remember to breathe.

mithrildreams:

I was merely saying I was dissapointed an idol of mine would say something so insensitive and hurtful. I still like Stephen Fry. He’s still one of my favourite comedians.

He just needs to think more - which is an odd sentence to say about Stephen Fry. I truely believe in giving people the…

I agree with this - it was actually Mikey’s response to me that I was responding to. I reblogged a couple more discussion posts that I hope clear up what I meant :) sorry lovely for meaning your dash gets spammed!!!

mohandaskgandhi:

futuresushi:

genderbitch:

futuresushi:

ironicnegligence:

a-time-lord:

octopusboy:

a-time-lord:

unicornsareace:

genderbitch:

Hate to harsh your mellow but while y’all are sucking his dick for his comedic stylings, remember that he says nasty fucked shit about me and mine.

But Michael Palin is still good, right?

Right?

=| Well kudos to you and your “words”, Stephen Fry, but there went that bit of respect.

Okay, first off, I’m pretty sure Stephen was joking around. I absolutely love QI, and when you watch the show you should be aware that the things Stephen and the panel members say are usually meant in jest. He was trying to be funny, not trying to be a dick.

Second, how can you be so sure he was being an ass on purpose? It’s possible that he wasn’t joking around, but instead just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s a difference between being ignorant and being transphobic.

I guess so, but as I’m not extremely acquainted with him I tend to be wary with my praise. Everyone seems to lavish him with praise and call him a national treasure, and they don’t provide me with evidence to support it. Instead they mock my ignorance, not really helping my opinion.

I’m open to this being a joke, but it’s a pretty insensitive joke, especially considering it’s a sub-community he is not a part of.

Stephen Fry is definitely worthy of praise, if just for his battling the stigma of mental illness. I’m also pretty sure in the “ladyboy” part he meant androgynous males, not trans women.

I see that what he’s said is questionable at best. From what I know about him, however, I doubt that he meant it as jokes at trans women’s expense, especially since awareness of trans issues is still woefully minimal. No, this does not excuse Fry, but I think calling him a transmisogynistic dick is going too far — I suspect he had no idea that he might offend people and would have kept quiet otherwise. But then, that’s just my suspicion.

ugh ugh ugh why does it sound like I’m apologising for him

I’ll apologize for him

One statement on a program where saying ridiculous things gets you more points by a man who is more sarcasm and wit than man itself I can forgive him for making pretty much one questionable statement in a career of being amazing.

I wasn’t aware a program about ridiculous things magically negates the effects of bigotry. I’ll go let sociologists know that people calling shit a joke makes that shit do less damage.

They’ll be thrilled to know y’all know more about sociology than they do, apparently.

I’ll upgrade my statement from “questionable statement” to “horrible misstep” but honestly, if I let one bad thing someone’s done or one bad attitude someone’s had about something ruin my entire opinion of them I wouldn’t even be able to like Gandhi

The comedy program bit was just to outline that it was probably just a joke in poor taste and not outright insults which are, while both harmful, vastly different things. 

Everything that Matt said.  Well done.

People make mistakes, as do all of you.  To judge the entirety of Stephen Fry based upon one statement while negating everything else that he’s done is quite foolish.  We don’t need to live humorless lives.  Put what he said into perspective and move on.  It’s not worth anyone’s time to get this upset over every little thing each person says because you’re going to find yourself to be quite upset all the time. 

Stephen Fry has actually spent a great deal of his life fighting for transgendered people, in addition to nearly every LGBT member on the spectrum.  If you’re going to reduce someone’s personality to one comment they make, then there isn’t one person in the world that is good… but we know that’s absurd. 

I agree with most of this - unfortunately, much of human experience is subjective, so it’s quite difficult to tell the intent behind the words of a comedian I have not met, and probably will never meet. While I do think that he should have made some attempt to mitigate or apologise given the backlash and the fact that he is a very public figure (rather than chucking a bit of a wobbly and threatening to quit twitter over it) I can see how that might be a knee-jerk response born out of frustration that while the massive inroads he’s made into better respect/publicity/exposure for the LGB community, he might be forgiven a slightly ignorant (at best) statement about the T community, and a joke in horrible taste (at worst) but with presumably good intentions. I don’t think that one ‘evil’ act precludes you from appreciating any other act from that person, ever.

In actual fact, now that I’ve made the effort to read up on exactly what was said, I’m not entirely convinced it was evil, but rather a satire on the position of a transphobic cisgendered male*, with the main problem being that because there are too many transphobic cisgendered males out there the comments were taken as mainstream and not in the spirit of satire in which they were made… if that makes sense. I feel like I’m not explaining myself too well here; let me try again. I feel like the comments were meant to satirise a large portion of society, with the unfortunate consequence that a large portion of society didn’t get the joke and instead agreed with him, leading to an understandable backlash from the trans community.

