Stephen Fry - Stonewall "nonsensical"

[fromorbit]

Another Reverse Ferret dashes out of cover.

Stonewall ‘has got stuck in a terrible quagmire,' Stephen Fry tells Triggernometry. ‘I have no interest or support of this current wave of nonsensical… It’s shameful and sad.’

The Rise of the Right is the Left's Fault - Stephen Fry

Good to see on one level, but irritating at the same time Fry didn't support the truth when it was hard. He also slags off Dave Chappelle for truth telling in the same interview. Someone tried to kill him though. Thousands of women faced death threats for saying biology is real, lost jobs and opportunities. Kids had their lives ruined.

More to the point now Fry feels it is safe to come out it shows we are winning, but a LOT more to do and the genderists will resist every step of the way.

You can be extremely well read, and have a very high IQ, but if you aren't open to the possibility that not only do you not know everything but but are in fact ignorant of most things, then you will always come across as stupid eventually. Stephen Fry's comment about "women not liking sex" is a classic example of that. Women's sexuality isn't anything any reasonable person would expect him to know much about but he still felt in a position to make a pronouncement on it in the tone of one who is an expert. Which made him look incredibly stupid because its an area in which an awful lot of people (at least 50% of the population) know a lot more about than him. So he instantly exposed his own ignorance - and then you wonder what other things he was commenting on in an authorative manner that he knows tuppence about.

Socrates understood this!

He wrote an 'hilarious' play about paedophilia at a boys prep school.

Perhaps it's easier to be brave when the war is nearly over?

He needs to take a leaf out of John Boyne's book - in every sense.
What odds will anyone give me on Billy Bragg? 😳

He's too dumb to ever realise what this is all about.

It’s cowardice, I’m sure he just didn’t want to be cancelled. A lot of people preferred to be popular rather than open their eyes to the sheer horror of it all. I don’t think he’s intelligent at all but he’s not stupid either.

Golden bridges are fine but he could at least be honest about how he got there.

As for Jason Manford - when pp said they had been unblocked I went on the ticket website for Manchester Opera House and there are still quite a few tickets left for his panto. I'm sure in previous years it was pretty much sold out by now - but I could be wrong about that.

Sorry I spelt his name wrong - do I care - no

I think if he was to say unequivocally that he was wrong, as say John Boyne did, you could say it is fine to change his mind. However he's still trying to hedge his bets by criticising Dave Chapelle and is sitting on the fence as far as I can see. He's trying to move closer to the GC side as he can see which way the wind is changing but without really having the courage to actually do it.

Rewatched Gladiator recently and I’m reminded of this

I saw he was on Triggernomitry and couldn’t bring myself to listen so thanks for listening for me. It’s interesting he’s even on that podcast, he’s clearly having a moment. I’m pretty sure he’d have described the podcast as alt right or spreading ‘harmful rhetoric’ not so long ago…yet here he is, becoming one of the ‘conspiracy theory’ podcast bros.

Same here. The comments underneath the YouTube video were very similar to what's being said here.

I don't think I can respect this man again, no matter how good he is at moonwalking...

Brilliant, yes!

I don't mind Fry, I think he's a reasonably funny guy, and I think he showed some principled behaviour with his comments on cancel culture and the press, for example in the Munk debate he was in.

Sometimes he says some stupid shit, but he's hardly unique in that.

I do think he was slow to see what was going on with this, but to some extent I think he may be in the same boat as some other older lefties, like Margaret Atwood. They just aren't that involved with the issue personally, they aren't dating, don't have young kids, and have had a lot of respect for groups like SW.

I think some of that generation has really struggled to realize the "side" they understood to be rational and counter-cultural is now conformist and dogmatic.

I do think some gay men don't have a lot of natural relation to women, even if they are not sexists. There are some heterosexual men who might not have a lot of women friends - and there are some women like this, they just tend to have same sex friendships - but they do still get to know and care about women through romantic involvement. Some gay men just don't seem to have much in depth interaction with women at all.

It's a shame it has taken so long but that's hardly surprising.

Why is it hardly surprising?

He's a very well-respected, punching above his intellectual weight, gay man and is seen as the house intellectual (along with God help us all, Peter Tatchell and Owen Jones) of the male gay movement. People have been telling SF for years about gay kids being transed. He's been interested enough to say some things about it while careful enough to not bite one of the hands that feeds him.

So he must have been interested enough to have come across some of the contradictions in the ideology and some of the terrible behaviour of transactivists and he's had literally years to wrestle with the intellectual challenges of the ideology and the ethical challenges of the misogynistic behaviour of the ideologues. He's had years. He's known about the downsides for years.

So why is it unsurprising? I mean, I know why I think it's unsurprising, I think it's because he's just not a very substantial man. He'll go with the flow and if the flow changes, so will he.

Is that what you mean or is it something else, to do with career, intellectual positioning, ethics etc.?

Didn't Jason manford hastily delete that tweet? I kind of assumed at the time that he had a little think about it and concluded that it was actually bollocks.

He should just let it out. There, there Stephen. You'll feel all the better for saying it.

More reactions:

suzanne moore
From now on it will be know as doing "a Stephen Fry" when a lot of gender crap you supported you now describe as nonsense. Trust me there will be a lot of these people. Each trying to appear reasonable. Each one feeling no accountability to the women and children they trampled on

Julie Bindel
Plenty of other high profile people, like Stephen Fry, will choose to denounce the gender ideology they once either actively supported or were silent about (while others were punished for speaking out.) What matters is that Stonewall & Mermaids etc are losing support, which will see them in the gutter before long. The day of reckoning will come

Telegraph article is pretty solid:
Stephen Fry criticises Stonewall’s ‘nonsensical’ stance on trans issues
Author and broadcaster hit out against LGBT rights charity during podcast interview
https://archive.is/GjBpG#selection-3065.4-3069.87

Fry has achieved being denounced by Sophie Sparkles and various other TAs.

Meanwhile JKR is trending as it is Terfmas. We should run a sweepstake on the next Ferret.

Yeah, I saw his tweet(?) and he was NASTY about Fry in a very apoplectic way. Ince was filled with wrathful anger for the apostate, one might say. Which is ironic given Ince's whole schtick being about science and facts and that... 😏

SM and JB nail it there. Disappointed in Fry, partly because, if someone with his public standing had been prepared to speak out years ago, it might have made a real difference to the landscape in the UK. But they wuz all luvvies back then.

Stephen Fry has always, and will always, act in the best interests of one person - Stephen Fry.

Grifters like him survive on one thing only - the public’s perception of who they are. They have no true substance or character, so they have to have a keen nose for which way the wind is blowing.

This reverse ferret from the Shein Robert Robertson is a good barometer for the incipient collapse of this nonsensical ideology, and it can’t come soon enough. I won’t hold out for Fry hanging his head in shame for the harms he was complicit in, though, as I’ve never seen any evidence that he has any.

"Stephen Fry has always, and will always, act in the best interests of one person - Stephen Fry.
Grifters like him survive on one thing only - the public’s perception of who they are. They have no true substance or character, so they have to have a keen nose for which way the wind is blowing".

Very well put. I think the mistake we (the public) make wrt TV personalities, actors, singers etc is that although they have some artistic/creative talent, that doesn't mean that they have intelligence, general knowledge or critical thinking skills, or the self awareness to realise that they do not have these attributes and therefore should stick to their aforementioned talents only.
So often we discover that our idols do indeed have feet of clay.

THIS

“ the Shein Robert Robertson”
😂

(I think you mean Robert Robinson though)