Thank you for writing this. I've been a fan of Bill and Real Time since the beginning, and I appreciate that he is finally expressing his opinions of gender ideology (the only one on the left with that size audience to do so), but his take on you was mean and uninformed.
I hope he reads this letter, and I hope he apologizes. I also hope he invites you on his show as the main interview, and I hope you accept.
If you're on Twitter, then you might try rattling his cage there. Graham had linked to a tweet by Sall -- Tickle vs Giggle -- Glover which tagged Maher so you, or anyone else so inclined, might do likewise:
In case you missed that case of Glover's in Australia -- kind of a big deal for many reasons -- it featured a rather demented "judge" who apparently "thinks" that "Ms." Tickle -- with "her" brand-spanking new neovagina -- had "changed sex" -- a medical and biological impossibility:
The Guardian: "Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app; Tickle successfully sued social media platform Giggle for Girls with judge stating ‘on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable’ ..."
I'm sure you're also aware that the judge hit Sall Grover with a $10,000 fine just because she laughed involuntarily at a "Smelly Balls" candle that the lawyer for Jason "Tickle" (named after a children's entertainer - totally normal!) put to her in court.
Tickle's side is also arguing in court that men who self-ID as women should get the same legal protections given to pregnant women!
The Guardian is usually very fair but on this one issue it has been awful. It paraded Tickle's victor in the article you refer to but it has refused to interview Ms Grover and it also failed these two facts above.
I won't really trust the Guardian again after all of its cover-ups on this issue. For example it has never formally apologised for publishing Peter Tatchell's 1997 letter that advocated for paedophilia-
Well I can't argue with you when you're not giving specifics about how they're "off with the fairies for years now". But on issues like the environment, corruption, foreign affairs - they're very good - much better than the Murdoch press gang.
It just shows how captured they are when it comes to gender issues. Helen Joyce said this brilliantly in an interview with Peter Boghossian, how just 1 person in an organisation can poison the entire organisation.
Sorry to reply to me - but I gotta add that when the Guardian keeps being pigheaded about gender ideology it does undermine trust in their reporting on other issues. A real shame because we need indie media right now.
I'm surprised that you nor anyone else with eyes to see and a goodly level of critical thinking could ever trust ' The Guardian ' + all and any of the other lying , double dealing reprobates that make up what's left of the legacy media and the fifth estate .......Ratbags - pretty much all of them
I'll take this on board and will not be so ' Easy ' on them next time . But- just to be clear , I loathe and despise the entirety of what currently passes itself
off as the mainstteam media ...be they left or right . In real terms I suppose
it would ne more accurate that I have a visceral hatred for the lot of them .
Yeah as I said above the Guardian is great on most issues like the environment, corruption etc.
If we just say that all media is as bad as Murdoch then he wins.
The whole point of propaganda is for the reader to say "I don't believe any of them and so I won't believe any of them" because when you say that you do nothing and the propagandist's masters can get on with destroying our beautiful world without any pesky people calling for a better world.
Thanks for the info. Lot of biases in the reporting from various "lame-stream media outlets", particularly on anything to do with gender.
Such an absolute clusterfuck, largely due to pigheaded ignorance and cluelessness as to what it takes to qualify as male and female, as to what "gender" actually means. Though much of feminism bears a great deal of responsibility for that state of affairs.
Something of a quick note in passing -- past my bedtime -- but you might have some interest in my open letter to three "journalists" at the New York Times and one at Slate on that score:
"Ma'am you have prostate cancer!" That really pins it down doesn't it.
The NYT has had some Gender Critical articles - despite ditching Pamela Paul. Slate on the other hand has never published a GC article - despite its readers (like those at the NYT) routinely attacking Trans propaganda pieces. But Slate is similar to the Guardian - normally trustworthy - just goes stupid on gender ideology. Good on you for having a go at Slate. US Democrats are so hidebound on gender ideology, it's very hard to engage with them. And they're usually humble but on gender ideology they go stupid - even when it really costs them politically.
Sorry - US Democratic Party *leadership* - including otherwise sensible journalists. Ordinary people resent having this elitist crap thrown down at all of us.
Thanks for the vote of confidence and for having read my open letter.
Though you, or others here, may not have read the post by Jesse Singal -- who's something of fraud and a grifter, a scientific illiterate at best -- since he let slide Mark Stern's frequent and rather demented "transition to another sex".
Bit of a joke for Stern to be blathering on about "legitimate disagreements over law and logic" when he starts off on an invalid premise and a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron or two. Much of what he said is, as the phrase goes, "not even wrong".
Re "ditching Pamela Paul", another black mark against the NYTimes. I may yet cancel my subscription there.
