Comment Piece in The Herald

[Mochudubh]

An interesting and balanced piece from Mark Smith.

Should open if you haven't read any recent Herald articles, if not just paste the link into archive.ph or similar.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/23871913.mark-smith-maybe-graham-linehan-right-scotland-changing/

Great stuff.

This article gives me hope. Hope that common sense will soon be restored and gender extremists will no longer be able to make everyone jump to their tune with their aggressive, controlling tactics. NoDebate is over. It has to be.

Some good comments below as well.

Thank you for this link. It's a very well written piece.

Just read it. It's the writer's second piece on Glinner in as many days. I'm glad he's big enough to admit his stance on self id has changed.

My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that he still clings to "compromise". I get it – everybody reasonable generally likes the sound of compromise – but it means he hasn't quite thought it all the way through. At least he seems to be aware of the arguments.

Agree - but I reckon we're watching a real-time real life gear change happening. And this guy seems definitely worthy of a golden bridge.

Good article, thanks for sharing.

'There’s part of me here that thinks some kind of compromise can still be found, although gender-critical feminists tell me talk of compromise is pathetic because men who identify as trans can either come into female spaces or they can’t and a wishy-washy compromise that lets some of them in some of the time is not acceptable. This is the position campaigners like Linehan hold and that’s fair enough, although I think they’re still quite a long way off from convincing the political class that they’re right and worth supporting.'

Thanks, I've just read the interview with Glinner. A fair bit of the opinion piece repeats the interview but it's notable that MS thought it worthy of writing about.

Unusual to have two such similar pieces in a newspaper on consecutive days.

The first was on Sunday 22nd - does the Herald do a Sunday magazine, and maybe the interview was in that, and then they decided to put the comment piece into the main paper? I'm not in Scotland any more so have no clue.

Good article, thank you. And Arabella nails it with the graphic.

It is making people comfortable to argue that there are extremists and angry/hateful people on both sides and lovely people will find the nice open minded middle ground....

yeah actually they're trying to squeeze between the women who want TQ+ people to live however they want, just not destroy women's rights, gay rights and child safeguarding, in order to pretend there's some kind of middle there rather than admit, this was the middle ground all along.

It's in many ways yet another insult to the women who have been pointing out the facts, reality, issues from the start, while being screamed at and threatened. And have turned out to be right.

You're bang on, @Froodwithatowel - we are the middle ground. Boundaries are the middle ground. Biology and safeguarding are the middle ground.

#YourMumIsTheMiddleGround

'There’s part of me here that thinks some kind of compromise can still be found,

I'm okay with that. It means they have noticed that there are real problems right now and agree it needs to be sorted. What they/media need to do now is start asking what the compromise could be where it doesn't impact women or children at all and how to implement it. Sometimes people need to think it through rather than be told. (And this is why I like a lot of posters in here, they/you explain it simply for the slow of thinking like me ❤).

It's certainly encouraging, but he gets it wrong when he says

gender-critical feminists tell me talk of compromise is pathetic because men who identify as trans can either come into female spaces or they can’t and a wishy-washy compromise that lets some of them in some of the time is not acceptable.

It sounds like he hasn't understood that it's not just that it's wishy washy to want to choose what kind of transwomen can and can't come into female spaces, it's that it's literally impossible to do so, because there is no way of knowing what kind of transwoman each of them is!

Yep.

It was mildly amusing yesterday reading some man puzzled at how 'all of a sudden' all these compassionate, caring, kind, diverse, left-leaning, right-thinking and thoughtful women who had spent their lives campaigning for women's rights and trying to better the world had overnight become raging horrible bigotted vipers who refused to accommodate the needs of some very unhappy men.

Guess what.

It wasn't us that changed.

PPs making some very good points here. We are the middle ground. Our position is the compromise. The extremist view (as extreme as the existing trans demands) would want it to be illegal for men to wear ‘feminine’ clothes, make-up, high heels etc. Ironically, it would enforce gender stereotypes as rigidly as trans activists do.

“The compromise”

With regard to toilets/ changing rooms surely the only acceptable “compromise” is that they put better lighting and decent mirrors in mens toilets/ changing rooms and tell men they are to stop being such TERCs ( trans exclusionary rabid cocks).

Thanks for posting a link to the interview - I enjoyed reading it.

I find it so interesting that journalists like Smith, Freeman, Turner who dislike/critique Linehan for his uncompromising tone also feel there is a compromise possible in this situation that somehow won’t involve the erosion of women’s boundaries/rights.

It’s becoming clear to me that, with Turner and Freeman in particular, their desire to be seen as reasonable is why they’ve written recent pieces distancing themselves from Linehan and criticising him.

They want what he wants but nicely . Without saying anything rude like plain facts. They have yet to realise there is no way of protecting women's equality in a way that will be acceptable to those who demand to destroy it.

There is no way to destroy women's equality just a little bit so that men (at least temporarily) will give it a rest. It's either equality or it isn't.

This sort of article, whilst not quite there, makes me feel optimistic, because even 9 months ago, he would have had difficulty having it published. The sex realist side is drip-drip-dripping through a crevice in the top of the dam. Let's hope that, before too much longer, the tiny trickle will become a torrent.

'There’s part of me here that thinks some kind of compromise can still be found,

There are so many possible answers to this, aren't there?

Compromise between people who believe in reality and people who believe in fantasy.

Compromise between people who believe in safeguarding women and children and people who don't believe in it.

Compromise between people who want to remove a group's basic rights and the group who want to retain them.