I exercise free speech; you are a bully; they are a Twitter mob

[steepholm]

Okay, this story is getting beyond bizarre now. For those of you who have not been following the affair that closely, a quick recap...

When Julie Burchill's now-notorious rant about trans people ("bedwetters in bad wigs", etc) was pulled by the Observer after thousands of their readers - cis and trans - expressed their disgust at the newspaper for publishing it, the White Knights of Fleet Street queued around the block to write articles about how awful it was, how free speech was being threatened, and how trans people should grow a thicker skin. Here are a few members of this Round Table:

• Tom Peck in The Independent, "Julie Burchill should be free to offend": "You’d think the trannies could take it really, their shoulders are broad enough. "


• Terence Blacker in The Independent, "The world has gone mad if Julie Burchill can’t stir things up and cause offence": "The offensiveness police are ever more powerful and vigilant, demanding views with which they disagree to be silenced, and individuals of whom they disapprove to be punished. We should be on our guard."


• Simon Kelner, again in The Independent, "Airing controversial views is the great skill of Julie Burchill's career - and something the Observer should never shy away from": "Does the Twitter mob now set the rules on fair comment?"


• William Henderson in The Telegraph, In trying to 'unpublish' Julie Burchill, The Observer displays its ignorance of the internet: "The notion that a journalist’s thoughts can be bludgeoned out of existence following their appearance just because they are politically incorrect, unpalatable, or offensive is as much censorship as it is shameful."


• And, of course, Toby Young in The Telegraph, "The Observer's decision to censor Julie Burchill is a disgrace": "It cannot be said often enough that freedom of speech, if it means anything, must include the freedom to say things that some people find offensive."

ETA: A latecomer to the party: Allison Pearson in The Telegraph: "Why taking offence is Britain's new national sport": "Two small words of advice to all the transsexuals “offended” by Suzanne Moore: man up!"

That's pretty clear, isn't it? Everyone must be free to offend, no matter how vulnerable their victims, no matter how much it will increase the amount of abuse and discrimination they receive. Anything else is a gross violation of the sacred rights won in Magna Carta, etc. etc. Okay, we get it.

And then came the story that I posted about yesterday, concerning the murder of Cecilia Marahouse. The Pink News published their own report, which is clearly based on the same source. Like me, they make reference to Suzanne Moore's "Brazlian transsexual" line, as you would expect any journalist to do, since it brought the plight of Brazilian trans women to wider pubilc attention within the last week. Otherwise, it is a simple, unemotive transmission of the facts.

Now, here's a question for you. What do you think crusading journalist Suzanne "If you want to be offended it your prerogative" Moore tweeted when she saw the Pink News article (for yes, having been "hounded off Twitter" she is now courageously back on)?

Was it:

a) This has really brought home to me the grisly reality behind my flip remark about "Brazilian transsexuals". Thank you, Pink News!
b) This is uncomfortable for me to read, but Cecilia Marahouse deserves to have her murder reported.
c) I am offended by the Pink News mentioning my name in this report, but I will defend to the death their right to do it. And so will Tom, Terence, Simon, William and Toby.
d) Read this piece of shit and Pink News will hear from my lawyers in the morning

If you guessed d), give yourself a cookie.

Comments

[lamentables]

Wow, I did actually give SM more credit than that.
Mind you, while I knew JB was a prat, until the weekend I didn't think she was quite as low and hate-filled that.

I think it's time for my cynicism booster.

[msstacy13]

One is hard-pressed to imagine that had she described blacks as "a bunch of spear-chuckers in bad suits" or Stephen Fry as "a fat cock-sucker" ANYONE would be upholding her right to offend.

[lilliburlero]

While I think that deleting the Burchill piece was probably a mistake -- not so much because it left the Observer wide open to this sort of disingenuous misunderstanding of what free speech actually means but because it deleted thousands of comments mostly supportive of trans people's rights -- it is hard to see what else they could have done with it -- put it in some ad-free archive was the best suggestion I saw, and I don't know how such a thing could be done.

Suzanne Moore's now claiming that her comment about the Pink News report was a joke, but I don't get it, do you?

[steepholm]

No, I don't get it - especially as around the same time she sent it she was also allegedly writing the following on Facebook: "Horrible and absolutely vile that I should be connected to this any way. Who edits Pink News? This is actionable."

