Hadley Freeman Article About Graham LInehan

[Igneococcus]

Not actually read it yet but here for anybody who'd like to read:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/6f23ce7c-596a-11ee-a62b-d21c2c8f0b9b?shareToken=3adab3e87e06a1d37788d0b2482f02b6

just use GB instead?

England, Scotland, Wales = Great Britain.

UK = the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

[leaving aside the mess of the U.K. Olympics team being called TeamGB]

I could have done. I didn't. I was still clear enough. Any more attempts at derailing from the subject of Hadley Freeman's article?

MyLady good suggestions 👍

I’m in N Ireland and generally we use GB or just Britain to refer to England, Scotland, Wales as a group. We use UK when we’re including NI in the grouping with the other 3 nations. Although, I have heard GB people use the term 'UK and Northern Ireland'. 😀

VWDiesel sadly gender identity ideology has escaped the universities here and is making its way through schools, clubs, and societies too. It’s popular with the usual strata of society as in other countries and all the NI political parties, apart from DUP, are supporting self-ID and TWAW. It’s basically the same in ROI too.

Okay. That's not what I hear from personal contacts from places like Bangor, Ballymena, Derry and Newry but hey-ho. I'm not surprised my in-laws know nothing (they live rurally) but I would have expected my feminist contemporaries, on the lookout for it over there, to be reporting back on it. Stephen Nolan did what he could, but he's no match for TikTok.

In the context of Glinner it seems a bit odd. Plenty of gender extremists in N. Ireland albeit , as you say, mainly in universities and media.

But such is the case here in the RoI as well. They live in their student politics micro biome. The reason they've got away with hijacking the agenda is because the general public was mostly unaware of the situation.

This has abruptly changed and you'd hear ppl muttering impatiently about it lately. The TRAs have been reduced to smearing GC ppl as West Brits. Dupes of Imperialism and so on. Or fundamentalist Christians. Not many Brits are Christians , fundamentalist or otherwise of course. But this strange discrepancy doesn't seem to bother Panti Bliss et al.

Sorry I digress....just seeing ' mainland UK' set off this train of thought.

LWS in Dublin recently was very well attended. Mind you, many women had travelled from elsewhere. The police did a pretty good job, which was good to see.

VWDiesel I’m not saying GI is taking over by any means, I’m just saying that among the middle classes, NGOs, and in towns, it’s definitely becoming more widespread - as you say, no thanks to TikTok etc there.

NI is caught between two jurisdictions where GI is already established in government policy and legislation; most of our social organisations and educational institutions are either pan-UK and GI-influenced e.g. Girl Guides, or they are all-Ireland and GI-influenced e.g LGFA.

It’s all spoken of with dire rumblings of dislike in rural areas, as something people in towns, or with notions about themselves, get up to.

Glinner, Helen Joyce, and things like LWS are not very widely or favourably reported by our media here so unless people are online, or listen to Stephen Nolan/Niall Boylan, they’re not going to find out about the issues or about GC organisations from the BBC, RTÉ or UTV. There are GC feminists in NI but they’re not a large group by any means.

NI also needs someone like Glinner (and Helen Joyce et al) to stand up and get a media spotlight that can be thrown on the issues here.

Yes, and you make the point I was trying to make to a previous poster — that Glinner has been invaluable here and that perhaps from an ROI perspective it's not clear how valued he is.

Another problem peculiar to Ireland , well maybe Scotland too , is the boomerang effect. We were always more socially conservative than English people. Now we get to appear more liberal than them.

We are in headlong flight from the previous iteration of ourselves. And we tend to blame all our previous issues on the church. Not on our ruling elites , our dreadful bourgeois governing class who used emigration as a safety valve for decades.

This way everyone wins. Rainbow washing is not very expensive at least in the short term. Our previous failings were all someone else's fault. Plus we are all holy and virtuous acolytes of the new faith anyway. At last we get to feel pity for the poor benighted English. To be clear , I am talking about media / academe. The rest of us have real world problems.

