliation of sense and logic.

Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Agreed. Ask these people to explain their ideology and they will inevitably claim that its too sophisticated for the uneducated. Simultaneously, however, they will claim that it should be taught to infants. . Obviously these people are trying to indoctrinate children into their ridiculous beliefs before they have the ability to rationally analyse them.

Last edited 1 year ago by Marcus Leach
Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Agree, the saddest thing is when I see people, I know -decent people – moving from wanting to support their trans friends, (which I fully agree to) to just simply denying biology and calling anybody else a bigot.

Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

May I ask where you live and what you do for a living? I have never come across an acquaintance that bought into this rubbish but perhaps, as a 50-year old Englishman, I am in a bubble of my own. I wonder how widespread it is outside of a few students and showbiz types.

Last edited 1 year ago by Matt M
james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

This is an excellent question which deserves further response. I have two, well-educated, offspring in their late 30s, both engaged in worthwhile careers, one in Finland, one in Britain, both of whom fully subscribe to the “rubbish” you refer to. They are impervious to any debate and seem convinced that any disagreement with their views results merely from bigotry, nothing else. (They are neither showbiz types nor students).

Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

In that case I suspect I am in for it once my daughter gets a bit older (she’s 11) and starts to get the indoctrination. What joy!

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

james goater, do you have any insights into how your offspring came to their belief, which I assume they did not hold several years ago?

james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

Nothing specific, no. We have lived far apart for many years, so their views have formed alongside their contemporaries, I assume. Neither of them were particularly rebellious in their formative years. When we’re together, I’ve learned to steer clear of the subject.

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

Thanks for that response.

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

Thanks for that response.

james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

Nothing specific, no. We have lived far apart for many years, so their views have formed alongside their contemporaries, I assume. Neither of them were particularly rebellious in their formative years. When we’re together, I’ve learned to steer clear of the subject.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

My sons (mid 20s) say all their friends are completely indoctrinated. My eldest says that he had a real struggle breaking fee from the indoctrination and kept trying to ignore the voice in his head questioning what he was being fed because it made him feel like a bad person an outsider

Last edited 1 year ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

In that case I suspect I am in for it once my daughter gets a bit older (she’s 11) and starts to get the indoctrination. What joy!

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

james goater, do you have any insights into how your offspring came to their belief, which I assume they did not hold several years ago?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  james goater

My sons (mid 20s) say all their friends are completely indoctrinated. My eldest says that he had a real struggle breaking fee from the indoctrination and kept trying to ignore the voice in his head questioning what he was being fed because it made him feel like a bad person an outsider

Last edited 1 year ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

True.

RM Parker
RM Parker
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

Interestingly, it’s been a sort of creeping contagion here in NZ: constant hammering from all mainstream media outlets has left people with a soft knee jerk reaction to issues which would’ve evinced a shrug at most a few years ago.

Take “Posie Parker”, for example, and the nauseating scenes of self- serving, smug and unnecessary violence played out in Auckland. General incuriosity about what Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull actually says played heavily into this – her words were not reported (I assume they’re liberal kryptonite or something) and if you look at Wikipedia (sorry – it’s just most folks’ first resort), you discover that’s she’s an “anti transgender rights activist” who “describes herself as a woman’s (sic) rights activist”, so of course people pigeonhole the whole sorry SNAFU in the “bad person, don’t need to bother, job done” bin. Regardless of whether one agrees with her, the wiki entry is a biased and inaccurate representation (no great surprise), but this mud sticks, especially as more is thrown in real time.

Worst thing is that the current ferment only serves the interests of the “new nihilists”, rather than those of any actual transgender people (and FWIW, I have had the acquaintance of several such folk) – but none of this guff is about the stated aim, is it?

james goater
james goater
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

This is an excellent question which deserves further response. I have two, well-educated, offspring in their late 30s, both engaged in worthwhile careers, one in Finland, one in Britain, both of whom fully subscribe to the “rubbish” you refer to. They are impervious to any debate and seem convinced that any disagreement with their views results merely from bigotry, nothing else. (They are neither showbiz types nor students).

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

True.

RM Parker
RM Parker
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

Interestingly, it’s been a sort of creeping contagion here in NZ: constant hammering from all mainstream media outlets has left people with a soft knee jerk reaction to issues which would’ve evinced a shrug at most a few years ago.

Take “Posie Parker”, for example, and the nauseating scenes of self- serving, smug and unnecessary violence played out in Auckland. General incuriosity about what Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull actually says played heavily into this – her words were not reported (I assume they’re liberal kryptonite or something) and if you look at Wikipedia (sorry – it’s just most folks’ first resort), you discover that’s she’s an “anti transgender rights activist” who “describes herself as a woman’s (sic) rights activist”, so of course people pigeonhole the whole sorry SNAFU in the “bad person, don’t need to bother, job done” bin. Regardless of whether one agrees with her, the wiki entry is a biased and inaccurate representation (no great surprise), but this mud sticks, especially as more is thrown in real time.

Worst thing is that the current ferment only serves the interests of the “new nihilists”, rather than those of any actual transgender people (and FWIW, I have had the acquaintance of several such folk) – but none of this guff is about the stated aim, is it?

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

It’s a fine line. One just hopes they will come through and see the deception of it. Whatever sympathy you have for it’s adherants it is just like watching a walking lie. It is not kind in the end to encourage a lie.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

I’ve moved in the opposite direction. I wanted to support trans people, but since the “activists” presuming to speak for them became outright fascists I have stopped indulging their delusion.

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Craven
Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

May I ask where you live and what you do for a living? I have never come across an acquaintance that bought into this rubbish but perhaps, as a 50-year old Englishman, I am in a bubble of my own. I wonder how widespread it is outside of a few students and showbiz types.

Last edited 1 year ago by Matt M
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

It’s a fine line. One just hopes they will come through and see the deception of it. Whatever sympathy you have for it’s adherants it is just like watching a walking lie. It is not kind in the end to encourage a lie.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
1 year ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

I’ve moved in the opposite direction. I wanted to support trans people, but since the “activists” presuming to speak for them became outright fascists I have stopped indulging their delusion.

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Craven
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

The important thing is that when people are required to pay lip service to something that is errant nonsense it teaches them that they are powerless

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago

Yes, all taken from the playbook for authoritarians; 1984 where Winston Smith is tortured by O’Brien to agree to obvious nonsense. What was Orwell’s terrible warning turns out to be a guide for the modern Big Brothers.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago

Yes, all taken from the playbook for authoritarians; 1984 where Winston Smith is tortured by O’Brien to agree to obvious nonsense. What was Orwell’s terrible warning turns out to be a guide for the modern Big Brothers.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Too bad you had to bring race into it, but apart from that yes.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

His point was well made and race needed to be bought into it and your response shows that you have bought into the narrative to some extent

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

His point was well made and race needed to be bought into it and your response shows that you have bought into the narrative to some extent

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Why not mention the Baader- Mienhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army in Japan, the Weathermen, the Prairie Fire, and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the USA? All turned out to be authoritarian, misogynistic and hierarchical using intimidation, violence, sexual exploitation and mind control to hold onto their members and recruit new members. Far from being liberators or fostering equality such groups demonstrated far right tendencies and can be considered covert-right movements masquerading as progressive left.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

I didn’t mention the cult groups you name because they remained ultimately unsuccessful and did not capture the state and society at large.

Personally I find right and left classifications unhelpful. The appeal of the left is to say you are poor because society is unfair and the rich are exploiting you. The so-called right have the same message but they tend to identify specific out-groups as the rich exploiters. The National Socialist German Workers Party which is regarded as a party of the extreme right is as the name implies a socialist party the difference is that the exploiters were particularly identified as foreigners and Jews but in their propaganda it was the rich Jews and foreigners that were particularly vilified.

In a free society people become richer by supplying what other people want or being the heir to such an individual. In a constrained or authoritarian society you become richer by seizing the wealth of others through state power.

Those who regard themselves as leftists fighting for a fairer society tend to be surprised by the fact that by giving more power to the state to achieve that happy nirvana bad actors tend to seize that power for malign ends.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

I didn’t mention the cult groups you name because they remained ultimately unsuccessful and did not capture the state and society at large.

Personally I find right and left classifications unhelpful. The appeal of the left is to say you are poor because society is unfair and the rich are exploiting you. The so-called right have the same message but they tend to identify specific out-groups as the rich exploiters. The National Socialist German Workers Party which is regarded as a party of the extreme right is as the name implies a socialist party the difference is that the exploiters were particularly identified as foreigners and Jews but in their propaganda it was the rich Jews and foreigners that were particularly vilified.

In a free society people become richer by supplying what other people want or being the heir to such an individual. In a constrained or authoritarian society you become richer by seizing the wealth of others through state power.

Those who regard themselves as leftists fighting for a fairer society tend to be surprised by the fact that by giving more power to the state to achieve that happy nirvana bad actors tend to seize that power for malign ends.

Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Agreed. Ask these people to explain their ideology and they will inevitably claim that its too sophisticated for the uneducated. Simultaneously, however, they will claim that it should be taught to infants. . Obviously these people are trying to indoctrinate children into their ridiculous beliefs before they have the ability to rationally analyse them.

Last edited 1 year ago by Marcus Leach
Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Agree, the saddest thing is when I see people, I know -decent people – moving from wanting to support their trans friends, (which I fully agree to) to just simply denying biology and calling anybody else a bigot.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

The important thing is that when people are required to pay lip service to something that is errant nonsense it teaches them that they are powerless

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Too bad you had to bring race into it, but apart from that yes.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Why not mention the Baader- Mienhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army in Japan, the Weathermen, the Prairie Fire, and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the USA? All turned out to be authoritarian, misogynistic and hierarchical using intimidation, violence, sexual exploitation and mind control to hold onto their members and recruit new members. Far from being liberators or fostering equality such groups demonstrated far right tendencies and can be considered covert-right movements masquerading as progressive left.

