Has there ever been a more petulant mob of moaners than that which is currently hurling abuse at Peter Tatchell? On Twitter, which is where these people live, self-styled queers and gender-benders are insulting and even threatening to kill Tatchell, the man whose risk-taking and street-fighting over 40-odd years helped to secure their liberation, to create a society in which they could live and speak freely. And how do they repay him? By tweeting their fantasises about him being murdered for being a ‘fucking parasite’.
Tatchell’s crime in the eyes of the PC thought police was to have signed a letter in the Observer calling for greater free speech in universities. Following student unions’ banning of various feminists who are ‘whorephobic’ (they don’t like the sex industry) or ‘transphobic’ (they don’t think men who have sex changes are real women), the letter-writers slammed the use of No Platform to ‘prevent the expression of feminist arguments’. It is ‘illiberal and undemocratic’ to silence people simply because you disagree with them, they said.
Then, in an irony so profound it could make your temples throb, trans activists and their ‘allies’ — people who follow them on Twitter — went berserk, describing the letter as an intolerable assault on their feelings and going after all who signed it. In short, they showed their anger about a letter that branded them illiberal by behaving illiberally. Two people in particular got it in the neck: Mary Beard, who said she felt so ‘battered’ by the liberty-allergic trolls that she went to bed; and Tatchell, who has been bombarded by 5,000 tweets, many of them insulting, some threatening.
How do we explain this tirade of abuse against someone I would describe as the grandfather of gay rights if I wasn’t worried that the use of such a gender-specific title might earn me a tsunami of online abuse? Why are people so incredibly thin-skinned? I think it’s down to the politics of identity.
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