The Otis Move
Also known as "Do it to Julia!"
Told you I saved my Twitter archive.
Here are my tweets to Buck Angel, who Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal claimed I would misgender on principle. Sorry again to bother you all with this stuff, but Jesse and Katie are trying to smear me so they look good by comparison. I call it the ‘Otis Move’ after the moment in Walking Dead where Shane shoots Otis in the leg so he can provide a delicious temptation to their zombie pursuers.
Again, Katie has my email, and could have cleared all this up by writing to me and asking me on the show to answer their questions, but they didn’t, choosing instead to misrepresent me because they very bravely wanted to direct some of the heat they get onto someone else. It’s why tweets like this are particularly galling.
Anyway, enjoy! You don’t have to understand what’s going on in all these tweets, but I hope it gives some idea of how I tended to comport myself on Twitter.
BONUS EXTRA: Here’s my last exchange with Katie, when I asked her to have a look at my House of Lords address and told her about the Challenor story. Jesse claimed he only belatedly found out I had covered the story. Ahhh, ethics!
I realise now I buried the lede. The letter is the most damning part of this
There isn't any such thing as "misgendering." People don't have genders. We have sexes. Gendering is for things that don't have sexes; the French don't actually believe that pencils have penises.
What Kate and Jesse call "misgendering" is correctly sexing. We can argue all day long about what's "polite" but I know for sure that what's actually rude is demanding that someone say something that isn't factually true.
Every person has to decide for themselves whether to go along with "preferred pronouns." I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I'm also not going to condemn you if you decide to switch over to correctly sexing everyone, either, and I have a feeling a whole lot of your followers here on Substack would agree with me. So keep that in mind.