A member of parliament, Jamie Wallis, has come out as the first known trans MP.
Jamie Wallis, who was elected in 2019, is the first MP to come out as trans.
The Conservative MP for Bridgend said a man sent pictures to his family and demanded £50,000 in 2020. He said he was raped in a separate incident.
Mr Wallis wrote that after he was raped “things have taken a tumble. I am not ok.”
The MP confirmed that he fled the scene of a car crash two months after he was raped.
A car crash? Wait, what does this have to do with anything?
Mr Wallis was arrested last year on suspicion of driving while unfit, following an incident where a car hit a lamppost at Church Road in Llanblethian, Vale of Glamorgan.
“When I crashed my car on the 28th November I fled the scene. I did so because I was terrified,” he wrote.
The MP said he suffered with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and “I honestly have no idea what I was doing except I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of fear”.
I think this person has problems that have nothing to do with his trans status. Wallis has been a fringe pseudoscientist for a long time, as I pointed out a few years ago. Their only “scientific” publications are with Chandra Wickramasinghe, on panspermia, and are best summarized as uninformed, credulous kookiness. Unfortunately, this means that the Gender Criticals are going to elevate Wallis as representative of trans Bad Science. It’s already happening. I got cited by a homophobe in a long thread on Twitter that is trying to discredit opposition to conversion therapy by pointing out all the other stupid things Wallis believes.
4./ Hilariously, this critique was amplified at the time by heroic "trans allies" including @pzmyers a science blogger wedded to gender identity baloney. He honed in on the identity of Jamie's thesis supervisor NC Wickramasinghe. Who *he* you might ask?https://t.co/WHmn9JNIC9
— Malcolm Clark (@TwisterFilm) April 11, 2022
This is a tactic the GCs love: find the rare trans rapist, the weird trans pseudoscientist, the trans activist arrested for jaywalking or whatever, and make them the face of the movement so they can slander the whole group as kooky jaywalking rapists. Never mind all the legitimate, credible biologists who can tell you that sex and gender are more complex than you can imagine, or the law-abiding, thoughtful trans folk who just want to be left alone — it’s all guilt by association. Jamie Wallis is going to be elevated as the face of trans science now, despite the fact that they were recognized as a very silly person for years before they came out, and was never regarded as a particularly credible authority on science at all.
It’s funny how Fred Hoyle was definitely far loonier than Wallis, yet we don’t trot out his cis-het status as evidence that there’s something wrong with all of the normies. Why, it’s almost as if wisdom was totally orthogonal to gender preference!
I’ve never heard of this person before, but rape should never be taken lightly. Especially rape of someone who is from a marginalized community. That said, my take away is that some people from oppressed minorities can also be wackaloons. See Katlin Jenner. I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find a trans person who voted for Trump twice.
Fear of being raped again in jail.
You would think that Wallis’s party’s appalling history with and similarly appalling contemporary attitudes towards all things LGBT would make Wallis reconsider belonging to such a group.
It seems Wallis was happy to flee the scene of a literal car crash, but the metaphorical one the Tories have made of everything over the last decade hasn’t quite registered yet.
Johnson was apparently making transphobic comments to peers within hours of praising Wallis’s bravery. And Johnson is now very concerned about trans people in sport.
Ray Ceeya @1
Spelling correction: it’s Caitlyn Jenner.
What she says and does makes her look bad enough, you don’t need to mangle her name.
It recently came out that Johnson was planning to break a manifesto pledge to ban conversion therapy. He then backpedaled after backlash, they’re now going to ban conversion therapy but only for sexual orientation, not gender identity.
Certain elements of the media (including the Guardian) have criticised Keir Starter and Nicola Sturgeon for taking reasonable stances on trans issues and Johnson clearly sees an opportunity.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-lgbt-trans-conversion-therapy-b2051960.html%3famp
@2 – apologies, its gaol, not jail.
I’m sure the media interest in Jamie Wallis will be transitory.
I’ll get my coat.
Fred Hoyle did eventually go largely crazy, but before that he was a real scientist. In fact, he probably deserved a Nobel prize. He originated the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars, which is a profoundly important component of our understanding of the universe. Also, the steady state theory when he developed it was consistent with what was known at the time, and it’s important for scientific ideas to be challenged. Where he went bananas was when he started trying to think about biology. Since he was cheated out of the Nobel, I’ll put him in the Nobel disease category.
Bruce Jenner / Caitlyn Jenner is probably the most famous trans person. So obviously all trans persons win Olympic medals. Hit GCs in the head with this factoid and when they object about the generalisation you turn the argument back in them.
.
Yup, early Hoyle was a clever bloke.
If I recall correctly, Hoyle also named the big bang theory. Not the sitcom, the actual theory. He intended it to be disparaging but it caught on. :-)
He says he didn’t mean it to be disparaging, but in the interview he does come off as contemptuous of the theory.
Not the first. New Zealand, as usual, is a land of firsts.
We had the first transgender MP – Georgina Beyer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgina_Beyer
That was 1999. So last millennium!
Silentbob @ 11
In Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic, we learn that the life cycle of the giant turtle that holds up Discworld is the subject of two theories. One, the turtle has always been like this, moving in a “Steady Gait”, or two, it will meet up with other turtles for a “Big Bang” of frenzied mating.
cervantes@9–
(Very OT — feel free to skip)
Plenty of crackpot scientists did good work in their careers. Or if you prefer, plenty of great scientists also held crackpot ideas.
Hoyle’s work on nucleosynthesis was definitely up there with other Nobel-level work. We know this because his co-author won the Nobel for it. But I’ve never thought that he was “cheated” out of the prize. It’s certainly possible Hoyle felt that way — he was notoriously egotistical — but the Nobel has always been open to the vicariousness common to awards. I think “cheated” would only apply if his work had been plagiarised by a winner, or there had been some underhand conspiracy to prevent Hoyle from getting votes.
I’d be interested to learn if there was such a conspiracy against Hoyle. I can certainly believe that by the time the Nobel committee felt nucleosynthesis was worth the prize in 1983, Hoyle had fallen way out of favour in the astrophysics community and that this may well have adversely (and unfairly) influenced the nomination and voting process. I still wouldn’t call it “cheated”.
There are plenty of examples of scientists who deserved to win but were mysteriously excluded by the committee even when their work was central to a winning discovery. Sometimes that has been recognised by the winners themselves. And yes, Hoyle is one of these (Fowler thought it strange that Hoyle had not shared his prize), but he’s far from the only one. See also Robert Gallo, Gabor Somorjai, and several more.
Of course, none of that is quite as embarrassing as Fermi’s win for work on synthesising transuranics that turned out to be flat wrong. The committee jumped the gun. The consolation is that Fermi could have won the Nobel for several other papers so even if the award was for the wrong work, it wasn’t a poor choice of recipient (e.g. Kissinger, Peace; Moniz, Medicine).