Mick Hartley

Stephen Daisley joins the Stephen Fry pile-on:

Fry suggests Rowling has been ‘radicalised’, a word familiar to followers of the gender controversy for its customary application to women who insist on their rights. Although the terminology echoes that used to describe recruitment of Islamist terrorists, you need not be a feminist semantician to suspect that ‘radical’ is being used as a synonym for ‘hysterical’, as though women who believe in chromosomal sex are like the mad heroine of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story and would benefit from a lie down.

Radicalisation is a deceptive and manipulative framing because recognising the existence of physiological differences between men and women isn’t radicalism, it’s biology. Fry has repeatedly professed his distaste for the gender wars and refused to engage on the substance. For all his donnish affectations, he’s a ‘be kind’ merchant whose contribution to the debate is every bit as vacuous as those Insta mums who pose with a Pride Progress flag in front of their ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ wall canvas every 1 June.

Yet were Fry to take heed of what the gender ideology vanguard say, he might grasp that their use of ‘radicalisation’ is projection. For if you’ve convinced yourself that men become women by declaring themselves to be so, that women corseting themselves in chest binders or having healthy breasts amputated is sound therapeutic care, that children should be offered medical and even surgical interventions to mutilate their bodies – and, yes, this is what the vanguard believes – then you should stop and ask who exactly has been radicalised here.

I get the impression Fry is someone who likes to be liked. That perhaps prompted his outburst in the first place: the desire to be seen as having the right sort of views by the "luvvie" dinner party crowd. To be "clubbable". I wonder if he's regretting it now. As well as reeking of misogyny – it does feel as though he really wanted to say "hysterical" but restrained himself just in time – his remarks come at a time when the climate of opinion is changing and the excesses of gender ideology are finally being rolled back.

It's like the Simone Biles case. There could hardly be two people more different than Fry and Biles, but both have come out recently with sudden out-of-the-blue ad hominem attacks against prominent gender critics. In Biles' case it was Riley Gaines, the US campaigner against men in women's sport. 

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph – How Simone Biles turned trans activist – and trashed her reputation:

The message was blunt, blistering and wildly off-brand. Simone Biles, the transcendent gymnast whose gravity-defying routines have been appointment viewing at the past three Olympics, needed just one social media post to shred her wholesome image in the most jarring fashion.

Railing against Riley Gaines, the former swimmer who has campaigned vigorously to keep biological males out of women’s sport, she wrote on X: “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” With that crass drive-by shot, she definitively affirmed the old Warren Buffett maxim of it taking 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it.

At least Biles, unlike Fry, wasn't trashing an old friend.