I really hope that clears a few things up over my views on the subject. I am not advocating transphobia, but at the same time I do have a problem with the demonising of those who say something at one time in the past that is taken in a way that, while perhaps a natural response, is different to the response intended at the time the comment was made. 

Seriously, though, Stephen Fry, you should probably say something to clear all this up - make your own intentions clear so we know better what to think of you!

sadydoyle:

kiriamaya:

Full disclosure: I myself do not like Stephen Fry, because he has made awfully transphobic jokes. Since I know little about the man’s oeuvre (I’ve only seen a little bit of Fry and Laurie, pun absolutely intended), I realize that my opinion is not the most informed; nonetheless, I think my emotion here is valid because, “Dude thinks my life is worthy of mockery and thinks it’s funny to shore up the cissupremacist system that could very well kill me one day” is a perfectly valid reason to dislike somebody, IMO.

Having said that… I am agreeing so hard with you here, Sady. The straight men joke above was thoughtless and definitely informed by patriarchy and heterosexism, but I’m having trouble accepting the idea that this one thing (which is really more of a mistake than anything deliberate) makes the entire person Bad and Evil forever.

Yes yes, I know, “Intent doesn’t matter!” But actually? It kinda does. If you step on my toes, it will hurt whether you meant to or not, true. But if it was an accident, I’m not going to be all, “FUCK YOU I HATE YOU FOREVER” and then start a giant tumblrthread about how awful you are. At most, I’ll tell you to be a little more careful. (Of course, if this toe-stepping is part of a larger pattern of you hurting me, that’ll change things. But you get what I’m saying.)

But like, I’ve seen this pattern many times before. Recently it was with Lady Gaga — people correctly pointed out that something she did was transphobic, and a bunch of people who’d never heard of her before were like “GOD WHAT A HORRIBLE PERSON” and there was no nuance at all. Which is not to say that transphobia is ever okay, of course; it’s just… there’s more to her than that, you know? A lot more. And some of us trans folks (me, for instance) are actually pretty conflicted in our feelings about her, and I think that emotion is valid too. It just bugs the hell out of me when complex human beings are reduced solely to one Evil thing they did once, and that then is used to define them for the rest of their existence (or until the Internet decides not to care anymore, whichever comes first).

I like youuuuuuuuu.

Today is a very special day, because it is the day I have time to be on Tumblr and debate things like this. And I have to say: The Hate Snowball, it’s hard. You can start it without meaning to. I’ve done it. You do have to get to the I Am Not Responsible For Other People’s Reactions place, at least by the time somebody makes a graphic with a cunning pun on your name because they disagree with you. But you also have to be aware that anything you say will be read as the simplest, least nuanced version of what you actually said. Because it’s on the Internet, because everyone’s on their lunch break, because it’s way more interesting to read “here’s the way I personally see this, which is not all good” as “I hate this and you should too,” because a lot of reasons. It’s why everything I write is 9,000 words long, because if it’s any shorter, if it’s at all casual or thrown-out there and if I don’t pause to anticipate every possible objection and record every possible hesitation, I’m just going to be your fun stupid-angry-feminist meme of the day, or you’re going to say some stupid shit that you think is in agreement with me and I will think of it as my fault somehow. I know this to be true. So you write something about Sylvia Plath, and someone in the comment section says that Ted Hughes intentionally killed her, and you don’t do enough to stop it. So you write something about the Taylor Swift Brand, and somebody in the comments starts slut-shaming. You can go back and look at what you wrote and see how you helped them to do that, but how long do you have to sit there and feel bad about it before you have to put another thought out there? How much of your time is well-spent when you set out to clarify yourself to every single fucking person in the world? Is it going to stop anyone from giggling about how stupid feminist interpretations of shit are if they’ve decided that’s what they want to do? Does it prevent you from being anyone’s imaginary best friend? Are you going to that party tonight? No. No, you are not.

I mean, I think we should all be prepared for the fact that anything we say will be exaggerated until it reaches its simplest possible interpretation, by which point it won’t be what you said any more. The only answer is to try to say it better next time, and know you can’t be everyone’s friend and some of the people who WANT to be your friend will scare you. But it seems like there ought to be a better way to be angry and to think and to put what you thought for eight hours on Wednesday night out there without starting the Crusades.

Reblogging for a more eloquent discussion of my feelings on Stephen Fry’s perceived transmysoginistic views after statements made using the politically incorrect term “ladyboys” on QI.