In events bizarre even for 2019, we’ve had what is possibly the first depiction of an anime character shown in the UK parliament and it was everybody’s favourite trans zombie Lily!
Unfortunately it was transphobe/terf defender Joanna Cherry who held up that poster of Lily, not as a rare example of anime getting a trans character right, but in an attempt to prove this particular picture was a death threat and the very word TERF was a slur on women. Which it isn’t of course, but you may ask yourself, well, how did we get there?
It all started with SonicFox, professional gamer, gay black furry and trans ally, tweeting a short video of him playing Mortal Kombat 11 and applying a fatality on Sonya Blade while shouting “die TERF”. Sonya Blade’s voice actor being one Ronda Rousey, ex-wrestler and still transphobe, not to mention a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. A nasty piece of shit in other words, with Sonic Fox letting off some steam there. He posted it to his Twitter and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for Helen Lewis.
Helen Lewis is one of the Grauniad/New Statesman stable of pet transphobes, also including Germaine Greer, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel. These are all career media “feminists”, largely left irrelevant as times moved on, who have found new relevance by becoming transphobes. In the process intentionally or accidentaly providing cover for American right wingers to expand to the UK. Lewis found Sonic Fox’ tweet, immediately did her “I want to speak to your manager” schtick and demanded he recanted. Which he didn’t of course. He just found this whole thing hilarious, a bunch of white, middle aged, English TERFs demanding he stop mocking them.
Which started the usual TERF brigading, where they rope in all their followers to mass report, mass harass somebody to get their account suspended or them fleeing from Twitter. They ultimately got their victory by getting Sonc Fox suspended for a couple of hours and forcing him to delete his tweet. In the process Lewis got the usual sort of meme responses from people annoyed by her transphobia, several of which featured this picture of Lily, holding a badly photoshopped in gun, saying “shut the fuck up TERF”. And it’s one of these tweets that Joanna Cherry cited in a Human Rights Committee Q&A session in the British parliament. And she lied about it. She said it said shut the fuck up, cunt when it really said, as is clearly visible in the video, “shut the fuck up, terf”. And terf is not a slur, not an insult.
So first she lied about terf being a slur, when it in fact was coined by trans exclusionary radical feminists as a neutral description of themselves, then she lied about the actual “slur” on the image. It’s not the only time she lies. She talks about Sonic Fox’s original video as if it’s actual violence against actual women instead of him playing a video game death scene. (Incidently, terfs on twitter are currently busy slandering him by claiming all instances in which he playing a male character in Mortal Kombat hitting a female character are examples of misogynistic violence…) She also pretends that the person supposedly targeted by Sonic Fox and others is some ordinary woman rather than the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Three lies found with just a cursory glance at the video.
So why is a member of parliament trying to gin up non-existing problems of non-violence against not actually women, but video game characters, but completely ignoring actually existing violence against actually existing women, against trans women? Is Cherry a transphobe herself or just an useful idiot?
At least the creator of the picture could laugh at all this.
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