How not to change minds

Someone called Kirstie Allsop has been doing a lot of clueless uninformed social media lecturing on How To Be Kind to our trans siblings blah blah blah, so I finally got exasperated enough to find out who she is to be lecturing from such a great height.

She’s a tv personality.

Gareth Roberts at Spiked almost exactly a year ago:

We all know people who are totally unaware of the complexities of a situation, but who are still totally confident in opening their big gob to pronounce on it…For much of the past week, I’ve been watching with a mixture of amusement and horror at the Twitter travails of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who has now entered the trans debate.

The amiable host of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location first piped up to defend American performance artist and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney has documented every day of his imaginary transformation to the female sex. He has been rewarded handsomely for this, with corporate sponsorships…

After US conservatives started to boycott Bud Light, following its partnership with Mulvaney, up piped Allsopp to ask what all the fuss was about. She said of his TikToks: ‘Childish perhaps, a bit silly arguably, but they don’t threaten me or any women I know. There are issues to debate, but Dylan isn’t the problem and targeting her is bullying’ (sic).

Mulvaney isn’t the problem, but he’s certainly a conspicuous beneficiary of the problem, and he’s certainly a problem.

To say that we should laugh off Mulvaney is pretty much like expecting black people to accept that a white person covered in boot polish is merely ‘childish and a bit silly’. But this was only the start. Over the days that followed, Kirstie dropped a series of ever bigger, ever more staggeringly uninformed clangers. ‘Using preferred pronouns is simply good manners’, said Rip van Allsopp, just waking up from 2012. When Olympic athlete and tireless campaigner for women’s sports Sharron Davies had a polite word, Kirstie demanded of her: ‘Who is telling children they can change biological sex?’ Where has she been?

And now a year later she’s popped up to do the same thing all over again.

https://twitter.com/KirstieMAllsopp/status/1779965195067990056

Yes it’s always best to have “debates” with people who know nothing about the topic of debate.

She’s a martyr! It’s tragic!

https://twitter.com/KirstieMAllsopp/status/1780580097906430345

She’s like a saint, you know?

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