Seeing an opportunity in hysterical claims that the country is “under attack” from its neighbor, the Liberal Party has rebranded as Team Canada, rallying the country around a patriotism it treated with disdain just a couple of years prior. Rather than lead with prudence, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has echoed the anti-Trump rhetoric. The propaganda machine is in full swing.

With an election coming in a few weeks, Canadians have been offered little more than political theater. The two parties competing for power seem to have joined forces against an invented American enemy, allowing Canadians a distraction from the very real problems that exist in their own country. How have our memories been wiped clean so quickly?

Just a few months ago, the ruling Liberal Party appeared dead in the water. Trudeau had become the most hated Prime Minister in Canadian history and calls for his resignation were deafening. By June last year, polling showed that a majority of Canadians wanted him to step down. He couldn’t even go out in public without being screamed at by angry citizens.

Even former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had avoided criticizing Trudeau to date, said the government had “denigrated” the country. Repeating what many of us had noticed, Harper said that Trudeau managed to stay in power thanks to a “media conglomerate” that “erased his every error” and “misrepresented his opposition.”

He was right. The already tiny Canadian media landscape was unabashedly biased in favor of Trudeau’s government, and against not just Poilievre’s Conservative Party, but any Canadian who did not subscribe to Trudeau-approved narratives. As the only party to mount a serious and unapologetic challenge to issues viewed as untouchable in Canada, the PPC was almost entirely erased from the conversation. Bernier was taking on many of the sacred cows politically homeless Canadians have been desperate to see addressed — things like gender identity ideology, climate change alarmism, and mass immigration. The PPC is a small party, but one Poilievre might take a page from: if he genuinely wants to lead the country down a different path.

Canada became evermore censorial under Trudeau’s reign, as dissent against the Covid mandates, gender identity ideology, and unevidenced claims about the supposed discovery of “mass graves” at old residential school sites was framed as dangerous hate speech.

Rather than encourage Canadians toward unity, Trudeau labelled those protesting the vaccine mandates as women-haters, racists and, science-deniers. Those of us fighting for parental rights and women-only spaces, and against the transitioning of children, were violent extremists akin to terrorists. Pointing out that no remains of buried indigenous children had been discovered at old residential school sites was referred to as “denialism,” rather than the truth.

Liberal authoritarianism peaked in 2022, when Trudeau famously went so far as to invoke the Emergencies Act and freeze the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy participants and supporters, all in an attempt to shut down the protests against the ongoing draconian mandates.

The Emergencies Act had never been used before in Canadian history. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked only once during peacetime — by Justin’s father, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in the Seventies. The Acts give sweeping powers to suspend civil liberties and democratic processes in the face of a dire threat to the security of the country.

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Canada’s false new nationalism

By George Dunn

At the time, Bernier spoke out unapologetically against “a series of violations of our fundamental rights and freedoms that a tyrannical government wants to keep in place by crushing dissent”. He made it clear that this was “not a state of emergency”.

And we are now seeing the same tactics being used again. In January, the Prime Minister announced he intended to resign. But only he didn’t, instead proroguing Parliament in order to avoid a vote of no-confidence. This gave him the opportunity to install his pick for the new leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, and drum up yet another “emergency” in the form of a trade war. While party members are meant to vote on a new leader, it was immediately clear that Carney would be picked no matter what. He was suddenly giving interviews across North America as a “Canadian Official” (odd, considering no one had elected him as an official of anything).

Indeed, Carney was installed as Trudeau’s successor in March. Canada had a new Prime Minister, and with that, all was apparently forgotten by Canadians who simply didn’t like the idea of voting Conservative and were relieved to have an excuse to fall back into their comfort zones. There was “no turning back” now, Carney explained dramatically. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.” It appeared half of Canada was thrilled at the prospect of a “war” with its bigger sibling.

In truth, as Bernier explained to me, “Trump does not want to invade our country militarily”. What Trump wants is a new deal — he wants to reopen the free trade agreement. And rather than sit down at the table and make a deal, the Liberals took the opportunity to fear-monger Canadians into believing they were the innocent victims of an unfair attack. In fact, it is the Liberal Party, not Trump, that started a commercial war — “a trade war that we won’t win” as Bernier put it.

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Annexation has always haunted Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

This is merely another distraction at a time when we need a national reckoning. I told Bernier that I saw there was no PPC candidate running in my old riding in East Vancouver, one of the most Left-wing electoral districts. I had lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, but eventually felt unsafe there. After I began speaking out against gender identity legislation and in defense of women’s spaces, the attacks on me were relentless. I’d been screamed at, threatened, and stalked while out and about — walking my dog or having drinks with friends. Many of my old friends refused to be seen in public with me anymore for fear of being canceled by association. I left East Vancouver in early 2021, during the Covid lockdowns, foreseeing a dark future. Despite addiction, homelessness, mental health crises, and crime spreading across the area, the progressives who dominated politically held firm in their approach, which offered little more than clean pipes and free drugs. Issues like women’s sex-based rights had been completely wiped off the table. Once I left, it seemed that my efforts to force a debate left with me.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Bernier if he thought I should run, unsure in that moment if I was joking or not. He responded enthusiastically.

And because I’ve never been one to sit back and let the bullies win, I’ve decided to run as a PPC candidate. In a democracy, people should have the right to vote for something they believe in. And if I don’t show up and force a conversation, it just won’t happen. Women’s sex-based rights deserve to be an election issue and a topic of debate, whether the Leftist authoritarians of Canada like it or not. Free speech is only a lost cause in Canada if we don’t fight for it. There has to still be some fight left in us.

For far too long, Canadians have accepted a status quo where expression is suppressed and democracy stifled. There’s only one way to fix that: stand up, speak out, and refuse to be erased.

“We’re collectively mourning right now and in grief, and a lot of old wounds have been dug up and reopened because of this,” said David Pratt, of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations. In response, the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, cancelled its celebrations, encouraging people to consider “what it means to be Canadian in light of recent events”.

A co-chair of the Canada Day committee in Fredericton said, “a quiet day of reflection may be the best way for our community to spend the holiday.” And cancelled their celebration. Sol Mamakwa, a Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario, called on people to “reflect on the dark roots of Canada”. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whose father was PM during the time the residential schools operated, suggested the country think of “those for whom it’s not yet a day of celebration.”

Of course, celebration and consideration are not mutually exclusive. And despite the fact that the majority of Canadians wanted to celebrate on July 1, #CancelCanadaDay trending on Twitter was enough for these politicians.

But it seems the activists calling to cancel Canada were not interested in quiet reflection. A number of churches across the nation were vandalised and burned to the ground, in protest of the past. One wooden church named St. Ann’s near Hedley, British Columbia — where members of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band had been gathering for over a century — was reduced to ash. Not far away, The Sacred Heart — which has served the Penticon Indian Band since 1911 — was also razed.

Churches have been burned in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. Almost all were on indigenous land, destroyed, apparently, in response to deaths of the children who were removed from their families sent to the schools in a policy of forced assimilation. But what do these acts really accomplish?

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Don't let the activists grind you down

By Meghan Murphy

It is true that Canada’s residential schools existed to destroy indigenous cultures and languages and were notorious for neglect and abuse. By the Seventies, most of these schools were run by the state. Nevertheless, the latest scandal has been widely misunderstood.

The “unmarked graves” that precipitated the cancellation of Canada Day and the church burnings were not the graves of murder victims — a fact many activists appear to misunderstand. Analysis of the remains shows that the children mostly died from the same causes as non-indigenous children at the time — things like influenza and tuberculosis.

Nor were the graves kept secret. A landmark 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had an entire volume entitled “Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials”. The report describes how “the practice throughout the system’s history was to keep burial costs low, and to oppose sending the bodies of students who died at schools back to their home communities,” hence why there were cemeteries on the school grounds. Very few articles about the report pointed out these facts (besides Brian Lilley’s in the Toronto Sun.)

Moreover, the graves were not intentionally unmarked; rather, the markers decayed over the years and were simply not maintained. The “discovery” of these unmarked graves was not a discovery, then, but something activists could have read up on years ago. It’s perfectly reasonable to be upset and disgusted by these facts. But it is important to get the facts right.

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Nobody will win the Culture Wars

By Tom Chivers

There’s always a temptation, when you’re an activist, to peddle the narrative that presents your adversary in the worst possible light (and you — the valiant saviour — in the best). In Canada, the Left gives into this temptation far too frequently — and I say this as someone who was a devout leftist for most of my life. Few spoke out against the arson of religious buildings. Those who did included indigenous leaders, who were left dealing with the fall-out.

The Abbotsford News reported that a residential school survivor and Indigenous elder was “devastated” after St. Ann’s was razed. Her ancestors had helped build the church. Upper Similkameen Indian Band Chief Bonnie Jacobsen also expressed dismay and disbelief at the burnings, which she called, “complete disregard for our elders and ancestors,” adding, “Putting our lands, wildlife, and members at risk is not the way.” Keith Crow, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief, said “I don’t see any positive coming from this and it’s going to be tough.”

These church burnings are part of a recent trend on the Left to destroy symbols or statues that some feel are representative of a regressive time. Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II were also casualties of Canada Day this year. When progressives tweet their support of extreme actions — which tend not to have any effect on them personally, or even their communities — they ignore the fact that destruction and violence do not tend to effect positive change for the communities they claim to be defending.

Both the Sixties race riots and the LA riots in 1992 destroyed working class communities populated by people of colour, which which never truly recovered, despite decades of working to rebuild. Many families were forced to leave the neighbourhood, and countless businesses were permanently erased. More recently, the result of Antifa-led Black Lives Matter riots in Portland and Seattle has been to sow even further division and repulsion towards those who claim to seek justice but advocate for and perpetrate violence against anyone who fails to toe the line.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

Who are these activists helping, when they burn down local businesses and religious buildings? These responses are too often about projecting toughness and holier-than-thou “commitment” to the cause. Often, they go too far. Last week, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), Harsha Walia, resigned after responding to the church burnings by tweeting, “Burn it all down.”

Walia, a long-time Left-wing activist, has long projected extreme views — advocating for censoring and cancelling those she deems political opponents. Before becoming the director of a civil liberties organisation she was, for instance, a supporter of a petition to have me fired from my job as an editor at a Left-wing publication in 2015 on account of my criticisms of the sex trade and advocacy for the Nordic model of prostitution law; she worked to have a talk by journalist and author Chris Hedges cancelled that same year, for the same reason. As a proponent for the full legalisation of the sex trade, Walia felt entitled to silence those who viewed the trade as inherently exploitative and wanted the men responsible for that exploitation held to account.

Advocating for the destruction of Canadian churches is an entirely inappropriate thing for a person representing an organisation supposedly committed to protecting freedom of religion and assembly to do. But the rush of power and validation activists experience in making such extreme statements ensures many speak without consideration for facts or consequences. Walia is, alas, also a typical product of modern progressive activism, which has devalued truth, rationality, and practicality in favour of short-sighted hyperbole.

