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[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman🇬🇧🌳🟦 13 insightful - 5 fun13 insightful - 4 fun14 insightful - 5 fun -  (6 children)

I was mindlessly doom scrolling on my phone in the midst of a sleepless episode but I've switched to my laptop now, such was my chagrin at reading this waffle.


despite being a civilization in terminal decline

The Empire is gone, and it's time we all accept that. I have to fish my own tea out of the harbour and nobody will ever call me memsahib, but it has to be said that the imperious attitude that comes with, well, imperialism is often a great comfort when the colonists get a little restive.

has focused on the cisgender woman at its vanguard

JK? Maya? Which cisgender woman? You can't make a claim like that and then not back it up (a theme we see throughout this 'article').

The UK’s high rate of homelessness amongst LGBT youth, the risk of deportation faced by gay asylum seekers, or the fact that homophobic hate crime has soared since 2015

Hard to find things to dispute about these points, really, except that the first two are not issues exclusive to homosexuals. There are plenty of straight homeless people too, and I imagine any number of straight people get their asylum claims rejected too. These issues, I think, need to be sorted out in totality, rather than doing the (what I feel is quite an American thing, to be honest) thing of asking 'But what about the gay homeless?' This is very much a case of all lives mattering.

Having successfully persuaded polite society that “TERF” is a slur, the British anti-trans movement now organizes under the banner of “gender critical” — a euphemistic moniker made considerably funnier by the fact that nobody is more critical of gender than someone who transitions.

That's funny, I always thought that transitioners were the ones who were most in favour of maintaining oppressive gender stereotypes, because without them their whole shtick evaporates into nonsense.

There's a certain kind of gay man who embodies the gender-critical vibe. He’s white, middle class and exactly 45 years old, and even though he works as a corporate lawyer, he thinks teenagers with dyed blue hair are an oppressor class. His Twitter Bio reads something like, “snarky prick taking aim at the tyranny of twaddle” or “why drink the Kool-Aid when you can have a lovely G&T?” His pronouns are “sod/off” or “jog/on.” He’s not especially interested in gay culture, and instead prefers the standard fare of middle-brow English liberals: George Orwell and The Great British Bake-Off; Solzhenitsyn and Strictly Come Dancing; comedy panel shows called “I’m Afraid I Haven’t the Foggiest!” and popular history books titled Bothersome Broads: A Feminist History Told Through 12 Grating Gals (which he “inhaled in a single glorious afternoon.”) His aesthetic crimes are gruesome and, more to the point, he is dedicated to making things harder on already vulnerable people.

This is gold, and I'm posting it in its entirety because I want to keep it forever. Also it's called I'm sorry I haven't a clue! and there's nothing wrong with Bake Off and Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the fucking Nobel Prize, and George Orwell is an important author who we all study at school, you can do a lot worse than their books. Would you be similarly blasé about Mark Twain or John Steinbeck? Probably, because they were straight white men and that makes your tiny American brain quiver.

There seems to be the concern that if gay men lump ourselves together with trans people — a group subject to greater discrimination — we risk being damned by association.

Stopped clocks and all that...

“GC gay men in the U.S. tend to be part of what I'd call a kind of anti-identitarian scene where everyone sees identity as a kind of red herring of politics — a distraction from things that actually matter,”

Perhaps you Yankees aren't so bad after all.

These men are spiteful and staggeringly unchic; they’re wasting their lives in the worst possible way— luckily, as a gay man, I am allowed to say so.

This is what it all boils down to, isn't it? Nasty British gay men rejected you because you're an American prick, you clearly don't like that some Americans like Doctor Who and Bake Off and decided to write a pissy, bitter article that paints you as the restive colonial we all know you are at heart.

What a cockwomble. Or is that too Anglophile-Tumblr for you?

[–]HelloMomo 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

The anti-Doctor Who bit is really weird. My oh my! Let's show how uncool, now unlikely to spread to other countries, this is by linking it to something that's lasted for decades and is very popular outside the UK...? And for that matter, Bake Off is certainly on the short-list of UK shows most popular in the US too.

[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman🇬🇧🌳🟦 9 insightful - 5 fun9 insightful - 4 fun10 insightful - 5 fun -  (4 children)

The vibe I get from this author is as follows:

Grew up and was probably into Dr Who, got really weirdly into Americans-Who-Like-British-Things Tumblr (I drink tea, I'm so quirky! #SherlockedInsideTheTardis) and probably wasn't part of the popular clique at high school. American, so I'm relying on American popular culture stereotypes here, but he was definitely a 'theatre kid'. Goes to some liberal arts college in the East of the US and ZOMG gets to study abroad in England for a semester?! dream. come. true.

Arrives on this sceptred isle, this other Eden and studies at some university like Anglia Ruskin or Lincoln, maybe a slightly more prestigious one like Bath or Bristol depending on the calibre of the college back in the States, but definitely not a university in London. One in the regions. One where people aren't used to seeing Americans and roll their eyes when they hear his loud, brash hear-him-before-you-see-him voice echoing in the corridors, or on his phone in the library. 'Oh hey Moooooooom'.

Realises quite quickly that Britain isn't the land of stereotypes that American popular culture has made it out to be and nobody is going to find him as interesting as he find them because actually it turns out that Britain, like the rest of the English-speaking world, has been saturated with American popular culture and politics for decades now, and nothing happens in America that isn't reported on here. Several sexual partners probably reject him too.

And so after a few damp, chilly months studying in a university town with nothing more exciting than a parade of betting shops and takeaways, he leaves this fortress built by Nature for herself, with few friends, not much in the way of academic progress, and a bitter, jaded view of the United Kingdom and everyone therein. No longer able to cash in on being the 'quirky guy who loves all things English' he finds a new home in identity politics, and shits out vitriolic waffle like this.


Absolutely, 100% untrue, all of it (probably? I guess I could check but who cares tbh, my version is better), but I had fun writing that.

[–]julesburm1891 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My experience with trans people in real life and online is that they’re all “grass is greener on the other side” people. They think all their problems would go away if they were the opposite sex. This attitude seems to bleed over in other aspects of their lives as well. “Oh everything would be so perfect if I lived in the UK!” “None of my issues would exist if I lived in a blue state instead of a red one!” “Everything would be great if I had a boyfriend or girlfriend!”

Idealizing anything and setting it up as one big solution is guaranteed disappointment.

[–]Elvira95Viva la figa 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

If I had an english girlfriend with this humor I would feel so lucky. Awww!

But for real, it isn't just the english world which is saturated with usa media, is all the west and beyond.

[–]MarkJeffersonTight defenses and we draw the line 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Epic rant; This is creative and interesting as heck.

[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman🇬🇧🌳🟦 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You're too kind!