Normal

How can we find delight, in not being “normal”?

“Normal” means something like usual, or common, but it’s related to “norm”, which means rule or value. If you are normal, you fit in. On facebook I saw a “quiz”, purportedly to test gender, personality, lifestyle and politics, and did it, even as I thought, why am I telling the data thieves? I was pleased to come out more female than male, though in the middle, but thought it might be because I said I was interested in makeup but not gadgets.

Why should that be female? It’s descriptive, rather than prescriptive- they asked women and men, and women were more interested in clothes and makeup. It follows the culture. People are moulded like this. How natural it is depends on how malleable people are, and I think people are malleable. And some people do not fit at all.

“Normal” or “Abnormal” in this test refer to personality. Do you have disordered personality traits? According to the page, some “abnormal” means you share traits with people who are “crazy” or have a personality disorder, but are not necessarily one of them. To me, the concept of a personality disorder makes sense. It is a disability, making it harder to function, but again that depends on how rigid society is, and in what ways. Or a personality disorder is a response to trauma, or a sane response to an insane situation. A man told me “I grew up in a plague zone, and caught the plague”. Societies can be disordered, as in Nazis “just obeying orders”, that is, fitting in or being normal.

One said “disorders” should be called “conditions”- as if “disorder” is a moral judgment. That moral judgment could mean that such people are bad, to be condemned, or afflicted, to be pitied.

I did not like the way Male, Normal, Traditional and Right-wing were all on the left side, as if they were the positive qualities. They’re also in the address bar for your result, so that being Left-wing or Progressive is a low score. To me, what they call “Traditional” lifestyle, shown by for example denying the possibility of gender fluidity, is a personality disorder, causing friction with worthwhile and valuable people. I want to stretch the concept of “normal” to include gender fluidity.

One said some trans or autistic people wanted classed as disordered or disabled in order to benefit from medical insurance or disability discrimination law.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph had a scare story. “Lesbians facing ‘extinction’ as transgenderism becomes pervasive”. It had no information, just quoting the rantings of LGB All Liars. They said there were 24 trans kids but no gays or lesbians in one school. If they were all taking hormones, that might be a worry, but in a year 161 children under 16, out of 12 million children in Britain, were referred for puberty blockers. The rest of these trans kids are using different words and ideas to explore their identity. It is extremely hard to get medical treatment.

I don’t know if anywhere there are a couple, both AFAB nonbinary, who refuse the terms lesbian or bi, but if there were it would be a change of language not of reality, or even of acceptance. Same sex attracted women may feel social pressure to act “normal”, and even marry men, or deny their attractions. You build up a self-image of a normal, acceptable person and are terribly conflicted when your unconscious desires lead you to explore. Then your self-image breaks down. I hope it gets easier to find our tribes and accept ourselves, and to accept other people’s difference.

There is delight in finding ourselves and being ourselves. First we are rejected by some, and that hurts and frightens and leads us to anticipate more rejection, but we find acceptance from others. Delight comes in recognising the value of the acceptance, and stopping caring so much about the rejection.

The Telegraph article is behind a paywall, so I got the text from Ovarit, a “feminist” forum set up to hate on trans people.

The Adoration of the Kings

Art to delight the eyes.

Andrea Mantegna, c1460, Venice.

Stanisław Durink, c1480, Poland. The head and the body of the kneeling king appear naturalistic to me, but I don’t think he has quite got the way the head should sit on the neck right, or the roof supports. I love the faces, though. The kneeling man on the left seems more real than the others. Perhaps it is a portrait, of someone paying to be shown as a Wise Man seeing Christ, who looks out to catch our eye.

The Master of the Virgin among Virgins. This is a “Notname”, where the artist of several pictures is known by one of them. They were craftsmen, not honoured by remembering their names. Delft, 1490. It is customary to paint the building as a ruin, as Christ will make all things new, and the old world passes away.

The Master of the Antwerp Adoration, which is a different adoration to this one from c1510.

The Master of Hoogstraeten, early 16th century. Mists make the mountains in the distance blue, though the change in colour seems too sudden, to me.

Francesco Bassano the Younger, Venice, c1568. They seem tired, at the end of a hard journey:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

Raphael, 1502, when he was 19.