Though I was somewhat pleased to see a recent post there by gay columnist and Substacker, Andrew Sullivan, which gives some evidence of the light dawning in that somewhat benighted neck of the woods:
In my considered opinion you would be better off ear-candling then listening to "Bill's" fatuous gobshitery. I think that he has been pissing in your ear and telling you that it's raining for so long that you now require a hearing aid that filters out left wing white noise. You have been authoritatively desensitised to bullshit after listening to it for so long.
Bill's wrong on gender ideology. But he has lots of good ideas and opinions on other topics.
Lots of hate and calls for extremism in the comments here. It'd be more worthwhile if people had more ideas about how to come together and fix things.
Silicon Valley's algorithms are already driving us apart and toward extremism - with help from their friends in Russia, Iran and other troll factories that haven't been discovered yet.
Graham, I flinched when I heard him say that. I'm in Australia, Ground Zero for the enforced madness. I send you my heartfelt support and want you to know I will defend you to anyone, anywhere.
Sadly, absolutely true. All Australian governments, at all three levels: local; state and commonwealth are all in with trans/gender ideology. And they are not for turning. A case study in the arrogance of ignorance.
Though don't know why we shouldn't be expecting that from the transloonie tribe since their "Auto-da-fés", their rather thuggish if not psychotic behaviours, have been front and center for a coon's age:
Anyone with their heads not up their arses, or those of various transloonie nutcases, which clearly excludes Maher -- should have noticed that a long time ago.
Though -- speaking as a Canuck (at least in Vancouver BC. ...), as a Canadian -- I'm rather "disconcerted" to have to admit that Canada is, indeed, part of those "trantipodes". Case in point being Canada's erstwhile fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, who has clearly drunk the transloonie Kool-Aid, pretty much to the last drop, with his full-throated endorsement of the transactivist mantra that "trans women are women!!11!!" -- and on International Woman's Day, no less:
New Zealand also - I’m currently watching a Human Rights Review Tribunal case in which a group of lesbians are complaining they were unfairly excluded from a Pride event, effectively because they refuse to agree lesbians can have penises.
Agree re Graham Linehan - he has been so brave in standing up for women’s rights and against lying to children, drugging and mutilating them. If opposing the latter is being “a crank,” I wouldn’t want to be anything else.
Being in New Zealand, you might have some particular interest in the following post of mine since your Statistics Department [NZS] gets more than a (dis)honourable mention or two 🙂. In particular:
"For instance, their definition of:
Lesbian: A woman who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex or gender."
A tweet from "Candy Outten" which underlines their cluelessness, their "ideological capture":
NZS: "Sex reassignment occurs where a person has undergone the necessary treatment to permanently change their sex. If a person's sex is indeterminate at birth, sex assignment occurs when they undergo treatment to become male or female."
"Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology; Lysenkoism and The Gangs Who Couldn't Shoot Straight"
I can only agree. Madness. And deeply homophobic- if attraction is not about actual sexed bodies, homosexuality becomes meaningless. As the UK Supreme Court said in April, humans are not attracted to gender recognition certificates
Bit of a puzzle where that "madness" started from, how that "crazy train" got out on the main line and built up a dangerous head of steam. So to speak. 🙂
Though there's some reason to argue that "feminism" in general deserves a fair amount of blame for that since they were largely the early progenitors/progenitrices of the distinction between "sex" and "gender". Although there is a fair amount of scientific justification for it:
Wikipedia: In 1945, Madison Bentley defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex". Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex has been interpreted as the beginning of the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory ...
Which the transloonie tribe have more or less "weaponized" such that, for example, simply exhibiting some traits typical of females -- e.g., neovaginas -- is to be taken as prima facie evidence of having "changed sex" -- a medical and biological impossibility. Not that that "cognitive distortion" hasn't had a fair amount of "currency" for 75 years or more:
The Guardian: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app; Tickle successfully sued social media platform Giggle for Girls with judge stating ‘on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable
As a lifelong feminist, I vehemently refute anything I’ve done encouraged this idiocy. I’d also point out that plenty of feminists- and other women - are fighting back, my self included in my own small way. The LAVA group of lesbians fighting against discrimination against them by Pride are all feminists.
I would rather suggest that the trans nonsense is a backlash against women’s rights. Remember there didn’t used to be public toilets for women so women couldn’t travel or go very far from home. Now the trans-identifying men are effectively taking out public toilets away from us. Making them dangerous places.
Wondered whether you might object to me laying at least a portion of the transgender issue at feminism's doorstep. 😉🙂 Why I qualified that with "in general".
