Kiarash T

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@libsoftiktok lol cmon now. Clutching at straws here no?

[David Atherton @daveatherton]

My regular reminder, courtesy of Christopher Hitchens on Islamophobia.

"Resist it while you can before the right to complain is taken away from you. It is only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme & absolutist religion.

"Beware of men in robes, who will open the gates to the barbarians."

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on @YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

Originally Posted on Evening Standard

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

“Sex is not the same as gender.”

But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex.

You can’t eat your cake & have it.

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@cctvidiots And you're telling me there isn't a god?

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@Derek2Earth @benshapiro But if you're referring to someone you don't know, you do say "they". For example, "did the candidate come for their interview?" "No, they're running late"

[BBC Politics @BBCPolitics]

“All those people that put Liz Truss in No 10, I hope it was worth it”

Conservative MP Charles Walker describes chaos around Commons vote on banning fracking as a "shambles and a disgrace"

https://t.co/l2irPFiiwM

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Yet there's a lot of talk in our rotten media about transgender issues

Do these have comparable importance to the average British person ?

Shouldn't matters threatening our very existence
take precedence ?

[NASA Earth @NASAEarth]

In summer 2022, heatwaves around the world felled records and fueled wildfires as temperatures climbed above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). https://t.co/nC67K3sekq

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@sophielouisecc If you're going to add quote marks to your tweet, at least make sure it's what the man said.

[Layla Astley @Laylaastley]

This is what we’ll wake up to tomorrow. #BorisJohnson #ByeBoris #NadineDorries #CabinetOfChaos

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@Praxeas @Delta Wow I mean at this point why ever leave the house? Who knows what the next person might do. They may be wearing an aftershave you don't like and you would have to smell it 😱

[Adam Brooks AKA EssexPR 🇬🇧 @EssexPR]

Canada still does not allow the unvaccinated to travel domestically by air, sea or rail.
It is the only country in the world still doing this.

@JustinTrudeau and his Government are not following science, they are following authoritarian rule.

Disgusting. 🇨🇦

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@joncoopertweets How is this BREAKING! Someone ran a survey and this was the result

[Kiarash T @KiaIrani]

@LesMiserabley @larry76079412 that is some wild calculation! This guy traveling 77+ miles a day for £100? Also if he's self employed, wouldn't that be tax deductible?

[Andrew Sullivan @sullydish]

Pitch perfect, as he often is.

[CynicalHistorian .bsky .social @Cynical_History]

They only have themselves to blame

[Anneliese Dodds @AnnelieseDodds]

Labour will lift women up, not hold them back.

Because we are the party of equality. #IWD2022