Duffield under investigation

Nobody ever answers this.

That is not what either if them were doing. It’s the narrative you’d like to be true.

Challenging Izzard claiming victimhood and invoking the nazis is completely different.

This is a thread about whether Duffield and Linehan were right to deny that trans people were persecuted by the Nazis.

The answer is they were not.

The second question then becomes whether that denialism is something that ought to be acceptable in the Labour Party. I think it should not.

Facts like the German court and the Bundestag - along with many historians - recognising that trans people were persecuted by the Nazis?

Being trans is not ‘choosing a certain type of clothing’.

Isn't it?

Transvestites are under the vast trans umbrella. For them, being trans is most definitely "choosing a certain type of clothing". Until recently, Izzard used to describe himself as a transvestite. He also says he has "girl mode" and "boy mode". Other than clothing, what is the difference?

Why on earth is anyone defending Izzard here, as if they’re championing some poor, marginalised, victim of a hostile society?

Izzard is powerful and influential. Izzard should be challenged for presenting Izzard as both superhero and victim. And using the nazis as his means of doing so.

Izzard uses maleness when it is to his advantage and the concept of womanhood when that suits Izzard’s purposes.

Any of you championing and defending Izzard should recognise that, however much you try to kid yourself, neither you nor Izzard is ‘punching up’.

Only what I was able to find on Google - her LinkedIn suggests she's self-employed:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-mary-jones-407883217/?originalSubdomain=uk

It's like facts are invisible to some posters on this thread. An inconvenient truth, perhaps.

It’s absolutely ridiculous that some
activist types are targeting Rosie duffield
over this when very one should have beem
mocking Izzard for declaring Izzard a ‘superhero’ and claiming victimhood via a nazi analogy.

What the fuck is wrong with the world that Izzard goes unchecked with this shite and people who do so much as liking a tweet challenging it are put under investigation?

Add to that the genuine problems with antisemitism in the Labour Party, and particularly among the sort of activists who are very keen indeed on punishing wrongthinkers, and the entire thing should be a parody.

You simply cannot keep repeating this ‘Izzard acts male for the purposes of acting’ nonsense without also grappling with the fact that gay actors also act straight for the purposes of acting.

That is utterly irrelevant to whether they would have been the subject of persecution.

As for Linehan and Duffield not being holocaust deniers - they are (most generously) holocaust revisionists. Holocaust denial doesn’t demand a flat out denial of all persecution - but the minimisation of the extent of the persecution or the denial of persecution for affected groups is part of it.

What is weird is when someone accuses someone of posting falsehoods, then totally ignores proof to the contrary. Very weird - and very predictable.

Being trans is not ‘choosing a certain type of clothing’.

Which is it? Was it not really persecution if someone - especially an actor - could hide the characteristic for which they were being persecuted? Or was it persecution nonetheless?

You don’t get it both ways - it can’t be persecution for gay people because gay people should not have been expected to deny their sexuality to survive, while also not being persecution of trans people because you think they could have just stayed closeted.

The reality is that both trans and gay people were persecuted. Denial of that fact is an example of holocaust revisionism and there should be no place in Labour for someone who engages in it.

No. Sexuality is not the same as choosing a certain type of clothing.

It's possible that gay transvestites may have been persecuted for their sexuality. Highly unlikely that straight cross dressers were.

It's weird that...

Sigh. No, it's not weird at all. You know, and understand, exactly what I'm saying, and you know perfectly well that in reality neither Duffield nor Lineham are holocaust deniers. You, like the rest of the mob in this nasty little witch hunt, are just claiming not to understand because it allows you to smear people you don’t like with some of the worst accusations our society can make.

Engage with the links that speak to the actual status, risks and yes, privileges a person like Izzard (Izzard who will happily dress "male" for money) would have faced instead of different groups you prefer to leverage to make your arguement and maybe I'll believe you are in good faith.