This is why activists rushed to spin the “unmarked graves” story into a shocking discovery, hidden by a media and liberal government that is always at their mercy. The result of this rhetoric was arson that devastated people whose lives most urban liberals can’t imagine. Activists put themselves centre-stage, to the detriment of communities; it’s disturbing, this knee-jerk response towards violence, destruction, and cancellation. Leftist leaders, in particular, must resist this urge, lest the entire Left burn all its bridges and go up in flames. Policy must be rooted in facts and rational thought. But perhaps that’s a little too dull for the burn-it-all-down crowd.

After being prescribed puberty blockers at 16, and undergoing a double mastectomy when she was 20, last year Bell decided to detransition, at 23. She is now taking action against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which operates gender identity clinics in Britain, to stop them from ‘rushing’ other teenagers down the same path.

“There was no exploration of the feelings that I had, no psychiatric assessment,” Bell told This Morning. “It was very brief and based on my recent past. There was no in-depth discussion.”

As a result of her decision to transition, Bell will probably never be able to reproduce, nor will her body or voice recover completely from the impacts of testosterone and surgery. Many other girls are having similar changes of mind; more and more are coming forward to say they were sent down the path to transitioning with little information or warning of the long-term implications.

The trouble is, therapists and medical practitioners are reluctant to interrogate these kids and their wishes too deeply, increasingly fearful of being labelled bigoted or transphobic, or even accused of practising “conversion therapy”.

This particular development is currently playing out in Canada. In 2015, Dr Kenneth Zucker was fired from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in Toronto, which he had run for more than 30 years, after trans activists called his approach “conversion therapy”. It transpired that this actually meant “watchful waiting” — rather than immediately starting patients who think they have gender dysphoria on the transition process, he thought it better to first try to “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies.” If the dysphoria persisted, Zucker would support them in their path to transitioning.

Today, his approach is close to being criminalised.

Last month, David Lametti, the current Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, reintroduced proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, which would criminalise “conversation therapy”. In principle, most can understand the practice of attempting to turn gay people straight as damaging. But Bill C-6 is dangerously deceptive, in that it conflates this outdated intervention with the practice of affirming “gender identity”.

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Don't let the activists grind you down

By Meghan Murphy

Lametti told the Canadian House of Commons that “conversion therapy refers to misguided efforts to change the sexual orientation of bisexual, gay, and lesbian individuals to heterosexual [or to] change a person’s gender identity to cisgender”. But while conversion therapy, as it is understood conventionally, is a harmful practice, it shouldn’t be used to describe interventions involving children who believe they suffer from gender dysphoria. Indeed, it is the trend of transitioning children that is more likely to cause harm.

It is common practice to talk about depression, mental health and suicide when discussing the supposed need to “affirm” gender identity in kids, in order to start them on the path to transition. Lametti told the House of Commons of Canada that “scientific evidence” shows people who undergo conversion therapy “must deal with its negative effects such as anxiety, self-hate, depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide”. He fails to mention that while this may be true of gay and lesbian individuals subjected to this practice, there is no evidence to support this claim with regard to youth who are not “affirmed” in their supposed gender identity.

Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst in the US, explained in Quillette that the young female detransitioners she sees in her practice were all “suffering from complex social and mental health issues” at the time they decided to transition, and that “transition often not only failed to address these issues, but at times exacerbated them or added new issues”. Girls struggling with puberty, mental health issues, sexual identity, bullying, trauma, eating disorders, or gender roles will not be helped by testosterone and surgery. The real risk is that, with no caution, these practices will ruin their lives.

Over 90% of children who start on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones, eventually getting surgeries like mastectomies. But the blockers themselves can also have significant side effects, as Bell’s lawyer argued in court, including loss of fertility and sexual function, as well as decreased bone density. The impact on brain development is not yet fully known, but we do know that the surge of sex hormones at puberty triggers important changes in the adolescent brain, connected to cognitive development. Puberty is not only about developing breasts or body hair, it is a necessary part of developing into a healthy adult in many other ways.

Treatments for so-called “trans kids” remains experimental, yet few in Canada are asking why we are experimenting on kids. The number of referrals to the gender clinic at British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital rose from seven in 2007 to 80 in 2017. The trans clinic at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children sees over 200 referrals each year. Ten years ago, the CHEO, a children’s hospital in Ottawa, saw one or two patients a year with concerns about “gender identity”. In 2018, 189 patients were referred to the clinic. And while a decade ago an equal number of boys and girls were coming to the CHEO clinic, today, 75% of patients are female.

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Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

Conflating sexual orientation and gender identity has proven to be a very successful means of manipulating public opinion, and those who wish to support gay and lesbian individuals to live joyful lives have come to believe that supporting gender identity ideology is the same thing. It is not.

Many governments and institutions across many countries are now treating “gender identity” as the determiner of biological sex — that is to say, that if one feels more connected to feminine stereotypes, one must be female, even if one is actually male. As a result, questioning gender norms, feeling uncomfortable in one’s body, experiencing same-sex attraction, or preferring toys or clothing typically associated with the opposite sex, is no longer just a normal part of growing up, but a that sign a child may be “trans”.

Bill C-6 proposes to criminalise those who profit from or advertise “conversion therapy”, which would include therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming “trans identity” unquestioningly. Choosing not to encourage a child to transition; suggesting a teen wait, and see if the “gender dysphoria” sticks a few years before beginning the process of transitioning; and challenging the concept of “gender identity” itself would potentially set a therapist or medical practitioner up for criminal sanctions.

It is already difficult to question the legitimacy of gender identity ideology in this climate, and it is practically impossible to access therapy that might allow a teen to grow out of their desire to transition, as so many do. Bill C-6 will make it illegal to offer therapy that does not approach transition as the best path.

The conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity in Bill C-6 is no accident. Lametti argued that his bill is an extension of Bill C-16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code in 2017. Passed with little debate, Bill C-16 set a precedent, leading provinces across Canada to adopt policies allowing males to access women’s same sex spaces. Along with some other feminists, I argued that such legislation would endanger women and girls and reinforce sexist gender roles fought against for decades. We weren’t listened to. But it is, indeed, what came to pass; males have been allowed access to women’s prisons and refuges — and even female beauty therapists are bullied into handling male genitalia.

The ball is already rolling with Bill C-6. Schools in British Columbia and Alberta have adopted SOGI, a programme to direct instructors on how to teach children about gender identity ideology. It claims to be aimed at stopping discrimination against and bullying of LGBTQ kids, but it does much more than that. SOGI insists that “Everyone has a sexual orientation and gender identity” and directs instructors to teach primary school kids that, “When babies are born, doctors and parents usually decide if the baby is a boy or girl. However, not everybody will grow up feeling like or identifying as a boy or a girl.” Students are to “look for clues” that tell them if a boy is really a girl. Lesson plans for teachers direct them to “ask students, what does it mean to feel like a boy or to feel like a girl?”

It is one thing to attempt to stop bullying and depression and suicide in teenagers who feel different and out of place. But it is quite another to indoctrinate children into gender identity ideology.

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What if you regret transitioning?

By Julie Bindel

Teaching girls and boys that sexist stereotypes determine their sex, and saying that if a young boy prefers dresses or dolls that means he is a girl, is dangerous. Teaching girls that if they don’t conform to old-fashioned notions of femininity they are not girls, but boys, is harmful.

Kids should be free and encouraged to explore a variety of interests, sure. And they should not be shoved into categories if they don’t conform. But they should not be led, by adults, down a path to harmful prescriptions and surgeries without any room for debate — in a country where such debate is about to be criminalised.

While Canada appears to be eager to be first to adopt gender identity policies and legislation, it is not the only country enmeshed in this trend. When 28-year-old Charlie Evans, from the north-east of England, announced that she was setting up a setting up a charity called The Detransition Advocacy Network, hundreds of girls and young women contacted her with their concerns about having transitioned. In the UK, the number of adolescents referred for “gender treatment” has increased from 97 in 2009 to 2,510 in 2017-2018, and among girls from 40 to 1,800 — a 4,400% increase in 10 years.In the United States, surgeries for females transitioning to “male” increased by 289% between 2016 and 2017.

In 2017, our Canadian political representatives ignored the few women who dared speak up about their concerns about Bill C-16. Now we’re facing yet another dangerous bill that will prevent therapists from doing ethical work, and set institutions and practitioners up for very serious legal cases like the one brought forward by Keira Bell. It will restrict freedom of speech and honest debate, and more importantly it will destroy the lives of thousands of kids. I hope all politicians will listen, before it’s too late.

Meghan Murphy is a writer in Vancouver BC and the host of The Same Drugs.

The problem with codependence is that it feels like the right thing to do for many of us. We believe we are helping, supporting and empathising. We care about the wellbeing of those around us and about maintaining our relationships. We don’t want to discard people because they are troubled — we know everyone struggles, and who better than us to help? And actually, we have the solutions. Let us make you a list and set up an appointment and find you some hobbies and provide you with some constructive criticism and keep on loving you so much than you’ll have to love us back, and change into the person we know you can and should be, which would really make us feel a lot more comfortable.

Women are particularly prone to codependency, as we are socialised to be the sex that considers the feelings, needs, and desires of others before our own. Women who put themselves first are cold, selfish, bitches. We are meant to be caretakers, and stay in marriages no matter how much they hurt us. We sacrifice ourselves for what we tell ourselves is the good of the partnership. Some call it “emotional labour” — defined by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart as having to “induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others”.

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Surely lockdown is a millennial's idea of heaven?

By Meghan Murphy

But the things we do to “keep the peace” do not actually make us feel more peaceful. They make us feel anxious and resentful; unheard, unseen, and misunderstood. Our lives become entirely focused on another — controlled by stress and fear attached to someone else’s behaviour. And rather than detaching, we stick around, trying to manufacture the perfect circumstances, behaviours, or scenarios, wherein we can finally relax.

In coming to these insights and revelations about some relationships in my life, it struck me that we’ve become enmeshed in one big codependent relationship with today’s modern activist — the “social justice warrior” we are now weary of hearing about. The young, self-righteous and woke.

Cancel culture, that ever expanding trend which sees individuals “called out” and burned at the virtual stake for various — usually insignificant — transgressions, from quoting someone else saying the n-word, to standing up for the rights of women and girls without acknowledging the men who are also women and girls, to tweeting a research paper showing that rioting does not tend to inspire public support, has left us all in fear. Rather than feel inspired by this activism, we feel controlled by it. We know the damage that can come from just one tweet; a text shared without context; an unflattering moment, caught on film; or the intentional or lazy misconstruing of one’s work, argument, or article. It takes so little to destroy a person’s life these days — it’s no wonder we all feel we are walking on eggshells.

