Graham Linehan on JK Rowling and The Outrage:

The response to Rowling’s statement demonstrates what women with less power, but just as much compassion and sense, have been trying to tell us for a number of years. Namely, that gender ideology is bad for women. That it erases them and insults them and endangers them, and when they dare to discuss this issue—and ONLY this issue—they are subject to disproportionately severe penalties. Maya Forstater lost her job, remember.

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Rowling chose her words carefully. The first four sentences are almost an apology for speaking out at all, because she knows how her support for Maya will be received. She front loads the statement with mollifying phrases to protect her central point, which is inarguable.

But as these women know, and the response to the tweet proves, it’s never enough. Women are to be colonised, erased, silenced and put at risk, and if they protest in any way, even in the most careful and civil terms, they are putting their faces to a blowtorch.

It’s never enough, and it’s never over. The demands keep ratcheting up and up and ever up. Five years ago we weren’t being told that we had to rejoice when men who claim to be women started stealing athletic prizes from women, but we are now. What will the demands be this year, and five years from now? What will be grabbed away from women amid a torrent of threats and abuse next?

The current fashion amongst celebrities who like being invited to parties is to dismiss and deride the women who dare step up. Men like Jon Ronson, Jolyon Maugham, Michael Cashman and Owen Jones, and women like Dawn Butler, Mhairi Black and Alice Roberts, the Professor of Public Engagement in Science who blocks everyone, have all been disappointing.

The most ironic thing about trans activists is that they are depending on women to act according to their gender ‘role’; to be nice, to budge up, to quietly accept the destruction of their sports, their safe spaces and even the language they use to describe themselves.

And! And! The men are acting according to their gender “role” happily, eagerly, with vindictive joy: entitled, intrusive, domineering, seething with hatred of women.

So if 2020 is the year you decide to step in to this debate, to risk the blowtorch to the face, remember the lessons of the Rowling tweet.

If no amount of capitulation is enough, why capitulate at all? Stand firm, speak out and let’s begin the process of winning back what has already been lost.

It’s the truth. No surrender ever is enough in this dispute, so why bother?