Little Owen Jones and Private Eye

[DanseAvecLesLoup]

Oh dear😂

They also positively reviewed Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage.

@Clymene - I find him annoying to listen to. Much prefer Matthew Pottage and Bunny Guinness playfully trading horticultural blows on variegation

Hang on. Isn't Alice Roberts (I am watching Curse of the Ancients as I type) an anatomist? I haven't seen anything about her views on trans issues but surely she can't believe humans can change sex?

Sorry for the tangent. I'm just very surprised if that's the case.

No, sorry, Alice Roberts is a #bekind idiot.

Christ, that’s depressing.

“We can’t tell what sex this skeleton is as sex is a non-binary concept. Besides, we don’t know how this individual identified.”

Said no archaeologist ever.

@WarningToTheCurious JFC. WTAF.

Although I have a (very slight) hope she may be tongue in cheek with that lat bit in your screenshot. Though, sadly, I don't think so.

sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional space

I can work with this.

Sex is a fixed point, or rather, one of two fixed points. Immutable.

Gender is usually, but not always, located around its matching fixed sex point. The distance can vary, and indeed, can change over time.

In some cases gender can ping out of our known, definable, measurable universe and enter a new-niverse of [bluehaired] dimensions.

I'd draw a graph but it might look a bit like boobs.

Duh. That's right re gender, wrong re sex. Twit.

I meant Roberts not the PP, that was an xpost

She wants to “challenge the strictly binary definition of sex in humans”. Sex IS binary and there’s no two ways about it.

Oh ffs!

I lost all respect for Wong when he started wittering about gardening terminology being racist. "Native" has a specific botanical definition (plants that were present in the British Isles before the last Ice Age).

I grow "heritage" squash; not because I'm a Little Englander (squash are native to North America anyway), but because you can harvest the seeds and they'll grow reliabley true to type in the following generation. If you grow F1 seeds from packets your first crop will be great, but you can't harvest the seeds in the same way.

Fascinating how some words (like "fascist") seem to instantly dissolve the brains of otherwise intelligent people.

I think that Francis Wheen might have had an input at PE about the trans stuff; he has a history of seeing through woo and other bullshit.
I'm a bit worried now that he’s left.

James Wong has form on being vocally ill-informed and self-righteous on this stuff. Unsurprising that he has gone for Catherine Bennet publicly.

Private Eye has had for a number of years a number of good, but small, pieces/ cartoons on the more ludicrous parts of gender ideology. But I would have thought the Nicola Sturgeon/Isla Bryson debacle merited a larger piece, and for 2 editions running they have limited it to a poem at the back.

They have been excellent on other things (eg Post Office horizon disaster was written about for years) so I don’t know why they don’t call this out as a disaster waiting to happen in so many areas.

I'm not sure Ian Hislop is always that 'up' on matters pertaining to women (much as generally he's a bit of a hero of mine). I remember him getting his arse handed to him on HIGNFY by Jo Brand about sexual harassment of women.

Yes, all three men were utterly shame-faced, but at least they admitted that they were in the wrong.

Just to clarify, Hislop was not harassing women! Brand's response was in reaction to Hislop's comment of something that happened at the House of Commons "not being high level harassment".

It was four

Ian Hislop, Quentin Letts (? I think, Mail columnist), Miles Jupp and Paul Merton.

But they ended up making a joke out of it, which is when Jo Brand explained that it offended her.

Private Eye is, as they would put it, rather a male organ.

I have no doubt that, if they had someone in editorial who could put their shoulder to the wheel on this issue, they'd do a great job of investigating and exposing the nonsense. Perhaps they are lacking in female staff there.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_Eye_contributors

I see three out of 46 (figures are out of date) are women.

I can never forget, or forgive, him for the horrible, nasty way he made fun of Paula Yates on 'Have I got New For You'. But then I don't generally like the sort of humour which is reliant on making direct, nasty personal comment about people.

You'd think, but I've seen it done.

There’s a positive review of the Hannah Barnes book this week as well as the cartoon I posted earlier.