Nothing to forgive, mate
Once again Peter Tatchell steps in to patronize women and tell us how to do better.
Martina #Navratilova tweets (& then deletes) rant about #trans athletes She promises to educate herself. Her tweet was wrong but she's apologised. Plus one misguided tweet does not cancel out her decades of equality activism. Time to forgive & move on https://t.co/twOuT4KISq
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) December 23, 2018
There was no “rant.” She doesn’t need to “educate herself” (Peter Tatchell, on the other hand…). Her tweet was not wrong and she shouldn’t have to apologize. Her tweet was not “misguided” and she doesn’t need to be “forgiven” by Peter Tatchell.
https://twitter.com/Jessie_XL/status/1077000297640349696
https://twitter.com/Jsoosty/status/1076990940236132353
https://twitter.com/Leadinglady0609/status/1076942116708904961
I scrolled through the replies for a long time and didn’t find a single one that wasn’t a variation on these.
Even if you happen to disagree with what Martina said, there is no way her message
“Clearly that can’t be right. You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard…”
can be characterised as ranting without dishonesty. Tatchell is asking for people to forgive Martina, because he is perhaps alarmed at the ridiculous pile-on, but he is wording it in a way that also acquiesces to those doing the piling on. He is throwing a sop to them, signalling that their wrath was justified while asking for it to be stayed.
He has caved on the subject, and is trying to have it both ways: opposing the magnitude of the mindless fury while agreeing with it.
Oh and happy christmas / merry holidays!
Tatchell has always been a self-promoting sack of shit. He was co-founder of OutRage! in the 1990s. Ostensibly a gay rights organisation (I don’t think the letter salad had been introduced back then), Tatchell & Co. took to publically outing people who didn’t want their sexuality made public knowledge. Being ‘out and proud’ himself, he apparently decided that his way was the right way and anybody both in the public eye and in the closet was to be outed and the consequences for the outed individuals be damned.
Now he’s accepting apologies that weren’t given and dispensing forgiveness that isn’t his to dispense. Still the arrogant, self-important blowhard he always was.