The physical attack on Julie Bindel and the trans cult response

When a woman gets attacked by a man (or three) and the attacker claims to be a woman, there are two options open to trans activists and their allies. One is to unreservedly condemn the attack and distance themselves from the attacker(s); the other is to try to spin the attack, to minimise it, to make it sound like it wasn’t really an attack, that the victim had provoked it in some way or simply that she deserved it because of her (assumed) views. Trying to make out that it was the victim who was, in fact, the attacker and the violent male assailant was some poor unfortunate “trans girl” or even that it was a set-up deliberately intended to entrap a trans person – both of which happened in my case – are optional extras.

Tweet by the real Cathy Brennan and with a typically nasty response from a trans activist.

On hearing that Julie Bindel had been the victim of such an attack on Wednesday evening, there was no doubt in my mind which of those options most trans activists – a group not exactly known for their integrity – would go for. If they could spin an attack on an unknown feminist, someone with no history of activism on transgenderism and attending her very first meeting on a related topic, they would certainly do it for Julie Bindel, who was already widely hated by the cult for her courage in standing up for women. It was just a matter of when and how.

On Wednesday the details were as yet unclear. There’d been a slightly confusing tweet from Julie, which some people had understood to mean she’d been attacked at Edinburgh airport, though it was pretty obvious that it was a typo, probably keyed into her phone while feeling shaken and angry. She later confirmed it had been an error and clarified that the attack had taken place outside the venue she’d been speaking at in George Square.

There was also a confusing tweet from the man responsible for the attack. This is a man whose real identity is buried under a stone and who – for use on social media at least – chose some years ago to use the name of a high-profile American feminist called Cathy Brennan. It’s a choice that doesn’t reflect well on him and I won’t be using that name to refer to him but will stick with his Twitter handle of @TownTattle. Or let’s just say ‘Tattle’.

Tattle’s tweet said he “lost his shit” at Julie, that she filmed him and that he’s safe.

Huh?

If he was the one who “lost his shit“, why would there be any question over his safety? What about Julie’s safety? And how could he know if she filmed him or not?

The first newspaper to tell the story, quoting extensively from Julie herself, was The Scotsman. We learn from her account reported in that paper that she had left the venue, where she had been a speaker at an event organised to discuss the future of women’s sex-based rights, in the company of one of the other speakers, Prof Rosa Freedman. Tattle was outside waiting for her.

Other newspapers published accounts that vary slightly in wording but in which the main details remain the same:

• He started shouting and screaming abuse at her.
• He lunged at her but a security guard pulled him away.
• She got her phone out with the intention of capturing footage of him.
• He charged at her again and this time it took three security guards to restrain him.

This account sounds plausible and hasn’t been disputed by anyone who was there except Tattle himself who, after admitting he’d “lost his shit”, claimed he’d only wanted to speak to her face to face. Yeah, right. When you just want to talk to somebody face to face, it is absolutely normal to yell abuse at them and then lunge at them hard enough for security officers to deem it necessary to grab you and restrain you.

In a response to Graham Linehan on Twitter, he again claims she was filming him and he makes rather a lot of this. He says Julie should show the video he claims she took, even though Julie herself has not said that she managed to film it, only that she had reached for her phone in the hope of doing so. I’ll wager that Tattle knows she was, in the circumstances of being physically attacked by him, unable to get any useful footage. Putting out the suggestion that there is video evidence that would demonstrate his innocence but that Julie is mysteriously choosing not to make it public, is exactly the kind of despicable tactic I’ve come to expect from people like Tattle.

So how have the cult reacted?

“She’s a liar!”

The first thing they tried to make capital out of was the fact that in her first tweet, she said she was “physically attacked” but when she gave the full story to the papers she made it clear that Tattle, although he got within inches of her and “almost punched her in the face”, didn’t manage to make physical contact because he was stopped from doing so by security officers. A columnist in the Evening Standard reports Julie as saying,

Was Julie assaulted or not?

Under the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which applies in Scotland as well as England, yes she was.

Provided that Julie’s account is accurate and, given that it was witnessed by several people – including Rosa Freedman, who publicly announced that she was prepared to give a witness statement – it seems unlikely that she would have invented this account. The only person who refutes it is her attacker. Even her detractors don’t seem to think it’s worth disputing.

