RÓISÍN MURPHY

well frankly radio silence sucks worse

again i'm not gonna look at her IG and can't see twitter, but my understanding from trans folks who are talking about it elsewhere is that the anti-trans types/terfs are coming out of the woodwork for her on there, attacking trans folks who are pushing back against her comments. it might be better to swiftly knock down all of that bullshit going on, vs ignoring it or taking a more strategic approach to her statement (if there ever winds up being one.) even something that indicates a better statement to come later, but for now would serve as a "back the fuck off" to the monstrous types who think she's an ally.

Yeah, the fact that she doesn't is telling.

shutting up when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about is a policy that could behoove lots of public figures in lots of circumstances.

i'd rather she just stays quiet instead of publicly doubling down and radicalising i guess, but still certainly not an ideal response. it'll probably come up again eventually in an interview though

personally i'm still expecting to enjoy the new album (although certainly not as much as i would have otherwise and i feel pretty jaded about it all) but wouldn't go see her live or anything now

gyac, I don't really know that much about Irish media, is it as TERF-infested as the UK?

No it isn’t.

That's good. I know Glinner lives in London and has done since the 90s.

regardless of whether she makes a statement admitting ignorance or doubling down, the thing I can't get over is that she made this comment in the first place. She is a very online popstar, in that she has cult following and critical acclaim without chart success, and in that she uses internet spaces beyond FB and Instagram such as live lockdown streams etc - there is no way that she could not have been able to predict this comment would be seen, screenshotted and shared. She could have put her phone down, and kept her misinformed opinions to herself and her private circle of in-real-life friends. She chose to type this out and hit submit because she felt strongly enough that it needed to be said. She felt that her opinion was valid and important and legitimate. That tells me how strongly she feels about this, and it tells me how little consideration she has for her queer fanbase which, let's be honest, in 2023 are a huge part of her sustained success.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwP-gMnIlz5/?igshid=NzZhOTFlYzFmZQ==

the comment she's pinned to this post, utterly abysmal. Any hope that she was just "taking time to educate herself" eradicated.

Gl*nner went on a long ranting tweet bonanza last night setting up the hashtag #istandwithroisinmurphy, tagging Jon R0ns0n, Ni$h Kumar and various comedy celebrities, links to buy her album to support her, tweets about Moloko videos, furious retweets of people who had come out against her.. this morning it had all vanished. He’s not one for deleting stuff usually either.

lol the most cowardly way to double down, pathetic

I don't see any pinned comments now, but I found a screenshot:

This is what Róisín Murphy thought would be the right thing to be 'pinned' on her last Instagram post. Says it all. 🚮

'This ideology is affectively transing away our gay youth'
SERIOUSLY @roisinmurphy ?!? SERIOUSLY?! GET IN THE BIN pic.twitter.com/9QHeOiGUMT

— diogo filipe filipe 🌈 (@DiogoFFilipe) August 27, 2023

"Leave kids be"

"transing away our gay youth" has to be the funniest and dumbest thing i've ever read

"don't socially affirm them" is a tell

ew ew ew

Popjustice locked their Roisin album anticipation thread out of disgust and everyone is canceling their preorders.

Funniest thing I read on that thread was from a Roisin defender (one of two, out of dozens who have completely disowned her) who claimed Roisin wasn't dependent on her LGBTQ fanbase, something along the lines of "well I saw her in Poland and there weren't any pride flags or gay chanting in the crowd" (??)

Imagine the pathology of a person reassured by the number of fans she's alienated.

thought about breaking down just how much that entire paragraph is made of bullshit but just like all fundamentally conservative/fascist ideology it willfully misunderstands and distorts every issue it's addressing. ime ppl who believe this have no interest in changing their minds

The sheer contempt of throwing statistics at a hurt group of people, and using a proxy bigot to do so

weird how the bad and hated tavistock is suddenly an authority when a terf claims a doctor there said something that supports their transphobia

Gay chanting? What? Lol

1) I don't think it's fair to claim that she is so dependable on the queer community. She was in the business long before most of you were born or aware of the fact who she (Moloko) was. She was living in a diffrent world with different people around. Certainly her last show in Poland wasn't dominated with LGBTQ community representatives at all (no flags, no transparents, no chantining....one big nothing).

Yeah there’s a reason the lgbtq community might be less visible in Poland…ffs

Seems like she unpinned that post.

xp yeah seriously

LOL at that post quoted by omar little - as a queer person living in Poland I am genuinely puzzled at what sort of transparent should I be bringing to concerts and what's the gayest way to chant so I get noticed by the poster

solidarity to you, i could get EU citizenship but i would have to live in Poland for a few years and...not doing that.

She hasn’t learned the first rule of holes.

At this point this is almost exclusively on social media. Pitchfork hasn’t done a news item. There’s one article I can find online, from some shoddy sounding sports site. If she does make a public statement I’m sure that will all change.

