The Trans Holocaust Is a Dangerous, Murderous Myth: Liberals Must Combat and Refute It

I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.

Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.

And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.

Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.

Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.

But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.

This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.

The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.

And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.

Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.

We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.

Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.

American Transpeople Joining Gun Clubs Against the Coming ‘Trans Genocide’

This is both weird and alarming. Karen Davis is a gender critical Black American woman, who gives her critique of the trans cult and its excesses on her vlog, ‘You’re Kidding, Right?’ on YouTube. She’s a musician and a music teacher. I think she teaches special children. She’s also been a care worker in a social club for schizophrenics. She has an excellent grasp of the medical literature and frequently cites relevant papers on the damaging side-effects of puberty blockers, gender transition surgery and the mental and physical differences between the sexes that persist despite the surgery and hormone treatment. She’s an important voice in the debate, but I deliberately haven’t posted her here. This is because she has very strong and uncompromising views, expressed in similarly strong language. And I don’t want to offend any of my readers unnecessarily.

Yesterday, however, she made a couple of posts reporting a very alarming development. It seems some American transpeople have worked themselves up into such a state of fear over an imagined coming genocide that they’re joining a set of gun clubs, ‘The Pink Pistols’, set up by gay people in the early 2000s in order to teach them to shoot in order to protect themselves. This came out when she was talking about the reaction among some trans people to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ passage of a law in Florida banning gender treatment for minors. This forbade doctors and clinicians from putting trans-identifying children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgery. This is important, as gender surgeons have been performing mastectomies on girls as young as 12. DeSantis is a Republican, and while I generally despise the Republican party, I think he’s done the right thing about this. Children are way too young to be able to make responsible decisions about such life-changing medical treatment. After all, we don’t allow kids of 12 to buy tobacco or alcohol, and over here they can’t buy glue at that age. It’s also the case that 65-85 per cent of children with gender confusion actually grow out of it, usually settling down as gay men or women. There’s real concern among part of the gay community that gender reassignment surgery is being used by homophobic parents as a kind of gay conversion therapy. If this is the case, then it’s as nasty as the historic gay conversion techniques involving electric shocks, isolation, starvation, sleep deprivation and other sadistic tortures. I don’t doubt that there are some people who really need trans therapy and medical treatment, but there are also very many who don’t and for whom it is inappropriate and damaging.

The people on one of the trans chatrooms visited by Davies, however, interpreted DeSantis’ legislation as the first steps towards the trans holocaust. One poster, InnocenceClaire, said that she was having fantasies of killing people. Her partner was in the navy, and she was concerned about having to shoot members of the US military when the state openly began killing trans people. She was also thinking of emigrating to Canada. Someone then suggested she join Pink Pistols, which is the subject of a further vlog post by Davies.

Okay, I’m very definitely someone who believes very strongly in gun licensing and restrictions on firearms possession. But I honestly don’t blame gay Americans for setting up their own gun clubs considering the violent persecution gays have suffered and still do in some quarters. Western society is much more tolerant now than it was when I was growing up. But I’ve been told by American friends that even though homosexuality has been legalised at the federal level, many individual states continue to have laws against homosexuality. And I don’t doubt either that transpeople get their share of abuse and violence. While drag has been part of British pantomime and the Music Hall tradition since the 19th century, it was illegal for ‘men to walk about in the clothes of the opposite sex for immoral purposes’, as the act put it. I don’t know when it was legalised. One of the gobbets we had to read in a book intended to help young people navigate their way into adulthood in RE when I was at school was about a young transvestite bloke in prison. In the 90s Private Eye in its ‘Funny Old World’ column published the obituary of an older transvestite, who had been frequently up before the beak. And the violence and abuse against trans people was covered in the small press magazine Aeon – the Magazine of Transkind. One of the great commenters here has posted a link to a BBC report on the abuse a transwoman received from a mob after an ambulance arrived to take her to hospital in this country.