Far from it, they seem to think that her account of some nutter screaming abuse and charging at her is nothing to make a fuss about and that it contradicts her initial tweet about being physically attacked. Therefore she lied. Hetty Spoon, who is either one of the dumbest handmaidens known to humankind or a bloke claiming to be a woman, did a whole thread on it and here are just some of the other tweets I found.

They are wrong.

What happened to Julie is classified as assault according to the law. She was verbally attacked by someone who then physically lunged at her, twice, putting her in fear of violence – and not the so-called “violence” of misgendering. Real violence. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed the irony in this downplaying of an act of real-life aggression by a man against a woman by people who think that failing to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns is some kind of heinous crime.

“She misgendered her!”

Talking of “misgendering”, the Evening Standard journalist – who I understand to be a columnist named Charlotte Edwards – mentions that Julie’s attacker is “a trans woman whom Bindel mis-identifies as a man”, thereby earning herself woke points with a cult that tries to sanitise male violence against women. Whatever floats your boat, Charlotte.

Let’s just take a closer look at this individual who Julie “misidentifies as a man”.

He has adopted a woman’s name but likes how he looks when he’s unmistakably a man and he has no qualms about advoctating violence against women. So apart from that name – deliberately stolen from a specific woman in order to taunt her – what exactly is it that supposedly makes him a woman?

What makes him a woman, apparently, is that he says he’s one, according to Charlotte Edwards, the Men’s Rights Activists who write for Prick News and any number of moronic, misogynistic trans cultists, who would no doubt say Tattle’s identity is “not up for debate”. I agree that it isn’t. Tattle is a man, whatever he identifies as and nobody in their right mind and without a vested personal interest in perpetuating a falsehood would truthfully say otherwise. Womanhood is not an “identity”!

But by calling him what he is, Julie has committed the ultimate act of violence against this poor delicate flower.

“She deserved it”

Of course, not even the trans cultists were dumb enough to explicitly state that Julie deserved what she got. Instead, they took the opportunity to strongly imply it by choosing this time to express their hatred of her. Apparently, she’s the world’s worst feminist, a hate-preaching transphobe, she spouts rhetoric at least as violent as that she experienced and is single-handedly creating a harmful environment for trans people. Incredibly, she “actively supports violence against women” in the interest of fattening her career and her “smug, bigoted face” deserves a milkshake.

I will wager that not one of these haters has ever listened to a talk Julie has given, read any of her books or seen the passion and energy she puts into fighting for women who’ve been victims of violence. I’ve done all three and I don’t recognise this repugnant caricature these vicious idiots have created in the interest of their own agenda.

To sum up: a woman was the victim of vile, verbal abuse followed by what very much sounds like an attempt to strike her. Security officers were concerned enough to feel the attacker needed restraining and it took three of them to do so. This was perceived by Julie to be what she called a “physical attack”. (Contrary to what some claim, she never said that he’d hit her!). What Tattle did amounts to an assault under the law of the land. Yet Julie’s detractors accuse her of “flat out lying” and belittle her experience while stating her attacker is the vulnerable one.

The usual suspect

It was no surprise to learn that a certain trans activist had taken the opportunity to indulge his obsession with me and to dine out once again on the violent assault on me by three trans activists at Speakers’ Corner twenty months ago – an assault that he used at the time to lie about my behaviour and present me as the aggressor. On this occasion, he produced a thread which starts with this assertion, apparently referring to anyone with the temerity to say Julie had been attacked by a trans activist:

It goes without saying that no example of any such “false narrative” is given, let alone any explanation of how this hypothetical “false narrative” endangers trans people.

Next, he describes both of us as “anti-trans purveyors of hate and misinformation”. This is defamatory. This site reports extensively on hate by trans activists against others – mostly women. Everything I say is backed up by links or screenshots of evidence. There is no misinformation on this site and if I link to any article elsewhere that is provably giving false information, I would be happy to remove it on request.

Of course, in the jaundiced view of trans activists, reporting on their hate is an act of hate itself. We’re supposed to put up and shut up, don’t you know?

