Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Bad faith at work

    Here’s a simple question. What’s the purpose of anti-discrimination legislation?

    Is it (a) to protect vulnerable people from discrimination, for example in employment, education or health care? Or is it (b) to enable people to be howling arseholes to vulnerable people?

    If you answered (b), you may be a religious extremist.

    I’ll preface this with my usual disclaimer: #notallchristians. This isn’t about Christians. It’s about arseholes.

    An industrial tribunal has ruled against a disability assessor who wanted to be an arsehole to transgender people. The assessor refused to use trans people’s correct pronouns in defiance of DWP rules and the Equality Act and would rather lose their job than treat people with basic politeness.

    The man goes by the title and name of Dr David Mackereth, but as he believes you should be able to call people what you like based on your sincerely held beliefs, I believe that I should call him Mrs Janice McBigotface and give her female pronouns. I sincerely believe that I can be an arsehole too!

    Mrs McBigotface was represented by the Christian Legal Centre, whose business is based on representing some of the world’s worst people and losing in court. In the meantime, however, they get lots of headlines that distort the facts of the case and feed into a fictional narrative of Christianity under attack from political correctness gone mad.

    This was no exception: for example, newspapers talked of Mrs McBigotface’s refusal “to refer to ‘any 6 foot tall bearded man’ as ‘madam’” in her meetings with DWP supervisors; as the tribunal notes, that exciting quote wasn’t used in any meetings and didn’t appear in any documents or testimony until a year later, by which point the claimant was being coached by the CLC. That was a year after the first lot of press coverage, which clearly wasn’t hysterical enough.

    Was Janice “interrogated about her beliefs” as the coverage and her submission claimed? No. Was she asked to “renounce her beliefs”? No. Were there any discussions about six-foot bearded ladies? No. Was she even suspended for her behaviour? No: she stopped coming to work because she “felt too distracted” by the pressure of being asked to be polite to people: “in no sense could that be construed” as a suspension. The tribunal called the claimant “a poor witness whose perception of events was skewed”.

    The verdict, which is linked in the BBC story, is perfectly clear. The law protects you from discrimination; it does not enable you to be a complete prick to other people and escape the consequences.

    Mrs McBigotface refused to call people by their pronouns, which is a very basic courtesy, in an environment where people are already feeling scared and stressed. That refusal continued even when people had legally changed their sex to female on all official documentation, and McBigotface appears to have taken some satisfaction in talking about  how she was going to lose her job for it.

    The impression the tribunal’s notes gives is that Mrs McBigotface was a kind of DWP Ricky Gervais, deliberately misgendering trans people and then, when someone said “Janice, maybe you should stop being such a dick to people, you’ll end up losing your job”, saying “That’s what the PC woke police want, isn’t it? They want to martyr me! But I shall stand proud against the forces of evil and continue to be a total dick to trans people, just like Jesus probably was, or something!”

    According to Twitter, finding that it’s okay and legal to sack someone for breaking the law and being a prick to vulnerable people “is just like the Nazis”, “profoundly disturbing” and “a shameful case of religious persecution”.

    No it isn’t. It’s much simpler than that. People’s right to religious belief is subject to article 9.2 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

    Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

    The tribunal found that by refusing to treat trans people with respect and then demanding an unworkable and offensive triage system for trans clients, the claimant was infringing those rights and freedoms.

    It’s really very simple. If  you don’t want to be sacked for being a dick to people, don’t be a dick to people.

  • It’s easy to be nice when you have nothing to fear

    One of my friends wasn’t born in the UK. Despite having lived here for a very long time, paying lots of money in tax and marrying the love of her life, a lifelong UK citizen, she does not currently know whether she will be allowed to stay in the UK post-Brexit. As you can imagine, this is very frightening and stressful for her and her husband; despite being one of the kindest, nicest people around she occasionally gets pissed off with people on the internet who, against her express wishes, try to argue with her by sending her links to publications that scaremonger about migrants every day.

    For this, she is told that she needs to lighten up, give people a break and be more kind.

    As she points out, the publications in question are not kind to, and do not give a break to, people like her.

    What’s happening here is called tone policing. Tone policing is an ad hominem attack where you attack the emotion behind a message rather than the content of the message itself.

    The underlying and fallacious assumption behind tone policing is that there are equal sides to a topic and that all participants have equal skin in the game. But the reality is that there are often topics where there are not equal sides, and where the participants do not have equal skin in the game, and where anger is a perfectly understandable and legitimate response to the malicious horseshit that the other side is throwing around.

