IIn 2006, I ran a website called "Why It's Delicious." I used to stay in touch with fans and talk about projects and share silly videos. I had it when the first series of The IT crowd It came out, and I had the brilliant idea of creating a post for each show so I could answer questions about it as it came out.
Trans rights activists were discussing ways to harass me
That idea worked like a charm until the sudden arrival of a bunch of guys from the Cook'd and Bomb'd website. This was a Chris Morris fan site populated by extremely angry young people. They immediately flooded the page with accusations of plagiarism, complaints about any other joke, and they spoke with such a tone of mocking superiority that I finally had to abandon the idea.
In 2021, a feminist friend wrote to me and told me about a website where trans rights activists discussed ways to harass me. He told me about the different forums dedicated to him and I asked him what his name was.
You guessed it. Cooked up and bombed.
"They are not trans activists," I told him. "They are Chris Morris fans."
She continued: “I skimmed this forum and saw some really disgusting things. There has been massive activity for many years. In recent posts, there are many other things, but the main thing that stands out is that forum members are collaborating on:
- Planning to raise money for various UK trans charities to screw him up.
- Take screenshots of comments on previously private sub-platform posts that you recently made public.
- Identify sock beads that they think are you.
- Contact people who believe they may take legal action against you (or Substack subscribers who have commented) because of Substack content.
- Get control of your domain names and / or sites to redirect URLs or sabotage the sites and poison any torrent you can configure ... "
Here are some examples from the site.
Interestingly, they got very nervous when they saw me chatting with Chris Morris after meeting him for lunch in London.
In case you believe that this type of harassment and surveillance is against the rules of the site, this is one of the administrators.
Here they discuss trying to poison the stream containing folders of evidence that the men identified as trans are using women's spaces to please his fetish.
Alan Driscoll - who you will remember as the comedian who thinks we should forgive the Lostprophets singer for child abuse, but not Helen Staniland, who wants to keep those men out of women's spaces, and sent a disturbing tweet about the children of Marion Millar - is, of course, a member.
My friend: “They have already filled 11 threads with just under 3000 messages per thread. More than 200 messages in this last thread and they started it less than 3 days ago. Lots of crappy, homemade, collage-like images (calling them 'memes' would be pushing it!), Mini-rants about TERF and transphobics, and such a preponderance of fantasies about their sexual activities that I wonder if it doesn't exist. Not a huge dose of self-loathing homoeroticism in his obsession! "
And, of course, they are misogynistic.
So to sum it up. I disliked a group of failed comedy writers / bitter comedy fans fifteen years ago and have found in trans activism a way to safely continue their campaign of bullying. Old world fun!
This article was originally published on The Glinner update and was reproduced with kind permission.
