A profound social sickness
Jo Bartosch on the sudden cancellation of Róisín Murphy:
Murphy’s crime was to have been forthright about her views on the use of experimental puberty-blocking drugs on children who are confused about their gender.
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Murphy’s views are certainly not unfounded. Medical opinion across the world is now shifting against the use of puberty blockers to treat childhood gender distress. And yet Murphy could not have put a larger target on her own back had she announced her engagement to President Putin, with Andrew Tate as celebrant.
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This week, it was reported that Ninja Tune, the record label behind Murphy’s long-awaited upcoming album, Hit Parade, has halted all marketing and promotion of her work. It has also committed to sharing proceeds from the new album with pro-trans groups. Today it was announced that two of her London gigs have been cancelled.
Punish punish punish the non-compliant woman. Keep punishing her until there is no punishment left.
It is a symptom of a profound social sickness that expressing concern over the safety of children leads to such hostility and public shaming. The real opprobrium should be reserved for those ghoulish medics and influencers who promote the myth of the transgender child, and who are harming countless numbers of children in the process.
Oh but it’s all fully reversible, they keep assuring us of that.
I want to listen to some of her music, perhaps buy one of her albums in support since her label is abandoning its obligatioin to promote it, but not being in Ireland I was not sure how to pronouce her first name and when I was in my car asking YouTube Music App to play some of her music the voice commands were giving me other stuff by people whose names sounding like “Royson” or “Royston.”
Her name is prononced RoSHEEN.
Gaelic language instruction should be mandatory in schools so we don’t have to go through this.
She’s right about puberty blockers, of course.
Haha, I occasionally look up how to pronounce Niamh. It sticks for a few months, then I forget, and the next time I see the name, all I know is that the letters in no way represent the sound you’re supposed to make.
I think I’ve finally gotten a grip on Siobhan…
Modern Irish is pretty regular. What’s rather interesting or amusing is that the practice of writing English in the Latin alphabet was mainly introduced by Irish missionaries in the first place. You could think of digraphs such as bh or mh as being analogous to th or sh in English. Both bh and mh would be pronounced somewhere between v and a very soft w – depending on dialect. Except when it appears as the first letter, “h” is never a “regular” letter but is part of a digraph where an overdot diacritic would have been used in older orthography. Rule of thumb – if the word has a “h” in it then don’t expect English phonography to be relevant.
That’s all oversimplified of course – more here.
Also, on pronunciation and silent letters. It’s worth noting that Irish (officially) had some spelling reforms that actually stuck, unlike the various serious and less serious proposals for English, so what I learned (very badly) in school was standardized, even if the rules are, uh, extensive.
On the other hand, Names are Special and many people who make a point of using a Gaelic spelling will naturally be using various older or traditional spellings.