ArthnoldManacatsaman

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.

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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?