Rather than luxuriating in the success of critically acclaimed dark comedy ‘The Curse’, comedian Nathan Fielder has instead spoken of a deep regret of unleashing the “obnoxious gender critical male” character of Matt Walsh onto the world stage. Originally conceived during the preliminary writing sessions of Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2018 satirical mockumentary series ‘Who Is America?’, the intense production schedule led to methods of working that would in turn cause the writers to lose control of their own character. “Sacha had never played so many different characters in such a short space of time before,” explained Nathan. “Plus he was laying the groundwork for the second Borat movie, including all the logistics of keeping that secret. Which is what led us to use other actors as temporary stand-ins until we switched them out with Sacha for our main subjects.” Nathan explained how this particular actor, who went by their real name of Matt Walsh in order to doubly fool any interviewees inclined towards preparatory online research, was under strict instructions “not to try to be funny, just to do a handful of mildly gender critical segments about the definition of the word woman, that we could stick on YouTube and give this guy some kind of convincing history in reporting.” “Plus, of course, we deliberately went with a guy that had the kind of generic look of a guy with a beard and glasses who probably has a podcast. And so would be interchangeable when Sacha turns up in his fake beard to do the real interviews. Or the real, fake interviews, I should say.” So far, so good, but problems arose when the character of Matt Walsh was ultimately dropped from the show, something the actor Matt Walsh did not take kindly to. “Sacha didn’t really feel like the character was working,” explained Nathan, “even before we tried to put our twist on it. It sounds hard to believe now, but even as recently as 2018, the whole obnoxious gender critical guy with a beard and a podcast stereotype wasn’t as prevalent as it is now, and we were worried the bits wouldn’t land. “Of course,” added Nathan with a rueful laugh, “this is where using the guy’s real name came back to bite us in the ass. He basically told us that he was going to keep doing the interviews independently. I don’t even think he understood that it was supposed to be a spoof. But what could we do? We can’t ban him from releasing stuff under his own name or talking about gender issues… And now, of course, he’s got a whole movie out.” The movie in question, the 2022 documentary ‘What Is a Woman?’ was mostly met with a mixture of apathy and confusion upon its release, while being predictably championed by the usual mainstream transphobic outlets desperate for increased legitimacy. Meanwhile, the online consensus seemed primarily to be “Is this guy for real?” A question that even Nathan Fielder and his colleagues still struggle to answer. “Honestly, there’s so many layers of reality and unreality going on here, even by my standards… Who even knows anymore?” said Nathan. “We’ve got this guy who we hired under his real name, doing real interviews as a cover for a fake documentary series, so that we can swap him with Sacha in a fake beard to do the real fake interviews… It’s like that scene in Curb where they were making the Seinfeld reunion episode, and Larry wanted to play George, a character who was originally based on the real Larry David… It breaks your brain trying to parse it all.” “But when all is said and done, seeing this guy out there, being successful and people apparently taking him seriously. It feels terrible. It feels like I’ve created a monster.” LGB Alliance founder and black lesbian Allison Bailey spoke today of the “moral epiphany” experienced following the online backlash to comments made in a promotional video for the LGB Alliance conference. The two-minute trailer features an extract from Allison’s keynote speech featuring the phrase “Girls are having breasts removed that have never known a lover’s caress.” Removed from the context of a discussion about trans teenagers undertaking top surgery, this led many online commentators to label her remarks “creepy and inappropriate”, and condemn the apparent sexualisation of underage girls. Allison stands by the content of her speech, the complete video of which is now available for online viewing. However the reaction to the extract featured in the trailer has still been a deeply upsetting experience. “As a survivor of child sexual abuse, I’m only too familiar with the guilt and misplaced blame that victims can often feel, and the vigilance it requires to maintain resistance to those urges. So to log on and see hundreds of people accuse me of endorsing and enabling child sexual abuse myself… It was an incredibly