Ricky Gervais can be a bit “Marmite” – love him or loathe him – but there can be no arguing with the fact he is one of our highest-level official court-jesters. Capturing this here for two maybe three reasons:
“I love the new women, you know the new ones we’ve been seeing lately… the ones with beards and cocks”
🤣🤣🤣@rickygervais pic.twitter.com/oEkCqPeldP— #KPSSistandwithJKRowling 🦖 (@bloominanna) May 24, 2022
Firstly, the whole “TERF War” has been an exemplary / archetypal issue for my agenda in the madness of “binary” woke – “freedom fetish” – identity politics disfiguring all hope of civilised discourse and understanding on any number of complex topics facing our times.
Secondly, when it comes to constructive discourse, the roles of both respect and rhetorical humour are so misunderstood. We can’t all be comedians if we really respect the discourse – but we really do need our court-jesters out there too – to say what can’t be said in constructive discourse.
And finally Ricky himself. With someone so creative on so many topics and with the entertainment community divided on this, he could probably just as easily have written his latest material from the TRA perspective – but he has chosen to make them the butt of their own absurdities. Good call Ricky. I hope his peers are watching.
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[PS – Ricky getting lots of attention on Twitter for this. So far much applause from the LGB & Feminist voices – “namaste” all round – not much shit-hitting-the-fan getting through from the TRA side yet … here we go:
Ricky Gervais: SuperNature deals in cheap jokes and humiliating trans people – review ⭐⭐ https://t.co/EdJciZlWrF
— The Independent (@Independent) May 24, 2022
Thread … it’s not “Trans people” being humiliated, it’s the ludicrous misogynistic / anti-LGB / TRA / Stonewall / cis-trans / TWAW movement.]
[Post Note: And now a couple of days (and dozens of articles and zillions of social media posts) later the “debate” continues. I’m not going to provide a running commentary, unless David Baddiel pipes up. All the James Acaster / Nish Kumar takes are so … such naive and ill-informed intellectual dwarves. Ho hum. Full marks to @NaturalPhilosopher for trying to educate those philosophers who really should know better.]