TWIBS: Gender-Fluid Dog Flummoxes Bigot
A lesbian woman in Cambridgeshire has own an arbitration between her and the county council because she was banned from her local LGBTQ group over… a gender-fluid dog? What?!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
We’re doing this? I mean, really? About a dachshund? I mean… it’s a dog, right?
Yeah, okay.
So according to a few different outlets (none of which are what I would call grade A sources, so take this whole story with a big pinch of salt), a lesbian social worker in the UK, Elizabeth Pitt, was paid £63,000—those are pounds, the regional currency of the British Isles, sometimes referred to as squids by the truly savvy—after she was banned from Cambridgeshire county council’s LGBTQ group for espousing gender critical views.
Her “gender critical views” were, from the sounds of it, very boring: She has a problem with trans women existing in women’s sports and women’s spaces, because of course she does, because they all do. It isn’t interesting or funny, and if it weren’t for one other fact, I wouldn’t even be reporting on this nonsense.
So the lynchpin of this whole thing, what makes it worth talking about, is what caused Pitt to go on her unhinged rant about trans people, which got her reported to the county council and subsequently banned from its LGBTQ group.
A gender-fluid dog.
No, really! I swear!
Listen, I’m not here to debate whether or not a dog (who almost certainly has absolutely no conception of the social import we place on gender as a concept) can be gender-fluid or not. That really doesn’t matter to me. If you want to they/them your dog, more power to you! The dog doesn’t speak English, either, so I can’t imagine it matters at all.
But to start a row, as our lovely friends across the pond would call it, to absolutely flip your lid and get yourself banned from an LGBTQ group because you’re espousing bigoted, anti-LGBTQ views… over a gender-fluid dachshund? What is the world coming to?!
Pitt and one of her colleagues were reported for, apparently, expressing these gender critical views in “a really aggressive tone,” so I don’t think this was a simple roll of the eyes and a snide remark. I wasn’t in the room, or even on the continent if you wanna get into specifics, but I can almost imagine the absolute meltdown this British boomer had about the idea of a dog using alternate pronouns.
I am thoroughly surprised she survived the encounter without having a coronary, but I guess she must have, since she went on to sue the county council. A tribunal who reviewed the case sided with her, probably because they were focusing on the gender-fluid dachshund of it all and not the blatant discriminatory remarks and hostile workplace Pitt fostered during the incident. They apparently awarded her “£30,000 in loss of earnings and £22,000 compensation for injury to feelings,” as well as forcing the council to pay “£8,000 in costs”... whatever that means.
The tribunal deemed that “at least part of the reason” for the council’s actions was about Pitt’s “gender critical beliefs,” and recommended that they amend their staff training to include a section on “freedom of belief and speech in the workplace.” I find that fascinating, since transphobic bigots aren’t actually a protected class of people!
I, for one, support the Cambridgeshire county council. It shouldn’t even be up for debate, whether or not transphobic weirdos are allowed to sit in on LGBTQ groups and talk shit about genderqueer dogs! Get some help, Elizabeth! You’ve got the money for it now!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
