Ian Hislop knew

Private Eye had the cheek to call me ‘unhinged’ today, misrepresenting my opinions on such figures as John Money and Jacob Breslow as a sort of Tourette’s where I’m calling everyone a ‘nonce’.

I wrote to Ian Hislop in 2019, once again foolishly thinking he might care about women’s rights or even what was happening to me, asking him to look into ‘Stephanie’ Hayden, subject of this recent Reduxx story.

Here’s what I wrote to Ian.

Dear Ian,

Sorry to contact you out of the blue, but I heard you recently met a few 'gender critical' feminists who were telling you just how insane the whole situation has become. I just wanted to confirm and amplify what you've been told by them. There are several, let's call them 'characters', who are using trans rights to harass and troll women, and Jessica Yaniv is just the first one to break out.

I've been targetted by the UK's version of Yaniv, Stephanie Hayden, who sued me just as he sues everyone who is unfortunate enough to come across his path. I have a ton of information about him and you're one of the (maybe two?) editors who would consider publishing it. He is a conman, a vicious misogynist  (second half of piece) who hounds both women and transwomen and it's so frustrating because this is someone who would wither and die at the slightest touch of sunlight.

He is the also the reason a young woman approached me after 'Noises Off' and calmly called me a bigot. I told her I probably had more trans friends than she did, as the ironic aspect to being the biggest tranbsphobe in the UK is that this fight has brought me into contact with gender critical trans women, all of whom see through Hayden better than anyone and all of whom will be left carrying the can when there's a public backlash against trans people, and Hayden wipes off his lipstick and legs it to South Africa.

I realise there might not be space to deal with such a story when Brexit is providing so much material, but I genuinely believe, Ian, that this is a hinge moment in the history of women's rights. This is an assault on women's privacy, their boundaries, their resources and even their sports. I thought the sports thing might be gender ideology's fatal overreach, but no, it's left to Samoa to protest at the unfairness, and as someone who has been ranting about this for a year now, I can tell you, they might still be ignored.

This thing is a juggernaut and LGBT leaders like Linda Riley are refusing to listen to what lesbians are telling her--that gender ideology is causing them real problems on the ground. To do otherwise would have her condemned alongside the women she's been smearing for years, and cut off an admittedly tiny part of her cash flow (the only 'lesbians' still reading Diva are the fully-intact males who identify as such). 

Here's the funniest example of these on-the-ground problems I've seen recently.

Please have a look at Hayden. I'm not the only person suffering because of him and you could cut short a nightmare situation for another of his victims.

No pressure though!

Graham

Here’s Ian’s response.

Dear Graham,

Hello. Thanks for the messages and for alerting me to the activities of Hayden and Bergdorf. Despite my well known belief that Twitter drives everyone bonkers and my suspicion that the Trans/TERF debate is not quite as important as those involved in it believe, I do have people looking at the issues, the areas of impact in the real world, and I will pass on your information to them. “The oxygen of publicity” is always a possible side-effect of the “letting in of sunlight” but as I say I am grateful to you for the guidance. Hope that you are ok somewhere in the social media swamp.

Best,

Ian Hislop

So I’ll say it again, the reason I may appear ‘frenzied’ to those like the author of that Private Eye snippet, is that establishment journalists like Hislop simply refused to do their jobs when it came to the destruction of women’s rights, language and spaces. Private Eye has been largely empty of coverage of this issue. It’s all been left to feminists, citizen journalists and people like me. So don’t you dare try to cast me as unhinged when you all broke your necks looking the other way.