He also, in what I presume is an attempt to diminish our experiences at the hands of trans activists, shows pictures of trans people who’ve been badly beaten up and claims that the assault on me is used to excuse this violence. WTAF?  Can he give a single example of anyone using the violence against me as an excuse to beat up someone else? Of course he can’t. I’m gradually becoming convinced that he is a compulsive liar and probably certifiably insane

He goes on to repeat the lie that I supposedly got one of my assailants – a man taller than me and less than half my age – in a “headlock”. This fabrication was repeated under oath at Wolf’s trial by Tara Wolf’s mates, Ananya Jaidev, Laurel Uziell and Kathryn Higgins, but it was dismissed out of hand by the judge, who pointed out that there was no evidence for it. There was, however, evidence to support the fact that Wolf had assaulted me three times. Thus Wolf was found guilty of battery.

For some reason, he also shows the pic of me taken shortly after I’d been thumped by both Tara Wolf and his pony-tailed accomplice, showing how my right cheek had reddened, saying,

It sounds as if he is trying to suggest that I had only one assailant and that the only strike I got was the double-thump clearly caught on film which landed in the region of my left shoulder. That was why the pic of the left-hand side of my face, which was also circulated immediately after the assault for comparison, looked normal compared to my reddened right cheek. Thanks for the excuse to link to the footage one more time.

Remember, I was physically attacked for being an unknown ‘TERF’ – an assumption made because I was waiting to go to a meeting to hear about proposed changes to legislation. Julie was also attacked for being a ‘TERF’, even though she speaks respectfully of “trans women” (see for example the talk she recently gave in London) – she just won’t go along with any falsehoods they promote. I’ve no reason to believe that any of the cultists who lied about and/or celebrated the attack on me would have behaved any differently had the attack on me been serious enough to warrant hospital treatment.

By the way, a clue as to why this individual has really decided to double down on his crap about me may be discerned from the fact that I ignored a couple of emails he sent me last month, threatening some kind of action against me over this page, though without specifying which words exactly he objected to and why. Here’s an extract from one of those emails:

Aside from the jaw-dropping suggestion that my truthful and evidence-based reporting of his diabolical, dishonest and bullying behaviour and my challenging the rank stupidity he persists in expressing publicly is “bordering on a campaign of harassment” (oh, the irony), I decided they weren’t worth wasting time on and disregarded them.

I haven’t heard from any lawyer acting on his behalf and nor do I expect to. As someone who’s been blogging and running websites for well over a decade and knowing several people who’ve been unsuccessfully sued (in one case for retweeting something I said), I am now familiar enough with the legislation to know what I can say and what I can’t. I know that what this man has said about me – including calling me “a purveyor of hate and misinformation” – is defamatory but I’m not the kind of cowardly bully who tries to get people to remove comments by threatening legal action they have no intention of taking. In any event, every false, idiotic and nasty comment he posts exposes him for what he is.

This is trans politics. It encourages defamation and mockery while excusing and minimising harassment and violence against women who won’t succumb to their demand that we redefine the meaning of the word ‘woman’ to include delusional and entitled men, in spite of their unabashed misogyny.

The only reason members of this odious and destructive cult are leaping to the defence of a violent man and attacking his victim is because he claims to be a woman and she disagrees. The intention is to try to intimidate any women brave enough to stand up to them and get us to shut the hell up.

Not happening.

On the contrary, based on our experience since Speakers Corner, the trans cult’s main achievement has been to disabuse an ever-growing number of people of the idea that they are a harmless, marginalised and oppressed group who should have the right in law to simply self-declare as women.

This is a conflict between male entitlement vs women’s rights to define our boundaries and preserve our hard-won sex-based rights.

Which cause is more worthy of support?

Edited to add this cartoon from the fabulous Feminist Heretic. Follow her on Facebook.

Essential Reading:  Julie Bindel: the man in a skirt called me a Nazi — then attacked The Times 09.06.19

Further reading: 

Open Letter to the British Media: You are Complicit in Male Violence Against Feminists Dan Fisher 07.06.19

Male Silence and Male Violence: A Marriage of Complicity Tom Farr 07.06.19

Published 09.06.19

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