I'm happy to "champion" the "feminist project" to defend women's rights -- I've often quoted Canadian suffragette Nellie McClung's quip that "no nation rises higher than its women". Probably why so many Muslim countries are such basket cases.
But there seems to be a great deal of rot within feminism -- some 23 "sects" within it at last count. ICYMI, a review of Professing Feminism by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge:
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
KS: "Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip.
Sadly, I don't see that she has done much if any "reflection" on how and where much of feminism itself has gone off the rails. Though her "Material Girls" might be said to have been a start on that.
See my earlier refutation that feminists are to blame.
Also, the distinction feminists made between stereotypes and what actual real women are was an effort to destroy stereotypes for women, yes, but also for men. We don’t want men forced into rigid definitions of what’s manly. Trans ideology, on the other hand, aims to set these stereotypes into reinforced concrete. All tomboys are being told they’re not really girls while “sissy” boys are being told they aren’t real boys. These are the child victims who adults are lying to. They’re being funneled into chemical poisoning and mutilation in the name of the lie that they can change sex. We know many of these kids would grow up to be gay if left alone. Instead they’re being sterilized and castrated. My definition of pure evil.
Quite agree with you on those "child victims". Kind of makes me mental that so many "doctors" are arguing that if some kids are "gender non-conforming" -- masculine girls, feminine boys -- then that means they were "born in the wrong body" so should have their genitalia mangled to resemble those of the other sex.
But while I sympathize with feminists to the extent of rejecting many of those stereotypes, I kind of think many go off the rails in not accepting that many of those stereotypes weren't cut from whole cloth, weren't simply something hatched in the inner sanctums of "The Patriarchy!!11!! for the sole purpose of "oppressing women".
Many of those stereotypes -- for both men and women -- have their roots in different biological bedrock. There's a great deal of fairly solid evidence for those differences -- some of which are socially beneficial and some which are not -- for example, more men who are rapists than there are women, something which that post of Stock's on abolishing gender goes into at some length:
KS: Radfems understand the fact that basic aspects of males and female bodies, produced by natural selection, causally contribute to predictable patterns of behaviour even across otherwise very different societies. .... At the same time though, many radfems simultaneously pursue a goal which undercuts a lot of this. They want to “abolish gender”. I think this is barking [mad]. .... There are a couple of possible ways in which the dialectic could proceed at this point. One route would be to say that nature in males and females extends beyond basic automatic physiological processes, spilling over into concrete aspects of psychology and behaviour as well. In that case, at least some of what we now take to be socioculturally plastic “gender” would not be as plastic as we think. And in that case, there would be no point trying to abolish what is naturally bestowed – for as Kant said, “ought implies can”.
I'm based in the UK but I cover Australia and NZ ( well also the whole Anglosphere!!! Beam me up, Scotty!!). Just done a Down Under Special - check it out:
I have an article currently in Eureka Street, about the way gender ideology has played out in Australia, the UK, Europe and the USA. It's long and there is a paywall, but it is available on my substack at https://substack.com/@juliette3/note/c-164095105
There may be occasions when I as a fellow journalist may not totally approve of your approach. I always deeply respected and respect your sincerety and your decency and your dedication.
You put your social existence on line for a cause not only you believe in, that everyone even remotely grounded in reality should know matters.
This is why I have been a paying member of this publication, and will continue to be.
Thanks, Chris. It seems to be impossible to communicate to people the stress I've been put under. I think my behavior has been quite measured, all things considered.
Sir, I think you have shown exemplary behaviour when faced with unimaginable stress. I cannot begin to imagine what you have been through & continue to do so. Bless you Graham, you have more friends, you may never meet, who completely agree with you, I wish you all the very best, your day will come. X
Your stress was not lost on any of us who have recently heard you speak. I was like omg (watching you be interviewed) he’s so stressed out he has the shakes. Sending you strength and love. You are a hero to many and hopefully you realize that.
I saw that piece and was shocked to hear him say those words against you, so brutally, so dismissively. I got the feeling he'd only scratched the surface of your life for the past decade.
Very well written piece, I really hope it does the trick.
Excellent Graham! In time we will see what we saw post holocaust where people will say of ordinary German people, "Why did no one speak up?". They will say it when all this nonsense is but a pile of rubble, lives in ruin because of it. Yes, you are right, people don't speak up because of the very real fear that exists but to admonish anyone who does is yet worse. "Crank" my arse, who the feck does he think he is? We'll see if he has any sort of backbone.
I've never been a fan of Bill Maher, think he's a smug, unfunny a-hole, and this story solidifies my opinion. Graham, you are ten times (or more) the person/man he is or ever will be, smarter, funnier, and a better human being overall. So glad you told him what you thought, and we your supporters concur. All the best to you! ❤️
This letter worth the upgrade to paid. Sorry I’ve been late, Graham - am not exactly flush.
