Hopefully the last post on this for a while. Christine Burns has just published a podcast interview with Julie Bindel in which Ms. Bindel apologizes unreservedly for some of the things she has said about transgender people in the past. Yay! Progress!!! You can hear the whole thing here.

Christine is marvelously diplomatic, and there are places in the interview where I would have been tempted to press Bindel much more closely on what she was saying. Then again, it was clear that time was short. Hopefully there will be more such discussion in future. But it did strike me that Bindel is still very hung up on the idea that you have to be one thing or another. In particular at the beginning of the interview she says that she thinks that being lesbian must be either the result of something innate, or the result of socialization, it can’t be anything in between (and she apparently favors the socialization explanation). Well, you know, humans are a lot more complex than that. And the whole point of diversity (an issue that Christine covers very well) is that people should be free to do what is right for them, not just what is right for Julie Bindel. So sure, make people free from oppression and violence, but don’t tell them that they can only be free from oppression and violence by doing what you tell them to do.

Oh, and Julie, should you happen to read this, an article in The Guardian on transgender rights would be a really neat way of saying sorry. I’m sure that Christine will have plenty of suggestions for things you could write about.

Update: I see that the comment thread on Christine’s post has already exploded. Sometimes you can manage to cause so much offense that apologizing isn’t enough, especially as those you have offended may not believe you. Tough job, being a crusading journalist.