Previous Harmontown guest, Irish Comedy Writer Graham Linehan has in the past few years gained a level of notoriety as a "gender critic"/"TERF". If he comes back on Harmontown would you be mad if Dan, Jeff, or Spencer didn't call him out on this?
Just putting this out there.
Whilst I think there are clearly some people in the trans rights movement who aren't considering the issues and concerns unique to cisgendered women as society moves forward in the discussion and execution of ideas and actions relating to feminism and intersectionality, in my experience they don't represent anywhere near as significant a number or threat as TERFs make them out to be.
Whilst this is clearly a shitty, unempathetic, and unproductive thing of these people to do, it's just as it almost always tends to be in these cases; it's largely the voice and actions of a cherry picked minority who are happening to get more air time in media because they cause controversy for clickbait, which then drowns out the rational voices campaigning for greater levels of social equality, and spreads disdain for the movement among those who are less deeply engaged with the topic.
But Graham has consistently been engaging in this issue online in an incredibly aggressive and toxic manner, and by and large he has been painting the entire Trans rights movement as being whiny, disrespectful, stupid, the old favourite of perverse, and recently even Nazi's. He also frequently disregards any support for Trans people given by cisgendered men as them having no right to talk about this because it's a women's issue, completely ignoring his own hypocrisy therein. All of which is pretty shitty behaviour for someone with his level of privilege and platform.
So, this is all basically to say that it'd be cool if in the spirit of talking openly and truthfully about everything even (hell, especially) when it gets clumsy and awkward, they should bring this up the next time/if ever Graham is on the show again. I mean, I think it's fairly clear where I stand on this, but no matter where it leads I just think it'd be pretty awesome of someone to say what a lot of his peers here across the pond seem unwilling to bring up with him.
Or just ghost him if he's ever back in LA or Harmontown is ever in the UK. That'd be fine too I guess.
Your thoughts fellow Harmenians?
Posted Dec 24, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC
i don't want him back. I think there are outstanding questions regarding trans rights that need to be dealt with but even if graham ever started from an earnest position it's very clearly and traceably devolved into base level bigotry. I feel kinda guilty because he followed me when I was yelling on twitter about a bunch of chapo's dogpiling me and i said they were like gamergate and since then graham has been calling non-terfs nazis and gamergaters and i cant help but think if he didnt see me tweet he wouldnt have thought of that on its own.
He also associates with people openly loathsome for trans people and if he has some sort of clear stance it doesn't come through when its filtered through a bunch of yelling bigots. But I think he's lost the plot on this.
This is conspiratorial but Russia likes to drive a wedge between straight males and members of the LGBT community in countries theyre targeting with psyops. There was evidence that anti trans activists were boosted by russian trolls who know that inflaming this culture war would be valuable. It seems to be a bigger fight in britain than here.
It's really been sad to see. It's such a weird hill to die on for seemingly an otherwise quite progressive person.
Totally! Which is kind of why I’d like to see him come on and be called on being just a straight up bigot and playing into the hands of people with horrific aims and motives. It’s something that a lot of people in the UK creative field seem unwilling to do either through wilful ignorance, for fear of being seen as disingenuous envy fuelled “haters”, or the ever present fear when dealing with popular media figures: being locked out of opportunities.
But I also totally get the desire to no platform him. Because frankly he doesn’t deserve quite the even handedness you guys give most of your guests. It’d just be interesting to see him flounder if called out by Dan because Graham always seemed to have an amount of respect for his intelligence and opinions, so half of his usual argument against his opponents would kind of collapse.
And yeah, I buy into that about the Russians. Every time we find out more about what the troll farms are doing here it becomes more and more clear that they’re actively driving a wedge between the various us’s and thems to stoke further conflict and keep us too busy infighting to prevent their further meddling.
The problem in the UK isn’t just straight males against trans people. This article gives a decent outline: https://theoutline.com/post/6536/british-feminists-media-transphobic?zd=1&zi=zxm4luym