gender | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’.

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate. Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority.

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples.

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that.

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

April 19, 2025

33:64 presents ” Not so much ‘Where’s Wally?’, but more ‘Where’s Plonker?'”

Imagine if you can, the nightmare scenario in which the Supreme Court ruled that trans-women were women. Terrifying I know, but thankfully common sense prevailed, some semblance of normality was restored to the universe and we could all breathe that much easier as as a result.

But if it had ruled that reality was nothing more than a combination of wish fulfilment, dressing up and getting others to affirm your fantasy, then Plonker would never have been off the airwaves. You think him endlessly repeating that his dad was a toolmaker throughout the election campaign was irritating? He’d be banging on about how trans women were women, and that even though women can have penises there was nothing wrong with them using women’s toilets and that to suggest otherwise was now a matter for the police to investigate and for the courts to prosecute.

To no-one’s surprise however, because the verdict was the very worst outcome for this government, Plonker has been conspicuously absent from our screens. There have been no tributes praising the long battle that women have had to fight to get here, no glowing admiration for them overcoming the death threats, the career ending abuse, the violence and cancellations they endured. No admission that he, along with the vast majority of the political elite were wrong and that the work of correcting that wrong, of undoing the procedures and policies that were eroding the rights of biological women was starting immediately.

There was only absence. Missing was any comparable response to matching that followed last summers riots in Stockport. Then the full power of the state was unleashed. Then there was an urgency. Then there was a will, and the resources needed to make that will a very visible reality, to confront the threat to our society that some localised rioting and few ill-advised tweets presented.

Has Plonker announced that all trans women prisoners have been returned to male prisons and are now housed in high security wings for their own protection? Has anyone told the NHS that single sex wards now need to operate on the basis of biological sex and that this needs to happen as swiftly as possible? Are the police now going to record crime statistics properly so we no longer have the abomination of a ‘female rapist’ being housed in a women’s prison? Will the be a directive issued whereby all schools should enforce single sex toilets, sex based segregation of sports and usher in a return to normality and to do this before schools return after Easter? Will these and the many, many other panderings’ to a dangerous nonsense be rectified quickly?

No, because successive governments’ have effectively ceded power to a lunatic cult and now this one has no idea as to how to get it back.

April 18, 2025

34:63 presents “The Supreme Court ruling was outrageous”

For many reasons, the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court that women are biological women and that trans-women are not, was outrageous. Not outrageous because of the ruling itself, but because such a ruling was needed in the first place; that notionally sensible adults needed to be told by a court something that I knew to be true when I was four.

Its outrageous that this case need to be bought before the Supreme Court because Scottish Courts had upheld the delusion that trans women were women, and as such could be counted as such when attempting to redress sex inequality in public sector boardrooms.

There are so many parts of this trumpery moonshine that I find so outrageous that to detail them all would be exhausting. But for now, here are a couple.

It’s outrageous the way in which the most of the broadcast media – the BBC, ITV and Channel Four – have treated the ruling as if it were a decision upon the merits of two equally valid yet opposing opinions and giving airtime to delusional men with nonsensical beliefs. The main evening news bulletins on each channel carried a piece about the ruling, the jubilant scenes outside the court before all of them seemed bizarrely fixated upon what it meant for trans women, as if they were the most affected group. Each bulletin devoted no more than fifteen minutes on it.

There is essentially no difference between them and the newspapers of the 19th Century who defended fairy tale of creationists against the evidence of evolution. It’s also outrageous the way in which when belief in one delusion is proven to be a delusion, more delusions spring up to replace them, like a linguistic Hydra of overblown hysteria, and equally outrageous that the broadcast and print media act as enablers in legitimising such ridiculousness.

If one didn’t know any better, one might think that even as you read this marauding gangs of pitchfork wielding lesbians were rounding up chicks with dicks and sending them to extermination camps, rather than simply wanting women only spaces to be for women only. And for the rights of women not to be constantly be eroded by men, in the service of other men, who despite not wanting to be men, still expect to be treated differently to women.

Its also an outrageous notion of equality that negatively impacts the majority of the UK population at the expense of a minority of a minority. According to the 2021 census, women – the ones with vagina’s and not delusions – made up 51% of the UK population, whereas all transgender people – both trans-men and trans-women – and people who identify as non-binary made up 0.5% of it.

Like I wrote, outrageous.