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Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

Like those trapped in codependent relationships, many of us have stopped trusting our own judgments. We are afraid to say what we really think, no matter how rational. Having honest discussions, engaging in independent thought, and asking the wrong question may cause a trauma response. We have been made to feel responsible for the emotional states of others. It is our responsibility to make those around us feel “safe”, and that “safety” depends on our ability to fake it — to suppress ourselves. The truth is hate speech; words are violence. We must alter our vocabulary, twisting ourselves into knots to make it through a sentence without stumbling into a trap set by the woke Stasi, as Julie Bindel would say.

If we can simply play the game, uphold the facade, be sure never to let an unfiltered thought slip from our mouths, we believe we can avoid “drama,” maintain our relationships, and keep the peace. Ironically, these attempts to ensure a sense of safety and avoid conflict leave us feeling entirely unsafe. Can none of us admit how oppressive it feels to hide your authentic self? To not be able to have honest conversations with those around us or to express ourselves, and trust we will still be loved, respected, and valued?

If I were our culture’s psychologist I would suggest we free ourselves from this emotionally abusive relationship with the internet mob, and find ourselves again.

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The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

As such, I have some advice for those wanting to disentangle themselves from what has become a toxic relationship with modern activist culture:

1) Stop apologising. Not unless you really, truly mean it. If you know you said or did nothing wrong, do not try to placate your bullies or attackers, no matter how intense they become. Your self-worth and integrity is worth more than whatever you hope grovelling will achieve. These people won’t leave you alone if you apologise, anyway. In fact, showing weakness makes it worse. Now they know they have you by the figurative balls (lady or man), and will only double down. Show no fear, show you will not cave, and eventually you will be left alone. There is no fun in bullying someone who does not give a fuck.

2) Detach. Physically and emotionally. Take yourself away from social media, which is where cancel culture thrives. Take yourself away from people who engage in this type of behaviour in real life. If someone is going to bail on you or turn on you, either because of social pressure, a desire to maintain status or popularity, or because you say something they disagree with, that person is not your person. Ask yourself whether you want to spend your life fearful that your true self will be discovered, and that those who are meant to love you, stick by you, and support you, will abandon you without a genuine conversation.

Do you want to hang out with a crew of cowards or do you want your circles to be made up of those who know you, know you are not perfect, know you will never agree on everything, and accept you anyway, and do the work of having sometimes uncomfortable, but honest, conversations? Be with people who will tell you the truth, to whom you can tell the truth; and move on.

3) Follow the advice we were given as kids, which most of us quickly learned we should not be followed at all: be yourself. Don’t hide your true self to protect others or yourself. Be the most authentic, open, vulnerable, honest person you can be (while also maintaining healthy boundaries).

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Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

The more open and true you are, the less likely someone will suddenly realise that, in fact, you do have a mind of your own, and perhaps you say inappropriate but hilarious things, or still find Louis CK funny, or know all the words Big L’s “Clinic”, or still follow Meghan Murphy on Instagram, and that you therefore must be publicly denounced, or simply ghosted.

I have been trying to reveal my flaws, imperfect thoughts, and vulnerabilities over the years for just that reason. I don’t want a pedestal; I want you to know that I’m human. I want the freedom to be myself. This is what we should all aim for: flawed, truthful, diverse, humanity. Stop trying to please everyone by squashing yourself. It won’t lead to safety, security, calm, or happiness. It will lead to fear, anxiety, and misery.

We can’t simply blame those around us for this culture we are living in. If we aren’t being honest and aren’t being true to ourselves, it is our own responsibility to change, and to start doing things differently.

Maybe we all need to break up, detach, and come back together — truly ourselves and ready to have some hard, honest, real, probably scary conversations. I suspect this is where we will find love and security — not in the arms of those who keep us hooked in with fickle loyalty.

One would think a worldwide lockdown — which has cancelled all our plans for the foreseeable future — would be exactly what these young people longed for. But when the concept was first introduced, I was a bit amused by the panic it was met with. Why were millennials posting about the trauma of cancelled 30th birthday parties they didn’t want to go to anyway? Why weren’t Zoomers delighted at the opportunity to retreat further into the digital world of Houseparty hangouts, Zoom parties and FaceTime dates?

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Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

It was strange, pre-lockdown, to observe the young being so very un-vibrant. Fine, be a tired mum. Go to bed at 8pm when you’re 80. A farmer would understandably be exhausted at the end of the day. But a single 30-year-old with a desk job, one would presume, might still have a little zest for life — a desire for adventure, or, at the very least, experience.

I saw it in my friends as well — not Zoomers, but near or post 40. Asking about New Year’s Eve plans was met with a sour “nothing” or “watching a movie”; even an attempt to make drinks plans for a Friday night was like pulling teeth. A 2018 think piece in Vogue  discussed the “staying at home movement” as “the ultimate indulgence”. A 2017 article in The Cut acknowledged that the familiar game of “cancel-reschedule ping-pong” usually ends in abandoning attempts to meet up entirely, but concluded: “doesn’t it also feel at least a little good to bail?”

I couldn’t relate. Cancelling plans constantly is rude and that “ping pong” game usually ends in someone giving up on more than just plans — no one likes to chase others around, so the end result is that we just forget those relationships entirely. This has always depressed me: I value friends and socialising. I like to meet up, in real life, with those I care for. Why would I want to waste my time lying around on the couch feeling sorry for myself?

I know the excuses people employ: I have social anxiety, I’m exhausted, I’m stressed, I’m broke, I’m an introvert, I’m an Aquarius, what is there even to do? But I don’t accept them. People have been broke, tired, stressed or shy for all of history, yet we remain social creatures. Why the desperation to avoid human connection?

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There is no mental illness epidemic

By Polly Mackenzie

One of the problems is social media. In the internet age, people believe that technology not only can, but should, replace face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder interactions. We attempt to do everything online — politics, dating, debating, socialising, learning, loving. The younger generations have never known anything else. Millennials and generation Z are more heavily reliant on smartphones and social media than older generations — so much so that their use is often reasonably viewed as an “addiction.”  And they have been conditioned to conflate online interactions with actual communication, and to equate social media connections with real-life ones. In some ways, their lives have been made more convenient; in other ways, young people have suffered.

Take Tinder, for instance. This dating app, while claiming to connect people, actually does the opposite. Nancy Jo Sales, who wrote the infamous (if you ask dating app fanatics) article “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse”,  for Vanity Fair told me:

“I don’t actually think the point of dating apps is to connect us with anything but the app. The whole point of it is to get you to keep using it.”

Indeed, dating apps have been designed like slot machines — they aim to get the player addicted, to keep swiping — offering the same dopamine hit you get when you hit the jackpot. Yet, ask a single person, and they will probably repeat the narrative offered by dating app companies: this is the best way to meet as many people as possible — why not expand your horizons? In fact, finding love is even less likely within the context of being offered seemingly endless choices, and we are less likely to commit. Overuse of social media or dating apps — the new normal in terms of meeting sexual partners — are shown to increase anxiety and depression, as well as to decrease self-esteem. Similarly, social media — which sells us the idea that we are connecting with thousands of people around the world, makes us feel lonelier and more disconnected.

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Get off social media and help!

By Mary Harrington

Don’t get me wrong, I am no Luddite. The internet is an incredible resource, and I am grateful that I can do many aspects of my job comfortably, from my sofa. But I know I need more than that. I know my health and wellbeing depend on my connections to others — as does my work.

But the cancel-everything-to-wallow-at-home-in-the-dark movement is often framed as “self-care”. In truth, it is the opposite. “Self-care” — ensuring that we are mentally and physically healthy — requires personal relationships and physical contact with others. Both millennials and zoomers revel in anti-social behaviour compared to older generations. For millennials, even the thought of interacting with others can be repulsive. A 2018 survey of 1,200 UK employees found that they “look to avoid human interaction” in the workplace.

Rather than recognising the value of human connection, the younger generations have isolated themselves — and then justified this behaviour online by insisting it is a version of ‘self-care’. Research shows they are deluded: the happiest people are the ones who are sociable — or force themselves to be, even if they don’t feel like it. Laurie Santos, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at Yale University and host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab, found that “happy people prioritise social relationships”. Referencing a paper by Marin Seligman and Ed Diener, Santos said:

“Strong social relationships are necessary for happiness — they’re not sufficient for happiness, but you can’t find happy people that don’t have them… And that means taking a hard look at your priorities to figure out if those social relationships are falling by the wayside.”

Not only that, but the dreaded “interactions with strangers” has been shown to improve our wellbeing, which means that talking to a barista or your Uber driver “can really bump up your mood”. It is not only a great way to build compassion for others and learn about those who share the world with you, but it makes you feel good.

Millennials and their Zoomer successors, for all their talk of self-care, are lonelier and more anxious than other age groups — and face rising rates of depression diagnoses. It’s the worst of both worlds: they neither make time to reflect by themselves — as this “alone time” is actually spent on phones or computers — nor are they out in the world, interacting with others and building intimacy. They become simultaneously incapable of being alone, yet refuse to connect with others in healthy and beneficial ways. And so they are lonelier than ever.

In other words, these anti-social generations are doing it exactly wrong.

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Drinking in the madness of social media

By Gareth Roberts

Those who used to whine about having to leave the house — and post memes about how great it is to go to bed at 9pm alone — have got what they wished for: legally enforced isolation. There is no option even to make plans! The pressure is lifted — we are free to be alone, at home, all the time. And yet, only a few days into the lockdowns, social media was full of desperate posts, complaining of mental health crises. The stay-at-homers have been spooked.

And good thing too. Perhaps, when we come out of this, they’ll stop taking the world for granted. They’ll remember that it’s important to hug our friends, to reach out, to get up off the sofa, to talk to the person sitting next to you at the bar. They’ll realise that holing up at home — typing away angrily at whomever our latest target is; swiping through faces, hoping for a momentary jackpot; or posting selfie number 24 of 30, filtered just so, captioned to sell our audience on a life, mood, and nose we don’t have — doesn’t make you happy.

When they’re able to make plans, perhaps they won’t cancel. Maybe they’ll just turn up.

Like any other civilisation we will disappear, and a few thousand years from now, there will be a new civilisation, and we will be thought of as a blip. A very stupid blip.

We have accomplished a lot. Perhaps too much. We have built a society so full of abundance that we have lost sight of what matters.

Some of us — those who view themselves as “political” — are relentlessly squabbling online, fighting for political purity rather than policy change. Others have made a decision to focus on their pronouns and sad selfies. By doing so they are signalling the opposite of that which they wish to convey; rather than suffering from a myriad of problems, trials and tribulations, and endless oppressions, they suffer nothing at all. They have so much privilege, they have been forced to invent problems, for the sole purpose of strong arming the world into paying attention to them.

Last week, “non-binary” singer Sam Smith posted a series of photos on Instagram, titled, “Stages of a quarantine meltdown”. The apparently distraught celebrity had staged a visual breakdown, having been contained to his mansion for four days. And what do we do in the midst of a global crisis, when there’s no opportunity to go out in ballgown and sparkly lip gloss? We fake cry, take a selfie, and post it on the internet for likes.