    Imagine you post a short message on your personal social media account to say that the person you love most in the world is seriously ill in hospital. Now imagine that I respond with a message or a series of messages containing links to publications that “prove” that their illness is either completely invented, the result of their own bad life choices or part of an international conspiracy. One of the articles demonises people like your loved one with a series of vicious slurs before concluding that they should be denied NHS treatment altogether.

    Would you (a) respond with kindness and wit, or (b) tell me to take a flying fuck at the moon?

    If you went for (b), I’d then respond: why are you being so aggressive? Why can’t you be nice to people? You need to lighten up!

    The reason you’d be angry, of course, is because I’m demanding you read inflammatory, incorrect bullshit about something that affects you but not me, and demanding you respond according to standards I’ve decided you have to conform to, whether you want to or not.

    That’s tone policing.

    Tone policing is particularly prevalent in discussions about people’s rights, where there are not necessarily equal sides where people have equal investment in the issue being discussed. You’ll often find that one side will not be affected at all by the issues under discussion while for the other, it’s a matter of life and death.

    For example, people arguing to restrict people’s rights, whether those rights are for gay people, women or EU nationals who’ve made their lives here, can usually stay perfectly calm if these issues don’t affect them in anything other than the most abstract sense.

    Some of those people are ignorant. And some are just terrible people. In the latter group you’ll find people tone policing minorities while getting apoplectic because a newsreader hasn’t been wearing a remembrance poppy since September, yelling themselves puce about pop singers’ pronouns, or vowing violence because Gregg’s sells pastry products to vegans.

    And more than anything, they get angry at the ungrateful bastards who have the temerity not just to say that things aren’t perfect in this, the best of all possible countries, but to use the word “fuck” when they say it.

    This is not a new concept. Martin Luther King wrote about it from Birmingham Jail, saying that people of colour shouldn’t just fear the Klan but also:

    the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”

    Battling injustice isn’t nice; it isn’t polite; it isn’t kind. As Dr King put it, injustice “can never be cured so long as it is covered up… injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

    Tone policing is an attempt to keep injustice covered up, which is why those with power or privilege deploy it so frequently.

    Tone policing protects the powerful, not the powerless; it reinforces privilege by refusing to listen to those who question it. It silences people: if they are not sufficiently angry, nobody listens; but the anger that finally gets them heard is then used to discount everything they say. They’re unreasonable, hysterical, a bitch, uppity, an activist, an angry X. Their views, their experiences, their lives are of no consequence.

    That’s not to say that anybody’s views should be presented without criticism or challenge. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

    I’m talking about people who have nothing to fear in their lives telling genuinely frightened people to lighten up.

    About people with extensive privilege telling marginalised groups to be kinder to their tormenters.

    About people who are more upset by someone calling a politician or columnist a cunt than the policies that kill people and wreck lives or the rhetoric that gets people beaten to a pulp in the street.

    If people’s righteous anger makes you uncomfortable, you should be grateful. Uncomfortable means unafraid: unafraid of being thrown out of the country you live in; unafraid of your hard-won human rights being sacrificed to satisfy extremists; unafraid for your safety, for your family or for your future.

    Rather than policing the expression of people who have every reason to be angry, try being grateful that you aren’t having to go through what they’re going through.

    And then listen to what they’re trying to tell you.

  • The Sunday Times plays dirty

    It’s Sunday, so of course The Sunday Times is running more hit pieces on trans women.

    What’s wrong with this picture?

    The clue’s in the caption. Verity Smith isn’t a trans woman. He’s a trans man, assigned female at birth and now transitioning to male.

    The juxtaposition of headline and photo are clearly deliberate and malicious: you’re expected to see the words “trans women” at the same time as you see the very male rugby player in the photo.

    And when the writer posted it on Twitter he tagged the anti-trans activist group Fair Play For Women (who he interviewed in the piece, enabling them once again to make unsubstantiated and unchallenged claims about “well funded and powerful trans lobby groups”) and the vocally anti-trans athlete Sharron Davies.

    It’s notable that the online version – the one people will share – is more inflammatory than the printed one, which doesn’t do the same malicious juxtaposition. Here’s the printed one:

     

    The article itself describes “bearded or heavily muscled” trans men, not trans women.

    Smith has endured a lot since coming out.  As he told CNN:

    “I’ve been escorted off the pitch, outed on the internet, assaulted and pinned down and had blood spat in my mouth and the police wouldn’t do anything about it. That’s been the lowest point for me, just being dragged off the pitch and not being able to walk out there with the rest of my team having not done anything wrong other than be myself.”

