What “trans community”?
John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and some other books, is the latest celebrity to have got on the wrong side of the trans cult and has deactivated his Twitter account. Having read the piece he wrote that provoked their ire, I was set to lay into him myself on this blog for some pretty nasty comments he made in it about Graham Linehan. But then I saw that he’d apologised, so I’m going to be a bit gentler. Just a bit.
In a recent article for the Irish Times entitled, Why I support trans rights but reject the word ‘cis’, Boyne tells us why he wrote his latest novel, My Brother’s Name is Jessica. Unsurprisingly, it is a story of a child’s acceptance of his brother, who thinks he was “born in the wrong body”. Also unsurprisingly, it’s already got a one-star review on Amazon by a trans activist, who hasn’t actually read the book because it’s not even out until later this week! (Edit: the one-star review has now been removed).
On the whole, Boyne comes across as sensitive and caring in the Irish Times piece…but only to transgender people. The negative effects of transgender ideology on women and children aren’t even mentioned, though he disses Graham Linehan, whom he criticises as “someone masking intolerance by promoting himself as a champion of women”.
Of course, Graham Linehan does nothing of the sort – he simply argues on our side and is appreciated by many of us for doing so, for enduring endless defamatory comments and for not running away from Twitter and the relentless abuse he gets from the trans cult. Because trans activists have no counter-arguments that stand up to scrutiny, they resort to exactly the kind of ad hominem attack parroted by Boyne, whose apology may well be the first Linehan has ever received.
Anyway, apart perhaps from having an eye on marketability and the possibility of a future TV adaptation, why on earth would John Boyne choose to write about this particular topic at this particular time? He explains:
For those of us who’ve been on the receiving end of trans activist bullying for a lot longer than John Boyne – and especially for my lesbian sisters, who are fighting the most blatant form of erasure by those same bullies – the claim that his experiences are no less than anyone else’s seems crass to me, but let’s not dwell on it.
What is more concerning is the state of denial that John Boyne is now in. Today the Irish Times published in an article telling us that:
“As a long-term ally and supporter of trans people, and the author of a new novel that seeks to help young people embrace both their own identities and the identities of their friends, I’ve been appalled by the response of people on social media towards both my Irish Times article and a book that not a single one of them has even read, since it’s not published until Thursday.”
He said he had taken the decision to delete his social media accounts after receiving personalised abuse and threats on Twitter.
Welcome to the club, John Boyne. Has anyone told you to die in a fire yet? To suck their girl-dick? Has anyone expressed their desire to piss on your face, cut your throat and watch you die in agony? Because that is the kind of things trans activists say to us every day for having the temerity to point out that those men who claim to be “born in the wrong body” – or some such nonsense – aren’t actually women, for saying we don’t want them in our spaces and they don’t belong in our sports events. Why, it’s even been known for some of them to physically assault a woman more than twice their age for the sin of wanting to go to a meeting they didn’t like the sound of!
However, Boyne continues:
Oh for crying out loud. Try telling your online trolls that you don’t think they’ve anything to do with the trans community, then duck! Even people you might think are members of the trans community can be hated or mocked by other people you might think are members of that same community.
What does “supporting the “trans community” even mean, when so many of them are waging a vicious war against not only those of us resisting their homophobic and misogynistic ideology but against those trans people who are courageous enough to resist alongside us. And they’re not just doing it online.
I’ve no reason to think that the nasty ones are in a minority – not when I’ve seen hundreds of them target anyone who won’t go along with everything they say, even though it is demonstrably harmful to both adults and children. Not when I’ve seen them trying to no-platform anyone they disagree with, physically try to stop people meeting, jeopardize people’s livelihoods and call for physical violence over and over and over again. You stand 100% behind people who do this?
That’s a question I’d also like to put to comedian, Janey Godley, who recently tweeted a god-awful video boasting that, in spite of what sounds like some pretty horrible harassment by feminists (though nothing remotely as bad as what trans cultists do to us, obviously), she still “supports the trans community”. On being presented with a link to the terfisaslur site, she responded thus:
not all transpeople are good
Not all people against trans are bad #notall
I may be wrong but what I understand from this response is that Godley wouldn’t publicly declare that she supports all men because some men are bad. So why say you “support the trans community” when some of them are pretty bad by anyone’s reckoning?
I presume both John Boyne and Janey Godley reserve their support for the trans people they agree with and not the ones who promote, carry out or celebrate violence against women, not to mention all the rest of their thuggery. I presume they think that trans people should have the same human rights as anyone else but that wouldn’t include rights that hurt other people and impinge on their human rights. If that is the case, then they are just like the rest of us – including Graham Linehan.
Here’s a suggestion for both John Boyne and Janey Godley:
Forget about the “trans community” – it doesn’t exist. Start seeing people – including trans people – as individuals, with a diversity of views about what it is to be trans and what rights trans people are entitled to and judge them accordingly. There are plenty of trans “women” who don’t claim to be actual women and don’t support gender self-ID, so parroting their scientifically unsupportable ideology that ‘transwomen are women’ isn’t being as ‘woke’ as you might think.
Oh, and John, you say,
Dude, taking yourself off social media is your choice! Countless of us – including a number of transsexuals – have been banned from social media platforms for no other reason than that we stood up to trans activist bullies in various ways. In my case, it was because I demanded an apology from my assailants and hit back against others who’d been tormenting me for over a year and still defame me at every opportunity.
If you need to borrow some big girl pants, you know where to find me.
- My letter to the Irish Times Graham Linehan 25.04.19
Updated 22.05.19
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