On Poor Jokes, Guilt by Association, and Human Rights

There have been many shameful moments in the Sandie Peggie tribunal, not least hearing from the doctors and nurses who cheerfully queued up to trash their professional reputations and shake public fath in the NHS by spewing the most bonkers, ideological anti-science garbage since the last Scientology symposium on psychology. But towards the end of the Tribunal, the horse-whispering Countess Russell, KC for the defendants, decided to play her last, reckless card. Call it the Nicola Sturgeon theory: all women who refuse to undress for strange men only do so because they are morally-shrivelled, thick, untutored, poor, common folk with unsavoury views that my Lord and Lady might laugh at over canapes on warm summer evenings in the leafier suburbs of North London. Of course, Russell runs the arguments according to her client’s brief, but surely she must have been aware of the optics? Moreover, was this really the tactic approved by NHS Fife? An admission that they were happy to wink at racism right up to the point that a cosseted, middle-class doctor’s feelings were hurt by a recognition of his all-too-obvious sex?

So, to the elephant in the room. Yes, those “jokes” were horrible. They were racist and they were really not funny. They are also, sadly, not as uncommon as many would like you to think. Poor taste gags in the aftermath of tragedy perhaps no  longer land in the in-boxes of the executive class, but in the early days of email, it sometimes seemed that was all it was used for. If you really want to see examples of the genre, you can find many nastier efforts on Sickipedia (if you look, don’t blame me). If Sandie Peggie were an “edgy” comedian as opposed to a working class nurse, would the standards be different? In the years before he realised that trans activism gave him a socially approved way to punch down on women, Frankie Boyle made a living out of twisted and cruel “funnies” about the disabled. And don’t get me started on the hordes of professional comedians who think rape is a laughing matter.

Trans comedians are not exempt – much as they might think normal rules don’t apply. Jen Ives, a terminally unfunny blowhard, and pal Yiannis Cove decided to accuse his audience of “hate crime” because they failed to chuckle at his witty sallies about JK Rowling being the devil. Apparently, the audience had caught terf cooties from Elaine Miller who was also doing a gig in the building (and is actually funny). Interestingly while Ives and Jordan Gray – another trans performer who waved his willy on live TV and was gifted a sitcom – rely on mocking real women for their material, the “transphobic” Miller doesn’t mention trans people in her routines which centre on women’s experience. Guess whose set the so-called “progressives” condemn?

Yet, does it follow that the teller or the person who chuckles at these efforts would actually act on a racist, ableist, or sexist impulse? Well, sometimes, yes. Boyle might not have spent his time knocking crutches out from under people at the spinal injuries clinic but he did, famously, get challenged on his hurtful routine by the mother of a child with Down’s syndrome and there were plenty of people online who thought that Boyle gave them licence to act out in a similarly unpleasant manner. Darker still are the allegations against Russell Brand, whose quips about his own sexual incontinence may have been the perfect double-bluff: as the 2023 Sunday Times investigation and C4 documentary revealed, his routine about enjoying “them blowjobs where mascara runs a little bit”, echoed one of the allegations against him.

It might be a stretch to blame Ives or Gray for the horrific, abusive banners which are now mandatory at Pride marches and include targeted abuse and incitement. But wishing death on real, named individuals is something that Ives indulged in on his Twitter feed. Ives has never been cancelled by the comedy circuit for “jokes” which are simply an expression of violent rage, including his graphic imagining of the death of comedy writer Graham Linehan.

So, had Sandie Peggie been accused of racism towards a colleague or patient, or an attack on the local mosque, maybe these posts could have been evidence. But she wasn’t and they weren’t. The only justification seems to be that because she shared off-colour jokes once in a chat group she must be an irredeemable bigot on all fronts. But how does that sit with the frequent racism and homophobia expressed by trans activists? Only this weekend, Helen Webberley, the disgraced doctor at the helm of puberty-blocking clinic Gender GP, made a clumsy attack on Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch for the crime of having Nigerian ancestry. No doubt Webberley thought she was cleverly satirising women’s rights activists, but she just came across as a crass racist. Then there is India Willoughby, the trans poster boy who  wanted to tackle immigration by putting a “nice spikey barbed wire fence somewhere on the channel”. Similarly, the crude sexism of the hypersexualised, aggressive, frequently misogynistic form of drag which has gone mainstream, fuelled by US imports like Ru Paul’s Drag Race, too often relies on degrading and attacking women. As Dr Em has said, sexism in a dress is still sexism.

