On Tuesday of last week, left-wing British columnist Suzanne Moore wrote an article in the New Statesman that has sparked debate about transphobia in the feminist press, inspired an uprising of Twitter anger and hate mail, and eventually led Moore to delete her Twitter account entirely.

While the original article was about the hardships faced by women during the economic recession, the part that inspired such anger was a remark about women being expected to have the body of “a Brazilian transsexual.”

Supporters of trans rights were quick to Tweet their discomfort at this phrase, and Jane Carnall at lgbt.co.uk (while describing the original column as “mostly great”), pointed out that Moore’s words were poorly chosen in the light of the high murder statistics for trans people in Brazil. Rather than posting a retraction, Moore doubled down, answering flippantly and finally tweeting, “People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.”

In response to criticism that her Tweets were transphobic, Moore’s column in The Guardian the next day tried to bring the discussion round to… [READ MORE]

Trigger-warning for offensive language in the Julie Burchill article mentioned in the above post. It’s so depressing when high-profile “feminists” turn out to have opinions such as these.