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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1000 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 4, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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I'm curious as to what firsthand experience convinced him this was what to spend the rest of his life on this topic; what X-pilled him?

Like JKR, did he brush up against the trans activist complex? They do seem to have this effect on people.

Yeah, I'm curious about that myself. The impression I get is that his TV career had been circling the drain for many years, to which he'd responded by becoming a sort of all-purpose keyboard warrior, taking to Twitter to attack all manner of people (including Kanye West, of all people) as "Gamergaters". At some point he fell down the gender-critical rabbit hole and here we are.

Perhaps the spiciest take I've seen on the whole matter came from Scott, in which he admitted that the spike in trans identification is probably a bad thing and it's worth trying to determine the underlying cause thereof - but then said that no one should bother trying to answer these questions because they'll end up ruining their lives in the process, like Linehan did. (Of course, a major contributing factor to Linehan's life being ruined was trans activists doing everything in their power to ruin it - Linehan claims that the police knocking on his door over tweets he'd posted was the catalyst that caused his wife to leave him. Regardless of whether that was the catalyst, it's undeniably true that the police did knock on his door because trans activists sicced them on him.)

To my mind, "this is a question worth investigating, but you shouldn't try to investigate it because bad actors will try to destroy you if you do" is a sensible position to take, if and only if you include an explicit condemnation of the bad actors trying to destroy people, which Scott doesn't.

The trans people went after him hard for making a very funny episode about an MtF trans person before such things were sensitive. It's both very unkind and rather touching, but in any case the trans complex went after it hard.

At the risk of impromptu psychoanalysing, Graham Linehan has always been on the winning side of the culture wars before: Father Ted affectionately but firmly took the piss out of the Catholic Church just as it was dying out in Ireland and while neither Black Books nor the IT Crowd are exactly politically correct, everyone was in no doubt that their author was basically sound politically.

Then suddenly that got turned around on him and I think it was a big shock. All that time being a feminist and so on and suddenly the winds change and he goes from being universally feted to standing with the baddies. I can imagine that being pretty shattering.

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