Bill Maher is one of the worst of them, in a way: the respectable, hugely influential, ‘reasonable’ professional ‘wealthy radical lefties’. Critical among the enablers. He is particularly insufferably smug, toking away on his joint with an air of supreme ‘centrist’ superiority and self-adoration.
F**k him. And all the other rich Boomer narcissist lefties stinking up the entertainment-‘celebrity journalism’ industrial complex.
The sooner we kill mass media Fame as a lucrative career option, the saner our village will become again.
I've noticed over the past few years that Bill is trying to straddle two worlds when it comes to transgenderism, Truth and The Elites. One minute he is calling out the ridiculousness of queer theory and the next is going out of his way to not misgender a dude in a dress. He is like Qatar trying to play both sides and please the West and The Fundamentalists. Both Bill and Qatar have large platforms and financial backing and have the power to influence all players if they play their cards right. Once and awhile cohorts such as yourself need to be thrown under the bus or dealt an unfair hand in order to keep their balancing game going. Like throwing a bone to the other side in an appeasement effort. You should go on his show and explain this to him;-)
Sometimes Maher seems so close to getting it but then he flakes out with a tentatively spoken half comment/half question about 'there are people who are born in the wrong body, right?' As if he is waiting for someone on the panel or in the audience to validate that viewpoint. He has made some random, excellently strong comments against gender ideology, like a couple of weeks ago when he kept saying "we're not doing that" after examples of men in women's spaces (as an example of how crazy the left has become). His "Gender Apartheid" segment earlier this year calling out the left for not marching and protesting against the oppression of women in Islamist countries was actually moving. But he clearly understands little about the broader fight against the ravages of queer theory and the courageous people who are doing the real work. His comment was a cheap shot from inside his liberal, consequence-free bubble.
You are right, maybe he doesn't really get the wake that will result from queer theory -- maybe it's the pot that keeps him from seeing the obvious. AND you hit the nail on the head regarding consequences. I read Bill's last book and every time he blasted woke madness he would immediately follow it up on a chapter that amplified TDS.
Maher is delicately walking the line, and getting away with it. It's easy for him to disparage a man who did not walk the line and did not get away with it.
Especially if that man is much funnier than he is.
It's spite and jealousy both. He wishes he had the moral integrity that Graham has, and the wit that Graham has, and so he puts Graham down to make himself feel better.
Thank you for writing this. I've been a fan of Bill and Real Time since the beginning, and I appreciate that he is finally expressing his opinions of gender ideology (the only one on the left with that size audience to do so), but his take on you was mean and uninformed.
I hope he reads this letter, and I hope he apologizes. I also hope he invites you on his show as the main interview, and I hope you accept.
Imo, we should all share it with Bill. Ask for action on this.
Excellent idea.
If you're on Twitter, then you might try rattling his cage there. Graham had linked to a tweet by Sall -- Tickle vs Giggle -- Glover which tagged Maher so you, or anyone else so inclined, might do likewise:
https://x.com/salltweets/status/1966845249927753815
In case you missed that case of Glover's in Australia -- kind of a big deal for many reasons -- it featured a rather demented "judge" who apparently "thinks" that "Ms." Tickle -- with "her" brand-spanking new neovagina -- had "changed sex" -- a medical and biological impossibility:
The Guardian: "Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app; Tickle successfully sued social media platform Giggle for Girls with judge stating ‘on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable’ ..."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/23/roxanne-tickle-v-giggle-for-girls-transgender-woman-wins-discrimination-case-against-women-female-only-app-ntwnfb
I'm sure you're also aware that the judge hit Sall Grover with a $10,000 fine just because she laughed involuntarily at a "Smelly Balls" candle that the lawyer for Jason "Tickle" (named after a children's entertainer - totally normal!) put to her in court.
Tickle's side is also arguing in court that men who self-ID as women should get the same legal protections given to pregnant women!
The Guardian is usually very fair but on this one issue it has been awful. It paraded Tickle's victor in the article you refer to but it has refused to interview Ms Grover and it also failed these two facts above.
I won't really trust the Guardian again after all of its cover-ups on this issue. For example it has never formally apologised for publishing Peter Tatchell's 1997 letter that advocated for paedophilia-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6374467/Peter-Tatchell-forced-deny-advocating-paedophilia-1997-letter.html
"The Guardian is usually very fair"
Nope.
They have been off with the fairies for years now.
Well I can't argue with you when you're not giving specifics about how they're "off with the fairies for years now". But on issues like the environment, corruption, foreign affairs - they're very good - much better than the Murdoch press gang.
