Supreme Court verdict on gender ignites fiery on-air trans row: ‘Just accept the ruling!’
Broadcasters Mike Parry and Benjamin Butterworth have descended into a fresh trans row on GB News, following actor David Tennant’s latest swipe at controversial author JK Rowling.
Tennant, 54, made fresh remarks about the transgender community and the Harry Potter author during an appearance on ITV1’s new show The Assembly.
He expressed concern for the “demonisation” of the transgender community, comparing it to anti-gay policies of previous Governments.
Airing his views on Rowling, Tennant said: “JK Rowling is a wonderful author who’s created brilliant stories, and I wish her no ill will, but I hope that we can all, as a society, just let people be. Just get out of people’s way.”
Benjamin Butterworth and Mike Parry clashed on the Supreme Court’s ruling on women
GB News
Tennant explained that he bore ‘no ill will’ towards JK Rowling
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He told GB News: “What about the nurses who had to take action because they didn’t want biological men in the same changing room as them? That’s not letting people be, that’s intimidating biological women.
“When a man who has now been certified by the Supreme Court to be a biological man goes into the same changing room and tries to enjoy the same space, surely that’s not letting people be, that’s threatening and intimidating people, isn’t it?”
Responding to Parry, Butterworth criticised the generalisation of associating all trans people with the “rapists” and minority of them that are the “most obscene”.
He stated: “We don’t do that for other groups in society, so I think that’s a great point of frustration for the average person that happens to be transgender, that they’re tarred with the brush of a rapist among them.
Parry told Butterworth to ‘just accept the ruling’ of the Supreme Court
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“But I do think if you’re only defining things on biology, then you have a problem, because there aren’t only trans women, there are trans men. If they’ve had a transition, they will now have a penis, they will have had testosterone, they might have muscles, and they might have a beard. And they now have to go in women’s loos. I don’t think that’s what anyone wants.”
As Parry declared that the Supreme Court’s ruling was “absolutely clear”, Butterworth disagreed, warning that it could cause “more lawsuits” and more issues than before.
Parry fumed: “Instead of accepting the ruling, you throw up all the problems this is going to cause – it’s going to cause dozens of problems, the future is now going to be so uncertain – you couldn’t just accept the ruling.
“It’s a tiny percentage of people in this country who are transgender. And yet we have spent oodles of time, millions of hours, millions of days of debate on a situation which, fortunately was finally sorted by the Supreme Court and in my view, should have been done 30 years ago.”
