The Rest is Entertainment

A while back MH wrote an article in the Graun 'JKR for PM', I believe.

I can understand her not wanting to expose herself and her family to the sometimes violent TRA's. She's speaking out on it in a milder way. In some regards that might be more effective with the BeKind crowd.

Love Marina ☺️

Sorry I haven’t read the whole thread so someone may already have shared this but I think this interview couldn’t be clearer on whether or not she’s GC (JKR for PM if you don’t want to click)https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/05/marina-hyde-guardian-columnist-answers-readers-questions. Was also reflecting on it when they talked about Ed Sheeran last week on the podcast and MH was adamant that celebrities getting involved in politics is pointless, and although I don’t totally agree with her on that, given the risks involved for any woman who puts her head above the parapet I can’t blame her for taking that position.

Oh that's so sad to hear, as a long-time (no more) Graun reader. I thought there'd been some movement of the oil-tanker there lately, but this doesn't help. Can't and don't blame her.

She was the only reason I still read it. Her and Jonathan Friedland (?). If she’s going k that’s it. I have no more cause to buy it. Kath Viner has run it into the ground.

Will the Guardian have any decent female columnists left?

Obviously not including Zoe 'man-pleaser' Williams in that.

Demob happy

I'm expecting Lucy Mangan is looking for the exits too

In answer to a reader question in the Guardian as to who should be Prime Minister, MH said J K Rowling - rather revealing.

I stopped listening to TRIE ages ago (ads every 20 seconds + goalhanger empire)

Marina is leaving the Guardian. Not sure why.

I’ve just got around to listening to this. I thought their (brief) comments about the BBC describing male rapists as ‘she’ and Martine Croxall’s eye roll sounded GC. I also think they wouldn’t have been as open as this just a week or two ago.

I'm getting the feeling that Richard is very much a "#bekind, let's all get along together and ignore the issues that make me feel a bit incomfortable, especially since I personally am not affected by them" sort of man.

I don’t think I can blame them for keeping quiet, it’s frustrating that more people don’t speak up but given the tantrums and abuse when people do I can understand why people keep quiet. They touched on the subject so gently this week and yet half the comments on Spotify seem to be accusing them of transphobia/being terfs/threatening never to listen again. Well, when I say “them” obviously almost all of it is directed against Marina.

I know what you mean about finding the true believers more palatable than the wimps. Likewise, I prefer transgender people, who are, after all, advocating for themselves, which is understandable, over Stonewall which was an activist organisation without a cause after gay marriage was made legal.

I think transgender people should be able to sue Stonewall for misleading them (and all the useful idiots in power) about their rights.

So they cling to the only thing they have left: their ignorance. If they can just say they never knew . . . if they can just avoid looking too closely at it all . . . if they can just mumble a bit about being kind, maybe they can make it through this unscathed.

You are being far, far to kind to them here. They are not ignorant. They know full well that men cannot be women.

They are craven, cowardly, and selfish. But soon, as the tide continues to turn and their livelihoods are not threatened by stating the truth, they will start to get all reasonable about it all.

I think MH and RO are both in the camp of "media luvvies who know where the power lies and don't want the dinner party invitations to dry up, so they keep themselves willfully ignorant".

In recent years, I find myself more tolerant of the true believers than I am of this sort of wishy-washy gutlessness. At least the true believers are engaging with the issue. You can talk to them. They will scream and froth at the mouth and call you a phobe, but many of them end up compelled to seek TERFs out and hear what we're saying, because they're so offended by our existence. Their intent is to play moral superior, of course, but there's always the chance a little seed of doubt will stick with them after the interaction is over. And sometimes that seed grows into a hardy little tree root of sanity, that comes up and buckles the concrete of the groupthink until it eventually breaks through into sunlight.

With the willfully cognitively dissonant though, there's nothing you can do. There's no way to reach them, because their self-preservation instinct is so strong they flee at the mere hint the conversation is headed in a trans direction. Usually these are smart people who know they wouldn't be able to justify the ideology if they really had to think about it. They don't want to have to make the active choice to turn a blind eye or defend the indefensible. So they cling to the only thing they have left: their ignorance. If they can just say they never knew . . . if they can just avoid looking too closely at it all . . . if they can just mumble a bit about being kind, maybe they can make it through this unscathed. And then when the tide of public opinion has safely turned, and their peers won't turn on them for speaking up, they can join in the conversations about how awful all this was, and pretend they've only just found out about it.

There's something so slimy about people like that. Especially as the conversation gets louder and louder, and you know it must be taking real effort to avoid it, at this point. Particularly for journalists, and media types who make online discourse their living.

There's not really a trans pile on. I mean there might have been, but there are a lot more comments now, mostly about the BBC in general and Trump.

I noticed this and mentioned it on the other Tim Davie thread, thought it was worth discussing as iwhether Marina is GC is a conversation that has popped up here from time to time.

The thing that struck me is that plenty of people are discussing the BBC only in the context of the Trump problem (esp in the Graun). The rest can easily be ignored if people don’t want to go there, which is why I cheered when MH did, with clarity, and expressly and deliberately said ‘males’ instead of ‘trans women’. I thought that was really telling that she didn’t fudge it.

I like the style of the podcast anyway, I think they are both good communicators, very knowledgeable, and do give a full picture of what they speak.

It was obvious Richard was going to leave this one to the women though - a niche issue to someone like him, it felt.

I don’t usually look at comments but will check them out as it is depressing there has been a pile on.

Yup

If they’d have dedicated more than the few seconds they did to this issue - i would have turned it off. I don’t listen to this podcast for anything aside from froth and trivia.

And both of them know that 99.99999% of their audience will be the same.

I can understand wanting light-hearted entertainment. I find if I read this board before bed I'm usually too angry to sleep!

But the posters here are not hijacking a lighthearted topic and ruining it for you. This is the board where women's rights are discussed and the podcasters said a little about a very relevant topic. So that's why it's being talked about. There will be other threads at other times which are about lighthearted content on this podcast but they'll probably appear on another thread.

Marina is smart and quick. I dont know if she is GC but she did talk at length abour Neil Gaiman's alleged abuse, which was appreciated.

The appeal of the podcast is the breadth of it - everything from video games to what order to do NYT puzzles in.

If I want a GC podcast, I listen to This Isnt Working or Seen in Journalism podcasts.

They were discussing the BBC. I'm fairly sure that comes under the remit of "entertainment".

Anyway, it's up to them what they discuss on their massively popular podcast. Not you.

and yet here you are in the FWR section of the board moaning that we are talking about women's rights? make it make sense.

I think as someone else said earlier (but perhaps with the opposite angle) it's what she doesn't say that shows her as GC - she never recites the TWAW mantras or talks about any brave rainbow journeys. In fact, I think she's been quite scathing about Dylan Mulvaney and that ilk as grifters who seize their moment (I could be wrong)? I've got no time for Osman, but I've read a lot of her writing and think she's intelligent and thoughtful, whatever skeletons there might be.

Yes, TriP are absolutely terrible and I gave up listening because it just seemed such an enormous issue they were hand-waving away. But MH in particular hasn't made any secret of finding the whole TRA thing ridiculous - while she hasn't said outright on the podcast "The TRA thing is ridiculous", she's made enough sardonic comments about gender woo, that RO has agreed with, that I think they're both firmly on the gender realist end of the spectrum.