J Mo
J Mo
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

The ignorance of that teacher is astounding — “there is actually three biological sexes” (besides the ideological capture, the bullying, and the grammar).
She meant intersex as well as male and female — so what is the gamete produced by the intersex person, Miss?

The kids were great.

RM Parker
RM Parker
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

Amen – the kids were stars.

RM Parker
RM Parker
1 year ago
Reply to  J Mo

Amen – the kids were stars.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

“absolute intollerance of dissenting opinion by the trans cult…..ideology being the most patent nonsense that cannot withstand any logical argument”
You may be right, I would pray you are right, but the above is true for pretty much any and every “Leftist” ideology, and intolerance and lack of logic hasn’t seemed to hurt them.
So far, we have blacks who never had a slave ancestor for centuries claiming quotas for “racism”……women claiming they are to be treated as identical to men, when it comes to maths PHDs, CEOs, action movie stars, sports money or lucrative tech or finance jobs…… muslims openly admitting what policies they will put in place if they get into power, while claiming victimhood points for “phobia”….alphabet folk screaming oppression while doing stuff in front of kids that should put you into jail….

And after all that, anyone complaining about it will meet utter intolerance.

And, to make it more delicious, it’s the upper class college educated women who were usually the ones at the front of the mob with pitchforks. Check out the typical BLM rally, for instance.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

You describe some groups accurately but I do not know why you think they are ‘leftist’ or if you think everything on the left is wrong or foolish and ideas on the right are superior.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

I would say it’s less about which is better or worse, but more because
a) the leftists have more power than the right, far more, control the media, civil service, education.
b) While far right is bandied around often, the Left is much more captured by the extremities of their ideology

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

That is so true.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Maybe, but that is exactly how the far left feels about the far right. The other guys almost always appear worse from within a bubble (that’s not directed at you personally). There are some scary currents of authoritarian populism and well-armed blood-and-soil militias on your preferred side. That mightn’t seem as scary as Woke Fever, BLM, or Antifa to some–and I can see the case for either the right or left being more dangerous at present–but it is not such a clear cut case.
Do leftists control the military? Churches? How about most governor’s mansions or the House of Representatives? Education and media? Yes, fair point but there is no ideological monopoly despite the imbalance, with significant pushback like Fox, Newsmax, WSJ, or Breitbart (and many conservative school boards, and like 3 major universities out of thousands).
I have a pretty extreme dislike of extremism, wherever it seems to land on the sociopolitical spectrum.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

The left largely controls education, welfare, local government ,science ( not so much engineering ) the media and Hollywood; basically culture and non military government expenditure.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

But don’t you agree that the military and (American) mega-churches are two major institutions that lean heavily right?
I see you’ve qualified the science claim to make it more fair (engineering) but unless you are talking the social sciences I don’t think there is a clear leftward bias–except in the sense that more scientists are rigid atheists than the general population–despite some performative wokery in the scientific and medical community of late.
I agree there is gross imbalance in higher education and major media. At the NYT, on average I’m at least a little to the right of the commenting center–which is less to the left than the articles!

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

But don’t you agree that the military and (American) mega-churches are two major institutions that lean heavily right?
I see you’ve qualified the science claim to make it more fair (engineering) but unless you are talking the social sciences I don’t think there is a clear leftward bias–except in the sense that more scientists are rigid atheists than the general population–despite some performative wokery in the scientific and medical community of late.
I agree there is gross imbalance in higher education and major media. At the NYT, on average I’m at least a little to the right of the commenting center–which is less to the left than the articles!

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

The left largely controls education, welfare, local government ,science ( not so much engineering ) the media and Hollywood; basically culture and non military government expenditure.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

That is so true.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Maybe, but that is exactly how the far left feels about the far right. The other guys almost always appear worse from within a bubble (that’s not directed at you personally). There are some scary currents of authoritarian populism and well-armed blood-and-soil militias on your preferred side. That mightn’t seem as scary as Woke Fever, BLM, or Antifa to some–and I can see the case for either the right or left being more dangerous at present–but it is not such a clear cut case.
Do leftists control the military? Churches? How about most governor’s mansions or the House of Representatives? Education and media? Yes, fair point but there is no ideological monopoly despite the imbalance, with significant pushback like Fox, Newsmax, WSJ, or Breitbart (and many conservative school boards, and like 3 major universities out of thousands).
I have a pretty extreme dislike of extremism, wherever it seems to land on the sociopolitical spectrum.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

They do tend to be leftish from my observation but I think the argument is moving away from left and right to common sense or rubbish.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Exactly, Judy. Such rigid, polarizing black versus white, good versus bad thinking.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

When the left comprised Keir Hardie, Ernie Bevin, Clem Attlee, Roy Mason , Jim Callaghan and Dennis Healey; basically tough patriotic practical Non Conformist Christians who believed in self help, responsibility and a hard days honest work should be suitably rewarded, The Left earned respect.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

I would say it’s less about which is better or worse, but more because
a) the leftists have more power than the right, far more, control the media, civil service, education.
b) While far right is bandied around often, the Left is much more captured by the extremities of their ideology

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

They do tend to be leftish from my observation but I think the argument is moving away from left and right to common sense or rubbish.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Exactly, Judy. Such rigid, polarizing black versus white, good versus bad thinking.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

When the left comprised Keir Hardie, Ernie Bevin, Clem Attlee, Roy Mason , Jim Callaghan and Dennis Healey; basically tough patriotic practical Non Conformist Christians who believed in self help, responsibility and a hard days honest work should be suitably rewarded, The Left earned respect.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

You describe some groups accurately but I do not know why you think they are ‘leftist’ or if you think everything on the left is wrong or foolish and ideas on the right are superior.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

When todays 13 year olds hit 23 and 33 they’ll look back at their childhood, at the superwoke millennial teachers trying to brainwash them, at their mutilated elder siblings, at the way truth and science disapoereared snd how they are struggling to restore them. Talking to friends who survived communism in Russia and China, it was grim then and it’s grim now. Just it’s cloaked in consumerism so it looks prettier.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

Well said!

Rose D
Rose D
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the universally inverse correlation between public awareness of & support for Gender Ideology-derived laws & policies.

Andrew Roman
Andrew Roman
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

One of my friends told me that his grandson came home from his first grade class in tears because his teacher told him that just because he had a p***s didn’t mean he was a boy. He had always thought he was a boy but now his view of his identity was being questioned by an authority figure. This can’t go on indefinitely.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

This woke nonsense is easier to teach than Maths, Latin and Greek.Compare the scholastic standards of a teacher at the bottom end academically with someone with a First in Greats from Oxford or a Double First in Maths From Cambridge who teach at a top school. Both are teachers but their abilities vary enormously.This woke nonsense is a way of teachers avoiding rigorous scholastic work such has needed to teach classics or maths to high enough standards to enter top universities.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 year ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

This woke nonsense is easier to teach than Maths, Latin and Greek.Compare the scholastic standards of a teacher at the bottom end academically with someone with a First in Greats from Oxford or a Double First in Maths From Cambridge who teach at a top school. Both are teachers but their abilities vary enormously.This woke nonsense is a way of teachers avoiding rigorous scholastic work such has needed to teach classics or maths to high enough standards to enter top universities.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

It is indeed a totally incoherent cult belief system. If children can be berated for not accepting a classmate to be a cat why should a white identifying as black not be similarly affirmed. We know it won’t happen because it offends against one of the other shibboleths of the woke lobby that regards the colour of someone’s skin as a vital characteristic of identity with privileges attached rather than a mere incidental difference in melanin content of no great importance.

The important thing is that the woke should be able to enforce a belief system on others precisely because it is absurd and self-contradictory. Like the red guards of Mao’s China they revel in the authoritarian power and relish the humiliation of sense and logic.

J Mo
J Mo
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

The ignorance of that teacher is astounding — “there is actually three biological sexes” (besides the ideological capture, the bullying, and the grammar).
She meant intersex as well as male and female — so what is the gamete produced by the intersex person, Miss?

The kids were great.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

“absolute intollerance of dissenting opinion by the trans cult…..ideology being the most patent nonsense that cannot withstand any logical argument”
You may be right, I would pray you are right, but the above is true for pretty much any and every “Leftist” ideology, and intolerance and lack of logic hasn’t seemed to hurt them.
So far, we have blacks who never had a slave ancestor for centuries claiming quotas for “racism”……women claiming they are to be treated as identical to men, when it comes to maths PHDs, CEOs, action movie stars, sports money or lucrative tech or finance jobs…… muslims openly admitting what policies they will put in place if they get into power, while claiming victimhood points for “phobia”….alphabet folk screaming oppression while doing stuff in front of kids that should put you into jail….

And after all that, anyone complaining about it will meet utter intolerance.

And, to make it more delicious, it’s the upper class college educated women who were usually the ones at the front of the mob with pitchforks. Check out the typical BLM rally, for instance.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

When todays 13 year olds hit 23 and 33 they’ll look back at their childhood, at the superwoke millennial teachers trying to brainwash them, at their mutilated elder siblings, at the way truth and science disapoereared snd how they are struggling to restore them. Talking to friends who survived communism in Russia and China, it was grim then and it’s grim now. Just it’s cloaked in consumerism so it looks prettier.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

Well said!

Rose D
Rose D
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the universally inverse correlation between public awareness of & support for Gender Ideology-derived laws & policies.