It turns out we have all been worrying about the wrong things all along. We are more likely to be taken out by the flu than a terrorist attack or, God forbid, an accidental “he-ing” of a “they.” This should be an opportunity for a community to take a good look at itself. There are a number of lessons we could learn from this pandemic. Yet based on my observations, to date, I suspect we will absorb none of it.

A key message is surely that we do not have as much control as we would like to think. We cannot control the circumstances of our lives (and death) in many ways. We can make good choices, try our best to take care of our health but, at the end of the day, the economy could crash, and you could lose everything; or a virus could jump from a bat to a human, wreaking havoc.

This is not to say that we should resort to hedonism — Well, we’re all going to die, we may as well devolve into a writhing orgy of narcissistic gluttony and depravity. It is only to suggest we stop trying to control the things we cannot and start to try to take hold of the things we can.

More from this author

Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

Here are some things that you cannot control: how others view you; how others treat you; how others behave around you; and what others think. Here are some things you can control: how you behave; how you treat others; how you respond to those around you; how you react; and how you analyse situations, systems, and people.

How do you respond to challenging times? Faced with isolation for a number of weeks? What choices do you make, knowing that they can have a major impact on all of our futures? What do you focus on, what do you prioritise, how do you treat those around you? What policies and actions are you supporting and advocating, with this new and frightening reality check? These are the important things, right now.

And here is what I’ve seen, in terms of human response to a global pandemic: swathes of financially privileged people buying up all of the groceries and toilet paper, leaving nothing for those who cannot afford to drop $400 on meat to store in a deep freezer they don’t own, because they also don’t own a house.

I see groups of people striding casually around my neighbourhood in Vancouver, in vast numbers, looking like amused tourists, thrilled at the image of themselves out on a Thursday afternoon (!!), in leggings (!!), carrying a badminton racquet (!!). Look at us! Drinking beers on our front lawns with the neighbours! How cute we are. #Quarantinelife.

“GO HOME, YOU FOOLS,” I want to shout at them. Three days into a state-ordered social distancing, and these people can’t manage to find ways to amuse themselves at home.

I’ve also heard endless whining about the challenges of working from home, as though the blessing of not having to put on pants and join the daily commute on a germ-ridden bus has gone completely over the heads of these unimaginative cogs.

Complaining that you have been released from the chain tying you to an office, five days a week, eight hours a day, and no longer have to suffer cubicle life is a privilege only the dull and mentally insufficient could manage. Meanwhile, countless people have no employment at all, with no future prospects, and no knowledge of how badly this situation will devastate their industries and opportunities for survival.

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Get off social media and help!

By Mary Harrington

Of all of this, the under-40s have been the worst. A stream of mental-health-themed posts have flooded my social media feeds: how to cope with “symptoms of cabin fever”? What of my anxiety?! How can I fill my time, now that an external force is no longer dictating the parameters of my life? The lack of self-sufficiency astounds me, as someone who spends every day alone in her small apartment, trying to learn as much as I can, produce quality work, and take care of my health — physical, emotional, and mental.

I feel blessed, every day, by my freedom, despite not owning a home or having any savings or financial security to speak of. Why are so many unable to manage being alone with their own selves and minds? Why are capable human beings so incapable of productivity, when left to their own devices? The panic in the face of a little adversity troubles me.

I do understand that many, many people will suffer terribly from this outbreak. And that many of us are actually, really, alone. We are social creatures, so this is nothing to scoff at. But my point is that it is also impermanent, and it is something we will get through.

What the world will look like when we recover from this will depend so much on the choices we make as individuals, right now — as well as the decisions made by our government. And instead of doing the bleeding obvious — staying home, strictly distancing ourselves from others, and thinking of the community beyond our own families and desires — we are hanging out at the park with our friends and their kids, and behaving as though the true threat to our lives lies on our couches, as if to re-watch The Sopranos or read a book will send us into a pit of depression, so dark we cannot reemerge.

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Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

On Friday’s episode of “Making Sense,” Sam Harris explained that “this is an emergency in which the most effective contribution you can make, to your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others, is to stay home”. And those of us who can — who are privileged to be able to work from home; who are not the grocery store clerks, the healthcare workers, the bus drivers — are not. Those of us in a position to be considerate of others, are choosing not to be.

Humans, for all their genius and capability, appear to be rather useless, unable to take direction, unwilling to make rational choices, and unfit for a level of hardship that is nothing compared to what their ancestors suffered. “Stay home,” should not be a hard ask. Do not hoard food, toilet paper or hand sanitiser, as it is unnecessary and harmful, should not be either.

“Be mindful, be grateful, be considerate, be strong and be creative” are some other achievable asks I would add.

If you can’t count your blessings during a time like this, perhaps you don’t deserve those blessings at all. And if you cannot view this pandemic as a reminder of what is valuable and important in life, and an opportunity to consider a better social and economic model, perhaps you don’t deserve those things either.

We are lucky to be such over-privileged narcissists, but that luck is wasted on us: the greedy, self-interested masses, clinging to things that are not real, material only until they slip away, and you are left with nothing but a weak and uninspired mind; a fake anxiety disorder (resolvable not through lengthy self-indulgent social media posts, but by going for a walk) and a closet full of toilet paper.

Two weeks ago, a Des Moines Register journalist called Aaron Calvin wrote a piece about a local man, Carson King, who had become famous by raising over $3m in charity, winning the support of a big brewery among others. In researching the profile, Calvin uncovered some racist tweets made by King when he was a teenager, for which he expressed deep regret. “In re-reading it today — eight years later — I see it was an attempt at humor that was offensive and hurtful,” King reflected. “I am embarrassed and stunned to reflect on what I thought was funny when I was 16 years old. I want to sincerely apologize.”

Calvin told Buzzfeed that, while he “recognized that these were not representative artifacts of Carson,” he felt obligated to share the information, so included a “brief mention of these tweets and his apology at the bottom of this profile, after the glowing synopsis of his charity”. Calvin felt he did so in a “thoughtful” way that showed the tweets no longer showed King’s worldview.

King was dropped by the brewery anyway.

King wasn’t mad at Calvin. In fact, he said he appreciated that the journalist had pointed out the tweets and with it the opportunity to apologise. Nonetheless, those who felt the journalist had tried to tarnish the image of a “local hero” targeted him with harassment and then – inevitably – some old tweets of Calvin’s turned up and he, too, was cancelled. Fired from his job and forced to leave his apartment – another victim of “cancel culture”.

“Cancel culture” is a sort of addiction: the addict — outraged members of the public demanding someone’s humiliation and “cancellation” — gets a high, but only temporarily, and the desire creeps back once again and must be fed.

Yet this type of public ostracism is not exactly like other addictions — food, drugs, pornography, shopping or gambling – which involve private behaviours, albeit connected to social problems. Most addictions are about an individual escaping from some kind of pain or trying to fill an endless hole inside of them. Cancel culture is very much about public behaviour — a display of anger, power and virtue — as well as the self-loathing and emptiness in all addictions.

No healthy, secure person invests that much time and energy into destroying other people’s lives. No happy, fulfilled human enjoys seeing others – strangers – ruined, ostracised and vilified. Unless we are purely targeting violent, evil or dangerous individuals… but, of course, this is almost never the case. We target comedians, politicians, writers, friends, fellow activists, co-workers and former comrades. In a terrified frenzy, we look for any excuse — a verbal blunder, a politically incorrect opinion, a tacky 20-year-old Aladdin costume…

While Justin Trudeau — the wokest of leaders — may well be many things, I don’t believe he is a racist. No one does. While black or brownface is indeed racist, Trudeau’s poor costume choices two decades ago do not reflect who he is today: a boring, phony, political coward.

Plenty of things that seemed acceptable or funny 20 years ago are not today. And people change. I mean, 20 years ago, I was wearing a white pleather mini skirt and a mesh animal print tank top, reciting every lyric to “I’m a player”. And I just cannot wait for someone to dredge up all of our old Halloween costumes. (I must have co-opted dominatrix culture at least three years in a row. All you Pocahontases better have your CVs ready.

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Whatever happened to 'publish and be damned'?

By Douglas Murray

The worst thing about cancel culture is not even its attacks on others – it’s that the whole thing is a lie. I don’t believe that anyone thought, deep down, that they were better than Justine Sacco who infamously lost her job for a tweet. They just didn’t make the mistake of trying to be funny on Twitter, in a culture that would prefer not to take a joke.

I don’t believe that anyone thinks Kevin Hart is a homophobe, or that Al Franken is a dangerous predator. And I definitely don’t believe they think Sarah Silverman is a racist.

Cancel culture doesn’t actually want accountability. It doesn’t want an apology. It doesn’t want a conversation. It doesn’t even want the world to be safe from truly dangerous people or ideas. What it wants is to feel that boot on someone else’s neck – perhaps in order to avoid the boot itself.

What is the purpose, after all, of demanding an apology, only to say the apology isn’t good enough? (And the apology is never good enough.) What is the point of saying you want accountability, when no redemption is available? Do we want change or do we want flagellation?

The truth is that many people get off on sadistic, herd-like practices that thrive on platforms like Twitter. Who can be the angriest, the most righteous, and the most devout in their hatred of the Wrong? Who would Never Do Such A Thing, never mind think it?

I don’t think racist or homophobic comments are harmless, but I do think that we prefer punishment over change. And if we truly wanted people to understand other’s hurt and to change their behaviour, we wouldn’t write them off for life.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Recently, when past comments by comedian Shane Gillis about Chinese-Americans came out of the woodwork, the new Saturday Night Live cast member admitted that he “sometimes misses” and that in his “10 years of comedy… you’re going to find a lot of bad misses.”

NBC, having recently hired Gillis for their flagship comedy, promptly unhired him. Yet not everyone wanted him cancelled — Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, who himself has suffered numerous racial slurs, suggested the two men “sit down and talk” and added, “I do not think he should lose his job. We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive. We are all human. He does not strike me as malignant or evil. He strikes me as a still-forming comedian from central Pennsylvania who made some terrible and insensitive jokes and comments.”

And this is precisely the point. Good people can say bad things; most people can and do learn from their mistakes. And sometimes, on the internet, things are misunderstood, misrepresented, and blown out of proportion. (Most of the time, to be fair.)

Indeed, we seem to thrive on doing just that: taking a headline, an out of context comment or joke, and running with it, never reading the article, asking questions about context, never wondering what else might have been happening beyond the frame. We love to hate, so much more than we love the truth or love to understand.

This has led to a real culture of fear. Young people feel so afraid of ostracism that they won’t be honest, even with their closest friends. “I probably hold back 90 percent of the things that I want to say due to fear of being called out,” one student told The Atlantic 2017. “People won’t call you out because your opinion is wrong. People will call you out for literally anything.” This isn’t uncommon; we all know that those deemed to have made “wrong” comments do not get conversations, they get cancelled. Online and in real life.

