Jeremy Clarkson has been criticised for making a series of highly controversial comments about trans people and the trans rights movement.
In a column for yesterday’s edition of The Sunday Times, Clarkson writes that he “did roll my eyes a bit” when the transgender rights movement “first began to surface a couple of years ago”.
“As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok,” Clarkson writes. “They were called ladyboys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag night anecdote.”
Later in the column, Clarkson says he was “horrified” to discover that some friends of friends had “indulged the whim” of their presumably transgender child, who was born with male genitalia but identifies as female.
“She had been born a boy but had insisted from the age of three that she had a girl’s name and wore girls’ clothes and, later, that she went to a girls’ school. And her parents had simply indulged this whim,” Clarkson writes.
“I was horrified. I wanted to seek them out and explain that they were free to live a lunatic life, washing their armpits with charcoal and liking Jeremy Corbyn’s thoughts on how ballistic nuclear submarines must be built by the comrades and then used as flower pots. But they must not, and I was going to emphasise this with spittle, be allowed to poison the mind of a child.”
After the column was published, it drew severe criticism from many commentators on Twitter and several prominent members of the LGBT community, including author Juno Dawson, Wayne Dhesi of LGBT rights charity Stonewall and writer/activist Paris Lees. Read their tweets below.
I'm angry about that Clarkson piece as much as I don't want to waste air on him. But he's the reason why I find the tube terrifying.
— Juno Dawson (@junodawson) January 24, 2016
The good news is that, like all dinosaurs, people like him will soon be extinct.
— Juno Dawson (@junodawson) January 24, 2016
My father bullied me for years, hitting me and criticising me to try and make me macho. Trans kids need love and acceptance @JeremyClarkson
— Paris Lees (@parislees) January 24, 2016
I seldom use this word, but saying anything that might encourage parents of transgender children not to support those children fully is evil
— Paris Lees (@parislees) January 24, 2016
Regarding Jeremy Clarkson's Times article about trans people… pic.twitter.com/8SeMEc7oDn
— WayneDavid81 (@WayneDavid81) January 24, 2016
Clarkson has yet to respond to the criticism.