    Smith’s experience is what the anti-trans activists The Times loves so much would like all trans sports players to go through. First, he had to seek written permission from the sport’s governing body in order to be allowed to play at all. Second, he only plays in the team appropriate for the gender he was assigned at birth, not the gender he actually is. And thirdly, he has endured awful physical and verbal abuse on the pitch, around it and on the internet for which nobody has been held accountable.

    And that’s still not enough. He also has to see his image used in a blatant attempt to make people hate and fear trans women.

    And it works. The article – and the photo – is already being shared on social media by anti-trans bigots.

    I’m not scaremongering; I’m not a snowflake; I’m not paranoid. There is a demonstrable anti-LGBT+ agenda at The Times and The Sunday Times, and while most of their energy is currently directed at trans women they are already beginning to target the rest of the community. This was the Scots editor on Friday:

    The language here is telling. Can you believe that they’re teaching kids AS YOUNG AS THREE all about the gays?

    What are they being “taught about same-sex couples”?

    The first level, designed for preschool to P1, includes slides explaining that “some families have two dads”, and recommends books such as Mommy, Mama and Me, about lesbian parents, and King & King, in which a prince marries a man.

    Imagine if children discovered that someone in their class might have same-sex parents.

    We have been here before, of course. In the 1980s, the completely innocuous book Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin became the centre of a media-driven moral panic – a panic that would lead to the infamous Section 28, which banned the supposed “promotion” of homosexuality in schools.

    Back then, The Sunday Times – which was hardly a friend to gay people at the time – wrote in an editorial: “[Clause 28] is a throwback to a more intolerant age. It has no place in the new Britain.”

    In January 1988, it printed an op-ed by Simon Callow. He wrote:

    In recent years – so terribly recent – the work of erasing centuries of crude superstition and fear has begun, so that now everybody realises (what was always true anyway) that they know at least a couple of gay people, and that they are, after all, give or take the odd flourish, much like everyone else, sometimes nicer, sometimes nastier – that some children have gay parents, that some brothers have gay sisters, that some employees have gay bosses, that some priests are gay, some teachers, some criminals, some saints.

    Thirty years later and the same newspaper is pushing “crude superstition and fear”.

    Update, 1 October

    A correction has appeared on the digital edition:

  • Beyond a choke

    (Content warning: sexual violence)

    Sometimes magazines provide advice that’s genuinely dangerous. Here’s an example from Glamour UK:

    The screenshot comes courtesy of the group We Can’t Consent To This, which campaigns against the normalisation of sexual violence against women. Glamour is one of many fashion and health magazines (including men’s magazines) that have talked about choking as if it’s just another normal thing most people do in bed. It isn’t. It’s really dangerous and it kills women.

    To talk about choking as if it were the same as the use of fuzzy handcuffs is incredibly irresponsible. There is simply no way you can be sure that choking is safe. In addition to the obvious risk of suffocation there’s the risk of cardiac arrest, and there’s also the risk of very serious injury from a partner who doesn’t know what they’re doing, doesn’t know their own strength and/or who has been drinking or taking drugs.

    And that’s assuming that the act is consensual in the first place. All too often it isn’t.

    Many women have experienced one-night stands where suddenly they felt a hand around their neck without warning, let alone consent.

    Maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t think attempted murder is something we should be trying to normalise here.

    And it can be attempted murder. Women die from this.

    That’s why We Can’t Consent To This exists. It tells the stories of far too many women: women who were murdered, sometimes incredibly brutally, by men who later claimed that the deaths were simple accidents during “rough sex gone wrong”. If you can read their stories without crying you’ve got a harder heart than me.

    Here’s Anna Moore and Coco Khan writing in The Guardian.

    Strangulation – fatal and non-fatal – “squeezing”, “neck compression” or, as some call, it “breath-play” – is highly gendered. On average, one woman in the UK is strangled to death by her partner every two weeks, according to Women’s Aid. It is a frequent feature of non-fatal domestic assault, as well as rape and robbery where women are the victims. It is striking how seldom it is seen in crimes against men.

    Numerous studies have shown that non-fatal strangulation is one of the highest markers for future homicide

    The mainstreaming of a previously very niche practice is largely because of online pornography. Like other industries whose business models have been transformed by the internet, its producers have found they have to produce more extreme content in order to survive, let alone thrive. And that means the mainstreaming of dangerous and degrading practices such as choking.