Manifesting joy

My essence is joy, and my calling is to manifest joy in the world, and communicate it.

That was my revelation at a Zoom group, where we share deeply. I am on four such groups, and it is the great blessing of 2020 for me. On Tuesday 22d, the question was, “What is your testimony?” “Let your life speak,” say British Quakers. What value or purpose has my life? My work, at the moment, is self-discovery, and I talked of phoning seven Samaritans. I took twenty minutes, saying things I could not have said last year, and my voice did not shake. When God is with us, I say things which surprise me, and I ended saying something like, “God’s leading for me is to bring more joy into the world &… I’m working on it”. It touched a Friend’s heart, and she wanted to know exactly what I had said.

On Wednesday, I felt and communicated darkness. There was the long drawn out teasing around whether there would be an EU-UK trade agreement. There were chaotic queues of lorries in Kent, with the ports barred because of the new, more infectious Covid variant, and the supermarkets were airfreighting fresh veg. There was Liz Truss’s scheme to inflame prejudice against trans people. Possibly I was most affected by the darkness of the day, with constant rain. At Pendle Hill worship I asked prayers for England under these threats, and expressed my misery.

I shared there, and was consoled that it is not personal, but it feels personal. Truss incites attacks on trans people, and the Tory damage from Brexit and their incompetent response to covid may affect me personally. A woman who worships there sent me a Christmas present of cash, saying “We wanted you to know that you are loved”. That warmed me.

Manifesting joy does not mean suppressing uncomfortable feelings. I think it means accepting the hard feelings, processing and digesting them, and the news at the start of this week was hard to stomach. I am doing my best against the causes of my fear, and still have reason to fear. Dealing with the uncomfortable feelings is something about unflinching truthfulness, facing the darkness and death, always acknowledging the light and life. The full range of blessing and horror in the world, and the breadth of my reactions to it, are hard to hold all at once. I am working on it. I will die, and always there will be light and love, and when all is gone it will be beautiful because it will have been. Dante went through Hell to get to Heaven.

“Underneath it all, you are a joyful, playful child.” That compliment speaks to me, raises deep echoes in me. There is joy and playfulness at the heart of my nature, and I want it to shine through, because it will bless others. It is my vocation. The work, now, is unpicking my history and internal conflicts. More and more the truth of my joy will shine, and the darkness will not overcome it. I said communicating joy was my vocation, on Jamie’s Lovely Gathering, and someone said “You definitely did that!”

One thinks of a vocation as the basis of a career, and I do not see how that could be, now. So where this “vocation” might lead me is unclear. Yet I am certain of it, and I will work on it. I think of the infectious giggles of the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu, and see joy can be spiritual. With Quakers on Sunday 27th I repeated to myself, “My calling is to manifest and communicate joy,” and it felt like acceptance and recognition, solidifying as I worshipped.

Merry Christmas to you

However you are spending Christmas, alone or with others, catching covid, getting drunk, may you be blessed by the coming of Christ.

Eugene Delacroix, the education of the Virgin

Elizabeth Siddal, Madonna and child

Alice Havers, But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart

Bouguereau, the song of the angels

Albert Aublet, the child sleeping in the desert

Marianne Stokes, angels entertaining the holy child

Amol Rajan

A transphobe was arrested at a protest while causing a disturbance. He goes out in a sandwich board reading “I ❤️ JK Rowling” on one side, “gender ideology does not belong in schools” on the other, and he gets into confrontations. “My pulse is often elevated way beyond what it should be” because of the stress of these encounters, he says. I read this and thought, “I hope he gets a heart attack”.

I am not proud of this. The man crowdfunds billboards against trans rights, which get far more attention on twitter. He is an insurance broker from British Columbia. In a sane world, he would not hate or campaign against me, and I would not hate him because I would never have heard of him.

Six months since JK Rowling’s hateful screed against trans rights, it continues to reverberate. I would rather not be reminded, but there’s this long article in The Cut, on how Rowling’s life and personality have led her to transphobia. Rowling is controlling over her wizarding world, and a transphobe Kathleen Stock is a proponent of “extreme intentionalism”. In contrast to Deconstruction, Stock argues a text is “a set of instructions to imagine certain things”. I disagree, but it might appeal to a controlling author.