And you don’t even need to express a cancellable opinion.

I’ve had several friends simply disappear on me, almost out of thin air – no explanation, no debate, no angry showdown. These are not people who suddenly discovered my opinions, either, since my political views have never exactly been a secret. Rather, they were experiencing pressure from friends — getting “called out” themselves, due to their continued association with me, and didn’t want to risk cancellation by association.

For personal (but obvious, without having to think too hard about it) reasons, I’ve got into attachment theory lately, and it strikes me that we’re living in a culture of avoidants. We are so afraid of making ourselves vulnerable that we reject those around us at the first sign of difficulty. We ghost with ease, and avoid face-to-face, honest conversations at all costs. Rather than drawing people in, we disconnect. We react in a knee-jerk manner so that we don’t need to think too hard. Our boundaries are solid — so rigid we need not question them, as we are confident in our one-sided answers: there is right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. No inbetween.

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Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

It is inhuman as well as isolating. We deny our own truths, authenticity, and humanity because we deny it of others. Yet we can’t be close to one another without vulnerability, honesty and face-to-face connections. And, in fact, I don’t believe we can be close without disagreement — without knowing that we can have hard conversations with those around us and still come out unscathed, and with respect for one another. We create a false ego based almost entirely on low self-esteem and fear, projecting hostile and cynical attitudes at those around us. Who needs that prick, anyway?

I say all this, having dabbled in this behaviour myself. Having knee-jerked, chosen oversimplified hot takes, and written off those I believed to be on the “wrong” side of the political spectrum. I have labelled people in unfair ways. I have judged them as bad and irredeemable, based on one act or opinion. I called people who didn’t share my politics various things that enabled me to write them off, including “Right-wing”, “neoliberal”, “misogynist”, “libertarian”, “woman-hater”, “liberal” or “MRA”.

I didn’t bother engaging with these people in good faith or try to understand their perspectives. This did not make me more right, and it did not make my ideas or arguments any stronger. It certainly did not make me a better or more compassionate person, or help me understand what people really thought; the opposite, in fact.

I regret mistakes I’ve made in the past, and I’m grateful to have learned from them, grown and changed. (Some things I’m undoubtedly still working on.) It is something everyone should have the opportunity to do, but I don’t see us granting people this space.

I don’t know what kind of world the cancellers want to create. Some say they support “social justice,” but their behaviour is incredibly anti-social and, while there is power in being a canceller, there is no joy. So go ahead and cancel everyone, bathed in the depressing blue glow of your iPhone, grasping at a high, safe within your own world. Righteous, but alone, and imprisoned by your own sanctimony.

Last month, it was Yearwood’s turn to take second place, this time in the 55-metre sprint at the state open track championships. First place went to Terry Miller, another transgender student, who in the process set a new girls’ state indoor record. Last year, the two students had sparked controversy when they took first and second place in the 100-meter race at the State Open Finals.

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How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

It was back in 1972 that the United States enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments, to ensure that high schools and universities had to offer equal academic and athletic opportunities to both men and women. Prior to this, women’s and girls’ sports were not taken seriously, not supported, and not funded.

The impact of this legislation was revolutionary: in 1974, 300,000 girls played high school sports in the US. Today, it is well over three million. But, like so many other hard-fought women’s rights, today’s generation seems to have forgotten the history and importance of the laws and policies that ensured females were no longer treated as second class citizens.

Today, we are at risk of losing women’s sports entirely. All in the name of ‘trans inclusivity’.

That women’s sports had to be specifically and explicitly supported should signal to people that, without sex segregated athletics, females will be out of the game. We simply cannot compete on equal ground against men. And this has nothing to do with lack of talent — there are basic physical differences between male and female bodies that are unchangeable.

To start, men, in general, are bigger than women. They have larger bones and organs than women. They have longer limbs, bigger hands, and larger lungs. They have more muscle mass, which means they are stronger than women. As females, our ability to reproduce has meant that our bodies have evolved for different purposes than men’s, which affects how our bodies develop and function. There is no self-identifying out of biological reality.

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Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Fair Play For Women (FPFW), a grassroots campaign group fighting for women’s and girls’ sex-based rights, explains that peak male bone mass is around 50% more than women’s, and that women are around 30-35% muscle by weight, while men are 40-50% muscle. While of course muscle mass can vary based on factors like age and fitness, FPFW point out that “women can’t match the bulk or strength of men’s skeletal muscles.” In measuring hand grip, a widely-used marker for strength, FPFW found data that showed the strongest 10% of females can still only beat the bottom 10% of men.

There is a mistaken view that feminists see men and women as exactly the same. That, in other words, they take the word ‘equality’ literally. This is not the case. Feminists are well aware that male and female bodies are different, and that our lot in life has been determined in many ways (though of course not in all ways) by reproductive capacity.

Indeed, women’s oppression has been historically rooted in men’s desire to control their so-called bloodline and, therefore, the means of reproduction. What feminists have fought against is the notion that women should not be allowed to participate in public life — to live full and independent lives, outside the home, and have access to things like education, political power, and a full range of career options – because of their ability to bear children.

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What does gender have to do with genitals?

By Julie Bindel

Feminists are rejecting gender stereotypes, not biology. We don’t agree that simply because one is born female, we must dress a certain way, act a certain way, think a certain way, or be treated as second class. We do know women are physically weaker, and that this makes women vulnerable to male violence.

There is little women can do, no matter how many push ups they perform, to fight off a male attacker. Men are, simply, stronger. This reality — tied to social and cultural norms that put men in positions of power — is why feminists have fought hard for legislative and social changes to deter male violence against women, protect females from being assaulted, and hold men who do perpetrate violence against women accountable.

Because men are most commonly the perpetrators of violence against women, women and girls have had access to separate spaces, where they might otherwise be particularly vulnerable: changing rooms, washrooms, shelters, and transition houses for women escaping male violence for example. These physical and social realities have also meant female and male prisoners are housed separately.

And, of course, the reality of physical differences between men and women have meant that almost all elite sports are sex-segregated. If women were forced to compete against men, they wouldn’t just lose, they would cease to exist in sport at all.

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When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

So forgive our “feverish hysteria” – as The Independent’s chief sports writer Jonathan Liew recently put it – over the new policies being adopted by athletic bodies around the world which allow males who identify as transwomen to compete in female sports.

Liew’s patronising call for us women to “chill out a bit” is based on his view that “hordes of male athletes” will not “suddenly declare themselves female simply to game the system”. But why not? Why wouldn’t mediocre male athletes declare themselves female in order to win at competitions they couldn’t otherwise win? There is, after all, power, glory, and financial gain in being a top athlete.

And while Liew may see a transphobic “straw man”, women are already seeing it happen. That males would compete against women and win is not, it turns out, a figment of our imaginations.

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Can academia be saved from the mob?

By Debra Soh

It was Canadian cyclist Rachel McKinnon’s world championship win last year that led tennis legend Martina Navratilova to tweet: “Clearly that can’t be right. You can’t just proclaim yourself female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as women would not fit that standard.” Other elite female athletes, including Olympic swimmer Sharon Davies and Women’s World Marathon Record holder Paula Radcliffe, have since expressed their concern.

In January, powerlifter JayCee Cooper set a new state record in Bench, becoming state champion, and winning best overall lifter. This was in the women’s division at the USPA Minnesota State Championships. Cooper, who was born male, but now identifies as a woman, lifted 57.5kg more than the closest female competitor.

After this happened, USA Powerlifting (a different organisation) instituted a ban on males competing as women, meaning Cooper’s application to compete was denied. The USAPL explains that “Transgender male to female individuals having gone through male puberty confer an unfair competitive advantage over non-transgender females due to increased bone density and muscle mass from pubertal exposure to testosterone.”

This comes after Laurel Hubbard, representing New Zealand in women’s weightlifting, won gold after beating fellow competitors by 19kg in Melbourne in 2017. Hubbard, who transitioned to female in her mid-30s, went on to compete in the Commonwealth Games last year.

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The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

The very real results are being felt by girls already. Last week, Selina Soule, one of the female students who lost to Miller and Yearwood in Connecticut, told Fox News that, when applying for track college scholarships, it is not specified if an athlete is transgender — students are either in the boys’ category or the girls’ category.

“So if a college coach looks at the results in the [championships], they will see the wide margin between first and/or second place, and the rest of the places … and they’ll say, ‘Hey, why aren’t the rest of these girls running as fast as these two’.

“It’s very frustrating because I know I have put in, and some of my friends and fellow competitors have put in, so much time and effort to take down our times and compete ourselves better, but we are not physically able to be competitive against someone who is biologically a male.”

Liew calls the scenario being painted by critics of this ‘trans inclusive’ approach to women’s sport “fantastical”, in part because he doesn’t believe there will suddenly be an influx on male athletes undertaking “the protracted and often traumatic transition process, securing the necessary medical and psychological documentation”.

But this fails to recognise that under new gender identity policy, males are not required to go through lengthy “transition processes” in order to declare themselves female. This is precisely why such heated debate has erupted around gender identity, as self-declaration is fast on its way to becoming the sole determiner of sex. Fill out a form, and you can now legally become the opposite sex in many countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, and Norway, where there are no judicial or medical requirements at all to change your sex.

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Twitter's dangerous approach to 'hate speech'

By Meghan Murphy

In the UK, this is what changes to the Gender Recognition Act propose. In Canada, you need only a note from an accredited physician or psychologist stating that an individual identifies as a different sex; there are no medical requirements.

Many states, including Washington, Oregon, New York, California, and Connecticut also only require a note from a doctor or nurse practitioner (or a note from someone even less qualified, including, in Washington, a naturopath or social service worker). Nevada requires an affidavit from the individual, stating they are the opposite sex, and an affidavit from a second person confirming this.

Naturally, this new normal has impacted sport. Until 2016, the International Olympic Committee required male athletes who wished to compete among females to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Under the new rules, they need only declare themselves women and demonstrate that their testosterone level has been below a certain point for a year before their first competition.

But lowering testosterone levels for a year does not change the physical body to such an extent that it negates the inherent advantages of being biologically male. It does not alter bones, limbs, or organs. It does not decrease muscle mass to an extent that renders the body equal to a woman’s. These men will still be much bigger and stronger.

Women’s sport is the just the latest example of the fundamental problem at the heart of trans activism: if we dissolve the definition of ‘woman’ to mean nothing more than a declared ‘identity,’ women – along with our hard-won rights – cease to exist.

Last month, Brown University assistant professor Lisa Littman published a paper looking at this “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in adolescents and young adults. Through surveying the parents of these teens, she found that this sudden onset of “gender dysphoria” was taking place in peer groups in which one or more friends became gender dysphoric at the same time. In other words, this seemed to be kids following trends.