Andrew Roman
Andrew Roman
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Leach

One of my friends told me that his grandson came home from his first grade class in tears because his teacher told him that just because he had a p***s didn’t mean he was a boy. He had always thought he was a boy but now his view of his identity was being questioned by an authority figure. This can’t go on indefinitely.

Marcus Leach
Marcus Leach
1 year ago

The absolute intolerance of dissenting opinion by the trans cult will be its downfall. Their ideology being the most patent nonsense that cannot withstand any logical argument, they are obliged to spit their venom at anyone who comes near their absurd dogma.
Their inflexabilty leads them ever further into absurdity. Today the Telegraph reports on a teacher at Rye College recorded attacking her class of 13 year old children because they questioned the logic of their classmate who identified as a cat and stood up for biological reality.
The depths of stupidity the trans ideologues reach is quite extraordinary and will be their undoing. It becomes increasingly obvious to the vast bulk of the public that these people are dangerous ideologues captured by a cult whose beliefs make flat Earthers look like respectable scientific commentators.

Last edited 1 year ago by Marcus Leach
Ben Jones
Ben Jones
1 year ago

I am also Gen X. I have always been on the centre-right but in a free-speech, libertarian sense. As an undergraduate when postmodernism was first gaining mainstream traction in the late 80s and early 90s, I remember many of us who weren’t left-wing predicting this sort of lunacy. We warned our ‘progressive’ friends (yes, back then it was perfectly normal to have good friends with different political outlooks).
We were ignored. I remember the joke “it’s political correctness gone maaaad!” on a comedy show, lampooning people who warned of the direction of travel.
Now we have mainstream politicians assuring us women can have a p***s. Which they, demonstrably, cannot.
I’m not saying the author of this piece brought this upon herself because of her left-wing beliefs. I am saying, however, she was an unwitting fellow traveller. This BS was hibernating in the wings of her political ecosystem all the time. You were warned.
Hey, I’m glad so many left-wing journalists have woken up and smelled the coffee, writing in right-of-centre newspapers and magazines. I just hope other parts of your world view are similarly adjusted by your brush with authoritarian left-wing reality.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

But they haven’t woken up and smelt the coffee. They’re still writing their left-wing stuff for a different audience, wondering how the revolution that gave them what they wanted could go so wrong…
The feminists who for years tried to minimise or deny any difference between men and women (except when some evidence arose showing how women were better at something than men, which was iron cast proof of their superiority, of course), now aghast that men are muscling in on their spaces claiming to be women.
The gays and lesbians complaining about what’s happened to ‘Pride’ and desperately trying to distance themselves from the Trans- and Queer+ parts of the Alphabet Community because now, with social affirmation in their corner, some of them are going after the children, years after the normies were told this would never happen.
They all want to reverse the revolution back to when it was on their side. But revolutions don’t work like that. And now here we are.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

The women’s lib have a similar lie in that women are the same as men. Now that it has got far worse when you can change sex with a decision surely the women’s lib must now allow that women and men are different.

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

“women’s lib” was about equal pay, equal opportunities etc. When did it say that women are the same as men?

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

Exactly, Janet.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

“women’s lib” was about equal pay, equal opportunities etc.
No, it was always about getting the rights and privileges of upper class men while refusing the responsibilities and sufferings of ordinary men.
It means the CEOs of nearly all major US defense contractors being women, while the soldiers during in Iraq or Ukraine remain almost exclusively men.

“When did it say that women are the same as men?”
Continuously.
Every STEM course with more men, sports where men are clearly superior, workplaces where the dangerous and stressful jobs are dune by men….
Women incessantly claimed they are the same as men, to push for benefits, quotas and selective favourable treatment for themselves.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

You’re using women’s liberation as an exact synonym for extreme feminism, which isn’t accurate or fair. Things like the right to vote or tell your husband “not tonight” or have a credit card aren’t in the same category as the special rights extremism you use as a “straw-woman” for women’s lib.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

What you call “extreme feminism” is literally what has been the stated view and stance of women’s groups for decades.
Remind me how many “women’s lib” members supported Damore, or men’s right to their personal space, rejected “equality” for women in sports or special womens quotas in STEM?

“Things like the right to vote or tell your husband “not tonight” or have a credit card”
Apart from bringing up stuff from a century back, when women didn’t have the right to vote, the same was the case with the majority of men (who, unlike women, had to die in WW1).
When women didn’t have sole rights to credit cards, it was because if they couldn’t pay, their husbands were legally obliged for that debt – but not the other way round!

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Such an unbalanced case. You use a series of straw-women to label and dismiss the legitimate concerns of moderate feminists–a group you seem to deny exists– or “women’s libbers”.
Credit cards were often not available to single women with their own money, or married ones unless their husbands co-signed for it. Until the 1970s or 1980s, nothing a husband could do to his wife behind closed doors was ever considered rape or abuse in many instances and places.
You want to dismiss the suffragette era–which brought women the right pursue higher education, compete to enter professions, and own property they’d earned or inherited–as some antique lore that doesn’t apply to modern-day feminism.
But let me ask you: Would you have voted to give women the vote if you were alive in 1920?

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Such an unbalanced case. You use a series of straw-women to label and dismiss the legitimate concerns of moderate feminists–a group you seem to deny exists– or “women’s libbers”.
Credit cards were often not available to single women with their own money, or married ones unless their husbands co-signed for it. Until the 1970s or 1980s, nothing a husband could do to his wife behind closed doors was ever considered rape or abuse in many instances and places.
You want to dismiss the suffragette era–which brought women the right pursue higher education, compete to enter professions, and own property they’d earned or inherited–as some antique lore that doesn’t apply to modern-day feminism.
But let me ask you: Would you have voted to give women the vote if you were alive in 1920?

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

What you call “extreme feminism” is literally what has been the stated view and stance of women’s groups for decades.
Remind me how many “women’s lib” members supported Damore, or men’s right to their personal space, rejected “equality” for women in sports or special womens quotas in STEM?

“Things like the right to vote or tell your husband “not tonight” or have a credit card”
Apart from bringing up stuff from a century back, when women didn’t have the right to vote, the same was the case with the majority of men (who, unlike women, had to die in WW1).
When women didn’t have sole rights to credit cards, it was because if they couldn’t pay, their husbands were legally obliged for that debt – but not the other way round!

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

You’re using women’s liberation as an exact synonym for extreme feminism, which isn’t accurate or fair. Things like the right to vote or tell your husband “not tonight” or have a credit card aren’t in the same category as the special rights extremism you use as a “straw-woman” for women’s lib.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

Exactly, Janet.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Janet G

“women’s lib” was about equal pay, equal opportunities etc.
No, it was always about getting the rights and privileges of upper class men while refusing the responsibilities and sufferings of ordinary men.
It means the CEOs of nearly all major US defense contractors being women, while the soldiers during in Iraq or Ukraine remain almost exclusively men.

“When did it say that women are the same as men?”
Continuously.
Every STEM course with more men, sports where men are clearly superior, workplaces where the dangerous and stressful jobs are dune by men….
Women incessantly claimed they are the same as men, to push for benefits, quotas and selective favourable treatment for themselves.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

Actually most genuine feminists said, “not only do women reject being replicas of men, but we want something quite different from equality with men and the competition, aggression, dominance and hierarchy that are characteristic of male supremacist societies. Feminists hoped that their proportional representation in society would usher in an era reflecting qualities associated with women like cooperation, negotiation, health, education and social welfare.” This will never happen as the accumulation of power in male hands over millennia will always accrue to the ability of men to wield that power whether to constantly wage wars, cause extinctions of keystone species, hold women in thrall and/or push forward climate warming for profit. The male impersonation of women is just the latest tactic used to destroy the small gains women have made over the last half century. The shelters and rape crisis centers we initiated to protect women from male violence are being invaded and overrun by men in womenface driving women out and into danger again. Sports programs so hard-fought for are becoming a charade for humiliating defeats of aspiring female atheletes while watching faux females rob women of even the paltry prize sums women atheletes are accorded. I see men gloating over the wreckage of women’s rights while mocking the latest transgender tactics of men’s rights advocates. As someone who’s worked for many, many decades to build a shield for women against male depredation I must admit to some chronic over-optimism based more on hope than on reality. Nevertheless, I recognize, appreciate and applaud those few men who are speaking up against the transgenderist’s wreckage for all the right reasons.

Gia Underwood
Gia Underwood
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

Well said. The idea that feminism means women want to be like men (wrong), to behave like men (wrong), that we are an imitation of men (wrong) or that men are the default against which we are measured or aspire to is so not what women’s liberation/feminism (not libfem) is about.
We decide.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

“ability of men to wield that power whether to constantly wage wars”
No, the dedication of men to die for their country. Women leaders were as happy as men to wage war, suffragettes were happy to use white feathers to shame men into dying in the trenches. It’s just dying in war themselves that women object to.

“Sports programs so hard-fought for are …. rob women of even the paltry prize sums women atheletes are accorded.”
They weren’t “hard fought for”. Special, women only sporting categories were gifted to women by men.
Those women were too dishonest and ungrateful to accept they are way inferior to men, and demanded much more than they were worth or earned, under the claim that they are as good and the same as men. All while expecting to keep their privileged women only events.

“competition, aggression, dominance and hierarchy that are characteristic of male supremacist societies. Feminists hoped that their proportional representation in society would usher in an era reflecting qualities associated with women like cooperation, negotiation, health, education and social welfare.”
Here is another way of putting it:
The courage, entrepreneurship, goal orientation, drive that are characteristic of males and ushered in modern society and every possible achievement of science and tech, instead of which women ushered in an era of emotional drama, narcissism, sloth, “equity”….