I would have ignored Amol Rajan’s blog post mentioning Rowling had it not been for the DW article. I poked around the DW site. Is it some crackpot hard right site funded by US billionaires, like Spiked or The Critic? No, it is Deutsche Welle [wave], “Germany’s international media organisation”, “an unbiased media organisation… conveying Germany as a liberal democracy”. It takes interest in Free Speech, and for once means real free speech issues like journalists getting arrested, rather than some claimed right to spew transphobic hate free from criticism. So why did it have an error in its headline, and another in its lede? It wasn’t a BBC award, but a jeu d’esprit of BBC media editor Amol Rajan.

What was the “award”? Rajan writes a blog post once a year naming a few essays he really liked. He admits the heading [Bertrand] Russell award is just something he made up, as if I were to award a George Eliot prize to Laverne Cox (except I wouldn’t, as I am terribly jealous of the recognition for trans writers). He claims not to take a view on the issues raised, but says Rowling was brave because of the disapproval she faced. But he likes plain language, even plain language spreading hate, like Enoch Powell’s most infamous speech.

DW writes throughout that it is “The BBC” giving this “award”. Pink News covered the story, but few others did, and I would not have but for Deutsche Welle and some wailing and gnashing of teeth in trans facebook, first over Rajan’s blogpost then over DW’s report.

Had he other form on trans? Some trans people, disabled people, BAME people objected to “Little Britain”, and when Netflix removed it Rajan went on BBC news to discuss the issue. I could not find what he said, something about “nuance”, but viewers liked it, said the Metro. Rajan condemned “offence archaeology”, which is trawling through ten year old tweets to find something that might offend, then using it to discredit the now-famous twitterer. The hard Right objects loudly to this as “cancel culture”, but Breitbart uses it against journalists- sneakily quoting anything that might be read as offending Left wingers: see this Atlantic article under the subheading War on the Press.

Also on Trans facebook: the Law Commission consultation. “We provisionally propose that the offences of stirring up hatred be extended to cover hatred on the grounds of transgender identity and disability. Do consultees agree?” Oh God, no. There would instantly be all the haters, self-publicists and provocateurs crawling out of the woodwork, saying hateful things and blogging them, daring the CPS to prosecute them.

Where trans teens are refused access to the right toilets for their gender, they are more likely to be sexually assaulted. That puts Rowling’s “fears” in context.

And- it is not personal. Up until 1900 anything you actually heard was personal. In 1896, the New York Times circulation was less than 9000, when the population of New York city was 3.4m. There was no media for most people beyond talking face to face. There were telephones, but most people wouldn’t have one. Now I can comment on any news I see, then note how many Likes and replies I get. People identify personally with their political party so that an insult to it is an insult to them, their personhood. This is not healthy.

Amol Rajan liking JK Rowling might affect the general view of trans rights in the UK by an infinitesimal amount, but a lot of people’s heart rates might be elevated. It’s not personal. It grabs my attention in a way that is not good for me.

Science and politics

What can science tell us about Covid? What should politicians decide, and what else should influence them? How are politicians helping, and how making the situation worse?

When the first casualties were dying of a new kind of pneumonia in Wuhan, science had a body of settled knowledge which would help humanity through the pandemic. This included knowledge about the immune, circulatory and respiratory systems, an understanding of what a virus was, how epidemiology could track an illness, how studies could give evidence of the effectiveness of treatments, how to assess evidence, and how to create and test vaccines, including a new kind of vaccine first used on covid. There was engineering knowledge of how to build ventilators and PPE, and medical knowledge of how to treat patients. There was behavioural science on how people might respond to the disease and to rules to combat it, and economic theory on how to mitigate the economic effects. By contrast the virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic was not discovered until the 1930s.

Scientists then began amassing useful knowledge about the pandemic. The virus’ genome was sequenced, and mutations have been sequenced since. Precise mutations can help show whence the virus is spreading. Studies showed how long viral DNA might last on particular surfaces, but also that infection via surfaces was rare, unlike with rhinoviruses. Infection was more likely through virions in aerosols or droplets exhaled. Tests were developed to test for current infection, or for past infection by testing for antibodies.

