Fr Ted creator/writer Graham Linehan Arrested over posts on Transgender issues

So I presume you were fully supportive of the UK supreme court decision earlier this year that in terms of discrimination/protected characteristics the term woman referred to biological women only and gender identity did not overrule sex based rights and protections.

Who said you had to spell it out? You put a link to an article about a statue being groped in the middle of a series of links about serious crimes against women - you used the phrase "women being groped". When questioned on the relevance, your response is "it's a bit icky". Can you draw a straight line, or even a crooked one, between something that's a bit of a tourist ritual, albeit icky (like touching the testicles of Wall St's charging bull for good luck), and violence against women? And before you say it, I'm totally against people being groped - I've been on the receiving end and it was deeply unpleasant.

No say at all? Come on. Politics drives policy always. It was a highly political decision (driven by the Greens) to make WPATH specifically mentioned in the last program for government. And that was reflected in implemented policy. In its own way, the fact that both WPATH and the Greens are gone from the present government, should be seen as a change in policy or at least a change in emphasis. But, of course now services are supposed to be divorced from political/public opinion … 🙄

So, now you've moved on from claiming it was a call for violence, to accepting it was a joke but not a good one. Have I got that right?

I think your unease with both these 'sides'of the debate is not really how they are debated but that the underlying motivations require these kinds of debating styles. Because they are not arguing from an honest viewpoint, they are not you and I trying to muddle through complex things and trying to think of how best to navigate things.

They are arguing from an activist viewpoint, with a pointed attempt to push certain policies and agendas. Anything that goes against that narrative and agenda should (indeed must) be swept away. It's why debating some of these hot topic issues is so terribly frustrating. Because to counteract any opposing narratives a range of techniques are used, including to not limited to; policing language, painting oppenents as bigots or prudes, dismissing real world issues as inconsequential or exaggerated,and worst of all attempting to make debate legally impossible.

I suspect that a portion of extreme left activists were always using such debating styles but that with modern culture wars it is more difficult to coherently mantain such debating styles when left politics have now embraced a broad and inherently contradictory choice of activist issues. So the left claim to stand for women's rights but also to be against minority discrimination, and thus also advocate for LGBTIQ and muslims. But Islam in it's most extreme form is anti women and anti lesbian/gay. The TIQ and LGB ends of the gay umbrella seem to me to have inherently different issues and idealogies, one being expression based and one being sex based. Women and trans rights come into opposition as womens rights to same sex spaces cannot occur in the same space that there is blanket acceptance that trans women are the same as cis women.

So to reconcile these contradictions, and these are extremely fundamental contradictions, modern left activists need to argue from a contradictory, dishonest viewpoint. So now no true feminist would object to the hijab, as a real feminist would support her muslim sisters. No true lesbian/gay would want to restrict their dating pool to same sex people only as bigots would do that, and lesbians/gays are not bigots. Tranwomen are real women and anyone who would argue otherwise is not a feminist as feminists embrace all women. Anyone who punctures these narratives is an enemy to the agenda and needs to be quashed, as acknowledging these contradictions will cause the entire unstable house of cards to fall. It's why I often feel these activist led arguments are often virtually indistinguishable from trolls, because in part they are the same, to shut down debate or annoy people into silence.

Absolutely, I think there will be a huge reckoning in years to come from the fallout of this. The long term mental AND physical health effects of these interventions won't be something that can be rolled back or reversed. It's horrible to contemplate. I'm glad organisations like Genspect and people like Donal O Shea are doing their best to limit the amount of people sucked into this.