Behold a cauldron of violent vitriol
Janice Turner was there when Maria Maclachlan was attacked by “activists.”
When is it OK to punch a woman? I’ve pondered this question since Wednesday evening when I watched a 60-year-old in specs and sensible shoes called Maria being smacked in the face. Yet I learn from her assailant’s defenders that it’s fine. Punch harder next time, guys! Because “acts of physical violence against those who are systemically violent are self-defence”.
I was at Speakers’ Corner waiting, along with about 80 others, to learn the secret location of a meeting entitled, “What is gender? The Gender Recognition Act [GRA] and beyond”. It was all very cloak and dagger because the original venue, a south London community centre, had cancelled the previous day on health and safety grounds. Which is one way of saying “trans rights activists harangued our staff and threatened, via various Facebook groups, to cause havoc if it went ahead”. Then, hearing of the Hyde Park rendezvous, they rang every conceivable venue within a mile radius to promise mayhem. Having failed to find it, about 15 of them arrived at Speakers’ Corner with placards saying “TERFs not welcome.”
Presumptuous, isn’t it. It’s not up to them who gets to gather at Speakers’ Corner. Granted, I might wave a placard like that if “TERFs” were replaced by “Fascists” and fascists were actually gathering, but this wasn’t that. We’ve been energetically coached to think a “TERF” is a very terrible person in some manner, but it’s applied to women who simply define “gender” in a way that some trans activists dislike. That’s really not a good reason to bully people, to prevent them from speaking, or to punch them in the face and steal their cameras and memory cards.
TERFs, according to trans activists, are evil. TERF is the new witch. Search on Twitter for “TERFs must die” or “burn in a fire, TERF” and behold a cauldron of violent vitriol. Before the meeting, a trans-woman posted: “Any idea where this is happening? I want to f*** some TERFs up, they are no better than fash [fascists].” Search “punch a TERF” and you will find crowing approval of what happened to Maria.
There’s still a strong delusion that this crap is somehow left-wing and progressive and good, but it’s not. It’s a mindless, venomous attack on women in general, cheered on by “allies” and thus making it clear yet again that women are always required to go to the back of the line.
So at Speakers’ Corner trans activists and feminists were chanting and taunting each other. Maria was taking photographs when an opponent grappled with her, snatched her camera and smashed it on the ground. Then a tall, male-bodied, hooded figure wearing make-up rushed over, hit her several times and as police arrived, ran away. I asked a young activist if she was OK with men smacking women: “It’s not a guy, you’re a piece of s*** and I’m happy they hit her”, came the reply.
Yes that’s the important thing – not “misgendering” the guy who hit a woman in the face because she thinks of gender in a way he dislikes.
I wouldn’t trouble Times readers, no doubt weary of reading daily about gender-fluidity and schoolboys in frocks, with this affair if it didn’t reveal such serious issues. Changes to the very definition of “man” and “woman” are being proposed, yet it is almost impossible to hold a public meeting to discuss them. Wednesday’s speakers were a lesbian academic and a trans woman. Two members of the LGBT group Stonewall initially agreed to take part in what was to be a debate, but dropped out. Winning arguments is far harder for the trans lobby than shutting them down.
Shutting them down and lying about them – Twitter is full of “activists” lying about the assault on Maria.
Maria held on to her camera when someone grabbed it – that’s the “violence” she perpetrated.
Miranda Yardley posted video of the assault:
“Intersectional” enough?
There’s no shortage of men who say much worse things about trans people than these supposed TERFs do.
When will these Brave Heroes start assaulting, say, Curt Schilling? He got fired from his ESPN job for circulating transphobic memes on social media. But I guess the brave tough heroes of trans activism don’t think violence is as justifiable against a 6-foot-plus former professional male athlete. Funny how that works.
This would be the same Reed formerly of FTB who wrote quite a number of posts declaring that lesbians who excluded penis-having people from sex parties, or even merely asked those people to keep their genitals covered, are bigots, correct?
Definitely formerly of FTB. To be honest I don’t know what she wrote, though, because I wasn’t interested enough to read it.
And we have keyboard warriors like Peter Coffin on Twitter trying to gin up the violence by marrying this sort of violent trans activism to antifascism, essentially calling anyone who disagrees with him about anything substantial a fascist and therefore worthy of violent opposition.
These people really don’t get that, if they build their TERF-eating machine, one day someone’s going to call them a TERF, and the machine will eat them, too.
As I said elsewhere, it’s only a matter of time before they kill someone. Someone gets hit, perhaps in the wrong part of the skull or falls down and hits their head on something hard.
This is why, as much as the macchiavellian side of me would be willing to consider violence as a tool, I can’t agree with using physical violence against fascists (or other people for that matter). Once it’s established that it’s acceptable to beat up fascists, only the definition of a fascist needs to be expanded for it to become acceptable to physically attack other people too. And then nobody with any (political) opinions is safe. It is unsustainable.
Zinnia Jones, formerly of FTB also tweeted in support. Something like “A TERF got punched LOL.” You can see a screencap on the Feminist Current article.
Unfortunately I can’t register on the Times website to read the article, so I went in search of other mentions in the media. Found this spectacularly mealy-mouthed take on the events in The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2017/09/trans-rights-terfs-and-bruised-60-year-old-what-happened-speakers-corner
Basically the writer says that you can’t trust the accounts of the non-trans-activists present, since they are “keen” to represent this as trans people or trans activists behaving violently. Therefore no conclusions can be drawn until theres further evidence. She says it’s best to “condemn both transphobia and violence against women” but then goes on to quote tweets which end with the tweeter lamenting how now nobody will be talking about transmisogynist discourse or male violence against trans women.
I expect a ‘damage control’ style post from multiple intersectional / trans bloggers in the very near future (or already posted), setting out why violence is fine when you don’t like the politics of the opposition. Disagreeing with trans people about the nomenclature and framing of trans issues is way worse than physical assault donchaknow.
@Holms
Indeed, disagreeing with them about nomenclature and the framing of trans issues is “literal violence.”
Watching the video, the thing that struck me wasn’t just the fact that a diminutive elderly woman was struck for holding and expressing a view that someone else disagreed with, Or that the person doing the striking was substantially bigger and had the musculature and leverage of a man, regardless of their gender identity, hormones or state of surgical modification. No, it was the shear cowardice of the act. The fact that they darted in, twice, from the fringes of the crowd, struck and darted away again. Oh brave hero [slow clap].
As for the people who are applauding. All I can say is that they have spun around so often their moral compass has disappeared up their own fundament. They clearly had a moral compass, or they wouldn’t have cared about trans rights to start with, so it’s not as if they started out amoral and fucked up.