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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.

As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.

I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”