It just shows how captured they are when it comes to gender issues. Helen Joyce said this brilliantly in an interview with Peter Boghossian, how just 1 person in an organisation can poison the entire organisation.
Sorry to reply to me - but I gotta add that when the Guardian keeps being pigheaded about gender ideology it does undermine trust in their reporting on other issues. A real shame because we need indie media right now.
They're no better than Murdoch and every bit as bad
Exactly
I'm surprised that you nor anyone else with eyes to see and a goodly level of critical thinking could ever trust ' The Guardian ' + all and any of the other lying , double dealing reprobates that make up what's left of the legacy media and the fifth estate .......Ratbags - pretty much all of them
Now don't pull any punches. Tell us what you really think of The Guardian ... 😉🙂
I'll take this on board and will not be so ' Easy ' on them next time . But- just to be clear , I loathe and despise the entirety of what currently passes itself
off as the mainstteam media ...be they left or right . In real terms I suppose
it would ne more accurate that I have a visceral hatred for the lot of them .
Yeah as I said above the Guardian is great on most issues like the environment, corruption etc.
If we just say that all media is as bad as Murdoch then he wins.
The whole point of propaganda is for the reader to say "I don't believe any of them and so I won't believe any of them" because when you say that you do nothing and the propagandist's masters can get on with destroying our beautiful world without any pesky people calling for a better world.
Thanks for the info. Lot of biases in the reporting from various "lame-stream media outlets", particularly on anything to do with gender.
Such an absolute clusterfuck, largely due to pigheaded ignorance and cluelessness as to what it takes to qualify as male and female, as to what "gender" actually means. Though much of feminism bears a great deal of responsibility for that state of affairs.
Something of a quick note in passing -- past my bedtime -- but you might have some interest in my open letter to three "journalists" at the New York Times and one at Slate on that score:
Open Letters; Ideological Capture
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/open-letters-ideological-capture
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pWR3!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6449cb69-e68e-44be-aad2-627b72c9f21d_628x548.jpeg
You might at least get a kick out of that picture, one on the "It's Ma'am" Incident 😉🙂
"Ma'am you have prostate cancer!" That really pins it down doesn't it.
The NYT has had some Gender Critical articles - despite ditching Pamela Paul. Slate on the other hand has never published a GC article - despite its readers (like those at the NYT) routinely attacking Trans propaganda pieces. But Slate is similar to the Guardian - normally trustworthy - just goes stupid on gender ideology. Good on you for having a go at Slate. US Democrats are so hidebound on gender ideology, it's very hard to engage with them. And they're usually humble but on gender ideology they go stupid - even when it really costs them politically.
Sorry - US Democratic Party *leadership* - including otherwise sensible journalists. Ordinary people resent having this elitist crap thrown down at all of us.
Thanks for the vote of confidence and for having read my open letter.
Though you, or others here, may not have read the post by Jesse Singal -- who's something of fraud and a grifter, a scientific illiterate at best -- since he let slide Mark Stern's frequent and rather demented "transition to another sex".
Bit of a joke for Stern to be blathering on about "legitimate disagreements over law and logic" when he starts off on an invalid premise and a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron or two. Much of what he said is, as the phrase goes, "not even wrong".
Singal's post:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/heres-my-exchange-with-slates-mark?triedRedirect=true
Re "ditching Pamela Paul", another black mark against the NYTimes. I may yet cancel my subscription there.
Though I was somewhat pleased to see a recent post there by gay columnist and Substacker, Andrew Sullivan, which gives some evidence of the light dawning in that somewhat benighted neck of the woods:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU8.mhBo.7fGw2_Qib8r6&smid=url-share
Even if Sullivan is still totally clueless that absolutely no one, clownfish excepted ..., gets to change sex:
AS: "...there are big majorities for allowing trans adults to transition to the sex they want. ..."
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/how-utterly-lost-is-the-left-960?triedRedirect=true
Some good could come of this if Graham were to be invited on the show. It would be a great opportunity to educate people!
In my considered opinion you would be better off ear-candling then listening to "Bill's" fatuous gobshitery. I think that he has been pissing in your ear and telling you that it's raining for so long that you now require a hearing aid that filters out left wing white noise. You have been authoritatively desensitised to bullshit after listening to it for so long.
Bill's wrong on gender ideology. But he has lots of good ideas and opinions on other topics.
Lots of hate and calls for extremism in the comments here. It'd be more worthwhile if people had more ideas about how to come together and fix things.
Silicon Valley's algorithms are already driving us apart and toward extremism - with help from their friends in Russia, Iran and other troll factories that haven't been discovered yet.