“The shelters and rape crisis centers we initiated to protect women from male violence ”
Where are the centers for the one third of domestic violence victims who are male? Welcome to equality.

Last edited 1 year ago by Samir Iker
Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

“ability of men to wield that power whether to constantly wage wars”
No, the dedication of men to die for their country. Women leaders were as happy as men to wage war, suffragettes were happy to use white feathers to shame men into dying in the trenches. It’s just dying in war themselves that women object to.

“Sports programs so hard-fought for are …. rob women of even the paltry prize sums women atheletes are accorded.”
They weren’t “hard fought for”. Special, women only sporting categories were gifted to women by men.
Those women were too dishonest and ungrateful to accept they are way inferior to men, and demanded much more than they were worth or earned, under the claim that they are as good and the same as men. All while expecting to keep their privileged women only events.

“competition, aggression, dominance and hierarchy that are characteristic of male supremacist societies. Feminists hoped that their proportional representation in society would usher in an era reflecting qualities associated with women like cooperation, negotiation, health, education and social welfare.”
Here is another way of putting it:
The courage, entrepreneurship, goal orientation, drive that are characteristic of males and ushered in modern society and every possible achievement of science and tech, instead of which women ushered in an era of emotional drama, narcissism, sloth, “equity”….

“The shelters and rape crisis centers we initiated to protect women from male violence ”
Where are the centers for the one third of domestic violence victims who are male? Welcome to equality.

Last edited 1 year ago by Samir Iker
Gia Underwood
Gia Underwood
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

Well said. The idea that feminism means women want to be like men (wrong), to behave like men (wrong), that we are an imitation of men (wrong) or that men are the default against which we are measured or aspire to is so not what women’s liberation/feminism (not libfem) is about.
We decide.

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

“women’s lib” was about equal pay, equal opportunities etc. When did it say that women are the same as men?

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

Actually most genuine feminists said, “not only do women reject being replicas of men, but we want something quite different from equality with men and the competition, aggression, dominance and hierarchy that are characteristic of male supremacist societies. Feminists hoped that their proportional representation in society would usher in an era reflecting qualities associated with women like cooperation, negotiation, health, education and social welfare.” This will never happen as the accumulation of power in male hands over millennia will always accrue to the ability of men to wield that power whether to constantly wage wars, cause extinctions of keystone species, hold women in thrall and/or push forward climate warming for profit. The male impersonation of women is just the latest tactic used to destroy the small gains women have made over the last half century. The shelters and rape crisis centers we initiated to protect women from male violence are being invaded and overrun by men in womenface driving women out and into danger again. Sports programs so hard-fought for are becoming a charade for humiliating defeats of aspiring female atheletes while watching faux females rob women of even the paltry prize sums women atheletes are accorded. I see men gloating over the wreckage of women’s rights while mocking the latest transgender tactics of men’s rights advocates. As someone who’s worked for many, many decades to build a shield for women against male depredation I must admit to some chronic over-optimism based more on hope than on reality. Nevertheless, I recognize, appreciate and applaud those few men who are speaking up against the transgenderist’s wreckage for all the right reasons.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

The women’s lib have a similar lie in that women are the same as men. Now that it has got far worse when you can change sex with a decision surely the women’s lib must now allow that women and men are different.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

I don’t understand why a mainstream politician who says ‘women can have a p***s’ is necessarily on the left of centre.

Nikki Hayes
Nikki Hayes
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Show me someone, anyone, on the right of politics who believes than a woman can have a p***s.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Nikki Hayes

Please excuse my off-topic interruption but how is bullshit or vagina allowed while the “clinical” term for male equipment is not? Not saying it’s some great injustice, just odd.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Nikki Hayes

Please excuse my off-topic interruption but how is bullshit or vagina allowed while the “clinical” term for male equipment is not? Not saying it’s some great injustice, just odd.

Nikki Hayes
Nikki Hayes
1 year ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Show me someone, anyone, on the right of politics who believes than a woman can have a p***s.

Gill Parkinson
Gill Parkinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

The worst thing was when they tried/try to equate political correctness/woke with politeness when the left are the rudest, most distespectful people going to their opponents.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Gill Parkinson

I am in England and when I listen on the radio to ‘Today in Parliament’, the right are just as rude. We no longer seem to respect the right of others to have a different opinion nor to recognise the difference between opinion and fact.
Of course, many of today’s problems are based on the failure to recognise scientific facts from opinion based on the so-called identity based on feelings.

Last edited 1 year ago by Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Gill Parkinson

I am in England and when I listen on the radio to ‘Today in Parliament’, the right are just as rude. We no longer seem to respect the right of others to have a different opinion nor to recognise the difference between opinion and fact.
Of course, many of today’s problems are based on the failure to recognise scientific facts from opinion based on the so-called identity based on feelings.

Last edited 1 year ago by Judy Johnson
Norman Powers
Norman Powers
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

Their world view will be unscathed for as long as they can just go and start writing their same old stuff for centre-right publications instead. Why would they re-evaluate anything? Self-reflection isn’t a well known characteristic of such people.
For example, how recently is “transphobe” a cancellable term? It’s been around for a few years now at least. Yet here is the author as recently as 2019 spreading falsehoods about gender:

The disgracefully low wages in the feminised childcare sector reflects the gender pay gap in the wider economy in which “women’s work” remains undervalued.

There is no gender pay gap and this lie by feminists has been debunked repeatedly for decades. On average women choose to do easy and safe but low paid jobs like journalism. On average, men choose to do well paying often dangerous jobs that require objectively hard skills and thus earn more. Szego surely knows this, somewhere deep down. Yet she chose to peddle these gender myths because they were advantageous to her and her ideology. Now other people on the left are pushing a different set of gender-related falsehoods and it’s a problem for her. Time to break out the world’s tiniest violin.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

But they haven’t woken up and smelt the coffee. They’re still writing their left-wing stuff for a different audience, wondering how the revolution that gave them what they wanted could go so wrong…
The feminists who for years tried to minimise or deny any difference between men and women (except when some evidence arose showing how women were better at something than men, which was iron cast proof of their superiority, of course), now aghast that men are muscling in on their spaces claiming to be women.
The gays and lesbians complaining about what’s happened to ‘Pride’ and desperately trying to distance themselves from the Trans- and Queer+ parts of the Alphabet Community because now, with social affirmation in their corner, some of them are going after the children, years after the normies were told this would never happen.
They all want to reverse the revolution back to when it was on their side. But revolutions don’t work like that. And now here we are.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

I don’t understand why a mainstream politician who says ‘women can have a p***s’ is necessarily on the left of centre.

Gill Parkinson
Gill Parkinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

The worst thing was when they tried/try to equate political correctness/woke with politeness when the left are the rudest, most distespectful people going to their opponents.

Norman Powers
Norman Powers
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

Their world view will be unscathed for as long as they can just go and start writing their same old stuff for centre-right publications instead. Why would they re-evaluate anything? Self-reflection isn’t a well known characteristic of such people.
For example, how recently is “transphobe” a cancellable term? It’s been around for a few years now at least. Yet here is the author as recently as 2019 spreading falsehoods about gender:

The disgracefully low wages in the feminised childcare sector reflects the gender pay gap in the wider economy in which “women’s work” remains undervalued.

There is no gender pay gap and this lie by feminists has been debunked repeatedly for decades. On average women choose to do easy and safe but low paid jobs like journalism. On average, men choose to do well paying often dangerous jobs that require objectively hard skills and thus earn more. Szego surely knows this, somewhere deep down. Yet she chose to peddle these gender myths because they were advantageous to her and her ideology. Now other people on the left are pushing a different set of gender-related falsehoods and it’s a problem for her. Time to break out the world’s tiniest violin.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
1 year ago

I am also Gen X. I have always been on the centre-right but in a free-speech, libertarian sense. As an undergraduate when postmodernism was first gaining mainstream traction in the late 80s and early 90s, I remember many of us who weren’t left-wing predicting this sort of lunacy. We warned our ‘progressive’ friends (yes, back then it was perfectly normal to have good friends with different political outlooks).
We were ignored. I remember the joke “it’s political correctness gone maaaad!” on a comedy show, lampooning people who warned of the direction of travel.
Now we have mainstream politicians assuring us women can have a p***s. Which they, demonstrably, cannot.
I’m not saying the author of this piece brought this upon herself because of her left-wing beliefs. I am saying, however, she was an unwitting fellow traveller. This BS was hibernating in the wings of her political ecosystem all the time. You were warned.
Hey, I’m glad so many left-wing journalists have woken up and smelled the coffee, writing in right-of-centre newspapers and magazines. I just hope other parts of your world view are similarly adjusted by your brush with authoritarian left-wing reality.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago

I was in Melbourne during and after KJK’s “Let Women Speak” event.
The reporting was appallingly biased and even the “Murdoch empire” was calling her an “anti trans activist”. The climate whipped up by the papers and the broadcast media culminated in violence in NZ.

Nobody seemed aware of the current medical and political scandals caused by zealous affirmation England and Scotland. They simply weren’t being reported on .

It is kind of amusing to see The Age editors practising a “paper of record” simulation. Unlike The Guardian, it wasn’t always a leftwng paper but had moved that way by the mid-1990s and was drawn completely into the vortex once social media took hold.

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
1 year ago

I did a site search on the CBC website a month after the first decision came down in the Tavistock lawsuit. Not one word about it. They refuse to cover issues that don’t support the narrative.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Johnson

Talk about bias. The MSM completely ignore things they do not agree with. Hopeless reporting.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Johnson

Talk about bias. The MSM completely ignore things they do not agree with. Hopeless reporting.

