Mick Hartley

After trans activist and writer Gretchen Felker-Martin celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk – “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch,” and “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Kirk,” – he received a call from the comics publisher DC, cancelling the series he’d been working on and terminating their relationship. A blow against free speech, no doubt, but in America the tables have turned. The left denied there was ever such a thing as cancel culture while happily cancelling anyone who didn’t agree with their particular line – in particular gender woo and “trans rights”. Now, though, with Trump and the rise of MAGA culture, some of these woke warriors are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Sarah Ditum at UnHerd:

“It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”

She had nothing to say earlier, though, about the persecution and cancellation of anyone who transgressed the in-fashion trans ideology. Reputations were trashed; careers ruined. But they were bigots and Terfs, so that was fine.

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 book Manhunt openly celebrates the brutal murder of Terfs and other lowlife who dare to question trans dogma – notably JK Rowling and Jesse Singal.

The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.

Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualised harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.…

The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.