115 Comments

Philips is being deliberately obtuse. Of course we can say the word woman. That's not the issue. But we can't say the word woman and mean exclusively adult human females. THAT'S the issue.

The trans lobby wants to include men in the definition of 'woman'. That's unacceptable. We have a right to the word for our sex class.

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Wholly agree. Denying biological sex is stupid, insidious and dangerous.

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And, in fact, under the transactivism that harms everyone, including her trans friend, the word 'woman' HAS been replaced, notably in health messaging. She's so disingenuous

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022

The perversion of language around women to pander to cos-playing tech bro”s and the likes of that British pillock with the beard and the Challenor-esque scheisse / paedo kink mob is reprehensible. No wonder women are incandescent with rage.

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Sounds like she's your typical "cancel culture is a right-wing myth" exponent.

Which is particularly galling considering the high profile victims of cancel culture are old school Lefties.

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Apr 10, 2022Liked by Graham Linehan

Anyone read 'Preference falsification'? Very interesting. 'A universal and pervasive phenomenon in which we misrepresent publicly what we really think or believe or want privately because of the fear of the consequences or because we wish to gain some benefit. It is a form of lying and occurs in many different interpersonal situations, such as in the political arena where voicing private sentiments publicly against a group can have dire consequences, within a research or peer-review setting where it can contaminate data or damage colleagues, or even among friends where it can affect relationships. Many people respond to social pressure to avoid being "a minority of one."

This sums up Jesse and many more like them.

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Which preferences do you believe Jess is falsifying; she genuinely seems to prefer some men be called women?

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Biology....that's a fact.

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Yes...not a preference; if she thought it was biologically impossible for men to become women, but publicly claimed that they could, that would be preference falsification.

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I want people to stop asking what a woman is. We all know, even those who refuse or pretend. We need to be asking what is trans. Stonewall’s huge definition covers so many and has deliberately confused matters in recent years. I believe we must start to push for clear definition.

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Agree - Nolan started to go there when he asked Owen Hurcum to define genderqueer and genderfuck. We need more of that to highlight the ridiculousness of it all.

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Absolutley this!

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deletedApr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022Liked by Graham Linehan
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hear hear. It was all built on sand

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And if everyone is trans... how will trans continue to fulfill its true purpose of making one SPECIAL???

Also: if everyone is trans... who will trans people fuck??? Cuz it certainly can't be each other! Not when they pursue people based exclusively on biological sex. You know... the thing that they accuse everyone ELSE of transphobia for doing.

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Meanwhile Dennis Kavanagh has been suspended from Twitter. When are we going to insist that tweets posted in Britain be subject to British law on free speech and non-discrimination on grounds of belief? Why should capitalist corporations be able to manufacture their own law and enforce it on our national territory?

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Oh no! He's been great

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Once again:

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/08/04/twitter-uk-cia-reuters-censorship/

There's twitter for you; they're in lockstep with your government.

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Craven and dishonest. Someone else should read out the names of women murdered by men, on IWD. In a Times interview with Janice Turner a year or so ago she mentioned a transidentifying man she has had 'girly chats' (my phrase) with. So like a lot of them it seems she's unable to see past her own friends and family and do her job, objectively.

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Oh yeah, the "I've got a transgender family member," so how dare you say anything against transgenderism? I don't even believe people now when they say this.

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Jess Phillips is a hypocrite. Rosie Duffield is worth ten of Jess and her fellow collaborators in the erasure of women as a distinct sex class.

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Ralph Miliband warned of the danger to Labour if it became "a sect for the virtuous". He also warned that the Conservative Party — despite being run by and for the ruling class — is a machine designed for electoral success and with a keen instinctual sense of what is popular to the working and middle classes. He issued this warning 60 years ago and nothing has changed.

It's worth nothing that the Labour Party has been electorally unsuccessful for pretty much most of its history. Even the lauded Labour government of 1945 led by Gaitskill had to be dragged kicking and screaming by its membership towards the implementation of the post-war policies that saw the introduction of the NHS and the establishment of the welfare state. It is genuinely startling to read Gaitskill's warnings that Labour must not act in a way which will cause it to lose credibility in the eyes of big business.

Miliband wrote extensively on the position of the Labour Party within the capitalist state. Put simply, the entire function of Labour is to act as a valve to relieve extra-parliamentary pressure for change. It is far better for the ruling classes to have discontents join Labour than it is to risk the chance of one of them picking up a brick. That kind of thing tends to escalate. The problem for Labour is that once these discontents find a home in the Party they tend to want to agitate for actual material change, which terrifies the leadership. Normally the Party does a pretty good job of keeping Left-wingers quiet (as Tony Benn put it "Labour is not a socialist party but a party with socialists in it") and so when in 2016, the Party machinery broke down and allowed an actual Left-winger to slip through — and then good God in heaven he starts talking about taxing the rich and renationalising industry — then the Party set about bringing him down. Jess Phillips was one them. Remember her interview when she threatened to stab Corbyn "in the front"? Can you imagine the outrage if Diane Abbott issued a similar threat to Starmer?