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
1 year ago

I did a site search on the CBC website a month after the first decision came down in the Tavistock lawsuit. Not one word about it. They refuse to cover issues that don’t support the narrative.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago

I was in Melbourne during and after KJK’s “Let Women Speak” event.
The reporting was appallingly biased and even the “Murdoch empire” was calling her an “anti trans activist”. The climate whipped up by the papers and the broadcast media culminated in violence in NZ.

Nobody seemed aware of the current medical and political scandals caused by zealous affirmation England and Scotland. They simply weren’t being reported on .

It is kind of amusing to see The Age editors practising a “paper of record” simulation. Unlike The Guardian, it wasn’t always a leftwng paper but had moved that way by the mid-1990s and was drawn completely into the vortex once social media took hold.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 year ago

“I’m a veteran Left-leaning campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities.”

Another biter bit, then. Welcome to the world that you never realised that you were arguing for.

Last edited 1 year ago by Derek Smith
Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Precisely.

They achieved the world they wanted. The tipping point was a few years back. Damore, the shrill claims for equal prize money for female sportswomen in football etc, the squelching of studies at universities looking at biological reasons for gender gaps in areas like STEM rather than “sexism”…..

The culture of having a closed ideological basis for “science”, vilification and cancellation of dissent, was put in place by leftists, and feminists were a key part of that coalition . In multiple areas, racism, climate change, COVID, but nowhere more so than gender studies, where you had to accept that women were to be exactly the same as men….or else.

The trans lobby is simply walking through an open gate. A gate thrown open by these lovely ladies, because they were too stupid, too self centred, too bigoted to think there might be consequences.

Last edited 1 year ago by Samir Iker
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Are you saying women’s lib caused all this stuff? I suppose that men can have women’s rights if they dress up as a woman.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

They won’t get equal pay and they’ll get sexually assaulted often. Will a transwoman have sex with a trans man one wonders.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Conrad

They won’t get equal pay and they’ll get sexually assaulted often. Will a transwoman have sex with a trans man one wonders.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

What’s wrong with equal pay for female sportswomen in football?

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

What’s wrong with equal pay for male models, male music artists, male porn stars and male nannies?

Pat Rowles
Pat Rowles
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it in principle (and I write as someone who pays to see Chelsea Women play), but with a few notable exceptions their matches do not generate anything like the same revenue from gate receipts, advertising, TV broadcast, merchandise sales, etc. So that’s why.
I might just as well ask why I don’t get paid the same for the pub gigs I play as, say, Ed Sheeran gets for his shows.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

What’s wrong with equal pay for male models, male music artists, male porn stars and male nannies?

Pat Rowles
Pat Rowles
1 year ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it in principle (and I write as someone who pays to see Chelsea Women play), but with a few notable exceptions their matches do not generate anything like the same revenue from gate receipts, advertising, TV broadcast, merchandise sales, etc. So that’s why.
I might just as well ask why I don’t get paid the same for the pub gigs I play as, say, Ed Sheeran gets for his shows.

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

Are you saying women’s lib caused all this stuff? I suppose that men can have women’s rights if they dress up as a woman.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

What’s wrong with equal pay for female sportswomen in football?

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Precisely.

They achieved the world they wanted. The tipping point was a few years back. Damore, the shrill claims for equal prize money for female sportswomen in football etc, the squelching of studies at universities looking at biological reasons for gender gaps in areas like STEM rather than “sexism”…..

The culture of having a closed ideological basis for “science”, vilification and cancellation of dissent, was put in place by leftists, and feminists were a key part of that coalition . In multiple areas, racism, climate change, COVID, but nowhere more so than gender studies, where you had to accept that women were to be exactly the same as men….or else.

The trans lobby is simply walking through an open gate. A gate thrown open by these lovely ladies, because they were too stupid, too self centred, too bigoted to think there might be consequences.

Last edited 1 year ago by Samir Iker
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 year ago

“I’m a veteran Left-leaning campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities.”

Another biter bit, then. Welcome to the world that you never realised that you were arguing for.

Last edited 1 year ago by Derek Smith
AC Harper
AC Harper
1 year ago

Newspapers used to write about events plus an editorial comment and perhaps an opinion essay. Now opinionpapers write about opinions using cherry picked events as a prompt.
What could possibly go wrong?

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Well what is going wrong is that they are all going bankrupt because a huge percentage of the population don’t bother with their content anymore.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Johnson

How do you know that? Here we are!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Johnson

How do you know that? Here we are!

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
1 year ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Well what is going wrong is that they are all going bankrupt because a huge percentage of the population don’t bother with their content anymore.

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 year ago

Newspapers used to write about events plus an editorial comment and perhaps an opinion essay. Now opinionpapers write about opinions using cherry picked events as a prompt.
What could possibly go wrong?

Gia Underwood
Gia Underwood
1 year ago

I wrote this letter to Patrick Elligett early this year about the reporting on Moira Deeming’s maiden speech. Whilst I am and always will be Left wing, union to my core and a feminist, I have always loathed dishonesty, including from my ‘side’. When the journalism comes from someone who mis-uses their significant platform they are also adding to the perceived degradation of the fourth estate.

I did not receive a reply.

**start letter**

Dear (new, and welcome) Editor,

On February 21st Broede Carmody reported on Moira Deeming’s maiden speech.

His reporting of it is deeply biased. It paints a picture that vilifies her views, paints them in the most damning way possible in exactly the same manner that Sky News reporting does to people they do not agree with, and omits large and significant swathes of what she actually spoke about.

For example, what he wrote:
“In a wide-ranging speech, Moira Deeming, a former teacher and Melton councillor, denounced ideals of unity and equality “taken to extremes”.”

What she actually said:
“I grew up idolising the left, the unions and the Labor Party. The ideals of unity and equality still resonate with me, but when taken to extremes these ideals have a dark side.”

What he wrote:
“Deeming also criticised recent changes to Victorian law to outlaw gay conversion therapy and allow gender transition in children.”

What she said:
“Thirdly, transgender affirmation practices on minors – this government has made it illegal for parents and clinicians of gender-dysphoric children to seek out any treatments at all, no matter how reasonable, if they are designed to naturally alleviate the dysphoric feelings and leave the child’s body intact.”

What she did not include was any criticism of outlawing gay conversion therapy. He claims she did. She did not even mention gay conversion therapy.

The legislation does not ‘allow gender transition in children’ as he claims. It requires gender transition for any child who claims a gender other than their biological sex. Link to this as follows:

https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/change-or-suppression-practices/have-you-experienced-a-change-or-suppression-practice/

Opinion pieces are fine, but when they’re dressed up as reporting actual events we have the absolute right to unbiased and accurate reporting, and to not be mislead, whatever the personal political views are of the reporter.

I would appreciate a reply to this email.

****End of letter****

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

Yes, this sort of dishonest reporting is no different to that of Der Sturmer or Pravda.

Jane Watson
Jane Watson
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

Great letter, thanks for your efforts.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

Yes, this sort of dishonest reporting is no different to that of Der Sturmer or Pravda.

Jane Watson
Jane Watson
1 year ago
Reply to  Gia Underwood

Great letter, thanks for your efforts.

Gia Underwood
Gia Underwood
1 year ago

I wrote this letter to Patrick Elligett early this year about the reporting on Moira Deeming’s maiden speech. Whilst I am and always will be Left wing, union to my core and a feminist, I have always loathed dishonesty, including from my ‘side’. When the journalism comes from someone who mis-uses their significant platform they are also adding to the perceived degradation of the fourth estate.

I did not receive a reply.

**start letter**

Dear (new, and welcome) Editor,

On February 21st Broede Carmody reported on Moira Deeming’s maiden speech.

His reporting of it is deeply biased. It paints a picture that vilifies her views, paints them in the most damning way possible in exactly the same manner that Sky News reporting does to people they do not agree with, and omits large and significant swathes of what she actually spoke about.

For example, what he wrote:
“In a wide-ranging speech, Moira Deeming, a former teacher and Melton councillor, denounced ideals of unity and equality “taken to extremes”.”

What she actually said:
“I grew up idolising the left, the unions and the Labor Party. The ideals of unity and equality still resonate with me, but when taken to extremes these ideals have a dark side.”

What he wrote:
“Deeming also criticised recent changes to Victorian law to outlaw gay conversion therapy and allow gender transition in children.”

What she said:
“Thirdly, transgender affirmation practices on minors – this government has made it illegal for parents and clinicians of gender-dysphoric children to seek out any treatments at all, no matter how reasonable, if they are designed to naturally alleviate the dysphoric feelings and leave the child’s body intact.”

What she did not include was any criticism of outlawing gay conversion therapy. He claims she did. She did not even mention gay conversion therapy.

The legislation does not ‘allow gender transition in children’ as he claims. It requires gender transition for any child who claims a gender other than their biological sex. Link to this as follows:

https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/change-or-suppression-practices/have-you-experienced-a-change-or-suppression-practice/

Opinion pieces are fine, but when they’re dressed up as reporting actual events we have the absolute right to unbiased and accurate reporting, and to not be mislead, whatever the personal political views are of the reporter.

I would appreciate a reply to this email.

****End of letter****

Margaret Ford
Margaret Ford
1 year ago

Thanks for another great article. I’d like to know more about how the relevant legislation got passed in Victoria – I understand it was while I was focussed on lockdowns and that the third part is to be anti-vilification laws prohibiting or limiting (more) our ability to talk about these issues. There hasn’t been anything balanced in the mainstream media on these legal aspects of this problem

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  Margaret Ford

The next step will be the end of our “free democracy”, when we are punished for speaking the truth.

