Thanks for that fabulous fleshing out of your Twitter observations!
In his (more recently written) afterward to the paperback edition of Madness of Crowds (the hardback came out in 2019, and the paperback in 2021 IIRC) Douglas Murray observed that he was convinced there was a form of sexism mixed (very unpleasantly) with envy in the way t…
Thanks for that fabulous fleshing out of your Twitter observations!
In his (more recently written) afterward to the paperback edition of Madness of Crowds (the hardback came out in 2019, and the paperback in 2021 IIRC) Douglas Murray observed that he was convinced there was a form of sexism mixed (very unpleasantly) with envy in the way trans activists behave towards left-leaning women who oppose them (while generally leaving Tory critics of both sexes alone, a pattern not broken until Lloyd Russell-Moyle's behaviour in the Commons this week).
Murray is even less likely to out himself as a feminist than me, and is a lot more heavily involved in this debate than I am, so if he has noticed this, then I suspect it's genuine.
What I wonder now is if the behaviour of the trans activists Murray describes has cross-pollinated, as it were, with mainstream journalism. Because last week's clueless behaviour on both issues you discuss was very bad, worse than all the legal commentary around Brexit, which was generally at least arguable.
Interesting. I don’t really have anything that isn’t merely impressionistic to add, save that this sounds plausible. I did look more deeply at some of the “progressive” commentary about Kate Bingham, appointed to lead the government’s Vaccine Task Force in April 2020 and six months later the subject of a Sunday Times politics article criticising her for reasons that later turned out to be wholly insubstantial. This was followed by activism from the Good Law Project in adding her appointment to a claim they then had running about cronyism in pandemic public appointments, and very much building on the wide assumption that a “Tory wife” had no relevant competence to bring to the role (for which she was in fact eminently qualified). They withdrew the challenge to her appointment before trial, in which they failed to prove any of the remaining cronyism allegations. But the Guardian eagerly published their narrative and many high follower Twitter voices (of liberal men whose knowledge of the UK biotechnology industry was less than nothing) were prolific and widely amplified, all in the same vein. I challenged a number of them, finding their adherence to an utterly outdated and sexist view of a middle aged woman who had had an outstanding career and was a role model for women and girls in science pretty depressing. So I think it is not far beneath the surface for far too many of them.
Thanks for that fabulous fleshing out of your Twitter observations!
In his (more recently written) afterward to the paperback edition of Madness of Crowds (the hardback came out in 2019, and the paperback in 2021 IIRC) Douglas Murray observed that he was convinced there was a form of sexism mixed (very unpleasantly) with envy in the way trans activists behave towards left-leaning women who oppose them (while generally leaving Tory critics of both sexes alone, a pattern not broken until Lloyd Russell-Moyle's behaviour in the Commons this week).
Murray is even less likely to out himself as a feminist than me, and is a lot more heavily involved in this debate than I am, so if he has noticed this, then I suspect it's genuine.
What I wonder now is if the behaviour of the trans activists Murray describes has cross-pollinated, as it were, with mainstream journalism. Because last week's clueless behaviour on both issues you discuss was very bad, worse than all the legal commentary around Brexit, which was generally at least arguable.
Interesting. I don’t really have anything that isn’t merely impressionistic to add, save that this sounds plausible. I did look more deeply at some of the “progressive” commentary about Kate Bingham, appointed to lead the government’s Vaccine Task Force in April 2020 and six months later the subject of a Sunday Times politics article criticising her for reasons that later turned out to be wholly insubstantial. This was followed by activism from the Good Law Project in adding her appointment to a claim they then had running about cronyism in pandemic public appointments, and very much building on the wide assumption that a “Tory wife” had no relevant competence to bring to the role (for which she was in fact eminently qualified). They withdrew the challenge to her appointment before trial, in which they failed to prove any of the remaining cronyism allegations. But the Guardian eagerly published their narrative and many high follower Twitter voices (of liberal men whose knowledge of the UK biotechnology industry was less than nothing) were prolific and widely amplified, all in the same vein. I challenged a number of them, finding their adherence to an utterly outdated and sexist view of a middle aged woman who had had an outstanding career and was a role model for women and girls in science pretty depressing. So I think it is not far beneath the surface for far too many of them.