Why has it suddenly become so difficult to find Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday Times column on transgender issues?
Jeremy Clarkson has once more worked up a Twitter storm for his latest column in The Sunday Times, in which he dismissed the prejudice against transgender people, although it has transpired that finding the article is becoming increasingly difficult.
However, since the column was originally published yesterday (24 September), the original link to the article, which was widely shared by other outlets, appear to now be broken. Even when searched for under Clarkson's byline on The Sunday Times website, the article does not appear.
However, when contacted by The Drum, the News UK title denied taking the piece down and sent a new URL without explanation for the migration. However, the new page did not yet appear within search results at the time of writing.
UPDATE: A spokesperson from News UK has since contacted The Drum saying the broken links were due to a "technical fault" and Clarkson's column stream had "not updated" to feature his article. The broken links have since been fixed and the article now appears in Clarkson's feed.
In his column titled 'Transgender issues are driving me nuts, I need surgery on my tick boxes', Clarkson wrote that he "rolled his eyes" when people started "endlessly" voicing transgender issues, saying: "[The media] have decided that we must now all turn our attention to the plight of people who want to change their name from Stan to Loretta."
"As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok. They were called ladyboys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag night anecdote."
Clarkson went on to criticise the parents of transgender children for "poisoning the minds" of their families, using the example of a child who was born a boy but from the age of three insisted that she had a girl's name and wore girls' clothes and later went to a girls' school, saying he was "horrified" when "her parents had simply indulged this whim."
He added: “I wanted to seek out [the parents] and explain that they were free to live a lunatic life, they must not – and I was going to emphasise this with spittle - be allowed to poison the mind of a child...
“[Children] dream impossible dreams. You don’t actually take them seriously. You don’t take them to a hospital when they’re 10 and say, ‘He wants to be a girl, so can you lop his todger off?’”
Readers took to Twitter to criticise Clarkson's offensive comments, calling his remarks "offensive" and "transphobic" among other colourful remarks.
This is not the first time Clarkson has come under fire for controversial comments, after being fired from Top Gear for assualting a producer, Clarkson continued his controversial streak on the show by making a distasteful joke about Oscar Pistorius' alleged murder of wife Reeva Steenkamp on the show.