Labour has nowhere to go. It can't out-Tory the Conservatives on the flags and bunting shit, and it can't offer policies that would bring real material change without incurring the wrath of the right wing press, towards which it is so craven. And so it is reduced to, as Miliband warned in 1960, "a sect for the virtuous." Then we come back to the second part of his warning: the Conservatives have an instinctual sense of what is popular with the masses. I believe this explains Boris Johnson's comments last week. He may be an opportunist but he can sense which way the wind is blowing.

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022

Oh yes - you can always rely on Labour to respond to the open goal by hoofing the ball into the car park.

Faced with a Prime Minister on negative approval ratings, they throw themselves behind a movement that's driven by porn addiction, misogyny and mental health issues, manifesting in sexual crimes and witch-hunts of feminists and people who care about safeguarding.

Labour could dump several tonnes of the gender ideology garbage of the last seven years on the Government, but instead they go out of their way to tell voters that they would be even worse.

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When the backlash against Glinner started I knew very little about the issues and as he could be vitriolic and single minded on Twitter I accepted the received wisdom. But as I appreciated his work, going back to his time writing for Select I checked out the YouTube channel and it educated me and introduced me to thinkers like Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce. Plus Exulansic, whose medical horror show videos further informed me.

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author

can you give me an example of when I was vitriolic? not trying to catch you out I'm genuinely curious when you might have felt that

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022

And I wasn’t insulting you earlier or shitposting with my ill considered comments.

My memory is that you gave more than a few people the rough end of your tongue.

Unfortunately I can’t remember any one specific example. It’s a while ago and you were prolific on there.

You could come across as spiky sometimes and imo you didn’t suffer fools gladly.

On reflection I made a poor choice in the word vitriolic. Maybe in the context of the acid - idiots would troll you and you’d burn them.

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author

Well the only thing I’d say in my defence was that everyone who came at me started the conversation by calling me a bigot....

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022Liked by Graham Linehan

I understand the urge to bite back. From now on I’m going to apply the carpentry maxim. measure twice cut once. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

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And it is your right to defend yourself vociferously. I can never understand why people think someone is just supposed to take it, except that famed British politeness which we all know is a load of shit. See photo of demonstration at 10 Downing.

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(Whisper) he’s Irish.

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You're pretty abrasive yourself! But thank you for apologising. Bloody rare ability - one which our MPs are very very poor at.

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I know. It’s like an impulsive switch goes on. I’m sorry for being disrespectful to you earlier.

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Really no problem.

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When it comes to women's rights lesbians are the canary in the coal mine.

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Well said , Graham. Totally agree. Women like her are a disgrace to womanhood. Such cowards and sycophants , throwing women's rights away by their virtue signalling to the bullies in this destructive cult. Don't know how any of them live with themselves ,when they actually know the TRUTH about this Toxic movement !! Keep it up ,Graham.👍👍👍♥️👏

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When Julia Long was supporting Rosie Duffield, outside Labour Party conference I think., Jess was very anxious to get away and not engage. Worth a look for anyone who missed it. No time for her at all after that.

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022

The Tories are not the solution. How many women are condemned to food banks and benefit sanctions? You can’t eat rights or principles and vapid platitudes don’t pay the bills. I agree with what you are saying Glinner but identity politics sidelines class and dumps people with common interests into silos that are easy to manage via wedge issues. Classic divide and rule.

Likewise, if you believe that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire cares about women, or Paul Dacre and Rothermere after thirty years banging on about how women on their own are responsible for dangerous dogs with BSE driving down house prices then I have some magic beans for sale. Price one cow.

The only way to fight this is by subversion. Take advantage of a cheap Labour membership, go to meetings and get the message out.

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Apr 10, 2022Liked by Graham Linehan

I agree with you, but if the laws on self-ID change as Labour has said, even very recently, that it wants them to, then it will be that much harder to undo all this. So IMO we need to keep them out, until they have found their heads, and backbones.

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deletedApr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022
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I don't know if I could ever vote for a Republican, and it's bloody upsetting to turn on the TV and see them being the ones talking sense. But you're right: If we allow this to go even further -- which it's already done! -- we are fucking doomed. And, no, I will never vote for another Democrat. I would vote for an independent if she had a head on her shoulders.

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Don't make the mistake of assuming that were are all middle class. Working class women stand to lose as much, if not more as men are allowed in women's prisons, rape crisis centres, domestic violence units; if their sexuality is denied. Working class women have children they wish to protect from an ideology that says if they aren't sufficiently 'feminine' they might be a boy; that says that they can have no voice in pointing out when a man in their space is a man. Take a look at Belstaffie and Aja on Twitter. This ideology has targeted 'looked after' children.

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This always makes me very angry. Everyone I meet assumes I am a college graduate, probably with an advanced degree. Just because I speak correct English and know something does not mean I went to college. It means I grew up in a working-class family with consciousness and an interest in culture.