Common symptoms were found early: a fever, and a continual cough. Less common symptoms were documented later. Knowledge of how covid can affect people is growing.

Apps could show where people had been and when they might have had contact with an infectious person. There were the phones to run those apps, and the skills to write them.

Whether we should attempt to achieve herd immunity through mass infection is a moral issue. It is not acceptable to infect so many as would be necessary, when 1% of those infected die.

The rest is politics. Whether schools should be closed to restrict the spread of the virus is a matter of weighing different interests against each other. What businesses should close, and which remain open, is a political decision.

In London in December, people could go to the gym or the pub. That seems too risky to me, with people panting for breath, or talking loudly, and so spreading the virus, but it is a political decision to allow dangerous businesses to remain open, rather than compensating them for ordering them to shut, or forcing them to bear that loss. The pubs are shut, now.

It was a political decision whether people could meet in the open air. At one point, people could not meet their parents in their gardens, though it was outside and infection was unlikely.

Left wing politics is best for counteracting a pandemic. We need common action for the common good. It is unconscionable for the extremely rich to make money from such a natural disaster. People who lose wages should be supported, up to a certain level. Left wing politicians are better able to see how people will act for the common good: left wing politicians imposed a requirement to wear masks earlier, knowing that people would comply, for their own good and the good of the whole community.

The hard right Nationalist government in Britain was too selfish to govern well. When Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown rules, the Prime Minister should have sacked him, in order to preserve respect for the rules. They also had a craven desire for popularity, so promised we could celebrate Christmas together from about July, and kept making that increasingly dangerous promise until Saturday 19th December. As a result our borders are closed, and supermarkets are showing shortages in some goods, even before their catastrophic Brexit would have achieved the same result on 1 January. Their ideological desire that all testing should be done by private companies rather than public employees, and their corrupt enrichment of their chums, made the situation worse.

The sociopathic President Trump was only capable of seeing his own short-term interests, and Paul Krugman suggests he delayed action hoping the stock exchange index would reach the magic figure of 30,000, improving his re-election chances. His suggestions of injecting bleach may have been to get attention. Republicans used the pandemic to stoke a culture war, on the new Republican doctrine that doing anything which is not entirely selfish is Socialism, and Un-American. Their science denial, developed for so long, on Creationism, acid rain, the ozone hole, and the climate catastrophe, continued on Covid. The result is 300,000 deaths. This is the result of politics. Science can only achieve so much.

Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi

The Wise Men pay homage to the King of Peace.

Why are there four of them? Four richly dressed men, one hurriedly covering his nakedness but wearing his crown. I love the tassel on Balthazar’s sleeve, and the embroidery. His page looks at the naked man, not the Baby. Here’s Mary, calm and regal.

Above them, there is the star, and a far city with a windmill and fantastic towers.

The side panels have some lovely details: the people in the fields have no idea of the rich gifts, or they’d be over for a gawp. A man in a woman’s headdress tries to dry nappies before a fire. The smell of smoke might mask the smell of Jesus-poo. St Peter escorts a donor, portrayed in piety, identified by his coat of arms and motto “One for all”. How strange, to buy your way into Heaven!

The fleur de lys identifies a female donor and her same-named saint Agnes. A wolf menaces a woman, and a bear engulfs a man. At least the sheep is peaceful. I wonder what those long spoons are for.

When the triptych is closed, the faded outside shows Christ crucified, and a devil taking Judas’ soul to Hell.

Here is the whole.

Can tweeting be a crime?

As a trans woman, you may be a public figure without realising it.

Kate Scottow was found guilty of a criminal offence for defaming Stephanie Hayden on Twitter, but won her appeal. The prosecutor and Scottow agreed that Hayden was a “public figure”, simply because she tweets her opinions. The judge said “such a person has ‘inevitably and knowingly laid themselves open to close scrutiny of their every word and deed’, and others can expect them to be more robust and tolerant accordingly” of comment or abuse. The comments of a public figure about court action are matters of public interest, and people may weigh in to a public conversation about it.

So I am probably a public figure because of this blog. You may be, if you have a twitter account, or have ever posted a tiktok video.

There are various possible offences if you tweet nastily.

Sending indecent, threatening or false tweets with the intention of causing distress or anxiety to the recipient is an offence.