From the 256 surveys Littman collected, she found that a large majority of these youths were female (82.8%), and 41% had identified as non-heterosexual prior to identifying as transgender. Almost two thirds had also been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before they claimed to have gender dysphoria.

One might deduce, based on this evidence, that these (mainly) girls were not, in fact, transgender, but lesbians and/or struggling with other mental health issues beyond gender dysphoria. And crucially, that these factors should be explored before leaping to start “transitioning” — a process that eventually involves a lifetime of hormone treatments and a series of complicated surgeries.

These facts, though, have been deemed unspeakable. Those who dare question the concept of gender identity itself — that is that one can have, say, a male body, but be truly a woman ‘on the inside’ — are treated as blasphemers and bigots, viciously harassed, attacked, and even fired from their place of work.

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Dr. Kenneth Zucker is a case in point. A sexologist and psychologist who ran the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in Toronto for more than 30 years, he was fired after trans activists mounted a smear campaign against him. Zucker’s ‘crime’ was to suggest that rather than immediately start children who think they have gender dysphoria on the transition process, perhaps we should first try to “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies.” Zucker himself was not actually opposed to the transition process — if the dysphoria of the youth he was working with persisted, Zucker would support them in their path to transitioning.

But simply acknowledging that desistance happens was apparently unacceptable. Over 500 professional clinicians and academics signed a petition in support of Zucker, arguing that his dismissal was “politically motivated” and that this should “stand as a warning to any clinical researcher who is or considers working at the CAMH: In the event of a conflict with activists for a fashionable cause, the CAMH might well sacrifice them — and the individuals and families they serve in their clinics — for some real or imagined local political gain.” But the damage was done. Zucker had been fired, and his reputation tarnished.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... trans issues

By Julie Bindel

The power trans activists hold not only in terms of controlling the narrative surrounding transgenderism itself, but also in determining legislation, policies, and even what research may be conducted and published, in relation to gender identity is astounding.

Which brings us back to Littman’s study. On August 22, Brown University published a press release about the research, which had been published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Almost immediately, a small number of trans activists complained, both to Brown University and to the journal itself.

One transgender Twitter user dubbed the paper “anti-transgender hate speech”. Another individual, who goes by the name “Hailey Heartless” and identifies as a “sex worker” and “dominatrix”, tweeted:

“The author of the study just wanted it in writing, she didn’t want anyone to review her flawed methodology or bias. She’s happy to do harm to a marginalized group now and take the hit to her credibility later. @HealthyBrown would be wise to distance themselves…

… The linked article was written using transphobic dogwhistles (sex observed at birth, for example), so it’s most likely that they have a transphobic contributor who knows exactly what they’re doing.”

Rather than stand by the professor and the research, Brown University responded by removing the news story and publishing a statement: “The School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” PLOS ONE published a comment on Littman’s study, explaining:

“PLOS ONE is aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy and COPE guidelines. As part of our follow up we will seek further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses. We will provide a further update once we have completed our assessment and discussions.”

This response is shocking – the initial complaints came from a small minority of people, none of whom are scholars or scientists. The two individuals who led efforts to have Littman’s research removed and discredited don’t have any particular expertise to offer on her study, beyond being males who choose to identify as women. They have not undertaken a scientific study. They are deeply committed to defending the notion of gender identity and insist that it is possible for males to become literal females, based on nothing more than an announcement of one’s preferred pronouns.

Further reading

The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

Academic studies and public debate should not be narrowly determined by those committed to the ideologies in question. No idea can be deemed to be intellectually sound or true, without any doubt, if it isn’t subjected to critique and rigorous study and discussion. And despite the fact that trans activists insist gender identity is not an idea, but a scientific fact, it is clear that this is not the case when the concept of gender itself remains the subject of debate.

Feminists, for example, consider gender to be the set of stereotypes imposed on people at birth, based on their biological sex – for example, the idea that men are unemotional and adventurous whereas women are emotional and passive. These ideas do not determine our physical bodies. Trans activists, on the other hand, along with many on the religious Right, believe that gender is hard-wired, and that these stereotypes are both natural and innate, intricately connected to one’s biological sex (and, in the case of trans activists, they believe these stereotypes and an individual’s feelings about gender actually determine one’s sex).

Littman’s research was subject to peer review, revised based on reviewer comments, accepted, then published; meaning her study was determined to be credible and ethical. This does not mean that research should be protected from critique, but, as a former Dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey S. Flier, wrote recently, Littman’s critics “have not performed any systematic analysis of her findings, but seem principally motivated by ideological opposition to her conclusions.”

But regardless of the motivations and actions of these critics, what is more troubling is the cowardice demonstrated on this issue by so many today. Politicians and legislators are clamouring to appear politically correct by creating legislation and policies supporting the notion of gender identity, without considering the consequences. Those who speak out or ask questions about the ideology and activism behind the transgender movement are threatened, abused, no-platformed, fired, and smeared. And too many are simply watching this happen in silence for fear they will be targeted or ostracised themselves.

It should terrify all of us that what we may study, debate and question is being determined by a small group of ideologues, many of whom go so far as to advocate violence against those who don’t toe the line. Regardless of your opinion on transgenderism itself, for all of us, our right to free speech, to speak the truth, and to think critically is under serious threat.

And Twitter is not the only platform facing pressure to punish women who speak uncomfortable truths. In a long read essay recently published by Broadly – Vice’s supposedly woman-centered wing – Eve Livingston expresses concern about what she characterises as “transphobia” on Mumsnet’s feminism board. In fact, Mumsnet has become one of the few places women are allowed to discuss their concerns about gender identity ideology and legislation — a breath of fresh air, considering the extreme harassment, bullying, and silencing that women are exposed to in just about every other forum (online and off) when they attempt to have such conversations.

The confidence with which Mumsnet users continue to insist on discussing material reality is rooted in large part in a 2016 “I am Spartacus” thread, which began when a user by the name of “OscarDeLaYenta” posted: “Men cannot become women, ever. Women cannot become men, ever.” The post kicked off a series of posts in which users refuted the idea that one can change sex and refused to use ‘correct pronouns’.

Suggested reading

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Considering Mumsnet has served as launchpad for feminist campaigns such as like “Let Girls Be Girls” (criticising the sexualisation girls are exposed to at a young age) and “Let Toys Be Toys,”  (aimed at challenging the gender stereotypes), it makes perfect sense that these women would push back against the idea that femininity and masculinity define sex (as trans activists argue). But Livingston and other trans activists refuse to acknowledge this obvious connection between feminist critiques of gender roles and feminist critiques of gender identity. Instead they frame women’s insistence that males are male, regardless of their predilection for the ‘feminine’, as ‘transphobia’ and ‘hate speech’.

Livingston worries that Mumsnet’s “political and social clout” exists not in spite of, but because its female users boldly defend women’s spaces and call males “he” and women “she,” regardless of professed “gender identity.” I suspect she might be right.

The thing about free speech – whether on social media or comment boards – is that it allows people to say things you don’t want to hear. If free speech were only applicable to people whose ideas and statements you agreed with, it wouldn’t be free speech. We have to apply this concept as broadly as possibly, no matter how distasteful the result may be, because they alternative is certainly worse.

Suggested reading

How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

Somehow, ‘free speech’ has become a clarion call for the Right. But why? Shouldn’t the Left, which claims to seek liberation, justice, and equality, also support citizens’ right to express unpopular ideas and engage in critical debate? Instead, many on the Left approach free speech in a way that suggests these ideals only apply to some people, not all.

In recent years, I have become concerned that both the Left and feminism have failed to value and support the concept of free speech as assiduously as they should have. I’ve seen hypocrisy in terms of whose speech is defended and whose is not. Self-professed Leftist activsts have worked to silence those whose political activism and ideologies they find harmful (often for legitimate reasons, though at times not), rather than simply fight back, debate, or criticise.

It cannot be argued that “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” are inventions of the Right. Some might argue these are necessary in order to protect against Right wing opinions, which they view as hateful or harmful, and assume opinions held by Leftists are the opposite, but this is over simplistic, as evidenced by the Left’s embrace of the rather terrifying and fascistic trans movement.

To be fair, numerous feminists who are also Leftists are fighting back against those trying to dissolve the category of woman entirely and criminalise people who insist that it is impossible to change sex. These women are doing so at great risk to their own safety and livelihood.

Suggested reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Over the past couple of weeks, trans activists launched a massive denial of service (DoS) attack against my site, Feminist Current; attempted to report me to the police for “hate speech” as founder and editor of the site; directed numerous graphic violent threats at me via Eventbrite, many of which were sexualised and misogynist; have libelled me online and in the mainstream media; and have threatened me with a lawsuit claiming that my stating that men are not women constitutes “hate speech” and “defamation.” (I have consulted numerous lawyers and it is most certainly neither.)

This all came after trans activists attempted to shut down an event I will be speaking at in January at the Vancouver Public Library (VPL). The event is an attempt to discuss the impact of gender identity ideology and legislation on women’s rights — apparently a subject that activists believe violates the Human Rights Code (they should probably read that).

Ironically, considering the threats against me, and considering that, as far as I am aware, no feminist has threatened a trans activist, Leftists and labour movement leaders are claiming my attempt to speak about women’s rights makes certain people feel “unsafe.” I am legitimately afraid for my safety due to actual threats made against me, yet my words are being positioned as dangerous.

The VPL did not cancel the January event booking, despite pressure from trans activists, but said nothing to deter the threats against me. Instead, in a statement they said: “We have advised the Vancouver Police Department of the event; they will be monitoring and will take appropriate action should conduct breach the Criminal Code.”

They weren’t talking about violence or misogynistic speech from activists — they were talking about me – the very dangerous woman who says violent things like “men are not women,” something Vancouver’s new ever-so-progressive mayor, Kennedy Stewart, considers “despicable.” (Stewart has yet to comment on the vitriol and unethical, dangerous behaviour of my detractors – though he has defended free speech.) What about my “safe space”? Why don’t these activists believe women deserve the right to speak about their concerns free from violence and harassment?

Suggested reading

The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

By Julie Bindel

I’m not the only one Twitter has banned for making rather basic statements about biology and reporting plain facts about the actions of trans activists – numerous women have told me they too have been suspended or banned in the past couple of weeks. The company appears to be systematically purging the platform of those who challenge trans orthodoxy and refer to men as “he” regardless of their identification as transwomen. Like Mayor Stewart, Twitter has consistently ignored literal threats of violence, instead targeting the victims of such threats as perpetrators of ‘hate’ speech.

To be honest, I don’t care what abhorrent commentary Twitter allows on the site, so long as they are consistent. Instead, they’ve adopted a nonsensical position that favours certain ideologies by censoring anyone who doesn’t get in line.

You might say, ‘Well, Twitter is a private company and can do what it likes’, but this is bigger than just Twitter. Those who rock the boat are being censored in universities, in the media, and in the public square – which in this day and age is really social media. Twitter is the place where we have become accustomed to engaging in and following debates, and sharing ideas and news. Even bad ideas, and even fake news. Think about it: Twitter, a multi-billion dollar company, is creating a false narrative by silencing dissent and controlling public discourse. That so many progressives are going along with this is shocking.

