And interestingly so many of the commenters on the assault of Maria MacLaclan (a petite 60 year old woman) by Tanis Wolf (6 foot two person) say the same - she provoked it. She was asking for it.
April 2018 NewStatesman article:
'The madness of our gender debate, where feminists defend slapping a 60-year-old woman: It seems swivel-eyed to condemn rhetorical “attacks” and blithely ignore physical ones.'
BY HELEN LEWIS
(extract)
"You would have thought that a feminist getting punched in the face would be reasonably large news – particularly if her attacker had boasted online earlier of wanting to “fuck up” some feminists, comparing them to fascists. But the conviction of the person who attacked 60-year-old Maria MacLachlan at Speakers’ Corner last year didn’t trouble the pages of the Guardian, where I would normally expect to hear about something that veers close to being a hate crime, or the LGBT website Pink News. Why? A clue comes in the fact that MacLachlan was slapped by a 26-year-old transgender woman called Tara Wolf, who explained to the court that MacLachlan was a “TERF” – a term commonly used to stand for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”, ie one who doesn’t believe that trans women are “real” women, but which Wolf defined as a “trans exterminatory radical feminist”.
The implication was that MacLachlan, now 61, wants all transgender people dead – something that seems absolutely barking until you realise this is quite a common accusation in activist spaces. The feminist group Sisters Uncut, which has done great work protesting the closure of domestic violence services, somehow looked at the case and decided that Wolf was the real victim. It used a hashtag – #freetheshewolf – and called for a protest outside Hendon Magistrates’ Court, asking for support for a “trans woman targeted… and harassed by TERFs, transmisogynists and cops”, adding: “Attacks on trans lives will not be tolerated.” (Continues)
"The Wolf affair also demonstrates another alarming phenomenon: the left getting high on its own supply of self-righteousness. “Some feminists have a different conception of gender to me” gets smudged into “some feminists talk about me in ways that I find offensive” and on to “some feminists are basically Hitler, trying to eradicate people like me”.
Once you reach the last statement, then of course you can slap a woman and still think of yourself as a good person. She wants to kill you; a mere punch is self-defence. (I’m not exaggerating about the language. The Edinburgh branch of Action for Trans Health tweeted the day after the attack: “Punching TERFs is the same as punching Nazis. Fascism must be smashed with the greatest violence to ensure our collective liberation from it.”) (continues)
www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/04/madness-our-gender-debate-where-feminists-defend-slapping-60-year-old