Guilt by association is a tired game, much beloved of people who cannot touch your actual arguments so seek to tie you to ideas and people with which you might not otherwise agree. I don’t think for one moment that everyone who believes in self ID wishes harm on “terfs” or think that lesbians should “get over” their sexual preferences (even if a disturbing number of them do espouse this view). I also believe, wet liberal that I am, that if human rights are to mean anything they have to be universal. One of the most important tenets, as set out in CEDAW, is that women face oppression on the basis of their sex. It doesn’t matter if you share racist jokes, or if you laughed at Frankie Boyle’s horrible gags after the mass shooting in Cumbria, it doesn’t matter if you are the reincarnation of Diana Mosely or don’t like Spanish food, you are still entitled to basic dignity, privacy and safety. Women’s rights, like any rights, are about ideas, not individuals; principles, not personalities. Sandie Peggie’s right to single sex changing facilities is not dependent on her wider world-view, the opinions of her husband, or whether a woman she went on holiday with for seven years likes her or not. It is based on the law.

This is where many trans activists come unstuck. If they were honest, they should apply the same principles to “Isla” Bryson as they do to “Beth” Upton. Both are men who claim to be women based solely on unquantifiable feelings. If doctor Theo has a “right” to change his name to Beth and undress with female staff, then rapist Adam has a “right” to be Isla and be housed in a female prison. Otherwise, someone will have to draw up a list of which crimes mean you forfeit a “right” to self ID, just as they will have to determine which poor-taste jokes mean you are no longer allowed single sex spaces. For people who make such a fuss about “policing” toilets and “checking genitals” you would think they might be more alert to a system which would be dependent on checking thinking, hidden motivation or past malfeasance. Writing in the Herald, Rebecca Don Kennedy of Equality Network mused that some people will be feeling “misguided” and their support of Peggie might now be “hanging by a thread”. But that only works if Equality Network believes that rights are exclusively reserved for “nice” people or those who share your politics or sense of humour.

Recently, another, less high profile case was in the news. Again, it featured allegations of “misgendering” and “hate” directed to a trans identified man. Yet, unlike Upton, the plight of “Alexandrina Stewart” failed to capture the trans twitterati, although women from Scottish networks did turn up to support the woman he accused of this heinous crime. Perhaps the trans ally reticence was because this drama was set not in a hospital, but a prison and featured not doctors and nurses, but murderers.

Stewart, whose real name is Alan Baker, was convicted in 2013 for the “wicked and brutal” murder of a father of two, knifing him at least 16 times. He has served his time in the women’s estate, forming relationships with another trans-identified man and, latterly, with notorious child murderer,  Nyomi Fee. Fee and Stewart accused fellow inmate, Jayney Sutherley, of a four year campaign of abuse which, they claimed made Stewart “suicidal”. Like Upton, Stewart adopted the persona of a helpless shrinking victim, devastated by women’s words – in this case, alleged “misgendering” and a claim that she once suggested Stewart sing “man, I feel like a woman” for Karaoke night. But for the trial, which was deferred several times, Sutherley would have been eligible for parole and, by the time she was cleared by the judge, was weeks away from serving her full sentence. It was another example of how the process becomes the punishment. The court also heard how Fee and Stewart engaged in sexual activity in the showers and communal spaces of the prison to the discomfort of the women around them. 

Sutherley, of course, is no Mary Sue. She was convicted of culpable homicide after stabbing a man in the heart with hairdressing scissors. Does it follow that the women who turned up at court or helped with aspects of her case are all cavalier about getting a bit stabby? That would, of course, be Don Kennedy’s logic: we can only back a person if we believe them beyond reproach and a shining moral exemplar or if, in our black hearts, we approve their actions, be they ever so terrible. Don Kennedy could not write an extended scold about the humanity of Stewart and the wickedness of Sutherley because in the philosophy of the purity spiral she is enmeshed in, it would be impossible to support Stewart and Fee without wholeheartedly embracing brutal murder – including of a two year old.

In this respect, the head of the Equality Network is no different from those who pop up on social media in the aftermath of cases like that of Liam Fee to demand the return of hanging or berate the lawyers who ran the defence. Some people are too wicked to merit due process in law, just as some people are too unreconstructed to deserve basic human rights. Don Kennedy has judged Sandie on her private posts and found her wanting, but our law, our rights, cannot be dependent on what other people think of your social media history, how you vote, or where you go on holiday. I don’t know if Sandie Peggie regrets sending those messages or if she stands by them and I do not care. I care that a woman was put in an intolerable situation, that her rights were violated, and that powerful individuals in her place of work conspired to punish her for it. Those rights are not a reward for good behaviour and if they become conditional, then none of us can ever, truly, be free.