But from what I can tell, most of the violence, abuse and threats of violence in this controversy come from trans rights activists, who may not be trans themselves, against gender critical feminists. Maria Maclachlan of the ‘Peak Trans’ vlog was the victim of one assault. A feminist protest in Spain against that country’s new gender identification laws had to be abandoned because of the menacing mood of the trans counterprotesters. There has been a lot of argy-bargy from the trans activists at the rallies Kelly-Jay Keen has held in Britain, including Bristol and Brighton. One of the trans rights activists there set off a smoke bomb and another was arrested with a bag of knives. Keen is on a campaign tour of America. She wanted to speak in Portland, but received hostile, threatening messages and was told by the cops that they wouldn’t be able to protest her. She wisely called it off. Now there have been social media posts smearing her as a member of the Proud Boys. Similar threats and attacks have happened to others. There was outrage a couple of weeks ago when Fred Sargent, a senior member of the American gay community and a veteran of the Stonewall riots, was knocked to the ground at a Pride march and had coffee poured on him because he was carrying a banner stating that transwomen weren’t women. And there were any number of posts on Twitter by people posting about how TERFs – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists – were fascists and Nazis and should be killed.

In fact, the violence actually suffered by transpeople in Britain in America is small. I think in Britain three trans people were killed a couple of years ago, and there have fortunately been no more murdered since. According to Davis, 36 trans people have been killed in the Land of the Free this year. That’s obviously 36 too many, but it’s a tiny number compared to the 1,800 women murdered by their parents, often after they’ve given birth. Gender critical feminists aren’t fascists and there no trans holocaust.

I am not saying this to vilify transpeople, only to make the point that there are parts of that milieu that is violent and abusive. My fear is that this section of the trans community will tool itself up with firearms and bring them to demonstrations, like other armed groups. I can remember a couple of years ago when a militia group turned up to face down Black Lives Matter protesters. There was a stand-off, but mercifully no-one was shot. My fear is that some trans protesters equipped with firearms won’t exercise similar restraint, not if they really believe that TERFs are Nazis. And that would be a catastrophe. Apart from the loss of the life, many gays and transpeople are afraid that the militancy and extremism of the trans rights movement will provoke a backlash against all of them. That could very well come true if someone is shot at a rally. I really hope cooler heads prevail.

For further information, see the posts ‘MTFs ARM IN RESPONSE TO FLORIDA MOVE TO PROTECT KIDS’ and ‘FEMALE IMPERSONATORS GET GUNS WHILE REAL WOMEN GET KILLED’

My Reply to Labour Email on Gay and Trans Policies: Supporting Videos

My last post was about the email I received from the Labour outlining its proposed policies for gay and trans people. I have absolutely nothing against protecting gay and trans people from prejudice, violence and discrimination. However, although the implications of Labour’s stance towards trans people aren’t made clear in their message, I believe they pose grave dangers for women. I am afraid women may be left vulnerable to predatory men in prisons, schools, rape crisis centres and homelessness and domestic abuse shelters through such men simply stating that they identify as women as so gaining access to them. I believe that women’s achievements in sport will be harmed through men participating in them while also claiming that they are women mentally. And I am also worried that the ban on gay conversion therapy will mean affirmative-only care in the treatment of gender-confused and trouble children, to the point where individuals will be trans where this is definitely not the appropriate course of treatment. I am also convinced that the sudden explosion in trans-identifying youth is due trans having become a social contagion rather than the product of innate gender dysphoria. And this is being promoted at the ideological level by Queer Theory, a postmodernist revision of Marxism.

Here are a number of videos that support some of the points I made in my email back to the Labour party.

Here’s an audio piece by gay YouTuber Clive Simpson, in which he describes the horrors of real gay conversion therapy and argues that it is most definitely not the same as any modern trans conversion therapy. He makes the point that any ban on gay conversion therapy will effectively leave only the affirmative care model as the sole course of treatment.

On the violence by trans rights activists to gender critical feminists, here’s a 30 minute video by Maria Maclachlan, a left-wing gender critical feminist. She was physically assaulted by a trans activist at Speaker’s Corner, but in a disgusting miscarriage of justice she was then one prosecuted.

Here’s a series of three videos from James Lindsay in which he reads through Gayle Rubin’s Thinking Sex. This is one of the founding texts of Queer Theory, published in the 1980s. Lindsay lay clear its basis in the postmodernist revision of Marxism and how it seeks to legitimise paedophilia as part of its radical agenda for sexual liberation and social transformation. These are long videos – each one is about about an hour and fifty minutes long, more or less, so you might only want to watch one of them.

In this video from Graham Linehan he discusses WPATH’s collaboration with the Eunuch Archive with feminist writer Genevieve Gluck. The Eunuch Archive is an organisation for castration fetishists, whose website includes an archive of its members fiction, some of which involve sadistic fantasies of child abuse.