Ps i ordered Tough Crowd at my local library , no problem. I had been a bit trepidatious tbh - having got bad vibes from the pink haired cashier in my local branch of Easons when I asked about Helen Joyce

Very odd article and like other PP I wonder "Why now?" Has someone else at The Times been given the job of reviewing his book, HF felt she should have had that gig and has wangled 2nd prize of a "general" piece?

I don't feel bad about speculating when HF has speculated, somewhat bizarrely and dismally, that Glinner is a friendless soul glued to Twitter for company when he is not writing substack articles. Bizarrely because books don't write themselves and, having distanced herself from him since February 2020, what would she know of his private life?

This looks like more speculation, unless HF has done a head-count, and deceptively contrasts a seemingly irrational, uncritical, positive emotional response ("love", "cheering him on") with a list of allegations more typically spouted by TRAs than "gender critics":

"While many love Linehan and cheer him on, many others on what I’ll term “my side” view him with distaste. They see him as a monomaniacal bully who gives gender critics a bad name. Someone who has tipped into being a full-blown obsessive for whom gender just happens to be his obsession."

The "many X vs many Y" framing gives the impression of numerical balance among "gender critics". I haven't done a head-count either but it does not reflect what I have seen, though I have no doubt that I move in different circles to HF.

The "emotion vs reason" contrast is manipulative. Either give reasons for both reactions or contrast "love" and "cheer him on" with a similarly superficial, unsupported, opposite appraisal, eg. "hate" and "wish him to fail" or maybe "actively try to discourage him from reaching the winning line".

Which rather gives the game away. There may well be some "gender critics" who feel that way but this is the archetypal position of TRAs, who hate "gender critics", try to discourage us and wish us to fail.

HL says that puberty blockers "help children change gender". That is not a "gender critical" position.

It misrepresents the official rationale for prescribing "puberty blockers" (the mythical "pause button") while portraying the fact that they prevent the curative impact of puberty as "helpful".

By "change gender" does HL means "pass as the opposite sex in social settings"? As children? If when they have become adults then this would apply mainly to some but not all males who go on to cross-sex hormones, and then within limits.

HL says, "It was the summer of 2018, I’d been writing about gender ideology for four years". So since 2014 - and nine years later HL still does not seem to have a clue why "puberty blockers" are being prescribed to children and is parroting inane explanations that could have been lifted from Mermaids promo material. Maybe if HL had been a little less of a dilettante and a tad more "obsessive" she might by now be better informed about "puberty blockers" and possibly actually a "gender critic"?

Was anyone ever "peaked" by a Hadley Freeman article about "gender ideology", did they learn anything new, were they prompted to explore the subject further?

One of the huge impacts Glinner has had is spreading awareness and bringing people into the fight for women's rights and protection of children.

I was at a social meeting of full-on activists earlier this year, I think there were 15 of us, all women, and we shared what had first alerted us to the fact that there was a problem. I was gobsmacked that six said "Glinner". They had been following him for a long time on Twitter "for the jokes", were puzzled then increasingly intrigued by his posts about women's rights, trans issues, etc., decided to find out more - then, boom! They had "educated themselves" and the full horror hit them!

There are not many people who have the same reach to the masses in the UK on Twitter who have yet to "educate themselves". It will tail off with decreasing age but you can see from the tweets when the is a "What is your favourite comedy series?" thing going on and #FatherTed is trending that that show is still enormously popular, along with followings for The IT Crowd, Black Books, etc.

Glinner has got 558.5K Followers on Twitter, which is no small beer. They will include people who are Following because of Father Ted, the IT Crowd, Black Books, etc. and some of them will follow the same trajectory as those six women or, at the very least, will be "educating themselves". I had a peek on Social Blade and his Following is predicted to continue increasing.

Nobody is perfect but I will continue to cheer him on, to hope that he does not suffer any more damage and I will not be victim-blaming him for the harm that has been done to him by those who would like a free run at undermining women's rights and compromising natural, healthy child development.

