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Well, there’s your problem then

All things considered, I should be a Tigger, bouncing around with excitement and driving everybody around me up the wall. But I’m not. Instead, every day feels like a slog and it’s getting harder and harder to stay positive. And that’s because every single day since I came out as trans, I’ve been subject to a war of attrition waged against trans people by bigots and their friends in the press.

That’s over six years now. Six years of the same old slurs, the same old “just asking questions”, the same long-debunked statistics and long-debunked talking points. And yet it never stops. Just yesterday, The Observer let Sonia Sodha write her weekly column about how anything bad in the news – in this case, the police arresting republican protesters at the Coronation – is all the fault of trans people. It’d be funny if it weren’t a weekly occurrence not just in the Observer but in pretty much every other paper too.

Just to remind Carrie what Ms. Sodha actually said about trans:

Take, for example, the egregious way the police have clamped down on the free speech of those who express the “gender critical” belief, protected in equalities law, that sex is binary, immutable and relevant in society. The police should be scrupulously neutral on this. Yet in recent years they have adopted the controversial position of campaigners who believe that gender identity can replace sex altogether – that being a woman is not a biological reality but instead about conforming to feminine stereotypes or a matter of inner identity, and that it is somehow “hateful” to deviate from this view.

That has led them to warn off citizens from making lawful political statements. Former policeman Harry Miller was visited by a police officer as a result of his tweets – mostly “opaque, profane or unsophisticated”, according to a judge, but well within his rights to post. There are plenty of other examples: one woman recorded herself being berated by a police community support officer for having a sticker “trans ideology erases women” in her window. A feminist activist was arrested and detained in custody for 12 hours by Gwent police on suspicion of displaying “threatening or abusive writing” after reports she had put up stickers including slogans such as “no men in women’s prisons” and “humans never change sex”. Police raided her home and, extraordinarily, confiscated a gender critical book, presumably as evidence of “wrongthink”. There are also cases of the police taking to social media to berate people for their gender critical perspectives, such as when Sussex police reprimanded someone on Twitter for saying that a convicted paedophile who identifies as a woman is biologically male, declaring: “Sussex Police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards their gender identity.”

This is not OK. Miller taking the police to court has given judges the opportunity to make this clear. “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or Stasi,” the high court warned in relation to his case. The courts ruled in 2021 that both the specific police action against Miller and the College of Policing guidance used to justify it were unlawful.

This guidance tells police forces to record as non-crime hate incidents anything – including social media posts – reported to the police that is perceived by the person reporting to be motivated by hostility, including “unfriendliness”. It is wide open to manipulation by those looking to threaten people they disagree with into silence, and by police officers who wrongly believe it is transphobic to think that sex is real and immutable.

Back to Carrie:

I’ve written many times that the line between anti-trans and anti-semite is often very blurry; some of the highest profile members of the anti-trans movement, and some of the highest profile anti-trans books, claim that “transgenderism” is a Jewish conspiracy. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of Sartre’s comments about anti-semites

Ms Sodha:

Two years ago, half of police forces paid the charity Stonewall – whose chief executive has outrageously compared gender-critical belief to antisemitism – for diversity training. Yet freedom of information requests reveal that many police forces are not properly training their officers on the law on free speech, and there are many examples of the police stating the law incorrectly to the public.

You know, it might not be what the newspapers are printing, or journalists writing. It could be the way Carrie’s reading it all.

15 thoughts on “Well, there’s your problem then”

  1. “I’ve been subject to a war of attrition waged against trans people by bigots and their friends in the press.” he whines. And we haven’t stopped yet. The white phosphorus shelling commences at…

  2. It is of course most regrettable that xe is not as bouncy as Tigger, or even Roo.
    The drugs xe is taking may be at the root of xer anomie, and if they were promoted as Happy Pills then she should sue.

  3. I get why you’re always ragging on Ritchie: he occasionally gets national media attention, so he deserves to be torn apart. But what has Carrie done to deserve any attention?

  4. As this is a relatively new public phenomenon whats ‘phobic’ about people asking questions? How else are they supposed to understand this? I’m sure if no questions were asked that would also be ‘phobic’

    I saw a trans person who has had the surgery complaining that a doctor didn’t believe they were trans and was the gender they identified as, you really can’t win with some people.

  5. Well if people use “trans” to mean “haven’t got the genitals I think I should have” *and* “now have the genitals I think I should have”, then what the hell do they expect. Language is about communication, which is founded on people using words for the same damn meaning.

  6. Andrew M- the gap between spouting and understanding is as big. TW’s said before on the subject of IT bigMouth is/was worth reading, so i guess he reads in the vain hope that he’ll change the record.

  7. ‘the same old slurs, the same old “just asking questions”, the same long-debunked statistics and long-debunked talking points.’

    I’ve noticed that I receive exactly this sort of nonsense when I point out that climate change and transgenderism are bullshit. That immigrants are evil colonialist settlers. That all we whites deserved continuing, unlimited reparations from the evil swindlers who dumped all those black no-hopers on us.

    But of course I’m right and he’s wrong.

  8. a) Very vocal campaigner

    b) Very good writer. I significantly dislike those skills being used in such a bad cause. No, not trans – don’t give a toss to be frank about that – but the persuation about poor poor me and us that goes on.

  9. I’d have thought that anyone who publishes in the public prints is fair game for having their arguments and claims examined and rebutted.

    This goes treble for anyone who even dips a toe in the water that supports cutting the tits off young girls or the knobs off young boys and feeding them ‘puberty blockers’.

  10. It could be the way Carrie’s reading it all.

    i.e through the lens of a narcissist…

  11. Fair points. Wasn’t aware of his/her status as vocal & successful campaigner. Only heard of them through this blog.

  12. @AndrewM
    But what has Carrie done to deserve any attention?
    He & I repeat HE wishes insists, no demands, people are complicit with his weird fantasy. That is a direct attack on one’s autonomy as a person to perceive, act & comment according to reality. There is nothing too bad for him or any of the men-in-frocks mob..

  13. Dennis, A Vast Reservior of Toxic Masculinity

    All things considered, I should be a Tigger…

    If nothing else, this is a perfect example of Carrie’s complete lack of self-awareness.

    Tigger was Tigger because he fully embraced – and was proud of – who he was. And he never pretended to be anything other than what he was. Lacking price in one’s self and pretending to something one isn’t are at the core of Carrie’s existence, which is why Carrie isn’t a Tigger.

    You don’t make yourself into a Tigger. You’re either a Tigger or you aren’t.

  14. Indeed Dennis. The absence of Tiggerness is infinite. Did HE never read the books? O can he a only construe them relative to HIMself? Sick fucvker.

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