January 26, 2023
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As many readers know, I am working on a book to come out this fall. The main theme of the book will be to hold US lawmakers and others accountable for throwing women and girls under the bus at the altar of “gender identity.” I really need to turn my attention to that so that I can meet the publisher’s deadline, but something came up today that I can’t ignore.
Taking a break from book research, I turned to the great global public square known as Twitter and came across this tweet:
For anyone who doesn’t know, “STV” is “STV News: the home of Scottish News, Sport & Weather.” Austin Sherican describes himself on Twitter as “Former SNP Glasgow City Councillor, Pro EU, Pro LGBTI+ rights, Pro Scottish independence, SNP Member, He/Him.” SNP refers to the Scottish National Party. Probably someone should call him a bigot for omitting the Q and the A from the acronym that he supports. Thank goodness he provides his pronouns.
Anyway, I stared at that tweet for a while, wondering what, from the perspective of someone who supports “gender identity,” could possibly be wrong with the STV headline. My own critique of the headline would be that the rapist in question is a man, no kind of woman, and should therefore be referred to as he, not she. But what objection could this promoter of “gender identity” possibly have to the headline? The only thing I could come up with was that he was upset about the words “was a man.”
For readers who haven’t been following this story, here are the basic facts, as I have been able to glean them from news stories over the course of the past few days.
In 2016, a person named Adam Graham raped a woman. In 2019, the same person raped a different woman.
This is the person known then as Adam Graham:
Photo credit: Daily Mail
Graham was criminally charged with the two rapes and later, in 2020, insisted on being called Isla Bryson. This is the person known now as Isla Bryson:
Photo credit: Daily Mail
They are the same person. Graham/Bryson was convicted of the two rapes on January 24, remanded to jail, and sent to the women’s jail. I have heard some chatter that he has since been removed from the women’s jail, but I have not been able to confirm that.
Plenty of Scottish feminists are rightfully angry about this entire situation.
So, getting back to Sheridan’s tweet criticizing the STV coverage of this story:
The STV article that Sheridan appears to be upset about is here. It says the same thing the tweet says: “A transgender woman has been found guilty of raping two women when she was a man.” STV refers to Graham/Bryson as “she” and “her” throughout the article. It uses the name Bryson. In other words, it appears to me to make numerous concessions to Graham/Bryson’s alleged woman identity.
So what is Sheridan so upset about? The only thing I can think of is that he’s upset because STV uses the phrase “was a man,” because according to many proponents of “gender identity” (I say many, not all, because there is never any consensus among sex deniers about any of this), “trans women have always been women.”
The point of this piece is not to take issue with that. As far as I am concerned, men are male, women are female, and none of that is complicated. Instead, I want to make two points here.
First, no amount of placating the biology deniers is ever good enough. STV (and other media outlets) can refer to men as “transgender women” and use “she” and “her” to refer to them all they want. None of that will ever be good enough if an outlet so much as acknowledges that a “transgender woman” “was a man.” (I mean, I would of course say that he is still a man, because he is, but that’s not my point here.) My point instead is that I wish everyone would drop the concessions to “gender identity” because no concession is ever good enough for the gender fanatics.
Second, in his tweet, Sheridan seems to be making the case that the framing of the article is “disgusting” and states that “it’s awful that as a result trans people, in particular male to female, will get backlash from this and in harms [sic] way.” Please set aside any questions about what the phrase “trans people” might mean here and just note that Sheridan specifically refers to “male to female,” which means that he acknowledges that Graham/Bryson was, at least at one point, male. If Sheridan is saying that Graham/Bryson has always been a woman and also that Graham/Bryson was once male, then Sheridan is effectively saying that Graham/Bryson (a convicted rapist) was a “male woman” before “she came out as trans.”
This is the absurdity of “gender identity.” It never stops getting stupider.