She takes pics of people's lunches on the train and tweets about how much what they are eating irks her.

She's done this multiple times, for years.

She's permanently angry, obviously.

And they think that shit won't get knocked down in Europe?

No wonder the same bigots making these proposals are desperate for Britain to leave the European Convention of Human Rights, because they all know their shit won't fly once they leave the biased courts on "Terf Island." (Their words.)

And the best the EHRC can offer them in "advice" is to try to judge people (and, let's be honest, we're talking about women here) by how they look, and if you decide a butch lesbian is actually a man, no document she produces should allow her to prove otherwise.

And then they have to deal with people stupidly suggesting they just provide "third spaces," as if

1) Businesses are going to pay the billions it would require to retrofit their premises.
2) Any trans or GNC people who they try to force to use these new spaces won't just sue them anyway.

She defends this by saying that children's bodies are changing are therefore it's okay to notice and describe this.

I doubt if a male teacher wrote about how he was noticing the changing breasts of his female students that the book would have got past the editor.

Blocked him, he was trolling, obviously.

Yes. Stop trolling. Bye.

All of this is so easily avoided, and what we have here is a failure of imagination, a writer plucking old horrible tropes to "colour" her writing, as she claims, and then trying to bully Goodreads into removing a review that rightly criticised her for this.

Clanchy is defending this as "colourful" writing, when really another C word is far more accurate:

Colonial.

Middle and upper class white writers should be sensitive to the barbaric past of white writers describing black and brown people, don't you think?

I think there's a long, racist history of white people describing minority people through foodstuff. For example "chocolate skin" is one that can be easily avoided. One critic in the podcast points out how hurtful such descriptions used by a person in responsibility can be.

What's also becoming very, very clear now is that there was virtually no way for people of colour to criticise this book without the estbalishment rounding on them.

The semantics that critics are playing are ridiculous.

"She didn't say "slanty" she said "slanting" or "slanted."

WTF.

At one point she reads a passage from the book in the podcast, about a young student getting in a fight with another one, and this passage is put to one of her critics and he, rightly, calls it "wild" that she would think writing like that about the incident would be okay.

I don't think any teacher should be referring to the slant of people's eyes, in any way, given the history of racism that entails, and they certainly shouldn't be referring to the "Cypriot bossoms" of young female students. Did you listen to the podcast?

There's a large bang of "We are right-on white saviours for you people, how dare you criticise us, know your place" about the whole shameful affair.

Not sure you need a 6 or 7 part podcast to ascertain that.

The endless handwringing about it is tedious.

There is no mystery here.

Social media gave a voice to people of colour to criticise white people's descriptions of them in literature, and the establishment tried to bully the critics into silence, and make them sorry for speaking up, so they can continue to write what they damn well like.

I also had to laugh when the first episode does try to spin a victim narrative in parts, and is entirely given to Clanchy, and then the second episode, which is supposed to give voice to her critics, ALSO gives a large swathe of time in the episode to Clanchy to make a defence for her writing.

It shows that the criticial Goodreads review had gone largely unnoticed, that many couldn't stomach the book privately, but didn't feel able to speak up (how right they were), until Clanchy poured petrol on the review, set it alight for everyone to see, and then blamed everyone else for the fire.

The semantic lengths Clancy goes to to try to justify her writing are ridiculous. All her FOI request to get communications about her from her former employer reveal is that they bumbled their response terribly, and some people at the company didn't like her. (Who can say why?)