Agree with you on the JB article. The Observer should never have published it - I think obviously - but once it was up, they were on a hiding to nothing. I think the solution you mention would have been the best of a bad lot.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, SM lost the argument entirely with that one (and the plot). The only person actually silenced in all this is Cecelia Marahouse.

Have spent an interesting evening & morning responding to Allison Pearson on Twitter. Some of what I read here helped me formulate my arguments. Striking how mainstream journalism has closed ranks on this, and how little they seem to like the freedom of speech granted their readers by social media.

The more I think about SM's response to all this, the more it makes me think of an elderly uncle who goes off in a huff when someone at the family gathering asks them not to use the word. "P*ki". Only elderly uncle can't resort to pages of national press to say what a brave warrior he is.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

And this morning, someone called Suzanne Moore has an article in The Guardian all about the importance of free speech. Are they by any chance related?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Surely a coincidence.

[katherine langrish (from livejournal.com)]

OMG.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Quite.

[jemck.livejournal.com]

I am particularly interested in my local version of The Man on the Clapham Omnibus's take on all this, specifically, The Teen on the Witney Schoolrun, since we happened to be in the car yesterday when Radio 4's The Media Show included Roz Kaveney vs Toby Young, and Laurie Penny vs Peter Preston. To that point, my son and his girlfriend in the car were entirely unaware of the whole row.

I have posted elsewhere about their initial reactions - and a 17yr old boy does tend to forthright critique - on Toby Young, 'he's talking bollocks.' 'He's still talking bollocks"'. On Roz, 'oh, good, someone sensible. Nice to hear from someone intelligent.'

This morning, we were discussing the argument (I use the term loosely) that eg the Burchill post is defensible because it promotes debate.

'No, it promotes buzz, and that's not debate. These people just want to be noticed and then they can feel special and brave when other people say they're talking bollocks, and then when the other idiots join in to support their prejudices, they can tell themselves they were right in the first place.'

'You mean they're just looking for validation?'

'Yes, because otherwise they'd have to realise that outside their friends, no one gives a toss what they think.'

Which strikes me as a sound comment on the general irrelevance of the London Commentariat/this particular clickbait clique to the youth of today.

NB we have had a conversation about the appalling murders in Brazil and the other issues raised by TransDocFail - which *do* need discussing without the interruption of derailing bile.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

If even half the teenagers are as clear-sighted as your son and his girlfriend, there is hope for the future!

As far as I'm concerned, the UK doesn't have a written constitution and, unlike the US, I am not aware that we have any unalienable right to "free speech".

I actually find rights-based discourse unhelpful and even problematical because you just end up with an intersecting and conflicting mess of "rights". You can't give someone the "right" to say whatever they want whilst at the same time ensuring that another person enjoys the right to live their lives without being persecuted and reviled. In fact in the UK we don't have the right to say absolutely anything we like because there are laws to protect some minorities and also laws about behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. Articles like Burchill's disturb the online peace and whilst one cannot prevent people writing whatever they want on blogs (especially those hosted outside the UK), you ought to be able to ensure that the supposedly reputable press uphold standards of decency.

[jemck.livejournal.com]

I am hopeful that teens generally are far more tolerant and savvy than the London Commentariat in particular realise. Not just the ones like my own, who have these converations.

A case in point - back in May, they had their School Prom - what used to be the irredemably naff School Dance in our day, through the transformative magic of US pop culture, has now become way cool...

Anyway, I collected a car full of lads afterwards, and bear in mind that this is a thoroughly-comprehensive Comprehensive and also in David Cameron's very own constituency, so this would by no means be a sample of typical left-leaning liberals...

I asked what sorts of dresses the girls had worn - optimistic, given the very vague replies.

Then one lad who I know comes from a family far more likely to read the Mail or the Express rather than The Guardian commented, entirely matter of fact - 'So-snd-so wore a tuxedo but then, she is a lesbian.'

'Did anyone have anything to say to her about not wearing a dress?' I asked.

'No, why should they?' Somewhat puzzled response from another lad.

'Fair enough,' says I, 'who did she dance with?'

'Her mates.'

By this point we had arrived and I turned to see the entire car-full looking at me with that 'what are you talking about, you weird old person?' expression teenagers can have.

As far as they are concerned, it was a total non-issue. As it should be.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Very similar to the attitudes of the A Level students I taught a year or so ago.