Bill Maher ........" A Leopard seldom ever changes its Spots " ( Shame on you Bill ) - you absoloute Gobshite
Graham, I flinched when I heard him say that. I'm in Australia, Ground Zero for the enforced madness. I send you my heartfelt support and want you to know I will defend you to anyone, anywhere.
Australia is now next level transid, up there with Canada. The trantipodes.
"The trantipodes"
Brilliant!!
Sadly, absolutely true. All Australian governments, at all three levels: local; state and commonwealth are all in with trans/gender ideology. And they are not for turning. A case study in the arrogance of ignorance.
If you’re in Sydney I’m up for a peaceful protest outside the uber transid national broadcaster offices- pm me if you know anyone who’s willing.
Not in Sydney, so sorry can't join you. We are in central Victoria. But thanks for the invite😎
> "trantipodes" 👍👌👏🙂
Right up there with "The Tranish Inquisition" -- no one EVER expects THAT! 😉🙂
"The Tranish Inquisition clearly shows the Orwellian nature of our electronic Agora";
https://medium.com/@williamray/the-tranish-inquisition-clearly-shows-the-orwellian-nature-of-our-electronic-agora-42883c79a180
Archived since Medium got "offended": https://archive.ph/RJCqO
https://www.peaktrans.org/silencing-critical-voices/
Monty Python Spanish Inquisition Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj8n4MfhjUc
Though don't know why we shouldn't be expecting that from the transloonie tribe since their "Auto-da-fés", their rather thuggish if not psychotic behaviours, have been front and center for a coon's age:
https://terfisaslur.com/
https://speakingplainly.substack.com/p/is-it-really-true-that-no-ones-denying
Anyone with their heads not up their arses, or those of various transloonie nutcases, which clearly excludes Maher -- should have noticed that a long time ago.
Though -- speaking as a Canuck (at least in Vancouver BC. ...), as a Canadian -- I'm rather "disconcerted" to have to admit that Canada is, indeed, part of those "trantipodes". Case in point being Canada's erstwhile fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, who has clearly drunk the transloonie Kool-Aid, pretty much to the last drop, with his full-throated endorsement of the transactivist mantra that "trans women are women!!11!!" -- and on International Woman's Day, no less:
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2023/03/08/statement-prime-minister-international-womens-day
And that's only the tip of the iceberg, one which should at least sink the whole goddamn Liberal party here:
"Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology; Lysenkoism and The Gangs Who Couldn't Shoot Straight";
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
New Zealand also - I’m currently watching a Human Rights Review Tribunal case in which a group of lesbians are complaining they were unfairly excluded from a Pride event, effectively because they refuse to agree lesbians can have penises.
Agree re Graham Linehan - he has been so brave in standing up for women’s rights and against lying to children, drugging and mutilating them. If opposing the latter is being “a crank,” I wouldn’t want to be anything else.
Being in New Zealand, you might have some particular interest in the following post of mine since your Statistics Department [NZS] gets more than a (dis)honourable mention or two 🙂. In particular:
"For instance, their definition of:
Lesbian: A woman who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex or gender."
A tweet from "Candy Outten" which underlines their cluelessness, their "ideological capture":
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1MX2!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe63f7c7e-3cfe-416a-b05f-8fd466773dc7_658x301.jpeg
Another classic case of that cluelessness:
NZS: "Sex reassignment occurs where a person has undergone the necessary treatment to permanently change their sex. If a person's sex is indeterminate at birth, sex assignment occurs when they undergo treatment to become male or female."
"Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology; Lysenkoism and The Gangs Who Couldn't Shoot Straight"
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
I can only agree. Madness. And deeply homophobic- if attraction is not about actual sexed bodies, homosexuality becomes meaningless. As the UK Supreme Court said in April, humans are not attracted to gender recognition certificates
Bit of a puzzle where that "madness" started from, how that "crazy train" got out on the main line and built up a dangerous head of steam. So to speak. 🙂
Though there's some reason to argue that "feminism" in general deserves a fair amount of blame for that since they were largely the early progenitors/progenitrices of the distinction between "sex" and "gender". Although there is a fair amount of scientific justification for it:
Wikipedia: In 1945, Madison Bentley defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex". Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex has been interpreted as the beginning of the distinction between sex and gender in feminist theory ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender#As_distinct_from_sex
Which the transloonie tribe have more or less "weaponized" such that, for example, simply exhibiting some traits typical of females -- e.g., neovaginas -- is to be taken as prima facie evidence of having "changed sex" -- a medical and biological impossibility. Not that that "cognitive distortion" hasn't had a fair amount of "currency" for 75 years or more:
Christine Jorgensen: 60 years of sex change ops
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20544095
The Guardian: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app; Tickle successfully sued social media platform Giggle for Girls with judge stating ‘on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/23/roxanne-tickle-v-giggle-for-girls-transgender-woman-wins-discrimination-case-against-women-female-only-app-ntwnfb
As a lifelong feminist, I vehemently refute anything I’ve done encouraged this idiocy. I’d also point out that plenty of feminists- and other women - are fighting back, my self included in my own small way. The LAVA group of lesbians fighting against discrimination against them by Pride are all feminists.