painful experience that I would not wish on anyone. “And while the vitriol faded as the days passed, as tends to happen on Twitter, I couldn’t help but be confronted with the abusive behaviour and abhorrent accusations that I had myself been complicit in. “A great deal of tactical and strategic thinking goes into gender critical activism, and one of our main weapons has always been to repeatedly associate trans women with child predators. This was never motivated by the desire to cause pain. It was simply a means to an end. “But having now experienced some of that pain for myself, of being publicly accused of the most heinous and horrific acts… I’m still having trouble processing the scale on which myself and my colleagues have been responsible for inflicting such harm. “Once you open your eyes to it, it’s endless. You’ve got the LGB Alliance’s Canadian account throwing around libellous accusations about ‘men who masturbate to images of babies’. Even our own branch has had tweets comparing transgender people to pedophilia and zoophilia banned by Twitter from hate speech. And this is from an apparent charity. “Not to mention Graham Linehan scouring the internet for any crimes committed globally by trans people to frame as representative of them as a whole, or Helen Staniland’s armies of followers lining up to yell ‘pedo’ and ‘nonce’ at anyone who objects to the framing of her questioning. Or in Graham’s case, maybe just a stranger wearing a Pokémon T-shirt. “While I maintain my gender critical views, I wholeheartedly apologise for the pain and harm that myself and my colleagues have caused in the way we’ve gone about expressing them, and I am also sorry that it took experiencing some of this pain for myself, albeit on a much smaller scale, for me to reach this point. “Enough is enough. The days of myself and the LGB Alliance attempting to score points over the opposition by equating trans women with pedophilia is over. We’re better than that, all of us.” The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has ruled that Metro did not breach media regulations when it described former comedy writer Graham Linehan as a “Lying Transphobic Cunt”. On 23rd January, Metro published an article about The IT Crowd creator’s decision to join Her, a dating app designed to “connect womxn and queer people”. Linehan’s own article included a photograph of himself in extravagant make-up and a satirical head tilt, as well as several photographs taken from the profiles of Her users. A legal representative for Mr Linehan subsequently complained to Metro, describing the stunt as the act of a twat, rather than a cunt, stressing the moral implications of the latter. However, Metro insisted that while the mocking selfie could on its own be attributed to the oafish buffoonery of a twat, the inclusion of the dating profile photos of real people elevated the act to one of cuntery. Linehan himself complained to Metro about the allegation of having “posed as a trans man” in order to evade a Twitter ban, claiming that “it was a line in a bio to try and fly under the radar.” Following an investigation, IPSO ruled that there was “no breach” in Metro‘s description, explaining with some exasperation that deceptively describing himself as a trans man in a Twitter bio while simultaneously claiming not to have done so was the very definition of a lie, the brazenness of which only reinforced the formerly established cuntery. Furthermore, the regulator upheld Metro’s reporting that Mr Linehan had accused English professor Grace Lavery of predatory child abuse, rejecting Linehan’s claim that he had been referring to “grooming the next generation into accepting the many boundary violations celebrated and implemented by Queer Theory.” As stated in the ruling, “The Committee took into account Graham Linehan’s prolific body of work in which the trans community are repeatedly characterised as predatory pedophiles, with cherry-picked examples of international crimes, allusions to the Rotherham grooming gang scandal, and pranks such as the ‘Jimmy Savile Safeguarding Award’, and concluded that the accusation of pedophilia was genuine and intentional. We also noted his promotion of a meme including a photograph of a horse being ‘groomed’ as a way to make such an accusation while maintaining plausible deniability, and therefore find that Metro were not significantly inaccurate in describing the complainant as a lying cunt.” Regarding the claim of “transphobia”, Mr Linehan’s legal representative tweeted that “a phobia is an irrational fear and graham isnt scared of transwomen so how can he be transphobic?” However, the regulator found that a phobia can also simply refer to an extreme dislike, which was also a “not significantly inaccurate” way of describing Graham’s relentless