Harassment is an offence, but just causing alarm or distress is not enough: it must be “oppressive and unacceptable”. This does not depend on the victim’s feelings, but the judge’s supposed objectivity.

Persistently tweeting for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another is an offence. The judge said, surely Parliament did not mean mere annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety. This is so bizarre that I have to quote the exact words used.

The Communications Act 2003 s 127(2)(c) says “A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—… (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.”

But the judge said, “It is clear, in my judgment, that these provisions were not intended by Parliament to criminalise forms of expression, the content of which is no worse than annoying or inconvenient in nature, or such as to cause anxiety for which there is no need.” He says they have to be persistent, and for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety, para 29, and later in para 32 he says they must have no other purpose.

All these are subject to the right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas. States can restrict that right if it is necessary to do so for particular purposes including protecting the rights of others.

So it is always a balance.

The Magistrate’s court found Scottow guilty of persistently tweeting for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety, but they faced an additional hurdle, a six months’ time limit. There were tweets less than six months before, and tweets more than six months before which could only be considered if they were a single course of action.

The police and the district judge thought the tweets were bad enough to be criminal. The appellant judge disagreed.

The judgment quotes the offensive tweets. There is misgendering: “he is a very sick individual I’ve evidence of that”. I don’t like Scottow calling Ms Hayden “sick”, but that was more than six months before, so not relevant. Also more than six months before, “I have many leads on the claimant”, which is threatening. Hayden got an injunction against Scottow, and Scottow used a new Twitter account to abuse the injunction.

The judge says the older tweets are defamatory or insulting.

It may be possible for abusive tweets to be criminal. Violent threats may be. Prosecutors may not think them serious enough to take action.

If you tweet, and someone tweets nastily at you, block them. After the appeal judgment, the courts may just not get involved. This is the judgment.

Liz Truss

Liz Truss spoke about Equality, and attacked Trans rights.

“In Britain, you can be whoever you want to be. Dress however you want to dress.” Of course this is not true. At work, some men are expected to wear ties, and some women skirts. But worse, it is an attack on trans people. It’s not just about the clothes. The clothes are the way I express my nature. It’s not just that I could wear a man’s suit and a tie, but choose to wear skirts. It’s that I find presenting male unbearable- weeping, curled in the foetal position unbearable.

And no, trans women can’t wear what we like. Presenting male, we might go under the radar, though it is living a lie in a way that makes the rest of life a drifting dull ache. Expressing ourselves female, we are exposed to hate and prejudice which Liz Truss and her government have encouraged.

It is a clear trans reference. Why else would she tell a falsehood about clothes?

Liz Truss says she will reject identity politics, and “move well beyond the narrow focus of protected characteristics” because those “end up excluding other people”, and are used to define people rather than our “individual character”. People often don’t see my “individual character”. They see only my gender reassignment, and treat me worse because of it. Sometimes they think they are considering my character, but they judge me more harshly because I am trans. (If someone with Cotard’s syndrome can rationalise away evidence that they are alive, anyone can rationalise away evidence that they are prejudiced.) That’s why we need protected as a characteristic, because we suffer direct discrimination. It’s also why we need statistics gathered about our employment rates, because we are less likely to be employed, and that is a sign of discrimination against us.

She names some protected characteristics- “sex, race and gender reassignment”. Why those three? Half the population are female, and 14% are BAME. A different but overlapping 14% are immigrants. 22% are disabled. By contrast only about 50,000 people are protected by the gender reassignment rules, 0.1%. She is using the rule of three, which is a good way of inspiring passion but also a way of conveying bathos. She uses “gender reassignment” not as a climax, but intending it to sound a dull thud, making the protected characteristics even less inspiring- because she finds gender reassignment unpleasant, and imagines other people do so too.

She will consider “socio-economic status and geographic inequality”, and “white working-class children”. This is pernicious. It divides the working class, and encourages the white majority to be racist, seeing themselves as particularly done down. The problems of BAME and immigrant people often come from being working class, because they are disproportionately so. We need class solidarity, not division by race.

The data project she offers is a good thing. It will “look at issues around geography, community and socio-economic background”. If the government actually addressed regional disparities, with infrastructure spending in the North of England, that would help. Her government is arguably exacerbating geographic inequality, spending £44bn on another rail link between London and Birmingham. Public spending is no problem to them, as long as the money is wasted.