    The Guardian again:

    [Porn director Erika Lust] points out that if sex education is inadequate, “young people will go to the internet for answers. Many people’s first exposure to sex is hardcore porn”. This, she says, teaches kids “that men should be rough and demanding, and that degradation is standard.”

    And both men’s and women’s magazines amplify it and tell them, hey! This is how everyone does it now!

    The inevitable and horrific consequence of that is that women die. Sometimes they die by accident, but more often they die because our culture tells them that they shouldn’t fear a man just because he tries to strangle them from time to time.

    Since 2009, the number of women killed in “rough sex games gone wrong” has increased by ninety percent. Two-thirds of those deaths involved strangulation.

    I don’t doubt there are some women who find choking intensely erotic. But there’s a reason such “play” has been a niche pursuit for as long as humans have been getting each other off: it’s incredibly dangerous, it’s often the sign that your partner is going to hurt you in other ways and no magazine should be attempting to persuade their readers that it’s akin to messing around with fluffy pink handcuffs.

    The handcuffs won’t kill you. A man who wants to choke you might.

  • You still can’t trust The Times

    In Today’s Scottish edition of The Times, the odious yahoos at For Women Scotland – a single-issue anti-trans pressure group – get a headline claiming that women’s services are being “starved by trans funding”.

    Is it true? Of course it isn’t.

    Here’s Jeffrey Ingold, head of media for Stonewall UK, on Twitter.

    1/ This anti-trans group has been ‘disqualified’ from government funding because they are actually trying to break the law. The 2010 Equality Act makes clear that trans people can access single-sex spaces aligned with their gender identity.

    2/ The group then claims that women’s organisations who aren’t trans-inclusive are being ‘deprived of government funds’, but there is no evidence or examples given of where this is happening (spoiler: because most of these services are trans-inclusive already).

    3/ So who is being ‘starved’ for funding as the headline suggest? Well, it has to be this group… which the article shows to be a single-issue lobbying group against GRA reform – meaning they don’t actually even provide any services for women/girls to qualify for funding anyway

    4/ Meaning this whole article is based on the bigotry of one anti-trans group to try and pressure the Scottish Government to stop supporting funding for services that help all vulnerable women, including trans women. Which… is their legal duty. Not that that’s mentioned…

    “Lobby group isn’t being given government money because it doesn’t qualify for government money” is hardly newsworthy. But if that group hates the trans, then The Times is all over it.

  • Bigots’ feelings are better than facts

    A few months ago, Irish TV channel RTE gave airtime to a notorious anti-trans bigot and bully in order to “balance” the insights of people who actually know what they’re talking about.

    The wonky-eyed washed-up yokel impersonator from a village currently missing an idiot was given multiple opportunities to spout ill-informed, often malicious nonsense; when a number of people complained that the human ham was allowed to make comments that were “inaccurate, harmful and displayed prejudice against transgender people,” the broadcasting regulator effectively said: Hey! That’s showbiz!

    More specifically, it said:

    it would be wrong to limit contributors to people with personal experience or expertise

    Imagine if we started having people with “expertise” on our current affairs programmes!

  • Hack comedians are not the heirs of Lenny Bruce

    Dave Chappelle, whose net worth is believed to be $42 million.

    (Content warning: extreme violence)

    Writing in The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu offers a recap of legendarily offensive comedian Lenny Bruce’s demise.

    Over the course of a six-month trial, critics, academics, psychiatrists, and even a minister spoke in Bruce’s defense—none more beseechingly than Bruce himself.

    “Don’t finish me off in show business,” he pleaded before his verdict was delivered. “Don’t lock up these six thousand words. That’s what you’re doing—taking away my words, locking them up.”

    None of it mattered. He was convicted and sentenced to four months of service in a workhouse. On August 3, 1966, Bruce, out on bond for the appeal of his case, was found dead of a morphine overdose. In his 1971 book Ready for the Defense, Bruce’s attorney Martin Garbus quoted a statement of remorse from Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, one of Bruce’s prosecutors. “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him,” he said. “We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

    To some modern comedians, this is exactly the same thing as criticising one of their jokes on Twitter.

    Nwanevu’s piece is a devastating demolition of so-called “cancel culture” in comedy, where comedians squeal censorship after making lame jokes about women and minorities. As he points out, the supposed cancelling of Dave Chappelle (anti-Asian and anti-trans jokes), Aziz Anzari (sexual misconduct) and others appears to have had little or no effect on their careers.

