{"id":139,"date":"2013-01-13T14:34:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-13T03:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=139"},"modified":"2013-01-13T15:54:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-13T04:54:08","slug":"julie-burchill-loses-it-on-transsexuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/01\/13\/julie-burchill-loses-it-on-transsexuals\/","title":{"rendered":"Julie Burchill loses it on transsexuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the\u00a0Comment is Free site, which has a huge audience because of its connection with mainstream newspapers, Julie Burchill has a piece in which she defends her friend Suzanne Moore <\/a>from transsexual activists on Twitter. If we take Burchill at face value, Moore was driven off Twitter after being ferociously dogpiled for making\u00a0a clumsy, snide\u00a0reference\u00a0to transsexuals. This appeared\u00a0in\u00a0an essay published in a recent\u00a0anthology<\/a>. (The essay has also appeared online<\/a>, published by The New Statesman<\/em>, presumably to promote the anthology. Check it out for yourself.)<\/p>\n

All this\u00a0raises issues about the legitimacy of dogpiling tactics, when legitimate activism turns into obsessive surveillance, witch hunting, and bullying, etc. If I knew the full facts of what happened here, perhaps I’d even side to an extent\u00a0with Moore. From what I know, I have some sympathy.<\/p>\n

It seems that Moore’s\u00a0original remark\u00a0was far from exemplary, but you can judge for yourself. To me, it appears\u00a0to show a callous, superior, disdainful\u00a0attitude toward male-to-female transsexuals, but that’s possibly open to debate. In any event, there’s an argument to be made as to whether the\u00a0response to Moore\u00a0was in the appropriate place, proportionate to the offence, etc., etc. Perhaps the response\u00a0went too far in going after the writer in such a personal way. Perhaps, in all the circumstances,\u00a0this was a bullying level of escalation.<\/p>\n

Even if that is so, however, Burchill goes far beyond thoughtful argument about such issues, or even angry argument in support of her acknowledged friend. She engages gratuitously in what looks like raw, hateful, cruel\u00a0transphobia. She appears to go out of her way<\/em> to hurt and provoke (and to whip up hostility against)\u00a0male-to-female transsexuals in general, based on their characteristics as transsexuals rather than anything else. She does\u00a0not merely\u00a0criticise, even in forthright\u00a0or angry\u00a0terms,\u00a0the tactics of particular activists or activist groups. Again and again, she does this<\/em> kind of thing: “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing”; “their relationship with their phantom limb”; “the trannies. (I know that’s a wrong word, but having recently discovered that their lot describe born women as ‘Cis’ \u2013 sounds like syph, cyst, cistern; all nasty stuff \u2013 they’re lucky I’m not calling them shemales. Or shims.)”; “To have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women”; “Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days”.<\/p>\n

To say this least, this is bad form. We can argue with each other about these sensitive issues, and we can even get angry with each other. Once again,\u00a0maybe Moore was<\/em> bullied, in all the\u00a0circumstances, for a relatively minor offence in the scheme of things. Whatever. But there is no excuse for the hateful way that Burchill has chosen to express herself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the\u00a0Comment is Free site, which has a huge audience because of its connection with mainstream newspapers, Julie Burchill has a piece in which she defends her friend Suzanne Moore from transsexual activists on Twitter. If we take Burchill at face value, Moore was driven off Twitter after being ferociously dogpiled for making\u00a0a clumsy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,19,37],"tags":[67,68,64,65,66],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-debate","category-in-the-news","tag-bullying","tag-hate-speech","tag-julie-burchill","tag-suzanne-moore","tag-tanssexuals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}