Brendan O'Neill's take on Graham Linehan, deadnaming, the trans activist vs feminist wars, Orwellian principles, and being able to utter facts.
It's pretty uncompromising (particularly when it comes to Graham's positions in the past), but I found it an excellent read. Thank you Mr O'Neill. We do need the free-speech defenders to get over their schadenfreude and the temptation to adopt a "the-left-is-eating-itself-so-leave-them-to-it" attitude:
Fine, have a laugh about that, get it out of your system. And then let’s get back to defending Linehan, because even people who don’t believe in freedom of speech must have their freedom of speech defended.
Linehan’s speechcrime was to be trans-sceptical – or ‘transphobic’, to use the word preferred by trans activists and their allies, which include the police, the military, the Church, the educational establishment, the academy, and virtually every single celebrity. Such an oppressed movement!
Linehan has been getting into online spats for months with trans activists. He agrees with those feminists who argue that making it easier for men to identify as women (even referring to them as men is a transphobic hate crime, I know) is not good for women.
....
So we have to defend Linehan. And we have to defend ‘deadnaming’. For ‘deadnaming’ is just a Newspeak word designed to demonise the telling of historical truths. Not satisfied with seeking to control contemporary discussion and attitudes, now trans activists and their allies (all institutions, in essence) want to control the past itself. History. No way. The past happened, it was true, and we should not allow that to be erased and forgotten just to make some people feel better about themselves.
www.spiked-online.com/2018/10/11/in-defence-of-deadnaming/