    Ansari, reputedly dead, in a professional sense, released a new Netflix special in July and returned to Forbes’ highest paid comedians list this year for the first time since 2015, having earned an estimated $13 million between this and last spring.

    Lenny Bruce he ain’t.

    As far as comedy is concerned, “cancel culture” seems to be the name mediocrities and legends on their way to mediocrity have given their own waning relevance. They’ve set about scolding us about scolds, whining about whiners, and complaining about complaints because they would rather cling to material that was never going to stay fresh and funny forever than adapt to changing audiences, a new set of critical concerns, and a culture that might soon leave them behind. In desperation, they’ve become the tiresome cowards they accuse their critics of being—and that comics like Bruce, who built the contemporary comedy world, never were.

    One of the minorities brave, marginalised warriors such as Dave Chappelle (net worth: $42m) likes to pick on is trans women; this week, a member of the US Cabinet cribbed from Chappelle’s act to justify stripping trans folks of their human rights .

    As Nwanevu notes:

    This isn’t to say, of course, that there aren’t real instances of intolerance and repression around for our putative chroniclers of cultural ostracism to take an interest in. In April, a 23-year-old Dallas woman named Muhlaysia Booker backed into a car in an apartment parking lot. The driver of the other car then held her at gunpoint to force her to pay damages. As the confrontation took place, a bystander was offered $200 to attack Booker. He obliged. In a video that subsequently went viral, a mob—a real one—can be seen joining in, punching and kicking her in the head and yelling slurs as she squirms and struggles on the ground. She was hospitalized with a concussion and facial fractures.

    Muhlaysia Booker isn’t going to be given a column in which she might describe her treatment to the public. She won’t be appearing on any panels or podcasts. She won’t be doing any standup sets. Muhlaysia Booker is dead. A month after the attack, her body was found face down in an East Dallas street with a gunshot wound. She was one of nineteen transgender people to have been murdered so far this year in a wave of violence the American Medical Association has called an epidemic.

    The cultural power the critics of cancel culture breezily ascribe to progressive identity politics did not save them.

    Last night in Dallas, a trans woman was shot repeatedly and is in serious condition after what police believe is a hate crime.

    Investigators say a man driving a pickup pulled alongside the woman late Friday, yelled slurs about her gender identity and fired several times, striking her in the chest and arm.

    I’m sure Dave Chappelle will find that “fucking hilarious”.

  • How to ensure your LGBT+ child hates you

    Right-wing shite-peddler The Federalist has printed a piece urging parents of trans and gender non-conforming kids to cut them off from the internet and their peers and beat them daily until they renounce transgenderism and its Satanic ways.

    I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. The latest in a string of similar pieces misrepresents research, makes unsubstantiated claims and advocates a course of action that we know to be incredibly damaging to children: conversion therapy.

    As author and commentator Brynn Tannehill points out, it won’t have the consequences the parents want. But it will have consequences.

    If you do this, and it doesn’t end up driving your kid to suicide, you kid will hate you for the rest of your fucking life.

    Tannehill has interviewed many trans people whose parents did exactly what The Federalist is advocating.

    Universally, they have zero desire to ever see their parents again after they were treated in exactly the manner described above. Turning 18 was like getting out of jail, and they have no intent of going back. They ghost their parents and disappear.

    That’s the best case scenario. Not all kids with unaccepting parents make it to 18.

    Conversion therapy causes lifelong harm, and transgender adults who were exposed to it are 4X more likely to have attempted suicide than those who weren’t, whether the therapy was professional or religious.

    There are Internet forums haunted by angry, bitter, lonely parents whose children severed contact with them as soon as they legally could. The parents rage and the parents mourn, and the parents tell each other that their children hate them because of social contagion, because of peer pressure, because of invented pseudoscientific bullshit such as “rapid onset gender dysphoria”.

    Occam’s razor offers a better explanation, an explanation that they are unwilling or unable to accept: they lost their children because they made it clear to them that they’d rather have a dead child than a trans one.

    I’ve written before that I have some sympathy for unaccepting parents of LGBT+ people:

    …to the point where I can understand the fury and denial that leads some of them to excommunicate their family members and even become anti-trans activists.

    But the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think that no, I don’t have sympathy for them after all. It’s one thing to find it difficult to understand or accept your child’s sexuality or their gender, or to worry that their lives will be harder because of it. It’s another thing altogether to be the one to make their life harder, to embark on a course of action that will traumatise them or perhaps even put them in an early grave.

