Tried to squash debate, squashed crickets instead
The Telegraph on the slaughter of the crickets:
Four suspected trans rights protesters attacked a gender-critical conference by releasing hundreds of live crickets into a packed auditorium. The stunt threw the annual LGB Alliance conference into chaos, as a room of about 600 people had to be evacuated on Friday afternoon…Rhona Hotchkiss, the compere of the event, encouraged people to stamp on the crickets.
That seems unnecessary. Crickets are harmless, and they’re nourishment for a lot of critters up the food chain. I’ve fed crickets to plenty of reptiles and birds back in the day.
Kate Barker, LGB Alliance’s chief executive, told The Telegraph that security guards had stopped the protester as she tried to leave the building and the police were called to the scene. She said: “They are trying to squash reasoned debate with silly tactics.
Could that be because reasoned debate is ruled out because what can they say???
It was an abrupt end to the charity’s fourth annual conference, which had featured speeches from writers, activists and lawyers. Many of the speeches criticised gender ideology, which is the belief that gender is not binary and can differ from your assigned sex at birth.
James Dreyfus, the keynote speaker who appeared in the 1999 film Notting Hill, said he had experienced homophobic abuse from supporters of the gender ideology movement.
“The current gender movement is undoubtedly the most homophobic movement I’ve witnessed since the early 80s,” he said. “And that is no exaggeration. We all have re-experienced being called ‘fucking poofs, Aids carriers’ etc.
“From three very specific groups. Firstly, the mob that is known as Trans Radical Activists. Secondly from those who feel the need to put their preferred pronouns in their online bios. And thirdly, from the ‘allies’, perhaps the most worrisome of all, who understand so little of the facts or indeed what the entire argument is about that I’m continually astonished how usually intelligent people have become so utterly brainwashed.”
Same, James, same.
Other speakers included Catherine Leng, a former senior journalist on the BBC News Channel, who left the corporation after multiple disciplinary actions over her gender-critical views. Speaking at the conference, she said the BBC had been, and remained, unbalanced in its coverage of trans issues.
She said: “2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, everything was so trans-affirmative it was incredible. There were no stories about puberty blockers but there were stories about transgender struggles.”
A BBC spokesman said: “We don’t agree with this characterisation; the BBC reports a wide range of views and perspectives on the subject, in line with our editorial guidelines.”
Hahahahahahahahahaha that’s a good one.
Killing crickets is awfully bad luck, so legend has it. Why? Because crickets are, also as legend has it, good luck. It might have something to do with the folk wisdom that says if you have crickets around, then you’re not likely to have snakes. I’m not a big fan of insects (or superstitions), but I’ll take crickets over snakes any old day. They should have brought cockroaches if they really wanted to gross people out.
That would have taken effort. They’d have had to find (catch? breed?) the cockroaches (or whatever).
I think you can buy boxes of crickets.
Yes, crickets are harmless so we could dismiss this as a harmless stunt. Of course, there is the fact that if trans boosters are willing to use innocent insects, isn’t that also a way of showing that they could release something else in the future, something not as harmless? One of the anti-woman images I have seen from the trans boosters is a “bug spray” can marked terf-be-gone. The image suggests that woman should be harmed and killed like insects.
So, yeah, nobody was hurt this time. Still making me think that a good portion of the trans boosters are not decent human beings.
Note that dumping insects into a crowded room could, with a bit of bad luck, cause a panic. So we get lucky, that’s good, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s just that, luck.
Actually, I’d say a lot of gender-crit folks would agree that gender is ‘not binary’, because gender (the social construct that is a thousand flavors of ‘pink for girls, blue for boys’) is huge steaming pile of bullshit, and not in the least binary. And this bullshit does, in fact, differ from your sex. The key issue is that sex itself is immutable, and carries with it a set of genuine consequences that feminism has been fighting to ameliorate for decades, only to have that fight overturned by the grafting of the T to everything.
You can buy cockroaches, too. Great big ones, suitable for dissection. They are quite expensive, since they are usually raised for science uses, whereas crickets are cheap, being raised to feed pet reptiles…and sometimes carnivorous plants.
Bad description, article should have said gender ideology “is the belief that there is an internal gender identity.”
Hm, since I’m feeling somewhat something or other, gender ideology is: the belief that there is a psychological, neurological, or biological phenomenon that causes or manifests as a properly basic sense of oneself as a sexed, non-sexed, gendered, or non-gendered being, which is or ought to be superior to, the basis of, or the replacement for conventional notions of sex or gender.
Trying to accurately spell it out really drives home just how vague and cafeteria-salad-bar their bullshit is. Some of them believe P, others believe ~P, and others believe both and neither simultaneously depending on whether Saturn is in retrograde or something.