`Nobody is perfect but I will continue to cheer him on, to hope that he does not suffer any more damage and I will not be victim-blaming him for the harm that has been done to him by those who would like a free run at undermining women's rights and compromising natural, healthy child development.’

Well said, Bosky!

I had no idea that HL had said that puberty blockers helped children change gender. Wow!

I'm also slightly questioning her claim to have been part of the GC debate since 2014 not least because louder and more educated (in that subject) than her have been honest that it took longer for them to understand how serious the GI movement is.

If Hadley thinks that, she clearly hasn't read Time To Think, or much else on the subject.

Helen Lewis has been featured on a number of American podcasts as, what the hosts often describe as, a measured/sensible/impartial expert on the gender wars in the UK & Europe.

Lewis doesn’t come across that way to me, her views are very much classical Liberal (fence-sitting, in my opinion) on the issue i.e. allow people to do what they want.

Like Jesse Singal, Lewis seems to believe that some children need to undergo medical transition because they’re true trans. Her opinion on GC feminism has evolved somewhat but not very much. Like a lot of journalists who consider themselves to be Liberals, she’s mostly of the ‘be kind’, persuasion on these issues rather than really grappling with the potential worst outcomes for society and children as a whole.

Bosky, great textual analysis. Such a slippery and unpleasant article and you've shown why.

I had high hopes of Helen Lewis. While she's moved slightly deeper into the GC position, and in some of the subjects she chooses to cover clearly doesn't support GI, she doesn't do much to question or condemn it. She's always seemed to give off a slightly disdainful vibe to the 'little' people on the ground who are actually taking this behemoth on in real life. I classify her with Helen Pluckrose (another proud liberal intellectual). I've learned a lot from them both. They are both impressive thinkers and commentators, but they both sit on the fence on this subject and I can't help but feel really disappointed by them. Lewis in particular, who has real clout on Radio 4 and could use it better, imo.

I don't listen to radio, is Lewis on much? I thought she had decamped to the US. I used to like her columns in the NS very much, she seemed to have the ability to write wisely and compassionately on a wide range of topics, serious and less so. But I don't disagree about her tone.

I subscribed to Lewis' Bluestocking newsletter until she included a really nasty, snippy item about Kellie-Jay Keen (think more or less insinuating she was far right and basically responsible for the violence against her).

When I unsubscribed I said why. I got a really dismissive, narky response from her. Over a couple of emails I think we got to a better understanding, but I was really struck by the speed and genuine crossness of her response. Does not like being questioned, while being a little prone to the purity spiral IMO.

HL says, "It was the summer of 2018, I’d been writing about gender ideology for four years"
You mean HF - Hadley Freeman rather than Helen Lewis?

Oops! Yes I do! Any references I made to "HL" were meant to say "HF" (Hadley Freeman) - they were typo's pure and simple, I did not have Helen Lewis in mind at all when writing that.

@MouseMinge , @UtopiaPlanitia , @VWdieselnightmare , @duc748 and @teawamutu my apologies for typo's where I said "HL" instead of "HF"!

Nowhere in my post did I intend to refer to Helen Lewis, they were straightforward typo's - I was not at any time even thinking of Helen Lewis so I do not know how on earth I mistakenly typed "HL" when referring to Hadley Freeman.

😳

I thought the discussion had widened and I'd just missed the first reference!

You're okay @Bosky I repeated your mistake even though I knew you were talking about Freeman and so was I!

I think I have worked out how I came to repeatedly type "HL" instead of "HF" for a while! I obviously wasn't paying enough attention and lapsed into abbreviating "Hadley" rather than "Hadley Freeman" and was initialising the syllables, ie. "H(ad)L(ey)"

🤦‍♀️

I was watching The Mess We're In the other evening.

Glinner is pretty upset about HF's article. I think he called it a 'hatchet job' from someone he thought was a friend. (He didn't name her but it was very obvious who he was talking about.)

Apparently he'd also name-checked her in the acknowledgements in the back of his book. 🙁