Free Speech: Transgressions

With gay marriage now legal in America, there is also the sense among online social justice communities that trans rights are “the new civil rights frontier” (as Time magazine wrote next to a photo of Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox). Social media has acted like an accelerant on this fire: sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post’s LGBT section offer uplifting tales of transgender children’s achievements and famous adults coming out, alternating with occasional three-minute hates for “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists), a group who are said to be inciting violence against trans women by refusing to accept them as women. Sharing such articles has become a badge of progressive correctness. The word “TERF” is sprayed around like confetti, with very little understanding of what it means. I’ve been called a TERF, even though I think trans women are women and absolutely have a place in feminism. I think it’s become a politer way of saying “witch”...

Helen Lewis, New Statesman.

The censorship movement thrives off a sense of victimhood, the idea there are powerful forces denying them their room to speak. When journalists or debate organisers actively seek out their opinions, it is interpreted as aggression because it must be filtered through the required prism of conspiracy and suspicion.

That sense of victimhood is combined with a constant demand for political purity, whipped into a tribal frenzy by social media. Any deviation from the moral lines of the tribe is treated as harshly as possible, typically with Twitter users encouraging their followers to pile on the transgressor. The storms they create are man-made. They are not just the result of many individual decisions. Usually, they are whipped up and encouraged by a small number of prominent social media users...

Ian Dunt, Free Speech Isn't All About You, Politics.co.uk

See also Zoe Williams, Silencing Germaine Greer Will Let Prejudice Against Trans People Flourish, and Hugo Rifkind in The Times today, on l'affaire Greer, Right-on Bigots Are Their Own Worst Enemy. 

And Roger Scruton's A Point Of View: Why We Should Demand The Right To Be Offensive.

Yes, he's a right-wing shitbag, but often they seem to be the only people daring to speak out about this pitchfork-waving Victim Olympics nonsense.

The above quotes and citations also should not be seen as an endorsement of anything else they've written neither, obvs.

And nobody's defending Germaine Greer's odious comments, so don't be silly.

Pride: Now That's Magic!

Modern culture is obsessed with the idea of gays giving straights a moral makeover. Apparently gays are really politically switched-on and super-fashionable – not to mention dab hands at interior design! – and so they are encouraged to grab straights by the scruffs of their badly dressed necks and turn them into better people. You see this trope everywhere these days: in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; in the Aussie reality TV show that sent a busload of drag queens to “educate” the beer-swilling inhabitants of South Australia; in Glee, in which pretty much every storyline involves a monosyllabic jock having his prejudices corrected by a shy, erudite gay kid. The TV Tropes website describes this kind of character as the “Magical Queer”, who has “all of the wisdom in the world because he is gay” and who is often charged with “bringing culture to his heterosexual brothers and sisters”...

The Magical Queer trope takes on a political edge when it is applied to the miners’ strike. What we have here is a subtle but quite profound rewriting of history, with the miners’ strike wrenched from its historical context and turned primarily into a problem of attitudes among far-away communities rather than a life-and-death political conflict. Thatcher might have beaten the miners, but it is the new cultural treatments of their strike that really bury them, through reducing them to little more than exhibits in today’s moral trial of British men and our being found guilty of having been too macho for too long and now needing to become softer, more consensual and a bit more gay...

Brendan O'Neill, The Telegraph blog.

[Insert obligatory, 'Now while I don't agree with everything Brendan O'Neill says...' caveat here].

I haven't seen Pride (The Movie) yet, but there is something deeply disturbing about how fawning and uncritical the coverage has been.

See the ever-so-slightly OTT quotes used on the poster above, for example.

The cover of the latest issue of Attitude even declares it; 'The greatest gay film of all time'. 

Of course it is, dear. 

Maybe this is because the subject matter is - now that enough time has passed - a wet liberal's wet dream?

And how ironic that a film about working-class resistance, rebellion and non-conformity should induce such cosy bourgeois conformity.

For shame.

PS Brendan O'Neill's piece seems to be founded on a belief that homophobia no longer really exists and all is hunky-dory for The Gays now. If so, may I kindly ask him to read the Telegraph readers' delightful comments? A gay version of Lewis's Law?

Update: The Daily Express - that well-known champion of striking workers and gay rights - has called it 'an absolute joy from start to finish'.
Makes you suspect the people behind this film have fucked-up big time, no?