My grandmother went to work at age 12 and worked all her life as a waitress or hospital aide; she died hostessing a banquet at Ohio State University. My mother got her first library card when she was THREE, she and her sister spoke Latin at home, and when they gave my grandma a ticket to see Paul Robeson perform Otello, she returned from the performance and insisted they both go as well. (My mother could have met Robeson because of her political activity, but she was too shy.)

I absolutely despise the assumption that somehow education and culture go hand-in-hand with bourgeois class status; I have known many upper-middle-class people who were utterly uneducated and ignorant. My mother spent her evenings reading anthropology books waiting for my father to return from his second-shift job; a friend from a well-off family whose father was probably CIA told me his mother spent her days playing bridge.

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"How many women in poverty have time to raise their consciousness to your enlightened level? I’m not being facetious"

That seemed like an assumption to me.

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deletedApr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022
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Please don't call people vermin, whoever they are. That way leads to totalitarianism, with you being the Nazis (this was exactly what the Nazis called the Jews).

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yes I was going to say something. I also don't like hearing words like that applied to people like Baroness Nicholson, who is fighting this nonsense with every ounce of her energy. Let's try and build a space here where we don't get into fisticuffs because of things said in (often legitimate) anger.

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I apologise for lowering the tone.

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Not at all

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Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 10, 2022Liked by Graham Linehan

Aneurin Bevan 1897 - 1960, chief architect of the NHS

"No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”

My grandfather was born in 1910. He didn’t own a pair of shoes until he was fourteen and signed on to work at the pit and was given boots for work.

His family lived in a one up one down cottage and because they were so poor he had to steal potato’s and turnips from farmers fields. When he was caught he was horsewhipped.

He also boxed professionally to support his family as his Dad was a WWI veteran who suffered shell shock and was mustard gassed then refused demob and sent to Ireland by Churchill to do God knows what as a Black and Tan. He came back and spent most of the family’s income on drink. My Grandad fought a former French world champion, Emil Pladner. The pit owner kindly gave him three days off to train for the fight.

He used to say “No such thing as the good old days hinny”

You are right that calling people vermin is wrong so I apologise. It’s the mindset and Tory tendency to blame the poor for their own poverty I despise.

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Great response and thanks for the edit. I can now agree with everything you say. The future for the poor looks horrifying under this bunch of entitled Tories.

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I'm a former Lab member and activist. I donated money I could ill afford and drove miles to campaign on doorsteps in GE 2017 and 2019. I voted for Starmer as leader because I thought he'd reunite the party and because of his response on this issue during his leadership campaign. I'm someone who really wanted him to succeed and he's blown it, he lied to get the leadership and now he just looks ridiculous as he worships at the trans altar. I'll never vote tory for all the reasons above but I can't vote Labour or LD or Green because how you can vote for people who deny reality when you know that at heart they don't really believe what they are saying. If Labour came up with policies that really helped families e.g. nationalising energy, rent controls, more council housing, realistic benefit increases etc I might just about be able to swallow this pill but right now they're just tory-lite, the best they can promise is a bit of managerial tweaking that will do nothing to solve the underlying structural issues. All that plus shitting all over women and pushing a generation of children into a dangerous cult that will leave them physically and mentally harmed for life - No Thank You.

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And Biden called people subhuman; what a nice man.

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Manipulating Labour membership gave us Corbyn last time. No thanks.

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The labour pairty is just anither liberal democratic pairty. Ony pretence o' bein socialist was finally dropprd courtesy o Blair and co. The workin class bases ravaged by Thatcher were abandoned. Scotland is labour nae mair and the English hertlands gone.

Corbyn an his modest policies never stood s chance cos the right wing PLP... a law unto itsel backed by MSM ,nae lovers o the workin calsses, carried oot a viscoous anti Corbyn lynchin backed by the Israeli govt.

So then son yer pairty is jist anither unionist dreary capitalist supportin lackey.

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An organised and motivated faction did that. Organise another.

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Expediency is the key. People who were hitherto "enemies" need to unite, as I understand is already happening with feminists either side of the political spectrum re Caroline Ffiske's new movement.

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Why bother it's as relevant as the lib dems.

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I find it hard to believe she and others in the Labour Party genuinely buy the TWAW nonsense. What I find hard to accept is that they couldn’t just all get together and agree to come out together. Hold hands and jump, as it would be harder for the woke bros to pick them off.

What’s depressing is that they are all essentially career politicians with no willingness to stand up for what’s right if it risks their seat on the gravy train.

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I do like that idea of 'Hold Hands and Jump' . It's frustrating to observe members of the Labour Party just regurgitating (enforced dogma). The female MPs have to kept "under manners", so to speak, but I have been shocked by the level of ignorance shown by so many Labour Supporters revealed by (quite frankly) naive comments on Facebook pages.

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I once suggested that our Congressional representatives be given small stipends, fed school lunches, and housed in military barracks. What an improvement we would see in our representatives!

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She always pulls that "I'm too busy with domestic violence victims for this trivia" line. Every time.

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