Cheryl Hercus
Cheryl Hercus
1 year ago
Reply to  Margaret Ford

Self ID was passed in Victoria in 2019, prior to Covid and the lockdowns. I suspect there was a concerted campaign from Rainbow Labor to have it introduced. A prominent, gay, pro, trans activist in the Victorian Greens, who has pushed for rules to expel any member who is gender critical, has a partner who is, or at least was, a member of the Labor Party and active in Rainbow Labor. Not surprisingly, the legislation was supported in parliament by the Greens. There has been a concerted, global effort to pass self ID, anti-conversion bans, and hate speech legislation to stop anyone talking about these issues. The anti-vilification legislation was ready to go, just needed the neo-Nazis to turn up to give them any excuse. Looks pretty fishy to me.

Last edited 1 year ago by Cheryl Hercus
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheryl Hercus

More than fishy. In the US there are organizations (including the FBI) that send fake Nazis to various events for the cameras. They walk around for a bit, carry creased flags fresh out of the Amazon package, get their pictures taken (they’re conspicuously masked), so the media can make hysterical claims of vast networks of “white supremacists”. They recently did it at Disney World to smear Ron DeSantis.
As for this writer’s complaint about her being sacked, all I can say is you don’t have to believe in unicorns to see that there is nothing “affirming” about about drugging, surgically mutilating or even just indulging the illusions of confused children.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheryl Hercus

Perhaps I missed it, but I never saw any follow-up reporting on who these black-clad figures were.
Names of indivduals? Name of organisation? Why did they come? Why did the police usher them on, as they appeared to do in KJK’s video? How come the photo opportunity was so well organised?
It’s all very well the media informing us that they were “neo-*****” but is there an actual self-described “neo-*****” organisation in Melbourne?
Have they appeared again since then?

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago

and which public official signed the permit they had to demonstrate on the street?

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago

and which public official signed the permit they had to demonstrate on the street?

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheryl Hercus

More than fishy. In the US there are organizations (including the FBI) that send fake Nazis to various events for the cameras. They walk around for a bit, carry creased flags fresh out of the Amazon package, get their pictures taken (they’re conspicuously masked), so the media can make hysterical claims of vast networks of “white supremacists”. They recently did it at Disney World to smear Ron DeSantis.
As for this writer’s complaint about her being sacked, all I can say is you don’t have to believe in unicorns to see that there is nothing “affirming” about about drugging, surgically mutilating or even just indulging the illusions of confused children.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheryl Hercus

Perhaps I missed it, but I never saw any follow-up reporting on who these black-clad figures were.
Names of indivduals? Name of organisation? Why did they come? Why did the police usher them on, as they appeared to do in KJK’s video? How come the photo opportunity was so well organised?
It’s all very well the media informing us that they were “neo-*****” but is there an actual self-described “neo-*****” organisation in Melbourne?
Have they appeared again since then?

Janet G
Janet G
1 year ago
Reply to  Margaret Ford

The next step will be the end of our “free democracy”, when we are punished for speaking the truth.

Cheryl Hercus
Cheryl Hercus
1 year ago
Reply to  Margaret Ford

Self ID was passed in Victoria in 2019, prior to Covid and the lockdowns. I suspect there was a concerted campaign from Rainbow Labor to have it introduced. A prominent, gay, pro, trans activist in the Victorian Greens, who has pushed for rules to expel any member who is gender critical, has a partner who is, or at least was, a member of the Labor Party and active in Rainbow Labor. Not surprisingly, the legislation was supported in parliament by the Greens. There has been a concerted, global effort to pass self ID, anti-conversion bans, and hate speech legislation to stop anyone talking about these issues. The anti-vilification legislation was ready to go, just needed the neo-Nazis to turn up to give them any excuse. Looks pretty fishy to me.

Last edited 1 year ago by Cheryl Hercus
Margaret Ford
Margaret Ford
1 year ago

Thanks for another great article. I’d like to know more about how the relevant legislation got passed in Victoria – I understand it was while I was focussed on lockdowns and that the third part is to be anti-vilification laws prohibiting or limiting (more) our ability to talk about these issues. There hasn’t been anything balanced in the mainstream media on these legal aspects of this problem

Peter Stephenson
Peter Stephenson
1 year ago

The unreasonableness of the sexual transition movement is one thing, and bad enough at that, but a separate problem of even greater proportion is how that unreasonableness has been empowered ten fold by almost every cultural and political organ, even by the law. Why transitioning is suddenly the thing to do is one thing, but why it has the support of the establishment is an even bigger mystery, which warrants special attention of its own, from analysts and journalists.

Last edited 1 year ago by Peter Stephenson
Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago

It’s a money maker.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago

That’s the huge, inexplicable mystery. It’s not all about the money. Is there some kind of loose-knit conspiracy behind it . Or is it as the late Molly Ivans might describe it, “A confluence of like-minded individuals.”

Paul T
Paul T
1 year ago

A friend of mine has recently succumbed to TransActivism. He briefly showed us on WhatsApp a “pledge” he had had to read out at a meeting with some charitable group he is involved with. It was serious sounding language and it appears he feels he has to keep his pledge. Has anyone heard of this pledge before? If they are coercing people to make this pledge at Alcoholics Anonymous, say, or in narcotics anonymous and similar group settings, they could quickly recruit large numbers of ordinarily strong and capable people that would then feel bound by their “pledge” – or at least, hopefully, until a critical mass of people wake up from the spell.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago

It’s a money maker.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago

That’s the huge, inexplicable mystery. It’s not all about the money. Is there some kind of loose-knit conspiracy behind it . Or is it as the late Molly Ivans might describe it, “A confluence of like-minded individuals.”

Paul T
Paul T
1 year ago

A friend of mine has recently succumbed to TransActivism. He briefly showed us on WhatsApp a “pledge” he had had to read out at a meeting with some charitable group he is involved with. It was serious sounding language and it appears he feels he has to keep his pledge. Has anyone heard of this pledge before? If they are coercing people to make this pledge at Alcoholics Anonymous, say, or in narcotics anonymous and similar group settings, they could quickly recruit large numbers of ordinarily strong and capable people that would then feel bound by their “pledge” – or at least, hopefully, until a critical mass of people wake up from the spell.

Peter Stephenson
Peter Stephenson
1 year ago

The unreasonableness of the sexual transition movement is one thing, and bad enough at that, but a separate problem of even greater proportion is how that unreasonableness has been empowered ten fold by almost every cultural and political organ, even by the law. Why transitioning is suddenly the thing to do is one thing, but why it has the support of the establishment is an even bigger mystery, which warrants special attention of its own, from analysts and journalists.

Last edited 1 year ago by Peter Stephenson
Steve Hay
Steve Hay
1 year ago

My First encounter with a trans activist was pretty hilarious at the time. Made more interesting by the way She/He carried on. The local women told She/He don’t think about using the female toilet. And generally took no shit at all from She/He. The HR manager who was a nice guy who pleaded with me the use the right name, as he got complained to, sometimes I forgot. All in all no hard done to anyone.
How things have changed now we have a cottage industry of Trans recruiters operating in schools actively recruiting troubled teenagers, usually girls. I thought this only happened in other places until the daughter of people I know. Started having “the hard word” as we used to call it. put on her via a friend by a trans recruiter.
I don’t intend to be unkind here, as I know your feelings about private schools. But the girls concerned would probably be safer there. As their management would have less tolerance for this type of child abuse on their watch.

Steve Hay
Steve Hay
1 year ago

My First encounter with a trans activist was pretty hilarious at the time. Made more interesting by the way She/He carried on. The local women told She/He don’t think about using the female toilet. And generally took no shit at all from She/He. The HR manager who was a nice guy who pleaded with me the use the right name, as he got complained to, sometimes I forgot. All in all no hard done to anyone.
How things have changed now we have a cottage industry of Trans recruiters operating in schools actively recruiting troubled teenagers, usually girls. I thought this only happened in other places until the daughter of people I know. Started having “the hard word” as we used to call it. put on her via a friend by a trans recruiter.
I don’t intend to be unkind here, as I know your feelings about private schools. But the girls concerned would probably be safer there. As their management would have less tolerance for this type of child abuse on their watch.

Ardath Blauvelt
Ardath Blauvelt
1 year ago

Anyone who refuses to render womanhood as a mere figment of someone’s imagination is aTERF. Lala land is here. Fight or flight.

Ardath Blauvelt
Ardath Blauvelt
1 year ago

Anyone who refuses to render womanhood as a mere figment of someone’s imagination is aTERF. Lala land is here. Fight or flight.

Beverly Barboza
Beverly Barboza
1 year ago

The forced acceptance of transgender people due to bullying and hatred has led to not only the bullying and hatred of anyone who questions their premise but their absolute destruction.
Why the transgender community would inflict on others the intolerance of which they themselves claim reveals the mental disorder they suffer from.
If they believed and accepted their gender identity they would be satisfied with their widespread acceptance.

Beverly Barboza
Beverly Barboza
1 year ago

The forced acceptance of transgender people due to bullying and hatred has led to not only the bullying and hatred of anyone who questions their premise but their absolute destruction.
Why the transgender community would inflict on others the intolerance of which they themselves claim reveals the mental disorder they suffer from.
If they believed and accepted their gender identity they would be satisfied with their widespread acceptance.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago

Replace the word opinion with consensus. Bleach all the color out of humanity and replace it with the rainbow. Intense, blind stupidity. That’s where we’ve arrived.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago

Replace the word opinion with consensus. Bleach all the color out of humanity and replace it with the rainbow. Intense, blind stupidity. That’s where we’ve arrived.