J (one of the voodoo boys) - now 26 - told me that he had been briefly bullied as a gay student by the captain of the school rugby team: when I asked him how he'd handled it, he said, "I just knocked him down, sat on him, snogged him and got my mate to take photos" - which they then distributed around the school. J was not bullied again, apparently.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I too have never been comfortable with rights-based discourse (as I wrote a while ago). Mostly I think people should behave well to each other, recognize their own power where they have it, and try to be empathetic. Oh, and not be a stinking hypocrite, obviously!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

An over-reliance on rights-based discourse was the main reason I felt uncomfortable about identifying myself as a Democrat in the 1970s, despite the fact that more of them than Republicans shared my positions, and I usually wound up supporting their candidates.

However, as from about 1978 onwards successive waves of sane people fled the Republican Party for the Democrats, they diluted that discourse without (necessarily) changing its goals (though, unfortunately, some of them did), and I went with them.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You have some sensible teenagers there.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

He had a wise head on his shoulders.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I've written a Huff Post piece about this. When they have published it I will cross post it here. I would say that trans rights are at the stage gay rights were 40 years ago. People don't understand. Thanks to a couple of friends here I understand a lot more than I used to. Moore's inital comment was just clumsy. It's Burchill who upset me the most.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

It may disturb you to know, btw, that Huffpo UK is one of the most egregious culprits in transphobic reportage- my isp take their news feed from them and it is........unpleasant, to put it politely.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Well, none of us agrees 100% with what the organisations we belong to say. Their lifestyle page is poor as well. If I see a problem, I'll challenge it.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I have written a number of complaints for all the good it ever seems to do.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It may be helpful to know that (from what hear from friends on Twitter) Moore has been trying to pass off her comment about calling the lawyers as a joke. On the other hand, around the same time she sent it she was also allegedly writing on Facebook: "Horrible and absolutely vile that I should be connected to this any way. Who edits Pink News? This is actionable." Funny kind of joke - but not funny ha ha.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

She could well be advised to take note of the ancient saw.............

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This seems all very strange to me.

I am speaking not here of physical violence against transsexuals, which is all too common in the US; one of the touchstone cases of a young trans woman murdered by young men occurred in a town very near here.

But the American commentariat, the chattering class, seems to have absolutely no interest in verbally abusing transsexuals, whereas in the UK it appears to be a constant hobby. At least, I hear about British cases all the time from you and Cheryl and Roz, whereas the American liberal bloggers I read, though sensitive to other GLBT issues, neither include examples of verbal trans abuse among their regular citations of the outrageous, nor indulge in verbal trans abuse themselves.

In fact, other than expressing the outrage that any decent person would feel against cases of physical violence, US commentators rarely mention transsexuals at all. It just doesn't seem to be much of an issue here.

Whereas, to take another GLBT issue, same-sex marriage creates the utmost roiling in the US, both pro and anti, while in the UK, even the government announces plans to enact it; the churches grumble, but nobody, even the opponents, seems to be either tremendously bothered or elated by what in the US is an "end of civilization" vs. "coming of the millennium" issue.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You're right, I think there is a real difference there, and I can't explain it. I'm sure if they rummaged around in Leviticus it wouldn't take the US right five minutes to come up with something showing that being trans was an abomination. As for the British, I'm tempted to say that the widespread fetishization of trans news stories betrays some deep-seated cultural anxiety around gender - but that would be no more than a guess.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not even concerned about the Leviticans. Julie Burchill isn't one, is she? The particular horror, at least as Cheryl Morgan has been describing it, is that the anti-trans bigotry is coming from people who are friendly to gay rights, or sometimes even gay themselves.

I found this quote from Burchill on her Wikipedia article: "Picking on people worse off than you are isn't humour. It's pathetic, it's cowardly and it's bullying." She's talking about verbally abusing "chavs" and her objection even to the term. Well, then.

(By the way, the "chav" subculture, or something very like it, is widespread in the US, but though it gets a certain amount of eyerolling in the press, it again doesn't seem to be the subject of targeted abuse here, and even the terms to denigrate it, like "trailer trash", don't seem quite like ethnic epithets.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As to that, you probably know there's a long history of hostility from some second-wave feminists to trans people. (As for the supposed rationale for this, I'll refer you to the first half of this article of mine from 2009.) In the '70s and '80s, people such as Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys were writing virulently against trans people not just in the UK but in the USA and Australia too. Julie Bindel, though a journalist not an academic, of course, is very much in this tradition. Some, like Bindel and Jeffreys, are instinctively separatist and believe in lesbianism as a political choice.