He also liked a transphobic tweet at some point and apologized saying it was “fat fingers” and liked by mistake and yet he followed the journalist before liking said tweet. So yeah as you said, the troublesome ones can be found by who they follow and interact with.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka)

fat bloody fingers are sucking his soul away

and yeah, no secret, it's jonny, and he gets it through his wife. (look at me, talking about transphobia like it's some sort of, i don't know, social contagion or something).

I think the US vs UK divide on this comes down to size, basically. The US isn't one country, like the name suggests it's basically 50 countries, and about half of them are governed by theocratic fascists or people who want to be and will be if given half a chance, but the other half aren't. And the US media is a patchwork, too, there's foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing media (mostly online) pushing a just-this-side-of-mob-violence anti-trans message but there's also trans defenders and people pushing back against that right-wing tide, and everyone's kind of siloed, reading and cheering for what they believe and occasionally hate-reading the other side. Whereas England is a little island with like 5 newspapers, all of which seem to have collectively adopted this frankly bizarre "the trans-es, they're coming to get us!" message, like people in a tiny rural village convinced that monsters are coming up the road, except the village is fucking London. Looking at it from outside it seems as if the entire British media culture (which again seems to be like 5 newspapers and 2 or 3 TV channels) has gone completely fucking insane.

― read-only (unperson)

i'm not sure if i agree with your assessment of us vs. uk media culture! us media is extremely oligarchical... there may be a lot of newspapers but most of them are owned by the same people and push the same ideas. they're not all anti-trans - the new york times, for instance, is anti-trans, but the washington post is pro-trans.

honestly, i do see the difference here as being a more flatly political one... the new york times is an exception, really, in being a liberal organ that's also anti-trans. if i were to boil it down to its essentials, i'd say that the issue is that the democratic party is pro-trans and the labour party is anti-trans. in actuality there is no "debate" in the uk, because the people in all of the major seats of power agree: trans rights are a bad thing.

there's no debate in america, either, because it's impossible for people who live in two separate realities to debate, but it's also really difficult to succesfully implement political policy on a national level. that, to me, is the difference... the us is basically ungovernable on a national level. so a state like oregon can mandate insurance coverage for trans healthcare, and a state like florida can forbid doctors from even providing trans healthcare. in addition, since people can freely travel between states, if you're trans in a red state you have very strong incentive to get out - stronger incentive to move than the financial disparities which _discourage_ moving.

representation matters! a lot of prejudice is driven by ignorance. if you live in a place where you _see_ trans people, anti-trans rhetoric is markedly less effective (since anti-trans rhetoric is all basically lies). on top of that, a lot of "red states" manage to _stay_ red by rigging their elections and disenfranchising any voters who might oppose the republicans. it's a cycle, and i have some thoughts about where it leads, but i try not to think about it too much.

i think one of the other differences between us and uk culture is that transphobia in the us is more _overt_, more... _vulgar_. i wouldn't expect britain to build death camps for trans people.* not on british soil, in any event. that's not how britain does genocide. britain's approach is more sophisticated and genteel. there are a lot of similarities, i think, between the way britain handles trans people and... yes, i'm going to talk about it... the _potato famine_. like many famines, the famine wasn't the "natural event" famines are often portrayed as, but a foreseeable side effect of deliberate british policy. you deny the population you're not fond of the resources they need to survive, and then disclaim all responsibility, or better yet, blame the people you're starving of resources, when they did. in the case of the irish, it was food... in the case of trans people, it's readily available life-saving medical treatment.

it's worth noting that even though america has _absolutely obscene_ levels of inequality when it comes to quality of care, trans care in the us is still more widely available than it is in the uk. any further commentary seems unnecessary.

* come on, seriously, if you were to find out florida was building queer death camps, would you _really_ be surprised?

as far as roisin murphy... this is The Pattern. you tip your toe in and pull it back out. it's like getting in the bath. just because you pull your toe out of the water doesn't mean you're not going to get in the bath! anybody who's a fan... i'm sorry. it's time to start the mourning process.

only just seen this thread and fucking hell, gutted

the poland talk reminds me of the one line i've seen from louis ck in years, something tiktok recommended to me, from his "comeback" show. the joke starts something like "i was in poland last year... because i had to go to poland to do shows...".

there really is a huge difference between us and uk media culture re: trans issues, but the broader political culture is a major factor too.

the big thing is that in the uk, transphobia has been successfully laundered as a progressive, feminist position and has become the dominant position across the entire media landscape, even supposedly centre-left publications like the guardian and the supposedly neutral bbc. this has happened because the initial transphobic push was really driven by prominent media figures who generally had some sort of at least vaguely feminist, left of centre background (bindel, moore, etc.) who have been casually pushing transphobia for decades before ramping up in the past decade. the uk media is incredibly insular (and most of it is incredibly right-wing and loves a deranged moral panic) and that lead to that sort of bigotry getting quite wide takeup in the press, even the not-particularly-right-wing parts. this still hasn't lead to widespread public support for transphobia but definitely made things worse and created a very loud radicalised transphobic minority of voters.

