Mick Hartley

Stella O’Malley at Spiked on how male journalists, broadcasters and comedians have been the biggest cowards in the gender wars.

British satire showed the pattern clearly. Have I Got News For You studiously avoided the trans topic for years, ignoring a national scandal involving children, medicine, prisons, law and safeguarding. Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and a rotating cast of panellists joked about everything else while pretending this was not happening.

Private Eye did the same. Sharp and confident, it should have led the charge. Instead it barely touched the story until very late. It’s doing better now, but it should never have taken so long.

The media men, whose job was to spot danger early, now feel exposed and afraid. Most minimised the trans issue because it unsettled them and they did not know how to engage with it.…

Many are now scrubbing old social-media posts, deleting the jokes and eye-rolls that reveal their complacency. Some are mortified they mocked the women who tried to warn them. Others have remained silent.…

A few, like James O’Brien, continue like the Japanese holdouts who stayed hidden in the jungle long after the war had ended. They cannot admit defeat now, because that would require admitting they were catastrophically wrong. So they cling to the position they took years ago, even as the evidence overwhelms them.

Graham Linehan had a few things to say about Ian Hislop, who, when approached by Linehan about gender issues, replied smugly that “the Trans/TERF debate is not quite as important as those involved in it believe”, and later, in the Eye, referred to Linehan’s “unhinged Twitter presence”.

He, Hislop, was too busy pulling in the money as the BBC’s establishment “contrarian” on “Have I Got News For You”.