alling

A few years ago, I read an interview with Simon Fanshawe, one of the founders of the UK charity Stonewall. It was very insightful for a number of reasons, but what was most interesting were his thoughts on why the gay rights movement had succeeded, yet trans activism was beginning to fail.

He made the very astute point that Stonewall's strategy was to take specific issues concerning lesbian women and gay men, and from these, derive broader principles which the general public could easily support. It was all about invoking a sense of fairness, and this is how they gradually built up support for equal rights.

He compared this to trans activism, and observed that these activists weren't following the same strategy. Instead, they were just telling people they're wrong, intimidating them into silence, and calling them bigots and scum and transphobic. He predicted that this approach was going to backfire. It seems he was right.

The other point he made was how trans activism more negatively affects women and especially lesbian women, many of whom had contacted him in distress at what they saw, increasingly so, as lesbian erasure. He talked about the death threats and violence towards lesbians that came from the trans activist side. He talked about how lesbian protesters had recently been kicked out of a Pride march for asserting their same-sex sexual orientation.

If we look at the points Graham Linehan has been making, they are very similar. His satirical profile on what was purportedly a lesbian dating site was a comedy bit with a serious point: that his ridiculous and overtly male presence on there was indistinguishable from the many other males on that app who called themselves lesbians. He was using comedy to draw attention to the erasure of a much more marginalized group, lesbian women.

Their activist movement has lost ground in public opinion as more people learn about how regressive and authoritarian its aims are. Unfortunately it's no longer about tolerating and accepting differences, as with the gay rights movement, which was highly successful on this basis. Instead the primary objective of trans activism seems to be forbidding women from drawing a boundary between themselves and any man who claims to be a woman.

His dating site shenanigans were very amusing though. Clearly his flair for comedy hasn't suffered, though he could do with dialing back the obsession on this specific topic, for his own good more than anything.

The streaming services in recent years decided to remove that IT Crowd episode entirely, which is unfortunate as it was very funny.