Overlap of those who are GC on social media and are also Russell Brand supporters.

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I'm feeling quite discomfited by the number of people I follow on IG due to their GC content who have also now revealed themselves to be RB supporters/defenders.

I can't get my head around how I can so passionately agree with their beliefs on gender bollocks yet be so opposed on the Brand issue when both issues boil down to protecting the rights and safety of women and children.

Of course I don't expect anyone to share all my beliefs but it's just such a stark contrast. I hate feeling in some way aligned with conspiracy theory-spouting rape apologists 🤢 .

Anyone else noticed this?

I do too.

It's the concerning current fashion for people being either all good or all bad, and it being ok to ignore usually unacceptable or illegal things if they're 'good' and to go for them with no morality and no holds barred if they're 'bad'.

Good and bad generally being judged from a political pov and tribalism. As opposed to there being set standards applied impartially and equally to all.

Hence the idea that it's fine at this point to go nuts on Brand because he's now officially a bad person. (And so is KJK, tear her to bits in a park, and JKR with her house papered with death threats). And police hate crimes units being set up to terrorise women for standing up for their rights and equality as the weapon of very dysfunctional people, while standing by and accepting crimes happening right in front of them, so long as they're being committed by 'good people' against 'bad people'.

It is all part and parcel of the same big problem.

FWIW, I don't think Brendan O'Neill is defending RB. He's just saying it's a bad idea to let companies like YouTube completely remove someone's income on the basis of allegations alone. I comepletely agree with him there, despite thinking Brand is guilty.

And encouraged to defund by a sitting MP! We all understand that he is guilty of being a sleazy sex-pest/ took advantage of his position to groom young women/ very likely can be charged with rape. If Youtube were to take action against him it should have been to demonitise his videos that he put out AFTER the allegations when everyone was lapping up whatever they could of his content (and he knew they would, he's not stupid)-- it could be argued that those videos were "profiting from his misdeeds." But removing all the income from someone who is being piled on by social media before they have had an opportunity to be found guilty :) in the normal way, whoever they are, is a bit terrifying.

And is anybody pointing out that the media created the monster that was RB. The BBC hired him specifically to be WHO HE WAS, to draw in younger viewers/ listeners. They wanted him outrageous, rude, hyper sexualised, unhinged. He was encouraged in his role as a sex pest and worse by the very people who are vilifying him now.

Beastlyslumber said it better:

He has to have those rights, because otherwise we can't claim those rights for ourselves or anyone else.

I doubt right wing people are actually gender critical.

Rather, they share the view that gender identity shouldn't supercede biological sex.

And I doubt they are motivated by it, "fits with the rest of their stuff". Yes, they may not have the social pressure that a leftie could be under, and the social pressure may even go in the other direction. And it may fit their politics in the sense that they were, and still partly are, against lesbian and gay activism. So it's natural that they don't like the expansion of this activism to transgender.

But the obvious reason why a conservative would deny that TWAW, or not want them in women’s sports, is just because it's a common sense position.

And you don't need to be into women’s rights to genuinely see an unfairness in males competing against women.

Point is, we need an explanation for why the left is going along with this, because it's so bizarre.

You don't need so much of an explanation for why the right wing rejects it. You just say it's a sincere belief. Is that not possible for right wingers?

If there is any over-lap it will be based on issues around trial by media and cancellation - whereby as soon as 'something' comes out about someone then everyone piles on, disassociates themselves in order to not be seen as complicit, and so on. Income is cut off; banned from social media platforms; contracts cancelled ,and so on.

So many of us involved in the push-back aganist trans ideology have experienced just the same.Also, because so many of us have had similar types of experience as a result of voicing our perfectly legitimate views, we've grown very ware of the culture which gves rise to such cancellation.

This culture is now commonly referred to as 'woke' culture - originating from three U.S university campus related theories: Intersectionalism; Queer theory; Critical Race Theory......these three now having morphed into a general 'social justice' mind-set which is authoritarian and prone to all of the above.