demonisation of the trans community and pedophile-related scaremongering. Metro did agree to amend one line in which the complainant was described as having “always been a cunt,” acknowledging that at one point Mr Linehan was simply more of a prick, before the full extent of his cuntery became apparent. It’s the riddle that has dumbfounded decipherers and confounded cryptographers ever since 1897 when English composer Edward Elgar sent a love letter to his lady friend Dora Penny (1874-1964) accompanied by a cryptic message that remained unsolved throughout Penny’s lifetime and beyond. Until now. Comprised of three lines and 87 characters of 24 separate symbols, facing eight directions often suspected to correspond to the notes of the musical scale, a solution to the cipher has eluded both amateur sleuths and professional codebreakers for over a century. In 2007, the 150th anniversary of Elgar’s birth, The Elgar Society conducted a competition to crack the code, but no suggested solutions were deemed satisfactory. Canadian cryptographer Richard Henderson claimed in 2011 to have used a simple substitution cipher to reveal the following message, although his assumption of phonetic shorthand, while credited for its cleverless, failed to fully convince. whY AM I VERY SAD, BELLE. I SAG AS WE SEE ROSES DO. E.E. IS EVER FOND OF U, DORA. I kNOw I PeN ONE I LOVe. All Of My Affection. Similarly, as recently as last year, Wayne Packwood proposed this almost-too-perfect solution: A WOMAN IS LIKE CHESS ONE HAS TO MAKE MANY SACRIFICES FOR ITS QUEEN IT IS VICTORY SHE COMMANDS NOT DO BETTER And while many wanted to believe, Packwood’s premise of a rotating conductor’s baton holding the key to the cipher was felt to be just too much of a wishful reach. Enter Jane Clare Jones, a feminist philosopher and academic who became the first to provide a complete and conclusive solution to the code, as presented here: THESE UPPITY BITCHES SHOULD JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP WHILE MEN TRAMPLE OVER WOMEN’S HARD-WON SEX-BASED RIGHTS, AMIRITE? Asked how she had managed to succeed where so many before her had failed, Jane credits both lateral thinking and her decade of experience in online anti-trans-activism. “Obviously I started out the way many others did, experimenting with substitution ciphers and transposing the symbols into a musical sequence in the hope of finding a harmonic parallel with the Enigma Variations, but despite the emergence of the occasional coherent phrase, no fully convincing solution presented itself. I even attempted downloading Elgar into my spine, also to no avail. I later repeated this process with Prince, but that just led me to assaulting Sinead O’Connor with a sock full of snooker balls. It was then that I realised that we had all been missing the point and playing into the patriarchy’s hands while doing so. As with my online discourse, the real question was not “What was this person saying?” but “What would I like him to have been saying?” It speaks to Edgar’s impish genius that he managed to send us all on a wild goose chase for over a century, seeking complex solutions when all along the answer was as simple as applying a technique I like to call ‘just making shit up’. Once I began looking at things from that perspective, the truth became self-evident. However, while undoubtedly talented, I note that Dora Penny was seventeen years Elgar’s junior, and he should therefore probably have his hard drive checked.” History is littered with the untold stories of iconic feminist warriors who wouldn’t wheesht. For centuries, women who refused to bend the knee to the patriachy were burnt at the stake, and more recently, silenced from Twitter or hounded from their academic positions at Sussex University for the ‘crime’ of questioning trans ideology and believing that sex is real. But there were some witches they couldn’t burn, although it is unclear whether this was due to flammability issues or simply that they’d run off. Either way, they gave birth to adult human females, who then gave birth to more adult human females, and now their granddaughters are here, and they’re ruddy well ticked off. Alright, fine, they didn’t give birth to actual adults, and the witch-burnings were more than two generations ago. But you know what I mean, shut up. Told from the perspective of Twitter exile, drunken liability and mercenary freelance hack Joani Walsh, the new play ‘Joani’ is a powerful and joyous tribute to the Kiwi Farms member’s gender critical activism as one of the biggest contributors to the normalisation of transphobic abuse in the UK, and a peddler of tawdry celebrity piffle, depending on which way the money’s flowing that week. Tickets are available now, starting from just £50. (Venue is not wheelchair accessible.) |