Every time I hear about a woman getting fired or harrassed by these men who think that THEIR values are EVERYONE'S values, it makes me sick. I am not some slavering fan of Jon Ronson, the journalist, but he wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. There are some real issues with it -- primarily that he is one of the people who did (and, even after researching and writing the book, still obviously DOES) wants to use Twitter and social media to shame people who he simply disagrees with. That's it. There's nothing more at stake than a stranger making an off-color or rude or politically disagreeable statement in public and he (like so many people) doesn't want to argue against it or block the person from his timeline/feed/whatnot -- he wants to END THEM.

But, he started talking to some of the people who've been ended (and it was too early for there to be a trans story at the time of his writing, really), and he began to have some compassion and feel badly for these people. They made a mistake or what they posted was taken too seriously and the mob destroyed and then the mob moved on because it's fun to destroy things and people. When you make a person into just a thing that they said and you hate what they said, you feel justified in wrecking them. Plus, there's the remove of people just being posts and not a real person who you are speaking directly to. He started to understand that doing this was wrong and was really a bad thing. It took his wife explaining how it's even MORE SO FOR WOMEN to get him to recognize that it's mostly men who do this wrecking and when they do it to women, it ALWAYS STICKS. (Men who don't apologize and weather the storm can often survive a social media mob, according to his research. Especially if it has anything to do with sex -- as in sexual fetishes and other sexual behaviors.)

This is just ridiculous. THIS is why free speech is important. It doesn't exist if, as an individual, you cannot express your beliefs and understandings of political situations (and holy fuck -- saying that males can be females IS POLITICAL). An author who writes children's books is allowed to have an adult life and have adult opinions and employers should have to tolerate them, especially if the person doesn't bring them into work. Full stop. It is not the responsibility of strangers who literally have no reason to care what some woman who writes kids books says. It doesn't affect their lives at all, that one person.

I simply cannot believe the craveness and cowardice of businesses. You are being directed by a bunch of people you likely want to have NOTHING TO DO WITH. If the managing editor had taken a half-hour to check in on the people braying for her job, we know what he would have found -- furries and trans fetishists talking about their bizarre sex lives and grooming children. And he caved because who wants to do the actual right thing when you can have a bunch of questionable human beings cheering for you?

Doing the right thing is usually hard.