This is beginning to remind me of the goth student who insisted she'd have been persecuted by the Nazis for her make-up and clothing choices.

No she would not. Because if she had been a young woman living in 1940s Germany and mysteriously, and anachronistically interested in 1990s fashions, she would have had the sense not to wear them outside.

People targeted for their ethnicity couldn't leave their ethnicity at home.

It’s weird that you keep insisting that someone who could pretend not to have the characteristic targeted by the Nazis would not, therefore, have been targeted by the Nazis.

It implies that you think gay men who could pretend to be straight - indeed, gay actors who played straight roles to take the Izzard example - weren’t persecuted.

And - to revert to the original point - it is hardly anti-Semitic to draw attention to the fundamental differences in the persecution suffered by trans people and that meted out to Jews.

Now ignoring two references that clarify the degree to which trans people were, or were not, targeted by the Nazis for being trans.

And indeed some trans people may well not have felt able to adopt a "cis" persona even for self preservation.

Izzard, however, has already proved willing to adopt such a persona not just for self preservation but simply for lucrative work.

It's really weird logic for you to ignore that specific fact about the specific person the tweet was by, and the specific fact in the linked sources that people with the specific attributes which Izzard possesses, attributes which Lineham specifically referred to, were not treated like the actual victims of the Holocaust, in order to appropriate the wider suffering of a different group of people in service of your desire to slur people like Duffield and Lineham because you have a political beef with them.

Duffield and Lineham are not denying the persecution of gay and transvestite men. They are denying Izzard's appropriation of that suffering to bolster his public image.

Well researched thread by Malcolm Clark;

'' trans healthcare was pioneered by a champion of eugenics, and a surgeon who designed experiments at Dachau. His victims there were not trans.''

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1662967081191497728.html

This is really weird logic. It's a bit like saying gay people weren't targeted by the nazis because they could just pretend to be straight.

The fact remains - it's simply incorrect to claim that trans people weren't targeted by the Nazis. Also incorrect to claim that they were 'just' imprisoned, and not sent to concentration camps.

Claiming that because their persecution was different to that of Jewish people, it's legitimate to flat out deny that persecution as Linehan did and Dufflied liked is nonsense.

Do you know what Helen Mary Jones is doing now @RoyalCorgi ?
(sorry for derail, was just thinking about her yesterday)
Has she disappeared without a trace?

Quoting from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust:

"An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time.
"During the 1935 redrafting of Paragraph 175 in Germany, there was much debate about whether to include lesbianism, which had not been recognised in the earlier version. Ultimately lesbians and trans people were not included in the legislation and they were subsequently not targeted in the same way as gay men."

https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/gay-people/

If Rosie stands as an independent, I assume she could stand in any constituency she likes. I'd like to see her stand against David Lammy - think of the dinosaurs out on the streets campaigning for her! Any other ideas?

@PlanetJanette

Leaving aside that your assertion firstly conflates transvestism, a specific subset of trans identifying people, with transgenderism, and secondly ignores the more accurate and nuanced analysis linked to above that notes that aryan transvestites like Izzard tended to be met with prisons not concentration camps, isn't the more salient point that Eddie Izzard specifcally, being by his own admission more than happy to slip back into a traditional male persona for acting roles, is extremely unlikely to have maintained his trans identify in the face of either prison or concentration camps, and is therefore being grossly offensive to appropriate the hideous things done to people who did not have the same choice to further his own political agenda?

I mean this is just wrong and at the heart of what Duffield is being investigated for. I note that it is the Times that claims she is being investigated for anti-semitism. There was nothing anti-semitic about the tweet she liked.

But the tweet is an example of holocaust denialism in that it denies - falsely - that people like Eddie Izzard were targets of the nazis. That is simply untrue (your claim in this post is also untrue). Indeed, the German courts, the Bundestag and the Museum of Jewish Heritage have all set out specifically that trans people (most commonly referred to then as transvestites) were specifically targeted.