The boycott of social media reminded me of something that I spent a lot of time trying to unpack at the time & I’ve never fully reached any sort of useful conclusion - how/when you can or should criticise a female identifying person employed to write/talk about football.

I saw lots of people relitigating the incident with Karen Carney this evening & my opinion is still the same as on the night it happened - I wish the Leeds account hadn’t tweeted about it & also that Carney’s comments were wrong, as all people sometimes are.

By coincidence, weeks before I’d inadvertently caused an infinitesimal version of the Carney situation when I tweeted a thread picking apart what I thought was a particularly bad newspaper article about Leeds under Bielsa. I didn’t realise the author was female when I posted.

I’ve since read it again & to be absolutely frank it’s still a pig of an article. I say this as someone who has had umpteen bad days at the office in various jobs. It happens & it’s not the end of the world. Presumably we’ve all phoned something in to meet a deadline.

I only tweeted it because I was trying to make fellow fans laugh & also because I genuinely did despair at the really terrible journalism being written about Marcelo Bielsa at that time, which seemed like a sustained assault that spanned negligence to absolute stupidity.

A while after tweeting the thread, someone tagged the author of the piece, which I try not to do. I hadn’t mentioned the writer’s name & it was only at this point I realised that it was a woman. I instantly felt conflicted about this turn of events & some of the comments made.

Although most of the external comments were also criticisms of the substance of the article itself, it was very hard to distinguish which, if any, were sexist in nature & I started to contemplate deleting the whole thread to alleviate any potential escalation.

The trouble was, if I deleted the thread, it would likely seem that I’d said something inappropriate or offensive, when all I’d done was highlighted some passages from the article I found to be unconvincing. The comments tagging in the writer would remain, bereft of context.

I also couldn’t work out if it was perhaps even more inappropriate to remove a thread that I 100% would have made if the author was male, which I’d wrongly believed to be the case. For all I knew, the writer in question would find this even more offensive than leaving it up.

Ultimately I left it up out of indecision rather than anything else. With very good reason, barely anyone reads my tweets & it obviously didn’t have the same impact as the now infamous tweet about Karen Carney’s punditry by the official Leeds Utd Twitter account sometime after.

When I read the criticism of the handling of the Carney situation, I understood the perspective that an entity the size of a Premier League football club has more responsibility & should be careful how it uses its considerable reach. This definitely makes sense to me.

I don’t think there was malicious intent by the social media team & as has been highlighted, it really was the latest in a series of rebuttal tweets aimed at people who had denigrated the prospects or achievements of the club. This is not an excuse, it’s just wider context.

Whilst I emphatically disagreed with Carney’s comments, I can’t pretend that a percentage of the vitriol directed towards her wasn’t sexist or misogynist. This is inexcusable & I still feel ashamed that it happened. I’m not diminishing the impact of this at all. It’s not okay.

I deliberately read as many tweets about the fallout from this incident & never got any closer to answering the question about if there is ever any way to criticise the writing/punditry of women or if it’s always inherently wrong because of the risk of inappropriate escalation?

One might assume that consciously focusing on the substance of any given article/opinion proffered by a female writer/pundit is acceptable but how can anyone be sure that someone else will not use it as an excuse for yet more sexist abuse?

I also strongly suspect that there will be female identifying football fans/writers who very specifically do not want to be treated with kid gloves or otherwise condescended to. I can only imagine that this could also come across as really belittling & patronising.

As it stands I think my modus operandi will probably be that I’ll err on the side of not passing comment about the opinions of female identifying pundits/writers in the future, which is of course no loss to anyone. It’s not important that people hear my ‘take’ on anything.

But reading over the comments today made by people (perhaps fairly) castigating Leeds Utd for the Carney tweet & also some of the fans defending their position, I can’t help but wonder if the matter hasn’t actually been resolved in any useful way. I for one remain unclear.

If the answer is do not ever tweet about an opinion offered by a female writer/pundit, I can definitely live with that & it’s an accommodation I’m prepared to make. I just don’t have any sort of concept if that actually helps the situation at all. I remain open to ideas.

I feel obliged to emphasise that I’m fully aware that sport is not that important in the grand scheme of things & social media even less so. I also recognise that systemic sexism is a blight on society & our collective culpability by inadvertently perpetuating it.