Mark Kennedy
Mark Kennedy
1 year ago

“Elligett responded: “Obviously we can’t have our columnists publicly disparaging the publication like that so we won’t be commissioning further columns from you.””

Not only is this not obvious, it isn’t true. A publication that specializes in analyzing public issues and doesn’t hesitate to criticize others, yet prevents its writers from pointing out when it has misbehaved or failed to live up to its own standards, has no credibility whatsoever. Can you spell ‘hypocrisy’ (or for that matter, ‘incoherence’), Mr. Elligett?

Last edited 1 year ago by Mark Kennedy
Mark Kennedy
Mark Kennedy
1 year ago

“Elligett responded: “Obviously we can’t have our columnists publicly disparaging the publication like that so we won’t be commissioning further columns from you.””

Not only is this not obvious, it isn’t true. A publication that specializes in analyzing public issues and doesn’t hesitate to criticize others, yet prevents its writers from pointing out when it has misbehaved or failed to live up to its own standards, has no credibility whatsoever. Can you spell ‘hypocrisy’ (or for that matter, ‘incoherence’), Mr. Elligett?

Last edited 1 year ago by Mark Kennedy
Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
1 year ago

No one has successfully defined what ‘trans’ even means. Is it true dysphoria? If so then it’s a mental problem & the person should be treated to see their body as it is not as they would like it to be. Is it wearing a dress & make up? What ‘rights’ does this give a man? Is it actual surgery? This effectively makes a man into male without a p***s… but still a man.
As far as I can see ‘trans’ is people presenting themselves in multifarious ways, in the glory of human creativity. Surely no one is seriously saying that they are ‘persecuted’ for that (unless they wear a gimp mask & ball-gag to their daughter’s wedding perhaps). It’s a ludicrous overstatement. True persecution is more than the misuse of a bloody pronoun. Maybe I am trans? I wear jeans & t shirts most of the time, I have short hair & I don’t wear make-up. Am I a man? Because apparently dysphoria is not necessary in order to just ‘identify’. Although in truth I have no idea what being a man is, or what it feels like. Which is the whole point, isn’t it? No one can know what if ‘feels like’ to be the opposite sex.
So my question is, since it is not biologically physically or emotionally possible for a male to become a female, what rights does a person lose for dressing up in stereotypical ‘gendered’ clothing? Or any clothing they like? They might get some looks, or even some compliments. But going into the ladies toilets or participating in their sports is not a right that they ever had, so how is it lost? Human rights are human rights, but there are protected sex characteristics involved too. For men to try to crash those boundaries is a blow to the heart of everything women have fought for since the suffragettes got us the vote. Men larping as women because they want to ‘be a lady’ is fine if that’s their thing (usually AGP). But bullying & intimidating women is not.
As for ‘affirming’ children, since when was it ok for adults to make children feel ‘wrong’? People who talk about having a “living son rather than a dead daughter” or vice versa are ghouls who seem almost to want children to have suicidal ideation. It’s grotesque. Children need time, love & a light touch to get through their puberty. In the vast majority of cases they came through without any identity issues. Those that have continuing problems into adulthood may do what they wish to their bodies. But let’s leave the kids alone.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
1 year ago

No one has successfully defined what ‘trans’ even means. Is it true dysphoria? If so then it’s a mental problem & the person should be treated to see their body as it is not as they would like it to be. Is it wearing a dress & make up? What ‘rights’ does this give a man? Is it actual surgery? This effectively makes a man into male without a p***s… but still a man.
As far as I can see ‘trans’ is people presenting themselves in multifarious ways, in the glory of human creativity. Surely no one is seriously saying that they are ‘persecuted’ for that (unless they wear a gimp mask & ball-gag to their daughter’s wedding perhaps). It’s a ludicrous overstatement. True persecution is more than the misuse of a bloody pronoun. Maybe I am trans? I wear jeans & t shirts most of the time, I have short hair & I don’t wear make-up. Am I a man? Because apparently dysphoria is not necessary in order to just ‘identify’. Although in truth I have no idea what being a man is, or what it feels like. Which is the whole point, isn’t it? No one can know what if ‘feels like’ to be the opposite sex.
So my question is, since it is not biologically physically or emotionally possible for a male to become a female, what rights does a person lose for dressing up in stereotypical ‘gendered’ clothing? Or any clothing they like? They might get some looks, or even some compliments. But going into the ladies toilets or participating in their sports is not a right that they ever had, so how is it lost? Human rights are human rights, but there are protected sex characteristics involved too. For men to try to crash those boundaries is a blow to the heart of everything women have fought for since the suffragettes got us the vote. Men larping as women because they want to ‘be a lady’ is fine if that’s their thing (usually AGP). But bullying & intimidating women is not.
As for ‘affirming’ children, since when was it ok for adults to make children feel ‘wrong’? People who talk about having a “living son rather than a dead daughter” or vice versa are ghouls who seem almost to want children to have suicidal ideation. It’s grotesque. Children need time, love & a light touch to get through their puberty. In the vast majority of cases they came through without any identity issues. Those that have continuing problems into adulthood may do what they wish to their bodies. But let’s leave the kids alone.

sam parker
sam parker
1 year ago

The Age is losing readers over this issue. It lost me & I have been reading it for 50 years. The trans “no debate” strategy is coming back to bite it. Once people find out about it – like I did 6 months ago they investigate. I was disgusted to find out Victoria had self ID laws & laws in place to direct “mature child consent” for children to take hormones without parental permission – allowed on the say of an unrelated teacher, Dr or adult. It is ridiculous to allow anyone at any age to say “I’m a ……… now & you have to validate me without question & allow me to do anything I want regardless of any danger to anyone else’s rights.

sam parker
sam parker
1 year ago

The Age is losing readers over this issue. It lost me & I have been reading it for 50 years. The trans “no debate” strategy is coming back to bite it. Once people find out about it – like I did 6 months ago they investigate. I was disgusted to find out Victoria had self ID laws & laws in place to direct “mature child consent” for children to take hormones without parental permission – allowed on the say of an unrelated teacher, Dr or adult. It is ridiculous to allow anyone at any age to say “I’m a ……… now & you have to validate me without question & allow me to do anything I want regardless of any danger to anyone else’s rights.

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
1 year ago

The Age masthead is already damaged enough that a little more damage wouldn’t have mattered. To paraphrase Old Nosey Wellington: “Damage and be damned!”

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
1 year ago

The Age masthead is already damaged enough that a little more damage wouldn’t have mattered. To paraphrase Old Nosey Wellington: “Damage and be damned!”

Katalin (Melbourne)
Katalin (Melbourne)
1 year ago

I have lived in Melbourne, Australia since 1988. The excesses of political correctness via being patronisingly called the equal of people who didn’t know me, and whom I didn’t know became apparent quite early, but Australia’s absurd reality of wilful blindness supported by fake crime-statistics only hit me years after becoming one of the many concurrent targets of a stalker coworker in 2009, whom I never called a friend of any kind.
By 2023 I learnt that as a woman being born female and living in my own home in a suburb of million-dollar homes in inner-Melbourne, I have no right to feel safe even in my own bed alone at night, behind closed doors, let alone having the right to get changed at my gym without being confronted by the utter powerlessness of biological women in Australia.
I stopped using gym change-rooms in 2017 in the Melbourne CBD, when I witnessed a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit sitting with his back to the lockers fully dressed, making no effort whatsoever to hide that he was there solely to perv on undressed women as we tried to use our lunch-breaks to get some exercise. While I saw the obvious discomfort and disgust on the faces of my fellow gym-going women, no one dared to ask him, or call a gym official. When I recalled this incident on popular talk-back radio a few years ago, I was laughed at.
I stopped listening to the radio or watching the news live on TV since.
My excuse for turning a blind eye is my need to pick my battles: mine is our police’s unsuitability for purpose, and the risks Australia’s fake law and order pose for people in Industrialised countries. As an Australian citizen, a highly educated and experienced woman with sought-after skills I don’t have the right to earn a living in reality either, but that is a whole different story. Or maybe it isn’t.

Katalin (Melbourne)
Katalin (Melbourne)
1 year ago

I have lived in Melbourne, Australia since 1988. The excesses of political correctness via being patronisingly called the equal of people who didn’t know me, and whom I didn’t know became apparent quite early, but Australia’s absurd reality of wilful blindness supported by fake crime-statistics only hit me years after becoming one of the many concurrent targets of a stalker coworker in 2009, whom I never called a friend of any kind.
By 2023 I learnt that as a woman being born female and living in my own home in a suburb of million-dollar homes in inner-Melbourne, I have no right to feel safe even in my own bed alone at night, behind closed doors, let alone having the right to get changed at my gym without being confronted by the utter powerlessness of biological women in Australia.
I stopped using gym change-rooms in 2017 in the Melbourne CBD, when I witnessed a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit sitting with his back to the lockers fully dressed, making no effort whatsoever to hide that he was there solely to perv on undressed women as we tried to use our lunch-breaks to get some exercise. While I saw the obvious discomfort and disgust on the faces of my fellow gym-going women, no one dared to ask him, or call a gym official. When I recalled this incident on popular talk-back radio a few years ago, I was laughed at.
I stopped listening to the radio or watching the news live on TV since.
My excuse for turning a blind eye is my need to pick my battles: mine is our police’s unsuitability for purpose, and the risks Australia’s fake law and order pose for people in Industrialised countries. As an Australian citizen, a highly educated and experienced woman with sought-after skills I don’t have the right to earn a living in reality either, but that is a whole different story. Or maybe it isn’t.