    I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot recently, probably because I’ve spent a lot of the last fortnight in hospital rooms looking at my son with tubes going into various parts of him, the only soundtrack a mix of his breathing, the beeps of the monitors and the thoughts in my head.

    There’s a particular agony to seeing your child so vulnerable, to seeing your child in pain. All parents know that primal urge to protect, the urge to do absolutely anything to take that pain away, that unshakeable desire to make everything okay – so I understand why parents stay loyal to children who have done terrible, unspeakable things.

    What I don’t understand is parents who do terrible, unspeakable things to their children. And conversion therapy is one of those things.

    Tannehill:

    Let’s get down to the brass tacks: if you think its better to have a child who never sees you again than to have a transgender child, do what The Federalist says.

    If you would rather bury your kid in the clothes you pick out for them than accept their gender identity, by all fucking means do what The Federalist says.

  • Damned lies from statistics

    The National Catholic Register has published a terrifying article implying that there have been thousands of deaths from puberty blocking.

    Is it bullshit? Of course it is. Even if you didn’t know that the National Catholic Register is a right-wing religious rag that really hates trans people, the use of the phrase “transgender industry” in the copy is a pretty big clue that we’re not dealing with good faith here.

    The Implausible Girl has looked at the statistics. How many deaths of gender dysphoric people have been linked to the drugs over ten years?

    None.

    How many serious adverse reactions among gender dysphoric people over ten years?

    Two.

    How much bullshit is in the article?

    100%.

    They conveniently ‘forgot’ to mention that the drug is used for LOTS of conditions. It has been prescribed to tens of millions of people over decades.

    It is a very effective and safe drug that is on the WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines.

    …What they’ve done is, quite deliberately, is used rare adverse events from a drug given to many, many people for other conditions and implied that it was a deadly threat to trans children ‘because adverse events and deaths’.

    You could do the same thing with acetaminophen [paracetamol].

    The article has, of course, made its way to the anti-trans activists on Mumsnet with surprising speed, so it’s no doubt just a matter of time before it’s written about by Janice Turner in the Times, James Kirkup in the Spectator or the rest of the anti-trans mob. At which point it will become yet another piece of scaremongering bullshit that trans people will have to debunk again and again and again.

  • It’s called consequences, not cancel culture

    Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast reflects on the latest person to lose a high-profile job for having said terrible racist things, comedian Shane Gillis.

    If you’re not familiar with the story, a recap. It’s about:

    Saturday Night Live’s firing of comedian Shane Gillis, of whom videos surfaced showing him telling blithely racist jokes that caused controversy not even hours after he was announced as a new cast member on the sketch show. (That his jokes traded in boring, retrograde stereotypes of Asian Americans was all the more cringe-inducing given that SNL had just made history hiring its first-ever Asian cast member alongside Gillis, Bowen Yang.)

    Gillis’s jokes were outwardly racist. They weren’t jokes about racism, or satire about race, or illuminating truths about the marginalized. They were racist jokes, and quite bland ones at that. People were pissed. Then people became pissed that people were pissed. Censorship! McCarthyism! Worst of all: Cancel culture!

    As Fallon points out, it’s hardly cancel culture if the people who say the terrible things are almost always completely and utterly unaffected in any way.

    It would take too long to list all the recent controversies involving celebrities who said something alarming enough to detonate social media outrage: Scarlett Johansson defends Woody Allen, Dave Chappelle mocks Michael Jackson’s accusers, Lara Spencer shames male dancers, a Queer Eye host rails against his critics, some Real Housewives are caught being casually transphobic.

    Some of these celebrities apologized. Some didn’t. All were likely forced to consider the impact and the responsibility of their words, amid outcry and, in many cases, calls for them to lose their jobs. But none of them were fired.

    Many people are building their brands on pretending they’re saying the unsayable, and saying it again and again and again. But on occasion, very infrequently, a tiny proportion of those people discover that their employers don’t want to have, say, massive racists, homophobes or transphobes on staff.

    In the non-celeb world, employment contracts frequently have a clause where you can be fired for bringing your employer into disrepute. Clearly Saturday Night Live has something similar.

    A job on Saturday Night Live is not owed to anybody. It is arguably one of the highest profile gigs in comedy. Fans, audiences, and critics are right to expect some sort of responsibility or awareness, a certain standard, from those who are given that platform. They are right to be upset if it comes out that one of those benefactors has a history of espousing racist views. Gillis, in turn, had a right to respond to those who were angered. His response didn’t satisfy those critics, nor did it satisfy his employer. So he was fired. That is how jobs work.