The much maligned 'right wing people' are often people like Kemi Badenoch, Miriam Cates, Jackie Doyle Price and so on....who absolutely do reject the underlying concepts behind gender identity theory........

These are not stupid, complicit women......they absolutely do get it.

The modern British Left has been taken over by american style identity politics, basically. Momentum and the Jeremy Corbyn crowd are behind much of it, and yes, they are often young.

If believing that humans can't change sex is now a right wing position and believing that they can (or at least that a person's subjectively experienced gender identity, and not their biological sex, is what makes them a man or a woman) is now a left wing position, that does not mean that having the former point of view means you are endorsing the political right or that you agree with the political right on any other issue.

It is, as you say, common sense versus nonsense.

Sadly, too many people on the political left seem to believe that in order to stay on the political left you need to adopt the latter point of view even if it is nonsense, because that is what the political left believes.

I am beyond furious that the political left have put women in a position where we either have to agree that our rights are less important than those of male people who believe they identify as women, or occupy common ground with people whose politics we otherwise deplore, including, in some cases, people who would deny us the right to have an abortion.

I also find it extraordinary that people who insist, apparently sincerely, that it is not possible to neatly divide all humans into "male" and "female" in a binary manner seem to believe that we can and should neatly divide all humans into "good people who agree with us about everything" and "bad people who disagree with us about everything".

It means I find myself up against people I otherwise respect and agree with about most things who insist on dismissing my point of view because really, when has Suella Braverman ever been on the right side of history? Maybe never. Maybe this is the first and last time Suella Braverman will ever be right about anything. But that doesn't make her wrong on this issue.

And I fear that there are only two potential outcomes here. Either the gender ideologues win, and women lose their language, their single sex spaces and their sports permanently (helped along by the women who passionately disagree but ultimately decide they can't afford to let the Tories remain in power any longer), or the political left sees the way the wind of public opinion is blowing, quietly backs down, and we all have to forgive them and forget it ever happened because they're not the Tories. Obviously I hope it will be the latter, but they absolutely do not deserve to be forgiven.

That's a bit of a tangent from Russell Brand, sorry, but I'm struggling to care all that much about Russell Brand. Obviously it's terrible if he hurt women, but to me it's just another day, yet another man behaving as though women are just resources to be exploited. And unfortunately there are people on both sides of the gender debate who think female people only exist to serve male people.

Initially I was surprised by this too OP, people who I thought held sensible views apparently supporting RB. But when I looked more closely at what they were actually saying they weren't supporting him, they were just saying 'trial by Twitter' is a really bad idea and something we should all be worried about.

It is a good thread title for the search engines.

"I think we all need to be sensitive to what's going on.
This hounding of a person, pile on from all angles of the media, the directing of opinion and cancellation is not fair or right without proper process.
Isn't this how some GC people have been treated?"

The news stories about Russell Brand are the result of years of painstaking investigative journalism, cleared by lawyers. There are numerous quotes from RB in which he admits to being a sexual predator. RB has lots of money and can easily launch a defamation action if he disputes the allegations.

It's a totally different situation from a GC feminist being cancelled for saying that a man can't become a woman.

Yes, there's trial by Twitter and then there's the fact that multiple journalists and high profile news outlets have put their necks on the line over this story.

They wouldn't have run it if they didn't have proof.

The chances of it not being true are virtually nil.

I've seen a feminist lawyer going on about 'due process' and 'innocent until proven guilty'.

which I would agree with if the conviction rate of sexual offenders would actually reflect the actual offending and not the very low % rate we see today.

I am very concerned that a government minister has been seeking to have Russell Brand cancelled rather than wait until he is found guilty in a court of law. It shows the same lack of faith in the UK judicial system as many people express here but from one of the very people in a position to make sure it works.

I don't know or follow Russell Brand but pharmaceutical companies have become extremely dangerous opponents, as we have witnessed in the transgender debate and he has lately been speaking out against against vaccines.