Another video from Glinner, in which he and his fellow conversationalists talk to two Spanish feminist guests about their campaigns and the violence they experienced from trans rights activists.

Here’s a short video of about 3 minutes plus on the controversy over the trans policy in Loudoun county schools.

There are several others that I could put up, but I hope these will be enough for now.

Maria MacLachlan Refutes the Allegation that ‘TERFs’ Are Right-Wing

Maria MacLachlan is a gender critical feminist, who posts critiques of the trans movement and their arguments on her Peak Trans YouTube channel. In the video below, she attacks and refutes the accusation that TERFs – ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists’ – are right-wing. This accusation includes the claim from angry and abusive trans activists that gender critical feminists are Nazis and White supremacists. This is, as MacLachlan shows,, utter nonsense. She gives a list of the Nazis crimes against humanity, such as their persecution of Jews and Gypsies and the sterilisation of the handicapped, to show that ‘TERFs’ don’t stand for any of that. It’s an example of the Genetic Fallacy, the logical fallacy that says that something must be wrong simply because of who says it. She gives as an example of this Piers Morgan. Morgan says some appalling things, but people may also agree with other statements he make if they look at them. The fact that something is said by Morgan neither makes it right or wrong, and it has to be judged on its merits. She obviously isn’t a fan of Morgan, who is shown telling the world on his TV programme that he’s only three feet from the thickest people in the world. But she does praise him for attacking and refuting one of the monstrous allegations made against J.K. Rowling by the trans activists.

The Genetic Fallacy would also include denunciations of vegetarianism and animal rights because the Nazis also believed in them. It seems that Hitler tried, not always successfully, to follow a veggie lifestyle for the last six or seven years of his life, and before then was serious about it. The Nazis also passed legislation promoting animal welfare, including banning vivisection. As the notorious case of the vile Dr Mengele shows, however, they had absolutely no qualms about experimenting on humans. But clearly saying that vegetarianism and animal welfare is wrong simply because these views were shared by racist, genocidal maniacs like Hitler and the Nazis is nonsense.

She then goes on to discuss one of the other smears against gender critical feminists – guilt by association. A few years ago a number of them spoke at a conference organised by the American right-wing organisation, the Heritage Foundation. MacLachlan states very clearly that she’s looked at the Foundation’s website, which contains a large number of their videos, which she finds absolutely appalling. But she doesn’t blame the feminists for appearing with them, as they were probably denied a platform by left-wing organisation. And the Heritage Foundation is one of the most influential organisations not just in America, but in the world.

She also goes on to refute the accusation that over here, the Conservative party are opposed to trans activism, showing various Tory politicos, who backed the Gender Recognition Act. These included Maria Miller, Nicky Morgan, Penny Mordaunt and Tweezer. She does, though, recognise that today’s Conservative cabinet – she posted this a year ago, but it was still Johnson – are very different. She also points out the difference between feminist and Conservative views on sex and gender. Both recognise that sex is real and biological, and that these form the basis for sex roles in society. But the Tories believe that these gender roles are innate and must be respected – men must be masculine, women feminine – while feminists also they believe they are socially constructed and must be challenged. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine man or a masculine woman.

Then there was another accusation of TERF fascism by trans activists, based on a sticker by the National Front. These real Fascists urged people not to be ‘gender offenders’ and to support the traditional family. She criticises the trans activists, who claimed that this showed that gender critical feminists were fascists such as the transgender actor Annie Wallace. The sticker’s demand for a return to the traditional family, with the man as head, clearly conflicts with feminist views on gender roles. Incidentally, Conservatives have also used the Nazis to smear gay rights supporters and activists because of the strong element of homoeroticism in the Nazi party despite their persecution of homosexuals.

At the end of the video, she describes the tactics that trans activists use to silence and intimidate their critics to show where some of the real intolerance comes from. These include no-platforming, mass demonstrations intended to shout down but not engage with any of the opposing arguments, and violence and abuse.

I’m putting this video up, not because I wish to see trans people persecuted and discriminated against, but simply to dispel one of the most frequent accusations: that gender critical feminists are somehow all prejudiced Tories or worse. As MacLachlan’s video states, they are feminists worried about the threat to women’s rights, privacy and dignity posed by the trans movement. I am also very much aware that not all trans people share the same views as some of the strident and intolerant individuals who appear in the video. I very much accept that many, probably the majority, simply want to get on with their lives in peace. But there are parts of the contemporary trans movement as it has developed over the past ten years which are a threat, particularly to women, children and the mentally and emotionally vulnerable, which have to be challenged and fought.

