The GutterView Transcripts

  JANICE TURNER Male bodies don’t belong in women’s sport Martina Navratilova has been cast out for telling the truth about how trans athletes have an unfair physical advantage Janice Turner Saturday February 23 2019 , 12.01am, The Times I n 1990, after trouncing Zina Garrison 6-4, 6-1 to win her ninth Wimbledon singles title, Martina Navratilova hurtled into the stands to embrace her lover Judy Nelson. A generation before gay marriage, two years after Clause 28 forbade promoting the “acceptability of homosexuality”, Martina defied prejudice and sneers with that joyful Centre Court hug. For living as boldly as she played, proposing to her present partner before the world at the US Open, Navratilova earned her place in any LGBT pantheon. Yet now she is a pariah in the movement she helped forge, kicked off the advisory board of Athlete Ally, an LGBT sports campaign, while activists lobby the BBC to drop her as a commentator. For what? Because she believes it unjust for male-bodi...

  Debbie Hayton The hounding of  Rosie Duffield 27 July 2021, 2:40pm I  grew up in 1980s County Durham; it felt at the time  like a People’s Democratic Republic. When the miners went on strike in 1984, Labour held 53 of the 72 seats on the county council. But whatever impression southerners might get from watching   Billy Elliot,  boys like me did not engage in ballet. Labour may have been in charge, but attitudes were socially conservative. We played football and supported the Toon, or Newcastle United to give them their official name. Allegiance to Sunderland raised eyebrows — in my town at least — while Manchester United was beyond the pale. If boys were ostracised for supporting the wrong football teams, teenagers struggling with sexuality or gender learnt to keep those things very close to their chests. In a society where ‘poof’ and ‘queer’ were insults of choice — terms of abuse hurled at victims to soften them up for a beating — coming out would have...

  Alex Massie: Death threats don’t sit on the right side of history The abuse heaped on JK Rowling by trans allies should not be ignored Alex Massie Sunday July 25 2021, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times Today, like yesterday and like tomorrow too, the most famous person living in Scotland will probably receive at least one death threat and all but certainly be the lucky recipient of plenty of other promises of violence. And today, like yesterday and probably like tomorrow too, very few people will bother to be concerned about this. There will be no vigil, no statements of support or solidarity, no suggestion this is a monstrous state of affairs to be deplored by all decent people, no indication at all, in fact, that there is anything to see here at all. It will be just another day in the life of JK Rowling. Even if the Scottish parliament were sitting, no politician would draw attention to the abuse  heaped upon Rowling for the crime (sic) of thinking women’s rights and those of ...

It's not woke versus woke if lesbians want to exclude the transgendered Edie Wyatt  22nd of July 2021 The street I grew up on was the border of a public housing estate.  On my side of the street was state-sponsored housing, and on the other side of the street was the new estates of the suburban middle class. The safe assumption was that everyone on my side of the street voted Labor and everyone on the other side voted Liberal (conservative for international readers).  I hadn’t met a middle-class person who voted Labor until I went to university.     The middle-class left were generally Marxists, the suburban working-class of my parent’s generation were not Marxists. My parents considered Marxism an elite indulgence, reserved for the upper classes, or those living off the public purse because they were too educated to be of any use to an employer (like Marx himself).  The kind of elite leftists that I met and were manufactured at university were th...

Why I changed my mind about trans self-identification There is huge fear in many quarters over speaking out, but debate and dialogue is not just necessary but essential       By   Anne Jenkin ‘Hero of the equal-marriage debate” was the accolade accorded to my father-in-law, Lord (Patrick) Jenkin, by PinkNews when  he died in 2016 . As a family, we were nominated for the Stonewall Politician of the Year Award in 2013. We have always been supportive of gay rights and equality. My husband, Bernard, was one of the small handful of Conservative MPs to support the reduction of the age of consent for gay men back in 1994, as well as voting in favour of civil partnerships and gay marriage. Recently, however, I find myself increasingly at odds with the doctrines from organisations such as Stonewall, with which that I previously had such common cause with. As I have read and looked more closely, I have realised that changes were slipping through without proper scruti...