Would be great if the Irish Times and other national papers would platform trans people on how Graham Linehan and his relentless campaign of abuse - typical of "gender critical" actvists - has effected their lives. Instead we get yet another handwringing article by a cis person. I would wonder if Graham had called for another minority to be punched in public would we have handwringing about "free speech" and a "both sides" defence?

At least, I suppose, the endless string of "he's not a transphobe" articles seem to have stopped.

That's something.

I listened to a bit of a "friendly" live stream where this woman was interviewed. At the top of the interview she said that she her friends didn't agree with her because they weren't as well informed, but then demonstrated she wasn't well informed in the rest of the interview 1/

https://twitter.com/MShipworth/status/1963542724109332594

For example, she brought up Judith Butler, who is the "gender criticals" pantomime "queer theory" villain. So, naturally, the interviewer asked her for her thoughts on queer theory and she said she didn't really know too much about it. All she knows is Judith Butler bad. 2/

Hi @jk_rowling

Graham tried to sue me once for repeating three things that were said on his Youtube channel by someone else. My solicitor replied with a non-exhaustive list of 30 instances where he had defamed and abused me. I never heard from his solicitors again. 1/

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1963297139905167722

This is the threat. It is vindictive, nasty, threatening, full of abuse and is in reply to a perfectly reasonable repetition of what was said on his channel. (The legal letter he eventually sent did not challenge the tweet at all, because it was true.)

Who's the bully here? 2/

Maybe another reason that @jk_rowling isn't commenting on Gaza is that Neil Blair is her literary agent, and these are the sort of tweets he is retweeting about Palestine. And yet he remains as her agent?

(With thanks to @LastRainbowFlag for highlighting this.) 1/


Neil is not just her agent, he served as chairman of her charity Lumos from 2010 to 2021. He has also been involved in production on Harry Potter movies. They clearly have a very longstanding and strong working relationship. 2/

Literally had 100s of conversations with "gender critical" activists, and know exactly what they say they believe, and what they actually believe.

For one, they have absolutely zero feminist principles (they say they do, they but they don't in practice.) How do I know this? 1/

https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1946600567821730214

Their movement platforms domestic abusers - men who have beat their wives about the head - which would SICKEN actual feminists. Actual feminists would not be able to keep quiet about their movement doing that, and yet, GCs never criticise their movement when they do it. 2/

One thing that anti-trans gay people like @Martina can't seem to grasp is that we're not saying that trans and gay people are the same, but that the OPPOSITION to people being trans and gay uses the same arguments and the same rhetoric, and often comes from the same people. 1/ Famously, homophobes claimed that lesbians like Martina were grooming young girls in tennis to become lesbians.

Lesbians were portrayed as predators. And even if they themselves weren't predators, how could you tell which lesbians were and weren't?

Sound familiar? 2/

If an author says they will use the profits from their books to target the human rights of a minority, especially a minority that is facing higher hate crime and suicide rates due to a global campaign of oppression, it is immoral to knowingly keep selling that person's books. 1/ So, the question here is not "why has this bookstore stopped selling JK Rowling's books?" the question is why does everyone else keep selling them? Selling or buying Harry Potter merch, currently, is an act of hatred of the trans community. 2/

https://x.com/NBCNews/status/1938371802276774204

Last night, @jk_rowling encouraged the public to photograph, report and publish pictures of women they think are trans using women's facilities.

I have screenshotted multiple replies calling trans women freaks, sickos, perverts and paedos, and advocating vigilante violence. 1/ Enabling people like this will endanger all women. A few days ago, Rowling was asked how she could tell if someone was trans and she glibly replied that she had the "superpower of eyesight." 2/

While admitting that Rowling is a "lost cause", Stephen Fry also says that the "vitriol" she faces "only hardens her" and is "unhelpful," as if softening Rowling is trans people's duty.

The road to increased trans rights does not lead through deradicalising Rowling. 1/ It was not gay people's job to deradicalise, or to un-indoctrination Anita Bryant or Margaret Court, no more than the road to increased rights for immigrants or black people lies in convincing Tommy Robinson that he is wrong, or finding a way to "soften" him. 2/

"Gender critical" people struggle with hypotheticals.

If Beira's Place took donations, @jk_rowling, would you be fine with them publicly courting and accepting the donation of a celebrity like Joey Barton, who was recently convicted of kicking his wife in the head? 1/ The context of this question was that a rabbit charity, acknowledging that Elon Musk owned a company that was charged with animal cruelty for experimenting on a monkey, still publicly courted and said they would accept money from him. This, apparently, is fine with GC people. 2/

Just saw a video where a prominent transphobic woman said she'd sometimes spread toothpaste on her face, and pretend to shave, she so wanted to be a boy. And the thing is, in her other writings, it is clear that this has never gone away for her.

