“It’s censorship”
No it isn’t. No one is stopping Joanna Cherry from expressing her views. The Stand has the right to not host Joanna Cherry. The Stand has an obligation to put the interests of their staff before the interests of Joanna Cherry. If you take anything personal out of it, Joanna Cherry can find other venues and platforms to share her views. No one is repressing her views. She never shuts up about them on twitter.
I used to defend Joanna. She’s my local MP and a member of my local branch. She’s quite nice on an interpersonal basis, though I’ve only met her twice. She’s working class and from a similar background to me. I used to defend her from accusations of transphobia, but no one can now. Such is her negative obsession with trans people that she would rather have the British government intervene anti-democratically to kill bills made in our own elected parliament. If that had been any other bill, if that had been a bill regulating the size of toothbrushes, Joanna Cherry would’ve been roaring against it. But because the bill was about making life easier for trans people, suddenly she supports direct British rule. And, more than that, she does so hysterically – as opposed to saying she thinks the GRR is a misguided, in terms of how you balance it with women’s rights, attempt to make the life of trans people better, (a perfectly reasonable argument worth debating) she comes out with all this conspiracist transphobic shite about the SNP and secret trans lobbies and a ‘conversion therapy’ and a plot to turn Scotland into some kind of McSaudi where women’s rights don’t exist and where male rapists roam around women’s spaces by law. She even endorses far-right transphobes and Islamophobes like ‘Posie Parker’. If I owned a popular venue, I wouldn’t let it play host to anyone who is linked to violent fascist groups.
And this is the kicker. Even if you think her extremism adheres to some kind of genuine self-believed principle, it actually doesn’t. Cherry’s main gripe with the SNP leadership isn’t that they’re ‘pro-trans’, but that they rightfully abandoned her Lord and Saviour Alexander ‘The Great’ Salmond. That’s where it begins. The name of Joanna Cherry will not, as some fringe elements of the SNP and members of the so-called ‘Alba Party’ would have you believe, go down as one of the pioneers of an independent Scotland, but rather as one of its most squalid enemies. The Unionists, particularly those illiberal right-wingers of GB News and Talk TV, love her.
