Women get treated far worse than men in Labour’s transgender debate

‘Retweets are not endorsements.’ It’s possibly the most futile disclaimer of our times. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the hate-pit that is Twitter knows that sharing something renders you wholly responsible, not just for its contents, but for all the actions and opinions of its author, and the responses that people have to it.

If you were, for instance, to retweet a link to a column this week by The Spectator’s Rod Liddle because you thought he made an interesting observation about, say, the BBC, you are of course endorsing something tasteless that he might have written in the Sunday Times last month or something horrible he did in real life a year ago. And you share responsibility for the upset those things have caused. That is how ‘conversation’ works on Twitter, isn’t it? Never mind logic or nuance or judgement, just be angry about stuff.

And if general run-of-the-mill Twitter is angry and stupid, gender-identity Twitter is angry and stupid on steroids.