She promises more Academies, run by private companies rather than supported by local authorities. This results in worse education. Always she puts the Tory privatisation ideology above the good of the country.

She has some warm words: “It is outrageous in the 21st century that LGBT people still face harassment in public spaces”. She promises no action against that.

The most threateningly transphobic line is not on the government website, which excises “political content”, because it is an attack on the Labour Party. It is also an attack on trans people: “It has led to the Left turning a blind eye to practices that undermine equality, whether it be failing to defend single-sex spaces, hard fought for by generations of women, enabling and tolerating antisemitism, or the appalling grooming of young girls in towns like Rotherham.” Antisemitism, sexual abuse, and trans women in women’s spaces are linked together here, equally appalling.

She describes protected characteristics as “misguided, wrong-headed and ultimately destructive ideas that take agency away from people”. She will do less to advance the equality of protected groups, and especially trans people. Her other attacks on trans rights frighten me. The speech is here.

Since then, I have been debating the speech on a public facebook group- not a trans or “gender-critical” group, but a general interest one, where trans folk and phobes may attempt to convince the public. One person raised Truss’s Foucault with a Baudrillard, which I thought a good bet. I said Foucault was right, and found myself in a debate with six women, which started when one claimed only transphobe MPs were “sticking up for women’s and children’s rights”. I asked them repeatedly whether they found any of the speech objectionable- its racism, its opposition to any method to ameliorate inequality- and they did not say, as if its one use of the term “single-sex” had hypnotised them. For them, it appears there is only one important political issue, eclipsing even Brexit and Covid.

Jane Garvey

“Person says something in someone else’s interview!” It’s a bit third-division that, the kind of thing a website does that does not have proper journalists (like this one). Here is the once mighty Times, allegedly a newspaper, doing a report about an interview on Radio 4. The actual interview is here. The trans stuff starts about ten minutes in.

The Times headline is pure clickbait. “Jane Garvey exits Woman’s Hour with plea on trans debate.” What plea?

I have interviewed more trans women than trans men on WH so that tells you something. Other people maybe need to think a little bit about that. I have also been called anti-trans and anti-women, I’ve been called too feminist, I’ve been called not feminist enough. It is genuinely a very very difficult area, we are never going to please everybody listening when we talk about it I also have to say from a purely practical perspective is this the issue that vexes our audience more than any other. Do they think of it as the most controversial or the most important thing we could be talking about? No, I honestly don’t think they do.

Make of that what you will. Especially given that the BBC requires a phobe to stick their nose in whenever trans folk are interviewed, for alleged “balance”, it seems she finds phobes boring, and the controversy they raise dull. The current head of Ofcom finds that “balance” “extremely inappropriate“. Though Paul Dacre might want only phobes.

The interviews Jane Garvey is most proud of are of ordinary people, “sharing in their real lives and challenges”. She feels she connects with listeners, and is blessed by the “adulation” she receives for what she calls “showing off”. She thinks Woman’s Hour should do more features on women’s caring responsibilities, for without the carers “Britain would just buckle”.

I don’t know what she thinks interviewing more trans women tells you. It could tell you that trans women are women and WH interviews more women than men. It could tell you that she thinks WH should pay more attention to trans men, because she thinks they are women. It could just be that there are more trans women than trans men so suggestions of women being made infertile are overblown. But here’s a suggestion that Jane Garvey thinks it is because trans women have male privilege.

The Times’ propaganda is clear. Trans was not the most important thing in the interview, and Jane Garvey wanted less concentration on trans issues, and perhaps particularly less anti-trans propaganda. The Times built this up into a story, because for them “trans person runs a red light” is a story.

Jane Garvey has said much the same before: the Daily Mail had a headline in December 2018, “Listeners complain that we do too much on the trans debate, says Woman’s Hour’s Jane Garvey”. In July 2018 she interviewed the mother of a trans man: starts at 27.20. She said that she has no choice who she interviews, but she is not hostile.

Jane Garvey is not an obsessive phobe. I don’t think there’s much indication that she is an ally, but I don’t think she will become a full time anti-trans campaigner. That’s a mercy, I suppose.