Some transphobia is self-hatred. She says that she was jealous of the anatomy of every boyfriend she had. It says it took decades to "accept" her womanhood. She struggles with the idea of long hair. She uses the male honorific "Lord" in her online handles, or screen names.

It's really important to understand how quickly online radicalisation works on vulnerable people:

Jan: TERFism is a cult
Apr: (Being trans is) not a cult, that's dumb.
May: I don't support a cult. (note the subtle difference)
Jun: Feel like I'm leaving a cult.

6 months. 1/


In reality, nothing has changed. The "gender critical" movement is still an obvious cult, and they are experts at online radicalisation, they can turn someone from "TERFism is a cult" to this within months, because they can see vulnerabilities in people. 2/

If you're watching Legaltweetz become an anti-trans activist in real time, and you're wondering why a very small number of trans people do this (Buck, Brianna etc.), one of the reasons should be very, very obvious from his (and their) tweets:

Narcissism. 1/ You don't have to be a narcissist to be a bigot, to go against your own community, but it helps. You will see in the tweets very similar themes of citing a long history of activism, how important they are to their community, feeling underappreicated for all that they do etc. 2/

It's 10 years since Ireland enacted a "self-id" law, there hasn't been one incident of a trans woman attacking anyone in a toilet. Cis men have done so, and been prosecuted. Banning trans women from women's toilets based on vibes does nothing for women's safety. 1/

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1923043306574905771

In fact, it makes women less safe, as has been demonstrated in a number of cases recently where women who don't fit the criteria of what men think a woman should look like have been confronted in toilets by men trying to kick them out. 2/

Let's talk about this. @jk_rowling sees that men on her side are generally anti-choice. She sees men who aren't on her side are generally pro-choice. So, she reframes abortion rights as one of the "things that also benefit men" to deal with cognitive dissonance this gives her. 1/ This is how "gender critical" people deal with the logical inconsistency of being in a supposed pro-woman movement, that welcomes so many obvious misogynists as allies. If it was truly a women's rights movement, it would not attract men who are anti-women's rights. 2/

Hi @hannahsbee

In 2022, the UK media reported that it was anticipated that "1000 families" (sic) would sue the Tavistock GIDs clinic, and the case would be filed within months. To date, there is no case. As you are somewhat of an expert, and a journalist, can you explain this? As you are no doubt aware, the case was put forward by a firm called Pogust Goodhead. A representative of the firm appeared on the Times UK Radio and said that while the figure was speculative, from the looks of his email inbox, he was confident it was accurate.

Do you remember this "gender critical" artist who set out to do 100 portraits of "detransitioned women" THREE years ago, and was determined to finish in 2025?

She has done ONE portrait this year, and that comes almost a year after she produced the previous one. 1/ Without a doubt, she believed in the "gender critical" propaganda that there was a huge wave of untold transition regret out there, so finding 100 portrait subjects would surely be easy, but she has stalled at around 60, worldwide, and at some point has to admit failure. 2/

This Canadian nurse lost an employment tribunal for "expressing her gender critical beliefs" and wrote an article that said, "Standing up for women’s rights is not transphobic...It is not hateful."

This is an example of the sort of "not hateful" comment she is talking about. 1/

https://twitter.com/preta_6/status/1485842594680631297

If you go to the mainstream media now you can read that this tribunal was a "witch trial" with lots of quotes from JK Rowling about women's rights, but the reality is that this has nothing to do with women's rights, it is simply hatred of trans people. 2/

Today is the "gender critical" movement's #DetransAwarenessDay, and I think people should be aware that (the very few) GC detransitioners are generally people who fell down Right-Wing rabbitholes, and ended up tweeting, and retweeting, horrifically ableist and racist tweets. 1/


Detransition is very, very rare, and generally not because people aren't trans, but because they find it difficult to exist as a trans person in a transphobic family or community. "General critical" detransition is rarer still, and is ideological.

#DetransAwarenessDay

Stella O' Malley is a celebrity psychotherapist in Ireland, and also the founder of "Genspect."

In that role she platforms "detransitioners" who are invariably awful, hateful people who freely use ableist slurs. Think this is bad? 1/


She also platformed another detransitioner, Keira Bell, 9 days ago, a few days after Keira, a Tommy Robinson fan, was retweeting horrifically racist tweets calling black people "monkeys", for example, without comment. But at least she's the only racist in Stella's gang, right? 2/

Whenever a trans woman does anything, a transphobic woman arrives to say that "women don't do that." The other day I saw a transphobe say that no woman has ever taken a picture of themselves trying on clothes in a dressing room.

That level of irrationality can't be "debated." Looking at the person's other tweets, they weren't a stupid person, they've just been taught to hate trans women for so long that they'll talk any sort of absolute bollocks in order to justify it. You can't "debate" people out of that, that is radicalisation.