I would rather suggest that the trans nonsense is a backlash against women’s rights. Remember there didn’t used to be public toilets for women so women couldn’t travel or go very far from home. Now the trans-identifying men are effectively taking out public toilets away from us. Making them dangerous places.
Wondered whether you might object to me laying at least a portion of the transgender issue at feminism's doorstep. 😉🙂 Why I qualified that with "in general".
I'm happy to "champion" the "feminist project" to defend women's rights -- I've often quoted Canadian suffragette Nellie McClung's quip that "no nation rises higher than its women". Probably why so many Muslim countries are such basket cases.
But there seems to be a great deal of rot within feminism -- some 23 "sects" within it at last count. ICYMI, a review of Professing Feminism by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge:
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
And you might also have some interest in a couple of posts by UK philosopher Kathleen Stock:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
Of particular note from the first:
KS: "Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip.
Sadly, I don't see that she has done much if any "reflection" on how and where much of feminism itself has gone off the rails. Though her "Material Girls" might be said to have been a start on that.
See my earlier refutation that feminists are to blame.
Also, the distinction feminists made between stereotypes and what actual real women are was an effort to destroy stereotypes for women, yes, but also for men. We don’t want men forced into rigid definitions of what’s manly. Trans ideology, on the other hand, aims to set these stereotypes into reinforced concrete. All tomboys are being told they’re not really girls while “sissy” boys are being told they aren’t real boys. These are the child victims who adults are lying to. They’re being funneled into chemical poisoning and mutilation in the name of the lie that they can change sex. We know many of these kids would grow up to be gay if left alone. Instead they’re being sterilized and castrated. My definition of pure evil.
Exactly.My feminism has always included men as I want them freed from lazy stereotypes too.
Quite agree with you on those "child victims". Kind of makes me mental that so many "doctors" are arguing that if some kids are "gender non-conforming" -- masculine girls, feminine boys -- then that means they were "born in the wrong body" so should have their genitalia mangled to resemble those of the other sex.
But while I sympathize with feminists to the extent of rejecting many of those stereotypes, I kind of think many go off the rails in not accepting that many of those stereotypes weren't cut from whole cloth, weren't simply something hatched in the inner sanctums of "The Patriarchy!!11!! for the sole purpose of "oppressing women".
Many of those stereotypes -- for both men and women -- have their roots in different biological bedrock. There's a great deal of fairly solid evidence for those differences -- some of which are socially beneficial and some which are not -- for example, more men who are rapists than there are women, something which that post of Stock's on abolishing gender goes into at some length:
KS: Radfems understand the fact that basic aspects of males and female bodies, produced by natural selection, causally contribute to predictable patterns of behaviour even across otherwise very different societies. .... At the same time though, many radfems simultaneously pursue a goal which undercuts a lot of this. They want to “abolish gender”. I think this is barking [mad]. .... There are a couple of possible ways in which the dialectic could proceed at this point. One route would be to say that nature in males and females extends beyond basic automatic physiological processes, spilling over into concrete aspects of psychology and behaviour as well. In that case, at least some of what we now take to be socioculturally plastic “gender” would not be as plastic as we think. And in that case, there would be no point trying to abolish what is naturally bestowed – for as Kant said, “ought implies can”.
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
I have been covering that Tribunal 😊
Best of luck to LAVA!
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/this-is-our-land
Dusty
I'm based in the UK but I cover Australia and NZ ( well also the whole Anglosphere!!! Beam me up, Scotty!!). Just done a Down Under Special - check it out:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/this-is-our-land
Dusty
I have an article currently in Eureka Street, about the way gender ideology has played out in Australia, the UK, Europe and the USA. It's long and there is a paywall, but it is available on my substack at https://substack.com/@juliette3/note/c-164095105
Thank you for all the kind words on the piece.
You tell him, Graham. Well said.
With you all the way here.
There may be occasions when I as a fellow journalist may not totally approve of your approach. I always deeply respected and respect your sincerety and your decency and your dedication.
You put your social existence on line for a cause not only you believe in, that everyone even remotely grounded in reality should know matters.