In more recent years, third wave feminism and concepts such as intersectionality (which you may have seen Suzanne Moore rail against) have become more prominent in most Western countries, and although the writers named above, or at least the living ones, are still writing on much the same lines as ever they did, they are increasingly marginal in the US and Australia, it appears. In the UK, however, second-wavers of this stripe had the ear of the last Labour government, notably Harriet Harman (hence the use of the Equality Act to remove transgender rights), and they still hold powerful positions in Fleet St, as we have seen this week. I think the younger generation looks on them as the ideological dinosaurs they are, but they have influence and connections, and when the lazy media want "the feminist point of view", it's often to one of these that they will turn.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

ETA: (I'm probably being wrongheaded here but I don't want to dig a bigger hole. The "our" here is a little messy. Just trying to explore the cultural anxiety, and feeling anxious.)

Is it related to our attitude to drag and female impersonators? Heterosexual male friends of mine are remarkably keen to wear a dress (and obviously transsexuality is more than just attire), but that might still police the male/female boundary whereas transsexuals are felt to undercut it? Something about improper property? A man behaving like a woman is always seen as a joke?

It seems as if a kind of essentialism that I thought we'd left behind is being reintroduced.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

When I see a heterosexual, non-transvestite man wearing a dress - say on the Bounty ads - I tend to see it as a carnivalesque inversion of the social order that actually reinscribes it. I really don't know enough about gay culture to understand the use of drag in those context, though.

The war on gender essentialism is one being waged on many fronts, I think - but there are certainly some areas where we are going backwards. (Look at the muesli shelf at Tesco if you doubt me!)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear heavens. It looks like dog food packaging. They might as well call it Hubby Chow.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

There's a pub near where I live that advertises itself as a "husband creche". I can never pass without leaving a little pile of vomit.

[gillo]

Some very tacky comments there, made by people who clearly think they are the first ever to come up with such wit.

Bleagh.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Like calimac, I am bemused by what appears to be systematic vitriol spewed towards transexuals in the UK. They are rarely referenced here, except along with gays, and when they are it is usually with some sensitivity. I am not aware of the same kind of "tranny" jokes that I've seen referenced in British media. Very strange. And I have to confess that I quite like the Canadian attitude to freedom of speech, which is that your freedom is not unlimited- we have hate laws. SM could easily have been charged under them here. We have our ultra-conservative commentators in the press that everyone loves to hate, but I can't imagine that article being published here at all.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

There are hate laws here too, but unfortunately in the big tidy up known as the Equality Act, trans people were either inadvertently or deliberately excluded.

Most of us suspect the latter..............

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, I run into tranny jokes in the US all the time -- Ann Coulter is regularly called a tranny, for instance, which is supposed to be a grave insult.

As for the headline "Julie Burchill should be free to offend," well, SHE IS. And SHE DID. I never can see why people don't get that.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Point is that it is a grave insult if used by someone who isn't against someone who isn't (or even is- the best analogy would be the 'n' word on that side of the pond. I am trans, so I own the word in the way that a cis person does not.

Burchill wouldn't be free to offend if her intended target was gay,black, Asian or Jewish.Hatespeak legislation is different here and I suspect USians don't always get that.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I conflated two things there that I really should not have, and I apologize -- "tranny" is an insult anywhere in the US (except, as you say, if a trans person reclaims it -- or if it refers to the transmission on a car). I meant to say that calling someone trans, even without objectionable terminology, can be used as a grave insult (and obviously I think that is wrong).

But no, I didn't know that about hate speech laws in the UK. Thanks.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It never ceases to sadden me how so many journalists flock to defend each other and resort to 'free speech' wails in this sort of circumstance. Group privilege above all else and certainly above thinking, principles or decency. Sigh.
One of my iron rules is never to read Burchill.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Free speech for them, not others of course. Quite apart from Moore threatening to sue the Pink News, they were censoring the comments on Toby Young's free speech article like billio. And I hear that today he called for Cathy Ashton to be sacked for saying something he disagreed with. And so it goes...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, but they are special guardians of free speech... Bah. Just vile.