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago

Very interesting article that shows that trans “allies’ are even more idiotic than the activists they support. One caveat: “commentate” isn’t a word. “Comment” works just fine.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  harry storm

Exactly!! How did she get away with using commentate?

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  harry storm

Exactly!! How did she get away with using commentate?

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago

Very interesting article that shows that trans “allies’ are even more idiotic than the activists they support. One caveat: “commentate” isn’t a word. “Comment” works just fine.

Andy Martin
Andy Martin
1 year ago

I’m beginning to think there might be some truth in some claims that one in twenty or even as many as one in ten males have a fetishistic interest in what might be termed ‘cross dressing.’ While some are out and about autogynephiles posting on tiktok and other social media, others dress up in a highly sexualized version of their vision of the ideal woman, pout and preen themselves in mirrors and do lord knows what else in the privacy of their own homes, especially when the missus is out. That these men are mentally ill and delusional in their belief that they have transformed themselves into beautiful, or even as some claim more beautiful than ‘cis women’ can be seen by the messages they post accompanying their ridiculous appearance.
This might explain why there are so many men who support trans rights, are ‘trancels’ who bully and threaten women ( see the website terfisaslur.com), and who tend to be the worst kind of illiberal loony lefty.
Well, this got voted down, but no rebuttal given. I myself remain skeptical of the claimed one in twenty , even as many as one in ten, but the sheer number of ‘Buffalo Bill- type Trans ‘women’ posting images and some very disturbing messages on social media indicates that there are more than a few of these mental patients around.

Last edited 1 year ago by Andy Martin
Andy Martin
Andy Martin
1 year ago

I’m beginning to think there might be some truth in some claims that one in twenty or even as many as one in ten males have a fetishistic interest in what might be termed ‘cross dressing.’ While some are out and about autogynephiles posting on tiktok and other social media, others dress up in a highly sexualized version of their vision of the ideal woman, pout and preen themselves in mirrors and do lord knows what else in the privacy of their own homes, especially when the missus is out. That these men are mentally ill and delusional in their belief that they have transformed themselves into beautiful, or even as some claim more beautiful than ‘cis women’ can be seen by the messages they post accompanying their ridiculous appearance.
This might explain why there are so many men who support trans rights, are ‘trancels’ who bully and threaten women ( see the website terfisaslur.com), and who tend to be the worst kind of illiberal loony lefty.
Well, this got voted down, but no rebuttal given. I myself remain skeptical of the claimed one in twenty , even as many as one in ten, but the sheer number of ‘Buffalo Bill- type Trans ‘women’ posting images and some very disturbing messages on social media indicates that there are more than a few of these mental patients around.

Last edited 1 year ago by Andy Martin
John Tumilty
John Tumilty
1 year ago

There is only objective.

Last edited 1 year ago by John Tumilty
John Tumilty
John Tumilty
1 year ago

There is only objective.

Last edited 1 year ago by John Tumilty
Norman Powers
Norman Powers
1 year ago

Sigh. How many of these articles do we need, Unherd? We get it, one of your editors or maybe the boss is on the terf/classical feminism side and wants to give a home to cancelled feminists. But all these stories are the same and they’re journalists writing about themselves. This isn’t why I subscribed; journalists are almost by definition well heard.

It’s especially hard to be sympathetic to left wing activists who are eventually shocked to die by the sword. She campaigned against private schools and is now unhappy about what schools are doing with kids, she campaigned for “sex based rights” but only for women whilst claiming it was all about equality, and lots of other incoherent/bad ideas, all the whilst ignoring the warnings (mostly from men) that these ideologies always eat their own. And now she wants sympathy.

If you’re really all about sex based rights all of a sudden, start by proving it. Go spend a few years supporting men’s rights activists. Then come back.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Norman Powers

What do men need that they don’t have? I assume you mean white men.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Norman Powers

But men impersonating women to invade women’s protected spaces are Men’s Rights Activists?! Sex-based Rights? Do you mean the right of men to get higher pay than women while women perform mostly all domestic household labor for free? Or do you mean men committing 97% of violent crimes against both men and women?

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

So the women performing “mostly all domestic household labor for free” are not getting their bills paid by “men who get higher pay than women”?
Something must be done!

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Betsy Warrior

So the women performing “mostly all domestic household labor for free” are not getting their bills paid by “men who get higher pay than women”?
Something must be done!

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
1 year ago
Reply to  Norman Powers

What do men need that they don’t have? I assume you mean white men.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
1 year ago
Reply to  Norman Powers

But men impersonating women to invade women’s protected spaces are Men’s Rights Activists?! Sex-based Rights? Do you mean the right of men to get higher pay than women while women perform mostly all domestic household labor for free? Or do you mean men committing 97% of violent crimes against both men and women?

Norman Powers
Norman Powers
1 year ago

Sigh. How many of these articles do we need, Unherd? We get it, one of your editors or maybe the boss is on the terf/classical feminism side and wants to give a home to cancelled feminists. But all these stories are the same and they’re journalists writing about themselves. This isn’t why I subscribed; journalists are almost by definition well heard.

It’s especially hard to be sympathetic to left wing activists who are eventually shocked to die by the sword. She campaigned against private schools and is now unhappy about what schools are doing with kids, she campaigned for “sex based rights” but only for women whilst claiming it was all about equality, and lots of other incoherent/bad ideas, all the whilst ignoring the warnings (mostly from men) that these ideologies always eat their own. And now she wants sympathy.

If you’re really all about sex based rights all of a sudden, start by proving it. Go spend a few years supporting men’s rights activists. Then come back.

Daria Angelova
Daria Angelova
1 year ago

I had a feeling Julie’s days at The Age were numbered after the detransitioner article, so this turn of events is hardly surprising. It now officially joins The Guardian on my ignore list.

Daria Angelova
Daria Angelova
1 year ago

I had a feeling Julie’s days at The Age were numbered after the detransitioner article, so this turn of events is hardly surprising. It now officially joins The Guardian on my ignore list.

John Dewhirst
John Dewhirst
1 year ago

It is astounding how much time and emotional energy is being wasted on the trans issue. I am genuinely perplexed if not depressed at how this has come about. It’s complete bonkers, the pursuit of those trying to prove how clever they are by claiming the impossible. What’s next for the indulgent debating society, to claim that the world is flat?

John Dewhirst
John Dewhirst
1 year ago

It is astounding how much time and emotional energy is being wasted on the trans issue. I am genuinely perplexed if not depressed at how this has come about. It’s complete bonkers, the pursuit of those trying to prove how clever they are by claiming the impossible. What’s next for the indulgent debating society, to claim that the world is flat?

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago

I used to laugh at conservatives who talked about ‘liberal bias’ in the media and soft censorship. The hyperbolic reaction to Trump changed my mind, and now we have stories like this popping up every few months. Clearly I was wrong and it was no laughing matter. In a broader sense, though, this reflects on the ultimate failure of identity/social politics in general. Situations like the author’s were and are inevitable in the long term. Logic dictates that if you keep creating new grievance categories, new ways to demand accommodation from the nebulous ‘majority’, eventually there’s bound to be some overlap between them, some competition for resources/attention, and most importantly, there’s bound to be a few issues where a new group clashes with one of the old ones. Well, thirty years after identity politics was invented by short sighted American politicians, here we are. The media just keeps on doing what they always did, enforcing a certain level of conformity among their writers. This time though the issue is pitting liberals against other liberals, the new interest group vs. the established one. Independents like myself can simply sit back and watch the feeding frenzy of Twitter sharks turning on each other and tearing themselves apart, accusing each other of being Nazis and fascists just like they do everyone else.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 year ago

I used to laugh at conservatives who talked about ‘liberal bias’ in the media and soft censorship. The hyperbolic reaction to Trump changed my mind, and now we have stories like this popping up every few months. Clearly I was wrong and it was no laughing matter. In a broader sense, though, this reflects on the ultimate failure of identity/social politics in general. Situations like the author’s were and are inevitable in the long term. Logic dictates that if you keep creating new grievance categories, new ways to demand accommodation from the nebulous ‘majority’, eventually there’s bound to be some overlap between them, some competition for resources/attention, and most importantly, there’s bound to be a few issues where a new group clashes with one of the old ones. Well, thirty years after identity politics was invented by short sighted American politicians, here we are. The media just keeps on doing what they always did, enforcing a certain level of conformity among their writers. This time though the issue is pitting liberals against other liberals, the new interest group vs. the established one. Independents like myself can simply sit back and watch the feeding frenzy of Twitter sharks turning on each other and tearing themselves apart, accusing each other of being Nazis and fascists just like they do everyone else.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Jolly
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago

In addition to sharing the prevailing view of the (Un)Herd on this one–a moderate version of that view, in my own assessment–I want to applaud the honesty and self-awareness of Julie Szego. I like her “voice” or style as a writer. A fair-minded, engaging personal reflection that chronicles a raging tide of overreach–one that’s beginning to hit strong countercurrents. I hope this stupid tsunami subsides quite soon. I think it will, but perhaps not before November of next year.

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago

In addition to sharing the prevailing view of the (Un)Herd on this one–a moderate version of that view, in my own assessment–I want to applaud the honesty and self-awareness of Julie Szego. I like her “voice” or style as a writer. A fair-minded, engaging personal reflection that chronicles a raging tide of overreach–one that’s beginning to hit strong countercurrents. I hope this stupid tsunami subsides quite soon. I think it will, but perhaps not before November of next year.

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago

Australian media? Do the newspapers have things that you can colour in and are they available on plastic so good for bathtime?

james goater
james goater
1 year ago

Glad to see that sarcasm and humour are still possible — even in the most convoluted and disturbing of threads, such as this one. But sadly, not everyone is laughing.