This is why I have been a paying member of this publication, and will continue to be.
Thanks, Chris. It seems to be impossible to communicate to people the stress I've been put under. I think my behavior has been quite measured, all things considered.
Incredibly so. I don't know how you do it!
Sir, I think you have shown exemplary behaviour when faced with unimaginable stress. I cannot begin to imagine what you have been through & continue to do so. Bless you Graham, you have more friends, you may never meet, who completely agree with you, I wish you all the very best, your day will come. X
Your stress was not lost on any of us who have recently heard you speak. I was like omg (watching you be interviewed) he’s so stressed out he has the shakes. Sending you strength and love. You are a hero to many and hopefully you realize that.
Is it really your place to approve/disapprove, or is it more appropriate to state you agree or disagree?
I saw that piece and was shocked to hear him say those words against you, so brutally, so dismissively. I got the feeling he'd only scratched the surface of your life for the past decade.
Very well written piece, I really hope it does the trick.
Bravo Graham - like you we are waiting with bated breath for his apology…..
It takes much more courage to apologise & to admit error, than it does to mock and sneer....does Maher have the balls?
No
Well said Graham! You are no crank, you are a prince among men
Excellent Graham! In time we will see what we saw post holocaust where people will say of ordinary German people, "Why did no one speak up?". They will say it when all this nonsense is but a pile of rubble, lives in ruin because of it. Yes, you are right, people don't speak up because of the very real fear that exists but to admonish anyone who does is yet worse. "Crank" my arse, who the feck does he think he is? We'll see if he has any sort of backbone.
100% agree....and thank you for doing what so many others were afraid to do!
I've never been a fan of Bill Maher, think he's a smug, unfunny a-hole, and this story solidifies my opinion. Graham, you are ten times (or more) the person/man he is or ever will be, smarter, funnier, and a better human being overall. So glad you told him what you thought, and we your supporters concur. All the best to you! ❤️
Brilliantly argued.
This letter worth the upgrade to paid. Sorry I’ve been late, Graham - am not exactly flush.
Bill Maher is one of the worst of them, in a way: the respectable, hugely influential, ‘reasonable’ professional ‘wealthy radical lefties’. Critical among the enablers. He is particularly insufferably smug, toking away on his joint with an air of supreme ‘centrist’ superiority and self-adoration.
F**k him. And all the other rich Boomer narcissist lefties stinking up the entertainment-‘celebrity journalism’ industrial complex.
The sooner we kill mass media Fame as a lucrative career option, the saner our village will become again.
More power to you GL & Co.
I've noticed over the past few years that Bill is trying to straddle two worlds when it comes to transgenderism, Truth and The Elites. One minute he is calling out the ridiculousness of queer theory and the next is going out of his way to not misgender a dude in a dress. He is like Qatar trying to play both sides and please the West and The Fundamentalists. Both Bill and Qatar have large platforms and financial backing and have the power to influence all players if they play their cards right. Once and awhile cohorts such as yourself need to be thrown under the bus or dealt an unfair hand in order to keep their balancing game going. Like throwing a bone to the other side in an appeasement effort. You should go on his show and explain this to him;-)
Sometimes Maher seems so close to getting it but then he flakes out with a tentatively spoken half comment/half question about 'there are people who are born in the wrong body, right?' As if he is waiting for someone on the panel or in the audience to validate that viewpoint. He has made some random, excellently strong comments against gender ideology, like a couple of weeks ago when he kept saying "we're not doing that" after examples of men in women's spaces (as an example of how crazy the left has become). His "Gender Apartheid" segment earlier this year calling out the left for not marching and protesting against the oppression of women in Islamist countries was actually moving. But he clearly understands little about the broader fight against the ravages of queer theory and the courageous people who are doing the real work. His comment was a cheap shot from inside his liberal, consequence-free bubble.
You are right, maybe he doesn't really get the wake that will result from queer theory -- maybe it's the pot that keeps him from seeing the obvious. AND you hit the nail on the head regarding consequences. I read Bill's last book and every time he blasted woke madness he would immediately follow it up on a chapter that amplified TDS.
No, he should publicly apologise to Graham imo
this 100%. delicately trying to walk the line.
Maher is delicately walking the line, and getting away with it. It's easy for him to disparage a man who did not walk the line and did not get away with it.
Especially if that man is much funnier than he is.
It's spite and jealousy both. He wishes he had the moral integrity that Graham has, and the wit that Graham has, and so he puts Graham down to make himself feel better.
Perhaps that expression 'medically transitioned' is so euphemistic that it's cranky. Castration, child abuse, exploitation? Just telling it as it is.