They call me TERF for refusing to believe a woman can have a penis – well I’ve got a name for those who think opposite
TERFS (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) are reasonable people; most of us aren’t even TERFS.
We’ve simply accepted the slur which TRAs (Trans-Rights Activists) fling at us and owned it, as other demonised groups have.
We want trans people to have exactly the same rights as all citizens of this country.
The only places where we’re keen to exclude them from are places where women are vulnerable to the disparity in male and female physical strength — women’s prisons, women’s refuges, women’s toilets and women’s sports.
A lot of women in public life — especially Labour politicians like Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry — have, shamefully, sold out their sisters on this.
I’ve got a word for such simpering little sneaks: Transmaids.
Nicola Sturgeon was the ultimate Transmaid, until her thoroughly unhinged fangirling over transvestite rapists led to her ruin.
Currently the highest concentration of Transmaids can be found among the posh young things of the top universities, hundreds of whom bayed for the blood of Professor Kathleen Stock when she sought to speak at the Oxford Union on Tuesday night.
Having been escorted by police into the debating chamber, Prof Stock had been talking for only five minutes before a bunch of protesters started screeching.
As these clowns are utterly interchangeable with the climate-change nut-jobs, it was entirely predictable that one of them would attempt to move on the debate by that time-honoured democratic action of glueing themselves to the floor.
Riz Possnett, the sticky wicket in question, even said that the issue of whether men can magically become women “should not be up for ‘debate’.”
This was telling — universities are surely founded on the idea of rigorous debate.
But this shower aren’t up for debate because their side, despite being so expensively and extensively educated, are basically thick.
The minute facts are stated (as opposed to the feelings of this new religion of transubstantiation; namely, that a penis can become female) they run screaming in terror.
What made Tuesday night even more of an own goal was that the target was Kathleen Stock, a woman so modest and reasonable that she makes Maureen Lipman look like Mariah Carey.
As the mischievous young feminist Raquel Rosario Sanchez tweeted: “Imagine throwing such a stupid temper tantrum over Kathleen Stock, objectively speaking The Nicest & Most Pleasant One of All of Us.
”
Forced to resign from the University of Sussex where she had worked for nearly 20 years, after her commonsense views on biological sex offended a bunch of the Violet-Elizabeth-Bott-joins-the-Stasi types who infest higher education, Stock was sent countless death threats and advised to fit security cameras in her home by the police.
A lifelong lesbian, she has an effortless elegance.
It’s hard not to think meanly that it’s her ease with her own sexuality which partly upsets these mixed-up giant toddlers.
She’s like the love child of Greta Garbo and Gandhi.
Though Stock made mincemeat of the mewling mob who monstered her, it’s easy to school a bunch of hormonal teenagers with white privilege seeping from every pore.
But the issue here is far greater than the tantrums of some blue-haired bed-wetters.
Free speech must be defended everywhere, every day.
It’s never desirable to drag words like fascism into differences of opinion, but (at the risk of being immature) they started it.
The transgender cyclist Emily Bridges recently accused the British Cycling body of committing a “violent act” by barring transgender women from competing in female events, before claiming that there is a “genocide” taking place against trans people aiming at their “eradication”.
Really? Well, it’s not working very well — there seems to be twice as many contestants on Drag Race every season.
The fact is that this mob don’t understand what fascism is any more than they understand what gender penises are.
Fascism isn’t saying there are two sexes, as the TRAs maintain.
Fascism — in the early stages, long before the piles of corpses it invariably ends with — is banning people from expressing their opinion.
If they persist in speaking, it’s driving them out of their employment and from public life.
We’ve seen this happen to Joanna Cherry (banned from the Edinburgh Fringe), Baroness Falkner (ongoing attempted hounding from the Equality and Human Rights Commission) Hannah Barnes (groundbreaking book about the chemical experiments on supposedly trans children at the Tavistock Clinic turned down by 22 publishers) and the bestselling children’s author Gillian Philip, now a truck driver after being dropped by her publisher for simply adding IStandWithJK-Rowling to her Twitter bio.
She explained: “It started with online messages threatening to kill and rape me, moved on to emails being sent to my publishers demanding my sacking and ended, a day later, with me losing my livelihood.”
While the Government’s new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act will at last give free-speech-loving academics and students protection against campus cancel culture, we must not underestimate the extent to which this social (media) disease is now spreading into the real world of the supposed grown-ups.
After all, the original Salem witch-hunts started with a few malevolent adolescents and ended up consuming a whole culture.
We mustn’t let the hysteria of a handful burn down the freedoms we, all of us, worked so hard to win.
- Julie Burchill’s book Welcome To The Woke Trials is available on Amazon Kindle.