Riley Claims Rowling Abused for Opposition to Anti-Semitism, Not Trans

I really do wonder what goes on in the mind of Countdown numbers person Rachel Riley. Yes, she’s another fanatical supporter of Israel who can’t tell the difference between anti-Zionism – which is opposition to an ideology – and anti-Semitism, which is simply racial hatred of Jews. But her hatred of anti-Zionists, or indeed, of any critic of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, has now grown so fervent that sometimes she speaks utter nonsense. As when she accused the Durham Miner’s band of being some kind of SS Nazi organisation because they played Hava Nagila at the close of the miners’ gala, just as they did every year. Even a brief knowledge of real Fascism and Nazism is enough to dispel that. One of the first things Hitler did was smash the trade unions, replacing them with a much weaker, pro-management substitute, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Mussolini tried to win over the established socialist trade unions after banning the socialist parties. When he couldn’t, he banned them and made it compulsory for Italian workers to join the Fascist trade unions. The black trade unions which formed part of the MSI, the Italian neo-Fascist party after the war, were anti-socialist and supplied blackleg labour during strikes. In Britain, the opposition to Oswald Mosley and the BUF included the Communists and trade unions, as well, of course, of self-respecting Jews and Irish. And Ken Livingstone, in his 1987 Livingstone’s Labour, describes how bog-standard, ordinary mineworkers and the unions objected to the employment of former Nazis by the Coal Board after they offered their services to British intelligence.

Examining some of her statements, I find myself using the same advice Private Eye gave its readers when reviewing the books written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s esteemed pater. You read it very carefully, and then turned it round 180^o, and bingo! You’d reached the right conclusion.

Last week Riley raised her head to claim that J.K. Rowling had suffered horrendous abuse and vilification, not because she didn’t believe that transwomen were women, but because she was opposed to ‘Corbyn and anti-Semitism’. Well, it’s true that she did issue various statements over the net attacking Corbyn as an anti-Semite. She also accused Mike of being an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. All this told me is that, whatever her strengths as a novelist, she was credulous in this regard and believed everything she read in the papers.

Rowling has come under fire for many of her views. The anti-immigration Alex Belfield types attacked her for defending asylum-seekers and the channel migrants. They demanded that if she was that in favour of them, she should put a few up in her multi-million pound mansion. They can’t make the same accusation of Benedict Cumberbatch, of course, because he has indeed taken one of them in.

But most of the abuse Rowling’s suffered came from a tweet she made a few years ago, in which she told her trans readers that they should dress how they want, sleep with whoever would have them, live their best lives, but that transwomen weren’t women. Not a hateful statement at all, as far as I can see. But because of this she was immediately accused of hating transpeople and wanting to kill them. Since then there were moves to exclude her from the documentary marking 20 years since the Harry Potter movies, and trans activists telling the world to read her books but ignore the fact that she wrote them. In all of this, I haven’t seen any evidence of anti-Semitism from her trans critics and opponents. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any evidence of anti-Semitism from trans rights activists at all. Rather the opposite. Maria MacLachlan, who posts her gender critical videos on the Peak Trans channel on YouTube, has one in which she refutes the accusation that ‘TERFs’ – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – are right-wing. Among the tweets she shows which make this accusation is one that says that ‘Terfs are Nazis, literal Nazis’. Which is utter nonsense. Many, if not most, gender critical feminists come from the radical left and are utterly opposed to racism, which includes anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. As for the trans rights activists, in all of their abuse I don’t think I’ve seen one that mentions Jews, let alone expresses anti-Semitism views. As far as I can make out, Rowling’s trans opponents are simply opposed to her refusal to accept their dogma that transwomen are women. And I have to say that her criticisms of Corbyn and the Labour were so long ago that I’d forgotten them until Riley reminded me of them.

Riley’s talking nonsense. I don’t know if she made this ridiculous accusation because her hatred of Corbyn has now become so intense and obsessive that he’s living rent-free in her head, or whether Starmer’s position as head of the Labour party is now so shaky that she’s somehow afraid Corbyn will come back. But she’s talking arrant bilge regardless, bilge which deserves to be refuted along with her other prejudiced statements about the Labour left.