You couldn’t make this sort of thing up. Level after level of complete stupidity.
On one side, you have Katie Hopkins – anything she says or writes is usually complete bollocks, and with her unique way of putting it across, it is frequently even more bollocks than that. Back in 2015, she made a mistake (not a unique phenomenon for her) and got someone mixed up with someone else, made one of her trademark asinine and highly offensive comments to the innocent party, then followed it up with her trademark refusal to admit her error and apologise to that person once the error was noted. Indeed, even after the subsequent libel case went against her – leaving her with a legal bill likely to top £300,000 – she is still shit stirring.
On the other side, you have the person she offended – listed as a “food blogger” who goes by the name of “Jack Monroe”. Something that struck me in all the media stories this week was that it wasn’t possible to pin down whether Monroe was male or female. The name implies one thing, the photos are ambiguous (which is the only reason the question occurred to me in the first place), and none of the stories I read used the relevant personal pronouns. But I think I can now see why that was. That Huffington Post article starts off confusingly by using the possessive pronoun “their” to refer to Monroe in the singular. I initially assumed it was a typo or bad editing – something which is now standard in most media outlets – since “he” and “she” are singular, and the only grammatically correct asexual alternative is “it”. But it clarifies a few paragraphs later:
Monroe, who identifies outside the binary construct of gender and prefers the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ and title ‘Mx’…
I wonder how long it took to come up with that pile of crap? I mean, you could say quite simply “he or she is writing a blog article”. It would appear that “it is writing a blog article” is not acceptable for some reason. Monroe apparently expects it to be rendered “they is writing a blog article”. And what the f*** is wrong with “Ms” if you live your life on a high horse, free from any sort of reliance on a filthy, putrid male? How the hell is “Mx” any different, other than requiring a brand new construct?
Any sympathy I originally felt has wafted away on the winds, along with grammatical correctness, and I now consider the match to be a draw. Mind you, it does mean we get two nominees for the 2017 Darwin Awards instead of just one.