Silly girl, Julie

(Hideously, I am indebted to the Telegraph for republishing Julie Burchill's diatribe in the Observer last week as I did not see it at the time, and it was withdrawn from the online edition. The fact that they did so only confirms my low opinion of this publication.)

It's so easy to do: you lose your temper about something bad happening to, or being said about, someone you care about (a relative, a friend ...maybe someone you don't even know, maybe a group or category of people who deserve better) and use your voice, your position, your fists even, to hit back. And allow your anger to cloud your judgement so you say completely the wrong things.

It's why a reactive email or text should always be left in draft until you've cooled down and read it again the next day.

It's partly why I loathe getting into arguments over topics I care about and when I do, it is invariably because I've lost my temper and am certain to blurt out something utterly inappropriate and offensive.

Far better to bottle up the anger and then lie awake fantasising extreme violence against the perpetrators of the insult/injury/injustice.

So Julie Burchill's friend (Suzanne Moore) had been victimised by a group of transgender campaigners she had offended after the, admittedly inappropriate, use of "Brazilian transsexual" as an example of what women are expected to look like. Rather than specifically attack those responsible for this bad behaviour, Burchill used her position as an Observer columnist to attack "the trans lobby" in terms which were extremely offensive to all people with what is known to the medical establishment as disorders of gender development or disorders of sex development.

Not only that, but she did so from what seems to be a position of utter ignorance about DGD/DSD.

Now I'm sure people with DGD have plenty of issues with the media and with public ignorance, but vilifying a journalist who makes a mistake is not going to help one little bit. Especially when it prods the UK's right-wing press into weighing in against them.

It was left to Deborah Orr to put some calm reason into the furore.

(And I don't think it does anyone any favours to refer to a "trans community". With the exception of a small group of activists I doubt if anyone with a DGD feels they are any more part of a community than I feel part of a ginger-haired community. "Community" implies shared living, locale, history and/or culture, not some accident of nature.)