We should have pushed back harder, years ago, when we saw young activists begin to shut down – rather than simply challenge – ideas and speakers they disagreed with. Because now we’re facing a monster that is working to criminalise women for making feminist arguments, for publishing feminist writing, and for trying to protect their rights and boundaries. I hope Leftists and feminists will see that no one is safe if we don’t carefully protect free speech for all.

On Twitter, McKinnon celebrated, announcing: “First transgender woman world champion…ever.” Jennifer Wagner-Assali, the woman who came in third, wasn’t so pleased. She tweeted: “It’s definitely NOT fair.”

Wagner-Assali later apologised for “not properly congratulating” McKinnon and for “fanning the flames”.

I apologize, @rachelvmckinnon , for not properly congratulating you on race day. I hope you accept it a few days late. Congratulations and enjoy your off-season. Thanks, everyone, for reading. –Jennifer

— Jennifer Assali (@jkwagnermd) October 18, 2018

But let’s not pretend she doesn’t have a point. Men and women’s bodies are different. Men are, quite simply, bigger. They have larger organs, bigger bones, and a higher ratio of muscle mass; they have bigger lungs, bigger hearts, and higher oxygen carrying capacity than women. They are generally stronger and faster than women.

Men and women are biologically different in many ways beyond this, but for the purposes of discussing what is “fair” and what is not, in sport, these points are obvious to most. The truth is, there is no possible way to change an adult male, physiologically, into a female.

Despite being a self-declared expert on “the ethics, law, and science of trans athletics”, McKinnon ignores this. Instead, he cites his “human right” to compete, accusing his detractors of having an “irrational fear of transwomen”. As he writes:

“I’m a professor. I teach courses on ethics, including sports ethics, and I’m teaching a course on sport and gender, focusing on the question: Is it fair for trans women to compete in women’s sport? My work answers that question clearly. Yes, it is fair.”

He qualifies this by simply saying that his ID now says he is female. The whole episode pretty much sums up the problem with gender identity ideology and legislation: when males are allowed to change their legal sex on official documents, women get shafted.

The transgender movement has yet to demonstrate what the difference is between a “transwoman” and a male. In fact, it has yet to define what it means to be transgender in any coherent way. But it isn’t even being asked to – all it is being asked for is the correct ID.

So an athlete who competed as a male last year is allowed to compete alongside women today, and any man who declares himself a woman has the right to enter women’s changing rooms, transition houses and washrooms. Those who dispute or question this are called “cruel”, “hateful”, and “bigoted”, and told to live and let live.

Suggested Listening

Are you a performative prepper?

By Julie Bindel and Trevor Phillips

In Canada, something similar has happened. A biological man who self-identifies as a woman been calling beauty salons demanding a “Brazilian bikini wax”. When he was refused treatment – waxing male genitalia requires a different technique and supplies, besides the female beauticians might not feel entirely comfortable carrying out the procedure  – he claimed discrimination on account of the fact that he is a “transwoman”. He filed 16 complaints on this basis at the BC Human Rights Tribunal, citing discrimination on the basis of “gender identity”. But what of the rights of the woman asked to wax a man’s scrotum?

And then you have the blatantly abusive cases. Such as that of Karen White (previously Stephen Terence Wood), who was moved to a women’s prison despite numerous rape charges, and, who within days of arriving, attacked four women. In May, nine women filed a lawsuit against Naomi’s House, a shelter for homeless women, and its parent company, the Poverello House, after a man identifying as female was allowed to stay at the shelter, and sexually harassed numerous residents.

The consequences of self-identification can range from the unjust to the criminal. And in all cases it’s the women who are forced to put aside their comfort and safety to accommodate this choice. But when challenged, trans activists like McKinnon reply: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Let’s be kind to each other.”

Being kind is all fine and good, but when it comes to dramatic policy and legislative changes that have harmful effects on women, we need rational, evidence-based arguments, not appeals to people’s emotions. Unfortunately, though, this is complicated by the fact that there is a troubling trend among young college-age “social justice activists” that expects people to fall in line through emotional manipulation, with no attempt at a convincing argument.

Suggested reading

The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

I’ve seen this first hand. Last month, I gave a talk in Kitchener, Ontario about the impact of trans activism on women’s rights. What was most interesting (and revealing) to me were the questions and comments from trans activists. One young woman asked, “How do you think your non-inclusive perception of woman and your non-inclusive language actually affects transgender people… [Do] you think you’re hurting their feelings?” In other words, rather than address any of the arguments I’d made in my talk, respond to any of the questions I’d asked or to any of the concerns I’d brought up, she wanted to talk about people’s “feelings”.

When I asked her to define the word “woman,” she replied, “I don’t want to be put on the spot.” When I asked why the word “woman” shouldn’t exclude men, she didn’t respond, and repeated, “I’m wondering how you think your words are affecting people’s feelings.”

I said, “Your words are affecting people’s lives.” Afterwards, the young woman tweeted, “I want to cry because I was just asking this question in attempt to understand if this woman possesses basic empathy… Deeply saddened by the blatant hate at this event yesterday.”

Far from uncommon, this is a go-to strategy on the parts of trans activists. When asked to explain their claims that “transwomen are women”, that individuals can change their sex, or, simply, what a “transwoman” or a “woman” is, they will refuse to respond, and instead accuse the questioner of being “mean,” “hurtful,” “hateful” or “bigoted”.

It’s a successful tactic, since most people do not wish to be considered “bad” or “hateful”. But when it comes to debating ideas and public policy, it makes no sense to avoid critical thinking or evidence, lest we upset those lobbying for the changes or ideology. Imagine if we were asked not to debate war or capitalism or climate change, lest it hurt the feelings of warmongers and capitalists and climate change deniers?

But beyond that, since when did being “nice” entail lying? Or rejecting critical thought? Is it “nice” to accept dogma one believes is harmful or irrational? If someone told you the earth was flat, would you agree in order to avoid hurting their feelings?

Suggested reading

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, sees this trend as having originated on college campuses, where students have “medicalized” their aversion to certain ideas, books, words, and speakers. Rather than simply protest, as they would have in the past, students are claiming that these ideas, books, words, and speakers are actually harmful, traumatising, or even “literal violence”. And rather than debate these difficult ideas, they no-platform speakers and entirely avoid having to examine what, exactly, they say or believe is troubling about the ideas or words in question.

This isn’t an attitude that will save us from bad policies or harmful political ideologies. In fact, it is already preventing us from forming good ideas and legislation with regard to trans issues. Nor is it good philosophical practice to accept dogma unquestioningly. Besides, how “nice” is it to demand the public go along with your preferred beliefs, lest they be blacklisted, bullied, fired, threatened, or labelled as “bigoted”?

I’ve been threatened with violence online countless times, simply for asking questions about transgender ideology and gender identity legislation. Recently, Twitter locked my account because I tweeted the phrase, “men aren’t women”. This doesn’t strike me as particularly “nice” or open-minded behaviour. Yet somehow I am the one accused of “hate”.

Hi everyone! I've been locked out of Twitter since Monday morning. They demanded I remove the viral tweet complaining about having been locked out last week for saying that men aren't women. The tweet was at like 20,000 likes so I guess they didn't like that.

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) November 21, 2018

Twitter’s response, after I appealed the suspension, was that I had engaged in “hateful conduct”, thereby breaking “Twitter Rules”. The company declined to elaborate on how saying “men aren’t women” is “hateful” or where, specifically, in Twitter’s Terms of Service, it states users are not permitted to differentiate between men and women.

You may successfully shut people up using these tactics, just as people are silenced and made fearful of rocking the boat under dictatorships. But if this is the preferred way forward, let’s not carry on the charade of describing trans activism as a progressive movement towards acceptance. It smacks, instead, of tyranny.

“Come and see SWOP today at @SussexUni Brighton Life and Wellbeing Fair. If you’re topping up your fees with sex work, or struggling to balance work and studies, or want to talk and don’t know where to go… we’re here for you. We respect your autonomy, privacy and confidentiality,” SWOP Sussex at Brighton Oasis Project tweeted last Tuesday.

While SWOP claims to be neutral, there to offer “offer support and advice without judgment” to “student sex workers”, the real impact of their presence on campus is much darker.

The opposing view

Feminists should support a woman's right to sell sex

By Victoria Bateman

SWOP is primarily a lobby group, advocating for the full decriminalisation of the sex trade. While all feminists fight to decriminalise those who sell sex, as they believe women and girls should not be punished for having been exploited or abused, organisations like SWOP want to decriminalise the exploiters — pimps, johns, and brothel owners. They argue that the only danger of prostitution lies in stigma, and that, therefore, the solution is to normalise prostitution as just a job like any other — no more harmful or exploitative than serving a cup of coffee.

Because of this party line, the often abusive — and violent — behaviour of pimps, johns, and brothel owners goes uncriticised. These men are simply ‘clients’ and respectable business owners. The truth is, of course, that countries that have taken this route, and fully legalised prostitution, have seen an increase in trafficking and exploitation. Reporting on the impact of legalisation in Germany, Spiegel Online cites a Family Ministry report that found working conditions for women in prostitution had worsened as a result. In Holland, Julie Bindel has reported that legalisation made it safer for the traffickers and organised crime to operate, but that the women are no better off. “Abuse suffered by the women is now called an ‘occupational hazard’, like a stone dropped on a builder’s toe”, she writes.

The stigma that was meant to magically disappear under legalisation also failed to manifest. Well, to be fair, the stigma for men who pay for sex or who profit through exploiting women in the sex industry has been drastically reduced. Prostituted women, on the other hand, remain as traumatised, ashamed, and as desperate to leave the trade as ever. This is because, of course, the vast majority of women and girls who enter into prostitution don’t do so out of eagerness to have sex with countless strangers, day in and day out, but out of desperation — a lack of options. The people who benefit from legalisation and normalisation are men, not women.

Suggested reading

This era of hysterical certainty does women no favours

By Jenny McCartney

SWOP’s stall at the freshers fair did not highlight the level of violence and misogyny women are subjected to in the sex trade – they kept things light.

Yet this is anything but light. If women have to perform sex acts for strange men in exchange for an education, society is broken. A supportive response to this reality — if indeed it is a reality (SWOP claims “one in six students does sex work or thinks about turning to sex work”) — should not be to facilitate it, but to work to ensure women are able to access degrees without having to resort to selling sex.

In the past, such a revelation would have shocked the general public. Most people would have recoiled at the idea of women trading blow jobs for BAs. But today, thanks to organisations like SWOP and legions of young, middle class social media activists – raised on a diet of third wave feminism that says women’s choices are always empowering, no matter what, and that opinions to the contrary belong only to those with cobwebs in their vaginas and bibles on their bedside – the tide has turned.

