trans | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 16, 2025

34:63 presents “Count Arthur Strong.”

Why do some people 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?

Gary Crisp, who looks uncannily like Count Arthur Strong without his hat, is a serial offender who it comes to this kind of thing and like Strong, he is a someone who thinks he’s more intelligent than he is and thus fits himself in hot water as a result. Unlike Strong however, this was all done for laughs and unlike Strong, he wasn’t cancelled by the BBC years ago. Resulting in a interview in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which he gave his opinions on two of the most divisive issues of the day, Gaza and trans.

Quite why anyone care’s what he thinks about anything other than football, I’m not really too sure. It’d be like asking Orson Welles how to bake a cake. But we live in an age where people do and where ‘celebrities’ own ego and sense of self-importance convinces them that they do. We also live in an age in which the media love to give an opportunity for someone like Crisp to say something controversial, because that will ultimately generate more revenue for them. It’s such a mutually beneficial arrangement that its essentially a digital ‘reach around’

So Crisp can say, safe in the knowledge that he’s saying the right thing – right in the sense that it won’t harm his career – “I think if you’re silent on these issues, you’re almost complicit.” The problem for him though, is that by not staying silent on these issues he is complicit in revealing himself to be a mental pigmy.

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through, unimaginable. I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters. I don’t know how the world thinks this is OK.” Does he not understand what happens in a war? Does Does he not understand that Israel is surrounded by countries who wish it never existed, or that the founding charter of Hamas espouses jihad – holy war – until Israel is no more.

“Obviously October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened prior to this, many of them against the Palestinian people.” There it is, the but. The ‘but’ that somehow transforms anti-Semitism into a bastardized moral equivalence. Is Crisp an authority in Middle Eastern history or is he just a student at the University of Twitter?

The attack by Hamas wasn’t just ‘awful. Being stuck in a traffic jam is awful. An undercooked meal is awful. Biting into a chocolate only to discover its coffee flavoured that’s awful. To suggest that the massacre of 1,141 people, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was ‘awful’ belies the sheer scale of its barbarity and his stupidity.

He is lives in a country where his stupidity has no cost, where his luxury beliefs are protected by democratic freedoms that the people of Gaza can only dream of. One where having different views won’t make you fearful of a knock on the door at dead of night, one where being gay isn’t seen as a crime, and in a time where one can earn an obscene amount of money by talking about an irrelevance to adults with who have yet to fully grow up.

He is a highly distilled iteration of the same combination of presumed moral authority, self-importance and entitlement that saw a a load of people most people had never heard of write a letter to The Guardian last week expressing something with some others.

Crisp also has deep feelings for these others. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?”

Of course he thinks that. Once again, at no point in his life will he ever be be confronted with the reality of his luxury beliefs. No man will. No man will ever find women demanding access to mens toilets, no man will themselves losing against mediocre women in sporting competitions just as no man will ever see their identity turned into little more than performative wish fulfilment by deluded women.

Its precisely because he’s so removed from the consequences of his luxury beliefs that he can afford to hold them.

What a Count.

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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.