it's a very different dynamic to the usa, where transphobia has been very blatantly driven by the religious right (which just isn't really a major factor in the uk), and so most democrat voters, even in the media, are already polarised against it for that reason, and there hasn't been any serious attempt to do 'transphobia is progressive' on a large scale. obviously there has been some 'liberal' publications trying to launder transphobia, especially more recently, but this has been usually just scaremongering about trans healthcare for youth rather than presenting their position as the true progressive one, and generally comes from a position of liberal faux-neutrality - wanting to find a culture war issue to concede to the right in order to be balanced. the only media figures to really take this up are smarmy centrist types (yglesias, chait, etc.) who already love punching left and urging 'compromise', and just blatant right-wingers who can manage to present as respectable to the nyt.

At this point this is almost exclusively on social media

mainstream media wouldn't see this is a story because her opinion is not controversial or upsetting to the bigots who have been controlling the narrative of gender issues in the past decade

it’ll eventually be reported as SINGER HOUNDED BY VILE SOCIAL MEDIA TROLLS

the ‘sing it back’ hitmaker has been SLAMMED by transgender activists online for expressing her views on controversial ‘puberty blocker’ treatments for teens

followed by a quote from some dickhead from the lgb alliance

Transphobia is also being weaponised against the Scottish government led by the SNP who is pro-trans, by the unionist parties UK branch (atm Scottish Labour still supports trans rights as do ScottishLiberal party. Its political opportunism mainly and its certainly creating moral panic in Scottish newspapers and especially the BBC. However there are anti-trans forces within the SNP waiting to take over.

I don't know who the person behind this account is but this is not leading me to expect an apology any time soon:

Roisin Murphy pic.twitter.com/vgpWEhZbfc

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) August 24, 2023

India Willoughby is a well known person in the UK

Transphobia is also being weaponised against the Scottish government led by the SNP who is pro-trans, by the unionist parties UK branch (atm Scottish Labour still supports trans rights as do ScottishLiberal party. Its political opportunism mainly and its certainly creating moral panic in Scottish newspapers and especially the BBC. However there are anti-trans forces within the SNP waiting to take over.

― Toshirō Nofune (The Seventh ILXorai)

my understanding (i'm in the us and tend to avoid reading the news if at all possible because self-care is important to me) is that sturgeon was actually forced out of office due to her support of trans rights? which is probably the most demoralizing news i've heard out of the uk in some time :(

Nah, although the usual suspects were using trans issues as a wedge to undermine her, she left because of an ongoing investigation into fraud with the SNP's finances, leading to her husband's arrest

Whilst I do appreciate that the appalling war against trans people is heading in some very dangerous directions and is a real and concrete threat to the health and lives many, Im not sure comparisons with a genocidal famine that killed or displaced 2.5-3 million people are appropriate in this context.

droid it's 4 in the morning, i'm not sleeping, again, and i'm trying to get myself back to sleep by talking about things, and i see you coming up here and saying that you don't think what trans people are going through is _really_ genocide. why? why do you think this is a good idea? trans people _are_ suffering from genocide, right now, i'm telling you this as fact, now. i didn't before, i merely drew a comparison, and that alone, that was apparently enough for you to take offense on behalf of the victims of the potato famine. what do you want me to do? do you want me to justify or explain to you trans genocide? is that my responsibility, to persuade and convince you that we are being displaced and killed, systematically, as a result of deliberate policy decisions?

if anybody's being "inappropriate" here, i'm not entirely sure it's me.

i'm going to go to try back to bed. not sure how successful i'll be.

(funnily enough i did write a 3,000 word essay on the topic of trans gendercide - and "gendercide" is not a word i made up, it's an established term in genocide studies - back in february. i think it's one of my better essays. droid, you can't read it, but if anybody else wants to, i'll be glad to send a copy.)

Im not asking you to explain anything, nor am I denying anything, nor did I mean to cause you any distress. Im just suggesting that there may be more appropriate comparisons to be made. BTW, we dont call it the 'potato famine'. It is simply the famine, or the great hunger, An Gorta Mór.

The Potato Famine was also catastrophic in the Scottish highlands which led to the displacement of thousands. It seems to be actually forgotten about in Scotland.

Im not asking you to explain anything, nor am I denying anything, nor did I mean to cause you any distress. Im just suggesting that there may be more appropriate comparisons to be made. BTW, we dont call it the 'potato famine'. It is simply the famine, or the great hunger, An Gorta Mór.

― droid

Fair enough. I apologize. I apologize for comparing the genocide my people are currently going through with the genocide your people historically were subjected to. The point wasn't to make a direct comparison in any case, it was to suggest a _larger pattern of behavior_, that British empire, by whatever name, is intrinsically linked to genocidal practices both historical and current.

those screenshots above aren't from india willoughby, they're from someone named Kabira (kabiraexplainsitall).