I'm always surprised that people who have seen how unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies are expect us to believe their every word in every other area of medicine, but such are the contradictions of this world.

I am not in the least bit interested in defending Russell Brand but a lot of women are very quick to jump on the bandwagon of condemning any man accused of sexual attacks and those types of accusations are often used for political ends. Eg. The charges against Assange were dropped once he was in prison and Alex Salmond was eventually found not guilty of the charges against him.

What is needed in the UK is a court system that can be relied on to send the guilty to prison and let the innocent off. Maybe then there will be an end to trial by media, which seems to a modern form of lynching.

Caroline Dinenage isn't a government minister. She's Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is cross-party.

The UK court system is already designed to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.

The trouble with rape is that it's so easy to argue that it was consensual and very difficult to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that it was rape.

The police could probably do a better job of investigating rapes, particularly if they spent less time quizzing women over transphobic stickers.

But as for the court system, in order to get a higher conviction rate with the kind of evidence prosecutors usually have, they would need to lower the burden of proof which would result in more innocent people being convicted as well as more guilty people being convicted.

@Coyoacan I believe the women who have been abused by Brand. And I have no problem with him being suspended from YouTube, just as I would have no problem with a company suspending an employee who is suspected of rape or any other crime. There is no comparison with KJK or JKR: neither are rape suspects.

I also believe the women who were abused by Assange, and Salmond. I couldn’t give two fucks that charges were dropped or they were acquitted. The legal system is terrible at successfully prosecuting sexual abuse and “not guilty” is not the same thing as “innocent”.

All I'm threading from that thread title is "if you are critical of gender identity belief you also support alleged rapists".

If it is accidental...

I completely agree.

Also, rather like JS, Brand has been ‘hiding’ in plain sight for decades. How anyone could bear to listen or watch him after thé Andrew Sachs call is completely beyond me. But I am well aware that a lot of cool girls would call me a right wing bigot for thinking that that sort of behaviour is vile.

I would boycott anything he did, and I would think less of anyone who had any regard for him, but I don’t think he should be censored or defunded. If there are proven criminal offences, he should pay the appropriate penalty.

A lot of GC people are traditional and conservative ‘men will be men and women are women’ sort of thing so it doesn’t surprise me at all. They also hate the general media and ‘new’ woke rhetoric.

"Men will be men" is the opposite of gender critical.

Not everyone who believes sex is binary and immutable is gender critical. Some of them are very accepting of gender, they just think it should be dependent on biological sex.

I am beyond furious that the political left have put women in a position where we either have to agree that our rights are less important than those of male people who believe they identify as women, or occupy common ground with people whose politics we otherwise deplore, including, in some cases, people who would deny us the right to have an abortion.

@MargotBamborough - absolutely bang on.

Yes, good post!

The 'over-lap' occurs around the issue of tribal condemnation whereby people are seen as either being " whiolly good people on the right side of history" or totally "evil, right wing bigots" who must be hounded from society; lose their livelihod, and be cancelled from absolutely everything.

Russell Brand is clearly guilty of the things he's been accused of, and will have to face up to the consequnces of that - but the way that everbody rushes to disassociate themselves from ever having approved of him , or liked him, because they want to. " be on the right side of history" is galling.

That's nonsense. Such a flat unnuanced reading.

People who are critical of transgender ideologuy and Queer Theory ( its originator) are critical because it is not rooted in reality - where we all live. Furtehrmore, it is regressive to push the idea that women have to behave in a certain way, or like certai n things- and if they don't they are men.

As it is regressive and insulting to suggest that men who get an erotic thrill from cross dressing should be including in the category of women - and given full acceees to their intimate protected spaces.

Pretending men can become women and so should have access to women's single sex facilities and categories is what happens to you when you have no practical, common sense and have ridiculously naive, idealistic pretensions based on academic theory - divorced from practical reality.