Again, stop smearing Terry Pratchett
Why do misogynists insist he'd share their views?
Donal O’Keefe joins Neil Gaiman in the ranks of the MMM (Misogynist Middleblow Males) who presume that the late Terry Pratchett was as easily bamboozled by fashionable nonsense, and smear him by associating him more closely with it.
I don’t know which way Pratchett would have gone on gender ideology. I like to think he’d be as horrified as I am that children are being told it’s possible to be born in the wrong body. I think he would have sniffed out the moral rot in the sudden enrichment of plastic surgeons and the swelling of pharmaceutical company profits.
Pratchett also wrote about witches, so I like to think he would have known a witchhunt had he seen one, and he would have recognised the witch hunters.
But one thing this debate has taught me, you can’t take anything for granted.
For instance, I never thought Neil Gaiman, the author of Coraline, could care so little about girls.
I never thought Jon Ronson would embrace an incoherent fad that was creating a Justine Sacco every other day.
I never thought the BBC would threaten women with a police visit for speaking about their rights. The irony of this is twofold. Over 70% of TV license prosecutions are for women. And in prison, there is the possibility of an extra little dose of punishment in that they may get sexually assaulted by a male criminal in makeup and a wig who was escorted into their midst and left there by the guards.
In other words, you better pay your license fee. Because someone decided that women in prison don’t deserve even the most basic levels of protection.
I think the idea that Terry Pratchett would have supported this horrific war on women is defamation. You may believe that lesbians should be coerced into sex with crossdressing men, you may believe that unhappy adolescents just need to bind or remove their breasts to “be themselves”, you may believe that JK Rowling is so unspeakably vile that she deserves the death and rape threats sent her way every day, but don’t smear the dead by presuming they agree with you on any of it. The contempt you display for women is yours alone.
Nothing to do with Pratchett, but did you catch Channel 4 news this evening? A simpering piece on L Hubbard's performance in the weightlifting, with a (very dapper) clinical director of a gender clinic brought on as an authority on sport physiology to explain that now his testosterone was suppressed his muscles were feminised and his big old male bones were more of a hindrance than an advantage. I used to think that Channel 4 news were honest and reliable. If I've learned anything from this whole gender fiasco, it's that everyone has their own angle, and they're not going to give it up.
It’s passages from “Nation”, talking about the “women’s places” that moved me most and convinced me that Terry Pratchett had an understanding of women (and of people generally) that a lot of men lack. The “other side” just betray their own ignorance of pretty much everything - and misogyny - with this.