Over the past couple of decades, discussing ‘victimisation’ has fallen out of fashion. Because women should aspire to be empowered, independent beings, we are no longer supposed to acknowledge that women and girls around the world continue to have less-than-liberated existences. It’s almost as though we gave up on the notion that we could escape the clutches of porn culture, and a world in which rape and sex are conflated, so instead opted to positive-think our way out.

Suggested reading

We might as well decriminalise rape

By Julie Bindel

If we simply reframe stripping as a fun and sexy way to stay in shape and bond with other women, maybe we can forget about the message it sends to men about what women’s roles are. If we start calling prostitution “sex work”, maybe it really is just a job like any other, and the choice between becoming a lawyer or an escort becomes only a matter of personal preference.

Rather than challenge the sex trade, or view it as something that epitomises and normalises women’s objectification in society, modern liberals have taken to defending “sex workers’ rights”, chanting mantras like “sex work is work!” But while prostituted women do indeed deserve rights, like anyone else, these progressive-sounding lines distract us from the truth of the sex trade – not just that it is exceedingly violent, but that it also conveys a dark message about how too many men see women. Even in a non-violent exchange, paying another person to have sex with you should not be acceptable. Sex should be mutually desired by, and enjoyable to, both parties.

Further reading

Feminism may have won the vote, but it has lost its way

By Victoria Bateman

An ethical, empathetic person wouldn’t want to have sex with someone who didn’t want to be there — who felt repulsed or dehumanized by the experience. Yet, while we insist – via “consent education” campaigns and the #MeToo movement – that the only sex we should be having is the kind that everyone involved is enthusiastic about, we are simultaneously sending young people the message that one-sided, coerced sex is OK as long as money exchanges hands. That’s not a message we should be comfortable with.

Framing ‘sex work’ as simply another choice young women make, like whether to major in political science or biology, misses the point. The conversation we should be having is not about whether or not women choose or enjoy prostitution, but why we live in a world in which it is acceptable for men to pay for it.

More from this author

How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

Today’s progressive discourse has determined that everything must be ‘inclusive’ of everyone – but, in reality, this change is both unnecessary and nonsensical.

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Toby Adams, executive director of the Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project and advocate for the bill, claimed it was necessary in order for “people whose gender is non-binary, neither male nor female… to get an accurate birth certificate” in order to validate “their reality”.

The purpose of a birth certificate, though, is not to record an adult’s feelings about their gender, nor whether their personalities align with society’s understanding of masculinity and femininity – it is to record a baby’s biological sex. Whether or not that baby takes a gender studies course somewhere down the line has no bearing on its physical body.

Adams also claimed that if a birth certificate “lists the wrong gender, you have to lie every time you fill out a form requiring you to show your birth certificate – registering for school, obtaining a ‘Real ID’, travelling”.

Again this misses the point. Gender is not the same as sex, and an individual’s feelings about their gender does not change their biological sex. Advocates of these types of policy change do not seem to understand that gender simply refers to social constructs of what it means to be male and female. Gender says a male should be a dominant, unemotional, adventurous football fan, while a female should be a polite, nurturing, delicate cry-baby with a deep desire to wear uncomfortable shoes and shave their pubic hair.

Sex, on the other hand, is biological, generally determined by a person’s reproductive anatomy. Unless born with a rare intersex condition, males have penises and produce sperm, females have vaginas and uteruses, and produce ova.

Further reading

The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

By Julie Bindel

Even more troubling here, though, is the fact that the material reality of biological sex, which cannot be altered based on feelings, politics, or declaration, is framed as ‘a lie’, while one’s personal feelings about gender are framed as objective, inarguable truth, so much so that we may alter government records and data.

To misgender an individual, for example to refer to a person who is male as ‘he’ when he prefers to be called ‘she’, is now said to be a hate crime. But not only are people claiming they can change sex, and that everyone around them must play along, individuals who feel they don’t fit the stereotype of either masculine or feminine are identifying as “non-binary”.

This would all be fine – people’s personal identities are, after all, theirs alone – except for two glaring flaws in the argument. First, the idea that a person can be non-binary assumes that everyone else is, somehow, binary, in terms of their gender. But no one in the world fits all gender stereotypes. I don’t like pink, am not nurturing, and enjoy burping and swearing much more than I do stilettos. Does this mean I am not female? Of course not. It means I am a woman with a personality. And I have never once felt the need to express that personality on my ID.

More from this author

How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

Second, acknowledging that a person is male or female is neither an insult or an opinion – it is a fact. And an important one. Women and men have very different bodies and health needs. Pregnancy is an obvious difference, requiring specialist healthcare, but there are plenty of other differences. Cardiovascular disease, for example, is the number one killer of women in many countries, including the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK, in part because both symptoms and treatments have been tested primarily on men. Because our cells are sexed, diseases, treatments, and chemicals impact men and women differently.

Regardless of how you want to self-identify, scientists and doctors need to know people’s actual sex in order to treat them properly and conduct effective research.

None of this means, of course, that we shouldn’t be challenging society’s understanding of what a woman or a man should be. Pressure to stay within the rigid social boundaries of masculinity or femininity hurt us all — those expectations are difficult, if not impossible, to live up to. But this does not require us to reject our biological sex in the process.

What would be much more progressive would be to say, “Yes, I am female. No, that doesn’t mean I am inherently submissive”, or “Yes, I am male, but that does not mean I am inherently aggressive”. Birth certificates, or other forms of official identification, however, are not the place to air those opinions.

Last month, Brown University assistant professor Lisa Littman published a paper looking at this “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in adolescents and young adults. Through surveying the parents of these teens, she found that this sudden onset of “gender dysphoria” was taking place in peer groups in which one or more friends became gender dysphoric at the same time. In other words, this seemed to be kids following trends.

From the 256 surveys Littman collected, she found that a large majority of these youths were female (82.8%), and 41% had identified as non-heterosexual prior to identifying as transgender. Almost two thirds had also been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before they claimed to have gender dysphoria.

One might deduce, based on this evidence, that these (mainly) girls were not, in fact, transgender, but lesbians and/or struggling with other mental health issues beyond gender dysphoria. And crucially, that these factors should be explored before leaping to start “transitioning” — a process that eventually involves a lifetime of hormone treatments and a series of complicated surgeries.

These facts, though, have been deemed unspeakable. Those who dare question the concept of gender identity itself — that is that one can have, say, a male body, but be truly a woman ‘on the inside’ — are treated as blasphemers and bigots, viciously harassed, attacked, and even fired from their place of work.

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Dr. Kenneth Zucker is a case in point. A sexologist and psychologist who ran the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in Toronto for more than 30 years, he was fired after trans activists mounted a smear campaign against him. Zucker’s ‘crime’ was to suggest that rather than immediately start children who think they have gender dysphoria on the transition process, perhaps we should first try to “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies.” Zucker himself was not actually opposed to the transition process — if the dysphoria of the youth he was working with persisted, Zucker would support them in their path to transitioning.

But simply acknowledging that desistance happens was apparently unacceptable. Over 500 professional clinicians and academics signed a petition in support of Zucker, arguing that his dismissal was “politically motivated” and that this should “stand as a warning to any clinical researcher who is or considers working at the CAMH: In the event of a conflict with activists for a fashionable cause, the CAMH might well sacrifice them — and the individuals and families they serve in their clinics — for some real or imagined local political gain.” But the damage was done. Zucker had been fired, and his reputation tarnished.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... trans issues

By Julie Bindel

The power trans activists hold not only in terms of controlling the narrative surrounding transgenderism itself, but also in determining legislation, policies, and even what research may be conducted and published, in relation to gender identity is astounding.

Which brings us back to Littman’s study. On August 22, Brown University published a press release about the research, which had been published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Almost immediately, a small number of trans activists complained, both to Brown University and to the journal itself.

One transgender Twitter user dubbed the paper “anti-transgender hate speech”. Another individual, who goes by the name “Hailey Heartless” and identifies as a “sex worker” and “dominatrix”, tweeted:

“The author of the study just wanted it in writing, she didn’t want anyone to review her flawed methodology or bias. She’s happy to do harm to a marginalized group now and take the hit to her credibility later. @HealthyBrown would be wise to distance themselves…

… The linked article was written using transphobic dogwhistles (sex observed at birth, for example), so it’s most likely that they have a transphobic contributor who knows exactly what they’re doing.”

Rather than stand by the professor and the research, Brown University responded by removing the news story and publishing a statement: “The School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” PLOS ONE published a comment on Littman’s study, explaining:

“PLOS ONE is aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy and COPE guidelines. As part of our follow up we will seek further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses. We will provide a further update once we have completed our assessment and discussions.”

This response is shocking – the initial complaints came from a small minority of people, none of whom are scholars or scientists. The two individuals who led efforts to have Littman’s research removed and discredited don’t have any particular expertise to offer on her study, beyond being males who choose to identify as women. They have not undertaken a scientific study. They are deeply committed to defending the notion of gender identity and insist that it is possible for males to become literal females, based on nothing more than an announcement of one’s preferred pronouns.

Further reading

The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

Academic studies and public debate should not be narrowly determined by those committed to the ideologies in question. No idea can be deemed to be intellectually sound or true, without any doubt, if it isn’t subjected to critique and rigorous study and discussion. And despite the fact that trans activists insist gender identity is not an idea, but a scientific fact, it is clear that this is not the case when the concept of gender itself remains the subject of debate.

Feminists, for example, consider gender to be the set of stereotypes imposed on people at birth, based on their biological sex – for example, the idea that men are unemotional and adventurous whereas women are emotional and passive. These ideas do not determine our physical bodies. Trans activists, on the other hand, along with many on the religious Right, believe that gender is hard-wired, and that these stereotypes are both natural and innate, intricately connected to one’s biological sex (and, in the case of trans activists, they believe these stereotypes and an individual’s feelings about gender actually determine one’s sex).

Littman’s research was subject to peer review, revised based on reviewer comments, accepted, then published; meaning her study was determined to be credible and ethical. This does not mean that research should be protected from critique, but, as a former Dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey S. Flier, wrote recently, Littman’s critics “have not performed any systematic analysis of her findings, but seem principally motivated by ideological opposition to her conclusions.”

But regardless of the motivations and actions of these critics, what is more troubling is the cowardice demonstrated on this issue by so many today. Politicians and legislators are clamouring to appear politically correct by creating legislation and policies supporting the notion of gender identity, without considering the consequences. Those who speak out or ask questions about the ideology and activism behind the transgender movement are threatened, abused, no-platformed, fired, and smeared. And too many are simply watching this happen in silence for fear they will be targeted or ostracised themselves.

It should terrify all of us that what we may study, debate and question is being determined by a small group of ideologues, many of whom go so far as to advocate violence against those who don’t toe the line. Regardless of your opinion on transgenderism itself, for all of us, our right to free speech, to speak the truth, and to think critically is under serious threat.